SEO Marketing - The Red Herring Strategy

Recently one of our clients was approached by an SEO firm who was soliciting their services, and as usual, a familiar SEO sales pitch was presented - it's what I call the "Red Herring" SEO pitch.

The Red Herring SEO sales strategy is commonly used among some large and small SEO firms. In this instance the SEO rep (see company in graphic), scanned the site for any error they could find to alert the site owner that they have very serious SEO problems due to the negligence of their current SEO firm (us). Well, they didn't find any Meta tag errors, density issues, or linking problems, but they did find 12 W3C (CSS) compliance problems in the site content!

Alarmed, the client contacted us immediately to discuss this problem that must be addressed before he loses his existing high ranking SERPs. We explained that W3C compliance issues are definitely something that we look at and fix on an ongoing basis, however, it was not at all likely that SERPs were being negatively effected by this issue. To illustrate our point further, we went ahead and did a compliance scan of (I'll let them be anonymous but if you look hard you can see them) - the company using the Red Herring sales approach and here's what we found:

We found 13 W3C compliance errors. Now, that doesn't mean that this company is inept or doesn't have a handle on SEO. Many, very well managed sites (even many SEO sites) will have W3C compliance errors arise from time to time and it requires some ongoing maintenance. When we showed our client that the company that had him up on arms about the 12 W3C errors that existed on his web site actually had more of the same errors on their own site, well... he got the picture.

Unfortunately, this tactic is common and it is far less than honest - in this case hypocritical. Many SEO sales persons are trained to use basic scanning bots to nit pick the compliance of a site in an attempt to discredit other SEO professionals rather than focus on the positive elements of their service. When we speak with a prospective client for example, we immediately acknowledge our observation that a site has or has not had a professional SEO work on it. In cases where we acknowledge that it has been worked on by a professional or someone with SEO knowledge (usually made obvious by titles), we focus on the reason why the client contacted us in the first place by discussing their goals rather than looking for ways to fool them into believing that the work that was done is somehow inferior.

This is fair warning to the users of the Red Herring approach. From this point forward, we will expose companies who use it when we encounter them. Next time, I'll put the company name in this blog. It's dishonest and unprofessional to use the Red Herring strategy and may be indicative of the integrity of their service.

LSI is here - Bring on the new tools! Or is it the latest Snake Oil?

I've been hearing about Google's implementation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for some time now. In a nutshell, the buzz is that LSI will change the On Page SEO game completely. The On Page SEO process currently consists of some the following evaluations among others:

Keyword Density
H1 tags
Meta/Title Tags
Tags matching anchor text
Interlinking/Navigation
Well Written Targeted Content

Do we now scrap the keyword density checkers you've been using and start reading articles about IR, Heuristics, and matrices as they are being used to calculate the overall "theme" of a web site based on the probable relationships between keywords as opposed to density?

Here is an excerpt of the patent filing by Google:
"The system is further adapted to identify phrases that are related to each other, based on a phrase's ability to predict the presence of other phrases in a document. More specifically, a prediction measure is used that relates to the co-occurrence rate of two phrases to an expected co-occurrence rate of the two phrases. Info gain, as the ratio of actual co-occurrence rate to expected co-occurrence rate, is one such prediction measure.

Two phrases are then related where the prediction measure exceeds a predetermined threshold. In that case, the second phrase has significant information gain with respect to the first phrase. Semantically, related phrases will be those that are commonly used to discuss or describe a given topic or concept, such as "President of the United States" and "White House." For a given phrase, the related phrases can be ordered according to their relevance or significance based on their respective prediction measures."

So basically, anything that help determine the topics, contexts and themes of a given page, like industry terms, synonyms, buzz words, acronyms, etc, will be more than ever, very useful and impact the way your page gets ranked. The relevancy of theme based words will be playing a key role this year and beyond. New factors such as LSI and theme based relevancy have been touted in recent years as the next frontier of ranking pages and combating keyword spam.

If LSI were ever implemented in the non-homogenous environment, on-page optimization will become as critical as the off-page, which will have to be properly implemented so they complement each other in a new way that satisfies both your visitors and the search engines. Every person interested in achieving top ten rankings under the new LSI-driven environment should understand the basics of this methodoogy, and how to comply to its requirements. Is it being implemented? Maybe to a degree.

There's an important twist. LSI is actually a real technology, however, some experts say that using LSI in the non homogeneous world wide web is not practical at all and LSI is simply the latest snake oil that that some SEO's put in their pitch.

Here is a great link on this topic from which I will borrow a quote:

http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-index-lsi-myth.php

I believe this article clearly explains why the use of LSI on a massive scale is impractical and is currently not being used as some SEO purveyors claim. So, if you've seen or heard a pitch from an SEO or a software designer who can apply LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or LSI to your site to increase your rankings, in my opinion, they are full of shit.

This author cites a defining quote about LSI and it's application in evaluating sites on a large scale:

"Professor Michael Berry head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee wrote me as follows 'Just for the record, LSI has been used to index on the order of 10 million documents using out-of-core SVD based techniques so you could apply it to subdomains of the Web but the entire Web would be problematic as you point out'”

blog promoters that are hot

High PR blog promotion sites that provide segmentation of blog content into another, highly organized format.

www.zimbio.com

www.alltop.com

www.feedagg.com

Much like social bookmarking sites attempt to reorganize human reviewed pages, blog aggregators provide an interesting search alternative. I've submitted a couple of my blogs to these sites and I'll try to measure the impact on traffic and Page Rank. Stay tuned.

Social Bookmarking - the Impact on Page Rank and Traffic

I read a good piece that very clearly and simply defines the purpose of social bookmarking and how this relates to we increasing traffic and page rank.

"When you do a search in a search engine, you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. It is easy to get a bunch of garbage sites that are loaded up with keywords but have poor content on the actual site.

The great thing about social bookmarking sites is the only sites you will find there are sites that other people have looked at and decided were worth saving for future reference. Real people have decided to save (bookmark) the sites, not robots. Real people also monitor the sites so if trash does get added, it is soon deleted.

The more people who bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes. As an example, lets say you are selling widgets for a really great price. You bookmark your home page on many public bookmarking sites. When someone is looking for a widget, they do a search at the bookmarking site and your bookmark comes up. They go look at your site and decide your prices are so good, they might want to come back later when they need another widget. So they add your site to their bookmarks for future reference. "

Here is the part about implementation of social bookmarking as it relates to SEO Strategy:

"Start with one bookmarking site and one page from your site. (Start with your squeeze page and build your newsletter list) Set up your account with the bookmarking site and add your page to the bookmarks. Make sure you use the best tags and description you can. (Check the popularity list on the site) Doing this in itself will help you get more traffic. Now you can go one step further and work both sides of the system.

Add a link to your site that will lead back to the bookmarking site that has your page bookmarked. Ask your visitors to bookmark your site on the social bookmarking site.

My example is below
Bookmark my site at Blinklist.com and access it from any computer, anytime. Create a link to the bookmarking site so your visitors only have to click.

You want to make sure the page opens in a new window so when your visitors are done setting up their account, they will still have your page handy to bookmark.

Next Page

Now move on to the next page. You will want to offer a different bookmarking site on each page. Why? So you can get as many bookmarks on as many sites as possible. Use the same information in the example above but change the social bookmarking site you are promoting."

This information was furnished courtesy of the following post:

http://backlinksbreakthrough.com/can-social-bookmarking-help-me/

Thank you for the very clear explanation Mr. Carpenter.

Video to enhance SEO? What's the big deal?

Simple explanation:

Youtube has a Page Rank of 9. Link Juice galore!

Example:

http://www.youtube.com/user/VickiNorrisOrganizer

When you publish a video, you can acquire a profile page with a Page Rank of 9. How often do PR 9 links come your way? Not to mention AOL and many other high Page Rank portals publish videos for free and they will rank high. In many instances, the video link itself will rank high.

Areas to research:

What is the best type of camera for shooting video for the web?
What is the best type of user friendly editing software?
What techniques are used to optimize a video profile on Youtube and others?

This is worth a test case. Time to buy the camera and put make a video about this very topic and then embed it in this blog - of course, it will be linked back from Youtube.

Zen in the Art of SEO

Originally, this blog was my supposed to by my research checklist for my team. Now, it's ranking well for search terms like, "SEO strategy" (position 21 on Google) and other related search terms. If you are passing through and this is your first time seeing the post, you deserve this explanation.

The fact is that this blog was never intended to be seen. The notes that I've made are research notes regarding SEO elements that relate to some current clients of mine as well as holistic concepts about Twitter, local map optimization, and new types of domain names that deal with the Trust Rank.

To be fair, I'm going to edit the notes so that whoever may land here to read about SEO strategy, they will at least know what I'm trying to learn. Also, I've included an RSS feed to what I believe is a good stream of information over on the right hand side.

So, here is the Zen. I have ranked high without trying to rank high. Why? That is the question. The answer is in the following qualities of this blog:

1. This blog had not real intent to promote anything. In a total of 8 posts, it has only 2 outbound links. What does that mean? Every other promotional blog that is purely designed to rank well on Google almost always has a specific "acceptable ratio" of keywords to links. Thus, those blogs are easy for Google to identify as "referencing" or "promoting" blogs as opposed to blogs that are not trying to game the system but be a quality information source.

2. There are no ads in this blog. Once again, this blog smells like it's not manipulating search engines to attempt to rank high. It just sits here and grows. Content just builds with no outbound linking or ads on the page.

3. I included a link to this page in an article campaign that was released a couple of weeks ago. As the article went out, it build a few low PR backlinks to this page. Did I think that would impact my rankings? No, not much, but consider the ration of inbound links to outbound links. Very few outbound (very little promotion) and quite a few inbound = perceived purity by the bots.

4. Just for the hell of it I bought a $10 domain name. This is theory, but I have other blogspot blogs that are stuck in the sand box that have good content. The domain name purchase may have given this page a small vote of confidence (aka better ranking) because I made a small investment in creating a home for this lonely little blog.

In the end, we're really searching in the dark for Google's philosophy. The philosophy is taught to us through the ranking of the pages we watch and change. So what has this taught me a about Google's philosophy? Create sincere value without much promotion and advertising and our users will like the page so we'll rank you high. Create a page with the intent to promote and we treat it with a greater degree of scrutiny without the liberal application of better ranking (not Page Rank - note this is a PR 0 that has some first page placements).

So, if you want to promote, don't promote - grasshopper.

Article feed into Twitter

http://twitter.com/LeslieMarquez

example of article feed into a twitter ID

Feeding it from:

http://affiliatemarketingontheinternet1.blogspot.com/

PR

Good PR Site - 14 State sites and 3 month permanent anchor tags

$29 per release

http://express-press-release.net/submit-press-release.php

PR Keyword Density Checker:

http://www.visiblepr.com/

Limo paid classifieds

Limo link exchange
http://www.limopages.net/AddLimousineCompany.asp

Research

http://www.dummysoftware.com/gzapper.html
submit software


http://www.limo.org/member-resources/member-lists/operators.aspx
limo PR 5 directory - check cost

research:

www.feedagg.com -

Local Search and Social Media Optimization

* Include yourself in as many relevant categories as possible at Yahoo-this can often lead to multiple URLs, and thus multiple citations.
* Pay the $9.95/mo. for Yahoo’s Enhanced Product. His company has found that the little “Merchant Verified” checkmark increases phone calls by 180%.
* Don’t forget about video, both as a citation source and a direct traffic driver. Getting a video thumbnail AND a local listing on the same search result page has led to a 340% increase in phone calls.
* Properly constructed social media profiles, like Twitter, can be picked up as citations if they include your business name, address, and phone number.
* Be sure to link out to your various profiles and citations directly from the landing page you list in the Google Local Business Center. This will ensure that Google is crawling your citations and correlating them with your local business listing.


* Creating plenty of city- or neighborhood-specific content on your own website to let the search engine spiders know you serve these additional areas.
* Registering a PO Box and obtaining a local phone number in the additional towns or neighborhoods you serve.
* Claiming your profile on local portals or data providers who only require a business name and phone number, or who will accept a PO Box as an address.


Claim Listings in core data feeds:

http://www.localeze.com/
http://www.universalbusinesslisting.org/
http://www.infousa.com/

Create Social Media Platform pages:

www.myspace.com
twitter
hubpages
facebook

Excerpt from SEO Book worth reading - Thank you Aaron:

"While Microsoft is busy fighting off competitors in many markets, Google keeps gaining market-share and market leverage in new verticals through soft-bundling.

One of my clients that did not use Google Checkout simply had to stop advertising on AdWords until Checkout was enabled, because without it the usually slim profit margins on AdWords turned negative. It turns out that pricing ads based on "quality" with a discount for a higher clickthrough rates allows the highest quality advertiser to rank #1, so long as they are using Google Checkout to give Google more market data and another chance at monetization. ;)

The Google Chrome browser is recommended on Youtube, advertised all over the AdSense network, and pushed via bundling partnerships with the likes of the Real player and Divx. Its release forced Microsoft to make some of their security products free, and will keep costing both companies money, with the hope that it costs Microsoft more than it costs Google.

Google is still crying to the EU that Microsoft's business behaviors are uncompetitive. Once you get branded it is hard to get un-branded. In spite of the recent slowdown in search volume Google still has a lot of market momentum behind them. You will know Google is in trouble when the market stops giving them leeway and treats them more like Microsoft.
How You Can Apply This to Your Business Today

1.) Always push to own a market default position and once you achieve that position keep investing in maintaining it, while reminding the market that your growth was organic due to your superior quality.

2.) Even if the business model is not there you can always create one/bolt one on if you get enough exposure. In the age of soft bundling it is no accident that we offer some of the best free distributed SEO tools like the SEO Toolbar and SEO 4 Firefox, with intent of helping push this site into a default market status.

3.) What sorts of distributed marketing can your site benefit from?

* real time data
* unique data interfaces
* widgets
* tools
* open source software
* mashups
* etc.


Here is a link to the top rated SEO blogs:

http://www.toprankblog.com/search-marketing-blogs/

TrustRank and .Pros Domains

Excerpt from a recently article by Michael Stankard

"PRO Domain Extension Will Weed Out Spam And Rank High In Google
November 6, 2008 by Michael Stankard

If you have been in the Internet business as long as I have, then you know that domain extensions come and go without making a dent in the rankings of .com and .org websites. The .net extension has performed the best out of all the non dot com domains, but clearly not anywhere near a .com.

Enter the .pro domain extension. I haven’t seen as much talk about it as I expected even though it has been out for months. I suppose that professionals online don’t feel it will crack the dominance of traditional .com’s. The fact is .pro will not only rank high, but has the potential to take rankings away from the vaunted .com domain extension."

There is an extra verification process for these domain names and the buzz about these domains require additional research, however, there may be something here. Why?

You must have a business license to keep your domain. This is a specific form of information validation that takes the domain name far above .com's in the realm of Trust. Anyone heard of TrustRank? If you don’t provide them with a business license along with the licensing entity within 44 days you will lose the domain. .pro domains are not available through wholesalers like godaddy - you will have to use Network Solutions or another registrar.

The Value of "Link Juice" explained

Here are the broad strokes for evaluating a link to your site:

1. Know The Page - if your site will be linked to from anything other than a home page, make sure you know exactly which page your link will be on. Some of the more shady link brokers won’t tell you exactly which page your link will be on, until you have already paid. This is a bad sign. All good brokers show you in advance where your link will be.
2. No More Than 100 TOTAL Outbound Links - the page linking to you should not have more than 100 TOTAL links including internal navigation and other site control links.
3. No More Than 25 Paid or Sponsored Links - make sure they don’t have a ton of paid or sponsored links. Really 16 is my rule of thumb for paid links, but enough industry people agree on 25, but the less the better.
4. No More Than 2 Google Adwords Boxes - any site that has more than 2 Adwords boxes will not help you.
5. At least 1 Point Higher In Page Rank - the site should have at least a 3 PR, as well as being higher than your page. Sites that have below 3 PR have little or no pass through.

These are basic guidelines for accepting inbound links. The thing to remember is; your own internal pass through, or link juice, also depends on your site following the basic rules of linking. Don’t have more than a couple advertisements, no more than 100 total links on a page, etc. By properly stuffing keywords and creating optimized content your pages will have more weight, which will in turn make your internal links have more go juice.