Taking the Snake Oil out of SEO

In website design meetings, as soon as a discussion moves to search engine optimisation (SEO) I see disengagement from the technical staff. I don’t know if it is from lack of interest or scepticism of the benefits, but there is a tangible shift in attitude.

Search engine optimisation is primarily concerned with making your website content as discoverable and understandable to search engine crawlers (software that visits your site and indexes it) as possible. Google has the largest share of search traffic in Australia, so the more indexable your site is to the Google search engine, the more chance you have to appear in relevant searches which means more page views and exposure.

Part of the problem with SEO is that there is a lot of snake oil practitioners out there who make outraging and unsubstantiated claims about how they can get your site at the top of the search rankings. Most developers have probably had a friend or relation ask them how get to the number one spot on Google search without wanting to spend any time and effort. I can understand the jaded opinion towards the topic.

Secondly, much of the SEO push is driven by the marketing functions of the business. SEO seems to be pigeonholed as the concern of marketers. There is a tendency for marketing to include developers after the fact in their SEO strategy and for technology to see SEO as a problem for marketing to solve.

I asked Ron Erdos, an ex-colleague and once a Fairfax Media SEO specialist and now audience optimisation strategist at Yahoo!7, for his take on how SEO can be seen more holistically in the organisation.

“If you see SEO as some kind of trick, it's easy to treat it with disdain … However, if you learn the principles of SEO, you'll be able to make design decisions which not only meet your brief, but put a smile on the face of senior management, when they learn that you've brought them extra traffic.” Erdos says.

The first thing to keep in mind is while Google doesn’t publish the secrets of their PageRank algorithms, that doesn’t mean they are unknowable. SEO is knowable by testing hypothesis and observing outcomes.

There is no magic one-size-fits-all solution to SEO but there are parts that need to work together to achieve a good search outcome.

Site architecture matters

According to Erdos, "One URL per asset is the golden rule of SEO-friendly web development. If you have multiple URLs for the same asset, you are almost definitely diluting the SEO value of that asset.”

This is why technical talent needs to be involved from the beginning of the SEO journey. Site structure and the way that the URLs are constructed materially affect how you are ranked.
As you build your online software execution, how the URLs are presented and linked to each other need to be consistent to gain maximum advantage.

Erdos recommends the “universal URL” approach, which Yahoo!7 have just implemented for their own assets. The universal URL is a reversal of the once fashionable subdomain approach - where a new subdomain for each channel such as m.example.com for mobile sites. “This is because the SEO strength of each url is determined, to a large degree, by the number of links pointing at that URL.”

Keyword choice

If site architecture is the domain of the technical team, equally important is choice of keywords which naturally fits with marketing. You have to use words to describe your products and content that your audience is going to use to search for it.

“Keyword research - learning which words and phrases people are using to find content. You then use these words and phrases in the title and/or description of your app or web page, and in other strategic places.” says Erdos.

For example, if you name your site or describe it using the word “laptop” but most of your target audience refers to them as “notebooks” then when they search for the notebook term and you haven’t used it in your content and links, then you are leaving it up to Google Search to know that the terms are equivalent.

Google Search will try its best to recognise similar terms such as “laptop” and “notebook” depending on how interchangeably they have been used by search users.

Engaging content

Even if you have a perfect system for serving SEO friendly URLs and have done your homework for naming and describing the content, you need to produce content that is relevant to the terms you promised in your keywords and URL names. If the SEO description of your site is for the terms “Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll” but the content is about insurance then your relevance will be low and your ranking sub-optimal. Erdos says that you still “need to prove that your content is engaging”.

“In SEO, this is expressed as links pointing to your content, especially from authoritative sources such as news and government websites. It's also expressed by low bounce rates - users staying on your site for a decent amount of time instead of hurrying back to the Google search results page. Those are just two of the engagement metrics search engines use.”

A good SEO approach combines the systems knowledge and analytical powers of your IT team with the audience understanding of marketing and disciplined content producers that keep site content current and engaging to their readers. SEO is not magic, it is hard work and good business.

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Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn't see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Ms Lewis highlights the importance of having a “real business, with real influence, that interacts with its clients – real people – and is active online.

I admit that at sometimes this new approach to SEO can be a bit frustrating and I am sure that many internet marketers will pass through some hard times switching to these new methods. I’m already doing everything Google wants, but that doesn’t mean that I can pull my hair down and relax. SEO will never be about laziness and relaxation.”

Five Favorite Social Media Marketing Tools

 

5 Relatively unknown Social Media Sites to increase social reach:

 

1. Sprout Social - Social Media Management

 

Sprout Social is a low-cost tool for social media mangement.

I have reviewed quite a number of social media management tools during my tenure as a Practical EcommerceI contributing editor, many of which offer highly useful features. Though none of them handle every task equally well, for my own purposes Sprout Social has become the "goto" application.

It's a low-cost tool - subscriptions start at $9.00 per month - that enables me to manage most of the social networks in which I actively participate. Not only that, it serves as a social listening tool, facilitates scheduled content publishing, keeps track of new fans and followers, and provides real-time reporting of my social network engagement activity. There is a mobile version, too, so I am not confined to a desktop or laptop when doing so.

2. Bottlenose - Social Listening

Bottlenose makes sense of social media conversations and trends.
I've always said "listening is the new marketing," and where social media is concerned, truer words were never spoken.

A recent find is Bottlenose, which is a social listening platform that tracks in real-time what's happening around the web on topics of interest to me. In fact, Bottlenose refers to itself as the "Now Engine." Though its interface is reminiscent of Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, Bottlenose was built for the express purpose of making sense of all of the conversations you and I follow, and the trends they relate to.

3. Wordpress - Business Blogging

Of all the blogging software platforms I've ever used - a list that includes Typepad, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr - I continue to come back to Wordpress. No other platform offers the same degree of rich functionality, extensibility, and design flexibility. And while it's not the easiest platform to use, for long form blogging Wordpress can't be beat!

4. RebelMouse - Content Curation

RebelMouse is a content curation platform.

A prevailing trend in social media is content curation, which is the filtering of content based on topical categories, industries and tags.

A new curation platform, and one that I've really come to favor, is RebelMouse. Its ability to automatically capture, display and organize content from my Facebook and Twitter accounts have made it my "social front page." I can also edit content, highlight particular entries, and even move them around the page with drag-and-drop ease.

Due to its visually-oriented, Pinterest-like interface, it's also a tool that merchant's could easily use to aggregate and filter content from their e-commerce sites.

5. Jing - Screenshots and Screencasts

In addition to my own blogging and social media engagement activities, writing "how-to" articles for Practical Ecommerce often requires that I grab screenshots from sites I review. Of all the tools created for that purpose, no other accomplishes the task as easily as Jing.

Screenshots can be "marked up" with text boxes, arrows, highlights, or captions, and users can automatically store screenshots and screencasts at Screencast.com, a free file storage service.
Those are the five social media marketing tools I can't live without. What's yours? Feel free to comment.