2006

Commentary on Danny Sullivan Interview with Jimmy Wales

12/30/2006 by Eric Enge 3 Comments

Danny Sullivan posted an interview of Jimmy Wales, in which they discuss Wikia’s plan to launch a new search engine. Danny asks a lot of great questions, and provides some good analysis. Danny points out in detail how hard it will be for them to succeed in holding off spammers if they begin to get popular.

One point of the discussion that I want to expand upon is the issue of the investment required to succeed at this. Danny touches on this as well, but I believe it deserves some expansion.

Personally, I believe that Google’s most important “core competency” is their ability to setup, manage, and leverage large server farms. I believe that they have displayed a unique capability in this area that can’t at all be trivialized. They do this better than Yahoo and Microsoft, who just aren’t too shabby in this area either.

While I don’t know the costs involved in designing and running a search engine that receives a large percentage of the world’s search traffic, I would imagine that crawling the entire web, indexing it somehow, and handling just 10% of the world’s search traffic would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars (maybe even billions).

I am likewise confident that putting in place the technical staff to make all this happen is also a daunting task. I think that there are lots of things that need to happen before this project can even get off of the ground.

Like Danny though, I am also hopeful about the underlying concept. As I have posted here before, I do think that there is a place for selective human review in making the best possible search engine. However, I don’t think a community element is the way to go here. I believe they will need to be paid employees of the search engine that get targeted on specific tasks that are flagged for them by algorithmic triggers.

Filed Under: Search Engine Algorithms, SEO, Social Web

7 tips on writing good content for the Search Engines

12/29/2006 by Eric Enge 3 Comments

Brian Clark at Copyblogger recently put up a post about how to write for Google. In his post, Brian quotes the Google guidelines, including the well known: “Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy”.

Brian also promises to offer more on this exact topic within the next year. I will look forward to see what he has to say about it. But in the meantime, being an impatient sort, here are my thoughts:

Make sure the person who is writing for you is, or becomes, an expert in the topic area you are covering. Without it, link-worthy, keyword rich content will not be appearing on your site any time soon.
Build a strong list of potential sub-topics within your topic area to write about before you write a word
Build a keyword map of your topic area. Figure out what the high volume keywords are.
Match up high volume keywords with the potential sub-topics for your articles, and decide on a set of articles to be written.
Let your writer know the topic for each individual article that they are working on. Don’t bury them with a long list of keywords to use, or SEO guidelines. Just give them the topic of the article, the main keyword you want them to use in the title, and let them write.
When reviewing the article, minimize and SEO input until they are done.
Once they are done, you can put a minimal amount of SEO gloss on top. This might be a simple tweak of the use of one keyword or another. Do not rewrite the article unless it really is not well written, or it’s inaccurate.

That’s really all there is to it. There really are two major themes here:

1. Make sure you have something to add to the conversation (i.e. the overall body of material on the Internet about the topic). This is why you need to have an expert on the topic writing for you. Without this, it will be difficult to get the high quality links you need to succeed.

2. Make sure you minimize the SEO imprint on the articles themselves. Sure, the up front research to decide the article topics is important. But if you want the writer to write good (linkable) stuff, you can’t load them down with all types of SEO rules. In addition, this basic approach gives you the best chance of connecting on important long tail terms that you might otherwise miss if you didn’t let them do their thing.

Filed Under: Content Development, SEO

Stats About Blogs and Link Development

12/28/2006 by Eric Enge 6 Comments

Blogs make for a great promotional tool. You have probably heard it many times. But does it really work? I think we can answer that question with a resounding yes! This post will provide you with some basic stats, showing the results achieved by SEOmoz in the last year, and our very own blog here at Stone Temple Consulting since it’s launch in mid-August.

Here are the stats reported recently by Rand at SEOmoz:

Year	Inbound links
2005	10,000
2006	326.000

What does this get them? Among other things, the #10 spot in a Google search for “SEO”, a hellishly competitive term. Of course, you may want to point out that SEOmoz is one of the most prominent blogs in the SEO business. So their growth may not be unexpected.

So let’s talk about the Stone Temple Consulting site. Our web site was completely unpromoted prior to the launch of the blog in mid-August. Frankly, it was a pure word of mouth business based on my personal referral network. The business was doing just fine as a small little boutique shop.

But then we made the decision to expand the business. At the time we made that decision the site had a whopping 4 external links. Basically nothing.

A linkdomain query on Yahoo! today returns 7,510 external in bound links. So ask yourself, what other campaign were we going to implement that would have gotten up 7,506 new links in 137 days (54.8 new links per day) from a standing start? Consider further that virtually all of these links are relevant to our industry, and not one single link was purchased.

Pretty cool stuff.

Filed Under: Blog, linkbuilding, SEO

Backing up your Blog

12/27/2006 by Eric Enge 1 Comment

It was a very scary moment. I was looking at the home page of my blog, and there was nothing but a WordPress database error of some sort. The irony of it was that I had just gone in, for the first time, to try and protect the history of the blog with the first backup I have ever done of it. And the process had somehow blown it away. Basically, I had gone through the following steps:

Ran PhpMyAdmin, the admin tool for the SQL database
Selected Export
Checked the Gzipped box at the bottom
Clicked on “Go”

Supposedly, this procedure is 100% safe. However, it seems that there is a microscopic chance that the database might be in the middle of an update while it is being written out (so I am told). This seems so 1950′s to me. When I was first learning computer science back in the late 1970′s, the idea of preventing access by others to a computer asset when you are using it was already old.

Be that as it may, matters were made worse by the calls to my hosting company, iPowerWeb. They told me that the Export operation in fact “emptied” the database. While this did not make sense to me, I have no experience at all with SQL, so it added to the fear of the situation (by the way, it’s not true either)

So I got their help to do an import of the backup file I had created. However, at my request, they did not overwrite the original database file, and uploaded it as a new file. However, when they were done, I was still left with the task of getting WordPress to use the new database as opposed to the old one.

I was not willing to do this on my own, as I simply did not want to make a mistake at this point. So I called back the tech support team, and found out that everyone there competent enough to address the problem had gone home! So I was basically flushed for the night, at least as far as they were concerned.

Fortunately, I got one of the people who works with me that has a good background in SQL on the phone. In short order we figured out that the original database still had all the data in it. A little bit later, we decided to run a repair operation on the database, which is easy to do right from the main Admin screen.

Bingo! We were back up and running. It had been a very upsetting sequence of events.

Nonetheless, in its own odd way, it underscored the value of backing up. Weird stuff still happens to your data from time to time. I am not naive about this stuff, so it’s not really black magic to me.

Most likely what happened is that some other application was trying to update the data right at the time I was backing it up, and the simultaneous operations corrupted it. It’s a shame, really, because this can only result from sloppy programming, as it’s 100% preventable. However, this is why we backup. Humans are involved in designing and implementing the programs we use, and they are prone to error.

Filed Under: Blog, Wordpress

Google Data Updates and Algorithm Updates

12/26/2006 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Matt Cutts takes a fresh cut at trying to explain Google algorithm updates and data refreshes. In a nutshell:

Algorithm updates affect the methodology that Google ranks sites. These are very infrequent.
Data refreshes involve changes in the data set which the algorithm processes. One example of a data refresh is an index update. The index is updated daily.

What this means is that search results are constantly changing and evolving. The results you see for given search terms are changing on a dynamic basis. This is a fundamental part of the Google process now, that allows them to be much more responsive to changes in the web, in terms of keeping their index as current as possible.

The good news is that as long as your site is not penalized in some fashion you should be able to see the results of your marketing campaigns in a relatively short period of time. Links from higher page rank pages on higher page rank sites should be found very quickly by Google during their normal crawls. Lower page rank links will take longer for Google to find.

But if you get into a good rythym of getting new quality links to your site, you should be able to see you site move up in the rankings on a steady basis.

Filed Under: Search Engine Algorithms, SEO