Wingnut SEO

2007 marked the rise to god-like popularity for social networks. Starting in late ’06 with a deal ranging in the billions of dollars when Google acquired YouTube to the hundreds of million’s invested into Facebook just a few months ago – it is clear that being social is big business.  Social networks are so popular that even the porn industry has gotten in on the action with Penthouse dropping $500 million into acquiring several dating social networks. These absurd amounts of money have caused the world to take notice.

 Social sites are popping up everywhere.  You can find them for just about every niche group there is.  There are social networks for music junkies, car enthusiasts, bargain hunters, tech people, book lovers, marketers, religions, and everything else.

 This, in turn, has and will continue to cause a radical shift in how online marketing and search in general is done now and in the future.  As little as just five years ago there were only a handful of well known ways to go about promoting a website and gaining traffic – SEO, PPC, link buying/banner placement, and the infancy of the social networks – forums and personal blogs. 

With the rise in modern social networks, however, it has opened the lines of communication from marketers to consumers and consumers to marketers in never before seen proportions.  This has unleashed an array of viral marketing campaigns, corporate blogs, and link baiting tactics that would have been nearly impossible in the past.

These new practices have caused online marketers to build reputations on networks such as Digg or StumbleUpon for the sole purpose of being popular enough to send thousands of unique visitors to a website with the single click of a button or a few lines of a written review.  This is no easy power to obtain but there is obvious value for companies to have people like this on their side.

Further changes to the state of search and the rise of social media in the near future include sites like Mahalo that continue to gain popularity and more users each day.  These sites are giving the power of search results to the people, by letting them submit like, find useful or think should rank more highly.

As this trend in social networks and social search continue the general population may one day inevitably turn away from the faceless Googles and Yahoos in favor of more reliable search from the people they or their friends trust. 

In essence that is what all the social networks are about - trust.  Something that the major search engines are losing as the general population starts to understand what sponsored links are and how easy it is to game the system to place a spam site at the top of the search results pages.  At the same time people are growing more wary of the search engines tendency to data-base everything they do for unknown (potentially sinister?) purposes.

In 2008 social networks will continue to gain steam with the general populace and with them more corporations will see the value in being a part of the social world through blogging and/or hiring people to become leaders in various social networks.

What the end result of these social networking and search trends will mean to the SEO and online marketing world is, as of now, uncertain. One thing you can count on, however, is that it will be very interesting to watch how the major search engines react to this fundamental change in how people find content online.  

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything (he says as he declares RSS bankruptcy after a long holiday and can finally breath again.)

Here I am sitting in front of a computer after a long break, staring at the screen trying to figure out what I’m doing. What great posts did I miss? What sites can’t I live without? What book marks should I get rid of? What the hell has the SEM world done in the last year - how it is going to change in the next 12 months? What sites should I be parking for 2008?

I look forward to the year ahead - but at the same time it is terrifying. Looking at the mountain of work that sits in front of me… praying one of my hair-brained web ideas that I have been half-cooking will go huge and I can just sit and do nothing… except maybe two chicks at the same time.

To make things less scary one needs a plan. My plan for this new year is in the works - It involves actually following through on great ideas that I am too lazy to do anything about.

Take things one day at a time - do what you love - and the rest will all fall into place.

Happy New Years everyone - I promise to write something less personal with more useful information next time - And hopefully a couple of the bad links I put in will become real pages very soon.

Finally someone else has said it.  I mean I have been shouting this from the rooftops for a while now but I never thought I’d be taken seriously.   No longer will I sit alone at the lunch table crying silently into my milk carton.

Now that I’m totally justified by calling myself famous I’d like to turn your attention to a cause that I feel very connected to.  One that, through the past decade and a half, has helped Ethiopian babies or something.  It’s called the Columbo award (better known as The Rubber Chicken.) This award, my friends, is pretty much just voting for your favorite blogger in a popularity contest style rampage.

Just click 5 for my post “Want Traffic?  Rank for High Traffic keywords“  and 1 for everyone else.  Who are these guys anyway?  They clearly are not as famous as me.  If you’d like to read the others the list is as follows

• We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them
• Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs
• SEOs home alone - Google’s nightmare
• 13 Things to Do When Your Loved One is Away at Conferences
• SEO High School Confidential - Premiere Edition!
• The Sphinn Awards - Part I & -Part II.
• Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2007 version)
• 10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
• The SEO’s Guide to Beginners
• The Internet Marketer’s Nightmare
• Mission Accomplished — Top Ranking in Google
• Google Interiors - the day my house became searchable

Thanks to everyone for reading :)  Also, these writers above are pretty great and it’s an honor to be mentioned with them.

If you want to read more about the Rubber Chicken Award head on over to Mike Blumenthal’s great site.

I like milwaukee coffee.  It is good.  Milwaukee coffee is all about the coffee and not about Milwaukee.  It is delicious and not bad.  Milwaukee coffee is my favorite thing there is.

*Note to my readers - Just trying something that involves the competitive nature of keywords “Milwaukee coffee”

There has been some talk recently about why a career in SEO is a bad move and why it’s a good move.

This got me thinking about the past three months of my moving from the freelance to corporate SEO world. What started out as a personal rant on the matter (or more of a vent of frustrations about my experiences) has turned into a list of the bad and the good about working for a company - it may be able to help people decide.

If you have to make the decision to take a full time corporate SEO job here are some things to think about.

THE BAD:

• No longer do you get to pick and choose your clients
• Clients come because of the company, not you or your skills (who are you?)
• Suggestions made are not always heard or are filtered through someone else
• When you suggest a total site redesign or major overhaul it is seen as a sales pitch and often ignored
• Promises can be made on your behalf without asking you about it
• Showing value or explaining what was done or why rankings have been going down due to poor work someone else did (when put on a client that was there before you)
• 9 to 5 (You have to be somewhere at some point)

THE GOOD:

• You know where your paycheck is coming from
• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Other benefits such as possible phone, laptop, parking space, free conferences/business trips, company parties
• You no longer have to actively seek clients - Joys of a sales team
• The people you meet - I work with some awesome and brilliant people in their fields - Amazing connections that I would likely not have had
• You get to work with larger clients and accounts that you probably would not have been able to land on your own
• 9 to 5 (You get to stop working at some point)

Hope it helps.

So I haven’t actually written about SEO in quite a while and a few of my readers (well, one really - and no, It wasn’t my Mom) have expressed concern that my SEO blog is losing focus and turning into a Social Media blog. This is true, I have been addicted to social media - and the first step to fixing an addiction is to admit your problem. My name is Dave, and I am a social media addict.

Anyway, on to SEO.

I was recently asked this question - “What are the first things you look at, on a website, when you start a new SEO project”

Great question, I actually have a mental checklist - That I will now turn into a physical one for you. My first glance is generally for technical issues that can be fixed quickly without much effort and generally my first first steps to any SEO project (keyword research not included.)

• Useless Meta-tags - Get rid of them.
• 301 Redirect - to “www” or not to “www” (example.com or www.example.com)
• 404 Pages - Try example.com/thispageisnotherebecauseitshouldbea404 - if a 404 message doesn’t come up something is wrong.
• Robots.txt - Make sure it doesn’t block things that it shouldn’t LIKEWISE make sure it blocks things that it should (TOS, user logins, privacy policy, ect - unless these things are original and fun and you want them indexed)
• Make sure no duplicate content issues - such as examplesite.com and examplesite.com/homepage being the same
• Are internal links maximized? Anchor text uses natural language that describes what it links to rather than “CLICK HERE” or “MORE”
• Heavy Java script at the top? Can it be externalized? Can it be moved down?
• Image Alt tags - use them

And that’s it - Of course there is much more to the SEO process, but as a first glance these are the things I notice. I will probably expand this list in a future post - to outline the entire process - as there is more to what I see right away, but I was trying to make this a simple/quick checklist.

Ripkanpitztickle was a funny man. He wanted me to see how quickly my blog is indexed. So I am writing this story about Ripkanpitztickle so I can rank for his name, that name being Ripkanpitztickle. If only he were real.

Post from yesterday -  2 links from this blog - and my spyware site is ranking for the keywords I wanted - page one.

Lessons learned:
1.) Blogs get spidered very quickly
2.) URL is very important if you are trying to rank for a specific keyword.  Duh.

1. Content – Make sure that the most important keywords are in the first 250 words of the story if possible, content is king.

2. Title Tag – Make sure there is a title that uses the important keywords for that story or page

3. Description Meta Tag – Make sure there is a good description tag for every new page. Make it keyword heavy and still easy for humans to read and understand what the page is about.

4. URL of Page – If possible make sure new page URL contains most important keywords – not just numbers. (like this blog… I’ll change that one day)
   

5. H1 Tags – Make sure the <h1> tag is being used for story titles.

6. Keywords Meta Tag – Although the keywords tag isn’t weighted as heavily in Google, many search engines still take these into account so it does not hurt to have them.

7. Social Media – Submit content to Digg, Stumble, Reddit or other social media sites in your niche. Using “link baiting” titles and short descriptions when submitting.

Taking a page out of the MMORPG china farmers handbook for success in business I present to you an idea that - if not already being done, I have not heard of it (if you have please let me know and I’ll take this post down) - this will soon be something that will start happening.

Social Media Avatar POWER LEVELING!

That’s right, I fear in the near future we should expect to see people building their living on gaining (then selling) popularity in the social media circles - making up “characters” and building huge friend lists that include A-List social media giants - to sell later on for someone to take over.

How will we even know? As long as the person who buys it isn’t an idiot, and tries (even just a little) to speak in the same tone as the character that was built up.

The reasons to buy a popular character is clear in MMORPG’s - PHAT LOOTS.

The same is turning true for popular avatars in social media circles. How much more often to you click on an article Sphunn by DoshDosh, TheNanny612, or aimClear?

If you could buy their avatar/persona and were able to keep in character when posting to a social media site how much traffic could you get? Probably a lot. The question is - How much is that worth? Again, probably a lot (depending on your business)

Would farming this kind of reputation be hard to do? Not really. You could have 7-9 different profiles pretty easy (that is to say without trying very hard/putting more than 2 hours a day into it) depending on the social media site you are on.

Since you are out there reading the blogs so you can comment about them - and already reading the comments other people are making so you can get involved in the community - it really wouldn’t be too complicated to game the system this way. Hell you could even start conversations and reply to yourself. (I suppose having multiple personalities IRL would help)

Actually…If I had the time/no conscience I’d start doing this.