The SEO Pyramid-On Video

Cool video from SEOmoz on the SEO pyramid.  All I can tell you is that you need to build links.  

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - The SEO Fundamentals Pyramid from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Like the Song Said, Been Gone Too Long

Sorry for not posting for awhile.  I had an internship that ended.  It's the holidays.  Blah...blah..blah...all excuses. 

So I'm back.

One interesting thing I've been working on is Collective Interest Green (www.collectiveinterest.us). I've managed to optimize it for hybrid cars, electric cars and solar energy.  Well, I mean I'm fighting the daily fight to provide content and terms relevant to those topics.  

Anyway, my AdSense campaigns are doing quite well.  In a macro way.  When I started the blog, I played around with AdWords and AdSense.  Didn't really dig in too deep, just enough.  Once I found that spending a certain amount of money in AdWords unleashes AdSense revenue (about $7 bucks/day for this site), then I've really started to use those SEO and SEM lessons to make a little scratch with the site.

The most recent thing I've done is to set up a test.  Here's the situation I'm in.  Advertising across 49 states (Utah isn't a good state for hybrid and electric), I get a lot of impressions.  A lot.  My CTR was never better than 1%.  But on the AdSense side, anywhere from 3-7% of site visitors were clicking on the ads.

So I need to increase the quality of my impressions and try to get that CTR into the 2-3% range. To that end, I found a heatmap of hybrid car sales by state.  I set up 3 campaigns with identical adgroups.  The control campaign is a replication of the original 49-state campaign.  I did a round of keyword optimization, and tinkered with demographics as well.  The second campaign, called "underperforming states" is targeted toward the states where hybrid car sales lag.  Other than the locations, this campaign is identical to control.  The final campaign is called "good states". Again it's identical to the control campaign; but it targets states and metro areas that enjoy good sales of hybrid cars.

What I'm trying to determine is to what extent underperforming states contribute to my traffic, and the corresponding click through rates.  I'd like to see more people in Montana buy hybrid cars, but I'm not sure if I want to pay extra to get them to my site.

What I need to know from the good states is how much traffic they represent, and whether or not their clicks truly contribute to my revenue.  It's not out of the realm of thought that visitors from underperforming states click on ads.  Since visitors from good states have more dealers and people driving hybrids, they have access to more information; especially live information.  This might mean they spend more time with content and don't click on ads as much.

Anyway, the test will fully deploy on Monday.  

Linkbuilding Without Drama

This is a good article from SEOmoz. I've been in contact with someone who needs some linkbuilding, and I'm happy to do it (especially since I've got SOOOO much on my plate). So I've been checking out some new-fangled ways to build those all-important inbound links.

Here's a snippet from the article:

Matt Cutts' webspam team, a segment of Google's broader Search Quality division, has made their position on buying and selling links for the purposes of boosting search engine rankings reasonably clear over the past 3 years. The practice is anathema - viewed as unacceptable because it infringes on the engine's ability to use links as an editorial signal of importance for search rankings. Both manual penalties and algorithmic filtering are applied as solutions, damaging the rankings of sites that buy as well as the ability for sites who sell to pass on link equity.

Naturally, this has led many individuals, sites and businesses seeking higher rankings to employee tactics that are plausibly removed from the direct exchange of capital for links, and while link brokers and link sales still thrive, they do so in an ever-increasingly paranoid & underground realm so as not to risk discovery and devaluation. In this post, I'll walk through examples of some of the more valuable and directly applicable methods to leverage finances for link growth while dodging Google's webspam edicts.

It's a quick read, 8 easy things to try. Check it out.

SEO Shortcuts, or Plagarism

Only in college are we required to reinvent the wheel. What am I talking about? In this case SEO. For someone new like me, there's a strong inclination to scour competitor websites for keywords and phrases. Hit SpyFu with their url so I can get a little info on what the industry keywords are.

At times I feel guilty. But at other times, I recall the lessons I learned in business. A long time ago a boss told me, "someone already plowed this ground, why not take advantage?"

Which is powerful. Less powerful if you're lazy, because all you'll never come up with something on your own, or use your wits to refine something to perfection. A lot more powerful if you see it as a safe place to start and go on to develop better.

I bring this up because I saw this on mining the competition at Marketing Pilgrim:

SEOs will generally kick-off an optimization campaign by examining analytics, performing keyword research, checking on-page elements, analyzing links, and so on and so forth. However, there exists an extremely useful tactic that is often underutilized or left out completely from the SEO’s arsenal. What am I talking about? Ladies and gentleman, I present to you… Competitive intelligence.

What is competitive intelligence? As it relates to search marketing, I would define it as the process of performing research to gather information about your competitors’ websites and analyzing that data for the purpose of extracting methods used and formulating strategies that you may use to optimize your own website.

Competitive intelligence can open your eyes to many things, including:

• What your competitors are doing.
• How you compare to your competitors.
• Predict what your competitors will be doing.

The article goes to look at keywords and link analysis as well.

So I don't feel so bad wanting to look at what the competitor is doing, as long as I'm going to use it as a base to improve. However, my college professors would have called it plagarizing.

The Black Hats v. The Google SEO Guide

As you should know, Google came out with a guide for effective SEO. If you didn't hear about it, look down a few posts and check it out.

Well the black hats are none too impressed. From SEO Black Hat:

...What if, instead, we did a case study?

On the one hand we will take a new site and follow Google’s SEO Starter Guide to the letter. We will limit ourselves only to the techniques discussed therein. (Note: there is virtually nothing in the starter guide about link building).

On the other hand, we will take a new site and do the EXACT OPPOSITE of every point of Google’s Quality Guidelines.

So, in the 2nd case:

* We will Make the pages primarily for search engines, not for users. We will deceive our users and present different content to the search engines than we display to the users (known as cloaking)

* We will Embrace tricks intend to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is that we would never want a competitor to know what we are doing. Another test is “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” The answer will be an emphatic “NO!” on both points.

* We will participate in link schemes designed to increase our site’s Page Rank. In particular, we will link to other web spammers and “bad neighborhoods”.

* We will use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages.

* We will employ both hidden text and hidden links.

* We will cloak and use sneaky redirects.....

This is a topic thread to keep an eye on. If the guidelines were more an instruction manual for the average SEO to succeed, then it's a good thing as well. If by publishing the guidelines it means that Google is officially beginning to crack down on Black Hat SEO tactics, then it means a sea change for SEO. If black hat tactics are blocked and not allowed to succeed, then SEO has changed forever.

Google Makes SEO Easy-ier

One nice thing about this industry versus the printing industry (where I came from), is that the terms are pretty consistent and there's a ton of tools and help everywhere. What's better is that the information is not guarded by sales guys.

I say that after downloading Google's new Search Optimization Starter Guide. According to the Google Webmaster Central, it's the same manual used by internal sites like YouTube, Blogspot, etc. I would imagine that there's a more sophisticated version that may or may not be available to enterprise clients; but this is pretty damn good for where I'm at.

3 Excellent Site Comparison Tools

So I'm helping a friend with selecting a website design vendor. One of the things we're doing is to compare his current site with others in his market, rate it, and generally get an idea of what the Googlebots think of what he has now.

Tonight I found a great article in Search Engine Journal about comparison sites. Complete with links to 3 tools, I'm now ready to take different looks at his site. The cool thing is that these tools can and will help establish what we want in a new site, as well as measure what the vendor provides us.

From the article:

There are a handful of SEO and web marketing competitive research tools on the market (see online seo tools) which gauge the value and marketability of a site by reviewing and delivering a mini-site audit which grades a site based on its basic SEO parameters and those of its competition.

Website Grader by HubSpot and SEObook’s Website Health Check are two common and free tools used by many webmasters and industry novices to get an idea of the value of a site. Another which has just been launched is ReviewMyWeb, which according to the site : Stacks you up against your competitors on Google, Yahoo, Blogs, and other key channels like Web 2.0, SEO, PPC, Social News, Blogs and much more.

Click on the links, the tools rock.

Online Reputation Management

Good for companies, good for politicians