BusinessOnLine SEO Blog

Build Links Fast! There Is No Penalty In Getting Many Links Quickly

2008-05-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

Now just before I said that, I am already wearing my bulletproof vest armor and mask with my forcefield on just in case people slam me right away without reading.

Links help in ranking

Here are a few SEO fundamentals that are considered SEO facts already my a majority number of people in the SEO industry.

Incoming links to your website increase ranking. They are like votes of authority, trust, credibility.

Google and many of the other search engines are against artificial link building. This is trying to influence search engines by creating so many links yourself trying to pretend many people like your site, thus linking to you.

Thus any form or kind of way you are trying to influence ranking artificially, like buying links only for the purpose of having a link for search engine ranking, or participating in various types of automated link exchanging and farming are frowned upon by search engines. And Google and other search engines are getting better and better in detecting these artificial link building activities.

Getting too many links too fast is bad!

Ok now I am contradicting my own title of the blog post. But this is known by many SEO experts already. If you build links so fast on a new page, or worst on a new site, and add tons of them in a short period of time, this spells ranking disaster and can get your site into penalty zone if you don't get kicked out right away.

I have seen more and more people experience this when they have a site on page 1 ranking at number 10, then suddenly adds so many links and after two days, they are found beyond the 100 rank. Which is not impossible to fix by the way, you can still crawl your way back up if ever you did experience this.

But massive link building can still be done quickly without getting any penalty!

This actually happens everyday. I have seen this happen many times in the past. But I don't memorize each example so I will just use a very recent one.

The China Earthquake

Now before I continue with this blog post, I'd like to take a break from your train of thought for just a couple of minutes and say a little prayer regardless of your religion and pray that there may be more survivors found in the rubbles of the recent earthquake last Monday at 8:00pm. And for the survivors, let's pray that the affected families be able to recover well from this disaster. It is believed that there are nearly 10,000 deaths due to the earthquake from the intensity 7.9 earthquake. We would like to express our deepest condolences to all the families that were affected by the earthquake. If you wish to contribute and help out in the relief fund, and is not sure where to go to, I always trust the Red Cross than any other website online as there are also scammers online that it is hard to detect who are the real and fake relief entities.

This sad event happened on Monday evening (China Time) which was two days ago. As of current press time, searching from the US on Google.com page 1 shows 4 pages that have so many links right away within 2 days.

Number 3 Result on Google for China Earthquake - CNN.com

CNN is showing that their article about the China Earthquake now has 811 links all acquired in 2 days.

Number 5 Result on Google for China Earthquake is Yahoo News

Yahoo's syndicated news from Associated Press gathers 321 links in 2 days.

Number 7 Result goes to technology blogger Robert Scoble on the popular Scobleizer blog

The techblogger already with a large fan base gets 560 links in two days after the earthquake.

Number 8 goes to the US Geological Survey that records almost any earthquake and volcanic activity world wide.

The high authoritative and very informative site of the US government gets 539 links easily in 2 days.

All of these sites gathered so many links in a very short period of time, and yet they are not beyond page 10. I know many of you may argue these are highly authoritative sites so they can get away with it, and I have seen this effect in the past already with Hurricane Katrina, San Diego's Wild Fires, Indonesia's Tsunami. This can build links to many news sites that are already popular with high Google PageRank. But that does not mean it cannot happen to a site that is unknown.

I have seen this happen to many sites but it is hard to remember a specific example and the one that I can quickly remember is Ms Dewey. Today Ms Dewey has 40k+ links but when the site first came out in 2006, she was totally unknown. The site came out of nowhere and their links just exponentially increased in a short period of time. Where they banned? Nope, their content was purely viral and links were all natural.

Now two words I want you to focus on in the previous sentence: Natural and Viral.

Going Natural

I believe natural links and artificial links is not that hard to be detected by Google. So many factors and patterns to look at. IP addresses, locations, rate of increase, date and time, types of sites, varying link text, deep linking and a lot more. The more natural it looks, the better.

Go Viral

I guess you have heard this word over and over again, viral marketing, viral video, viral media but this is actually an old concept even before the Internet went commercial. The term word-of-mouth is already talking about viral marketing. The more viral it is, the more it spreads, and serves as better link baits. Thus making more natural links.

To end this blog post and sum it up into 1 sentence, that sentence would be: Building links so fast and so many is ok as long as your links are all natural.

And a few more things for you to think about...

Viral content may not be applicable to every industry. It will all depend on your advertising creativeness. We go back to content is king, whatever the content form is, text, photos, videos, applications, etc. How can you apply this to your industry?

SEO is not all about link building and it is not all about link numbers but also link quality and PageRank. With earthquake example I had, as of current press time, CNN, Yahoo News, USGS and Scobleizer were on page 1. But the number 1 organic result a blog post that gathered only 59 links.

Note: All the number of links used in this blog post are based on Yahoo's Site Explorer report on links. This may not be an exact number, but is currently the more complete you can get publicly and I used this on all websites to be consistent with the number comparisons.

Google's Friend Connect Ready to Dominate Web 2.0 Social Media

2008-05-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

Just when I think I have seen the best that Google has to offer, they come up with something new. And today they did it again with Google Friend Connect. Check out the video and see how this new Google toolset can add social media functionality to your Web site in a matter of minutes (once its out of beta), requires almost no coding and immediately helps your site become more viral. The ability of your friends to publish their activities on your site through their activities feed (which gets displayed on facebook for example) has the potential to be a stand alone viral traffic source. I signed up for the beta today for my bands Web site (www.heavymusic.com)so I will let everyone know once I get in to the program. But I highly recommend the video if for no other reason, because a lot of people are going to be using this soon.

Digital Hollywood Internet Marketing Conference Today

2008-05-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Well I finally made it to Hollywood last night at midnight thanks to my car breaking down yesterday and someone breaking out my back rear window. It's always a bummer to spend $300 just to get back to the same state you were the day before (having a working car...lol). But, undaunted, I made the journey last night to my favorite city outside of San Diego and I am ready to rock! I don't speak today until 2pm but we have an 8am meeting that I am currently at waiting for other speakers to arrive. We are also right next to the Dreamworks people who are showcasing here as well.

Today I am going to be speaking on the best practices of an ongoing SEO campaign. In other words, after you optimize pages and get all the groundwork done, what are the next steps that you can take to keep improving your rankings after the initial optimization lift. We are going to talk today a little about linking strategies, more about Google Web master tools, and content development just to name a few. Anyway, gotta go! More updates soon.

Ask.com Celebrates "Cinco DO Mayo"

2008-05-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

ASK.com today decided to do their best Homer Simpson impersonation (DOh!) by celebrating "Cinco do Mayo" (c'mon fellas, let's do some proof reading):

A Visual Comparison of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

2008-05-05T10:29:00.001-07:00

All the noise today about Microsoft dropping it's bid for Yahoo (hopefully it stays that way) inspired me today to take another look at the differences between the search engines and why one (Google) is utterly dominating the competition (Yahoo and MSN). And suddenly as I looked around the office and noticed some of the "swag" that my fellow BOLers had picked up from the search engines at various conferences, I was immediately struck by the obvious. The bottom line is, company culture has everything to do with why one company is winning and the others are losing. And that culture ironically is perfectly illustrated in the following picture. Google uses sophisticated technology and spends the money to do things right, Yahoo has some clever ideas but they aren't quite up to speed, and MSN is still lost in the past:

Mystery of the Viewstate Variable - Does It Really Affect SEO?

2008-04-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting questions that has emerged recently in the world of SEO is the mystery of the Viewstate variable. This handy little invention of Microsoft's twisted mind allows form users to recapture data they had previously typed in a form in the event that they hit the back button after already submitting the form. It's another way to get the functionality of session IDs (another search engine headache..lol). If you want to know more about the what the Viewstate variable is and why it is used, check out the Wiki article about it or this article. But the price you pay for this nice little feature can be large, literally. Many Viewstate variables can grow to be HUGE, some of which over 100K. And that has prompted many SEO professionals to become concerned about its potential effect on SEO. But will it really have any affect on your search listings?

There are really two main issues at the heart of potential SEO problems for the Viewstate variable:

1) The size of the variable can prevent the search engines from indexing some or all of the page.

2) The size of the variable pushes content down on the page, which makes it less important in the eyes of the search engine.

Let's look at each of these issues a little more closely to really understand the concerns.

The first issue really stems from Google's old "Best Practices" in which they used to recommend that Web masters make Web pages less than 100k because that is all they indexed for any given page. Thanks to technology advances, Google now indexes more than 100k. I have seen up pages of more than 500K indexed in Google and I am sure they do much more than that nowadays. Yahoo also has a the ability to index much more than 100k. So from that perspective, it is unlikely (although still theoretically possible) that you Viewstate variable will prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your content because of a file size issue.

The second issue is a little more problematic to draw a conclusion from. The thing is, although many SEO professionals including Rand Fishkin and Bruce Clay (scroll down half the page and read Bruce's advice on Tables which has a direct correlation to this issue) subscribe to the theory that keyword prominence is important to SEO rankings, it is not clear if the engine would view the Viewstate variable as being equivalent to text and / or whether or not the search engines would view the prominence of the content any differently if it was preceded by the Viewstate variable. In other words, it may just ignore it, in which case the page content is pretty much equivalent with or without the variable as far as the search engines are concerned. And from a logical point of view, it makes a certain amount of sense. However, when it comes to Google and SEO in general, assumptions based on logic don't always pay the bills...lol.

My philosophy about SEO has always been to eliminate as many unknown variables in the process as possible. And while I may have convinced a few people based on these observations that the Viewstate variable has no effect on SEO, it is virtually impossible to set up a controlled test to determine the effect absolutely. And so, because the potential for issues exists, my opinion is, don't leave it to chance. Or in this case, don't leave it to Google to decide if the Viewstate variable harms your search rankings. There are also some reports of problems with implementing Viewstate variables as it pertains to SEO (**note in this thread, Joe Brinkman of DotNetNuke proposes another possible solution). The other point I would make in justifying a change to the Viewstate variable to make it more SEO friendly (as well as PPC friendly) is that with big sites, this variable can have an affect on your load time and overall site performance. So it bears looking at even if you decide not to change it, to at least optimize the variables it stores.

So now that we have determined that we are concerned about the SEO effect that the Viewstate variable might have based on its default implementation, what can we do about it? We have four options:

1) Get rid of it (in other words, turn the Viewstate variable off).

2) Move the Viewstate to the bottom of the page. Another article about moving the Viewstate.

3) Make it smaller. You can use Viewstate decoder software to understand what variables are being passed and then eliminate the unnecessary ones. This can be very effective as the default setting for Viewstate is often times more than necessary.

4) If you are really technical, Peter Bromberg explains how you can move Viewstate to the server. ** Special disclaimer, I have never tried this personally but based on Peter's credentials and the content of his article, I believe this would be a good solution.

In the world of SEO where there are over 100 variables (according to Google) that can affect rankings, its always a good idea to eliminate as many potential problems as possible. It's also a good idea to not only optimize your site for rankings, but for users as well. And that means having as short of load times as possible. And with that in mind, I recommend using one of the four solutions presented here to make sure that the Viewstate variable is causing you problems you can't see.

SEO Content Strategy - The Importance of the "Application Page"

2008-04-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

I'm back! lol. Sorry about the long delay since the last post but business has been going crazy around here and it's been hard to find time that wasn't dedicated to clients over the last two weeks. But no more excuses, lol.

Today I wanted to talk about content. Everyone knows (or should know) that sustainable search engine listings are based on compeling content. There are a number of different categories of content that are commonly used on most Web sites. These include "products", "services", "industries served", "support" or "help pages". But one category of content that is often missing from sites is "applications". And the reason that this category of content is so important is that it tends to be the most keyword focused.

When people are searching for your product or service, they often times do not know that they want your product or your service, or even your company. What they do know is, they have a problem. And that problem is often times associated with a specific "application" of your products or services. So for example, let's pick on Black and Decker, one of the most prolific tool manufacturers in the world. This is a great looking Web site that is broken into well thought out categories. It's easy to find any tool that you are looking for, assuming you know what tool you need. But what if you don't know what tool you need. By building content around a do it yourself section of the site that focuses on the most common applications of their tools, Black and Decker could target thousands of additional keywords including "deck building", "kitchen remodeling", "home improvement" as well as other relevant words that would have a high propensity to result in both sales and targeted branding.

A good example of a site that does "applications" well is Home Depot. Check out their "Know How Section". You can see they have the content to target those thousands of keywords that we were talking about. Only problem, they haven't even optimized their page titles yet! Doh! Well, you can't win em all I guess, but I still bet Home Depot gets more searches for related keywords to that content than Black and Decker does. And more importantly, they are serving their customers better.

Content that addresses the primary needs of your customers not only causes an increase in conversions and helps your site to become a more trusted resource with users, it also allows you to target some of your most important keywords through organic search. One of the most effective SEO strategies ever invented is a steady stream of keyword focused content based on keyword research. And looking to "applications" of your products or services for those keywords is a winning formula.

Google Now Crawling Forms to Find "Invisible Web"

2008-04-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Google announced today that they have started to experiment with filling out forms to get access to data that they currently can't see. Unfortunately there are still a lot of potential variables that can prevent your content from being indexed but it is a step in the right direction. Don't skip the noscript tags for your drop down menus just yet though. This experiment is so far confined to a limited number of trustworthy sites, and, remember that the no script tag is still good for accessibility for users without Java script. So while this is good news for searchers in general, I don't think it really changes much of the optimization process. Especially if you want to have a consistent pattern of indexing. One interesting note is the confirmation that Google does scan Java script and Flash for links, although again, to ensure that Google sees what we want it to see, existing optimization techniques should still continue to be used.

Shady crazy guy tries to trademark SEO

2008-04-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

Good thing Sarah Bird was paying some attention to pending filed trademarks at the US Patent and Trademark Office and found someone named Jason Gambert trying to file a trademark for the word: SEO. The trademark is actually near it's final stages of getting approved and Sarah blogged about it on SEOMoz.

SEO, the acronym for Search Engine Optimization is so widely used just like saying you are a consultant and you offer consulting services. You can't just trademark "consulting" since it is not something that originally belongs to you to identify your product or service as part of it's brand. Although SEO may not be a dictionary word, it is still an acronym that is commonly used since the late 90's for Search Engine Optimization. It is a generic service that is almost like a verb in some ways.

Now some dude, named Jason Gambert attempts to register SEO as his trademark with his main premise as SEO is his process and it is not a service. After several declined statements from the US Patent and Trademark Office, he still shoots back and somehow convinces the trademark office to reached near the final stage. Right now it is openly published for opposition.

What will happen if Jason Gambert does get to register the word SEO as his trademark?

We can't tell the future but what he can do is file a cease and desist order to every company that uses the word SEO and say they cannot use it because he owns the trademark. So far this battle is led by Sarah who already started the filing of opposition which cost her $300 by the way. But if ever this still does not get the attention of the approving lawyers at the Patent and Trademark office, maybe more voices may help. Besides $300 is a small price to pay by any good SEO company.

Sarah Bird's Story

Status of Jason Gambert's Trademark Registration of SEO

Where to File for a Notice of Opposition Sorry I am no lawyer to give specific how-to steps. I suggest consult your company lawyer how to do this.

I felt compelled myself to blog about this and I believe every SEO blogger should blog about it and get more people to tell the US Patent and Trademark Office that SEO is a service, not a process by Jason Gambert. SEO is almost common language to every ad agency and web design/development company today as it is part of their services.

4 SEO Tips for Improving Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy

2008-04-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Having an ongoing search engine optimization strategy is essential for any successful SEO campaign. And there is a big difference between SEO strategy and SEO techniques. I define SEO techniques as the actions that one takes to optimize a certain segment of a Web site. So in other words, having keyword focused title tags, changing 302 redirects to 301 redirects, optimizing content, are all techniques that can be used to optimize a Web site for search engines. How you put together the master plan of utilizing those techniques on an ongoing basis is your SEO strategy. It may seem at first like an exercise in semantics but its important to understand the difference. A person can employ a number of different SEO techniques that can help a Web site attain higher rankings, but if there is no overall game plan as to how these techniques are going to be used in conjunction with one another over a period of time, then there is no strategy. If I were to use a football (American football) analogy, doing SEO would be playing the game of football. Calling plays in a huddle and then running the plays is playing football with a strategy. Not having a huddle and just telling everyone to go get open, is playing without a strategy. You can win either way, but usually your odds improve greatly with a strategy. Football and SEO are the same in that way. So today I would like to give you 4 SEO tips (techniques) to improve your overall search engine optimization strategy.

SEO Strategy Tip #1: Add Internal Links Based on Your Analytics and Long Tail Keywords

Too often in SEO we focus on the big words that we want and we forget the low hanging fruit that can taste the sweetest. By studying your analytics and getting your keyword referrals, you can usually find a number of long keyword phrases that are relevant to your business. Because these phrases are long, they are not that popular with searchers and therefore the competition to target these phrases is much less. So for example, if you sell dog food, you might find that you start getting hits for "discount dog food in san diego" because your business happens to be located there. So you go to Google and find that you are currently ranked #6 for the phrase and it gave you two visitors last month. Now because you are smart, you have set up your analytics to measure conversions (sales) based on keyword referrals. If you are not smart and haven't done this yet, stop reading this post immediately and go fix that because it is a major problem with your business. Seriously.

(Back to the analogy) So looking at your conversion data you find that both clicks resulting from "discount dog food in san diego" converted into sales. So obviously it behooves you to rank #1 for that term. And the good news is that because that term is not that competitive, you can probably improve your rankings by adding a little bit of internal link text! Usually a few links for non competitive terms really makes a big difference in your ranking. So the first thing to do is to go to the page that is ranked for that phrase and make sure that the phrase appears at least once in the body of the main content. If it doesn't, figure out a way to add it without detracting from the readability and professionalism of your content. Now, go to Google and use this command to search:

site:www.yourdomain.com "discount dog food in san diego" (or whatever your keyword is)

This search command will show you all the instances of the phrase that already exist on your site. Change those occurrences of the phrase to link text pointing back to the page that already ranks for the term. If you don't have any results from the Google search, it's time to evaluate what other pages on the site you could add the phrase to manually and then link it. This is a very effective technique if you do it CONSISTENTLY. So part of your overall strategy should be to have time every month when you do this.

PS. This also helps with site usability :)

SEO Strategy Tip #2: Produce Content Based on Keyword Research on an Ongoing Basis

The biggest problem I see with most SEO initiative is the lack of resources dedicated to producing content on a consistent basis. And more so, producing content that is keyword focused. Whether its Web site content, articles or blog entries, your Web site should be producing content that is relevant to your readers on an ongoing basis. And there is no better gauge of what is relevant to your readers than the keywords that they are using to get to your site. Additionally, internal site search analytics are essential to understanding what your audience is looking for, and perhaps having difficulty finding. Give your users what they want and you will be successful. Your SEO strategy must include producing content on a consistent basis that is driven by keyword research. If not, your falling behind your competition even as we speak (um, read..lol).

SEO Strategy Tip #3: Blog

The advantages of blogging from a branding, authority building, content producing and networking perspective are too numerous to mention in this short article. From an SEO point of view, one of the biggest advantages to blogging is the number of links that you can generate in a fairly short amount of time. And I don't mean blog comment links (from do follow blogs) or profile links (make sure you customize your LinkedIn Anchor text to your Web site) although there is some merit in utilizing both of those in your overall link development strategy. But the primary advantage really in terms of linking is that bloggers link much more frequently than traditional Web masters. If for no other reason than they generally produce more content. But also the blogosphere has a little different culture than the World Wide Web in general and most bloggers are prone to linking within their content and their blog rolls when the content they are linking to justifies it.

Additionally, by promoting your blog in social media sites like Digg or Mixx, you can connect with like minded bloggers who are likely to link to your content (if it's good enough). Having a blog allows you to participate on the Internet in a completely different way than having a Web site. And if you do it right (make a great resource), you will find that it becomes one of your best link development tools. And it can also become one of your most important content creation tools as well.

SEO Strategy Tip #4: Make the Most of Your Existing Links

Many times companies come to us and they already have thousands and thousands of links. Rather than go out and look for more, sometimes the best use of time is to optimize the ones they already have. One of the things I typically do is gather all the back links I can find for a Web site and then evaluate what opportunities might exist to augment the most important ones with keyword focused ALT text. Many times these are links that the company already controls because they own sister sites or have related divisions under a different business name. Sometimes because of the size of some of these companies, the Webmaster for one division or international section of a company won't be in communication with another. And that's a gap that we bridge. Sometimes it's as easy as seeing which trade shows a company sponsors and asking those shows to add appropriate ALT text to an image link. Sometimes it's sending an email to a Web master thanking them for the link and asking them to add a keyword or two to the existing anchor text if possible. The point is, there are usually a number of creative ways to take better advantage of links you already have. Part of your SEO strategy should be to evaluate those opportunities on a consistent basis and then take action.

I hope these 4 SEO strategy tips help you to not only improve your overall search engine optimization campaign, but inspire you to start thinking about your overall strategy and stick to it consistently. In SEO, slow and steady doesn't always win the race, but it's usually in the top 3 ;)

Come Join and Have Fun at an SEO Company!

2008-04-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

Just look at our previous blog post we had on April Fools Day. We indeed are having fun! But just because we do this, that doesn't mean we don't work and it's all play. We work hard because we have a lot of work on our hands and maybe you can help out with the work we do.

If you have the hard core skills in business or management and is thrilled to work in the online media space, you might want to join in the fun! We are currently looking for the following to start ASAP:

Business Analyst
Project Manager

These jobs are based in the cool and sunny San Diego, California. This is a full-time job with a complete line of benefits. Get to work with our team of experts in Internet marketing and web development that has delivered solutions for top brand clients such as Sony PlayStation, Hasbro, Cisco, Caterpillar, RailEurope, and many more.

Visit our job opportunities page for more details.

Photo Credit: Glenborough, LLC - 610 W. Ash, San Diego

April Fools Day Strikes Again - The Tin Foil Treatment

2008-04-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here at BusinessOnLine, we work hard and play hard. And sometimes we prank hard. This is an old school style prank that was really well done today. Candyce is still recycling the tin foil as we speak :) Happy April Fools Day! TRUST NO ONE :)

Dive Bomber Opening for WWE Star Christy Hemme

2008-03-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, please be forewarned that this post has nothing to do with SEO...lol. I am very stoked to announce that this Wednesday night, April 2nd, my band Dive Bomber will be opening for WWE Superstar Christy Hemme.

Here is a pic of Christy in case you are unfamiliar with her career. And if you are really interested (and over 18..lol), here are some Christy Hemme videos.

I checked out her band on MySpace and they rock. Needless to say, we are excited to share the stage with such an accomplished performer. Hopefully she won't decide to body slam me off the stage if I accidently get in her way...lol. So if you are in San Diego this Wed, we will be starting the party around 9pm at Brick by Brick.

If you don't see me on Twitter until noon on Thursday, you'll know why ;)

Have a great week.

Catfish

Meta Descriptions Still Very Important for SEO

2008-03-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading an outstanding article about Meta Descriptions by Barry Welford and I thought I would share a couple more thoughts I have on the subject. In Barry's article he mentions about the importance that description tags play in creating the snippets that the search engines display in the SERPs (search engine results pages). And he elaborates on the importance of placing your most important keywords in the description because the snippets are drawn from the text surrounding those keywords in the Meta description. The other thing I thought was worth adding to this part of the conversation is that the Meta Description is a great place to put your competitive advantage statement. In other words, tell people why they should click your link versus your competition. It could be "Free Shipping", it could be "Since 1970" (meaning you have a track record of success), it could be "Exclusive Pricing" or whatever you have as a competitive advantage. Communicating that value statement in your Meta description tag will increase your click through rate (although you won't always be able to fully control the messaging of your search result listing because they vary based on the search query).

Another comment I thought was important to make about the description tag is that before Google removed the Supplemental results tag, one of the most effective methods for getting pages out of the supplemental results was to ensure that it had a unique Meta description. We found numerous cases of pages that were in supplemental results that had no Meta description. Once we added to the unique description to these pages, the majority of them escaped the supplemental results and even more importantly, we saw dramatic traffic increases for these pages coming from organic search. Couple this with Barry's observation that pages with no or short Meta descriptions are flagged in Google Webmaster tools, and it is fairly apparent that unique Meta descriptions are of utmost importance to your SEO campaign.

One of the areas though that Barry and I disagree about descriptions however is the length of the description tag. Confining the length of your description to the 155 character limitation in Google in my opinion is not good for search engines nor is it good for your long tail keyword targeting. I'm not saying that every description should exceed 155 characters, but I don't believe truncating the description of a page to fit into a screen character limitation is best practices for a tag that is supposed to be primarily to communicate information. Part of Google's algorithm is based on Latent Semantic Analysis, so the more contextual information that is available to the engine, the better able it is to correctly rank your Web page for relevant keywords.

Take for example the following description that is less than 155 characters:

The BusinessOnLine SEO blog covers the latest tips, techniques and news in world of search engine optimization. (112 characters)

It's not bad and has some pretty good keywords. But if you add the next sentence which pushes the description over the 155 limit, you get a lot more information for the search engines to make ranking decisions with:

Authors Ray "Catfish" Comstock and Benj Arriola discuss topics like 301 / 302 redirects, link building, on page optimization, usability, online marketing ideas and other current SEO issues. (301 characters total for both sentences)

I usually make my descriptions about two sentences because it has been my experience that you can communicate quite a lot of information in two sentences, both from a keyword perspective, and a competitive advantage standpoint. The marginal value of each sentence after that usually doesn't justify the energy to create it although you might find exceptions. And while the control over the messaging isn't as standardized across relevant keywords as it would be with a shorter description, you increase the amount of opportunity to rank better for a number of long tail keywords. But more importantly, you communicated more USEFUL information through the Meta tag (assuming your doing it right and not spamming)which is it's primary function, regardless of the search engine's display constraints.

But my disagreement with Barry over this one point doesn't take away from what I think is an outstanding article. I think that's what makes SEO so interesting, is the different philosophical approaches that various people take to things like Meta tags, redirects, nofollow tags, paid links, etc. Have a great week.

Catfish

Enterprise Level SEO - 5 Reasons Why SEO for Big Companies is Different

2008-03-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

One the best parts about the last three years of working here at BusinessOnLine is that I have had the opportunity to work on numerous projects for large enterprise level clients, some of whom are Fortune 500 companies. And I thought it would interesting to compare the experiences I have had with those projects and how they differ from my experience with smaller clients. Keep in mind that this list is from an SEO engineering perspective. It doesn't take into account the differences in the sales cycle or the project management responsibilities.

Here is my top 5 list of differences in the SEO process for enterprise level clients:

1) Number of Stakeholders
It has been my experience with smaller businesses that there are generally only one or two (possibly three) stakeholders in a project. In other words, if those two or three people decide that your suggested SEO strategy is valid, it gets implemented. In larger corporations, there might be several different stakeholders that need to understand and buy off on your suggestions. Often times this can mean having to speak to a large number of people with a Power Point presentation as to why you are recommending the changes, what their effect will be and if applicable, how to do the changes. Sometimes it might mean doing more than one meeting. I have seen situations where the Internet marketing team and content management team have both agreed to suggestions only to have the IT team push back at a later date. And then another meeting is need with the IT team in order to clarify suggestions. I have also seen it where the content management team is opposed to using certain keywords because of branding considerations. These types of scenarios are much more common in an enterprise level engagement and will sometimes require a little more preparation on your part (like a Power Point presenation for example).

2) Technical Limitations
Eliminating SEO problems from CMS systems is a common for both big and small business. But most small businesses use 3rd party CMS software platforms. Most of those systems by now have SEO modules that you can add to them to make them more SEO friendly. Although I still think Oracle is one of the most problematic but that's a conversation for another day. With enterprise level clients, it is not uncommon that they have their own proprietary CMS system. So that extends the learning curve versus if someone is using Drupal or even Wordpress, which you might already be familiar with. Additionally, your timeline may be affected by the fact that your suggested SEO modifications to their CMS system can be implemented, but it will take a couple months to get the code pushed. These are the kinds of variables that are more common with enterprise level clients. These are also the kind of variables that require more time investment from the SEO engineer's perspective.

3) Ability to Directly Implement Suggested Changes
One of the biggest differences between enterprise level clients and smaller clients is your ability to directly interface with the Web site. It is very common with smaller businesses to be given FTP access so that you can use Dreamweaver or a similar Web design program to implement new title tags, Meta tags, content edits, and other SEO recommendations.

With larger clients, these changes usually need to be put into a document like an Excel spreadsheet and delivered to the client who then implements your suggestions. An audit it needed afterward to ensure that everything has been changed correctly. Creating these deliverables in a presentable fashion that is consistent with your company brand imaging is no small task when you have never done it before.

4) Time Frame of Implementation
With smaller companies, there aren't usually that many hurdles (except the IT team guy's quirky schedule) that get in the way of implementing SEO changes once they have been agreed upon. With enterprise level clients however, it is more common to have to work around code pushes or scheduled release dates. This obviously affects the overall timeline of the SEO campaign. It's important to identify these issues in the beginning of an SEO engagement to schedule work efficiently and set expectations accordingly.

5) Number of Meetings
Other than #3, I think this is one of the biggest differences between big and small companies. The sheer amount of communication that needs to happen in order to get your teams moving in the right direction. By teams I am refering to your own internal team as well as the client team. With large projects comes a large work load that is usually handled by a team of experts. Coordinating those team members takes management skills that are not needed with smaller engagements. Additionally, coordinating the education of the various client stakeholders, the actual implementation of SEO recommendations and the results of that implementation, typically requires more meeting time than with one or two decision makers in a small company. If for no other reason than the number of questions that people have about the process.

I hope that illustrates some of the challenges that SEO professionals face with large enterprise clients that are not as common with smaller companies.

Lyrics to the SEO Blues

2008-03-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

For those who were curious:

The SEO Blues (© Copyright 2008)
Lyrics by Catfish

It was Monday morning and I was just out of bed
Logged onto Hitbox just to see if I had
Any reason to be happy that day
Cause ya never know what Googles gonna take away
(I got the)

Chorus:
SEO Blues
The SEO Blues
The SEO Blues
Another Google Dance is all ya need to wake up to
SEO Blues

Number one the first day and you're gone the next
Trying to run a business man is such a mess
Page Rank, Back links, 302s
I already had enough to do (without the)

Chorus

I'm sinkin in the sandbox cause I got no links
I talked to Rand Fishkin just to see what he thinks
I talked to Matt Cutts and Shoemoney too
Not even Greg Boser knew what I should do (about my)

Chorus

It seems I had a problem that I couldn't understand
Until I read an article at search engine land
My site got hijacked by my own IP
And a 302 redirect I couldn't see (I had the)

Chorus

PS. This is purely a fictional story ;)

The SEO Blues - Free MP3 Music Download by Catfish

2008-03-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

During the last 10 years of optimizing sites, I have come across a lot of circumstances that could only be described as "The SEO Blues". *lol* So I finally decided to write a song about it. It's called The SEO Blues. Everyday on my lunch I go to my band studio to eat and relax. Fortunately it's only about 10 minutes from work. I wrote this song over the last couple weeks and today I decided to record it on my iPod. There are a couple mistakes on the guitar but I only had time for one take. I hope everyone enjoys it. I think its kinda funny. I am sure many people can relate to the theme. *LOL* Just click on the player below to listen to the song or download the SEO Blues mp3 file. Maybe someday I'll do a video ;)

Download The SEO Blues

Top 5 Ways American Express is Losing Money on SEO

2008-03-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

So before I slam American Express today for being clueless (stay tuned), let me recap my awesome weekend. Although I couldn't play flag football this last weekend because of my elbow injury, I coached our squad (The Vultures) to an opening day 29 - 6 throttling of team Havoc. We are now 1 - 0 in our second season in A League of the San Diego Men's Flag Football League :)

Additionally, my band Dive Bomber won our first round of the Emergenza Battle of the Bands and we are moving on to round 2. Not bad for a band that doesn't have a vocalist, although we did finally find one, but he hasn't performed with us yet.

Ok, so now that I have bragged a little about how cool my weekend was, let's look at the ridiculous SEO advice that American Express (who last I checked was a credit card company..lol) is distributing to people. Today I was doing a little reading at WebProNews and I read this story about American Express and their small business handbook in which they claim:

"Finally, don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques, and once your site has been put on Google’s blacklist, it will take forever to get off."

Well since I am a search engine specialist myself who typically deals with companies of this magnitude, I thought I would evaluate their laughable and myopic advice by looking at their site and pointing out how they could greatly increase their organic traffic by adhering to search engine best practices, which clearly they do not. The funniest thing about this exercise is to see all the money that they are losing by turning a blind eye to SEO. I wonder if their shareholders would be impressed.

Anyway, here are the top 5 ways they are blowing it. If anyone from AMEX is reading this, you gotta pay for the rest of my observations if ya want em...lol. So without further ado:

1) Really lame page titles.

Page titles are extremely important in organic search. Probably the most heavily weighted on page factor in my opinion. Lets take a look and see how AMEX is doing with Page Titles:

Homepage:
"American Express Credit Cards, Business Services, and Travel Services"

Not bad really. Top 10 in Google for Travel Services. Nowhere to be found on Business Services. Pretty generic keywords really and not very strong calls to action but overall, I could live with this title. Not having "credit cards" in the Meta description though is a boo boo :)

Travel Page:
"American Express - Travel"

You're joking right? LOL. I mean, at LEAST include the word services. There is so much lost opportunity here its amazing. I would be really surprised if being on Page 8 in Google get you any traffic for the word "travel". Furthermore, there are so many other permutations that are more targeted that would be easier to get:

travel resources
travel packages
travel deals
business travel (** they are #8 for this term on a PR5 page, not the main travel URL which is a PR8. How high could they rank if they added this phrase into their main travel page? It's prolly a waste of money to find out).

I could do this same exercise on many of their pages with the same result. Too much opportunity left on the table because of poor page titles.

2) Bad URLs (and Javascript links)

Click on the "Car Rental Insurance" link on the left navigation and you will be taken to a URL that looks like this:

https://www212.americanexpress.com/dsmlive/dsm/dom/us/en/feefreeservices/pages/carrentallossdamagei
nsurance_allccsg_shareddetails.do?vgnextoid=063a9501c3a0e010VgnVCM20000012b3ad9
4RCRD&vgnextchannel=3c830da9846dd010VgnVCM10000084b3ad9
4RCRD&name=carrentallossdamageinsurance_allccsg_shareddetails&type=intBenefitDetail

Ok first of all, this URL is never gonna get indexed consistently because it is WAY too long with too many parameters. It currently doesn't exist in Google. Second, even if the URL was clean, the link is made in javascript so the engines can't see it which means no Page Rank gets to the page from that link. Essentially, this content has no opportunity to get ranked in search engines. I wonder how much money it would be worth to AMEX to get listed for the term "car rental insurance".......

3) This one is my favorite: (from the source code of the personal cards page)
https://www143.americanexpress.com/cards/home.do#PILLARS/0

As if replacing an image with text is going to "optimize search engine results". Nice use of the comment tag though..lol.

This isn't one of their bigger issues, I just found it REALLY amusing.

4) Flash. Same page. It was hard to look at the text cache of this page because the text version calls some other URL that Google doesn't have indexed which means you have about 1 sec to look at the cache before the redirect to the Google error page. However, thanks to my quick guitar playing fingers, I was able to get a screen shot of the page:

http://www.businessol.com/images/seo-blog/amex-screenshot.jpg

Compare this with the content appears on the page in the normal browser window courtesy of the FLASH, and you can see a big difference. There are a lot of places on this site where content is hidden from search engines in Flash. It makes you wonder how much organic traffic this issue is taking away from AMEX (and how much that traffic might be worth).

5) ALT Tags. A link is a vote. Its a vote from Page A (the page with the link) that Page B (the page being linked to) is relevant for whatever keywords appear in the anchor text. When an image is a link, ALT text is used to convey keyword relevancy instead of anchor text. When there is no ALT tag, no keyword relevancy is conveyed and therefore there is lost opportunity. One of the most important ALT tags is the one that appears on your homepage logo because it serves as a vote for your homepage from EVERY page on your site. Therefore, it's crucial to have a good ALT tag. A good general rule of thumb is to make it roughly equivalent to your homepage title. If we look at that same personal cards page, we can see that the ALT tag reads "American Express Home". Think about what that ALT tag could do for the keywords "credit card", "business services" and "travel services" if those phrases had been included in the homepage ALT tag. I wonder how much money that is.....

And that's just the top 5. One of the biggest problems with SEO is the amount of bad information that is being thrown around by unqualified "experts". Both in and outside the industry. The truth is, there are good SEO companies and bad ones. The bad ones try to use algorithmic loopholes to trick search engines into ranking a site higher than it should. The good ones have an understanding of search engine best practices and try to maximize a site's inherent values while offering a strategic vision on how to improve those values through better usability, better content and better design. Not understanding the difference between the two shows a lack of knowledge on the subject. And that's exactly what AMEX is doing with their recommendations.

That's all for today. Hopefully someone over at AMEX will get a clue and offer a more sophisticated approach to SEO for their Business Gold Rewards Card program. Because being ignorant is not much of a reward ;)