ThirstyPony.com

Search Marketing - Simplified

Social Media Marketing Blog

Using Squidoo for Search Engine Optimization

“If you build it, they will learn.” – A Squidoo mantra.

First things first – what the heck is a Squidoo? It isn’t a snowmobile that can drive on water. At it’s simplest, Squidoo has been called a sort of MySpace for adults. While that analogy is becoming popular, and is oh so clever, it couldn’t be less accurate.

The official word from the horse’s mouth is that Squidoo is an “… online platform that makes it easy for anyone to build lenses on topics they are passionate about. These lenses help you find a unique, human perspective on things that interest you… fast. Not only can Lensmasters spread their ideas, get recognized for their expertise, and send more traffic to their Web sites and blogs—they could also earn royalties.” Former luddites can become online authorities and the possibilities are astounding. Over 20,000 lenses and 8,000 lens masters currently make up the network, and there is no end in sight.

The private Squidoo beta launched in October, and already some of the earliest lenses have Google Page Rank and are pulling in signifigant search keyword referrals from major engines. Google’s affinity for Squidoo is especially noteworthy, and many search engine marketers and optimizers are taking notice. And it’s official: In a recent interview at SXSW, Squidoo’s Senior Director of Community Development – Heath Row – was quick to point out the rate at which new lenses have been getting indexed. Listen to the full interview here.

So a lens can be a lot more than a shortcut for searchers to subject matter on a focused topic. From an SEO standpoint, it can also serve as a shortcut to getting newer websites indexed by search engines who regularly crawl, and give creedence to, Squidoo’s growing network. Make lenses for your clients, your company, or anything you are passionate about. It’s the next big thing in so many ways.

{ 0 Comments }

KSSS – Keep SEO Simple, Stupid.

The SEO game has changed frequently and drastically during it’s short existence. Meta tags gave way to hidden text which gave way to Page Rank, incoming links – and the list will continue to grow each year. The big players, Google, Yahoo and MSN, strive to differentiate their directories by offering the most comprehensive and relevant results possible. This fact is great news for consumers and retailers alike – it keeps the playing field fierce, but level.

Most search engines have developed comprehensive spam filters that weed out the spammers from the legitimate sites and penalize sites caught trying to cheat the system. Google in particular has led the charge for quality over quantity. (site-reference.com)

Simply put, SEO is becoming a simpler practice. Not simpler as in easier – it’s as competitive as ever. But it is harkening back to the pre-spamming days when good content and a few basic search friendly ground rules were all you needed to ensure the majority your traffic.

{ 0 Comments }

The Ethics of SEO

The number one goal for any search engine optimization professional is to achieve high rankings for their clients. The methods optimizers employ in an attempt to achieve this success do not fall in line with a roadmap or best practice plan. SEO is full of grey areas and guesswork however there are identified tactics that have been proven to increase the risk of a site being penalized or banned from directories. As a result, web marketing professionals must be careful when making changes to a website and the importance of perceived ethics in search engine optimization has become immense.

It can be said that SEO professionals have two clients: the website owner and the search engines. While clients have to be comfortable with changes to their site, search engines also have to be considered is the site optimized, and are said optimization efforts in danger of compromising rankings? Each major search engine has its own set of stated guidelines that webmasters are expected to follow as a condition of its use. Client requests have to be weighed alongside these rules or ethics to avoid penalization.

SEO professional Wayne Hurlbert has outlined three popular SEO ethics classifications, often referred to as hats. Professionals are classified as being either a white hat, black hat or grey hat SEO. A white hat SEO professional is one who follows generally accepted optimization techniques, and avoids anything that even slightly conflicts with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Any method that raises ethical questions is completely avoided. A white hat professional is one who upholds the highest ethical standards.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the black hat SEO professional, who clearly violates all guidelines, stated by any search engine, and has no regard for generally accepted optimization techniques. Some black hat practices include cloaking, hidden text and link farms. A grey hat SEO professional is one who lies somewhere in the middle of the other two. Many disagree about what exactly is constitutes ‘grey’, but the utilization of certain linking tools and content generating software suites have been mentioned.

The exact definition and boundaries of the hat classifications are up for debate, but the concept serves as a barometer for ethical SEO practices. Professionals must figure out their individual boundaries and decide for themselves which SEO practices enable them to achieve rankings while maintaining standards that are in line with their personal values. Research is essential when it comes to deciding which SEM firm to outsource to, as below-the-belt tactics can prove devastating to a site’s organic visibility.

{ 1 Comment }

Top 5 SEO Best Practices

To say that SEO has changed by leaps and bounds over the last 5 years would be the understatement… of the last 5 years. What was once a measure of a onsite meta tags and coding dilligence, has now become a larger measure of offsite influences. Algorithmic formulas have become more sophisticated as the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) try to differentiate themselves from one another. Objective SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) relevance of a given keyword search will make or break a user’s confidence in a very short amount of time. If an individual has a hard time finding what they’re looking for when using Google, due to off-target or spammy results, they’ll try MSN – and so on.

Through a focused combination of attention to both your code and your surrounding landscape you can better the chances of your domain being interpreted positively by search engines and in turn reach your target market effectively.

The Pony’s 5 Golden Rules of SEO:

  1. Fix Your TITLE Tags: Titles must be unique to each and every page, whenever possible. They should contain your top keywords, in a variety of iterations, throughout your site and be especially targeted to the content of the given page in question.
  2. Utilize Your URL Structure: If you don’t need to have dynamic, alpha-numeric URLS, then don’t! Make your URLs SEO-Friendly by incorporating keywords, or automatically mimicking page titles via a mod-rewrite script.
  3. External, Incoming Link Building: Currently one of the most effective ways in which to increase your rankings is by getting other sites to link back to yours. This can be done via superior original content, press releases, good old fashioned flesh-pressing and more. Think of every incoming link as a vote to your site – because the search engines will! Link building is not easy, takes time and is never truly finished. Hang in there.
  4. Keyword Density and Placement: Your pages should contain an average of 3-500 words of ASCII text, with major keywords and iterations sprinkled healthily throughout. The best rule of thumb when walking the line between density and SPAM is to remember: If the copy reads poorly to you, there’s a good change it will sound funny to the spiders as well. Use keywords and phrases in moderation.
  5. Don’t Panic: SEOs do just that – they optimize. Ultimately, webmasters have very little control over how their site is viewed by the major search engines. One can do everything right, follow all of the best practices and still be invisible for their most desired words and phrases. Algorithms fluctutate, and SERPs change – constantly. Just because you’re buried today, or have lost ground for yourself or a client, doesn’t mean that all can’t change in a few days. Stay dilligent with the offsite SEO and make sure you haven’t done anything for which you may be penalized.

Search Engine Optimization has many complex facets and is always evolving. However, there are effective means in which you can improve your visibility if you pay attention and stay slightly ahead of the crowd. Remember – Anything that search engine engineers can add to an algorithim to keep SEO companies and web masters from manipulating it’s organic SERP – they eventually will. All “proven” offsite SEO methods, and many onsite (hidden text and keyword stuffing for example) will eventually be discounted and even become cause for index expulsion. Stay current, be patient and build those links!

{ 2 Comments }

Profiting from Obscurity

What’s a search marketing professional to do when their vertical of choice becomes completely flooded? Or, more accurately, what’s a search engine marketing professional to do – period? When the low-hanging fruit is a fond memory, it’s time to break out the 24 foot extendable ladder.

This article didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it’s a good shortcut for the newbie. In a nutshell, find the more obscure phrases that people use to find what you’re selling. When it comes to PPC, locating these sweet spots is what SEM firms spend hours doing every day across the globe. But how many people are building pages that are focused specifically on terms like discount blue baby bedding? The longer the keyword phrase, the less people are likely competing to optimize for it. Learn, love and live the longtail.

Yes, we all already knew this. But when applied to page creation as opposed to PPC – it got my brain working. Stay tuned for my brand new site: www.brightredrubberpickuptruckfloormats.com. Not really.

{ 0 Comments }

SEO and The Importance of Portals

If you’re an SEO/SEM firm, you likely have many clients who are obsessed with and focused on only 1 keyword (variable) and 1 search engine (Google). It can be a challenging feat explaining the value of having your top words and phrases do well in a variety of engines, as opposed to just the behemoth that is Google. It’s also how we SEOs validate our services and work and – more importantly – increase client comfort levels and their genuine belief in what you do for them month after month.

I tend to point to server log keyword and search engine referral data in this situation – but there is little substitute for a client not being able to go enter their perceived top word into Google and see it themselves sitting pretty on the first page. So always remember, for their benefit and yours, the dramatic way in which web portal loyalty dictates an individual’s start page and search engine. Let’s look at the tale of the tape:

According to this recent survey by Neilsen, Yahoo reigns supreme when it comes to portals, and MSN is behind Google by just a hair. While Google’s run at establishing itself as a portal cannot be denied – particularly with continued popularity of GMail, Google Calendar, Co-Op and other features – Yahoo is still ahead by 20%, and MSN has a few tricks left up its sleeve too. Microsoft’s new Vista operating system will ship with MSN as the live integrated desktop search of choice, and they’re just about to launch their own PPC network, too. Hardly signs of resting on their laurels.
Consider this chart, and share some version of it with any of your disheartened or impatient clients. Being on the first page of MSN and Yahoo does mean something! I get frustrated when I make serious inroads in other search engines, and customers don’t even want to hear about it because it’s not Google. In the foggy world of Search Engine Marketing, It’s up to us to help them understand important acheivements that may not seem quite so outstanding.
{ 0 Comments }

Google Sitemaps and Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to the fleet of new Google-related tools, there are those who give them a try without a second thought, those who will wait for the bleeding-edgers to test the water before easing themselves in and finally those who will do everything in their power to avoid Google tools based on stubborn principle. Google Sitemaps was introduced about a year ago and was meant to help improve their index by allowing webmasters to assist with comprehensive spidering by their own efforts. Users could submit all of the individual pages on their website to Google Sitemaps, taking some of the strain off of Google’s crawling efforts. Soon thereafter many webmasters realized that they were being dealt the short stack, not receiving anything in return for submitting these intricate sitemaps.

After some negative feedback, the new and improved Google Sitemaps was introduced it doesn’t promise to increase your ranking, but it does offer a few handy features that will aid in your quest for relevant SERP rankings. All those webmasters who abandoned it after round one should give it another chance. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, as it can now be said that there are definite SEO benefits.

You may check your PageRank daily using Google Toolbar. If you have hundreds of pages within your site this is a lot of tedium to endure and there is definitely an easier and more accurate way to keep an eye on your site’s SEO advancements. Using Google Sitemaps you can learn much about your website that you might never have discovered. Statistics reports summarize useful details that will immediately signal to you whether or not you are on the right track and what you can do to reach your goals. The importance of PageRank has been widely debated, but remains a decent barometer of how Google views your site in terms of importance. And the more information that is gathered about your website, the more of a chance you have to gain an edge over your competitors.

Google Sitemaps creates tables of query stats, showing you which searches performed over the last three weeks returned pages from your website and what the highest average position was. It also sheds some light as to which top search queries resulted in click-throughs and which did not. Hopefully, the ones with the most click-throughs will parallel your stats on conversion rates. If you have many top search queries but hardly any click-throughs, then you should focus on increasing your rankings for those.

Google Sitemaps also provides the crawl status of your URLs and how many pages have a high, medium, or low PageRank. It displays which page on your website has had the highest PageRank for the last three months, and has a Common Words section which displays which words commonly appear on your website and which words are the most frequent in inbound, external links. If you’re seeing words in the Common Words list that are not the same as your target keywords, then you should consider rewriting some of your content.

As far as managing your sitemap goes, using Google allows you to change some key attributes. First of all, you can set the priority you want Google to place on particular pages in your site, 0 to 1 (only relative to your site). If you have certain pages within your site that are more important, by giving them high priority you will increase their importance in the eyes of Google. There is a last modified timestamp which allows spiders to avoid re-crawling pages that haven’t changed. Also, you can tell Google how often you change a particular page this is important if you change it very frequently.

All in all, using Google Sitemaps is definitely a proactive move you are informing them about your new pages rather than sitting around and waiting for spiders to crawl about and discover them on their own. It can be a great gateway for brand new pages that do not have many external links to them. The Internet is drowning in websites and the extra indexing effort is worth the while.

{ 3 Comments }

Don’t Let Your PPC Campaigns Get Stale

Starting a new PPC campaign from scratch requires planning and a clear set of conversion goals. Building new accounts, researching keywords and testing ad copy all factor in to the ramp up time – but is there ever a point at which you’re ‘done’? Can occasional maintenance take the place of the undivided attention you were devoting in the early days of a new PPC effort? The short answer is ‘definitely not’. Although it may seem plausible that your campaigns will reach a point where they can be switched on to auto pilot, there are many reasons you should always remain active in their daily management.

In particular, PPC strategists should actively devise promotions and rebates which cater to annual trends. You can’t do this if you’re taking a hands-off approach. Keeping your ads seasonal can be a huge boost to their effectiveness and click-through-rate. During the months of April and part of May, for example, many retailers integrated Mother’s Day specials into their PPC advertisements. Discounts coupled with targeted ad copy which speaks to the specific occasion a person is shopping for – an occurance which is more likely should you be tailoring ads to specific calendar events – have much higher conversion rates than the general variety. Keep your PPC copy current and watch your sales soar!

{ 0 Comments }

Browser Bias can Bite you on the Butt

Search Marketing efforts don’t end when a consumer arrives at your site. We’ll spare you the you can lead a horse (or pony) to water. analogy. You can have great SERP placement and an outstandingly comprehensive PPC campaign – but ultimately a visitor’s decision to buy or balk will be made after they get to your storefront.

Site content, and how intuitively or accurately it is displayed, is the major conversion determining factor. It is obviously very important when designing your website that you have first identified your target market. Likewise it is integral to recognize the marketing advantages tied to being aware of what web browsers your audience is likely to be using – and accomodating for as many of them as possible through your coding and design.

Internet Explorer has enjoyed a position as the most popular browser for many years. Increasingly beloved competitor FireFox, however, is making a quick and aggressive run at the crown. The FireFox elevator pitch is that it strives to interpret HTML, CSS and other languages the way they were meant to be seen and read, while IE is more likely to display inconsistencies. Which of the two remain the most loyal to coding standards is ultimately, however, open to personal interpretation.

Regardless of where your loyalties lie, design and coding elements that display ‘correctly’ (i.e. the way they were intended to appear by a developer) in IE will often times appear ‘incorrectly’ in FireFox – and vice versa. Throughout the design process, make sure to test your design and coding in any browsers that you feel your audience may use. PC browsers with considerable market share include Internet Explorer, FireFox, AOL, Netscape, and Opera. And make sure you don’t neglect to test Mac browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, and Camino. Making sure your site is appearing as intended will prevent you from having to make large edits to the site down the road or losing potential customers due to questionable browser translation.

The competition between browsing applications has been heating up lately, with Microsoft preparing to launch Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla about ready to offer FireFox 2.0, and Opera suiting up to launch Opera 9.0. All three browsers are currently in the beta testing stages and are available to download for the public to test out. The good news in all this is that developers have been making a concerted push to create uniform standard-compliant browsers. With a renewed shift towards compliance, it’s certain that creating websites with consistent aesthetic components will be less of a struggle going forward. Until that day comes, multi-application testing on both PCs and Macs is going to remain an SEM best practice.

{ 0 Comments }