SEO
Tips in a Sea of Change – Advanced SEO 2006
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
January 11 2005
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Waves of change have cascaded over the search marketing sector in the
past year prompting changes in the methods, business and practice of search
engine optimization. Though many things have been altered, expanded or
otherwise modified, the general search engine market share has not. Google
remains the most popular search engine and continues to drive more traffic
than the other search engines combined. Another thing that has not changed
is the greater volume of site traffic generated by organic search placement
over any other form on online advertising.
There are six or seven advanced public search engines out there but the
vast majority of SEO attention is naturally given to Google. Many of the
tips offered in this piece, while useful at the other search engines, are
written with Google in mind. We are also thinking about alternative file
formats and other ways visitors might find websites aside from pure-search.
The most visible changes can be seen in the variety of search formats and
in search results returned by the major search engines but the greatest
changes are taking place in the philosophies and practices of search engine
optimizers. As the search environment has changed, so too have the techniques
and tools used by search marketers. More time is focused on improving website
content and navigation in order to appeal both live-visitors and search
spiders. There are also new metrics measuring the success of a search marketing
campaign, all of which are far more complicated than simple search engine
rankings.
Since the introduction of the Jagger Update at Google, we have been doing
a number of things slightly differently and have updated expectations of
our clients and ourselves.
Organic search engine placement now requires a lot more work on our part
and on the part of our clients or their webmasters. Content needs to be
updated regularly, navigation simplified and shared analysis of on-site
traffic is increasingly important. Top10 websites, especially around their
main entry points, have become production pieces requiring a greater degree
of strategic planning than the general, annually updated brochure sites
do. Creation of that content needs to be considered a standing business
expense though that expense should be more than made up for in long-term
advertising savings.
Along with that greater effort, we strongly advise our clients to integrate
their PPC campaigns with their SEO campaigns though, not necessarily in
the hands of the same person. SEO and PPC are two unique arms of search
engine marketing. Many SEOs spread their time crafting both paid and organic
campaigns for clients though each requires unique and highly developed skill
sets. PPC offers guaranteed placements for a fee but require greater attention
and monitoring, along with different levels of analysis. We have set caps
on the number of PPC campaigns we can run in conjunction with organic placement
campaigns and have taken measures to outsource via recommendation any overload.
The key here is to have the PPC and the organic SEO teams working together
on several aspects of the client’s web documents.
That said, we need to stop thinking of search engines as the main show
in website marketing. This might sound like a self-defeating statement coming
from a search engine optimization specialist however search, as a tool,
is no longer confined to the search engines as we know them. Think about
paid-ad generating site visits from a third-party website. The transactions
that brought the visitors were not conducted on a search engine, but one
or more search engines, in conjunction with that third-party website facilitated
them.
Now, think about social commentary and viral marketing. Internet users,
as is true with most of us offline, tend to rely on first-person recommendations.
I tell a friend about a service that worked particularly well for me. They
try that service and tell their friends as well. It works that way with
almost any industry from restaurants to airlines, moving companies and magazines.
Now, try to imagine your personal network of friends and contacts. How many
of them know each other or might connect through a third or fourth party?
Imagine the impact of giving users the ability to tag their search experience
with comments. During the Christmas sales rush, Yahoo Shopping experimented
with user-compiled shopping lists, sort of a global gift-guide that used
social networking and comment tagging to cross-reference for search results.
(If you are interested in Stereo Speakers, you might also be interested
in StacyB’s Audiophile Shopping List.) Yahoo’s Flickr photo
sharing service has seen amazing growth through global networks of friends
exchanging images they have tagged with their comments.
Similarly, the appearance of Blogs has substantially expanded the online
marketing environment. It is estimated that by the year 2010, there might
be as many as one billion Blogs published online. While most are personal
diaries, blogs appear to have lasted long enough to be more than a fad and
are evolving rapidly as users learn to modify and improve on them.
Businesses are increasingly turning to Blogs to communicate with customers
or to respond to inquiries. Newsgathering organizations are using Blogs
to fill the gap between TV broadcast and the Internet by posting everything
from breaking news, information podcasts, video clips, and reporter’s
notebooks to recipe ideas, shopping tips and paid-search advertising.
There are two major advantages Blogs offer search marketers. The ability
to link Blog entries together to form an information-thread network provides
search marketers with a number of tools beyond the improvement of the knowledge
base. We are able to help clients establish communications centers from
which they can link to information supplied by suppliers, distributors and
clients on their websites or blogs. An important goal for search marketers
is to help our clients provide users with a clear path to information they
need. Clear paths tend to get followed by many people, a trait today’s
search spiders look and account for. Blogs, if maintained properly can be
an important component in a winning website structure. The second important
feature of Blogs is RSS, real simple syndication. Anyone who expresses interest
can subscribe to your blog, getting instant notification of updates or messages.
Search is going to be a facet of all information applications and many
electronic appliances moving forward into the next decade. The major search
engines are each working to make deals with the major appliance and electronics
manufacturers in order to provide search results to users in planes, trains
and all automobiles, along with your kitchen, living room, mobile phone
and quite possibly to display screens appearing in shopping carts.
In other words, search will be a greater part of our daily lives, which
brings us back to search engine optimization for websites. That’s
still important, even if the traditional search engine rankings pages are
less important.
Building a good website structure is critical. Search engines have
changed radically over the past ten years to the point that we are now
in a period
of what appears to be constant change and evolution. The most important
elements of SEO today, more important than writing the perfect keyword
enriched title tag, are ease of navigation, clarity of purpose, and
relevant links (think of links as information-threads). Keywords are
important;
make no mistake about that but search engines have moved far beyond
simple keyword/context measurements.
Search engines have significantly improved their ranking algorithms over
the past two years and in particularly, the past few months. From the earliest
years until about five years ago, search engines looked for keywords in
several areas or elements of a website, including incoming and outgoing
links. Rankings were determined by the arrangement of keywords and the number
of incidents of those keywords found on or around the site.
For the past five years, Google has set the standards SEOs work to achieve
but over the last six months, those standards have subtly changed and will
continue to change long into the foreseeable future. What made Google different
five years ago was their method of using a standard keyword based spider
that also factored in the number of incoming links to each site. That led
to a number of techniques based around making artificial link-densities
by creating link-networks, portal sites and other tricks aimed at gaming
Google. After a series of algorithm updates aimed primarily at preventing “black-hat” manipulation
of its rankings, Google has moved well past the basic premise of PageRank
and its simple, democratic explanation.
We believe the Jagger Update is only one of many algorithm shifts that
are leading Google away from pure link-context to include shared incidents
of semantic intention found between linked documents.
Where we used to look at a website as a collection of similar documents,
often of a common file type, found within a distinct URL, we are now examining
far more complex layers of differing web-documents strung between several
URLs. Again, think of links between documents as information threads being
followed by the spiders. As much as possible, these threads should be more
than useful links between relevant sites, they should help complete whatever
story the live-user is experiencing. Your site visitors are looking for
something, at least, that’s what Google, Yahoo and the rest want to
think. Google is especially interested in how visitors use your site, how
often they return and how often they use links leaving your site.
Google has just reopened Google Analytics on a limited, invitation basis.
Overwhelmed by massive user-interest when it released its modified Urchin
site-statistics program, Google Analytics provides a detailed look at how
visitors use your site. We are strongly urging clients to sign up for Google
Analytics as it becomes available and will be offering assistance interpreting
data extracted. One of the features of the free software package is the
integration of AdWords/AdSense support showing how your ad campaigns are
performing and how ads displayed on your site are doing.
While Google is making it easier for search marketers and advertisers,
its goal is obviously to make itself more money by increasing click-through
rates while collecting user data from the millions of websites signing up
with the service. It has also provided SEOs with a dashboard view of critical
factors involved with how it ranks sites.
The practice of search engine optimization has in some ways become more
difficult but in others, has actually gotten easier. SEO has come a log
way since its early days in the mid 1990’s. A decade ago, SEOs were
considered secretive and manipulative cowboys, roughneck mercenaries who
would (because they could) do just about anything to get a site ranked in
the Top10 on the major engines of the time. There were more search engines
along with a variety of directories and spidered databases such as Inktomi
that sold results to other engines.
This switch, combined with the rapid growth of the Web necessitated
better search algorithms and a crackdown on manipulative search marketers.
At the same time, the SEO and SEM sectors have seen tremendous growth
due mostly to a shift towards paid-search marketing by major advertisers
and the attendant growth of interest in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The
search marketing sector has doubled or perhaps tripled in size in just
twenty-four months as new practitioners were hired by established SEO
firms or forming their own businesses. Many of those new practitioners
have spent that time absorbing and adding to the huge volume of information
that makes up the SEO sector’s knowledge base.
Those SEOs are coming of age, professionally speaking, and are very good
at what they do. Their skills are going to be an important asset to the
sector in the coming year as the business of search expands way beyond the
desktop and into everyday life. Change is good.
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