In a recent survey of our own SEO clients, MorePro has discovered that many business owners and marketing directors are not paying full attention to the ROI of their online spending. While Search Engine Optimization is online component of a company’s online marketing program, it’s one of the most critical to the bottom-line. Natural, organic traffic gets cheaper each time a new visitor comes to your site - PPC continues to be costly throughout your campaign, unless you simply turn it off.

Here are some interesting results from our survey:

• Approximately 36% of the individuals we surveyed, said they look at their SEO ranking reports “infrequently” (less than once a month).

Ok, so we’re sending the SEO results to our clients so they can keep tabs on the program’s success… that’s good right? But 36% aren’t even looking at them - ouch!

• 33% of respondents said they’re “Not sure” what affect incoming links have on their SEO campaign.
• 25% said they’re not sure what affect Social Media Marketing has on their SEO campaign.
• Almost 49% of respondents said they did not implement the SEO recommendations provided, or only installed some of them.

The last bullet item has always been a difficulty…
How do you convey the importance and urgency of SEO recommendations to a client? Besides using common SEO best-practices and providing resources confirming the recommendations are in fact legitimate, how do you ensure that the changes get made?

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to enforce the completion of SEO changes due to numerous circumstances, including: additional unforseen costs, amount of effort to complete, adequate staffing or time, failure to believe recommendations are valid, site limitations (coding, structure, etc.) and many other excuses. For sites that have implemented the recommendations, we see great improvements - so why can’t everyone do it?

What we take from the results of this survey, is that most businesses don’t fully understand the following:

1. What SEO actually is and involves.
2. Common terminology & methods of SEO.
3. How to evaluate the success of an SEO campaign.

By sharing this information, our intention is not to point fingers at these businesses or to say their aren’t smart; we’re simply showing how companies interact with SEO firms, including ours. I’m sure this applies to other SEO companies as well - it’s just as important to teach & inform your clients about our industry, as it is to do the work itself.

We need to do a better job of teaching our clients about SEO best-practices and keeping them updated on the strategies & techniques that are required to continue improving their SEO rankings and traffic. Afterall, if the client doesn’t know what’s going on with their SEO campaign - how are they going to see the “value” in it?

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist

It may not be something you think about when you’re reading one of your favorite blogs or RSS feeds, but each electronic media element that you see could be putting a number of individuals and/or companies at risk.

Not only is the creator of that electronic content at risk for lawsuits or other potential risks, so are the 3rd parties who are tied to that content, such as: ISP’s, Feed Aggregators, Websites, marketing companies, technology companies, etc. Even publishing a “negative” comment about a business or individual could land you in hot water if you’re tied to it and someone believes it is “defamatory”. Copyright and trademark infringement fall in the same boat… you publish it or host it (or contribute to it), you could be found liable.

Yes, there are risks online and in other media formats… but there’s hope.

There is a special type of liability insurance called “Electronic Media Activity” coverage that can help protect you from:

• Defamation
• Right to privacy
• Plagiarism/Piracy
• Copyright infringement
• Negligence

This special coverage is available from Stuckey & Company (www.stuckey.com). Electronic Media Activities services are typically not described on professional liability insurance policies as a covered service. Stuckey’s policy gives coverage for electronic publishing, web casting, or other distribution of electronic content on the internet.

Whether you think you need this coverage or not, you might want to contact your insurance broker and find out. If they don’t provide it themselves, they can signup up w/ Stuckey & Company to get it. You also have the option of getting the coverage directly through www.stuckey.com or via one of their listed brokers.

The folks over at Axandra.com have published a new article today about “Mosaic Cloaking” and how search engine optimizers are now using it to “game” the search engines.

Mosaic Cloaking (the basics)
It’s not much different from regular cloaking, except that instead of serving completely different pages to the search engines, clever marketers are now just serving different parts of their pages via cloaking.

For instance, you might have an E-Commerce site selling bikes. To the average visitor, you’re going to present them with a great photo, bullet list of the bikes features & an easy way for them to purchase. For the search engines, you might swap out that entire product section and fill it with an optimized article about that particular bike.

While this new Mosaic Cloaking is certainly a twist on the original, I would be willing to bet that those of us reading about it now are months (if not years) behind the game, in terms of keeping up with other SEO professionals.

This new method may work for some sites, for an undetermined amount of time, but with it now out in the light and more people talking about it, you can bet that Google and the other search engines will be creating a way to detect it and penalize those sites that are using it.

I’ve never used cloaking personally and our company, MorePro Marketing, has never employed that practice either - something I’m rather proud of. We’ve been able to acquire top search engine rankings for our clients without resorting to that level of “black hat” optimization.

I was reading an SEO newsletter this morning and they had mentioned a number of important SEO strategies to consider when undertaking the optimization of your website on your own.

A number of the SEO tips were quite common and should be practiced by all SEO strategists, not only those working on their own sites, but also those working for agencies and an actual SEO company. Some of those tips include:

• Navigation and internal linking
• Titles & Meta tags
• Unique content
• Relevant backlinks & continuous linking programs

There were two other SEO tips that I feel are generally disregarded or not implemented on a frequent basis:

• Your site’s Value Proposition (Find out how to craft your site’s Value Proposition)
• Code bloat / Site download time

The Value Proposition (VP) issue isn’t always that easy to resolve quickly, because it takes a lot of constructive thinking in order to determine what sets your business apart from your competitors - especially how to communicate that to your potential customers. A good VP can make a world of difference on how your website converts visitors to sales (or leads).

The other item was the “Code bloat / Site download time”, which I strongly feel is overlooked on a regular basis.

The concept is simple… reduce the size of your pages (code & images) and they’ll load faster, enabling better usability from your site visitors, as well as allowing the search engines to spider your pages more quickly. There are a number of rather easy ways to reduce your code bloat & increase your website’s download speed:

• Convert all inline JavaScript to external files and call them as separate files
• Convert embedded font styles & formatting to an external CSS file and reference it as a separate file
• Optimize the size of the images on your pages - For some industries/markets, having crystal clear images is important and those visitors should be willing to wait a few more seconds. For most industries, however, they’re not going to wait, so your fancy, slow loading image is actual a friction point that will hurt your chances of converting that visitor.

There’s nothing that I’ve mentioned here that’s “new” - it’s common knowledge. Use these SEO tips on your website and you’ll see improved results.

One of the top site analytic/measuring companies in the world, Nielson/NetRatings, announced plans to shift from reporting Page Views as the metric of how popular a site is, to using how long users spend on a website (or Time Spent on Site).

With the continued emergence of AJAX, dynamic content, online videos and other new technologies, the “page view” has lost it’s accuracy, which has led marketers to rely on other metrics like “time spent on site”.

There’s a lot of talk about how this affects where Google ranks among other sites… The talks are trivial in my opinion, since Google is primarly a search engine and visitors aren’t suppose to spend a lot of time on the site.  The visitor is suppose to quickly find what they’re looking for and go to another website.  Spend time worrying about non-search engine sites, not Google.

“Just got a job with someone in town who found me in the top spot on Yahoo. FYI!”

Thanks!

Janet Ault
Female Voice Over Talent

In an article published in the SEO-News newsletter this morning, Kanga Internet’s Chris Diprose details 10 of the most common SEO mistakes that you’re bound to make on your website. Whether or not the mistakes are done on purpose, are done because of a lack of SEO knowledge, or you had someone else build your site - these SEO mistakes should be avoided. Some of the mistakes that Chris mentions were covered back in January, when we published our “Common SEO Blunders… Must read for web designers” post.

If you find that you’re guilty of any of these mistakes, take the action now to correct them so you can start improving your search engine rankings.

Here are Chris’ Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Bad Titles
2. Filename of the Page
3. Duplicate or Bad Content
4. No Links
5. Incoming Link Anchor Text
6. Bad Internal Page Links
7. Live Links
8. Impatience
9. Keyword Selection
10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

I certainly don’t have any objections to the list that Chris prepared. I might rank Impatience (#8) higher on the list, only because becoming impatient with your SEO can lead to more problems down the road. You’re more likely to try an SEO tactic that’s untested or engage in some type of questionable SEO practice if you don’t plan out your strategy properly and if you don’t give it time to work.

1. Bad Titles
A survey of top SEO professonals on SEOMoz.org a couple months ago ranked the Title tag as the most important aspect of SEO, so it only makes sense that bad titles are probably the worst mistake you can make when optimizing your website.

2. Filename of Pages
This one is a little off-base, at least in naming the mistake. This should be URL structure or “dynamic URLs vs. static URLs”. Certainly, having a site with long, dynamic URLs is a problem. Use Mod_rewrite or the Windows equivalent to rewrite your URLs to be more friendly. This is not a necessity unless your URLs have more than 2-3 variables on the query string in my opinion. We’ve had plenty of experience and success w/ single variable query string URLs.

3. Duplicate Content
We’ve covered this topic several times in the past and it’s probably one of the hardest mistakes to effectively communicate to site owners and content managers. They just don’t see the value of writing unique content for their products or their stores, when they can get a completed data feed from the manufacturer and plop it right into the site… unfortunately, that just won’t yield any long-term results.

4. No Links
This is a no-brainer… a site cannot rank on content alone.  Every website should have an ongoing backlink strategy.

5. Incoming Anchor Link Text
See previous mistake… Just make sure your backlinks use keywords.  Many site owners and marketers will try to use the company’s name and/or just the domain name as the anchor text.  This is much less effective than using keyword-rich anchor text on all backlinks.  Be sure to vary the keywords also - your incoming links (backlinks) shouldn’t all be the same. 

6. Bad Internal Page Links
A site w/ poor navigation or linking structure will struggle to compete with sites who have good navigation and structure.  Be sure to categorize your pages properly and to use keywords in the anchor text.  Another common problem w/ internal page links is the use of images for navigation instead of text - always go w/ text unless you already have a full text menu elsewhere on the page.

7. Live Links
Broken links hurt… check your site frequently to make sure you’re links aren’t broken.  If you find broken links, fix them ASAP.  Setup a custom 404 error page if you have pages that no longer exist and if you can’t get the links changed (from backlinks for example).

8. Impatience
This can kill an SEO campaign.  Do the work and use the methods that have been proven to work over time.  Allow sufficient time for all the work you’ve done to take affect (several months).

9. Keyword Selection
Selecting the wrong keywords is almost as bad as not selecting keywords at all.  Be sure that you’re optimizing for the keywords your target audience is using, not the keywords you think they are (yes, there is usually a difference).  Use keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google Trends to find out what your visitors are using, what’s most popular, and what keywords are slowly fading into oblivion.

10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
This is just plain dumb… Your website shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords you are targeting, let alone keywords you’re not (that’s a whole other story).  Common keyword stuffing takes place in site footers, comment tags, meta tags or other typically hidden areas of the site and/or the HTML coding itself.

Google appears to be beta testing some new search results features:

The first item allows you to quickly modify the type of search you’re performing, whether it be a standard search engine query, blog/news search, video search, etc.

The second section shows you Related Searches, or queries related to your search.

Not sure I like the layout just yet, but it seems a lot more like Ask.com.  I think they’d be better off moving the features to the right hand side of the page or at the bottom personally.  It seems to distract from the results themselves.

In a test of how powerful internet users are on social networking and media sites, rising social media site Digg.com has learned the hard way that their site is run by the users and for the users.

A recent cease and desist order caused Digg moderators to remove all posts containing a secret encryption key hack that would allow anyone to copy HD-DVD’s, something the entertainment industry does not want to see happen.  While Digg did not receive a notice directly, they felt it was in their best interest to squash all posts containing the encryption key, as evidenced by the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose’s comments at 1pm yesterday:

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

This is really where the power of Digg’s users comes into play.  Not long after this post, Digg members begin flooding the site with random submissions containing the HD-DVD hack key.  It wasn’t isolated to just the technology categories even - the entire site was slowed to a crawl and new posts were delayed significantly due to the overwhelming chaos that moderating Digg posts had caused.

Digg users quickly “dugg” all of the posts w/ the encryption key in order to get them on the front page of Digg.com and it worked very well.  At one point, every story on the homepage was about the HD-DVD hack - either a post containing the hack itself, a post bashing Digg for removing posts, or other related posts.

By 9pm the Digg management team had changed their stance on the censorship and issued the following statement:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The actions by Digg yesterday highlight the power that we, as web users posess.  Digg member’s posts and comments literally changed the moderation policies and legal standings of one of the web’s hottest social media websites.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.