Ramblings About SEO

Back in December I did a blog post about Updating to Wordpress 2.3.1. I noted in that post that I waited a long time to do the update because I knew it would be a somewhat painful process. I probably spent an hour getting the stage set (backing things up including the database), and reading and re-reading the instructions.

I then completed the actual update in about 2 hours. Not horrible, but still not something you do on a whim. Ironically, 2.3.2 came out within a week or so of my doing the update. But, I was not in any hurry to do it again. So I waited.

It was with some pain that I saw that 2.5.1 was available, and saw the dreaded words indicating that it included an important security update. That’s a good way to get my attention enough to contemplate investing a few hours in something, so I decided to go through it all again.

Given the expected downtime, I set aside a few hours of my Saturday to get this done. Saturday afternoon I went to the Upgrading Wordpress page on the Wordpress site. That’s when I saw it:

What? Update in about 2 minutes? You are so full of … What the heck I decided, let’s give it a try. So I clicked on the link to go get the Wordpress Automatic Update plugin. I then tried it out.

Well it definitely took longer than 2 minutes, but I was actually done in about 10 minutes. When I was done with it, I sat there a bit stunned. I had geared up for a major grueling task, and it was over in no time.

Note that the plugin does backup your entire blog and your database right at the beginning. So if anything goes wrong you should be able to restore things relatively easily.

The only odd thing in the plugin is that when I got to the last screen where it was supposed to enable my pluging again, I got an error message. I ended up having to manually reneable the plugins (which is easy of course). I then spent some time checking out the blog to make sure that everything was ok, which it was.

All in all though, this is one phenomenal tool. Don’t even think about doing an update the old way any more, unless you have reason to believe that you have done some custom things to your blog that the tool won’t be able to deal with.

It startles me sometimes how many people out there are publishing very significant web sites, but don’t really understand what is going on with SEO. Worse, many major CMS systems make it impossible to build a search engine friendly web site.

The types of issues that people run into with these systems is always pretty much the same:

• Undecipherable URLs
• Poor crawlability / encoded links
• Create reams of duplicate content
• Limited or no control over titles
• Limited or no control over headers
• Limited or no control over metatags

By the time you are finished absorbing all these problems into a web site you are left with something that is completely useless.

Last Wednesday I spoke with Stephan Spencer of GravityStream product. It’s a great potential solution to all the above problems.

How it Works

GravityStream does not require you to make any significant changes to your existing CMS and web application environment. When a user goes to a web page on your site, GravityStream gets invoked. It then takes the existing page and tweaks the page according to a set of changes specified in its own CMS. This can include fixing the URL, making links crawlable, dealing with duplicate content, and changing titles, headers, and metatags.

It turns out that this is really easy to setup. Stephan told me that the time from SOW to completed implementation is typically thirty days. Makes it pretty easy to get off the ground with it.

The fact that it is minimally intrusive to the pre-existing environment is a critical factor. When dealing with large companies, it can be very difficult to get them to change their web environment. The minimally intrusive approach makes this a much easier pill to swallow.

Summary

Certain types of problems are endemic to large scale web sites, particularly those that use third party CMS and web application environments. These environments are designed to be flexible enough to handle a wide variety of different web site structures, and that’s a great thing. You just can’t afford to give up search engine traffic as a result of all this.

While we have not used GravityStream (yet), it appears to offer a nifty solution to these problems.

Once you learn a little bit about how search engines work, moving a web site from one location to another begins to sound like a frightening thing. The basic solutions that people talk about in the market are pretty straightforward. However a recent post by Riona MacNamara on the Google Webmaster Central blog, titled: Best practices when moving your site brings out some additional extra tidbits.

As laid out by Riona, the basics remain the same. You want to perform a site wide redirect of the old site to the new site on a page by page basis. If you are changing site structure then you need to try and match up the content as closely as possible for the redirecting pages on the old site to the new site. But here are a few interesting tidbits:

1. “pesky 404 (File Not Found”) errors can harm the user experience and impact your site’s performance in the search results”. You can read this statement in a few different ways. My read is that if you implement your redirects in a way that end up in a significant number of 404s that this could affect the site rankings, because of a loss of the related link juice on the site.
2. Riona also suggested that if you are planning to move the site and redesign it at the same time, that you should consider doing a straight domain move first, and do the site redesign at a somewhat later date. The purpose of this suggestion is to reduce the number of variables you are changing all at once in the process. It’s good advice.
3. “To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.” Thia was perhaps the most interesting comment of all. This suggests that if the old site does go away after 180 days, that’s OK, and you do not need to retain the redirects longer than that. Note that the post earlier acknowledged that you might not be able to get all you old links pointing to the new site, and would need to rely on redirects.We have known for some time that Google keeps a time based record of things like links to a site (so it knows when the links were created). It’s possible that Riona is alluding to here is that after 180 days Google will assume the redirects are permanent, even if the old site and goes away with it’s redirects, and will continue to count them to your site.

   Reading between the lines a bit further, the implication is that this would still be true even if the old domain is taken over by someone else and new content is put up on it. If this speculation is true, it’s an interesting insight into Google at work.

This week’s interview is with Google’s Dick Costolo. We discussed RSS Feeds, the way they are being used, and how monetization of feeds will evolve in the future. Please feel free to comment on the interview below.

Recently I got to interview Market Motive’s John Marshall. This interview focused on why it’s bad to go out and buy “traffic”. Your focus needs to be sharper than that - you need to focus on the intent of the visitors, and how you are goping to persuade them to buy. If you want to discuss it, you can do so below.

What should an SEO firm report on to their clients? There are a whole host of things that people usually talk about:

1. Technical SEO changes made
2. New links obtained
3. Rankings reports
4. Total backlinks
5. Pages indexed
6. Competitive info
7. Web site traffic

While most of these are useful at some level, I think that if any of them become the central focus of an SEO’s reporting, that they are missing the boat entirely.

What matters most to clients is increasing their conversions (e.g. sign-ups, leads, contact me requests, or e-commerce transactions). It should also be what matters most to you. If you can increase the profitability of their business, by generating more conversions out of search, then you are in good shape for a long term relationship with the account.

The reason why this is critical is that it will focus your SEO efforts on things that drive new conversions for the client. With a focus on conversions, you’ll probably end up picking different keywords to focus on. You will end up picking different link partners to pursue. A laser sharp focus on this will make sure you are putting yourself in the best position to justify the cost of your service.

From the very beginning of an engagement, setup the web analytics to track conversions resulting from organic search results. Monitor the impact of what you are doing on that metric. Examine what keywords and traffic sources are generating conversions today. Just make sure you do this over a long enough period of time so that the data is statistically significant (don’t base your strategy on what happened with a single conversion!).

In my initial list, traffic (or more precisely traffic from search engines) should be an important thing that you monitor as well. However, as John Marshall will tell you traffic is not the goal. Not all users are created equal.

For example, in the world of search, if someone types in “buy blue widgets” and someone else types in “blue widget reviews”, there is clearly a different likelihood that one will buy versus the other. Now you probably want to be able to win on both those search terms. But expand the concept a bit. Perhaps someone searches on “orange widgets”, but the conversion rate is much lower than it is for “blue widgets”. This means your SEO campaign will bring a better business result to the client if it focuses on blue widgets.

Increasing conversions should be the focus of your reporting as well. Communicate to the customer early on that this is the priority, and that you are going to measure it for them, and report on it regularly. Keep in mind that the objective is to show the client the value you are bringing. What better way to do that then show them that you are making them more money than you are costing them?

Recently I put a podcast together with Pheedo’s Bill Flitter. Bill is the CEO of Pheedo and shared his insights on how RSS is being used, and also provides advice on promotion of your feed. Once you are done reading or listening, you can comment on the podcast below.

This week’s interview is with TV Guide’s Kirsten Rasanen, Director of Product Development for TV Guide Online. Kirsten and I discussed TV Guide’s video search engine, as well as the future of video search. If you want to discuss it, you can do so below.

Guy Kawaski of Garage Ventures has launched a new web site known as Alltop, with a tag line of “All the top stories”. Here is a summary of their business from their site:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

The basic value of the site is that you can get a view of the major doings of an industry in just a few seconds. In addition, since the sources have been pre-screened, you know you are getting the latest from trusted sources. The site has a number of categories including an SEO category.

Check it out and see if it works for you. Certainly seems like a good way to check in on market spaces with which you are not intimately familiar. Hey, it must be good, after all, our own blog, Ramblings about SEO is included in the SEO category.

Recently I have the chance to speak with Kevin Lee, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Did-It. We spoke about the SEM industry in the past year, the future of it, as well as the types of tools to use to get the best results for your campaigns. Please feel free to comment on the interview below.