Here is a classic example of SEO in action. When performing Search Engine Optimization on a website, you target keyword terms. Typically you emphasize the big terms, the ones that drive the most traffic, aka the Juicy Head (as I heard Seth Godin say it) of the curve. Your SEO efforts also yield rankings for other minor terms, that maybe only deliver a fraction of the traffic a juicy head term would, but taken collectively with all the minor terms, they may add up to match or exceed the major terms, this is the classic Long Tail.

So I am going to show you an example of the Juicy Head and the Long Tail in action, Here is a snapshot of traffic stats for one of our client websites, Party Ideas and Event Planning website bestpartyever.com. Keep in mind here that Google and Yahoo use different factors to rank websites, and the psychology and demographic of the user of each search engine is different.

Notice over this short period of time, Yahoo delivered more total traffic, spread across almost 3x as many keyword terms (the long tail). Where as Google traffic was more concentrated over 4 main terms (the juicy head). 0$ in PPC was spent over this period. This has a lot to do with how quickly the different search engines index and start ranking websites.. but I think you get the drift. SEO for the Major Terms for a big traffic punch, but don’t forget the minor ones that over time will drive just as much or not more traffic. 

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What is the value of maintaining a healthy social garden? At some point it will bear fruit.

How many social networks do you belong to? MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Virb, BestPartyEver, Linkedin, Digg, Purevolume, Last.FM, Pownce, Flickr, Threadless… are we tired yet? At one time or another you may have joined one of these or one of the 1000’s of other social networks out there. You built a little group of friends, and then lost interest and moved on. You left that garden to whither and die in cyberspace.

Yet there may be 1 or 2 networks that you use consistently. Here you have created a quality social graph, participate on a semi regular basis, and are making a “name for yourself”: in these networks you maintain a lush garden.

You Reap What You Sow
Linkedin is a great example. I think one could easily draw a semi-straight line between the energy invested in making new contacts on LinkedIn, and the quality and direct benefit to you these new contacts provide. Your social garden bears fruit, as long as you maintain it.

Here is another great example. My wife Sally (BizGirl) is an avid Twitter user. She has invested much time in tending her social garden that has already born fruit. She has created many useful connections with other professionals, landed a interview with Robert Scoble, and opened dialog with a few VC’s (which is a good thing, since she is seeking funding for her startup).

The Green thumb
While some may see time spent on social networks a waste, it really can be a productive endeavour. The name recognition, branding reinforcement, and personal connections you can make can prove valuable in tangible and intrinsic ways down the line. Tending your social garden is as important to business today as the trade show was 15 years ago.

From an SEO perspective it is a vital part for building links. The content that you push to these networks may generate backlinks to your site which in the long run will help your rankings.

Don’t over fertilize

There is a fine but clearly defined line between being a schmuck that spouts noise all day, and gently finessing your contacts with targeted messaging and marketing. Don’t be the guy that twits 400x a day as you will quickly lose your followers, on the flipside though don’t be afraid to share your ideas and things you find helpful with your network. These nuggets that you pass on may be of help to someone who may return the favor later in the form of a new contact, lead, or personal recommendation.

Bottom line: dedicate some time every week to tending your social garden, it will mature over time and generate ample fruit to your benefit.

Thoughts? How do you utilize Social Networks?

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Let’s face the facts: Most web designers don’t know a thing about SEO. Many companies don’t understand that a total re-design of their website by a web designer unskilled in the SEO industry most likely will result in a tanking of rankings. Re-designs do not have to equal a ranking tank if you keep your bones in place.

1. CSS is the way to go. Anyone that is getting their website re-built should not do so without CSS being the base of their design. This will cut out tons of back code and will allow the search engines to crawl through the site. Yes, flash may look pretty, but the search engines have no interest in an all flash website. It’s not Marti Gras, so keep your flashing to a minimum.
2. Keep your current bones in tact if at all possible. Creating the re-design off of the old navigational structure will help hold your rankings steady. This only applies if you are re-designing an html site to an html site. Cookies needn’t apply.
3. Any changes in navigational structure should be 301 re-directed to the new page. Don’t let search engines lose sight of your content and site’s structure.
4. Keep your content, keep your headers, keep your meta’s, and keep your anchor text. If your website is ranking for top terms and you are doing a re-design, these are all vital (especially if they have been optimized previously). If you would like to change any of the above, I suggest revisions opposed to a full revamp. If you have content you do not want to share anymore,
5. Send out a press release and include your top terms which in turn link back to your website. The press release can be about why you did the re-design and what your new site provides online users.

With these steps, you should not have a problem keeping your site out of Google’s gutter. Made unaware, you will definitely tank. Having your SEO consultant speak to your web designer prior to the re-build is the best tactic, but will not re-assure they will listen. Having the same company that does your SEO to do your design is your best bet.

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All websites should serve the purpose of either selling services/products, or informing their users. No matter what your business plan is, the user always comes first. To have a successful online marketing campaign, you have to corner your niche and target your audience.

There are an abundant amount of online marketers that push clicks and traffic as being a buying factor into their services. The line I use all too often is that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Horses are one thing, but when you start leading animals down to the watering hole that don’t naturally drink from them, conversions are 99 times harder to come by. This is why target marketing is so important in todays online industry.

Not only will target marketing be the soul driving factor of the search engines in the near future (I suspect within the next 3 years), it is also the easiest way to grab your audience and sell them on your purpose.

Social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are making it easier than ever before to create our own little sections and leach off it’s pre-defined juice (or users rather).

Recently I created a Mypsace profile for BestPartyEver.com to bring in targeted traffic. With BPE being it’s own social network for party goers, vendors, and event planners; what better audience to target than those already apart of a social network?

With this in mind, I also thought about the possibilities that Myspace already offers. Myspace has groups for users interested in different areas. Groups are probably one of the easiest places to scrounge around and dig up potential traffic. Since BPE is for parties, we can focus on the groups planning weddings, baby showers, army wifes, food vendors, and party/event planners.

Taking it a step beyond adding friends to our newly created Myspace, I added a list of services that we offered. This is to funnel the Myspace visitors to our BestPartyEver.com page.

Of course after users are so kindly to add us to their Myspace page, I have to thank them. What a better way than to create “comment stickers” or banners to lay out the basics of what BPE can provide to them as an individual. All comment stickers should focus on our groups for a more personal touch. Those planning a wedding will get “Plan your wedding with BPE,” and those holding a baby shower will get “Celebrate the birth of your baby using BPE” and the like.

Putting in the extra care to market a target audience per the individual’s wants and needs is a surefire way to not only increase your traffic, but your conversions as well.

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Am I more “me” on the web or off the web?

The web is truly another world of its own. “You” on the web are different than you away from the computer screen. This is because the web sucks you in and opens you up to a whole new portal of people and personalities; which allows you to expand your own. So are you more yourself on the web, or off the web?

We can even change (and most of us do without realizing it) who we are on the web. I am quite shy in a crowd, even a bit anxiety ridden, but when I’m on the web, nothing can stop me. I’m quite fierce and outspoken in my own little online world. I tell all fairly freely.

Online social networking websites allow us to interact with each other in ways we never thought possible 5 years ago. Beyond the chat rooms, beyond simple email between friends and family, online social networks give us a way to debate with others, express our opinions, and be more open about our beliefs.

We can even find out more about ourselves by socializing with others like us on the internet. Special interest websites and social networking groups allow us to interact with others that have the same religious beliefs, diseases, health issues, job industry fields, demographic regions, interests, etc. More and more, we interact online with others and find ourselves sucked into this other dimension. We open up to those we hardly know, expressing our most secretive, deepest and darkest self beings.

Online users do this because they feel their information is somehow kept private. Keyboard and screen keep us from feeling tracked or violated in any way. Actually a sense of freedom is felt while browsing around the net.

Not everybody knows that their information is being tracked. And even if they do, they are lightly conditioned to be OK with the fact that our information is out there to be tracked by anyone who wants it. Why? Because we are already open to the thought of web personality, interaction, and search.

Google picks apart your brain.

Again: Since we are so open with each other on the net, this allows search engines to track who we are (demographics, gender, age, interests, etc.).

The search engine that tracks us the most is obviously Google. Beyond our general search (even though the General search statistics are tracked too), if we have set up any type of account with Google, our online search activity is being tracked to properly display SERPs that will pertain to our specific liking. Good ol’ Google helped us find that specialized social network we are now apart of.

Just like with a psychologist, the more they know you, and the more you tell them about yourself, the better they can help diagnose you. Proper therapy or medication (or in our case search results) can be administered.

Many search engine optimization and marketing specialists fear this change, as it will be harder to ‘game’ the search engines to provide them top rankings that result in more traffic. However, by search engines being more in-tune with each individual user, they will be able to display more accurate results, which in turn provide better conversions. These changes will actually make my job a little easier.

For the most part, we wont have to target demographically related keywords. Google will already know its users demographic location, age group, special interest, and past search conversions.

How can this necessarily be a bad thing? The future of Google excites me actually. This means going beyond marketing, beyond user function and click troughs, beyond funneling a user to purchase a service or product.

We are going to need to understand our potential users reason for possibly coming to the website to convert them. I just hope Google makes these statistics readily available in our Analytics. This way we can continue to provide clients with the most accurate analysis (demographics, gender, age, common interests, etc.) for their website.

So go ahead and take over the brains of all us Google guppies, analyze what we’re into, and give us the results we want.

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Google! Stop Stealing my SERPs!

I was doing a simple keyword analysis for a client of mine when I came across something I have never seen before in Google. I know they toy around with the supplemental results, I know there have been rumors of them selling organic placement, but this didn’t fall into either of those categories.

What I found was that instead of using a suggested keyword list for my searched term as normally done, they provided me with an ‘inset’ second list of SERPs distinguished with “See results for: equity apartments” as shown below.

When I scrolled over the link to discover the link’s path, it was clear that Google is carefully tracking the click through for the input suggested SERPs. At first I thought maybe Google was selling the placement for keywords relating to my original terms. But it seemed unlikely, as they were clearly marked as being keywords I was not searching for.

So I then viewed the SERPs for equity apartments, and found out that the 3 placed SERPs were ranked the top 3 in their correct order as viewed using “equity management” SERPs.

When I scrolled over these results, thinking that maybe Google got rid of the sponsored section look to make everything flow, I noticed the links without the Google tracking. So the input links were the top 3 SERPs for their designated keyword.

This still boggles me a bit. I was reading a Sphinn article by Kimber Cook how Craigslist was stealing her clients Google rankings, and now I feel that Google is stealing my Google rankings. In this case, it narrows down the 1st pages results to displaying only 7 results pertaining to the originally suggested keywords. The spots with the highest lead conversions (SERPs 3-6), are being replaced with other semi relevant suggestions.

I would love to know how readers of this article feel about this discovery. Anyone know what’s going on?

Melinda Roberts

obu Web Technologies, Phoenix Search Engine Optimization

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There’s no doubt that a picture is worth a thousand words. We’ve heard it time and time again. As you will notice that on a lot of social networking sites, top ‘dugg’ articles are simply images. They take the same “link baiting” approach, but instead it is applied to images.

Here’s one of the top dugg articles on Digg.com today (08/14/2007 @ 11:03AM Arizona Mountain Time) with over 416 diggs. This is a clear example of the comedy approach in link baiting. The linked to image is just a hand drawn comic created by an internet user (most likely using MS Paint). The comic is so simple, yet it makes people laugh. It made someone’s day, so they’re going to blog about it. In return, the viewers dugg it.

[edit: by the time this article was completed, this article moved from the first page to the second, and almost doubled it’s hits in less than 2 hours]

Another way to get link bait by using images through implementing the “news” approach (posting “top secret” or “just released” photos).

For example: Before the launch of the xbox 360, there were insider photos on what the console was going to look like.

Social networking website users want to know the news first; especially when it comes to tech toys. News is one of the fastest spreading link bait approaches. Problem is they are harder to come by.

It is relatively easy to see the benefit of link baiting through the use of images. Especially in the first example I posted (comedy approach).

Even pointless images, such as the one dugg below, gets some love from the digg kids.

A few of the pros consist of:

• Cheap to create
• Quick to make
• Easy to post
• Fast to view
• A pleasure to blog about

So if you run into writers block, take a step back and think of a different way you can occupy your time. Grab your readers attention by creating a image link bait post. You will be surprised at how fast you get noticed. Just don’t forget to mention in the title that an image is present. That approach seems to work best.

Author: Melinda Roberts

Leader of the Phoenix Search Engine Optimization department at obu Web Technologies

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This Arizona Search Engine Optimization website has been live now for about 30 days. We are tracking the results of this website as it moves up the search rankings in this case study, which we have just updated.

Follow along and pay attention, we are electing to be fairly transparent in our methods for educational purposes, (and of course to showcase our results driven process). SEO is a repeatable process, you just need to serve the information that the market, and search engines, are looking for.. aka write quality content and use the tools available on the web to promote it.

Until next month..

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