David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

In my review of the “Free Traffic System” (FTS), I recommended spinning manually your articles before submitting them through FTS or through any other article submission program. And I promised to share with you some advance spinning tips. This blog post is divided into two parts:

1. Why manual spinning is superior to an automated spinning program.

2. Exactly what to do to manually spin an article – my advanced spinning tips.

For those who are new to this topic, let me quickly review what spinning is. Those already in the know can skip to the first sub-heading below.

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.

The sentence above is, technically, four different sentences. When this sentence is fed through an article submitter that recognizes spin code (This is the particular syntax used in FTS, but the principle is universal), it comes out as four different “unique” sentences at four different article directories or blogs:
The wonderful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get.
The wonderful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get.
The beautiful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get.
The beautiful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get.

The math is simple: two words, each with two options, creates 4 “unique” sentences. The value in this is to ensure that the hundreds of articles pointing back to your site are not duplicate content, which is supposed to be frowned upon by the search engines’ algorithms. Try this one:

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.

Two words multiplied by three options gives 6 “unique” sentences. Why do I put “unique” in quotation marks? That’s in the next section, but the theory of spinning leads to the conclusion that you are getting past whatever duplicate content filter the search engines might place on the pages linking back to your website. One more…

The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh [spin]feeling|sensation[/spin] you get. A [spin]holiday|vacation|trip[/spin] out of doors will [spin]refresh|relax|reinvigorate|benefit[/spin] you more than you can [spin]imagine|dream[/spin].

The concept of article spinning, just to belabour the point one more time, holds that just with this one paragraph spun as above, there will be 192 “unique” articles (3x2x2x2x4x2) on 192 websites, each one pointing links back to your website.

That is spinning in a nutshell.

Why bother spinning articles manually?

Before I dive into the benefits of manually spinning, as opposed to using one of the automated or semi-automated article spinners on the market, a big CAVEAT: This is a strategic issue. This is not a rule. Follow my logic, then make your decision, because there are trade-offs involved. Trade-offs of quantity versus quality. Trade-offs of long term results versus crash-and-burn-results. With a bonus of risk assessment thrown in for good measure.

Article spinning: the story so far…

A) Once upon a time, people would submit articles to the article directories. To both of them, in fact. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.

B) Then, people got smart. Because these were good links that helped sites rank better, more people started writing more articles and more article directories sprang up. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.

C) But people loved these more and more and more and more and the number of articles was multiplying and multiplying and people got even more clever and created submission software so that even more articles could be distributed in a fraction of the time. Ah, the miracle of automation.

And spammers just love miracles and they love automation. Ah, the curse of automation!

This would be a good time to refresh your memory of what search engines are all about. Which is, of course, making money. To make money, they need eyeballs. To keep eyeballs, they need lots of people really liking the search results they deliver, which is why they have meticulously crafted and carefully guarded algorithms. Do they care if people try to maipulate their results? Not really. Do they care if people succeed at manipulating their results? You bet! Let’s look at the three steps above from a search engine company’s perspective:

A) So what?

B) So what?

C) Wait a second, massive link-building can skew our results. Automation makes link-building scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.

And so, the effectiveness of duplicate content in article submissions was (as best we can determine through the observation of thousands) reduced to very little.

A) So people started manually spinning their articles to avoid duplicate content.

B) And some smart person came up with a lazy way to spin, using automation.

C) Spammers, being inherently lazy, caught wind of this as did everyone else, and now everybody is spinning their articles using automation.

And the search engines’ reactions?

A) So what?

B) So what?

C) Wait a second, massivearticle-spinning can skew our results. Automation makes article-spinning scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.

We don’t know if C) has happened yet or whether it’s on its way, but I can tell you with 99.9% certainty that it is not far away.

At this point, I know that some readers who are using automated spinning programs will dispute this, typically saying, “Well, it’s worked for me so far.” I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have heard this line about one link-building technique or another shortly before the search engines have taken step C. Before webmaster forums are filled with the gnashing of teeth from all the people whose websites lost rankings. If you want to build your rankings based on the past (as most people who call themselves “SEO expert” seem to), you can stop reading here.

What I can tell you about the past is that one pattern has proven enduring, and that is the same pattern as you will see in the stock market: when everyone is rushing to buy, that is the time to sell (before the crash). When a particular linking method becomes so scalable through automation that even the spammers are doing it, stop sinking more resources into it.

Let us look, then, more specifically at automated article spinning. It does offer a very seductive advantage over manual spinning. It can be done quickly. In fact, a typical testimonial for article spinning software would be, “It took me minutes to do what it used to take me all day.” So you can do 5-10 articles in the time it takes to do one. The advantage is quantity.

But does it give quality? The very simple spinning examples I gave above in my intro all replace single words with synonyms. Here is a screenshot pitching one popular automated article spinner program:

They create “unique” articles, but do they create unique articles. Well, I guess if you can’t find a thesaurus, they create hundreds of unique articles. But what if Google and Bing have thesauruses? What if megalithic Google’s and Bing’s computing power, funded by millions of dollars of capital, is somehow bigger than the computing power of your little $70 article spinning software? Sure, unlikely…but what if? Let’s face it, those four sentences I used as an example in my introduction are not unique – they use synonyms, but they remain the same sentence…and any algorithm drawing data from a thesaurus can see that faster than you or I can.

So quality versus quantity. And when the search engines do devalue duplicate content links with the help of a simple thesaurus, it becomes long-term results versus crash-and-burn results, as all those “unique” links you’ve built are suddenly worth less (not necessarily worhtless, but worth less).

But I also mentioned risk assessment earlier. So let’s imagine for a moment that a search engine sees that you have 573 identical articles pointing to your site. Let’s further imagine that the search engine has identified that these are not organically identical, but identical by virtue of synonym manipulation. In other words, duplicate content, disguised as non-duplicate content to try to trick the search engines. If there is one thing we know about Google (and I can only surmise it is likewise with Bing), is that is punishes blatant attempts to trick it – hidden text, doorway pages, concealed links. Perhaps also fake unique articles?

I leave it to you to determine whether Google would consider this deceptive and whether they would do something about it – whether automated article spinning is just poor quality work or whether it actually places your website at risk.

How to manually spin your article

To do what I would consider a quality spin, you need to create articles that are significantly different. By significant, I mean more than just replacing words with their synonyms. In the extreme, this means writing from scratch a brand new article for each place it appears. Yup, one for each of those 573 article directories. Look up the word “unique” in the dictionary.

For those of us who don’t have 1500 hours in a day, the extreme option is not an option. Below is my guide to what I believe is effective in creating articles that are unique, rather than just “unique” with what I view as a reasonable amount of grunt work. Who knows if I am being paranoid or just over-cautious — or perhaps I am not creating articles that are unique enough and these might still be seen as duplicate by a search algorithm. Take what you want and leave the rest.

The title is the most important part of the article to make unique, as it often appears in <title> tags, in a page’s URL, in <H> tags and in links to the page. This is the one place where I’ll sit down and write 100 options from scratch, trying for many variations of style.

Because I am partially lazy, I usually start out with a few styles, such as:

6 ways to enjoy your villa rental
Why a villa rental is tops in accommodation
Villa or hotel?
Choose a vacation villa over a hotel or motel
Six reasons villas are tops
The villa choice for luxury

Then I will rewrite each one, mixing up several elements. For instance, here are some rewrites of the first style:

Six reasons to enjoy your rental villa
Six ways to enjoy your vacation rental villa
6 reasons to enjoy your private villa rental
Six ways to enjoy your private vacation villa
6 ways to enjoy your private rental villa

The first sentence is pretty important, so I tend to write 3 or 4 versions of it in completely different styles…

When you use your credit card, it would be worth stopping to remember that credit card issuers are businesses with shareholders.

Who issues your credit card? A business, of course.

Some folks view credit card issuers almost like quasi-government institutions. Not a chance. They are businesses like any others.

Notice that I totally reworded the first sentence. Each example sets up the second sentence equally well, but notice that the three options are different length, even different number of sentences and, of course, totally different wording. These are completely unique. Mix up not just individual words, but the sentence structure itself.

Do the same for entire paragraphs. Take a paragraph, then rewrite it so that it is shorter. Then rewrite it so that it is two paragraphs. Use some of the same wording if you are feeling rushed or lazy, but remember that the more you change the better.

At least once in your article, rewrite a long paragraph as a short paragraph followed by a bullet list. It helps to create a few versions of the list, changing the order of the bullets and even removing some of them in some versions. Bullet lists are often the easiest to play around with.

When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a replacement option. For example…

When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a [spin]replacement option|replacement|replacement option in your article|replacement option, but try to add in more text so that some versions of the article are truly different and unique[/spin].

When creating options, more is better. In 5. above, the example has four options, much better than two. There is a time versus uniqueness trade-off here, but if you can create more than just two or three options, especially in the first few paragraphs, it helps make your articles more unique.

Let’s end with one of the most important places to have variation – your linked text. As much variation around your keywords as possible…but you probably already know that from other link-building efforts. Vary the actually links (link to different pages of your website in different versions, if appropriate), vary the link text, very the surrounding text and vary the order of your links (in some, the home page might be the first link, so make it the second link in others).

Nothing I have had to say here should be taken as “The Truth”. It is my best assessment of the most effective compromise between various trade-offs, based on my experience in SEO since 2003. I just hope it is helpful for people who might seek a similar balance between quantity and quality…and don’t want their “Yippee!”s turn into wailing at the next major algorithm shake-up.

We pride ourselves on offering bloggers one of the more up-to-date tools that encourages readers to social bookmark their posts. This tool is of course, TheBookMarketer.And one of the biggest changes in Social Bookmarking in the past year was the death of Propeller and the almost simultaneous arrival of OldDogg.

We are pleased to be one of the first social bookmarking tools to remove Propeller and to add OldDogg. (Are we the first? Can anybody tell me?)

Here is the code to install TheBookmarketer on your pages:

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Tomorrow we will celebrate a funeral and a baptism of sorts.  OK, perhaps “celebrating” a funeral is not the best choice of words, but today is Propeller‘s last day.  (But “celebration” is a great word for OldDogg‘s baptism!)  If you’ve been around social media for only the past couple years, you might be asking, “What is Propeller?”  and “What is the big deal”.

FIRST, the funeral…

Once upon a time, Netscape – remember Netscape, the most popular Web browser in the world until Bill Gates got it in his sights? – set up a social bookmarking service to rival Digg and Reddit.  It began to grow and looked like it might be a contender, until Netscape itself began to wither away.

Eventually, when there was not much left of Netscape, with its last dying breath (OK, it didn’t quite die, just sort of whimpered into limbo), Netscape sold its social bookmarking service to AOL.  Yay, a big, successful company to revive the still thriving but pretty-much-orphaned site.

AOL took immediate action.  It creating new branding for the site under the name of Propeller.  It gave light.  It gave hope.  It gave a spare corner of a dusty old closet in the basement.

Oops.

That was 2007, and ever since, Propeller has slowly been withering away.  Just a year ago, it would still take at least 12 votes on  bad day for a story to make the front page.  A few months ago, we started seeing  stories make the front page with a single vote.  In the past couple months, it was rare for a story to need more than one or two votes to make the front page.

Propeller was dead, but still it walked on.  Or crawled.  And tomorrow the euthenasiaists finally do their dirty work and put the zombie out of its misery.

THEN, a baptism…

For those diehard Propeller loyalists and for others seeking a place to go, a new social bookmarking website was born – OldDogg.

The “others” I am referring to are most specifically refugees form “New Digg”.  A month ago, Digg resolutely decided to ignore the lessons of Coca Cola, and launched a new version whose main intent was to pull the rug out from under the 20%-or-so of its most loyal and regular users, its very heart and soul….and give it to Big-time publishers.  

Suddenly, there was a significant group of passionate social bookmarking fans in search of a place to go.  Overnight – literally – Phil Mitchell in his UK home office (a 12 foot by 12 foot room with two monitors and a 3.5ghz 4gb ram computer) put up a brand new social bookmarking website called OldDogg.  If that was not impressive enough, for his next act he wooed the Digg refugees over.

Let’s be clear.  Old Dogg was basically a Pligg clone with some new skin.  It was – and still is – no Digg.  And many disgruntled Diggers are returning to Digg.  But Phil laboured away, coding faster than the speed of Tiger Woods at a sorority party, and the site has really come together since those early days just a month ago. 

In the first 25 days the site had clocked up over 27,000 votes and 1,500 comments.

• Diggers who are returning to Digg don’t seem to be leaving OldDogg.  At least for now, they are keeping one foot on each site.
• Every day, OldDogg is getting new members from pretty much all over the place.
• Over the past week I have seen a significant Propeller diaspora showing up.
• I should note that I see a healthy dose of my Mixx friends on OldDogg, too.

Born one month ago, it’s time to hold a baptism and say that here we have both a refuge for fed up Diggers and a homeland for lost Propellerheads (sorry).

What does the future hold for OldDogg?  It is hard to say.  It all depends on whether Phil can make it scalable.  I had given him this advice: “There are always a gazillion ways 2 improve (everything Digg used to have, I guess), but right now IMHO you need more non-power-users first.”

He seems to be doing just that, and the timing of Propeller’s funeral is a stroke of luck for OldDogg, as it has added a very active group  members.  But with more members comes the need for more complex coding (I can’t follow what my friends submit , as I can on Mixx and used to be able to on Propeller and Digg, for example).  And Phil Mitchell will need to assemble a team that is bigger than just Phil Mitchell.

These are more than the ramblings of an uneducated observer.  Unlike Phil’s instant success, I have been running Zoomit.ca totally on my spare time (exactly!), and I don’t do PHP coding (so I have to empty my pockets to make upgrades).  With time and money both in short supply, I’ve been doing a slow motion version of what he has done with OldDogg (but watch in the next couple weeks for some exciting upgrades to Zoomit.ca, too!).

From what I have seen over the past month, Phil is probably up to the task.  Keep your eyes on OldDogg; I predict it’s here to stay.

A lot of SEO specialists and webmasters frequently check their link partners for those elusive missing links. We call them “SEOthropologists”.

Many times I have seen questions posted at forums similar to…”I want to sell to these three countries.  Should I set up a domain in each country, or should I just have a different section of my website for each language?”

I know this might seem obvious, but often it is not: language and country are not the same thing.  Spanish is spoken in many countries.  English is, too.  Canada has two official languages.  There are two languages in the USA, too, even if the second one is not official.  The point being, you cannot segregate nationality on your website by language; you can segregate it only by country.

How you approach a multi-national, multilingual market will depend on a number of factors:

• Languages you can serve them in
• Countries you can ship to
• Countries you wish to target
• Currencies you can accept
• Whether you can appear local enough that a country-specific website will appear credible
• Whether you want to manage multiple websites.
• Which countries you are marketing to (read on to see what a difference this can make)

This post addresses strictly the aspects related to country domains, such as .ca for Canada or .es for Spain.

How search engines view country-specific domains

I recently wrote a guest post on whether to adopt a .ca domain for a Canadian website.  I provided examples of the advantage a .ca domain has with Google.ca rankings beyond where it would rank at Google.com.  A country-specific doain is likely the clearest signal you can send the search engines that your website relates to a specific country. There is no question that for many searches, a country-specific domain helps reach searchers in a local market.

How people view country-specific domains

Does that mean you should set up a domains with .fr, .de, .ca, .co.uk, etc. for every country you serve?  That could be an effective strategy, but there are obviously drawbacks, too.  From an SEO perspective, it is probably worth your while to have a country-specific domain for any major market. But SEO isn’t everything.  You really need to know your market and how you plan to promote your domain.  In Canada, for instance, word-of-mouth traffic, including people who hear a domain on the radio, will tend to type .com even if they hear .ca .  This even happens sometimes when they see a URL in print.  Canadians are so accustomed to websites beginning with “www” and ending with “.com”.

Not so in Europe, where people expect to see their own country domain.  In fact, in many countries the domain tells them whether they are likely to be able to read the website – whether it is even worth visiting.  For instance, wander a little around Budapest and observe how many website URLs are advertised – every one a .hu domain.

Beyond language, consider the alternative to a country-specific domain, that being every country and/or every language on a single .com site.  (Here is where it is wise to consider which markets you are addressing.)

In Latin America, .com means “international”.  There is a certain trust level that comes from dealing with a big international company that in many countries would be seen as above the local corruption.  .com is not the way to go if you wish to appear local.

In Europe, .com is very often seen as “American”.  And in Europe, that generally isn’t good.  A site likely will have a lower trust level, given the American image of being out for a fast buck.

And as I said earlier, in Canada .com is simply seen as the default for a website, just as it is in the USA.

There is no simple answer whether to choose .com or a series of country-specific domains.  Like so many things in running a business, there are many factors to consider and the final decision can be no more than a guess.  But with the information above, at least it will be an educated guess.

Once again, we’ve improved The Bookmarketer by adding four very unique social bookmarking gems: BizSugar, MMO, Tipbo and Kirtsy.

TheBookmarketer is a blogger’s best friend, making it easy for readers to spread the word about blog posts they like.  Two lines of code posted into the template for single posts, and they have instant access to post a link and recommendation to your blog on 75 websites.  In addition to popular social bookmarking websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Delicious, your blog posts can now be easily added to these four new social bookmarking gems.

BizSugar is a vibrant community of bloggers and others who share blog posts and news stories related to small business and sales.  They typically share stories related to managing a small business or freelance operation, marketing both online and off, human resources, motivation and more.  One thing that makes this a vibrant community is that submitters don’t just sub and run;  many take the time to look at others’ submissions, vote and comment.  Only small business related articles.

MMO is a young community of mostly bloggers interested in sharing tips and stories related to making money online.  Although fairly new, it is quite vibrant and for that reason has been added to The Bookmarketer.  As with BizSugar, what makes this already a vibrant community is how submitters don’t do hit-and-run submissions;  they take the time to review, vote and comment on other people’s submissions, too.  Only articles or posts related to working online, please.

Tipbo is a unique social bookmarking service.  Although it does not cover a single niche – you can submit articles about knitting, hockey, dental fillings, closing a sale, or the best way to pickle and iguana brain – it accepts only one type of article: tips and advice.  So news articles, stories, biographies, funny videos and images are all out. 

Kirtsy is also a somewhat unique social bookmarking service.  Although it accepts the full range of topics and in pretty much any form, you don’t have to be a member to vote (although only members can submit items and leave comments).  And there is no voting button.  A simple click on the title is all that is needed to vote.  In many ways, this makes it a must-use service for bloggers who can share the submission via Twitter or FaceBook.

And I should not miss an opportunity to remind you that if your blog is Canadian, you really should be submitting posts also to http://www.Zoomit.ca (and voting for other good submissions while you are there).

Believe it or not there are still some businesses – no, make that many small businesses – that have not yet grasped the importance of SEO to their profitability online.

For that reason, we have put together a white paper on why small business needs SEO.  In fact, we have taken it one step further and explained how small business can benefit from “holistic SEO”.

But don’t worry, it’s an easy read, just 10 pages with lots of graphs and charts.

To download your own copy: Why SEO?  Holistic SEO: Indispensible for your website

This being April Fool’s Day, you might be expecting me to post some kind of prank or hoax.  I don’t have a prank for you, but it might be time for a “fun” post, which hasn’t happened on this blog since Bugs Bunny came to visit a year ago.

I was recently trying to submit something to Mixx, but I kept getting that napping baby screen. 

After a while, I thought to myself, “Hey, this Mixx baby has been napping for quite a while.”  And sure enough, when I looked at the photo, I discovered that it had been napping for quite a while.  Have you ever seen a fuller diaper?

So today, I am running a photo caption contest.  Who can come up with the best caption for this photo.  I suggest you post your entry here and also at Mixx .

The rules:

1. There are no rules. 
2. The winner will be chosen totally arbitrarily based on how I feel when I choose a winner, the alignment of the stars and the percentage of starfish in the Indian Ocean who say they prefer honey to jam on their toast.
3. There is no deadline.  At some point, probably after the Easter recess, I’ll pick a winner.

The prize:

One Mixx submission.  I will submit something for you to Mixx, assuming you have something interesting (again, my arbitrary decision).  There are no guarantees implied with this prize.

With so much on the line, I hope you’ll come up with some creative and unique captions.

You can easily share this post by clicking on reTWEET this.

Comradez for social bookmarking

If you plan to promote your website and it’s great content through social bookmarking and other social media, you probably fall into two camps:

1. You submit every blog post and every article to each of 5, 10, 20 or more social bookmarking websites.  Then you leave…and show up the next time to repeat the process.  If so, you typically get a single vote (your own), driving no traffic and creating negligible ripples in the search engine rankings.
2. You submit your own content, you make friends and submit their content, you vote for and comment on others’ submissions and become an active member of the community.  If your content is good and you are a consistent friend to others, you are probably building a following and incrementally increasing your traffic.  You are also probably gaining a lot of reasonably valuable links for the search engines to include in their ranking of your website.

If you fit into the latter category, there is a fairly new service available that will help you reach a wider audience: Comradez.net.

Comradez is a social community of people who want to boost exposure to their submissions at various social bookmarking websites.  It works on what I call a non-binding reciprocity basis, which I like.

• Reciprocity, because if you ask people to vote up your submissions, you are expected to do the same for others.
• Non-binding, because nobody is checking who votes for whose submissions, so you are free to vote for the ones you like and not to vote for those you don’t. (Sorry, if I think the submission is crap, I don’t vote for it).

People are organized into groups.  For instance, if you join the StumbleUpon group, you can ask folks to ThumbsUp your blog post or article.  In the Digg group, you can ask people to digg your submission.  This is just one more way to reach other serious users of the same social bookmarking service, and expand the number of votes your submission is likely to get.  Remember that success in most things is a matter of having good substance and letting people know about it.

A few tips on how to use Comradez.

1. Fill in your complete profile.  This is the kind of place where people check you out to see what other opportunities there might be for collaborations.  Those opportunities might be guest blog post, submitting your content for you, link exchange, joint venture, etc.
2. Give first.  Like every social website, the number 1 rule is give first, then ask.  If you are about to ask for a Mixx or a Reddit, check out other people’s Mixx or Reddit requests.  Remember that you don’t have to vote for something you truly don’t like.  And you shouldn’t.  Trading votes is in fact against the terms of service of most of these websites.
3. When you post a request for support, tell us what the title and/or topic is.  Why?  Because if I see a few dozen requests in several groups I belong to, and four of them give me an idea what they are before I click, I am more likely to click on them and ignore the other 20 requests.  It’s a pretty well-proven principle that “click here” (or in this case “please Digg”) is much less effective than giving people a reason to click.  See samples below.
4. Make sure to thank the people who mentioned that they supported you.  This is networking, and in all such situations people like to be appreciated.
5. If you are worried about getting banned on Digg or any other service, you will be comforted to know that all links posted links Comradez automatically convert to bit.ly links. This includes diggbar and su.pr links.  So all the social bookmarking site sees as a referrer is a bit.ly link. You can also delete your post after members finished voting it, if you wish

Comradez should not be your only tool to expand your exposure.  Most social bookmarking websites have internal share tools, so you can share with the network you build up.  You should also use Twitter and/or FaceBook.  You should also make it easy for people to vote for your content right from your blog or article pages (We offer a free tool to make this easy: TheBookmarketer).  Comradez is a handy service that should also be part of the mix.

I don’t usually participate in memes, but this SEO FAQ meme interests me… and I hope it will interest you.  By way of introduction this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO questions you always wanted an answer to was started by Berlin-based SEO specialist, Tad Chef.  He has challenged at least 10 other SEO specialists to create FAQs that will outrank “fake” SEO FAQs for the search term SEO FAQ.

So without further ado, here are the 31 questions he proposed, with my answers inserted:

1. What does SEO stand for? Usually it stands for Search Engine Optimization, but it is often used also for Search Engine Optimizer.  This can get somewhat confusing – an SEO who practices SEO – so I prefer to call SEOs “SEO specialists”.  (Not “SEO experts”, but that’s another rant for another day.)

 

2. What is SEO? I define SEO as the combination of steps that lead to improved (higher) rankings in the search engines’ organic (non-paid) listings.

 

3. Is SEO spam, bullshit, dead etc.? No, but if you expect it to be science, you will likely think it is all of the above.  SEO is much more sport than science – multiple players competing for specific, limited rankings for each keyword.  Think about all the goes into a sports champion – drive, training, strength, agility, equipment, discipline, player size, nutrition, coaching, funding, concentration, massage therapy…  Neither the team that wins the Stanley Cup nor the athlete who brings home the gold medal for diving is tops for all these factors.  The champion is the one that assembles the best combination.  No matter how well you and your competitors do SEO, there will always be ten websites in the top ten.  No matter how poorly  you and your competitors do SEO, there will always be ten websites in the top ten.   Somebody will always be tops – in tennis, in boxing, in bowling and in SEO; you just have to be better than each of your opponents.  

 

SEO is a sport.  Just like bowling, only less dangerous.

4. Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? Because somebody else is.  Read the answer to Question #3 above.

 

5. Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Often people searching from different computers are sending different geographic data to the search engines (such as a different location for a person’s home and workplace ISP).  Or there are elements of personal search enabled.  Or your wife lives in a different time zone.

 

6. When will we see results? You start a new softball team with all rookies, no equipment, no training, no funding, no discipline, no muscles and no massage therapist.  Then you hire an experienced coach (an SEO specialist).  How long does it take to win the championship?  I have found many clients want to know exactly when they will achieve a certain position, and then they will own it.  Just as the team that stops playing baseball will fall in the standings, so too the website that stops doing SEO will fall in the rankings.

 

7. Can we rank for iPhones? Yes.  You can rank at least 2,112,888 for iphones at most search engines with very little effort.  If you want to rank #1 for iphones, you will need:

 

- lots of money

- lots of time

- lots of strategy

 

Why?  Please read the answer to Question #3 again.

 

8. Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? Yes, some countries take home Olympic medals in a wide variety of sports.  But most countries take home medals in just a few sports where they have chosen to concentrate.  In the land of Internet, deciding how big a country you are – or can realistically be – is an important strategic decision.  Indeed, if you hire an SEO specialist, he should be able to help you make that call.  Just remember, the more searches you want to rank for, and the more competitive those searches are, the deeper pockets you will need.

 

9. How much does SEO cost?  How much does a baseball coach cost?  The little league team down by the park pays their coach with a big High Five after every game.  Rumor has it the New York Mets pay theirs slightly more.  It all depends on what you are competing against, how determined or entrenched your competitors are, and how good an SEO specialist you wish to hire.

 

10. Why is SEO so expensive? It’s not.  SEO is an investment that earns you money.  But if you plan to invest just $200/month in SEO, don’t expect to see any ROI during your lifetime.

 

11. How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Just a few minutes, but really the practical answer is that it doesn’t matter.

 

12. How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.?  I can’t answer any better than Tad did in the original meme post: “You don’t submit sites to search engines these days. You link to them from already indexed sites, you ping them via blog posts and or you submit an XML sitemap.”

 

13. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? By allowing yourself to get sucked in by a scammer.  It’s actually quite easy, and really quite painless because they only fleece you for a small amount and you learn such a valuable lesson.

 

14. Do I need an XML sitemap? Most sites do not.  Generally, only sites with thousands of pages spread multiple levels deep really need them.

 

15. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Meta tags have nothing to do with SEO, unless you need to instruct the search engines not to index or to follow a certain page (which is better done via a robots.txt file). Meta tags are still a good idea  (to increase click-through rates, to get listed in some directories, etc.), but they are not a requirement for SEO.

 

16. Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? The tighter the competition for your searches, the more important every factor is, including a high PageRank and the size of your site (I added site size for the benefit of visitors from Question 27).  Please reread the answer to Question #3. PageRank is one factor, probably a fairly important one, but there are many others that are extremely important, too.  (Related post on why PR0 links are sometimes worthwhile)

 

17. What is linkbait? It is any content you put on your site in the hopes that some other websites will link to it.  Interesting history about this.  The proper name for it is “magnetic content”, a name I gave to it before someone more famous than me started calling it link-bait and now I won’t get the movie rights.

 

18. Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? Absolutely.  Why just last week I asked my brother-in-law, the plumber, to flush out my arteries.

 

19. Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Absolutely.  Why just last week I asked my brother-in-law, the plumber, to flush out my arteries.

 

20. Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? You really are not getting this, right?  SEO is a specialty that requires both planning in advance and judgment calls on the fly.  I have seen situations where any of these people have made unfortunate judgment calls that have gotten websites banned from Google or Yahoo because they thought they knew SEO (In fact, they did know SEO, or at least 20% or 30% of it, and a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.).

 

21. Why should I outsource my SEO? It’s pretty much a full-time job to keep up on the changing landscape of the web.  Outsourcing or having a dedicated in-house team are your best two options.

 

22. Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? Can’t I just buy good hockey equipment for my team?  Please, please reread Question #3..

 

23. Does Google hate SEO?  I like Tad’s answer in the original meme post, so this is what he said: “No, Google even offers SEO advice and a plethora of SEO tools itself. It’s an ages old myth that Google fight SEOs. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners. Most SEO companies are big clients of Google as they also buy PPC ads from Google.”

 

24. Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? First, what Tad said: “Some people still assume that SEO is used to please search bots only. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for users.” Next, let me add that an important part of SEO these days is drumming up interest in your content so that you get talked about on blogs and in social media (and in offline media).  While speaking to the search engines’ algorithms is crucial, you ignore human beings at your peril.  You might also want to refer to my SEO thesaurus post.

 

25. Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? I consider them all black hat, except buying links.  I very rarely recommend purchasing a link, partly because the “purchase” is in fact a rental.  And partly because the search engines frown on it, which is a bone I have to pick with the search engines (but that’s another rant for another day).

 

26. Is black hat SEO legal? Yes.  So are evil-looking smiles and teensy-weensy fine print.  I don’t practice black hat SEO because I value my clients’ long-term welfare, but it’s not illegal.

 

27. Does site size matter? Yes.  See the answer to Question 16 for elaboration.

 

28. Do domain extensions (top level domains  like .com, co.uk) matter? For the most part, I do not believe TLDs make a difference.  But if your business targets the clientele of a certain country, they do.  I have a number of Canadian clients, and having a .ca TLD makes a big difference ranking at Google.ca .  TLD matters even more for increasing your click-through rate. If you plan to serve Hungarians, you had better have a .hu TLD, or you won’t get anyone to even click on your site.  In Latin America, .com often says “impressive and credible International website”; in Europe .com often says ‘Yuck, an American site.”

 

29. Do nofollow links count? Yes, they count less than DoFollow links because they don’t pass on PageRank.  PageRank is something, but it is not everything.  Please refer to the answer to Question 16 and also to this NoFollow/DoFollow post.

 

30. Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? No.  Why not re-read the answer to Question 13?

 

31. Is blog commenting for SEO spam? This has been debated widely and bloggers are all over the map on this.  On my blog, I look almost exclusively at the quality of the comment and what it adds to the conversation.  Only if the comment is borderline will I consider whether the name makes the comment spammyish or not (So John Block has a better chance of having his comment approved than John the Florida Villas Guy, but if he makes a really great contribution to the discussion, John the Florida Villas Guy is welcome here) .

One final note…if others in this meme wish to link to this page, please do so and let me know, so I can also link back to your answers and connect the meme participants.  SEO is not a science, so there are certainly many items where different specialists will offer different strategies and therefore different answers to a number of these questions.