StepForth SEO News Blog

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Florida's Effect on SEO Spam

Friday, February 24, 2006

What is Social Networking and how will it affect online marketing in the coming years? That's a question a number of people have been thinking about since the dawn of the commercial 'net. In the earliest days, online social networks formed between users of bulletin board services (BBS). People met each other by joining the board with planned, in-person gatherings taking over entire cafes. That was a time so geeky it seems quaint in remembrance. Today's social networks are enormous, robust and sophisticated. The medium is a lot of things but these days, there's nothing geeky about it.

Ever since Friendster established itself as the dominant "circle of friends" networking tool in 2003, younger Internet users have trended towards accessing the Internet primarily as a social space, as opposed to a purely informative space. This trend has been gaining momentum for a while but in the past year, a bulk of new users has accelerated adoption of the medium to the point where the most popular network, MySpace sees more traffic in a day than Google does.

Something about a statement that ends with, "... more traffic in a day than Google does." makes a search marketer's eyebrows rise. One of the most solid rules of the web says that users dictate what happens to any new piece technology. As they adopt new ideas or technologies and adapt to them, they begin to innovate new ways of using that technology. Invention begets innovation. People inform each other and the faster that happens, the faster things change through invention and innovation.

The reason it is so hard to put your finger on what Web2.0 is from a search marketing perspective, is that it is a rapidly moving target and difficult to actually point at. To be basic and blunt, there are two ways of looking at the web as an advertising medium and both are still valid though the latter is rapidly supplanting the former. These two types of thinking are happening concurrently in most SEO and SEM shops but the new types of user will eventually overwrite previously established ideas and norms that form the old way of thinking.

The classic way of viewing search engine marketing has users accessing the Internet using a number of unique applications they are comfortable with. Some use IE, some use Firefox. Some use Google while others use Yahoo. This group primarily accesses information by seeking it out from scratch. They search, and, if we have done our jobs properly, they find what we want them to. They connect, our clients do some business and we hope that visitor keeps coming back. The web, for many of its users is an intricate and never ending series of one-way streets. You can always get there; find what you need and leave, returning only when necessary.

Another way of viewing the web has users accessing the net through a social portal offering search and recommendation options. People who like each other (in the offline world) tend to like or do the same things. They tend to have similar interests that somehow draw them together. Now that they know each other, they begin to inform each other. This basically is the way Top40 radio worked for decades. Today of course, everyone is a DJ and virtually everything is of interest to visitors drawn from a global audience. Some kid in Mississauga Ontario named Kari doesn't know it but an MP3 track planted in her personal Myspace site has just told me about a band I really want to check out. When I get around to it, I'm likely to add it to the recommendations list on my new Myspace profile/site.

As a search marketing application, the basic concept of social networking is simple. There are multiple points of connections between almost anyone on Earth. Working from that basic truism, virtually anything imaginable is possible to find, share, enjoy, and track, providing a cross-reference can be found. With social network applications, user choices and preferences are saved, stored, shared and used to build rapidly growing chains of endorsements.

As those cross-references are established, the profile of a person, company or service provider, along with its traditional website increases in recognition and reputation. Think about how links affect rankings at Google but on a different, more chaotic sort of scale. As search marketers however, our job is to get our clients' sites recognized and to build traffic across their domains using whatever legitimate means is available and relevant to their business.

A similar social network, LinkedIn, has formed for the IT business community. After accepting an invitation to register, new users suddenly find themselves able to browse an online Rolodex made up of everyone in that network's contact list. It is surprising to actually see how quickly the range of connections through the search marketing community leads to folks like the director of search products for AOL, a VP at RazorFish, along with over 5000 other possible contacts.

By nature, most of the SEO and SEM community are focused on the classic way of viewing the Internet as a marketing medium. It will continue that way for the foreseeable future. Even as a new and highly dynamic wave of web users is introducing Wiki communties, Wikipedia, MySpace and other participation driven applications, organic search results as supplied by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and the rest will continue to be integrated into those applications. At the same time, user-popularity is becoming an important factor in the ranking algorithms of the major search engines. Google for example, uses bookmarks, personal references and repeat visits as a gauge of relevance and importance.

With the exception of our experimentation and research, StepForth's services are primarily targeted towards the web as a one-way street. While we preach the gospel of blogging and RSS, and our SEO techniques, consultation and recommendations have been moving rapidly to encompass usability and accessibility principles, the opportunity and necessity to embrace social networking on behalf of our clients has not previously arisen.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: SEOcial Networking - Search Marketing and Social Networks

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

For years, the major search engines have been building membership lists by offering a diverse range of services to registered users. Yahoo and MSN, for instance, have offered email accounts to registered users for several years. The major search engines are working to brand user experiences on as many levels as possible and claim memberships as indicators of user loyalty.

The membership race heated up dramatically over the past two years with the introduction of Google's wide array of membership driven services.

A study released yesterday by Boston based marketing firm Compete shows that search engine users are a fickle bunch but if being part of a branded club is a measure of loyalty, Google has again beaten its competitors.

The study, Searching for Loyalty, examines the search habits of people who have declared themselves "loyal" to one brand or another. Every user tends to start their search with their preferred search engine. Compete's study shows how many searchers ventured beyond their search engine of choice and how many used one brand exclusively over others.

Google, by far and away, gets the most loyalty from its users. Predictably, Yahoo and MSN follow in second and third respectively but there are many surprises to be found moving down the list.

• Google: 71.0%
• Yahoo: 48.1%
• MSN: 27.8%
• Excite: 23.4%
• AOL: 23.2%
• Ask: 21.6%
• AltaVista: 16.6%
• Clusty: 10.3%
• A9: 6.4%
• Lycos: 5.8%

The results of the study give a good indication of how reliable search engine users find the search engines they use. It doesn't necessarily show which engine is better or more relevant but it does show that even the mighty Google has a user-bleed rate.

The study also shows that there is often a pattern to where search engine users go when moving from one engine to another. Knowing how and where search users are likely to migrate can help SEOs and SEMs better serve their clients by strategically concentrating on the interconnections between the search engines and user habits. Repetition is the key to remembrance and helping searchers remember the name of our clients is most certainly a goal.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Google Users Display Biggest Brand Loyalty

The room was excellent, providing seating for about 50 people per session. The chalkboard and flip charts were fully stocked with fresh chalk, clean brushes and brand-new Sharpie markers. There were three thermoses of organic coffee, which never seemed to empty, no matter how many cups were consumed. The overhead projector and the A/B/C switch (attached to the three laptops used by the presenters) were wired and the movie screen behind the podium automatically raised and lowered at the push of a button. Sizing up the situation at half past seven o'clock in the morning, Bruno, Frank and I smiled, each knowing something interesting was going to happen in just a few short hours.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of speaking at the inaugural Search Engine Business World seminar held at the downtown campus of Vancouver 's Simon Fraser University . The event was a success though registrations were slightly lower than expected. The number of attendees was relatively small but based on the names of the corporations they work for; the collective advertising budgets they work with are enormous.

Speaking to a room made up primarily of corporate executives is somewhat different than other forums where the audience is generally the IT crowd. It is easier to speak to a room full of executives than it is to speak to a room full of techies. The executives have absolutely nothing to prove to each other and are willing to accept the panel as experts in our fields. The attendees have, by and large, benefited from a classical education and it shows in their manners, their language and their depth of understanding. The session feels more honest and the audience feels more willing to make a connection with the speakers.

The tone and phrasing of questions is milder and often clearer, even if the person asking the question is sometimes unclear about a few technical concepts or advances. Along with the five-star treatment, there is a healthy measure of respect in this room from both sides of the podium. The conference eventually becomes a very interesting, agenda driven conversation between business people and highly qualified technicians.

Here are a few observations I walked away with.

First of all, the event was well received by the audience. The format, lower number of attendees and the overall attitude of the group allowed for a more intimate conversation. This gave the presenters enough room to work from one idea to another. The environment was crucial to the event.

Secondly, though their website doesn't necessarily show it, the execs have learned a lot about search engines and search engine marketing. They are fascinated with the world of search from a number of different angles. For instance, a portion of my presentation dealt with the evolution of search engines and the evolution of SEO techniques. As I assumed, the audience was very interested in the general history of search engines and I saw a number of people nodding or smiling when various names were mentioned. I used the history and evolution of search to demonstrate how SEO techniques have evolved over time. By knitting the history of search with the evolution of SEO technique, I hoped to address concerns about redirects, doorway pages, link-farming, and other spammy techniques that have become synonymous with SEO in the mainstream press.

This approach led to my third observation. There is a perpetual knowledge gap among corporate executives when it comes to IT, their corporate websites and search marketing. Without a doubt, they understand the "big picture" perfectly well. It is the little things, the numerous fine details of how the machine actually works that they often face problems with. Based on my experience yesterday, the executives came to the presentation already knowing this. That's why they were there without people from their IT departments.

The people I presented to yesterday have experience managing the people who run their search marketing campaigns, but for the most part were really not satisfied with the results of those efforts. They either want to micro-manage in house SEO and SEM efforts, or they want to learn how to properly outsource it.

The knowledge gap appears to be one of language and definition more than a lack of conceptual understanding on the part of the execs. While they don't necessarily expect themselves to be on the cutting edge of technology, they realize they need to know more about how the medium is, and can be used for marketing.

A simple example of this is the use of the word "Keywords". It is impossible to address SEO without using the word in several sentences. The word has two distinct meanings, one more relevant than the other. Keywords are found on a document and in the source code.

Many of the attendees understood the word to mean the Meta tag, period. It took me a few minutes to realize why many of them were not quite getting it when I was speaking about keywords found ON a document. I had to take about 90 seconds to clarify the difference. That's when I made a fourth observation.

Even when I stressed that the keyword Meta tag is not an important or powerful tool, questions often drifted back towards the use of it. It happened at least twice as the seminar progressed. In both instances, I found the executive was holding on to the last information he or she had received, likely from their IT department. In order to comfortably let go of one idea and start to see another, they had to push a bit to test the strength of the limb they suspected I had ventured out on.

For the past few years, their firms have been using search marketing in one way or another and they have absorbed a lot of information in that time. Some of them confessed to feeling overwhelmed during the session, while others were furiously reconsidering a number of assumptions they had made about search marketing.

The knowledge behind their assumptions comes from two primary sources, the IT workers in their offices and business media relevant to their industries. Members of the IT department forwarded much of the technical information they received about search marketing. They know they need to challenge these assumptions, especially in light of the thumping some of their sites have taken as a result of the Jagger/Big Daddy updates at Google. They are going to be attending a lot more conferences, seminars and workshops in the future.

A fifth and final observation is that the executive level is learning, en masse, that the world of search and search marketing is moving faster than their already beleaguered IT departments can keep up with. Corporate executives are people whose roles train them to think about a number of factors surrounding any given issue. Their job is to set the big goals and marshal the efforts of different departments in their organization to achieve them. In some ways, the execs appeared to view search marketing as a "space race" against their competitors, an attitude formally reserved for traditional media such as television and print.

There is going to be a lot of pressure put on IT departments from firms that want to exploit the marketing potential of search with in-house talent. At the same time, it will be extremely important for those in-house SEO/SEM teams to learn to communicate their knowledge to their management. SEO and SEM are becoming far more important and management is starting to find outside sources of information.

This is a good thing for everyone involved in the SEO/SEM sector, both corporate in-house workers and independent SEO/SEM firms. Corporate decision makers are without a doubt, favorably reconsidering the importance of organic search engine placements. SEO consultancies, such as the one offered by StepForth, will be in much higher demand in order to help outline and analyze campaigns executed by in-house SEOs. Outsourcing of SEO and SEM projects is also likely to increase as the decision makers realize that the boundaries of the search marketing world are constantly shifting and expanding.

Search Engine Business World Vancouver was a mini-conference that became a conversation and looks like it could become a community. For me, it was more than a pleasure and a privilege speaking to a room of corporate executives; it was an invaluable learning experience. I hope it was for those who attended as well.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Bridging the Corporate Knowledge Gap - Conferencing with Execs

Monday, February 20, 2006

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Blogs and Barcodes – The Online Blurs into the Offline World

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Search Engine Business World Conference - Vancouver BC

Friday, February 17, 2006

The banner across the top of the site reads, "In a World of Conflict, the Truth Must Survive". Below the banner, we see a twenty-two year old image of a dead man, minutes before he met his fate. The image, captured by Israeli photographer Alex Levac in 1984, shows a Palestinian hijacker being led away by Israeli Defense Forces. Minutes after the shot was taken, the hijacker was dead. The official story issued by Israeli authorities said the hijacker was already dead when the IDF found him. The story illustrates the importance of war correspondence in an environment where the greatest casualty is almost always the truth.

Welcome to the words and images of Kevin Sites, in the Hot Zone.

For the past six months, journalist Kevin Sites has been traveling to some of the most brutal places on Earth to document and share stories that would otherwise go untold. Calling his journey an experiment in "backpack journalism", Sites’ goal is to, "... cover every armed conflict in the world within one year, and in doing so to provide a clear idea of the combatants, victims, causes, and costs of each of these struggles - and their global impact."

This week, Sites examines one of the most confusing and captivating wars, the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. The coverage will tear your heart out, regardless of your political opinions or cultural heritage.

Sites' approaches his subjects with a humility rarely seen in Western journalists. He not only wishes to inform his readers about the conflict he is covering, he tries to introduce his readers to the human element often ignored in the course of televised war coverage. Using the Internet as his medium offers Sites the advantage of virtually unlimited space to tell those stories. As he does, his viewers are aptly reminded that the dead once spoke, often with passion, grace, love and emotion.

Sites enters conflict zones armed only with communication equipment consisting of a high definition Sony video camera, a Samsung Camcorder, an Apple Powerbook, Palm Treo Smartphone, and a satellite phone/modum. His material is available as content through the Yahoo Publisher Network and for all readers of Yahoo News. Thus far, he has covered stories from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Israel / Palestine.

This is likely one of the most relevant and important experiments in citizens' journalism, ever. Though Sites is a professional journalist, he is working from the grassroots without the support of a traditional news gathering organization. In the process, Sites tells a series of stories that fill in the gaps left by mainstream and alternative news sources. Sometimes the most important truths about war are found in the little details, the people living in the conflict zones.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Yahoo Publisher Network Content - In the Hot Zone with Kevin Sites

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Correction to yesterday's post

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Google has made another alteration the Google Help Center, this time removing the assurance that Google's results are completely automated. The change was first noted by Phillip Lenssen in his Google Blogoscope.

As recently as February 2, the document outlining Google's Principles stated, " The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query, nor does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of results. Occasionally, when a particular website is the subject of public attention, other sites begin linking to it. This may elevate its importance as gauged by our ranking software, which assigns a PageRank value based in part on who links to a given page. Higher ranking in Google results may lead to more awareness, which may lead to more links and so on."

Today, the same page opens with the headline, " Does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of its results? "concluding, "... No. Occasionally, when a particular website is the subject of public attention, other sites begin linking to it. This may elevate its importance as gauged by our ranking software, which assigns a PageRank value based in part on who links to a given page. Higher ranking in Google results may lead to more awareness, which may lead to more links, and so on."

The Google Principles navigation page was altered as well, changing linked text worded, "Does Google ever manipulate its search results" to read, "Does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of results?"

Uh, huh... Is Google playing a joke on its critics or is the change a post Valentine's Day love letter to their new friends at AOL, and in Beijing , or are they making subtle comment on the two-minute cloaking penalty assigned to BMW last week.

It is very possible that the deal made with AOL in late December and its continuing collaboration with the Chinese Government in regards to censoring Google.Cn, has prompted a universal realignment of the company's stated values. If that is true, they haven't "jumped the shark" they have been consumed by it. (You are what you're eaten by?)

It is also possible that the alteration is a reference to the delisting and rapid reinsertion of the German language version of the BMW website last week. Google confirmed BMW had been removed for using a technique known as java-script cloaking, a spam-offence generally punishable by 30-days in the penalty box. After BMW.de complied with Google's demand they remove the spam, their listing was re-included in the index. All obviously done by hand. If this scenario is true, Google might just be clumsy enough to fall into the shark's mouth, get chewed a bit and spit out as unappealing.

Whatever motivated Google to remove the assurance of automated organic results, the alteration, we are no longer able to tell clients Google's results are guaranteed by Google to be 100% organic. That is a very bad thing for Google today.

Yahoo and smaller rival Lycos have both publicly conceded the general, organic search space to Google but recently, it has taken a number of major hits to its reputation, some well earned, others slightly misplaced. It continues to dominate the search engine spectrum but is now the in the center of the ongoing discussions about human rights and freedom of information.

Google's greatest asset is the faith its users place in it. With billions of dollars in the bank and a number of the world's greatest minds working under its roof, we cannot understand why Google would break with the very core-principle that made it unique.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Are Google SERPs Entirely Organic?

It's been a long time since we've heard from Lycos. Long lost amidst the choppy seas of corporate change, Lycos was once one of the ruling elite. Today, Lycos appears to be a number of fragmented shells of its former self. That might be changing soon though.

Last week, word of a restructuring phase at Lycos spread around the web based on a post on John Battelle's blog and an article written by me. As it turns out, the information was correct but our assumptions were wrong. Lycos is not getting out of search, exactly, it is simply changing the way it approaches the search engine marketplace as consumer use of search engines evolves.

In an interview with StepForth Tuesday morning, Lycos Chief Operating Officer, Brian Kalinowski noted Lycos was going to be releasing a series of products marketed to producers and distributors of web content over the next six months.

The firm's focus is shifting towards ... consumer created and specialty niche content". This means Lycos plans to support independent creators and publishers by building products, services and platforms that allow them to make professional content and distribute it through social-based search applications.

"Search is an absolute, necessary vehicle," said Kalinowski, "Web2.0 search is the primary vehicle for navigation and discovery. Lycos is not the general purpose [search] destination of choice but it will always offer competitive commercial search and specialty search for niche content."

Currently, the Lycos search network is fragmented with the "international version" of Lycos (the .com address) displaying results culled from the Ask Jeeves database. Regional versions of Lycos tend to draw results from the Google database. Both search engines databases are available through HotBot , (another of the original search tools but now owned by Lycos).

"Territorial relationships are managed by separate groups", said Kalinowski, noting how Lycos.ca chose Google for organic results while Lycos.com has been showing results from Ask Jeeves since March 2005. Over the coming months however, Kalinowski says Lycos will "...dramatically be changing its overall search experience in the next three months", with a dramatic relaunch sometime in the next two.

Lycos is much larger than most people think. As it was one of the original search engines, it has been a part of the scene for a very long time. It has been involved with innumerable deals over the past decade, many of which helped shape the Internet as we perceive it today. In some of those deals, Lycos itself was a hot-commodity and in others, it appeared to be an asset too big to lose but too ungainly to hold on to. Along the way, the company picked up products as varied as, Wired Magazine, Quote.com (sold to IDC on Feb 1st.), Tripod, Anglefire, HotBot, Gamesville, Raging Bull, and Wired's WebMonkey.

Over the past year, Lycos has consolidated a lot of products. "We had 42 unique products in May but have boiled them down to 16 - 20," said Kalinowski. "Our primary focus is rolling them into 7 or 8 key properties. "He went on to identify key areas as; news, entertainment, games, content, email, blogging, photo albums and multi-media / social networking products.

A glance at the Lycos Network Help page shows they already have many of the technologies in place. Anglefire and Tripod are services geared to helping beginning bloggers or website builders create web-ready properties ready to accept fresh content. Much of that content can be stored, shared and gathered using Planet, a youth-focused social network platform introduced by Lycos. New webmasters can register domains through Lycos and receive HTML tutorials, manuals and gadgets through the WebMonkey and HTMLGear services. Wired Magazine is considered to be among the most credible sources of Internet and technology news.

That collection of assets gives the management structure at Lycos a wide resource base to work with as it reinvents and reasserts itself in relation to its much larger competitors, Yahoo, Google and MSN.

For Lycos, reinvention is, "... the opportunity to go from a large public to a small private company." While admitting Lycos is, "...never going to beat Google," at pure search, Kalinowski says Lycos will focus on areas, "where we can make a big dent."

The area Kalinowski identified as Lycos' primary target is niche content created by independent producers. Lycos wants to become a, "... destination for not only consumers but for producers and creators where they can market and promote the goods they create." He noted there are several independent producers of films, music, video games, and written products.

As an example, it plans to create and promote a virtual record label associated with the Lycos brand along with becoming a virtual publishing house for games, films and text creations. "Anybody has the ability to self promote, produce and market their own goods," says Kalinowski. The system will enable end users to drop-ship product and can accept payments via Visa, MasterCard or Paypal.

"In the typical publishing industry, take music, 100 bands will be marketed from the 1000 bands that are signed and produce an album without promotion. We are trying to focus on that segment of content not large enough to make it without the support of the 5 or 6 big-boys [who dominate the various publishing sectors]."

Lycos sees a great deal of potential serving long-tail searches in order to aggregate content that appeals to small markets that control niches in the larger marketplace. The idea is that fresh content will draw viewers, "... creating a larger audience of varied, eclectic tastes." Lycos plans to be a big player in a lot of smaller markets.

"We see and use search as a discovery engine,"Kalinowski said. "It will evolve in a few years to personalized content based on user interests and desires. Google needs to stay on the cutting edge of general search, sort of a one-trick-pony. We see many niches so if one falls off..."

If anything, Lycos is a survivor. When asked how search engine marketers should think about Lycos, Kalinowski replied, "As the sleeping giant. We will never come back and be the $100 billion company. We're aiming at capturing a lot of smaller niche markets, satisfying needs that Yahoo and Google can't because that requires focus outside of their capabilities."Lycos intends to, "... take a significant position for indy content creators and content outside the realm of mainstream publishers. This is a very dedicated commitment for us."

As the search sphere segments, it will be interesting to watch Lycos' continued evolution.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Lycos Looking Forward, an Interview with COO Brian Kalinowski

Monday, February 13, 2006

The company is calling on the other tech giants, along with the US Government to take a harder, collective stand against Chinese Government censorship of the web.

Along with rivals Google, MSN and Cisco Systems, Yahoo has drawn a lot of flak from human rights activists and values based western businesses for appearing to give in to Chinese Government demands regarding the censoring of information and for providing information on China based users.

Yahoo has faced a great deal of criticism after information it gave the Chinese Government in at least two instances resulted in prison terms for Chinese bloggers. Last week, the press freedom organization Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) called on Yahoo to supply a list of all cyber dissidents it has provided various governments data on, starting with 81 people in China.

In its release, RSF said, "The firm (Yahoo) says it simply responds to requests from the authorities for data without ever knowing what it will be used for. But this argument no longer holds water. Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals. The company must answer for what it is doing at the US congressional hearing set for February 15."

Michael Callaghan, Yahoo's general counsel told the Financial Times, "This is everyone's dilemma, operate in a country and comply with laws that lack transparency, or withdraw. No one company, no one industry can tackle this on its own. We very much look forward to taking this to Washington."

Yahoo's basic dilemma is this. They are required to follow the law of the land in which they operate or leave. Leaving is, of course, not an option, especially with direct rivals Google and MSN competing their way into the Chinese space. Yahoo is not going to make sacrifices on its own unless every other player agrees to make similar sacrifices. That seems natural. Would you want to be on the management team explaining to shareholders the details of a sudden, unilateral exit from the fastest growing market in the world?

Yahoo appears to be taking a moral stand, one that is a long time in coming. It will be very interesting to hear their Congressional testimony on Wednesday February 15. It will also be interesting to see if other western businesses who profess to value freedom of speech and freedom of information heed Yahoo's call for collective action.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Yahoo Calls for Collective Action Regarding Chinese Web Regulations

Something interesting is happening at the Googleplex. Just a week after publicly slapping BMW for using cloaking and doorway techniques, Google has confirmed a much larger penalty it applied in 2004 against what was once one of the largest SEO firms in the world, Traffic Power. When an SEO firm gets its own site banned from Google it is somewhat interesting but not terribly newsworthy. It becomes an enormous story when that firm’s client list is banned from the index.

About eighteen months ago, Google assigned a penalty against Las Vegas based Traffic Power setting off a chain of events that continue to affect the SEO community to this day. Sometime in the first weeks of June 2004, Google brought the boom down on Traffic Power, banning it and its client list from the Google index.

Having already made a bad reputation for itself by hiring a legion of phone solicitors to cold-call small businesses, Traffic Power had accumulated a fairly large client list. Traffic Power was huge, boasting over 10,000 clients at its peak. As a result, they fell hard. On the way down, they filed a civil lawsuit against popular blogger Aaron Wall and the owner of a consumer-rant site called TrafficPowerSucks.com. They also sent Cease and Desist letters to a number of other web-publishers, effectively creating a climate of liable-chill to forcefully dissuade others from reporting on the saga.

Along with dozens of other bloggers, a search marketer named Aaron Wall covered the story on his blog, SEOBook.com. What made Aaron different from everyone else is that Traffic Power chose to use him as an example, filing a lawsuit against him in the early summer of 2005. They chose the wrong target. Aaron is a popular and sometimes controversial figure in the SEO/SEM industry. He has a lot of friends and even more friendly acquaintances. Coverage of the suit propelled the story back to the front pages of the industry and mainstream press.

This weekend, the story took another twist when Matt Cutts, Google's chief search engineer, posted definite confirmation of the penalty on his blog. In doing so, Cutts lifted the liable-chill by providing proof that everything Aaron posted to his blog was true in fact.

Cutts appears to have been moved to post confirmation of the ban in response to a post made by Aaron at Threadwatch on January 27, 2006 in which he outlines specific issues Traffic Power claims in its lawsuit.

The penalty was imposed over several techniques known to violate Google's posted webmaster guidelines. From the use of java-script redirects across literally thousands of doorway pages to the linking of those doorway pages through an artificial link-density network, the SEO tactics (often automated) used by Traffic Power on hundreds of their client sites were pure spam. It seems highly improbable, by the summer of 2004 that no one at Traffic Power realized its techniques were in violation of Google’s posted guidelines.

Reports about the ban started almost immediately after it was imposed in 2004. There were a lot of frustrated business owners out there looking for answers and assistance. There were also a number of SEO firms who wanted to use the case as an example of the worst that can happen if your SEO uses spam-driven techniques. Articles appeared on Blogs, in trade journals, in local (Las Vegas) magazines and, after Traffic Power tried to sue a couple small web-publishers, into the Wall St. Journal. The Southern Nevada Better Business Bureau and the Search Engine Consultants Directory got into the fray, both publishing pages warning consumers about Traffic Power. A mysterious group known only as "the consortium" materialized to investigate Traffic Power, presumably with the intent of forming a class action lawsuit against them.

There was one other thing that caught Google's attention back in the summer of 2004 when Traffic Power got banned, which wasn’t mentioned in Cutts' blog posting. They used an absurdly large network of doorway pages as an indescribably complex link-farm. This violation of Google's guidelines was based on a network of doorway pages creating an artificial link density for pages or documents within it that worked wonders against the link-dependant algo Google was running at the time. Though the Google engineers already knew about the exploit, the massive degree to which Traffic Power abused it was one of the major catalysts in the Jagger/Big Daddy updates playing through today.

Many in the industry hope Traffic Power, now operating as First Place will quietly drop the suit against Aaron.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Google Posts the Truth About Traffic Power

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Lycos Responds to Lights out Rumour

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

The beginning of our era ended almost two weeks ago. The last Western Union telegram was sent on Friday January 27th.

Western Union has a long and storied history. Though the company continues to thrive as a money-transfer service, it was among the first public-access electronic communications providers. Within a decade of its founding it was certainly the largest. As the company grew, it developed and introduced a number of communications technologies, each revolutionary for its time.

The company was founded in 1851 in Rochester New York , as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. It changed its unwieldy name to Western Union in 1856, sparking a series of acquisitions and mergers that gave it control of a trans-continental telegraph network by 1861.

The telegraph would be considered a highly disruptive technology for its day, and over the years, Western Union a highly disruptive company. They changed the way people did things and perceived the greater world. For its first century, Western Union was the Google of its day, (minus the search-engine of course).

The advent of Western Union's trans-continental telegraph put the famed Pony Express out of business by delivering a full message from New York to San Francisco within an hour, a full ten days faster than round-the-clock riders could. Western Union also introduced the first stock ticker in 1866 and the first electronic money transfer service in 1871. It was one of the first companies traded on the Dow Jones when the market was formed for the NYSE in 1874.

In 1914, Western Union introduced the first consumer credit card. Twenty-one years later, Western Union transmitted the first inner-city fax. By 1974, Western Union was launching satellites, establishing the first private commercial satellite communications network.

The mystique and significance of the Western Union telegram is likely to be lost on generations who grew up after the advent of email.

Western Union ended its independent life in 1994 when it was purchased by First Financial Management Corporation, which became First Data Corporation a year later. On Thursday January 26, First Data announced it would spin Western Union off as an independent publicly traded company focused on money transfers and financial services. The next day, Western Union announced it was immediately discontinuing its telegraph service.

ALL STOP.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: The Final Telegram

For almost a full year we have been preaching a brand of search engine optimization that quotes heavily from the gospel of Usability. Under our marketing philosophy, sites should be designed and optimized in order to make transit from any given entry point (not necessarily the index page) to the desired goals and expectations of both visitors and site owners, as simple and intuitive as possible.

Sadly, this user-focused facet of our overall website marketing philosophy was not reflected in the five-year old face of our former website. Late last week, we uploaded a new version of the StepForth website, one we have been working on for nearly four months.

Call it a case of the "cobbler's shoes complex" or an old-school fear a site redesign would cause an immediate loss of our own Top10 search engine placements, we had put off a redesign longer than we should have. Now that it is completed and posted, we can start to publicly explore how a commitment to Usability is common sense SEO, without feeling like we should smile while we say such things. The experience has also given us a greater appreciation of the challenges faced by other businesses when contemplating the redesign of a fairly large site.

As we near the end of the process, we have completely updated the main sections of our website and are performing document-by-document re-optimization of the entire domain as time allows. We will also be converting our sub-domain network over to the new site templates in the coming weeks, again as time allows. Who would have thought our site would balloon to contain over 1200 documents in just a few short years?

Case Study - StepForth

We knew we had a problem when we examined stats from WebTrends, Alexa and Google Analytics. Our website receives a fairly high number of visitors through two primary entry points (pages) and a number of secondary ones.

The first primary point of entry is the SEO Blog we have maintained for eighteen months or so. The second is our INDEX page, which ranks in the Top10 on all major search engines and is also page linked from articles reprinted by other online publications. Our stats tell us we have a very high bleed rate. Most visitors view one document before leaving and that is obviously problematic. We know we are very good at getting them there, it's the keeping them around part we appear to have had problems with.

Visitors to the blog tend to read one or two articles and split, likely off to find other search marketing news or information in other places. That is understandable and to a large degree expected. Blog visitors are more likely looking for information or opinion than they are for our firm's services. We do know that a few blog visitors moved to our site-review or services pages and can assume that some of these visits have led to successful conversions (based on our average contact / conversion rate). We believe the number of blog visitors who choose to move further into our website should be higher.

While we expect to slightly increase traffic and conversions from our blog, our self-analysis showed we desperately needed a new front face. Our second primary point of entry is our Index page. WebTrends revealed a startling situation. Over 94% of all visitors to our index page choose not to travel further into the site. That means only 6% of our site-visitors were immediately interested in reading about our services! To make matters worse, the vast majority of visitors to the Index page only visited once. Our old design was text-heavy, built and optimized for search spiders that ranked sites based largely on keyword content. While the site has sat squarely in the Top10 for most of its existence, that Top10 placement was not enough to convince more than 6% of visitors to consider doing business with us.

The 19th century retail advertising pioneer John Wanamaker once said, "I know half of my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half!" While we would love to enjoy the 50% retention rate Wanamaker based his dilemma on, at least we knew exactly where to look for an answer to our problems. Our Index page was our problem.

Gord Hotchkiss wrote a piece, The 50 Millisecond Judgment, which was published in Search Engine Guide last week. In it, he outlines the findings of researchers from Ottawa's Carlton University suggesting website visitors can, "... accurately judge visual appeal in just 50 milliseconds, or one twentieth of a second". Visitors were leaving our site because they simply couldn't find their way around it quickly or easily.

Here are some of the steps we have taken to improve our overall site, starting with the Index page.

We spend a lot of time looking at other sites from the search marketing field. Our colleagues are often our best teachers and keeping up with their sites is an important part of staying on top of the immense professional learning curve in SEO. We choose our overall layout based on a number of elements we saw in other websites, tending towards a design that we think reflects the conventional wisdoms of the crowd we work around.

One thing we noticed about sites run by SEO firms we consider important competitors. They all have eye catching looks, a focal point that captures the viewer's eyeball longer than 1/20th of a second. The challenge and the task fell to our in-house designer Mark Johnstone who created the new look.

The use of eye-catching graphics is good to engage the interest of the observer however, a web document is really only as good as its content. In website marketing, all content should be viewed as a call to action. The goal of commercial websites is to convert visitors into participants of one form or another. A converted visitor is moved to choose to remain inside the domain. Ultimately, commercial websites exist to push product.

Our firm has two products, information and technical skill. We tend to give information away for free, and that information is often mass-propagated across other search marketing related sites so that goal is easily met. Mass publication of our free-product does not necessarily provide a clear trail to the revenue generating product our company offers, our technical skill in search engine optimization. That job is supposed to be accomplished by the Index page.

We sell our skills to make a living. While our own rankings and those of our clients have proved our technical acumen time and time again, that reputation does not necessarily precede us when visitors come to the Index page. Like any other business, we need to constantly convert new visitors to new clients, a job made much more difficult as time passes in the increasingly competitive search marketing sector.

In order to convince more visitors to stick around, we have made a number of drastic changes in the look of the site though we were able to retain the overall site structure. Above the fold (before scrolling down), we:

• Have increased the spacing between lines in order to make the text easier to read.
• Are trying to make effective use of columns, headlines and color so visitors can more easily scan for information.
• Are using an easier to read drop-down menus
• Have placed right-side “call to action” boxes for website reviews and newsletter subscriptions, along with a clearer right-side navigation menu
• Created body text with clear information about the company, our senior staff and our ethics.
• Clear division of visitor interests expressed above body text:

  • business owners
  • resellers and webmasters
  • news and information

We placed our text outlining our service information and links to internal service pages below the fold believing that visitors who see the top will either scroll down or use the drop-down menu or right-side navigation options if interested.

Retaining visitors is key to success in the new search algorithms, especially in relation to Google. Figuring out what motivates visitors to our site is important to us. We believe we have created a smarter, more intuitive site that mixes the pillar of Usability in with the other pillars (wise use of SEO technique, adoption of useful Web2.0 technologies and clarity in the tone of messaging) of our overall website marketing philosophy.

The site looks much fresher and is much easier to use, especially for visitors unfamiliar with search engine marketing. We look forward to hearing from our site visitors both directly at info@stepforth.com, and indirectly through continued analysis of our site stats.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Doctor, Heal Thyself - StepForth Site Redesign

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View this Article Only: Great Geek Joke

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Cleaning Up the Messes - Reviving Sites Banned for Spamming

Monday, February 06, 2006

Proving that even the big can get themselves burned badly, the brand new website of German automaker BMW has been blacklisted from the Google index for spamming.

The BMW.de site used a series of keyword laden doorway pages which, when accessed, redirected visitors to an image heavy page with less text that while more attractive to live visitors would have performed poorly in search engine listings. As any first-year SEO knows, deceptive content is the primary reason for being disincluded in the Google index.

In a posting to his blog, Google's chief search engineer, Matt Cutts discusses the reasons behind the temporary banning and outlines the steps BMW will need to take to get its site reinstated in Google’s index. The post, "Ramping Up on International Webspam", clearly shows two styles of pages, one delivered to Googlebot, the other shown to live visitors who where instantly redirected by the first.

"That's a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines," writes Cutts, "specifically the principle of, 'Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.'"

Cutts notes that the BMW design team has taken some steps to clean up their site but as the site is so large and the technique used so often throughout, Cutts suggests a full reinclusion request that provides information on who created the doorway pages will be in order.

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: BMW.de Blacklisted from Google for Spamming

Friday, February 03, 2006

Google appears to be experimenting with social tagging and expanded bookmarking; leading some to conclude that if successful, Google might integrate user-input data into future organic algorithms.

Last Sunday (January 30), Google released the fourth version of its toolbar for Internet Explorer (a Firefox version is scheduled to be released soon). Two of the features embedded in the toolbar suggest Google is moving towards incorporating views expressed by its users into its methodology for factoring search results.

The first is a Bookmark button inviting users to save documents or search results by creating a specific toolbar command to access those documents or results.

Another feature allows users to share websites, documents or results with other users via Email, SMS or Blogger.

The ways in which Google users who have the toolbar installed make use of these features will be tracked by Google and likely incorporated into the document histories Google keeps on all files in its index, thus affecting search results.

Currently, SEOs assume Google is actively tracking how each user sees and moves though documents in its index. Google Analytics, combined with information gleaned from toolbar users and registered members, already provides Google with a great deal of up to the minute data detailing visitors' impressions of documents found in its index.

User behaviours are thought to be one of the best indicators of the value or relevancy of a particular document. If, for instance, users tend read Document A and subsequently view other files in the site Document A originated from, Google assumes there must be quality information found on Document A. Users took the time to read it and they obviously want to know more about the site or business the document was written by. If, on the other hand, users tend to exit the document before reading it without following links found on the page, Google will likely take a dimmer view of the relevancy or importance of information found on that document.

In conjunction with the bookmark feature, Google users are being prompted to personalize their surfing experience by adding one or more tags to the documents they bookmark, sort of like a user-entered keyword or phrase describing the bookmark. Those tags are then associated with similar tags in the Google search history feature.

Google's biggest search rival, Yahoo has successfully used tagging since the advent of del.ici.ous and their purchase of Flickr, both of which are Yahoo owned properties.

(Go Seahawks)

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Google Tags onto Web2.0 Theory

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Super Bowl ads are legendary for their creativity and some of the most well known and popular TV commercials made their debuts in previous games. Many of those watching on Sunday will actually be more interested in the ads than they are in the game. Unfortunately for Canadian viewers, these commercials are often blacked-out by local cable companies, who run their own commercials, none of which are as funny or well produced as the REAL Super Bowl ads.

Lucky for those of us living outside the States, Yahoo and IFilm will be compiling an archive of 2006 Super Bowl Ads, displaying them at Yahoo Video shortly after the end of the game. Commercials from previous Super Bowl Sundays will also be available at the site.

StepForth makes every attempt to remain non-partisan at all times however we are located a scant 60 miles north of Seattle. Go Seahawks!

Copyright ©2006-2012, The SEO News Blog, StepForth SEO Services
View this Article Only: Yahoo to Feature Archive of Super Bowl Ads

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

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View this Article Only: Windstorm Chaos - Sustained Gales Hit Vancouver and Victoria