Search Engine Optimization as a product.

SEO as a service, is offered from professional (and hopefully good) individuals like myself, as well as from big internet marketing companies, like eVisibility. The level of service also varies, for example:

• The individual consultant is often limited to how much he/she can actually do, and the level of knowledge is limited to what that person knows.
• The big agency can offer a wide range of services that intertwine and make up a healthy campaign. The level of knowledge is vast as there is a team of clever individuals working on the same campaign (at least that’s the case for good agencies).

The SEO Buyer.

As a prospect buyer of this service, one can be quite overwhelmed with the wide range of possibilities, actual deliverable tasks, personalities, cost, and more!

One of the things the SEO buyer starts to realize, as he/she shops around for their future SEO provider, is that different SEO providers will quote different deadlines to achieve a certain goal (usually measured around rankings).

We will get your website ranked in 3 months!!! GUARANTEED!!!

… oh boy…

SEO IS FOREVER!

Dear Mr. SEO Buyer,

Are you serious about thriving online? Yes? Well I have news for you, SEO is FOREVER!!

I understand that if you heard this during the sales process, you might think that the person on the other side of the phone has gone bananas. How can you even consider spending a bunch of money on something indefinitely (or at least for as long as you have a business that needs the internet)?

Don’t freak out, let me show you a different point of view on the subject at hand..

The 6 Months Trial

Once you find an SEO provider that you can trust, make sure that you have enough budget to run a 6 months campaign. You need to give your new partner some time to get the foundation established before you can expect to see any ROI.

After 6 months you should have a pretty good idea as to whether or not this is working for your business. You should be educated enough in the process to spot the weaknesses and strengths of your campaign.

If it’s working, keep going! If you have gotten great rankings and quality traffic, keep going!! Remember, there will always be someone, somewhere, doing the same thing you’re doing and more..

If you’re serious, Mr. SEO Buyer, you can never stop SEO, it’s forever!

–

Photo Credits:

SEO Blocks: Flashdaweb

Sleazebag Salesman: NVISolutions

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

SEO is FOREVER!

Matt Cutts put up a video about how Google deals with Robots.txt files. This will be a good one if you’re wondering exactly how Google sees your blocked URLs, etc…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

How Robots.txt works in Google

In the last year we all saw the Universal Search feature change the way people search in Google. That was a big change, but not as big a change as what’s about to come. 

Universal Search blended results from multiple databases such as images, videos, news, etc. You’ve seen it, here’s an example below: 

What’s about to happen is an even deeper blending of information, and the end-user will have more options to filter and find more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

The full story can be found at Dullest.com’s blog, and we should start seeing this roll out in bits and pieces during the next several weeks.

Image courtesy from http://www.dns.com.tw/

This Dance will make many SEOs out there re-think the way they build their strategies and drive force them to optimize for the various channels from where data will be pulled from.

This could result in a greater amount of spam control in sites like YouTube, and directories from Google such as Google Local. Unfortunately not all SEOs are nice and create relevant, useful and positive content…

With that said, this is a change for the better and I’m personally looking forward to this new environment – better catered to the end-user. 

There will be more and more details coming about in the following weeks, but make no mistake that it’s coming

If you have any questions, drop me a comment and check the “Notification” box so you know when I answered

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Ready for a Google Dance? Google is Ready!

The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) strikes again. I posted a video by this guy in the past, about pay-per-click management, but if you haven’t seen him yet, here’s another chance. The lyrics are good little guide on things to keep in mind when doing a redesign and/or a new design.

Watch the video and read the lyrics, comment your thoughts

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Designing SEO friendly code

I was recently asked the following question:

Is code markup validation [through W3C] good for SEO? If so, should I go for Transitional validation or Strict?

The answer was at the tip of my tongue. I knew that:

1 – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the bar for coding, but are not affiliated with any search engines.

2 – Google (the main search engine most of us care about) doesn’t validate some of their own pages. If they don’t care about their pages being validated, they probably wouldn’t care about your pages being validated either.

3 – The only times I ever had to deal with W3C validation, was when a site I built wasn’t displaying correctly in some browser.

I know that wasn’t much knowledge on my part, but I knew those facts would probably lead me to my answer. Just to be safe I did a little digging and the more I dug, the more I found information supporting my hunch. The point is that W3C is a great resource to find how close to the top coding standards your site is, and to make sure it is accessible throughout different browsers, but it doesn’t really count in terms of SEO. Most blogs and web sites out there don’t validate well, heck! seosurvivor has 60 errors! (still less than Google, YES!)  And that doesn’t get in the way of ranking my blog for whatever keywords I may be striving for.

In my educated opinion, W3C is very important for web developers so they can make sure that their web sites are displaying correctly in the different browsers (by the way, here’s a cool place to check your site in different browsers). When is comes to W3C and SEO, don’t spend too much time worrying about it. W3C will improve accessibility, and that’s about it.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

W3C Markup Validation and SEO

Image via Wikipedia

I was talking with a friend about how a higher amount of contextual links, from pages with lower PageRank, are better than fewer links from pages with higher PageRank but not much context. He was having a hard time grasping that idea. The perfect scenario would be to have both, but if you need to choose where to put focus, I would go with context and relevance first. Don’t make the mistake to get caught up in the PageRank maze. A lot of people still do. PageRank has its importance, but it isn’t the ultimate measuring stick.

Contextual links are a better choice because they are providing links from pages with material that is very relevant to the destination pages within the destination site. It’s also good to have many different sources so that  the Googlebot will see those links coming in from different IP addresses, and will see that many different websites, located in several different parts of the country and world, are linking to the same relevant destination and around the same topic of the keywords and content used in the final destination. That’s contextual linking.

Ordinary links acquired from higher PageRank sites can do their job, but they will always lack some relevance, and the focus is usually very narrow. Take this for example:

The screenshot shows the footer of a PageRank 4 website. The links are loosely placed here. You can see that while you have a few links that are in the same topic as the home page (it’s a site about fish), you have others that have nothing to do with it like “English and French Bulldogs” and “Party Poker…”

A link such as this can be hard to get, maybe because it’s expensive or maybe because you can’t find the webmaster. If you’re only going for a few of these you wouldn’t get as much return as you could get with a higher amount of links that are contextual links, like the ones displayed in the screenshots below:

…and from different places, geographically identifiable by IP, and in the case below, also by language…

This is my two cents on why going after relevant, contextual links goes a long way versus trying to score fewer in between links and only worrying about PageRank.

By the way, this is the first post I’m writing using Zemanta.. I’ll write more about it on the next post, it’s a cool tool

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Contextual Links

Over a month ago a friend sent me an email asking if his Link strategy was up to par with Google’s policies. He wanted to make sure that his site wouldn’t end up being penalized by Google.

It’s also important to determine if all the work you’re doing will actually bring you the “Link Power” you’re seeking. I often encounter business owners who still spend a lot of money and energy into builing link exchanges with other sites, and in the opinion of this humble SEO Consultant that’s the biggest waste of time! To have a relevant link exchange is one thing, but to blindly create reciprocal links from buried pages on a site about tires going back and forth to a site about candles won’t help. That’s just a ficticious example by the way.

Anyway, back to my buddy’s question… He asked if it would be ok to own 4 different websites, all using different hosting servers, then create links from three of them going to the main one. The thinking behind the different server is so they can have different IP addresses. The purpose behind that is so that it looks natural, not like you’re manipulating Google, even though that’s exactly what you’re doing.

That’s smart thinking and all, but there’s something else we need to consider, the Registrar information. If you’re buying all domain names as the same entity, then you end up having the same registrar information under your WHOIS record. Can Google look into that? You would be surprised with what they have access to! In February of 2005 Google became a registrar. What does it mean to become a registrar?

Registrars are resellers, any entity can become one and sell domains. There are different tiers of registrars. You could be a “middle man”, between the source and the client. You could even be the “middle man” between the original middle man and the client and so on. It only costs a few thousand dollars to sign up to different tiers, and for Google that’s small insignificant ash tray change. Do you think they acquired that so they could let you buy domain names from them? ——- No.

Disclosure: now we enter the area of speculation and SEO Survivor’s opinions

Google made this move so they could have greater access to domain information. That doesn’t mean that now Google has information to all domain names purchased. They would only have the information to the domain names registered under them, but now they have the edge they needed to get into the registrar databases. They may not get into the black and white information, but as registrars, they get benefits such as being able to carry out high volume of automated queries and many others. I won’t get too techincal here since there’s more information about Google as a registrar if you want.

If Google can reset the Search Engine Authority from domain names that expire, you can be sure that they can find that your domain names are owned by the same entity even if they are hosted in different servers. This remains to be tested though, so if you are currently doing this, let me know how it’s going. It could work out for a while, just keep in mind that it is a huge pain in the ass to get out of Google’s supplemental index, and that’s where you go when you do something naughty in Google’s eyes.

The best way to build links is to be active in the Social Media community, share and help others out. To have original and useful content on your site, to have an SEO friendly and user friendly site navigation. To personally contact other site owners that have relevant content to yours and offer to write something for them to post on their site and link to you, as well as other practices along those lines. Organic strategies may not produce results as fast as robotic strategies, but be sure that they are well worth the time and effort, and provide super valuable links to you. Also don’t be affraid to link to other relevant sites since you have to give if you want to receive. And remember, don’t panic if it’s organic.

I hope this helps out a bit! Stay tuned for more and don’t be affraid to comment people! Peace out…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Link Strategies and Google

Buenas tardes everyone,

It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
2. A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.



4. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
5. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Geek gossip

Today I’m going to write about a time when you should be turning off your SEO for Firefox tool.

I first noticed this anomaly while working on my own blog, and again when working on a client’s site who uses Drupal. (hey, they already had Drupal installed. Nothing wrong with it, but if you ask me I prefer other technologies)

Alright, back to the subject. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO for Firefox, it’s a Mozilla Firefox add-on that every SEO professional and enthusiast should have, along with SEO Quake. It’s a free resource. Read this post first, then after you subscribe to my blog (hint, hint), you can get yours here.

So, while writing my post about the DoubleClick purchase, I used <rel=”nofollow”> on some of my links cause I didn’t feel like giving Google any of my precious link authority . (If you don’t know about “nofollow” tags, this post explains it, but finish reading first!!)

To add the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to my link tag, I had to switch to the “Code” tab in my post editor.

Now that I was in there, I added the attribute as you can see below:

Then I switched back to the “Visual” tab to finish up my blog post. I switched and notice that my SEO for Firefox was picking up that link as a “nofollow”, and highlighting it red as it likes to do with all “nofollows”. I thought: “Alright, you go nofollow! I mean… ummm… You are actually going nowhere, you’re a nofollow..” It acted as a confirmation that it was in place.

So I continued on with my post and published it. Once it was all done, I checked the live site on all browsers I have installed on my machine, just to be extra anal. Firefox first, duh! Check… Next was Explorer… Check.. umm.. Wait! Something wasn’t right there. I don’t have SEO for Firefox installed on my Explorer and somehow it was picking it up and highlighting it.

I thought to myself… Weird! Specially because that was the only nofollow on my page being picked up. Very weird indeed! What to do? I went back to the code. Logged back into my admin area, went into my “Manage” tab and picked this post.

Everything looked ok, I still didn’t get it.. So I went into the “Code” tab and lo! and behold! Well, see for yourself:

Did you see what happened there? You probably did, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll help you out. When I first added the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to the link tag, I had my SEO for Firefox turned on. Then I switched to “Visual” mode and the SEO for Firefox did what it does best, it highlighted the link red because it saw a “nofollow” on the code behind it. When it did that, my post editor read it as if I had highlighted that word in red myself, so it added the extra code <style=”background-color: #ff0000″> into the link tag. The end result was a link with the red highlight in the code, not something I wanted at all.

From that point on, I learned to turn my SEO for Firefox tool OFF before working on a post

I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please don’t be shy, comment, share, subscribe!

Til next time!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

When Seo For Firefox Needs To Be Turned Off

Just another regular day of good old SEO ass kicking here at eVis… My office mate Fumi is on the phone with a client chatting away while I’m doing my unintended eves-dropping because we sit a few feet away from each other. Then I hear Fumi yelp a “Whaaaaaaat???” in mid-sentence and I had to look at his screen.

He’s already calling me over, and pointing at his screen while getting back into his conversation. I look at his screen and I see search results for “ftc” on his screen. I notice the usual Sitelinks and then, the unexpected:

WHOA!! What the heck is that “Search ftc.gov” doing there?

Is Google trying something new behind my back? I haven’t heard of any buzz about this new feature yet, so I can say I was truly surprised.

Is this something Google is awarding sites with extremely high authority, like ft.gov for example?

Is this something Google is just testing out but will be implemented to every site that is awarded Sitelinks?

Will we have any control over this tool through Google Webmaster?

There will be some researching here on my end, as I’m sure there are many other blogs writing about this right now, so let me figure this out write a bit more about it later.

Just wanted to share the new findings! Take care and please do comment about it with your thoughts.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

New Search feature with Google Sitelinks