Offline advertisers have a saying that half of the money they spend on advertising is wasted -- they just don't know which half. Solving that sort of problem is what search engine marketers (both paid and organic) have been able to do with the proper implementation of web analytics. The PPC folks are the best as they are able to calculate a cost per click or conversion and they're able to point to what modifications in their campaigns resulted in a change in results. The SEO side of the house used to be able to come close to the reporting accuracy of paid search, but recently connecting activities to results has become nearly impossible.

Before you go off screaming how half-baked my statement is, let me expand on it a bit. First off, SEO in this context is ANYTHING that results in improved organic search visibility and traffic. The list includes not just the usual on-site stuff, but also social bookmarking, community outreach, content distribution, digital asset optimization, and local search. The problem with having so many avenues to approach the SEO problem is that it has become next to impossible to attribute an uptick in organic search traffic to any one activity. The situation is exacerbated by the reality that multiple activities will be happening in parallel which further confounds the attribution problem.

Now I'm not saying that an experienced SEO is just going to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. Far from it. A good SEO will assess the problem, work on a strategy, and select from the set of all known SEO tactics to formulate an approach to achieve the strategy. And that SEO is undoubtedly confident that as a set of tactics, the chances of success are very good. At the same time there is the knowledge that some portion of the tactics chosen, even if executed well, will not have a noticeable impact.

A Bit of Fiction

Here's an example of how things might play out. In Jan 2010 I finish writing a new ebook on SEO (I cleverly call it The SEO Book). Now being an SEO Expert according to SEOmoz, I proceed with a plethora of optimization tactics. For 2 or 3 months I see improvements and I manage to get to the first page of the Google SERPs for "seo book". Some other dude has the number one spot.

In March, when the snow in NY is gone, I happen to meet up with Mike Grehan of Incisive Media for a couple of drinks (hi Mike, I owe you a pint err.. maybe a keg by now). Amongst other topics I mention my new SEO book. Mike, wanting to help me says he'll put a tweet out with a link to my site. Great!

The next day, unbeknownst to me, Mike realizes that he won't actually have time to read my book and being a man of integrity doesn't want to promote it without actually having read it. Still wanting to help, he mentions the book to a few folks at ClickZ. Nothing happens until a month later when one of the ClickZ authors has a severe case of writer's block and decides to check out this book I've written. He loves it and publishes an article about it. He uses the clever title, Marios Alexandrou Might as Well Be Called Aaron Wall 2.0 (an SEO can dream, right?). The article inspires some links and mentions for a few days and a month or two later my site is up above the fold in the SERPs. Awesome!

So, should I have bothered with SEO for the first few months or was that money wasted? Would the results from the ClickZ article have had as significant impact if I wasn't already on the first page of results? I can't say. The only thing I can say is that in such a scenario, I wouldn't have changed a thing since in the end from January to May the return on my efforts exceeded the cost of those efforts (even including the keg for Mike).

So ultimately, it may not matter that some of the tactics failed as long as the overall results produce a positive return on the SEO investment. But, that does bring me back to my point that some portion (and I wouldn't be surprised if it was half) of SEO budgets are wasted. Or to put it another way, the same results could be achieved with half the money.

OK. Now you can go off screaming.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Half of the Money Spent on SEO is Wasted

SEOs, especially those providing consulting services, are often confronted with situations that they need to explain. They are, after all, supposed to be experts in the way search engines work and knowing why something has happened is why they get the big bucks, right? For those that have put their trust in an SEO, you've probably heard some crazy excuses and sensed a little CYA or BS. For future encounters, I've expanded on 5 of the more common excuses.

1. The Algorithm Changed

This is a good one. Since Google and the other search engines keep the details of their algorithms a secret, anyone can claim that there's been a change knowing that there isn't any way to disprove the statement.

Sometimes the explanation is legit especially when the word "algorithm" is used to denote any piece of data that the search engines use to determine ranking rather than the "core" algorithm that probably doesn't change all that much.

If the algorithm has changed, then there should be noticeable changes on multiple sites since a change is highly unlikely to affect just one site. For example, Aaron Wall identified an algorithm change when he reported on Google's preference for big brands.

2. It Was a Manual SERP Edit

When a decline in a site's performance in organic search results is sudden, a manual SERP edit is often blamed. While it's true that Google's web spam team will manually evaluate sites and apply a penalty / filter if they discover something that violates their terms of service, if you aren't doing anything particularly aggressive then a manual edit isn't likely. If, on the other hand, you have crossed the line that Google has drawn in the sand, then a manual edit is quite possible.

There's no foolproof way to distinguish between a manual edit and one that was algorithmic. The only advice I can provide is to assess what you've been doing, undo it, and if performance improves you were likely hit with an algorithmic penalty. If things don't improve, that's when you'll want to submit a reconsideration request since a manual edit requires a manual review to correct.

3. They're an Authority / Brand Site So They Can Do Anything They Want

The authority / brand explanation is the SEO's lament when a competitor continues to perform exceptionally well. While never admitted to by the folks at Google, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that a popular brand can get away with more TOS-violating activities than a lone site owner.

There isn't much you can do about this double-standard except to build a brand of your own. Since most of us don't have that kind of budget, the alternative is to always proceed in a defensive manner -- if you put all of your eggs in one basket you're going to be in big trouble when Google knocks that basket out of your hand.

Even when a big brand is caught red-handed, there's still a double-standard as reconsideration requests are actually attended to quickly.

4. I've Seen This With Other Sites

This explanation is sort of like social proof. If another site is doing something and is successful, then that alone is often reason enough for your SEO to suggest the tactic to you. Similarly, if another site is dinged for an activity then your SEO may be warn you against doing it. The problem with this sort of thinking is that you can't know all of the details about what someone else is doing. What is being detecting as correlation between an action and an effect may not be causal -- there could very well be 10 other activities that are responsible for the observed effect.

5. Matt Cutts Said So

The best is when Matt Cutts apparently said something in one of his videos. Yeah, Matt Cutts probably, maybe said something sort of related, but it's next to impossible to track down the exact statement because the videos are too numerous and transcripts for all of them don't exist.

The other complication with references to Matt Cutts are that Matt is a graduate of the school of Alan Greenspan explanations. At first blush everything sounds cool, but when you listen closely every answer prompts two more questions. No offense Matt, the information you provide is great and I certainly don't expect you to give away the farm whenever an SEO asks.

By no means am I saying your SEO is lying to you when you hear one of the above excuses. Just be aware that sometimes such answers are based on a gut feeling and that asking for additional details might help both you and your SEO zero in on the real explanation.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

5 Excuses SEOs Love to Use

The trick with graphs is displaying accurate information. That goes beyond just using accurate numbers to power the graphics. It also involves looking at the end result with a critical eye and asking, "How might someone misinterpret this?" While thinking about this I've come to the conclusion that 3D graphs, although pretty, are the most likely to result in false impressions.

Take for instance the common 3D pie chart I've shown below.

What is your first impression about the % of traffic coming from Google (blue pie piece)? You're probably inclined to say that the percentage for Google is about double that of Yahoo and MSN. That impression is a result of my use of a 3D perspective which I purposefully manipulated to inflate Google. The underlying data though has Google at 0.3% with both Yahoo and MSN at 0.35%. The data is accurate, but my portrayal of it is deceiving.

Here's another example using columns.

This time around I adjusted the perspective and put MSN up front to make it look like MSN delivers what looks like almost 3 times the traffic of Google. Using a non-zero scale also amplifies the perception of MSN's dominance. Again the underlying data has Google at 0.3% and both Yahoo and MSN at 0.35%. Anyone quickly glancing at this graph would surely be tricked in to believing that MSN is a much more important player than it actually is.

Edward R. Tufte, the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information calls this the Lie Factor and even provides a simple formula for calculating it:

Lie Factor = size of effect shown in graph / size of effect in data x 100

In my first chart the the lie factor is 6 and in my second chart the lie factor is 2. For reference, Tufte says that, "a lie factor greater than 1.05 or less than 0.95 indicates a substantial distortion, far beyond minor inaccuracies."

I used to favor 3D graphs in the past up until a client came right out and said to me that one I had created was confusing. I realized at that point that "confusing, but pretty" just isn't a good combination and I've been on the 2D graph bandwagon ever since. However, it's only during my most recent efforts to create new ways of visualizing SEO project performance that I've thought about the many ways that people create deceptive charts and graphs. Whether you're doing SEO in-house or using the services of an SEO agency, beware of the lie factor. That is, unless you're one of my clients in which case just nod your head and pat me on the back for a job well done!

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The SEO Lie Factor

While it's true that removing bureaucracy will help an SEO or SEM get his job done more efficiently, if there is no sharing of knowledge between the different teams, the group as a whole will fail to achieve the level of expertise one might expect. This aggregation of learnings has to be built into the policies and the procedures that govern each team's activities.

It may seem obvious that teams need to communicate, but in practice companies fail to facilitate such communication. A typical arrangement has SEOs and SEMs assigned to teams that have a certain sphere of responsibility likely mapped to a particular division's line of business. Each of these teams goes on its merry way doing the best it can and they often achieve some level of success. And because efforts are successful, there is no pressing need to check in with other teams to see how they're faring even though doing so could make all the teams even more successful.

A more appropriate structure, in my opinion, follows the typical matrix set up used commonly by web development and design teams. In such arrangements there is at least one leader of a functional group i.e. a manager or director. This leader keeps tabs on all of the activities within each team and therefore is in a position to make sure information gets passed from one team to another. This central figure is also in the important position of being able to recognize similar problems shared by different teams allowing him to pool the necessary talent to resolve such problems. In addition, a matrix setup allows each functional team member to work with a wider variety of people than each member would normally be exposed to if assigned to a specific project team permanently.

I don't think there's anything earth shattering in what I've just written. In fact it's no more than what you'd get from reading a couple of pages from the Wisdom of Crowds book written by James Surowiecki. I just think some companies go astray when they're overly idealistic with their organizational structure and forget to ensure that there's someone responsible for keeping everything together.

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SEO and SEM Team Structures

After using the plugin on multiple sites I came up with some additional features that I wish the plugin had. Well, now it has them:

1. Limit the number of keywords that are turned into links on any given post. This'll keep a post from looking too spammy to your users.
2. Broadening the matching functionality so that words in between the keywords you specify will be ignored. This will help increase the number of matches while also increasing the variability of the anchor text used in the links.
3. Allow for words before and after the keywords you specified to be included in the link. Another way to increase the variability of the anchor text.

Along with the above new features, the latest version of the plugin has been updated to:

• Not cross punctuation such as periods and exclamation points when turning keywords into links. Without this you'd get some funky looking links.
• Be compatible with WordPress 2.9.1.
• Not leave unnecessary data in the WordPress database when you save a post.

You can download the latest plugin from its home on SEO ROI.

If you find any bugs, let me know! I'm also curious in any interesting features you'd like added.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

New Features for the Internal Link Building WordPress Plugin

First Link:

Second Link:

dsflkuioiuwe

I'll put the results into an amendment to this post so stay tuned.

Update 2009-12-29
Just checked the SERPs. Neither link appears to be having any effect. I'll check again in a week or so.

Update 2010-01-07
Checked the SERPs again. No change i.e. neither link is having any effect. I didn't expect results to take this long. Oh well.

Update 2010-01-12
Thanks to Zoe and Andy for pointing out that the SERPs are now including additional results. It looks like the text link (second) is passing anchor text while the image link (first) isn't. I think I'll wait for another week to see if things "stick".

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First Link Priority with Images

Avoiding these traps, and making the most of your resources, means becoming a smarter marketer. But becoming a smarter marketer doesn't require expensive tools or intricate solutions; instead, there are simple, easily implementable changes you can make to improve both your strategy and execution.

Check out the rest of my article at KeywordDriven.com -- smarter SEO is only a few steps away!

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

5 Traits of Efficient SEO

Unfortunately I left the company and so the domain name didn't make much sense so I changed it to AllThingsSEM.com. I liked this new domain as it gave me a lot of leeway in terms of topics I could write about. Afterall, SEM (search engine marketing) is the umbrella term that covers both paid search and search engine optimization. Mistake #2.

While those in the industry know that SEM is an umbrella term, those that buy SEM services actually think it equates to paid search or PPC. It's a lot like how social marketing has been adopted by many to refer to activities involving social media sites and content when its original meaning from the 70's is marketing with the goal of changing some aspect of society e.g. anti-smoking campaigns. So picking SEM was mistake #3.

I also had a grand vision of partnering with one or more people to augment the content I write about SEO. Ideally, that partner would be someone on the PPC side of things. I never found such a partner and so a majority of this site's content is SEO related. Mistake #4.

So what is the impact of all of these mistakes? Well, as an SEO I'm bummed that:

1. I don't have a decent ranking for SEO blog (yeah I've already included SEO in my title tag). That phrase is certainly competitive, but I even with passive link building efforts I figure I'd at least be in the top 50.

2. I do have a #2 ranking for SEM blog. Sadly, according to Google the number of monthly searches for this phrase are 16% of those for SEO blog globally and just 2% in the US.

Pick your domain names carefully! And if there happens to be a paid search blog owner out there that picked a bad domain with SEO in it please contact me. Maybe we can arrange a domain name swap

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Would a Domain By Any Other Name Be As Sweet?

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Link Building Goes Mainstream

Are you embarrassed about having recommended the nofollow attribute?

Not at all. Matt Cutts stated that the change in how nofollow is treated happened in the last year which means that recommending it was good for around 3 years. That seems pretty good to me. I know people still recommended meta keywords...

Also, adding the nofollow attribute was at worst ineffective. There is no penalty and it's generally a really easy thing to implement. So why not include along with dozens of other recommendations since a site is going to be updated anyway?

Nofollow has been called an unnatural change and a hack to make to a site, so why did you do it in the first place?

Unnatural or not, the online space is competitive and I believe you need to examine all of the tools available to you. If the potential reward outweighs the potential risk, that's a pretty compelling argument for me to move ahead with an idea.

And don't forget, although it was never labeled a top priority change, using nofollow was highlighted by Matt Cutts as an approved technique.

Shouldn't you have noticed the change in how nofollow is handled?

Ideally, yes. But there are so many variables being changed with the sites I work on that isolating the impact to just one change would be difficult to do. At some point you have trust previous results and the findings of reputable sources.

I think of it like what doctors have to do. They read research and rely on the findings of that research. They don't repeat every experiment before believing the results. Sure, SEO isn't quite that scientific, but the same sort of thinking holds with the idea of relying on research from reputable sources and augmenting that research with your own findings.

Why don't you recommend a site restructuring instead?

"The boilerplate recommendation to re-organize a site optimally for users and search engines is out of touch with reality."The boilerplate recommendation to re-organize a site optimally for users and search engines is out of touch with reality. People who make such recommendations are either playing it safe or have simply not worked on a site of significant size. Aside from the enormous resources needed to redesign a site, it is next to impossible to get different business units to decide on what will appear on the home page let alone work out a complete site architecture. Everyone wants their link and their copy in the most prominent place. So if a full restructuring is going to take a year, why not make tweaks in the meantime?

The nofollow at least provided the opportunity to help search engines direct users to the most appropriate destination pages despite the mess that often comes with committee-based decisions.

Aren't there more effective SEO-related tactics than nofollow?

Oh absolutely. Again, I point to the typical large company engaged in an SEO project. Getting anything done is hard enough. So you go for what is likely to be the easiest first while working on the long-term changes.

Never worked with a big company? Here's an example of how hard it is sometimes: I've been trying to get a sitemap.xml and robots.txt file uploaded to a client's web server for 3+ months. These are changes that are invisible to end-users. Can you imagine what it's going to take to make content changes!?

Do you find it odd how Google didn't relay the change with nofollow for over a year?

Absolutely. But some big thinkers have already weighed in on that including Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall and Michael Gray.

Will you be telling clients to remove the nofollow attribute?

At the moment, no. At worst keeping it simply prevents link juice from flowing to pages that have been identified as low-quality anyway.

Will you recommend the nofollow attribute to future clients?

For the time being, no. As much to avoid having overly lengthy discussions with certain types of SEO clients.

I'd like to thank Marios for taking the time to speak to me today. For more commentary on the search engine marketing industry, check out Marios' SEM / SEO blog.

Note: Although I'm speaking as an agency SEO, I'm not necessarily speaking for an SEO agency

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An Agency SEO's Perspective on Nofollow

1. A gaggle of teen-age girls. All talking at the same time with no one actually listening. Not that it matters, because no one is saying anything important anyway.

2. Walking through a crowded room. You catch snippets of conversations, but can't really tell what people are talking about because you didn't hear the beginning of the conversation and you're not around when it ends.

3. A buffet. You get to listen to a lot of different people in a short amount of time, but in the end you have to admit that you would have had a richer experience had you just focused on one person.

4. Speed dating. Some people are boring right from the start while others seem interesting. Sadly, they only seem interesting for the first 140 characters but the rules say you can't stop listening to them or they'll think you're mean.

5. Scanning radio stations. You never manage to catch a conversation when it is starting, but if you scan through the tweets fast enough and long enough you can maybe piece together the list of conversation topics for the day.

6. The housing market a few years ago. You spend too much time on it, are twittering because everyone else is, and the bubble will eventually burst.

7. Birds at a bird feeder. All the fluttering about looks exciting and you can't stop yourself from joining. But then everyone disperses as quickly as they gathered and you realize people were just after a their share of the seeds.

8. Going out of your way to expose yourself to too much information in too little time. Very much like grabbing every pamphlet you can from every slightly interesting place you visit and then never remembering where you went or what the hell these leafletey things are on about. Submitted by Robert K of Creare Group.

Got another metaphor? I'll happily add it.

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Twitter is like... Metaphors for Newbies and Veterans Alike

The overall problem I see time and time again is that clients behave as if they don't need to really be engaged in the SEO campaign. They show up for the weekly meetings where they proceed to zone out; nod their heads in agreement like a bobblehead on a car dashboard; and set new standards for what it means to push paper. Instead, a truly involved client is one that:

Considers the impact of SEO recommendations...

... and alerts the SEO agency to potential obstacles. Or, if that knowledge is not on hand, invites others (e.g. editorial or technical staff) from the company to the meetings where recommendations are discussed. Doing so can reduce the amount of time wasted circulating SEO recommendations for review, approval, and implementation. With more than one client I've had recommendations circulating for over 3 months just because the right people weren't involved at the beginning.

Actively identifies opportunities...

... for the SEO agency to shine. No matter how good the SEO agency is, there's no chance of them knowing all of the projects and activities going on within the client's company. Having these highlighted could bring to light areas where the SEO agency can have a significant impact which is a win-win for both parties. The most common type of failure here, in my experience, is when a new site is in the works and the SEO agency doesn't hear about it until it is in the staging environment and ready for deployment.

Builds trust with the SEO agency

There aren't too many things that can as effectively kill the success of an SEO project than a client that is constantly asking for detailed justification of every recommendation. It's like asking your doctor for a summary of all of the research he's read regarding every ailment you've ever had. Sure, the SEO agency should be able to provide this information at any time, but having them do so repeatedly uses up resources that could otherwise be allocated to actually doing something productive. Establishing trust isn't necessarily easy, but if both sides don't trust each other after a couple of months into a yearlong campaign, that's a really bad sign.

Champion changes to their web site

These changes could be structural or content-based. In some cases this means the client may need to help the SEO agency argue for a change to corporate policy by bringing different parties together. I worked with one company that had a formal policy of seeking out sites that had linked to them without permission and requesting that those links be removed. Shocking, I know. The client wasn't willing to put my team in touch with anyone to discuss the negative impact of this policy and to explore possible changes.

Is willing to learn

The more a client knows, the less the SEO agency has to explain. So if a concept has been covered a few times, the SEO agency should be able to build on that concept to constantly elevate the sophistication of the SEO effort. If, instead, the client doesn't care enough to get a handle on the concepts, I can pretty much guarantee the SEO agency won't get support for more advanced techniques like building links through social media marketing. There's only so many times you can change a page's title...

If you ever land an SEO client that does most or even all of the above, I recommend you do everything you can to keep them happy. If not, watch your back because I'm going to come in and steal the perfect client from you. What? You think I'm kidding!?

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Getting The Most From Your SEO Agency

1. No SEO Knowledge, But Eager to Learn

These are generally my favorite clients. Not because I like to be the know-it-all (although that doesn't hurt), but because clients with no knowledge are generally receptive to anyone willing to fill in the gaps. So with a list of recommendations you simply need to provide some high-level rationale for the recommendations and generally the client won't push back. If you can also turn-around answers to questions such clients have without ever showing frustration for having answered the same thing 17 times, you'll remain their favorite for a very long time.

Identifying Traits: Asks a lot of basic questions. Often the same question multiple times.
What To Do: Land this client! Don't tell anyone.
What Not To Do: Don't take advantage of the client's lack of knowledge because there's a good chance you'll regret it. A client without SEO knowledge eventually becomes one with SEO knowledge. If you're twice as expensive as everyone else, you better be providing twice the value.

2. Some SEO Knowledge, Overly Eager to Demonstrate Expertise

I can hear my SEO readers snickering now. They understand exactly what I mean by the client that knows some SEO coupled with an uncontrollable urge to convince everyone that they're experts. These are the folks that read an article, attended a conference, or skimmed through a book and feel they have grasped all there is to SEO. The problem is that their knowledge is out of date (e.g. just put your keywords in the meta keywords tag) or they haven't thought through the implications of an idea (e.g. nofollow all external links). The challenge with such clients is that any SEO recommendation that is not inline with the client's knowledge must be vigorously defended and even then a compromise with a mediocre outcome is common. And with a mediocre effort comes mediocre results.

Identifying Traits: Tells you about SEO experience during first conversation. Tries to one-up you at least once in the first 3 conversations.
What To Do: If the SEO budget is big, suck it up. If not, walk away.
What Not To Do: Don't let your ego get the best of you.

3. Unreasonable Expectations

Whether accompanied by SEO knowledge or not, there are some clients that have crazy expectations. Somewhere along the line these folks concluded that an SEO effort requires little work and/or can quadruple traffic in 30 days. If only that were the case... Many in the industry will say that these clients just need to have their expectations managed. A seemingly simple thing to do, but my experience has been that clients that are actually receptive to having their expectations managed aren't the ones that have unreasonable expectations. Know what I mean?

Identifying Traits: Asks questions along the lines of how soon before traffic will double.
What To Do: Be very clear about what success is in the contract. Sure you may double traffic, but only a 25% increase in the first 6 months is actually required.
What Not To Do: Don't agree to all of the client's demands. You will fail.

4. Limited Development Resources

These sorts of clients are often pleasant to work with except for the tiny fact that nothing you recommend actually gets implemented. In some cases, the client is aware that their lack of resources is the reason for a lack of progress and so a renewal is quite possible. In other cases, the client gets frustrated as the contract end approaches and so there is no hope of a renewal.

Identifying Traits: During the pitch, gently inquire about the process for implementing web site changes. Any mention about submitting a ticket to the web team or having to prioritize workloads is a red flag.
What To Do: Take the project, but identify goals other than ones directly connected to site traffic. For example, having the client's team "SEO Certified" is a good goal that doesn't require as much from the client as making site changes. A renewal will get you closer to having recommendations actually implemented and so eventually everyone wins.
What Not To Do: Don't point fingers at and complain about whichever team is the bottleneck. Doing so will just make you more enemies.

5. Resistant to Change

The worst clients are those that won't adapt to a changing online space. They don't want to change how they write titles, they don't want to target keywords, and they certainly don't want to get involved with social media. Umm... so why did you hire an SEO agency?

Identifying Traits: During the pitch mention a type of recommendation you expect to make. Look for any humming and hawing from the prospect about the recommendation going against corporate policy.
What To Do: Take the gig and hope your assessment of the client is wrong. Sometimes it is. Do your best to evangelize SEO within the company.
What Not To Do: Don't count on a renewal.

Have more types you want to add to the list? Send descriptions my way. If they're sufficiently different than the above, I'd be happy to give you a link in exchange. Happy prospecting to the rest of you!

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

SEO Clients: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and Umm... 2 More

The plugin that I've been digging into has code that randomly determines whether to inject a link into the outputted text. Not only is the insertion frequency dynamic, but so is the link that is injected. That is, the link is pulled from a web site that when queried, spits out a different link. A nice automated link building tool, wouldn't you say?

After a few minutes of requesting links from this site, it became apparent to me that the black hat has just made it easy for me to identify 18 of his sites.

So what would you do with a list of domains all being supported by black hat link building techniques? Take the opportunity to learn a thing or two? Call Matt Cutts?

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

WordPress Plugin Reveals a Black Hat's Network

Often times, marketers overlook the importance of a campaign?s keywords in favor of catchy creative, fancy testing techniques or their reliance on bid management software to sort it all out. Now, I?m not saying that these individual components are not important. Everything plays a role in the success of a campaign. However, keywords make up the fundamental basis of a strong campaign.

Keywords are vital because they indicate user intent. We can determine if the consumer is in the research phase looking for general information, looking for a specific product or brand and when they are ready to make a purchase. Using this information, we can effectively group the keywords into relevant categories in order to creative appropriate (and timely) ads, improving our chances of creating a positive user experience.

All too often, inexperienced markets will take a quantity over quality approach. Judging a campaign by the large number of keywords it contains does not indicate its potential for success. On the contrary, smaller, highly-targeted sets of keywords are the best way to control spend and drive ROI. Once best performers are identified, you can experiment with variations of these keywords instead of making random guesses. Keywords can also be used to beef up your other marketing channels. Successful PPC keywords can be used as content in email, mobile or banner creative.

A successful SEM campaign makes use of many tools and strategies. Start with solid keyword research and add some intuitive thought to get into the mind of your potential customer. You?ll find that using this approach from the beginning can lessen the learning curve and speed up your path to a positive ROI.

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The Keyword and the SEM Campaign

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DiggBar iFrame Foiled by Standard Frame Buster?

I make it a point to log into my master analytics account and check out traffic levels for the sites I regularly work on. I typically just look at traffic changes over the last few weeks to identify problems. It takes deeper analysis to actually affect the performance of a site, but traffic is a great diagnostic metric. At the end of January, after a week long hiatus, I saw this:

Figure 1: Traffic Drops Precipitously

Some more digging revealed this wonderful graph showing a spike in 404 errors.

Figure 2: 404 Errors Spike

To confirm the issue I logged into Google's Webmaster Tools. Sure enough, about 75% of the URLs in my XML sitemap were flagged as having generated a 404. The remaining 25% probably weren't crawled during the week before I found the problem.

What's an SEO to do when a site gets de-indexed due because of accidentally issued 404 errors? Obviously the first order of business is to fix the problem. Turns out there's a funky bug in WordPress which took me about 4 hours to uncover. The much harder task still lay ahead of me. How do I get Google to re-index my site? I had 5 ideas immediately pop into my head:

1. Submit an updated XML sitemap with every date stamp set to the current date. Done.
2. Create some new content with links to the de-indexed content knowing that the FeedBurner pinging service will bring Google in quickly. Done.
3. Take advantage of the $1 SEOmoz Pro subscription I was evaluating and ask the pros there for their opinion. Hey, my head is not so big that I won't seek ideas from other SEOs. The response I got was that I need to be patient and let things play out. Probably the right answer, but I was hoping there was something I could actually do.
4. Crawl my site with a browser from a few locations and hope the AdSense ads trigger a visit from Google. A few servers and the iMacros plugin took care of this a few times a day for a few days. Note: I wasn't clicking ads, just crawling my own site. Seemed like an OK thing to do.
5. Redirect some indexed URLs to the de-indexed URLs and hope the content is re-indexed. Seemed a little shady so I passed on this one.

Google was crazy slow with re-indexing my site. Every week I saw single digit percentage increases in organic traffic. Only 4 weeks later did I know my site was back in business -- a more than doubling in traffic from one day to the next along with a return to near 100% inclusion in Google's index.

Figure 3: Traffic Climbs

So while I'm pleased to have recovered, this little excursion has cost me about 5 weeks of revenue. Ugh. If only Google Analytics had alert functionality I likely would've caught this much earlier.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Accidental 404 Errors... Ugh.

Over at the UserEffect blog there's a great check list of usability tips. Someone has already done half the work. Your job is to take such lists and assess the SEO impact of each item. Then take the list and remove anything that, although may be great from a usability perspective, may distract from the SEO effort. Ideally, you can keep everything in, but if you've done SEO consulting for a while you know that the ideal is rare.

The following is UserEffect's list of 25 usability items. The headings are the same as the original list, but below each heading I've identified whether there is an SEO benefit and marked whether I'd keep it. For more detail about the usability task associated with each heading, check out the original list of 25 usability tips.

Section I. Accessibility

1. Site Load-time Is Reasonable
The reasons for extended load times would determine for me whether I'd harp on this one or not. Lengthy HTML code is worse than a lengthy Flash movie at the bottom of the page which likely won't impact rankings.

2. Adequate Text-to-Background Contrast
Unless we're talking about the old search engine spam technique of white text on a white background, this one is out.

3. Font Size/Spacing Is Easy to Read
If we're not talking about hiding content with really, really small text, this one is out.

4. Flash and Add-Ons Are Used Sparingly
Yes! Flash continues to be the bane of many SEO's existence. I'm got one client that wants to do everything in Flash. Entire sites are built in Flash so I've got just one URL to target keywords with. And of course, the Flash has all of the useful content in so it's largely devalued by search engines.

5. Images Have Appropriate ALT Tags
This is basic image optimization so keep this one. Toss in keyword-rich file names and captions to make the effort more worthwhile. Ann Smarty has a good post on image seo.

6. Site Has Custom Not-found/404 Page
This will help keep the search engine indexes clean. Not to mention that you can't register a site with Google Webmaster Tools without a proper 404 server code.

Section II. Identity

7. Company Logo Is Prominently Placed
Not a big deal on the SEO front.

8. Tagline Makes Company's Purpose Clear Answer "What do you do?"
I'd kick this one out for SEO although who in their right mind wouldn't see the value in this?

9. Home-page Is Digestible In 5 Seconds
Digestible, yes. But that doesn't mean it should be just two lines long. Keep the structure clean and use headings (good for SEO) to make it scannable.

10. Clear Path to Company Information
Not a big one for SEO.

11. Clear Path to Contact Information
Neither is this.

Section III. Navigation

12. Main Navigation Is Easily Identifiable
Identifiable and search engine friendly aren't necessarily the same here. So I guess the SEO value depends on what the recommendation is to make the navigation identifiable.

13. Navigation Labels Are Clear & Concise
If HTML text based, this is a good one for SEO. Clear and concise can also include keywords.

14. Number of Buttons/Links Is Reasonable Psychologists
If you're a PageRank sculptor you agree with this one. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz covered PageRank sculpting not too long ago. His focus was with the nofollow attribute, but the logic applies when you're consider what links to include and exclude on a page.

15. Company Logo Is Linked to Home-page
If you do #7, you might as well make the logo a link.

16. Links Are Consistent and Easy to Identify
This might have some impact on reducing bounce rates which in turn might send a signal of quality to search engines so keep this one.

17. Site Search Is Easy to Access
Keyword research anyone? Aaron Wall over at SEOBook even suggests using this data for content creation ideas.

Section IV. Content

18. Major Headings Are Clear and Descriptive
SEOs love headings. Use the h tags and you're all set.

19. Critical Content Is Above The Fold
A keeper. You want search engines to "understand" a page too.

20. Styles and Colors Are Consistent
Search engines are color blind. Although I wonder if they're working on this. If they know a searcher is male is there more value in sending me to a site with a palette more appealing to males? Hmmm...

21. Emphasis (bold, etc.) Is Used Sparingly
I don't do a whole lot of bolding these days. I wouldn't dwell on this one.

22. Ads and Pop-ups Are Unobtrusive
Pop-ups can result in disabled ads with the AdWords program. Their impact on SEO is still an area where much speculation exists. Last year the folks at SEOOptimise posed this very question. At this point I wouldn't call pop-ups an SEO deal breaker, but trying to get rid of them could very well make some enemies with the marketing team.

23. Main Copy Is Concise and Explanatory
Explanatory is a big one. Tell the search engines what a page is about and they'll give you the appropriate visitors.

24. URLs Are Meaningful and User-friendly
Meaningful and friendly can easily mean keyword-rich so this is a good one. Another post by Ann Smarty, but this time on Search Engine Journal is a quick read about optimizing URLs.

25. HTML Page Titles Are Explanatory
It's funny that what many consider to be the single strongest on page element for SEO is at the bottom of a usability list. Definitely keep this one.

You've now become the usability's expert's best friend. After all, who else in the company are you 80% in agreement with!? If you're lucky you'll start getting e-mails asking for your opinion on usability recommendations which if they can be supported by SEO are more likely to get implemented. Similarly, you can take your SEO ideas and run them by the usability expert for help with repositioning them in a manner that will resonate with whoever holds the purse strings.

Want to do the same exercise with a bigger list? Jacob Neilson's Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed has 113 usability tips.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Hide SEO Under the Cloak of Usability

"...the web site...PortugalSpainBoth.com traveled from zero page one rankings on major search engines to 506 pages ones in nine months -- all through organic search."

Hmmm...

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Rankings Don't Matter Except...

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Shreddies = Flatulence Underwear

My own voting patterns got me thinking as to whether anyone is actually reading the articles or if people are just voting for the authors they already like? I'm hoping it's the former. Time for a quick poll...

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

SEMMYs: Does Anyone Read the Articles?

Then very recently another article made the rounds describing a process for tracking organic search visits from universal results. This was particularly interesting to me because I've yet to find rank checking software that recognizes universal results (if you know of one, please let me know). For example, every rank checking software I've tried fails to report that a #1 ranking is actually #11 because there are 10 map listings above it.

I finally got through some basic testing today with both filters. I used two sites: one that is purely informational and one that is ecommerce focused. I followed the instructions and set up new profiles and applied the appropriate filters. Here are my results from the larger dataset of the two I have.

Google Rankings

Out of 35,535 organic search visits from Google, 16 visits were from keywords on page 2 and 7 visits were from keywords on page 3. The rest were either from page 1 or the information wasn't available for Google Analytics to capture. That works out to 99.9% of the keywords driving traffic being on page 1. That shouldn't be surprising given all of the research indicating that users don't go past the first page of results and instead prefer to refine their query. In conclusion I'd say that there's little value in this filter.

Google Universal Results Traffic

Out of 42,853 organic search visits from Google, 42,853 were flagged as not originating from a universal result. This could mean that the result was from a traditional blue link or that the universal result link didn't provide the necessary information for Google Analytics to track it. That number works out to about 98.4% of visits not attributable to universal results. Curiously, the most popular universal search result is 'spelling' errors at 469 visits. Next up was what I think are map/local related listings at 79 visits.

As with the Google Rankings test, the numbers for Google Universal Results Traffic aren't too impressive. However, I think results will vary greatly depending on the site and so I'd recommend not dismissing this filter. Instead, I'd set it, let it run for a bit, and then assess potential. If at the first time around there's nothing interesting in the data, check back quarterly in case Google includes a new result type or starts to include a greater percentage of blended results into the mix.

Anyone have other Google Analytics filter ideas? Send my way and I'd be happy to test them out.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Tracking Universal Results and Rankings Revisted

1. Arrange with a competitor such as Best Buy to redirect the traffic to them. This has got to be worth something, no?
2. Replace every link on CircuitCity.com with affiliate links. True, this would be a great technical undertaking, but I?m sure some of the newly unemployed web developers would've pitched in their time for a cut.
3. Keep the site as is but put up some ads (e.g. AdSense). Both CPM or CPC should work.

I suppose any money coming in would just go out to investors and lawyers so maybe this would all be moot...

I'd also like to use this post to mark the shuttering of the doors to learn what there is to learn from the disappearance of the site. At the moment, Google is reporting 1,170,000 indexed pages. There's a 302 redirect in place rather than a 301 redirect or even a 404 not found. I wonder how long before Google drops all of the content.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

If Only Circuit City Had Asked Me...

Note: The pink line represents the probability of spam.

1. Top Level Domain

Relatively speaking, there is more spam on .biz domains than on other domains.

2. Language

And apparently spam is quite popular with the French.

3. Compression Ratio

Repeated (e.g. keyword stuffing) words generally lead to better compression rates.

4. Visible Content

Not to be confused with hidden content, visible content in this context basically refers to the code to text ratio. Guess what? A page with a higher ratio of code is actually less likely to be spam.

5. Number of Words

Longer documents are more likely to be spam.

6. Average Word Length

Long words, generally formed by combining other words such as freemp3, result in an above average word length.

7. Number of Words in Title

This one shouldn't surprise anyone. Stuffing the keyword title is common with spammers.

8. Words in Anchor Text

Too large a proportion of text in link text is a good indicator for web spam.

9 & 10. Most Frequent Words in Corpus Common with Text

The fraction of words on a page that are contained in the set of 200 or 500 words that occur most frequently in the English portion of the research paper authors' 105 million document corpus.

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

10 Graphs Reveal Web Spam Patterns

I can install a Firefox add-on to set my browser's user-agent to match that of the GoogleBot and spend the rest of the day identifying cloaking with near 100% accuracy. So what's been keeping the PhD-filled Google complex from wrapping what I can do into an automated process? I had no idea what the answer to that question was until I read through a research paper titled Cloaking and Redirection: A Preliminary Study by Boening Wu and Brian D. Davison of Lehigh University.

Cloaking in Brief

Cloaking on the web, in case this is the first time you've come across the term, refers to the delivery of content to users that is different than what is delivered to search engines. The motivation behind doing so is to obtain rankings in search engines while driving subsequent visitors to some action without providing the promised content. For example, a site may require visitors to sign up before seeing the content, but those very same visitors wouldn't ever see the content if it didn't rank in search engines. Cloaking to the rescue -- show the full content to search engines, but swap in a registration form for human visitors.

Methods for Detecting Cloaking

At first blush it seems that detecting a cloaked page is a simple matter of comparing the content delivered to a search engine vs. the content delivered to a browser. Unfortunately, this comparison turns out to be a non-trivial task. Some reasons for this are that some sites:

1. Change their content frequently (e.g. news sites) so comparing two different copies would yield a false positive.
2. Rotate through content and show something different for each request (e.g. a page the profiles different people).
3. Serve "clean" versions of their content to search engines (e.g. by removing advertising). There's no malicious intent with this sort of activity.
4. Include dynamic elements such as a time stamps that make every version of the page content unique.

Back in 2003, M. Njork filed a patent for a system and method for identifying cloaked web servers. He proposed using a browser toolbar installed by users to compare pages to what was stored by a search engine. The problem with his proposed solution is that it doesn't take into account any of the 4 items above. Fortunately, I don't believe such a toolbar ever made it to the masses.

Wu and Davison, authors of the research paper I mentioned above, proposed a few alternate methods for detecting cloaking. The first looks at the terms on the page using the following algorithm:

• Capture three copies of a web page. Two by a crawler (C1, C2) and one by a browser (B1).
• Parse the HTML into terms and count only the number of unique terms.
• Compare the counts for C1 and C2 (call this NCC) along with C1 and B1 (call this NBC).
• If NBC is greater than NCC, mark the page as cloaking candidate. Note that the threshold used for what constitutes a significant difference between NBC and NCC can be changed to achieve desired level of precision vs. recall.

Another approach compares the link counts on the pages in a similar fashion as to the steps described above for comparing terms. The results revealed that link comparisons identify fewer instances of cloaking than term comparisons, but the results are more accurate.

The final method requires an additional copy of the browser version of the page bring the total to 4: C1, C2, B1, and B2. The assumption for this third method is that deliberate cloaking will return a set of specific terms (chosen by the spammer) to search engines, but never to users. So, if C1 and C2 have common terms that don't appear at all in B1 or B2, it's likely the page is cloaking. Again, a threshold would be required to reduce false positives for insignificant differences.

Unfortunately, all three of these methods are flawed (even the others say so) and will result in many pages being marked as engaged in cloaking because they fail to distinguish between "acceptable" cloaking and that which results in web spam. In addition, search engines would be required to capture 3 or 4 copies of the same page which would add to the already daunting task of crawling and storing web content.

So what do you say? Should we cut Google a little slack?

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This is a post from the All Things SEM and SEO Blog ©2009 Marios Alexandrou. All Rights Reserved.

Detecting Cloaking Algorithmically Is Not Easy