Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

In the last post, I mentioned the importance of qualifying  your search engine marketing firm in various disciplines.  You wouldn’t take your car to a brake specialist to get the oil changed, and you shouldn’t go with a marketing firm that doesn’t specialize in link building or SEO.

To round up, today I want to talk about some qualifiers for SEO and Social Media marketing.  You should be asking questions of your SEO company, in effect interviewing them to get an idea of their qualifications before you commit to a contract.

If they specialize in SEO

SEO is made up of two distinct areas, on and off-page optimization.  On page optimization involves things like keyword research, competitive research, copywriting and content development and structure as well as an understanding of the technical requirements to set up and work with a variety of website types and content management systems.

Off-page optimization involves link building through various methods, like directory submission, link exchanges and content development and syndication.

More often, a firm will specialize in one or the other.  I, for instance, specialize in the on-page optimization strategies, though I am familiar with many of the techniques for building links.

When you hire a company to do your optimization, there are questions you can ask to find out exactly how qualified they are before handing over your dollars.

Q: Can you tell me about your background in marketing and SEO?

A: look for at least 5 years of experience in marketing.  For young companies with less experience, you can sometimes get a better price on SEO campaigns if they have the qualifications.

Q: What methods do you use for keyword research?

A: They shouldn’t just be targeting the most popular terms, but those that provide the most value and relevant traffic.  Look for an understanding of how keyword research works and how they’ll target the best opportunities.  Most firms won’t tell you everything, as they want to protect their trade secrets, but they should be able to tell you enough so you feel confident to buy from them.

Q: Do you offer full disclosure of all your methods?

A: Transparency is a huge deal in SEO, as the wrong strategy could get your site penalized.  If they don’t offer 100% disclosure, go with someone else.

Q: What types of link building are you proficient in?

A: Ask for specifics, if it’s directory submission, link exchanges, content development or syndication.  They should be able to provide specific examples for each form of successful link building.  From most to least valuable (in my opinion) are: 1) Content development, 2) syndication, 3) directory submission 4) link exchanging.

Q: Can you give me some examples of websites you’ve optimized?

A: This is easy, they should be able to provide examples of work they’ve done AND be able to provide results for their own website.  Researching their website and the company will give you great insight into their business practices.  Ask for references too.  Make sure you Google their company, check out their links and check with companies they’ve worked with.

Q: What sort of guarantees do you provide?

A: This is a tricky question.  No SEO firm worth their salt will guarantee specific results unless you pay through the nose for it.  Every SEO firm worth their salt should guarantee an improvement in results and rankings for targeted terms.

If they specialize in Social Media

Social media requires a lot of ingenuity, great timing and the ability to develop enticing and engaging content.  If you can’t do it yourself, you may be able to farm it out to a third party who will work on your behalf.  That sort of marketing would be too costly for most businesses to outsource based on the time commitment alone.  If you must outsource here, or if you plan on hiring someone for an in-house position, here are some questions you should ask before committing to a contract.

Q: What sort of results have you generated for other companies using social media?

A:  For a small business, brand awareness is less important than actual traffic and new business.  Building social profiles and embracing web platforms are wasted efforts if they don’t generate the desired action. I would want case studies of businesses they’ve worked with in social media campaigns.

Q: Which social media channels do you leverage for your clients?

A: They should be able to answer with the main ones.  YouTube, Flickr, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc…

Q: Are you a power user in any of these networks?

A:  The social media networks are ruled by the power users, those who have spent hundreds of hours developing loyal followers.  Many power users are able to have a content item pushed to the forefront by tapping into their social networks, these are the people you want on your side when you have something ready to go viral.

Q: What benefits do I get from using your company to run my social media campaigns vs. running it myself?

A: There may be distinct advantages to using another company ranging from experience in creating successful viral campaigns to overall know how.  I would want an answer that spoke specifically to the benefits of using their company over doing it myself.  Time saved is NOT a good reason.

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There will be other questions you can ask, and I’ll post them in future updates as they come to mind.  To round up, you just can’t ask enough questions of your marketing company before committing to a contract.  If they don’t have the answers to your questions or aren’t willing to provide them, you should probably look somewhere else.

If you’ve just had some work done and want to know what the results are, drop me a line and I’ll check your existing SEO strategy and send you a brief report on my discovery.

I don’t want to sound like a nerd, (ok, maybe I do), but I was just reading a paper called ‘tagging human knowledge’ by Paul Heymann, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina.  Because I’ve been speaking recently about categorization and taxonomy and their importance in defining relationships of things, I completely neglected tagging as a viable method of organization.  I didn’t forget about it, but I didn’t think it was as reliable as a system organized by taxonomy experts and librarians.

From the abstract

A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness.

In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.

The conclusion?  In a nutshell, organizing content by tagging works as well  (if not better) than organizing content using library systems.  Furthermore, it turns out that non qualified, non-paid individuals were just as effective at organizing content ans librarians and taxonomists.

I used to think that tagging wouldn’t work, just because there were too many random factors when you ask a person without knowledge of a thing to categorize a certain thing (that’s what tagging is, essentially) and couple it with financial motives.  I still think commercial applications of tagging are too open to manipulation, but it’s good to know that the system works.

Applications for tagging in SEO

So here’s where I decide to start using tagging more effectively on Harbour City SEO.  Play along at home if you like.

1st.  Go to delicious.com.  Type in the main keyword you’re targeting into their search box.  I did “SEO”.  Then I look at the first page of results.  All of the sites on there are ones I’m familiar with and pace a certain amount of trust with, so I take down the details of the tags I see them using.

2nd.  Take the common occurrences of tags and put them aside.  I eliminated any tags that only occurred once.

3rd.  Take the remaining list of tags and insert them into your tag structure if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that supports tagging.  If you’re not using a system with built in tagging capabilities, make sure the keywords are somewhere on your page.

This is the list I came up with:

• google
• keywords
• marketing
• ranking
• reference
• search
• seo
• tips
• tools
• webdesign

I’ll be sure to include those tags for my SEO strategy, as they should help increase relevance for my topics and usability for visitors.  Sweet sassy molassey, I’m excited to finally be using tags with confidence.  How about you, are you ready?

A taxonomy is , in an oversimplified manner, a hierarchical organization and categorization of a subject.  The categories of this blog, for example, represent a basic taxonomy.  DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project represents a more complex taxonomy.

Categorization is important so we can understand how a thing fits in with other things around it.  The more we understand the relationships between things, the more we understand the thing as a whole, right?  Ok, enough rambling.  I bring this up because I often see SEO specialists calling themselves marketers, designers call themselves SEO specialists and a whole lot of other muddled definitions.  There’s no certification required in most of these disciplines, and sometimes none available.

But there are distinctions between disciplines.  People that perform well in some areas may not have any experience in others.  A branding specialist may not have any experience with public relations, programmers may not be able to slice a PSD.

Before you hand over a cent to a service provider, ask them these questions to make sure they’re spending their time, and your money, wisely.

If they specialize in internet marketing.

Internet marketing includes disciplines such as PPC management, affiliate program management, banner campaigns and paid link building.  It could include social media and content development and syndication, but I tend to look at those as separate disciplines.  If you’re looking for any of these services, there are a lot of questions you could ask to see if they can handle your needs.

Pay Per Click Q&A

Q: What sort of volume do you handle on a monthly basis?

Anything over $2000.00 would be a good answer

Q: How many clients are you handling currently?

Don’t want too many here, if they say “20″ – then it seems like they’re not committing a lot of time to you.

Q: Have you ever worked in this industry before? 

“Yes” would be good here.  If they haven’t, ask what similar industries they’ve worked in.

Q: Are you a certified AdWords professional?

This is a certification process for managing AdWords.  You have to take a test and score well.  You also have to spend a certain amount over time.

Q: What sort of results can I expect as far as increased clickthroughs and lower costs?

I can’t say this enough, ask for specific targets to be defined here.

Affiliate Marketing Q&A

Q: Can you tell me about the work you’ve done for other companies?  How have you improved their sales?

Look for an overall, sustained increase in sales.  Ask for referrals

Q: How long have you been in business?

5 years + in the affiliate business is a good benchmark.

Q: How many affiliates do you have in your recruiting pool? 

You want thousands, if possible.  Ask about some of the top affiliates in your industry.

Q: Which affiliate networks are you familiar with?

Shareasale and Commission Junction are the two top affiliates.

Banners and Paid Links Q&A

Q: Which banner networks are you familiar with?

Buysellads is popular.  Google AdSense and Doubleclick offer impression based advertising as well.

Q: Does your company provide creatives and tracking? 

Will you have to get your own designs done?  Will they create tracking links for you?

Q: What advantages are there to using banners and impressions?

Banners are great for branding, text links and paid links are great for SEO and traffic.

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In the next article, we’ll talk about SEO and Social Media.  Make sure you don’t miss any of our posts in this series by subscribing to our RSS feed.

There’s a phrase that has stuck with me over the last decade.  It’s a philosophy that I picked up during my days managing a sales team that has carried a lot of weight through to my days of internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Plug the holes in your bucket before pouring more water into it.

In essence, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if that traffic doesn’t convert.   It’s an important message for most small business owners.  Whether you get 100 or 1000 visits each month, if your sales don’t increase proportionally, then there’s something wrong with your site’s conversion path.  Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz predicts that 2010 will be the year of conversion rate optimization, and I tend to agree that it’s a critical step for any business relying on a website to generate sales leads.

Arguably, one could say that a conversion is made every time someone performs a desirable action on your website.  If that action is visiting a certain page, or clicking on a certain link, then you could make the argument for conversions over traffic.  The next steps down this road involve crafting links, focusing on calls to action in your content and tweaking your copy to drive visitors to different areas of your site and increase saturation of certain pages in search results.

This is fine for a full time webmaster, but it’s essentially micromanaging your content.  You could spend hours making subtle changes and not see that much of a difference, certainly not enough to justify the amount of time you’ve put into it.   In addition, if your site is driven by impression-based advertising revenue, focusing on conversion too early in the game is a waste of time.  You’re better off creating traffic channels, building links and, to some degree, improving overall usability.

What you should be getting now.

If you run a small business in Nanaimo, or any region of Vancouver Island (such as greater Nanaimo, Comox Valley, Cowichan Valley etc…), a well optimized website with a moderate, organic link portfolio should be getting about 1000 unique visitors each month.  From those 1000 visits, you should be getting anywhere from 5 to 30 contacts per month. 30 would be exceptional, 5 would be slightly below average, but it also depends on your product line.

Without question, I would target the unique visitor benchmark first.  The qualifications of your visitor will go up as your traffic and ranks increase, so it’s important to have those visitors landing on your site before you make any judgments about the quality of your conversion process.

Once you have sustained traffic for at least three months, you should target a contact rate of 2%.  That means for every 1000 unique visitors to your site, you should be getting 20 emails, contacts, phone calls and/or walk-ins.

Where are you now.

If you don’t know what your stats are, most hosting plans include at least one analyzer.  If your web host doesn’t, you should switch to one that does.  If you don’t know how to check your web stats, or aren’t sure what to look for, you can contact your web host for help or, contact me at Harbour City SEO directly for a free evaluation on your site’s current performance.

The semantic web is coming.  Tim Berners Lee, the “father of the internet”  describes it in this article in Scientific American.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

Clear as mud right?  I’ve been putting together scraps and pieces of information for some time trying to understand exactly what it all means.  I wasn’t able to describe it, or what I thought it was, for years.  Not to myself and not to others.

A few weeks ago I had my ‘eureka’ moment.  I think I was driving to work, maybe I was in the shower (those are places my ‘eurekas’ commonly occur) and I figured it all out.  Rather than interpreting our queries and providing the results it thinks are best, the semantic web will understand our queries and provide the results we need, knowing what we meant not interpreting what we said.  Right?  I think so anyway.

Wolfram Alpha is at the forefront of this new understanding with it’s computational knowledge engine.  Google and Yahoo!?  They’ve made strides and efforts at truly understanding, but have fallen short or failed completely.

Google has, supposedly, incorporated latent semantic indexing into it’s algorithm.  Yahoo! tried tagging by incorporating del.icio.us tags into search results.  Neither, in my opinion, improved search results to the point where Google or any major search engine are able to understand the meaning of a query, or the relationships of words in a specific context.

Oh, I suppose they’ve made improvements and progress here and there.  Fundamentally though, there’s something missing.  Allow me to ’splain.

I’m optimizing my own site.  Makes sense, I’m an SEO guy, I want the brass ring.  I don’t use black hat stuff, not because it’s wrong but because I don’t know how.  Now, I know, and I think you know, that the following phrases all mean the same thing.

SEO Nanaimo
Nanaimo SEO
Search Engine Optimization Nanaimo
Nanaimo Search Engine Optimization
SEO Nanaimo BC
etc…

I would go on, but I don’t want to get accused of keyword stuffing.  So, as I was saying, we all know that the above phrases are the same.  Google doesn’t though.  I have to target each phrase individually in Google as the results for each query are different.  It’s the same players, ultimately, just in a different order.

For you, the small business, it means you have to choose wisely.  If you have a small site, say only 5 or 10 pages, you’ll have some hard choices to make.   You can blog (like I do) which is a good way to create relevance.  You can do major link building campaigns and target various terms through your anchor text, since Google still relies heavily on links to decide relevance (not as much as before though) or you can build more content for your site.

You could also let sleeping dogs lie and pick one term that represents the best opportunity.   Need help with that?  No problem, drop me a line for free advice on your current keyword strategy.

My previous post on the new Google features was published today (June 5th) at 11:48am

The screenshot of the search result below was taken about 5 minutes ago.  I’m not certain why this post was indexed so quickly while others remain un-updated. It definitely calls for experimenting.

Search Results from June 5th, 2009 at about 12:45 pm PST

I do know that blogs tend to get indexed a bit more quickly than standard sites with a fixed navigation path to static content. My theory is that blogs are current, and so, more relevant. It seems to be working for me, which is exciting. I’ve seen nothing but steady growth since I started this blog a couple of weeks ago.

Google recently rolled out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions… read the complete article here

It’s true, folks.  I did a search using their suggested phrases.  “spice market review shrimp starter dessert” yields results, one of which had a 312 character snippet.  It should also be noted that Google pulls the snippet from the <meta name=”description”> tag.  If you don’t have one of those, it will use the first snippet of content it finds on your page.

Google also says:

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Sounds like they’re trying to push forward on semantic understanding.  And here I thought they’d given up.

Time will tell if either of these additions turn out to be particularly valuable.  It will mean a change in the way a site is optimized, as individuals try to increase relevance across a broader contextual understanding.  For relevance, I still like Wolfram’s odds of providing the best answers to my questions and queries.