On Friday, we organized the very first RankSense SEO webinar entitled Searching for Results. If you missed the webinar you can access a recording of the live event here…

During this inaugural webinar, Hamlet covered several key SEO topics including:

• Solutions to Common SEO Problems
• Creating successful content
• How to attract successful traffic
• How to use the “Brand Hijacker” technique to attract visitors
• A look at the concept of link opportunity
• Viral Link Building
• How to scale your SEO efforts
• Hamlet’s SEO mind map

The SEO Mind Map
My personal favorite was a look at Hamlet’s SEO mind map. I think this mind map is a good visual representation of what SEO is all about and how a good SEO campaign is developed and implemented. The chart summarizes all of the key steps involved in the often complex SEO process.

More SEO Webinars coming soon…
We will be organizing future webinars as well. Be sure to add your name to our mailing list to receive exclusive invitations to future live webinars. If you have any suggestions as to what type of topics you’d like to see covered, do let us know! You can contact me directly at ednar@ranksense.com. Your suggestions are always appreciated and valued. =)

About Edna Rodriguez – Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Edna is Director of Business Development at NEMedia, the creators of the RankSense SEO suite. A native of the Dominican Republic, Edna was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and grew up in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. Prior to joining NEMedia, Edna resided in Atlanta, GA where she was Senior Program Officer at the Atlanta Women’s Foundation. On her spare time Edna enjoys spending time with her kids, reading, learning about SEO and working on her small business projects.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

By the way, Gyutae is managing our affiliate contest that is giving away more than $14,000 in prizes. Our goal is to register a good number of quality affiliates and of course, to increase the visibility of the RankSense product. Check it out and see if you want to join the conversation.

This blog is now 16 months old and you’ve probably noticed that I don’t run ads, push products or do any kind of affiliate promotions. Only recently did I timidly begin to promote my SEO software. Why? Well, until recently I didn’t feel like the quality experience I was hoping was there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of the ideas, innovations and concepts that RankSense offers and also very proud of my development team–especially now that RankSense is finally at a place where I feel comfortable promoting the product.

I have to admit that in the early stages of the project, we made some critical design decisions (mistakes) that resulted in a very unstable code based and non-optimal user experience. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in removing bugs, speeding up the software and providing more valuable insights. Of course, there is still room for improvement and we are continuously working on identifying and addressing these.

When I first came up with the idea of developing a comprehensive SEO management suite that would simplify the technical aspects of SEO, I honestly had no clue just how much effort, money and time would be involved! It’s been four years since starting and I often wonder if all this time and effort would have taken me farther, had I decided to focus on something else.

So what went wrong… Perhaps I simply broke some of the rules I followed to achieve my initial success. For example, I had always tried a new project by creating something small, testing the response and then making it bigger if I was able to see results. No results, no further effort, time or money. With RankSense things were different. I wanted to pursue a dream and along the way ignored common business sense. This is why it is important to remove emotional considerations from your decision making process!

There is also a part of me that enjoys taking on new challenges. I used to be very proud of this personality trait. With this experience, I have to say I have grown a bit wiser. These days, I tend to think that as long as you accomplish your desired goals, there is no need to take the most difficult and challenging road just to prove a point. For me, those days are long gone!

Despite all this, I actually don’t regret having started the RankSense project. I have learned far too much to look back at my experiences with regret. Plus, I am a firm believer that things do happen for a reason. =)

Well, I needed to get that off my chest … now some positive news.

During the past few months, I have been working hard to sign on new web hosting partners interested in promoting the RankSense software suite. I think that a list of good partners will be instrumental in distributing the software at a much faster pace than I could myself. We are starting to see the results of that effort.

1. Superbhosting just added our software to their customer control panel and online marketing section.

2. 1&1 added information about Ranksense to their affiliate marketing site

3. Hostgator signed the partnership agreement and we are expecting them to start offering the software to their customers very soon

4. We have a couple of more hosting companies testing the software and considering it for promotion.

I honestly think that an SEO suite that focuses on simplicity and improvements from an SEO perspective has the opportunity to help give SEO the credibility that it has been sorely lacking. Regular people want search traffic but are primarily turning to PPC due to the instant gratification and perceived simplicity over SEO.

Our goal with RankSense is to remove the technical barriers and allow people to write content and promote it in ways that can improve their search presence. We do not claim to be the magic tool that will instantly push the site to the top of the rankings. Our belief is that by exploiting obvious “search opportunities” anyone can enjoy increased search traffic. There is no black magic, or rocket science in this approach.

What are your thoughts? Will RankSense help or hurt the SEO community by getting SEO into the hands of thousands of non-experienced website owners?

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

Apparently Adam Audette from AudetteMedia thinks so. Thanks for the recognition, Adam!

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

You have probably heard about the two most important metrics for the success of a website: traffic and conversions. No one will dispute that the more traffic you receive, and the better that traffic converts, the more sales/profits you are going to make. Entire professions are dedicated to driving traffic to your website and to improving your landing pages’ conversion rates. The general wisdom is that these two important fields need to be treated separately. But in this post I am going to explain why the two are more tightly related than they initially seem.

Going Back to the Source

Certainly you can do all sorts of things to your site to “improve” the likelihood that the visitor will stay around longer and perhaps take action eventually. But I think that too much effort and thought is put into driving traffic from as many sources and keywords as possible and in trying to optimize everything that can be optimized on a website. Yet little thought is put into something as obvious as trying to understand clearly what each visitor is expecting when they see your landing page.

Think about it. Visitors land on your website all the time, but the path of clicks they followed to get there, and their expectations once they arrive, are often completely different from visitor to visitor. One visitor may arrive after reading a favorable review of your services from a reputable blog site or online magazine. Another may arrive directly from your Google AdWords ad that promised a discount on purchases “today only.” This is what I call the visitor’s frame of mind. It is a very important concept for conversion: the source of your traffic preconditions your visitor to take (or not to take) action on your content.

Once you really understand how much the visitor frame of mind changes from one traffic source to another, you will place more emphasis and effort in the sources that provide the most valuable visitors. You will conclude, like I did, that the conversion from online advertising is abysmal compared with the quality traffic you get from editorial pieces. Incidentally, the editorial frame of mind is also why I’m a big fan of affiliate marketing: you have third-party sellers endorsing your product and services.

I consider search engine marketing the most powerful way to get clicks that are likely to take action. Remember, high-ranking organic search listings are also perceived as a form of editorial content and endorsement. If Google ranked your site as number 1, people believe it’s worth a try. Ads, on the other hand, are not seen as endorsements, but rather “try at your own risk” advice. Think about your own experience searching. Do you trust the PPC ads on the side of the screen, or do you jump to Google’s “recommendations” first?

Opening day madness

These days, the keywords that convert best are usually the most expensive or the hardest to rank for organically. Savvy advertisers have identified these keywords and start bidding wars that increase the overall cost of acquiring clicks. But you do not necessarily need to get the most expensive ones — you just need to get the cheap ones and lure people back to you a few more times. It’s similar to the way we shop for movies. Sometimes we’re willing to pay more money to see a movie on its opening day at the theater, while in many cases we prefer to pay less and wait for the film to come out on DVD so we can see it a few more times for less money.  You too can get cheap clicks if you are willing to wait for people who are not ready to buy right away.

How? In order to get the action you expect — a purchase, a signup, a download, etc. — the visitor needs to feel like your content presents the ultimate solution to his/her problem. If you solve specific problems affecting many users and gain the credibility and visibility to be a recommended resource, the traffic and the conversions will pour in. This is why I say that conversion rates are affected by the source of the traffic more than you might expect.

The stream of clicks that got the visitor to your site in the first place can tell you what that problem might be. If you select the right keywords to map the problems/needs your potential visitors are expressing, you can better serve them with the content that is going to address those particular needs when they land on the website. That will boost your conversion rate — and your profits.

Another important tactic is to build a relationship over time. Offer a free e-zine subscription, for example, and you can share useful tips with these visitors until you get the person into the right frame of mind. People are primarily looking for content/information, and you can provide that info while slowing building up their desire to purchase from you at a later date. The idea is to trade your time in creating valuable content, tips and advice in exchange for traffic and sales down the line. The visitors will come back to your site with the right frame of mind. This is the approach I’ve taken on this blog and it is working out very well.

Now, I just need to find more time to write/share more useful content! Please let me know what you think of this concept in the comments.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

A couple of months ago I found a really clever and easy way to build thousands of links to any site (with your choice of anchor text). In the spirit of sharing I try to promote in this blog, here it is…

PAD your link-building regimen

There are thousands of software developers that provide their solution as a software download (RankSense is one of those), but getting visibility for your solution is an uphill battle due to the large number of competing products in any software niche. One of the easiest ways to get a lot of visibility is to offer a free version of your product and syndicate it through free software download directories.

Now, there are thousands of such directories and submitting your software to each one manually is definitely a pain. Fortunately, there is already a solution for that. All of the software distribution sites support a standard syndication format for content similar to RSS. It’s called PAD (Portable Application Description). Essentially, it is an XML format with all the details about your software, your company, and so on. And most important of all for us marketers, it includes a space to provide our company/product URL and description. In most cases, both result in a link with the anchor text you specify.

You are probably going to say that you don’t have a software download to distribute. Here are two very simple options for you:

1.      Hire a programmer on Elance or Guru and have him develop a very simple tool (like a calendar or to-do list) or enhance an existing open source one. If you search diligently, you can get lots of proposals for anywhere between $50 to $200 bucks. Most of the software directories—at least the ones that are most useful for link juice—review each submission, so if you want to increase your chances try to create something simple but original.

2.      Turn your blog’s content into an e-book in executable format using one of the popular e-book creators. This strategy is even easier and I guess most of you will go this route, but I need to warn you that you will have less success with the directories that carefully review submissions.

After you have your “free new software” you need to create the syndication file—the PAD file. There is a free tool that you can use for this called PadGen. Simply fill out the forms, which are self explanatory, and let the software generate the PAD file for you. Pay special attention to the fields for your link and company name. Those are the ones that control the link back to your site and the anchor text. Upload the file to your server, and submit the URL to the directories.

Anchors away

As a regular reader of this blog, you probably understand the importance of mixing your anchor text. Getting thousands of links back with the same anchor text is not a good idea. So here is a clever strategy you can use to control the anchor text:

Write a simple PHP script and map it to your PAD file URL using Apache’s ScriptAlias, or map the .xml extension (if you don’t have other files with the same extension) or do something similar. The idea is that the script must intercept the request and randomly or serially alter the anchor text in the XML with the values of a predetermined list of anchor text that you want to target. Performing basic keyword research will give you a suitable list. The goal is to have every submission use a different (but relevant) description for your company/product. To be on the safe side, I suggest you always leave the product name with the keyword-rich description. I also recommend that in some of the variations you use only the product name and not a keyword-rich description. This will make everything look much more natural.

This sounds like a lot of work, but really it isn’t. Syndicating software is not very different from syndicating content.

All that’s left is to find a big list of software directories to start submitting your PAD file to. A search in Google for “software downloads” returns more than 70 million results and all I see are software download sites, so the sky is the limit! I recommend you don’t include your personal e-mail in the PAD but create one that you can actively monitor because many of the sites will e-mail you additional steps. I’m sure spammers set up fake download sites to harvest e-mails so be careful with that, too.

There are software tools that can automate the submissions too; do a quick search in Google and you will find some really useful ones.

Happy link hunting!

Update: I’m glad to learn that SEO expert, Nick Wilsdon, has been using this technique for years! Check  out his really useful post for more useful tips

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

The problem is scammers who claim to be SEOs and who disrepute all of us with what they do. Wherever we draw the line between who is and who isn’t a “real SEO” is not important. There is no central authority or watchdog group that validates which SEO claims are true and which are false. But—and this is a big but—there is one way we can turn the tables. You guessed it: unlike scammers, we can guarantee our results.

A Knock at the Door

It’s well known that many people at the moment associate the term SEO consultant with snake oil salesmen. This is in large part thanks to people that don’t have a clue about SEO, but do know a lot about telemarketing and how much money can be made by proffering SEO services. Picture somebody coming to you and offering an irresistible service that will send mountains of customers right to your door; he’ll charge several thousand dollars for the service and you need to wait six months to see the results, which he doesn’t guarantee. Would you buy it?

Actually, a lot of people do buy into it…and that’s a problem for us. By offering our services with no guarantee at all, we are encouraging others to do the same. It has opened the door for scammers to prey upon innocent people. When a site owner comes into contact with an SEO, how can he tell the good ones from the bad ones? Most small business owners don’t attend search marketing conferences and don’t know who Danny Sullivan or who Aaron Wall is. They do know that their inbox is flooded and they get called maybe five times a week from different companies pitching SEO services.

You don’t need to know SEO to confirm whether a practitioner is providing a useful service or not. Just measure words against tangible results. How many extra visitors and/or sales/leads have resulted from the work of this SEO? Many will say that SEO has nothing to do with sales/leads/actions/conversions but, as I have laid out before, I strongly disagree. And I’m not talking about conversion optimization, which I consider a separate concern from SEO. If the consultant can show only rankings as proof, run away. Why? Because rankings alone are not useful unless they result in an increase in valuable traffic.

If you read my previous post, I think you’ll agree that rankings are not the best way to measure the success of an SEO campaign. There has to be a bottom-line benefit for the site owner, and that will depend on the specific goals of the campaign. Is it to increase awareness and trust of the brand, or to generate leads and sales? At the end of the day, the campaign is successful by reaching those predetermined set goals. This makes the SEO campaign valuable, both to the customer and the SEO providing the services.

A Line in the Sand

What I am trying to get across is that we can (and should) guarantee results—the right kind of results—because a well-executed SEO campaign will certainly drive more search traffic and affect conversions. This is true for at least a couple of reasons:

1.       With proper SEO you can pretty much define the right audience for a product or service. That is, if the consultant does a good job and selects the right keywords, those visitors should already express an immediate interest in whatever it is they are expecting on the landing page. Choose the wrong keywords and the results and conversions are going to be drastically the opposite.

2.       People tend to trust editorial pieces more than ads. That being said, when someone does a search in Google they see “editorial content” on the left (which is the result of SEO) and they see paid ads on the right (the result of PPC). Which content do you think they trust more? Which will result in higher conversions more often? Remember, most people trust Google, and that trust is conferred upon the search results. This is why Google is so protective of their users; every search result is perceived as an endorsement.

The larger point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be fighting amongst ourselves about different hat colors. It doesn’t matter if you’re a white hat, black hat or gray hat if at the end of the day you’re providing results and the customer understands the risks of your methods. No matter what hat color we wear, we should be fighting together against the scammers that are infiltrating and destroying our industry. Our real concern are those people scamming our potential customers and not providing any value at all. We need to set a clear line in the sand that separates “us” from “them.” That is why I believe the smartest thing to do is guarantee our results—not top rankings—but measurable results.

If you get a customer and you don’t think you can provide measurable results, then don’t take the job. There will be plenty more knocking at your door because, when you deliver on what you say and exceed your customers’ expectations, they will come back to you for more and refer you to others.

Okay, I’ve said my piece. I’d appreciate your thoughts on this in the comments.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

A better way to check search rankings

I definitely feel the pain of those that need to rely on tools that are constantly getting blocked by Google. But there is no need to get Google mad at you and block your IP. I learned early in life that there are always many different ways to achieve the same goals. You can get far more information about your rankings, for instance, directly from your traffic log files. You can determine all the keywords that you are ranking for, their relative positions, the number of visits each keyword is sending, and, with the IP address, you can also determine the physical locations where searchers are coming from. We’ve had this functionality built in to RankSense since we started developing it four years ago! Plus, you don’t need to query Google to get this information. (BTW, the new 2.0 version of RankSense is coming out, and the Discover Rankings tool can now detect conversions as well. That way, you’ll be ranking first for the keywords that actually bring in the money!)

The problem with fixation on ranking reports

But even if you can still check your rankings, this belies a notion that SEO is all about moving a site to the #1 spot in the search results. There is a camp that thinks ranking reports like this are important because customers are asking for them; the other camp argues that it is a waste of time because different people get different search results, and that the success of an SEO campaign must be measured in another way, like traffic and conversions.

There certainly are some fundamental problems with letting your customers get fixated on moving up in the rankings. Let me explain a few of them:

1.       A #1 ranking for a keyword means nothing if the traffic that derives from it does not give you the desired results: leads, sales, downloads, sign-ups, etc. Is the customer clear on his or her specific goals for the SEO campaign? How does he or she know a ranking for “blue widgets” will help achieve those goals? Has the keyword phrase been tested with PPC? Those are more important questions.

2.       Rankings can move up and down for a multitude of reasons, and fixation on those fluctuations can make any normal human being crazy. For example, Google delivers different results based on the physical location of the searcher, the language setting, the search history, and so on. That makes perfect sense because people living in different places and having different interests would consider relevant things that other people in other places do not.

3.       There are more important metrics of success for an SEO campaign. We should not let the client forget the main purpose of SEO, and ranking for “blue widgets” should not be the end goal in and of itself. As consultants, we need to be the ones telling clients which keywords are going to produce the best results, not rankings.

Does this means that trying to rank #1 is impossible or a bad idea?

I personally don’t think so. Fighting for #1 is like trying to be the best at what you do, and it is well known that #1 rankings bring with them a huge amount of benefits. They receive more than twice as many clicks as the second result (provided it doesn’t have a crappy snippet) and being #1 is a sign of trust to searchers. Users trust that if Google recommends the site as #1, it has to be good.

Also, while it is true that for many keywords the location in the search results might shift for different users, for a great many searches this is not the case. Consider navigational or brand searches. People doing brand searches are expecting the same thing and it doesn’t matter where in the world they are, their language or their search habits. A search for RankSense anywhere in the world should hopefully bring you to my RankSense software! For many searches, trying to be #1 (or on the first page) for queries that bring in money and don’t necessarily vary much from searcher to searcher is a very good idea, IMO.

My SEO Key Performance Indicators

As I said, rankings are not a measure of success unless they result in tangible goals such as traffic and conversions. That is why my favorite KPIs for measuring/tracking the success of my search campaigns are:

1.       Search traffic growth and corresponding conversions. I want to know week-to-week and month-to-month how my organic traffic is growing and, more importantly, how many conversions I’m getting from the overall search traffic.

2.       How many rankings I have on the first page vs the rest of the SERPs. As I said, I can derive this information from the traffic logs. Getting more visitors from the first page of results than from page two downwards means that I will be getting more traffic, so this indicator supports the first. In addition, I want to make sure my most profitable keywords are on the first page. That needs to be a priority because that will drastically improve my results.

3.       How many new incoming links I am getting every week/month etc. If I were the obsessive type, instead of fixating on rankings I’d fixate on how many new links I was getting. Getting links and increasing the visibility of the site will result in deeper index penetration (because the site is considered more important) and the ability to rank for more competitive terms that can potentially result in a lot more traffic. It could also help me adapt my content development strategy to focus on more competitive terms.

4.       How many pages I have in the search engine index vs. the total crawlable pages of the site. Last but not least, the easiest way to start getting search traffic from long-tail queries is to create lots of quality content and promote that content. Every page we manage to get into the search engine index is another source of search referrals, so making sure all or most of the pages are getting indexed is a winning strategy.

There are several other metrics I use to measure success, but for me the most critical/important ones are these four. Do you use any KPIs to measure the success of your SEO efforts? If you do, please share them in the comments.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

This is a guest post by Paul Burani from Clicksharp Marketing, a very sharp search marketer I met in NY

In the search engine world, it’s easy to think in terms of black and white.  Some traffic you pay for, some you don’t.  There’s page one, and there’s everything else.  And of course we use the terms “black hat” and “white hat” SEO to differentiate the practices which push (or exceed) the limits of what is deemed acceptable by each search engine’s terms of service.

This view often creates a temptation to pursue Search Engine Optimization at all costs, when in fact it may be an ill-advised strategy.  What would lead a CEO, marketing manager, publisher or webmaster to make a dubious investment in SEO?  In many cases, this is based on the simplistic notion that clicks from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising come at a significant price, whereas in organic search, they cost nothing.

The idea that SEO is free is patently false.

What you’re not paying in Cost Per Click (CPC), you’re paying in time: the time required to generate and/or syndicate content, format your markup properly, research competitors, and stay current on trends in search engine algorithms.  We all know that time is money.  And if you’re outsourcing any of the above, you’re paying money on top of that money.

So whereas in PPC you build your campaigns around a certain monthly ad budget, with SEO your budget is effectively measured in content and not dollars.  Writing more content and creating more pages increases the reach of your site.  It broadens the spectrum of keyword queries for which you can be reasonably competitive — from the high traffic core keywords to the “long tail” terms with comparatively low volumes but high upside (in the form of conversion potential).  This creates a very powerful virtuous cycle:

• Googlebot and other search engine crawlers have more content to crawl, and begin to view your domain more favorably.

• A growing number of unique users find your site through their own natural search behavior.

• A certain percentage of these users link to you in the process of generating their own content.

• Your steadily growing network of inbound links improves your authority in search engines, indirectly improving your crawl rate, your search engine visibility, and the overall stature of your website on the internet.

If you haven’t yet gained any key insights from your PPC campaigns, SEO may not be as valuable.

Another myth about SEO is that it’s a dark science, driven by a small handful of hyper-intelligent individuals who stand around a bubbling cauldron sipping nerve tonic, talking about how much smarter they are than Google.

That’s far from the case.  While it is true that an SEO campaign is driven by basic competencies in content generation, keyword and competitor research, server dynamics, usability and so on — ultimately SEO is about running a business.  The same way an offline business might invest in a billboard placement to pull in new customers, search engines are simply a newer medium for practicing all the same rules of business.  Thanks to all its campaign administration tools, and support from the major search engines, PPC tends to be more generally embraced as a business development tool.  For instance, measuring and enhancing Return On Investment (ROI) in PPC has evolved much more quickly than in SEO.  Maybe that’s why the industry doesn’t consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to be a part of the broad strategies of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Making the transition from PPC to SEO, however, is easier than you think.

If a PPC campaign is well-designed to attract a wide variety of clientele, and has been running long enough to have statistically-significant volumes of impressions, clicks and conversions, the next step is to skim the cream off the top of the campaign and create the foundation for an SEO campaign.

Imagine you’re running your favorite analytics program, looking at a list of all your PPC keywords, sorted by conversion rate.  Once you’ve filtered out a few outliers with inadequate sample sizes (go back to your Statistics 101 textbook if need be), you find maybe a dozen keywords that are significantly outperforming the overall campaign.  (Note: in PPC/SEO-speak, both single words and multiple-word phrases are referred to as keywords.)

These keywords now become the bedrock of your campaign to migrate business potential from PPC to SEO — we’ll call them the Dynamic Dozen.  Your copywriters are instructed to create content which repeatedly brings the Dynamic Dozen to prominence.  Your developer or webmaster organizes supporting elements of the markup (e.g. title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, etc) accordingly.  Your PR firm (or guerilla link builders) generate inbound links using the Dynamic Dozen as rotated anchor text.

You’re acting on a very simple premise: once upon a time, the people who searched for those core half-dozen terms found you and became customers — and other people would do the same, regardless of whether they found you in the sponsored results or the organic results.

Checking your rankings in the search engines for the Dynamic Dozen might seem like a worthy benchmark for success, but it’s important not to give too much credibility to this metric.  A better strategy is to become very friendly with your analytics program, and monitor your search engine traffic on a regular basis.  Trends in absolute numbers of unique visits will give you a very general idea of the SEO campaign’s progress, but for a more objective view, ask yourself questions such as:

• How much traffic is being generated specifically by the Dynamic Dozen (including phrases that contain any of the these terms)?

• The people who reach my site through these keywords, do they develop a better-than-average relationship with the site content?  Do I see a lower bounce rate, higher pageviews per visit, growth in repeat visits?

• Are the Dynamic Dozen converting at the same rate as they were in PPC?

• Here’s the million dollar question — for the amount of time and money I’ve invested in SEO, is my organic search traffic reaching the same rate overall ROI as it was in PPC?

How would I begin to estimate the cost of an SEO campaign?

Understanding the return on your SEO investment can be tricky, but as always, you have a lot of objective data to use to your advantage.

1. Costs.  Come up with a reasonable estimate of the value of one hour of time for each of the key people involved: copy writers, webmasters, link builders, etc.  There are a variety of very cheap (or free) time tracking tools which facilitate this kind of record-keeping.  Add to this any costs for submission and/or syndication.

2.Assign value to conversions.  These numbers can usually be input directly into your analytics program.  If you’re selling product directly, the value is measured in profits.  If a conversion is represented by something less concrete, such as a white paper download, use your own business data to calculate the rate how many white paper downloads it takes to generate one new customer — and how much that new customer is worth.

3. Competition.  You can set a reasonable benchmark for ROI by isolating a few key competitors and studying their SEO campaigns.  Count up all the inbound links pointing to an important page on their site (you might also apply a filter such as PageRank, to account for the varying levels of inbound link quality).  Using your own human resources as a model, estimate how much it would cost to create and promote that content, and divide by the number of inbound links.

Once you’ve accomplished this, an objective view of ROI is your reward, and you’re essentially left with one of two results.

1. The ROI is lower than what you’ve observed for your PPC (or lower than what management has required).  In this event, you’ll need to return to your analytics software, extract the laggard keywords, and adapt both existing and new content toward better performance for these terms.

2. The ROI is higher — and which case you’ve earned a pat on the back.  You now have a mandate to return to the C-level executives asking for more budget.  Or if they don’t want to invest in marketing, maybe they’d like to invest in a big bonus for their new marketing guru.

There are many compelling reasons to invest in SEO.  Though it is not as “free” as many people believe, much of the intelligence needed to manage your campaign already exists in the form of PPC data.  Transferring these assets to the organic search channel, and measuring their impact on the bottom line, are a viable marketing strategy for many businesses competing in the digital economy.

So when is this a good idea, and when is it not?  Consider these criteria:

• Are you prepared to spend human resources, as well as your marketing budget, on SEO?

• Can you come up with an ongoing list of themes to use for developing new content?

• Have you gained a clear understanding of which keywords are convert your website’s visitors into customers?

• Do you regularly use your analytics software to measure your marketing investments?

• Do you have a good sense of which competitors are doing the same thing?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you may not yet be ready for the spoils of Search Engine Optimization. But if you believe your marketing agenda is prepared to meet these challenges head-on, the upside is yours for the taking.

[Editor's note: BTW, don't miss my interview at Meetinnovators ]

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I’ve been spending a little bit of time lately out of the search marketing world and into the broader Internet marketing space. I signed up for every “guru’s” newsletter, accepted all the free offers and I even signed up for a few paid ones. There are a lot of scams out there, but there are also those genuinely interested in providing quality information.

What I’ve come away with, and I’ve certainly talked about this before, is that conversions depend a lot on the traffic source. This becomes especially true when we move our ads away from the search page and onto social media sites or other places where users are browsing, not searching. Most people will say that in order to increase conversion you need to tweak the landing page, change what you say, how you say it, update the artwork, the offer, or work on other countless variables. What they don’t tell you is that you can also improve your conversion rate without making any changes to your landing page at all. How? Well it all goes back to the traffic source, so keep reading…

Traffic is less than king

As search marketers we focus too much on traffic. This is especially true of those working with social media. The truth is that traffic alone is not enough—we need to get the traffic to convert into desired actions on our website (leads, sales, etc.). You may have a page that converts at 10%, but if you send that page untargeted traffic the conversion rate will quickly drop to zero. Targeted search engine traffic is more likely to convert than any other traffic source for two reasons:

1.       The searcher is actively looking for what you are offering.

2.       Most people trust popular search engines and assume that if you are listed (especially if you are number one) you must be good and will deliver on what you promise.

But what about other traffic sources? Social media sites, banners, blogs, etc.—those traffic sources are good too, but they require a different content strategy. They require us to understand the difference between browsing and searching. When I search, I am actively looking for something. The marketing and sales message can be very fast and direct. When I am browsing social sites and blogs, I click on an ad more out of curiosity than focused interest. The way we convert the browser into a buyer, then, is a whole different ballgame.

The slow sale

It’s well known that the browsing traffic you get from social sites and blogs is great for branding. Top link baiters understand this and leverage it to get large numbers of links. But browsing traffic is good for more than just links. We can leverage browsing traffic for leads and sales too, but we must do so as part of a more prolonged strategy, similar to the one employed by B2B companies. We must offer something valuable for free to the browser right now in order for them to click through. Social site and blog readers love things like free e-books, useful tools, reports, etc. The idea is to collect their contact information now and contact them later, persuading them slowly over time to finally take action. I’ve seen this used by several successful sites. The idea clearly works.

Here is my process to increase conversions on non-search channels (social sites, blogs, Google content network, etc.)

1.       Study your target source carefully. Try to understand what the audience likes and wants. For example, people visiting technical forums like free scripts or technical documents. People visiting “make money online” sites like free reports/e-books on how to make money.

2.       Prepare a compelling offer. Provide something that is going to be attractive to the target group. Digital content is easier to produce so it should be the first option, but free tools are generally well received.

3.       Create ads that call attention. Search ads are generally more passive, but when you are browsing you are not even looking for ads so they must call attention to themselves more aggressively. Something like “Get top widgets here…” may work for searchers, but “Free report: 10 secrets to world domination!” is more likely to get clicks on a social site.

4.       Collect the leads. Ask for an e-mail and a name at the very least. Then, set up auto-responder messages to move your targets slowly onto your persuasion scheme.

There’s no question that this is more work than selling directly to people actively searching for what you offer. But consider that at any one moment more than 80% of web surfers are not looking to buy anything. However, we know that eventually they will be. If you’ve already got your foot in the door, you’ll quickly tap into that huge market opportunity when the moment comes.

As always, let me know your own experiences or ideas in the comments.

I promised everybody that I’d be posting my presentation slides from my talk at the SMX Advanced Bot Herding panel, so here they are!

First, let me say that I was very excited to be speaking at a major search marketing conference, and I can say with confidence that all the traveling was definitely worth it. My only regret is that I did not get to finish my presentation. This is the first time I spoke publicly and as an inexperienced speaker I was not even looking at the timer. My apologies to all those in attendance. Frankly, I do think speakers should be allowed a little bit more time for SMX Advanced, as you really do need time to lay the groundwork before delving deeply into these sorts of topics.

For those that didn’t come, let me summarize the key takeaways from my speech and put it into context regarding Google’s recent post on Webmaster Central:

Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you’re in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

Basically, Google says that geolocation and IP delivery (when used for geolocation purposes) are fine as long as you present the same content to the Googlebot as you would present to the user coming from the same region. Altering the content the robot sees puts you in “a high-risk category.” Google is so strict that it suggests you need a checksum program to make sure you are delivering the same content. Obviously, it doesn’t matter if your intention is to improve the crawling and indexing of your site or not.

Why would you want to cloak anyway?

Let’s talk about the key scenarios I discussed in my speech:

• Content accessibility

-          Search unfriendly Content Management Systems. According to Google, if you are using a proprietary CMS that does not allow the flexibility of making the URLs search-engine friendly, or if it has cookie-based session IDs, or has unique titles and descriptions, you need to replace your CMS with a newer one. Using a reverse proxy that cloaks to fix those issues is a “bad idea.” Again: easy for Google, hard for the customer.

-          Rich media sites.  If you use Scalable Inman Replacement, SWFObject, JavaScript or CSS to render rich media content to the user and regular text to the search engine then you are fine, because the checksums will be the same.

-          Content behind forms. Google is experimenting with a bot that will try to pull content from basic forms using HTTP GET and providing values listed in the HTML.

• Membership sites

-          Free and paid content. Google recommends we register our premium content using Google News’ First click free. The idea is that you need to give searchers the first page of your content for free and they need to register for the rest. This is very practical for newspapers that have resorted to cloaking in the past. I do see a problem with this technique for sites like SEOmoz where some of the premium pages are guides that cost money. If SEOmoz signed up for this service, I would be able to pull all the guides by guessing search terms that would bring them up in the results.

• Site structure improvements

-          Alternative to PageRank sculpting via “no-follow.” I explained a clever technique where you can cloak a different link path to robots than you present to regular users. The link path for users should be focused on ease of navigation and the link path to regular users should be focused on ease of crawling and deeper index penetration. This is very practical but not really mandatory.

• Geolocation/IP delivery

-          According to the post we don’t need to worry about this. Some good news at last!

• Multivariate testing

-          This is a very interesting case and I would have liked them to explain this in the Webmaster Central post. Search engine robots don’t take part in these experiments because they don’t execute JavaScript, yet many users will see a different version of the page than the robot sees. JavaScript-based cloaking will provide the same checksum for the page the bot sees and the page the user sees. I’m sure some clever black hats are taking advantage of this to do “approved” cloaking.

Google = Romulans

Just like the Romulans from Star Trek, Google doesn’t want cloaking technology in the hands of everyone. I didn’t get to talk about this in my presentation, but let me speculate as to why Google is drawing such a hard line on cloaking: Simply put, it is the easiest, cheapest and most scalable solution for them.

1.       As a developer I can tell you that running checksums against the content presented to Googlebot vs. the content presented to the cloaking detection bots is the easiest and most scalable way for them to do it.

2.       Similar to the problem with paid links, it is easier to let us do all the work of labeling our sites so they can detect the bad guys without having to dedicate a huge amount of resources to solve such problems.

Enjoy the slides and feel free to ask any questions. If you were there at SMX Advanced and watched me present, please let me know your honest comments. Criticism can only help me improve. Let me know what you think of the slides, too. Originally, I had planned to use more graphics than text, but ultimately I thought that the advanced audience would appreciate the added information.

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It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing that can happen to an SEO. But it’s also something you can often avoid completely with a little planning. In this post I’m going to talk about a technique I like for using pay-per-click first to test out my SEO game plan. This way the next time you make it to the top of the search rankings, the traffic and money will start pouring in!

Using the PPC guinea pigs

An important point before we start is to disable the Google “content network” and set up conversion tracking—that’s how we’ll ultimately identify the best keywords. Remember, the best keywords aren’t the ones with the highest number of searches or even the most clicks. They are the ones that bring in the most conversions at the lowest possible cost. Our PPC strategy is simple:

1. Start with a large list of relevant keywords using Google AdWords keyword tool.
2. Create very specific ad groups and landing pages you want to test.
3. Split test everything: ad copy, keyword matching options, and landing pages.

Spend money to make money

Start with a large list of as many relevant keywords as possible. Divide your keywords into small groups so that each can be sent to an appropriate landing page. Set a low budget per day in AdWords so that you don’t spend anymore than necessary. Even if it turns out to be an expensive campaign, you can run it for a limited amount of time just for testing purposes. I think in the vast majority of cases, the ultimate payoff is worth the small investment.

There are some other points worth noting as you go about your testing. Keep in mind that you are finding the best candidates in multiple categories: keywords, ad text, and landing pages. Ad variations will eventually help you title your SEO landing pages and offer meta descriptions that appear in the search results and cause searchers to click on your link. You have to think of an ad as an offer. The searcher is always in the “What’s in it for me?” frame of mind. Your ad text must offer a promise of something specific to the searcher. Your landing page will have to deliver on that promise; if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get a conversion. You can also test the efficacy of different landing pages with Google’s Website Optimizer

Another often-overlooked point is to test variations on the same keyword phrase. AdWords offers you flexibility in terms of a broad match, exact match or phrase match. These are explained here in Google’s documentation. AdWords also has an advanced matching option called embedded match that I can use to help make my split testing more effective. It’s just as important to test these keyword matching variations as it is to test different ads.

You’ve seen the future, now go after it

With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to do a detailed assessment of your campaign when it’s over. You’ll see clearly the exact words people typed into the search that led to conversions. This will allow you to hone your keyword list even more. Based on your PPC conversions, you’ll also be able to estimate how much revenue you can potentially earn and whether your SEO efforts are going to be worth it for these keywords.

Before I leave you, I want to mention that this post was inspired by an answer I read in the LinkedIn forums written by Laura Alter from notebookforums.com. I want to thank her for that, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think of this strategy in the comments.

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PageRank sculpting with nofollow

The majority of the nofollow debate centers around external and paid links. But nofollow can be used with internal links as well in a concept often called “PageRank sculpting.” The idea is to use nofollow to help shape the relative importance of pages on your site. In the eyes of search engines, certain pages on your site are clearly more important than others. Google and Yahoo determine this automatically by how many incoming links a page has, and they include internal links in this calculation. Of course what the search engine believes is important may not necessarily agree with what you think. With a commercial site, for instance, the pages that make the most money are the important ones, but users around the Internet don’t naturally link to commercial content as much as to informational pages. It makes practical sense that you want these moneymaking pages listed in the search engine index, and you can use nofollow on internal links to lessen the importance of some pages and thereby increase (internally) the importance of others.

There are people in the SEO community who don’t encourage this. You can do similar things with information architecture, JavaScript or other methods after all, and nofollow is just another way. For a large e-commerce site like Amazon, for example, it might make some sense. Amazon has a good toolbar PageRank, but there are so many pages available that they will want the most PageRank on the most important pages. But for the vast majority of sites out there, I don’t think this is a problem. The focus should really be getting PageRank in the first place. Think about it this way: what’s going to benefit your site most, incremental tweaks of shifting PageRank in between pages, or getting more PageRank juice to start with? I think, for most of us, the latter is true.

A follower no more

That is one particular use for nofollow. Search engines, of course, are encouraging sites to use nofollow for paid links. As I’ve outlined before, I don’t think this is the best solution and search engines have other alternatives they should try. But some blogs and other sites nofollow everything with the hope that they can keep all of their internal PageRank for themselves. If you read my latest post on SEOmoz about how PageRank works, you understand that this idea really doesn’t hold water. You’re still going to share some amount because of the way the PageRank algorithm is designed. If everyone starts doing the same thing, it’s going to be harder to get links and I don’t think it’s a good idea to promote this behavior.

Until today my blog was a dofollow blog. I wanted to reward my readers for reading and commenting. As SEOs, I know that one of the hardest problems we face is getting links to our sites. So why did I reverse my decision and go from a dofollow to a nofollow blog? It’s because I simply don’t have the time anymore to moderate all the comments and filter out the spammy ones. I’m finding that some first-time readers feel like they need to write a comment on every single one of my posts, even ones that are several months old. It takes a lot of time to delete these things.

To me, all this is sad. I feel that I am sending out the wrong message because I am very much against the nofollow attribute. But I don’t want my blog to become a source of spam comments either.

If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’re as welcome as ever. Above all, I still want my readers to be active with this blog and be rewarded for it. With that in mind, I’m soon going to install another plug-in called Linky Love. The idea is that after several approved comments you can get dofollow link for your comments.

Let me know your opinions on the subject of nofollow. Your comments do matter here!

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It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post here as I am extremely busy with RankSense. In selling an SEO software suite I answer a lot of technical questions, but, oddly enough, I feel I have become much better at explaining what SEO actually is. As SEO has become more mainstream, and more people are curious about what exactly it means, I think it’s important to find ways to explain SEO in simple terms. That’s exactly what I want to do in this post: simple SEO in terms of goals, strategies, and tactics.

Eyes on the prize

I’ve found that explaining SEO in terms of specific goals is the most successful way for me to get my point across when pitching my services or products to prospective clients. I like to think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website to improve the number of qualified visitors coming from search engines.

In order to get qualified visitors, you have to pursue 3 specific goals for the website. The first, and most important, is increasing the site’s visibility. For a user to find a website via a search engine, the search engine has to find the site first! Just as important, the search engine must also deem the site important: worthy of having a high place in the index. At the moment, search engines, including both Google and Yahoo, rely primarily on the links coming into a website. If many big sites link to your content, Google assumes your content is pretty useful. So the activities involved in increasing the visibility of a website in the eyes of Google and Yahoo primarily means that you are building links. In a future post I’ll talk about some research I’ve been doing that shows that search engines are trying to shift away from this methodology and have started working on incorporating usage data instead to determine importance. But the truth of the matter is that, for the moment, there is nothing as solid as link building to increase your site’s importance.

The second goal is targeting. If I want to get more qualified visitors to my site, I need to understand which specific keywords are bringing me the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on my site (download, subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, and so on). A lot of people new to SEO or the Web just want traffic. But traffic alone is not useful. You want traffic that takes action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to do that.

The third goal that you pursue when doing SEO is what I call the presence. You want to get as many pages of your site as possible indexed, but especially the ones that are most important. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.

As I have tried to lay out with these goals, SEO is not simply about ranking #1 for a random keyword. Many people will tell you that, but they are missing the point. Rather, the purpose of SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords—the goals of your site will determine the kinds of users you really need.

Strategies for successful SEO

When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO. But how do you get to that point? Let’s talk about strategy and tactics. My strategy has 3 different steps:

1. Research – First, I try to understand where my site is right now. Am I targeting the right keywords? What’s my market? Am I missing any keyword opportunities? What are my competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets me learn and apply their strategies to my own site.
2. Create/Promote – My next step is to create an SEO plan that will get me where I need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, I need to promote my content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve discussed in previous blog posts.

• Keyword research
• SEO copywriting
• Social media marketing
• Link building/baiting
• Blogging
• Creating XML sitemaps
• Fixing duplicate content issues
• URL rewriting/redirects
• Etc.

3. Track progress – The final step, and this is one that many people forget about, is tracking your progress. How far are you from your specific goals? Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you know what worked and what didn’t, as well as the areas you still have to focus on.

So that’s how I’ve been explaining SEO to all the people who ask me. I’ll be posting on a more regular basis from now on, but I’m curious to know how you map out your SEO thought process. Sound off in the comments.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

The Thrill of the Chase

Chasing links is the traditional way of building links. This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies. While it’s the most common way to acquire links, it’s also the most time-consuming, labor-intensive approach. But who is going to disparage a tried and true technique with results?

Step 1: Identifying link targets. First off it’s important to consider and research the links that are most valuable to your site. One way to do this is to scour through search engine results to see the top spots for your keywords, and attempting to acquire links from those sites. Another way is to look at your competitors and see what links they are getting (Yahoo Site Explorer is great for this). Personally, I like the latter method because you know that if your competitor obtained a link, surely you can too.

Step 2: Categorize your targets. There are different kinds of sites and each will require a unique approach, so you should look at where the most valuable links are coming from. Are they from blogs or news items? From link directories or review sites? Membership organizations you might want to join or already belong to? By understanding the kinds of links you’re after, you can hone your approach and employ specific strategies.

Step 3: Approaching the link target. As with any chase, approaching the target deftly and surely is of paramount importance. Press releases, for instance, have a particular format and style. Your success rate will be higher if you follow the guidelines and focus on a specific, newsworthy idea. Link directories also have their own rules and guidelines. Read them carefully and make certain you meet the qualifications before submitting. (Notice that I am assuming that the directory will review your site. That’s because a directory without an editorial board, one that lets every site in, probably isn’t worth your time as it will be demoted by search engines, either now or sometime soon.) Some blogs accept paid reviews, but probably the best ones won’t. Study what authority sites are already linking to so that you have the right idea of what to present them with. Always get the right contact information, an email address or phone number, and do things in an individual, personal, and personable manner. The chase of link building is a refined art!

Pros

Chasing after links allows you to be more selective and gives you greater control over your link structure and link text. It’s going to be naturally high quality and diverse. If you look at my previous post about link mass, you know that I encourage you to go after the hardest ones first because they usually give you the most link juice.

Cons

The obvious con is the time and labor required by you. Chasing after links isn’t something you want to be outsourcing because it requires personal rapport. It necessitates having your own voice and building a connection with representatives of other sites. Clearly it also takes a whole lot of time and patience.

* A Caution About Link Exchanges

Sometimes when you ask for a link, the site owner or blogger wants something in return, including a link back to their site. While this is standard practice, you don’t want to get involved in too many link exchanges because it could create an artificial-looking link profile. This is especially true if you use the same keyword-rich anchor text every time. Search engines are getting better at noticing this. Get your brand name out there first, and then start with keyword anchor texts.

The Pleasure of Being Chased

A less traditional but highly effective way of getting links is doing just the opposite—getting people to link directly to you without asking. Often called link baiting, the idea is to create viral content so powerful that it attracts links. This might come in the form of a useful step-by-step guide, a widget, an online tool, or a really funny viral video. All of these call for a slightly different strategy, but it’s always a similar process. Clearly, it also requires creativity and it involves more risk, but there are experts who can help you take a good idea where it needs to go.

Step 1: Identify the influencers. Instead of link targets, we identify the influencers. These are the “sneezers,” or what Rand Fishkin calls the linkerati. They are the people who will talk about your content, include a link, and by the sheer volume of people who view their sites, you’ll get even more links. Social media sites are probably some of the best sources for influencers (Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, etc.). A lot of journalists and other people interested in news go to these sites. Of course if you make it to the New York Times or Yahoo news, you’ll get lots of exposure and links as well.

Step 2: Choosing your content. You must understand which kinds of content do well on those sites, but the basic idea is quite obvious. I’ve spoken before about creating content that drives emotion—stuff that is often even controversial. That’s what gets people excited and talking. Of course controversial content may not be right for your particular brand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with interesting resources. Often you can look at things that have done well before and decide how you can make something better or go at it from a different angle.

Step 3: Promoting the content. Submit your content to social sites or other places where you can get exposure. Titles are very important in social media because it encourages people to read and some people vote based just on that. It’s also a good idea to begin building relationships with power users, or become one yourself—power users have more of a following on social media sites so they get more votes, increasing your chances for exposure and links. I’d like to be one myself, but I barely have enough time to blog!

Pros

When successful, a good link bait will yield a massive amount of links. Ultimately, it requires less effort and is more cost effective. People will link to you with lots of different kinds of anchor text and from many different kinds of sites, giving you a very natural link profile.

Cons

While the pros are really outstanding and hard to ignore, link baiting is more risky. You’re not guaranteed to be successful and, more than likely, it will take you a few tries to learn the ropes. The results are also unpredictable; you could get just one or two links, or hundreds. Finally, it bears mentioning that you’ll have little control over your link structure and link text. While I’ve stressed that you don’t want an artificial link structure, the point really is about ranking for specific keywords. A bunch of random traffic will get you hits, but not necessarily for the keywords you truly want.

Float Like A Butterfly And Sting Like A Bee

The secret to link building truly rests in finding the proper mix of both chasing links and being chased. I don’t think that link acquisition should be an either/or scenario. I recommend starting with 50/50 investment both in time and money for each type of link acquisition. Diversifying is also a sound strategy for your budget because, after all, link baiting may be cost-effective, but it’s risky. Eventually you may want to shift to something more like 80/20 for what works for you and your site. In my experience, this is inevitably viral content and link baiting, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

I’ll leave you with one last idea that can help you combine the power of link baiting with the focus of anchor texts in traditional link acquisition. Often when you create a tool for others to use you offer them a “place this code” box to use in their web page or blog template. Instead of offering up the same anchor text link back to your site, use software on the backend that has a list of anchor texts that you want to target. Have the software rotate the anchor text each time so that different users copying the code will display varying anchor texts linking back to you.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll work on this idea myself. Otherwise, sound off in the comments about your own experience with link acquisition. Are you a chaser or a chasee?

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

When you check the backlinks of sites ranking for competitive keywords (terms with many search results) you see that those sites have a large number of links pointing to them. But if you count the links of the top ten (using Yahoo Site Explorer, as the rest of the backlink checkers are not very useful), you notice that the results at the top don’t necessarily have more links than the ones at the bottom. This is the case because each link carries a unique rank-boosting weight (real PageRank and other link-value factors in the case of Google) that contributes to the ranking of the page for that particular term. In order to simplify things, I like to refer to the combinations of positive and negative link value factors of a page as its Link Mass.

Understanding Link Mass

In order to explain link mass better, let me first outline a couple of fundamental concepts: importance and reputation. Importance (or PageRank) is a measure of the visibility of a page. This is regularly represented by the sheer number of incoming links a site has and their respective importance. However, a page can be very important (highly visible), but not necessarily very reputable. For search engines the reputation of a page depends primarily on how much it is associated with spam. Search engines internally label each page in their index as spam or not spam (using a range instead of just black or white). The best way to understand reputation is to think of it like your credit score. The more infractions you commit, the more points are taken from your score. Similarly, the more your site links to sites that are considered spammy, the more it affects your score. There are other factors that can affect your reputation and flag your site as potentially spammy: getting too many links in a short period of time without natural signs to support it, having an artificial (unnatural) pattern in your link structure, evidence of massive link exchanges, or having the majority of links coming from very low-quality sources (already flagged as spam by the search engine). The idea is that your importance improves with the quantity and quality of your incoming links, and your reputation diminishes with any signal that search engines can pick out flagging your site as guilty of link spam.

With these concepts clear, it is simple to explain link mass. The link mass of a page is the sum of the importance (or real PageRank) contributions from incoming links, minus the reductions in the reputation score for the reasons explained above. A few other things to note:

1. The more links you have and the higher their quality, the higher your link mass; the more negative elements in your site or the sites linking to you the less your link mass.

2. Pages with higher link mass contribute more link mass to the pages they link to than pages with less link mass.

3. Links coming from diverse sources contribute more link mass than links coming from affiliated sources.

Calculating Link Mass

Determining link mass requires a careful and thorough analysis of the link structure of a site or page. First you need to extract all the links to a site, as I explained in a previous post (BTW, I still plan to release the tool I promised in that post, I am just not very happy with the performance at the moment), and then you need to measure the importance and reputation of each incoming link. The importance can be as simple as determining the toolbar PageRank. Determining the reputation of a page is difficult because we don’t know for sure which pages Google or other search engines flag as spam. However, I think the technique I described in the link building project article offers a good approximation of the link mass of a page, because any negative factors are factored in when search engines decide to prioritize the crawling and indexing of the site. After all, why would they want to crawl a page often if they believe it is not very reputable?

Identifying link opportunities

On the Web there are content consumers and content producers. It is important to understand this because content producers and content consumers do not regularly speak the same language. Content consumers are the ones who type queries into search engines. Search engine rankings, however, are primarily influenced by the content producers via the links and endorsements they include in their content on a regular basis. I am not going to discuss here the motivations of content producers to give links (paid or editorial), but rather I want to offer a very simple way you can identify link opportunities. When a content producer writes content naturally, it is unlikely that he or she will use the exact same words that somebody (the content consumer) types into the search box. In a previous blog post, I talked about how people type their problems into search engines by expressing the symptoms they have, not necessarily by typing in the solutions. This is why content producers need keyword research to write more successful content. It is also one of my favorite strategies to find keywords with low link mass (and thus require less effort to achieve).

How to determine the effort required and project the ROI

Link mass is therefore an important metric to consider when determining the amount of effort necessary to rank for a particular term. Just counting the sheer number of links for a top-ranking site doesn’t tell us the whole story. We need to consider the importance and reputation of each one of the links, because some links will contribute more link mass (ranking power) than others, and it is usually a good idea to try to get the hardest ones first. The easy ones will be easy.

Different link-building strategies require different amounts of effort, time and budgets. If you are a smart link builder you will try to sync your keyword research with your link-building strategy. Among a group of relevant keywords for your site, you want to focus on the ones that have the same or similar demand (volume of searches or potential clicks) but that require the less effort (lowest link mass) in order to begin seeing results sooner rather than later.

It is best to keep a simple spreadsheet where you can tally those numbers. For example, let’s say that you are trying to get your site to reach a link mass requiring ten links with a PageRank of 7, five links with a PageRank of 4, and twenty links with a PageRank of 3. You also want to make sure that the sites where the links are placed do not have any visible spam signals, such as a very old search engine cache or massive link-exchange directory. Then you measure how much time and effort it takes you to get a PageRank-7 link, a PageRank-5 and a PageRank-3. Please note that I am not talking about buying links, but the effort (e.g. research, write and pitch a guest post to a site with such characteristics, or finding a dofollow blog and leaving a thoughtful comment). Knowing your target link mass along with these numbers will allow you to project the cost and time to reach a particular ranking. You can combine the data from your keyword research to determine the revenue potential of the keywords, and with some simple math calculate the ROI for yourself or your client.

Final Thoughts

The two most fundamental aspects of any SEO project in terms of the return for time spent are keyword research and link building. You need the keyword research to make sure you are getting relevant traffic, but without links you won’t rank for any keyword that is going to send you search traffic, period. I hope this helps you with your own link-building strategies. Let me know in the comments.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

If you have read some of my posts, you know that I don’t like to do what everybody else is doing and I think that reflects strongly in the way I designed the software. For instance, if you have used any of the keyword research tools on the market, you know that there is little that differentiates one from the other. Most do the same thing: find the keywords people are actively searching for, measure their competitiveness, assess their value, and so on. RankSense is different.

In this post I would like to go deeper into what I believe is one of the most powerful and useful features of RankSense—a radically different keyword research module.

What Everyone Else Is Doing

I am sure most of you are familiar with rank checking tools. If you search for “rank checking” you will end up with thousands of tools (free and paid) to help you identify and monitor your rankings for the top search engines. A lot of people are extremely obsessed with checking their site rankings and would like to see their sites move up in the hopes of grabbing more traffic and business.

But let me explain a few fundamental problems with the current rank checking approach.

1. You need a prodigious mind. Current rank checking software assumes that you know what keywords people are typing to find your website. In reality, you might be able to know a handful of keywords, but realistically you are not going to come up with all of them.

2. Modern search engines present different results to different geographic locations. As part of search engines’ efforts to improve the relevancy of their results, they use geolocation technology to present results relevant to searchers in different cultures/countries. This is a problem for rank checking tools that, depending upon where they are being run, produce completely different results than expected. For example, I have a customer that used to outsource his SEO to India; when they ran the rank checker software in Asia, the site would not appear in the top ten for important keywords, but when the search was performed in the US, voilà, the site was there.

3. Personalized results. Personalized search is one of the biggest challenges that current rank checking tools face. Millions of users will have completely different profiles and your site might come up in the top ten for some users and not for others. How do these checker find your rankings in such a scenario? The simple answer is they don’t. Now, imagine that Google makes personalized results the default.

4. Sending automated queries to search engines. Search engines have specific terms of service and sending automated queries for rank checking violates them. Problems arise, including your IP address being banned or constantly being asked to provide a captcha.

5. Focus on rankings instead of on useful search traffic. This is a fundamental problem that I see come up when people focus too much on rank checking. Anybody can rank in the top ten for keywords that nobody is searching for. As a business owner, a top-ten ranking doesn’t mean much to me unless the keywords that I am trying to rank for are practical and useful for my business. So just any top-ten ranking is of no value—the real goal is a top-ten ranking for keywords that people are actively searching for and that can potentially help my business achieve its aims.

RankSense and the Keyword Goldmine

In contrast to other popular SEO suites and tools in the market, RankSense is primarily a log analysis tool. Why? I find that traffic logs are a goldmine of information about the activity and performance of the website. RankSense focuses on mining information that is particularly useful for organic search optimization.

The first process you can try once you have set up your site properly in RankSense is the “Discover Rankings” feature. It is like a modern rank checker without any of the problems that I detailed above. It works instead by studying your traffic log files and detecting all the keywords that people are using to find your site. But more important than detecting keywords and search engines, it also detects the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) where the user found your site. This is one feature you won’t find anywhere else and one that I am particularly proud of.

The benefits of this approach are many:

1. The software can produce a list of all the keywords that drive traffic to your site along with their corresponding traffic and ranking. We have tested the software with sites that get search traffic from tens of thousands of keywords (although that appears to be a limit that we are working to optimize in terms of memory usage).

2. The physical location of the user doesn’t matter. If the user saw the search result and clicked on it, our software will include the keyword in the list.

3. Personalized results are no problem either because, as long as a user found the site through a personalized result and clicked on it, the keyword and ranking will be there.

4. Because RankSense uses log files, it doesn’t need to send automated queries to the search engines to identify where your site ranks.

Going Beyond Keywords

A description of RankSense’s keyword research tools would be incomplete if I didn’t mention another important differentiation and powerful feature that you don’t see in other SEO tools/suites. All the tools in RankSense collaborate—that is to say that they share the data and information gathered automatically. This particular feature saves time and simplifies a lot of things.

For example, the keyword research tool transparently extracts the current rankings from the rank checker tool. When you enter Keyword Selection (assuming you ran the Discover Rankings task in Smart Mode) your keyword basket is already populated with a bunch of keywords in blue. These keywords are there because you are already ranking for them, but not coming up in the first page of results. There is no easier way to improve your existing rankings for a whole list of long tail keywords than working on these. All current keyword research tools on the market require that you type in some seed keywords (you can do that in RankSense too, of course) but ours can automatically recommend the keywords that you should be ranking for. It is a feature that you won’t see anywhere else. For good measure, RankSense can also extract keywords by doing an on-page analysis of your site, or even your competitor’s site.

The Real Value of Opportunity

One of the most useful elements of any keyword research tool is the ability to estimate the value and level of competition for any keyword. This allows you to prioritize your content development efforts. Focus on keywords that are actively searched for, that can potentially bring money or positive branding traffic to the table, and you can get good rankings in a reasonable amount of time. If you instead focus on keywords that are too competitive to start with or that don’t bring enough money or branding benefits, you will lose both time and money.

In order to gauge the value of the keywords, RankSense incorporates a metric we call Opportunity. Essentially, it combines the frequency a keyword is searched for or clicked, how much PPC advertisers are bidding on the keyword at the moment, and how many results come up in the organic search results (you can adjust all of these settings in the interface). The idea is this: if PPC advertisers bid high on the keyword consistently, then the keyword must be a valuable enough to at least break even for the revenue it gains you. So, our Opportunity index is directly proportional to the number of searches or clicks the term receives and the PPC bid value of the keyword, and indirectly proportional to the number of sites competing on the search results.

Organization is Key for Keywords

Most keyword research experts will tell you that organization is a very important element of keyword research. You need to organize your keywords into meaningful groups so that you can create relevant content (i.e. landing pages) that include the right keywords in the text and start getting organic traffic. With RankSense, you can group keywords based on the intention of the user: navigational searches, informational or transactional. We chose this default set of groups because it highlights the importance of driving searchers to the pages where they are most likely to find what they are looking for. Although it is tempting to send everybody to your product purchase page, that is not what everybody is looking for. You want to send people searching for information to your marketing articles, for example. Of course the software allows you to create additional groups and organize your research in any way you think is more efficient or appropriate for you or your client.

The way the software is designed means that we focus on highlighting opportunities where you can drastically improve the quality and quantity of your search traffic as opposed to focusing on just getting top rankings. This can be seen very well in the Reports section of the software, which is another interesting feature. As you make progress through your project and you complete each of the tasks, actionable reports are generated from the data you provide and that the tools produce. For instance, I am sure you want to know which keywords are driving the most traffic and also see where you are ranking for such keywords. As I explained in a previous post, by simply creating more attractive search snippets you can improve the click-through rate and get far more conversions.

The Last Word

All right, I’m going to pause here. I can write forever about my software and what it can do, but I think it is better to leave you to test it out and tell me what you think. As usual, I encourage constructive criticism. Leave me a comment about what you think of the software and places where you see a need for improvement.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

As I like to do, let me explain my process with an actual example.

Last month there was an interesting post on SEOmoz about session IDs and HTTP cookies. In the post, Rand asserted that search engines don’t support cookies, and it’s therefore another alternative to controlling robot access to a site. Very clever; I don’t know how I didn’t think about that first!

Well, in the comments, King questioned the validity of the original assumption that search engines don’t accept cookies. Here is what he had to say:

I’m not sure its [sic] really true that search engines (Google at least) don’t accept cookies. I recently (well 6 months ago) created a site that checks for cookies before allowing customers access to the shopping cart. If cookies are disabled it sends the user to a[n] info page on the topic Google indexed the actual shopping cart page perfectly well, they totally bypassed the “cookie info” page, and never indexed that at all. Cookie checking was done entirely via PHP code.

For a while I have assumed that Google does not support cookies, but the truth is that search engines are constantly being improved and have evolved over the years. For instance, years ago search engine crawlers did not follow links embedded in JavaScript, but recent experiments have proven that at least Google does follow the less intricate ones.

So, this was a perfect candidate for a simple experiment. Let’s confirm whether search engines accept cookies or not. As best I can, I like to follow the scientific method.

The observation

In order to determine whether or not search engines accept cookies I configured my web server to append cookie information to my visitor log file. If you use Apache as your webserver, this is how you do it. Under your website configuration, change your log format to include HTTP cookie information, like this:

LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\” \”%{Cookie}i\”"

The reason I choose logs for my observation is because search engines do not execute the JavaScript tags commonly used by web-based analytics packages. I need to see the behavior of the robots on the site, so my logs are the most logical option. An alternative would be to use a packet sniffer such as tcpdump, but sniffers spit out far more information than I need and parsing web server logs with regular expressions is very simple and straight forward. There is no need to complicate things.

First, I check the log for regular user visits to the site (especially the pages that return HTTP cookies) and I confirm that the cookies are being logged when the user is accepting (and returning them).

195.62.206.192 – - [01/Mar/2008:03:03:04 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “http://hamletbatista.com/2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; MediaCenter PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath.2)” “__utma=205505417.902185886.1204356928.1204356928.1204356928.1; __utmb=205505417; __utmc=205505417; __utmz=205505417.1204356928.1.1.utmccn=(organic)|utmcsr=google|utmctr=link%3Awww.mutinydesign.co.uk|utmcmd=organic; fbbb_=1343817243.1.1204357560473; subscribe_checkbox_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=unchecked; comment_author_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=Webeternity+web+design; comment_author_email_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=goodsite%40webeternity.co.uk; comment_author_url_88ce75a961c252a943f6a63bd04c8d5d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webeternity.co.uk”

Here most of the cookies are from Google Analytics (check the ones that start with __utm and utm).

Side note: Here I confirmed my suspicion. My loyal reader David Hopkins is responsible for the large amount of manual comment spam I’m receiving lately. Apparently his competitors want to rank top ten in Google for “web design” too

If search engines support cookies, they should return them back and the server will log them with their visit in an entry.

Now, let see what happened when each one of the top search engines visited the site.

Google – no cookies logged

74.52.123.218 – - [04/Mar/2008:00:20:56 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”

Yahoo – no cookies logged

74.6.28.203 – - [01/Mar/2008:19:18:36 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)” “-”

Msn/Live – no cookies logged

65.55.209.101 – - [02/Mar/2008:06:22:15 -0500] “GET /2007/11/13/game-plan-what-marketers-can-learn-from-strategy-games/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 61477 “-” “msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)” “-”

As you can see from the log, none of the top search engines returned the cookies and hence the web server didn’t log them.

Formulation of the hypothesis

From direct observation I can conclude that, as of this moment, top search engines do not support HTTP cookies.

Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena

I can therefore predict that it’s possible to use cookies to control or modify the access of robots to my website. A lot of creative things can be done using this technique.

Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters

Here is my call to you to duplicate these tests on your site and report back whether you get the same results. This is the step that most experimenters miss. You need to share your findings with your peers and the exact procedure you used to arrive at your conclusions, and invite them to test as well and see if they arrive at the same results. “But why do we need to do this?” you might ask. It’s because of human error.

Incorporating Human Error

We are imperfect and we make mistakes. I first learned this lesson years ago in a physics class I took in high school. The teacher taught us to repeat each measurement several times, average the results, and use the lowest and highest values as limits. The idea is that we are must face the fact that we won’t know the exact value, but we can determine a pretty accurate range. The concept of human error in that class was so interesting that I have never forgotten about it (as you can see ).

Human error is not limited to just taking measurements. There are many psychological issues as well. Here are four common mistakes that I regularly make and that I see others making when they come up with new SEO theories:

1. Bias. Many times when you are testing a theory you already want it to be true or you want it to be false. It is very hard to start experimenting without some prejudice about what you expect the outcome to be. At the same time, it is just as easy to ignore supporting evidence that is contrary to your desired outcome. Sometimes you want to believe so hard ignore what the data is actually telling you. This is particularly true when you are testing just to prove a point or to prove somebody else wrong.

2. Failing to estimate the errors in the experiment. As I explained above, there will always be a margin of error, and we need to account for it or risk losing the entire value of the experiment.

3. Failing to repeat the experiment under different scenarios and circumstances. I have to admit that this is one mistake I make too often. I guess I am too lazy to repeat my experiments, but nonetheless I know very well the importance of being able to repeat and confirm the conclusions. It is particularly important that the test be duplicated by your peers who will hopefully have different biases than you.

4. Identifying symptoms as diseases. One of the disadvantages that we (SEOs) have is that search engines are black boxes and we don’t know for sure what is going on inside them. We can see the search results and study patterns to arrive at conclusions, but for example, many times observations we make are mistakenly labeled as penalties. It’s easy to jump headlong in the wrong direction. I like to draw this parallel: imagine telling your doctor that you have a headache and he returns with, “Oh, you must have a brain tumor.” There are probably thousands of diseases that share a headache as a symptom and only further tests are going to get at the right diagnosis. The same happens when you observe search results or search engine robot behavior. There are probably hundreds of reasons why a particular result has changed, including something as simple as a random search engine glitch. To be on the safe side, I simply ask myself a common sense question: “What would be the purpose of the search engine doing this? Does this help them do a better job or am I misinterpreting the results?”

Experimenting and testing theories is what separates experts from the pretenders. You need to be highly skeptical of any new concept unless you can see solid proof or you can test it yourself. I’ve witnessed many interesting ideas and concepts unearthed, not because of deep research or deduction, but by observation and trial and error. It’s important to have a receptive mind. Try to avoid these mistakes when you are doing your SEO experiments and I am sure you will become a stellar SEO expert in no time!

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

The Challenge

Toolbar PageRank was a very important factor in measuring the quality of a link for a long while. But Google has played so much with it that it can hardly be considered reliable these days. I like to see problems like these as challenges and opportunities, so I decided to look hard for alternatives. I know there are several other methods (like using the Yahoo backlink count, number of indexed pages, etc.) but I did not feel these directly reflected how the link was important to Google, or to any other specific search engine. Each search engine has its own evaluation criteria when it comes to links, so using metrics from one to measure another is not a reliable gauge in my opinion.

I knew the answer was out there, and I knew just where to look.

Research: Putting the pieces together

Especially beyond the beginner stage, you need to make it a habit to research and read as much as possible. For advanced SEO knowledge, my favorite sources of research material are search engine–related patents and information retrieval research papers. In order to avoid getting lost while reading such documents, I recommend first reading the excellent tutorials on linear algebra and Information Retrieval from Dr. Garcia. Bill Slawsky also has an excellent blog where he unearths useful patents and provides excellent commentary. In fact Bill unearthed a very relevant patent, which provided a valuable insight for my Toolbar PageRank challenge. It is called: Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system. Here is part of Bill’s conclusion:

The information about crawling rates, and the possible role of PageRank along with frequency of changes in content, which could influence how frequently a page is crawled is also the most detailed that I can recall seeing in a patent from Google.

From the patent I learned that search engines (at least Google) define their crawler priorities based in part on how important they think the page is and how frequently the page is updated.

So here comes a logical conclusion. If Google (and maybe other search engines) use the real PageRank or importance of the page as a criterion to determine how frequently they should visit the page, then by studying how frequently they visit a page I can indirectly determine the real PageRank or importance of the page to the search engine. Bingo!

Digging Deeper: Your own research

If you want to dig deeper, and you definitely should, you must learn to find valuable sources yourself and come up with your own conclusions. I personally love Google’s patent search. You simply need to use keywords like “pagerank,” “yahoo,” “google,” “anchor text,” and so on; you can order them by date and select “Issued Patents” or “Patent Applications” to come up with a goldmine of information and topics. Many of the ideas are never implemented, but some are—and it is good to be a step ahead of the rest of your competitors. In order to find interesting research papers you can use Google Scholar and type in queries related to search engine research. The patent search usually returns more recent documents, however.

(Another rich source of research material is the bibliography and references of these research papers and patents. Sometimes I follow so many references that I lose track and focus, so be aware.)

Now, the real trick is how you go about reading this information—back to front. There’s no need to read the entire paper from start to finish to find something valuable. Check the title and if it is interesting enough, read the abstract. If the abstract is interesting then you can go straight to the conclusion and learn the most valuable information. Why? Because most papers concentrate on proving their conclusions, but since the authors have already taken great pains to do so, you don’t need to waste your time, too! Of course if you are curious about something you always have the option to go back to the explanation and see how the author came up with it.

Making Something Useful

Now, with my challenge identified, my research bearing valuable fruit, I just needed to put it all together to create a solution. As a technical guy, my job was now to figure out how to determine the crawl rate and update rate of the page. In reality, it didn’t take much research. Google stamps the cache pages with the time of the crawl/download and I was already familiar with the concept of “conditional HTTP GET”(this is explained in the article). It was just a matter of putting all the pieces together. I also included the indexing rate because it is useful in detecting duplicate content issues and hard-to-detect penalization problems, but in reality is not a requirement for the technique to work.

I hope you’ll read the full article to appreciate this new technique to evaluate links and pages.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a schematic to generalize the concepts explained here for your own challenges.

1. Identify a problem/challenge and note the major roadblocks.
2. Research and test alternative solutions to the problem. Each problem can be solved in many different ways. Some are better than others depending on what the goals and constraints are.
3. Put all the pieces of your research and testing together by making logical connections. It is incredible how simple ideas can turn into great ones by combining the right pieces of information.
4. Share and get peer feedback.
5. Adjust your idea based on constructive criticism.
6. Go back to step 1.

The contents on this feed is copyrighted. Hamlet Batista dot Com © 2007

This conference was particularly important for me because I wanted to use SMX West to help launch our flagship product, RankSense. We have worked on the software for more than three years (including several months of beta testing) and I think SMX was the just the right place for its debut. The first day I had to work with my team in final preparations for the booth, and the other two days I ended up staying on to answer questions and speak with guests, so I was not able to attend all the conference sessions. But I met a lot of wonderful people with whom I have exchanged emails, phone calls or instant messages, or whose quality work I simply enjoy online. Thanks to all of you, the conference was big success.

Although I was not able to attend the sessions, which from what I heard were extremely helpful, I did learn something very important. While I began by explaining the value of RankSense to people visiting the booth, on many occasions I had to back up and explain the value of SEO. Many folks I spoke with were unfamiliar with organic SEO because they primarily did pay-per-click (PPC) or were completely new to search marketing (some were coming from email marketing or other online marketing disciplines). I learned to perfect a pitch that worked very well, and I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you.

Here is how I explained the business value of SEO…

If there were no SEOs

Let me tell you the hard but honest truth: You don’t need SEO to rank highly in search engines. If you write high-quality content consistently and that content is link-worthy, the content will rank in the search engines. Period. Why? If this weren’t the case, search engines would be broken; it is their job to make sure that good content ranks first.

“So,” asks the conference-goer, “why do I need to hire an SEO or to optimize my site at all?” The short answer is that, without SEO, you have absolutely no control over what terms your content will rank for. Without SEO, you are leaving it up to Google to figure out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in most cases. But if you want more than just visitors—if your aim to have users who take action, buy your product, download your software, sign up for your newsletter—you need to put serious effort into targeting the right keywords, the ones that will send the most qualified visitors to your site.

The longer answer is that there are so many ways to improve search traffic to your site that it is simply impossible to pretend that it can happen automatically with no optimization. Personally, I see SEO as anything you can do to maximize the quality and the quantity of the traffic you get from a search engine using many different strategies. These include:

1. Improving the keyword use in the content so that rankings move up to the first page of search results for non-competitive keywords.
2. Making the page focus on more profitable keywords.
3. Creating new content that contains additional, relevant keywords.
4. Obtaining more links to the site or improving the site structure in order to get more pages into the search engine index (and hence more search referrals from additional long-tail queries).
5. Improving the title and descriptions for higher click-through in the search results.
6. Removing duplicate content issues to get more content indexed.
7. Removing canonicalization issues to improve link juice distribution and help get the crawler to visit more pages.
8. Removing broken links so that search engine robots can find all pages of the site.
9. Fixing bad web server configurations.
10. And so many more, it’s impossible to name them all!

There is no perfect optimization; there is always room for improvement. At the same time, business situations and search engine formulas change, and so do your optimization needs.

For those who already had PPC experience, it was far simpler to explain the value of SEO. I just pointed out that they already have to manage their campaigns and find the best performing keywords, ads and landing pages for a reason. Those same PPC optimization concepts apply to SEO.

How do you explain the value of SEO to your clients? As usual, please let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers, and thanks again to everyone we met at SMX!

Internet security is a big problem, and it isn’t just for the IT staff anymore. It affects us as SEOs. Don’t believe me? Consider the incident reported at the end of last year by security research firm Sunbelt Software.

…criminals are now combining SEO tactics and booby-trapped Web pages, and doing it systematically. By posting tens of thousands of Web sites simultaneously, criminals can take over all the top spots on a search results page, casting a wide net that’s more likely to catch Web users. Eckelberry described these criminals as “SEO Gods,” saying they can “take any site and get it on the first page of Google results.”

Instead of wasting energy defacing sites and showing them off as trophies to their peers on IRC, hackers are now modifying the code of hacked sites to include (invisible) links to their web properties or link farms. The article talks about virus writers creating tens of thousands of websites and cross-linking them using all sorts of queries as anchor text. They then spam blog comments around the Web to improve the overall PageRank of the link farm.

Hackers already know how to break into sites. Now that they see the profit that can be made from top-ten search rankings, they have adapted their techniques to break to take advantage. Currently, search engines’ quality reviewers can detect most sites utilizing these black-hat techniques because they show up pretty obviously as SPAM. However, this is just the beginning, and I’m willing to predict that this is going to scale with cleverer hacks that are harder to detect. Most break-ins will be highly sophisticated and highly automated. They will “recruit” thousands of computers into their link-farm. If your site is one of those “recruited” without your knowledge, your site will most likely be penalized by the search engine along with the whole group.

How can somebody break into my server if they don’t know my password?

I remember my days working for a big ISP, setting up firewalls, installing the latest patches and hardening servers. It was a constant battle between the hackers and me (crackers is the correct term, but I will use hackers out of habit). One day one of the consultants the company hired to do penetration testing told me that I was not letting him “do his job.” He meant breaking into the servers of course; the only thing left for me to do, he said, was to disconnect the servers from the network. I couldn’t resist laughing out loud.

I had another boss once that would ask me simply to change the passwords each time our sites got hacked. He didn’t even want to buy a firewall, the most basic form of protection. Why changing the password is ineffective may be too obvious for those of you with some security background—but that’s clearly not everyone.

Hackers break into systems by exploiting software vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities exist because most software is tested under “normal” circumstances. Software developers don’t usually expect users to provide input designed to fool the program into doing something it was not designed to do. But that’s exactly what hackers do using buffer overflows, string format attacks, script and SQL injection, default passwords, and other tools of the trade.

Protect your site from hackers now

You can protect your site or blog from such attacks, however. The first order of business is fairly straightforward:

1. Server hardening. Update all software, apply the latest security patches and disable all unneeded services.

2. Install a firewall.

3. Install an Internet security scanner and instruction detection, such as snort.org. Set it up to poll your site every day and address all issues that come up in the reports.

Unfortunately, some setups require a large number of software packages and keeping that list of components up to date can be quite a nightmare. The most common approach to deal with this is to use a multilayer approach—separate servers that do specific functions, such as a web server, database server, application server, etc. It is also common to host the blog, forum, chat rooms, and other elements on separate servers because each requires different applications and poses new security risks. The idea behind all this is to, at the very least, isolate the sensitive parts of your system, like your e-commerce components, customer list, and other delicate information.

Where SEO meets security

When you set up a blog or forum on a separate server, you still want to have it linked from the main site, typically using subdomains like forums.sitename.com or blog.sitename.com. The problem with this approach for SEO purposes is that search engines regularly treat each subdomain as a separate site when counting incoming links. The incoming link juice is therefore split among the domains. Google makes an exception only when displaying search results.

The single domain will benefit from higher rankings if links to the subdomains are funneled to the main one. Luckily, there is a technique to do this—reverse proxies. I have mentioned reverse proxies in the past and they are very useful beasts. In a nutshell, a reverse proxy sits in front of the web server, receives all requests, does some special processing (such as caching) and forwards the requests to the actual servers. A reverse proxy can be used to map URLs to different servers, and this feature comes in very handy for SEO.

We can use Apache’s mod_proxy for this. Here is a sample configuration

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass /blog http://blog.sitename.com
ProxyPassReverse /forum http://forum.sitename.com

Instead of directing users to blog.company.com, we write a reverse proxy rule to send requests for company.com/blog to the internal server blog.company.com. We can do the same for forums, chat, e-commerce systems, and so on. It is completely transparent to the user (and search engines) that the website is divided among multiple servers. Note that each web server will need to be isolated completely for the security to work. If someone breaks into the blog because the software hasn’t been updated, for instance, at least he won’t get to the e-commerce system.

Internet security is a very large (and interesting) topic. I will talk about it more in the future if there is enough interest. As usual, please share what you think in the comments.

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