SEO News of 29-7-2010

Why SEO Gurus Got Slapped in the Face

t felt like only yesterday when SEO gurus ran the search world.

There they were, changing hundreds an hour while they poked around on their computers, analyzing keywords, calculating algorithms and directing cheaper labor overseas to conduct their link building projects — all with the belief that these tactics were the only thing needed to gain top rankings on Google.

Once upon a time, that's all that was needed to rank high on Google.

Flash forward to today and now SEO "gurus" who once killed it on the search scene, are scratching their heads and screaming at their offshore partners.

News flash: your tactics are now considered spam.

It could be said that social media hit mainstream about four years ago. Around that same time, all hell broke lose. Facebook's flood gates opened to everyone; YouTube was crawling to the top of Alexa; and, everyone wanted to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch on Twitter. Once everyone else started to care about what everyone else was saying, search started to listen.

Of course search engines started listening to the massive amounts of conversations and user generated content created online, which is called real-time search.

That content has answers and we're all just searching for answers anyway aren't we? Who better to trust than Kim Kardashian or your best best friend from high school on Facebook? (slight sarcasm).

Nevertheless, social is now important for search marketing and the agenda of Search Engine Strategies (SES) SF 2010 is a reflection of that.

SES is a global conference held annually in cities around the world. Less than a month away is SES San Francisco, which starts August 16th. While previous years conferences have focused primarily on SEO, SEM, PPC strategies for search, the focus more recently has shifted to social media. But why?

Social media is playing a huge factor at SES this year, according to Byron Gordon from SEO-PR.com. This has nothing to do with social media as a buzz word or a fad. It has to do with the undeniable fact that search has changed, dramatically and quickly. One minute you are showing up on the first page for keywords with their queries, the next minute, Google ignores you as spammer. Why? Too much SEO and too little SMO (social media optimization).

SEO and Social now need to work together. An SEO practitioner can no longer apply the same tactics to be a top rank without integration of social media as well. Further, the way people search, make decisions, and what they click on has change. In fact, there is very little discussion of paid search at this years SES San Francisco event.

There are some great topics and speakers to be discussed at the event. Agenda topics range from Introductory SEO or Social Media to in depth topics like Augmented Reality and Facebook.

What I do not see covered in depth however, is social search — a new way people are starting to search and make decisions about what to click on and even buy.

I would expect to see a full discussion period blocked out for this topic. While I do see mentions of the changes to search, etc. the face of social search in itself deserves more consideration at a search engine strategies conference.

Aren't the new strategies involving social to optimize search essentially what people expert to learn from attending? What do you think?
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Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.

Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”

So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.

In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.

Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.

Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.

Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.

In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.

Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.

She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.

She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.

Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).

“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
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Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.

The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.

Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:

Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.

Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Algorithms: The Cure for Copywriter’s Block

Writer’s block, or perhaps more accurate these days, blogger’s block, is a common occurrence. Great bloggers try to pump out insightful and engaging content daily, but eventually the question becomes, what more can you write about? It’s at times like these when I suggest you delve into a little keyword research.

Rather than struggle internally to find topics for your next blog or article, let data drive your reporting or writing. Tools like Google’s Adwords KeyWord Tool, BlogPulse and Wordtracker are good for discovering what topics are trending for Copywriting inspiration.
Content Farms vs. Attention Mines

Newspapers and journalists have bemoaned the growing industry of “Content Farms” in recent years. As sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media grow in prominence, traditional publications are losing web traffic and thus, advertising opportunities. But how are Content Farms getting so many readers? Shouldn’t the journalistic reputation of major newspapers and magazines be enough to attract readers? Not anymore, thanks to search algorithms.
Algorithm as Editor

As online journalist Jason Fry (@JasonCFry) explains in a recent post, Content Farm sites use of algorithms to create story ideas in an “algorithm-as-editor” model. This flies in the face of the traditional writing style in which editors or bloggers assemble story ideas through a keen journalistic, yet un-digitized public awareness or crowdsourcing. Now, writers are guided by search engine queries, a model you can use when attempting to ward off copywriter’s block.
Attention Mines

Noted journalism entrepreneur Michael Tippet (@MTippet) reengineers the somewhat spammy reputation Content Farms have evoked by calling the collection of sites Attention Mines. In this sense, writer’s still hold the key to the car, so to speak. Writers, bloggers and professional journalists can all use algorithms in developing story ideas, but don’t let search queries alone guide your pen. Keyword research is only one component to identifying what readers want and what they need. If we let search engines write the stories, we’d read nothing but Justin Beiber

Make Headlines, Don’t Write Them

There’s a big difference between merely commenting on search queries and using them to write good copy. If you’re posting a blog or article, strive to create a headline and add to the conversation, rather than merely rehashing the keywords you saw in your keyword research.

Algorithms can tell you what readers want, but more importantly, they help you understand why. In your keyword research, you’ll come across story ideas that make sense, but a few that are out of the blue as well. A great article can come from those outliers. Keyword research can help you find what an audience wants to read, but as a writer, you must give them what they need..
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How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging

One of the things we do to help our SEO efforts is to write professional articles about our niche. We believe this is a great way to get links, and anyone can do this in their own niche.

Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.

The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.

First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.
At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?

Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.

You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.

An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.

This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.

If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!

So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.

While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.

For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.
So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.

Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:

1. Read the alert feed
2. Iterate over all items
3. Remove items from sites we don’t want
4. Keep all others
5. Output the kept items as a feed

This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.

So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.

Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.

So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.

The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!

The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.

Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.

From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.

We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.
A word about how it works

We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.

If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:

* Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
* Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
* Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
* Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.

Summary

Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.

A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.

We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!