Organic search and keywords

In the "Basics" and the SEO classes I always emphasize that if you take one thing away, it should be signing up for Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools lets you see (with as much detail as Google will allow) your site the way Google sees it: when it's getting indexed, what pages are found and so on.

Now it's even more important, as Google made a change to its search engine last year that encrypted all searches. It's a wonderful privacy enhancement, but it also makes it harder for site owners to understand which keywords a user typed in to reach their site. In fact, in Google Analytics, the excellent (and free) web metrics product from Google, normal organic searches no longer provide keywords. That means that if you're trying to discover whether a user used "Austin hair salon" or "Austin day spa" to find and reach your site, that kind of detail is no longer available in Analytics.

However, that data does remain available in Webmaster Tools, so the simplest (and free) way to discover these keywords is just logging into Webmaster Tools and clicking on Search Traffic, then Search Queries. You'll see a list similar to this one:

For more insight on this change as well as some other options for viewing keywords that lead to your site, check out this excellent and thorough piece over at Search Engine Watch.

Link-building comment spam

That ever-present pox on blogs and just about any site with commenting – otherwise known as comment spam – is finally getting its day in the sun. In this case, the sunlight is sanitizing, and Google's most recent algorithm updates have actively and aggressively penalized the sites who used comment spam for link-building.

I've covered legitimate ways to build to links in class, and those methods – seeking relevant, quality links from other sites – are still good practice. But the darker art of massive-scale link building that went on for many years in the comments sections of websites around the world has now come back to haunt the companies that benefitted from those strategies, and the results are sometimes hilarious.

For a great rundown of how all this happened and the plaintive requests that site owners are now making to have their links removed, read this great piece over at The Awl. It's a fine, brief history of "black hat" link building and a pretty humorous review of the requests that The Awl is now receiving to have those links removed.

Where's the Ad? Half of Us Can't Tell

As I mention in class, the ads that Google and others run in their search engine results are often not obviously different from the natural (or "organic") search results themselves. Apparently, the FTC agrees and this week told search engine companies that they need to do a better job of identifying advertisements. I guess that barely visible light yellow background for Google's pay per click ads isn't doing the trick; a study by SEOBook found that almost half of searchers didn't recognize the difference. Full story at the New York Times.

The Tricky Business of Selling Via Amazon

Those of you that are building e-commerce sites are presented with a host of options, from Shopify to Magento to dozens of others. Many businesses also set up shop on eBay or Amazon because of the broad exposure you receive by being part of their marketplaces. You make a little less money on each sale and you have to abide by some fairly complex (and frequently changing) rules, but you have immediate access to a large audience of buyers without having to engage in SEO to build your presence from the ground up.

As some sellers have seen, though, selling through giants like Amazon or eBay can be difficult if you don't meet their standards for feedback or ratings. These marketplaces put such rules in place to weed out fraudulent sellers, but they can also snare legitimate businesses and hold up their payments for months at a time. If you're considering Amazon, check out this article from The Seattle Times detailing complaints from sellers regarding Amazon's payment and account policies. While these are isolated cases out of many happy sellers, it's worth understanding the power a giant like Amazon (and eBay, Google and many others) has in its seller agreements. View the article here.

Pay-per-click alternatives

The New York Times has an interesting piece on pay-per-click alternatives. Advertisers - especially small business - are beginning to search for alternatives to Google's AdWords program as the cost per click creeps up beyond many companies' threshold for a healthy ROI.

As I've pointed out in the SEO classes, many advertisers are also building content to improve organic ranking, and it works well for those who put the time into it. Check out the article here.

Bare-Bones Analytics

Over at the eBlox blog, I discuss the basics of web analytics in a hopefully non-soporific manner. If you want to understand the basic measurements of success (and failure) on the web and don't have a month to learn an analytics package, you might want to check it out for a quick read.

Google Places Mischief

Interesting piece in the New York Times on the dangers of crowdsourcing business information. Google Places, like similar services such as Yelp, uses user-submitted information on local businesses to keep its listings up to date. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous users post incorrect information intentionally, such as indicating that the business has closed down! Read the full article here, along with some additional analysis from The Atlantic Wire here.

The Top 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords Advertising | WordStream

Some interesting info for those of you considering advertising online. Wordstream has compiled a list of the most expensive keywords in Google's AdWords pay-per-click advertising system. "Insurance" takes the cake with a 24% share and a top CPC (cost per click) of almost $55! Check out the infographic here. It might give you a few good ideas on keyword campaigns to avoid!

The New York Times on Content Farms

The paper of record provides a good overview of the hows and whys of content farms, and what Google has launched in the last few months to combat them. If you're looking for a straightforward, layman-friendly explanation of how content farms work and why they make money, you should check it out.

Of course, you can expect the content farms, spammers and questionable SEO companies to adapt in response, but for now, the results are looking pretty good. Read it here.

In class, I often mention "content farms" as an example of the SEO-influenced clutter that makes up most of the internet's online content. It's tough to get your head around exactly how much of the content out there is created solely for gathering clicks and viewers (and thus dollars) as opposed to actually informing people. The amount of junk content is truly staggering, and it's only getting worse.

Here, then, is an interesting tell-all by a "content farm" writer from AOL. It's not pretty stuff, and once you understand how much of this junk is being created, you'll get a much better idea of just how difficult it is for search engines to find the content that matters. As I've discussed before, Google is constantly adjusting its algorithm to rank the junk lower, but it's an uphill battle.

The Importance of Google PageRank: A Guide For Small Business Executives

An entry-level primer over at HubSpot on exactly what Google's PageRank is and how it affects your search ranking. For those of you who desire a more thorough explanation of PageRank than what I provide in class, this is a great starting point.

If any of you are trying to optimize a site that sells products that are pretty much identical to your competitors', you might want to check out my latest article for Identity Marketing magazine. I discuss the ups and downs of trying to optimize a site that sells commodity products when hundreds or thousands of other online sellers are offering exactly the same stuff. In this case, I'm talking about promotional products, but the same advice can apply to anyone who sells commodity goods against a lot of other competitors. Check it out here on the eBlox blog.

Google updates algorithm, targeting content farms

We saw this one coming a while back, and now it's live: Google has made changes to their algorithm that will reduce the ranking of so-called "content farms" like Demand Media or eHow, who create all those wonderful articles like "How to Get Pregnant" (seriously). These articles, though marginally informative, don't really exist to provide unique, useful information; they exist to sell ads on those very pages, and that advertising is big business - Demand Media's IPO was valued at more than one billion dollars.

It remains to be seen exactly how content farm pages will suffer in ranking. Demand Media and other large-scale content providers have been anticipating this change for quite a while, so I expect they're already attempting to work around it. But, there's no denying that web users have staged something of a revolt against low-quality, high-volume content creators, and Google had no choice if it wanted to be perceived as delivering good search results.

The twist? Google, as the largest online ad network in the world, makes millions off the ads that are shown on these sites. Reducing the ranking of high-volume content farm pages will undoubtedly impact Google's ad revenue. No one has any idea how much impact this will have on ranking or revenue, but if you're interested in an in-depth overview of the change, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has put together a thorough, detailed analysis.

Maybe that Groupon deal isn't so awesome

Check out this article over at the eBlox e-commerce blog about MerchantCircle's latest small business survey – some great info on social media and the effectiveness of deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, including this money quote: "55 percent of people who have run a daily deal campaign said they would not do so again."

This Thursday, we'll discuss local deal sites as part of our Web Marketing seminar, and this is good reading ahead for that. The eBlox blog piece is here. The full press release from MerchantCircle can be found here.

Is Google Ignoring The HTML Title Tag More Often?

With all our talk about the importance of title tags, this one comes as a bit of shocker - many webmasters are complaining that Google is ignoring title tags in certain situations and generating its own titles for search engine results. That means that the carefully keyworded, clickthru-optimized titles that you wrote for your pages might not show up when someone searches for your site on Google.

Don't worry, though: they'll always show up on your own site! This may mean that Google is giving less (or no) weight to the keywords and order of title tags, which probably makes sense given that Google focuses pretty much exclusively on page content. Also, Google's own Chrome browser happens to do a terrible job of displaying titles in its tabs if you've got more than a few tabs open, so it's possible that Google feels the tag itself isn't as important as it used to be.

More than likely, though, Google is treating the title tag the way that it began treating the meta description tag a few years ago: it decides what to do with it based on an algorithm. If it's good, brief and non-spammy, Google uses it, but if it looks loaded with keywords, or perhaps over-optimized for click thru, Google will ignore it and create its own. I'll keep you posted on this one....

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com

Comprehensive overview of how JC Penney gamed Google's search engine over the holiday season. If you're looking for a reasonably succinct explanation of how "black hat", or under-the-table search engine optimization works, this is a good place to start.

In JC Penney's case, they weren't caught until the New York TImes pointed it out, and they weren't penalized as harshly as others who game Google; they were just demoted in ranking to where they should actually be based on their quality. It's an interesting story, and it shows that even big companies who try to game Google can only be successful at it for so long. Full article here.

The Huffington Post and SEO

Some interesting detail on what, exactly, AOL was paying for when they purchased The Huffington Post last week. Similar in some ways to the strategy used by so-called "content farms" such as Demand Media, The Huffington Post employs techniques that mine the internet for popular trends and searches. Once a popular set of keywords are determined (e.g. "what time is the Superbowl?"), Huffington Post writers often create articles geared specifically to capturing clicks from search engines for that content.

To be fair, The Huffington Post also creates a good deal of original editorial content that is less engineered toward search engine eyeballs. But their search engine-tuned content chops are what bring in the money and triggered the acquisition. I'll leave the determination of whether they are contributing to the rise of junk content up to you. Full article here.

Specialization and Cross-Selling

An article from Identity Marketing on how specialization and cross-selling can be a primary strategy for online sellers in very competitive spaces. Worth checking out if you are planning on selling something where the main keywords are very competitive - like "shoes" or "promotional products". Check it out here.

An App World

Over at the eBlox blog, an article I wrote for Identity Marketing magazine about apps and their possible effects on web sites. Check it out, especially if you're building an e-commerce website.

An article I penned for Identity Marketing magazine, republished on the eBlox blog, about giving up on organic search optimization. For those of you that are considering organic SEO (optimizing content and inbound links to rank higher in organic searches) vs. diving into pay-per-click advertising, this might provide some insight as to why I feel the latter is often a better use of your time, especially if you are engaged in e-commerce and want to actually sell your products online.

You should still optimize your site for organic search – as I've said in class, keywords are everything – and try to get those higher-ranking, relevant inbound links. But the article specifically addresses the situations where organic SEO is a losing battle because of the intense competition. In this situation, the targeted, controlled method of advertising offered by pay-per-click may be your best bet. Read the article here and let me know what you think.

New York Times on Google AdWords for Small Business

If you've taken my classes, these tips on advertising with Google's AdWords from the New York Times will probably sound pretty familiar to you:

• Begin by casting a narrow net, advertising in your local market and then expanding to additional markets like Google’s AdSense network.

• Try to choose keyword terms that your competition has overlooked to keep per-word costs low.

• Remember that good campaigns require constant adjustment.

That's good advice, and while there's not a lot here that you haven't seen in class or in the handouts, the article does offer some specific examples of AdWords use by small businesses. Highly recommended if you're ready to take the dive into pay-per-click advertising.

Check it out here.