Enjoy!

Warning Signs

Broken English
Broken English in a provider’s ad, pitch, or website doesn’t necessarily mean that their service is sub-par but more often than not this seems to be the case. The main concern would be that this provider is probably going to be working on your title tags, descriptions, URL structure, content, etc. They will be doing things and stuff to your site that require an intimate knowledge of the English language. They’ll need to be able to do appropriate keyword research and determine what keyword phrases are going to be most beneficial to your business. This would go for any strategy or campaign that has to do with content or keyword research, especially PPC.

“We will submit your site to over 500 search engines!”
Wherever you just saw this – run, run away! There are many crappy programs out there that will auto-submit a domain to hundreds of search engines. Many hacks think or want you to think that there’s value in this when there’s none. The only search engines that people care about and use is Google, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian). You don’t have to submit your domain to these engines in order for them to find you. The more links you have pointing to your domain the easier it will be for them to realize your domain exists.

“We’ll get you to rank #1 in Google!”
If you’re niche is incredibly unusual and there’s not a lot competition this may be true but more often than not, this is complete and utter BS. Due to high competition, more authoritative domains and their age, the chances of your domain ranking 1st for ‘widgets’ is highly unlikely. Not to mention Google cycles its results, provides you with results based on your individual search history, serves results based on the geo-location of your IP address, throw in about 200 other variable ranking factors and you get tailored SERPs. This isn’t to say that they can’t be (to a degree) leveraged in your favor but that takes a lot of time and a lot of careful and expert link building (among other strategies). An experienced and advanced search marketer would never tell you that they could get you to rank 1st in Google for your term. Expect an evaluation of your domain and its niche and then expect your potential search marketer to give you realistic expectations of what they can achieve.

“Let us handle your link exchange program!”
Ugh, if anyone touts this as an important aspect of a campaign then they’re way off base. Some people today still think that exchanging links has a great amount of value and granted link building in general does but the simple fact that your link is on their domain and their link is on yours doesn’t mean much. What it probably means is that you’re participating in the outdated mentality that exchanging links is a great SEO strategy. It’s a waste of time and you’ll want to avoid anyone selling this technique.

Sites or places to Avoid When Searching for an SEO/SEM provider

Craigslist
Every once in a while you can find a legitimate and experienced person posting on here and if you do find someone good, chances are they’ll be relatively inexpensive in comparison to the larger firms or more well known folk. However, about 90% of the postings on here are by inexperienced providers who will probably end up damaging your domain and will take your money in exchange for little value.

A Search Engine’s Paid Search Ads
If a search marketing company has to pay their way to make a dent in the SERPs then how are they going to provide any real value to your business? Specifically search for the services you’re looking for and browse through the listings. Note that there are many companies listed in the organic SERPs that are using unfavorable techniques to gain visibility for general terms like ‘seo services’. Get as detailed as possible in your search and the chances of you finding someone who meets your needs will be more likely.

Low Grade Directories
There are hundreds of thousands of low grade directories out there and just about anyone can submit their website to them. Trusted directories are usually hand edited, have good, reliable content, and do not require a submission fee. Directories you can trust would be DMOZ, Yahoo’s Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, and the Librarian Internet Index.

Some Good Places to Look for an SEO/SEM Provider

SEMPO
SEMPO stands for Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. There are hundreds of search marketing companies listed here and most are well-known, reputable firms. You can search for providers using a few different filters, including a search within your geographic area.

PubCon, SMX, or SES Speakers
These are industry conferences that are held all the time in various locations nationally and overseas. Visit the conference websites and see who’s been speaking and in what capacity. If you’re interested in hiring someone who specializes in viral content, check out the session details of past conferences and see who’s talking. If you find someone but there’s no contact info listed just Google them. You’ll be sure to find their domain and contact information.

Sphinn
I hesitate to suggest Sphinn since there is a lot of misinformation and gaming happening here but there’s also a lot of really good and reputable people who participate. If you go to Sphinn and click on the Network tab and then Hot Spinners tab you can see the popularity percentage of user submissions. I’d say about 95% of the people listed here are very good at what they do. If you click on their usernames you can access their contact information. Send them an email or IM and see what happens. If they don’t provide the services you’re looking for I’m sure they’ll know someone who does.

Word of Mouth and Referrals
It’s always good to ask people you know. Most of the big players in this industry don’t do any advertising because they don’t have to. They’ve worked with enough happy clients and have received enough attention to get client inquiries on a regular basis. Send out an email to friends and family and see if they know of anyone. If they do reply back, Google the person’s name to see what you can find. If they’re experienced they should have a website, their name should be associated with or mentioned on other domains or social sites, and they should be able you provide you with a list of references.

Sigh…

This post is being written to help explain search engine optimization services, search engine marketing services, and the implemented tactics and strategies that go with them so we can hopefully put some of these reactions to bed. I want to help educate and make everyone’s lives a little easier. So here are a list of non-Wikipedia sites that have great glossaries on terms pertaining to search engine optimization, marketing, tactics, and general jargon. I did consider writing out these definitions here but why rehash what so many others have done so well. My favorite finds were:

SEOBook
Aaron continues to successfully build his mini-empire and I was not surprised to find this amazingly thorough glossary attached to his domain. He just about covers everything here. Quite a task and accomplishment.

SEMPO
SEMPO has a great glossary in their learning center. This one is a little more concise in terms of tech talk.

SEOmoz
Who doesn’t love these guys right? They have a page from their YOUmoz section that has a nice write-up of SEO jargon provided by David LaFerney

Webmaster World
Here is a nice user contributed list of various terms. The date range on the posts here is from July 2007 – August 2007 so it may be a little outdated. As you could imagine the total definition list isn’t really organized/alphabetized so you may have to browser search your sought phrase.

Besides Wikipedia these were the four best resources I could find. If you know of any others please submit them in the comments below.

Now let’s have a little fun. Let’s see how each glossary defines a certain term. How about social media?

SEOBook
Define: Social Media

“Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.”

SEMPO
Define: Social Media

“Sites where users actively participate to determine what is popular.”

SEOmoz
Define: Social Media

“Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.”

Webmaster World
Social Media not defined

I think I like David LaFerney’s from YOUmoz the best.

Need SEO, SEM, or Social Media help? Hire Squareoak!

Contents
SEO Checklist
A: Homepage
B: Site
C: External

SEO Checklist
A1: Homepage – www.domain.com
1. Check for redirects and canonicalization issues
2. Choose http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com
3. Redirect domain.com/(index|main).(html|htm|php|cfm|asp) to domain.com

Apache redirects and editing .htaccess files:
domain.com to www.domain.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

A2: Homepage – Navigation
1. Check for image, drop downs, javascript, image maps vs text navigation. Text is the best option.

A3: Homepage – Content
1. How much text is present? The more the better.
2. Check for keyword density in homepage content
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
3. Check for use of H2 tags and bold fonts (light/appropriate use is good on keywords)
4. There should be a sitemap present
5. Do a select all (ctrl + A) to find potentially hidden text
6. Check to see how search engines will view your site with SEO Browser. Make sure everything is crawlable.

B1: Site – Meta Tags
1. Check Title tags. Are they using keywords and are formatted correctly?

Brand authority formatting:
Brand Name or Domain | Keyword, Keyword & Keyword

Non brand authority formatting
Keyword, Keyword & Keyword | Brand Name or Domain

2. Check Descriptions for keywords and composition. Make sure the description gets to the point and speaks to the purpose/content on its respective page in the first couple sentences.

3. Make sure the keyword tag contains around 5 – 10 keywords. No more or less is really necessary.

4. Make sure there are no duplicate meta tags anywhere, site wide.

B2: Site – URL Formatting
1. Check url formatting. Dynamic URLs are bad. URLs that are too long will be truncated in Google SERPs.
2. URLs should contain keywords separated by hyphens.
3. Hyphens are more preferable than underscores
4. Keywords in URLs should match the content contained within the page they are leading to.

B3: Analytics
1. Make sure you have some sort of analytics installed. It doesn’t have to be Google analytics but do remember that every page within the site should contain the analytic tracking code.

B4: Site – Links
1. Links should contain keywords
2. Links should contain titles utilizing keywords
3. Anchor text, link keywords, link title, and page being linked to should be relevant to one another.
4. Site linking structure should be cyclical. There should be no dangling pages.
5. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links

B5: Site – nofollows (advanced)
1. nofollow TOS, Privacy Policy, or other pages that don’t contribute to your site’s ranking.
2. If you know how to link funnel correctly this should be done. I haven’t written anything on this yet but you can consult Slightly Shady SEO or Andy Beard

B6: Site – Robots.txt
1. Check for robots.txt file. Does one exist?
2. See what’s being blocked and what’s not.
3. Make sure it’s written correctly (consult Sebastian’s Pamphlets for best advice)

B7: Site – Duplicate Content
1. Make sure there is no duplicate content within your site
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content on other domains. You can use CopyScape to check for dupe content.

B8: Site – PDF files
1. Does this site contain PDF files? If so these can be optimized with new titles, keywords, and comments. Use Adobe Acrobat Professional to edit PDFs.

B9: Site – Images
1. Images can have ALT tags. Make sure to utilize these appropriately with keywords. When implemented, your site may gain traffic from image search engines like Google Image Search.

C1: External – Indexation
1. Perform a site:domain.com search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Compare what’s being indexed and what isn’t.
*Install FireFox Extension Search Status by Craig Raw
You’ll be able to easily perform this operative plus many other functions with the Search Status plugin.

C2: External – Backlinks
1. Perform a backlink count with the Search Status plugin.
2. You may also want to install Joost de Valk’s backlink checker plugin for FireFox to check the anchor text of your Backlinks within Yahoo Site Explorer or Google’s Webmaster tools.

So that’s about all I can think of for the time being. If I forgot anything please submit your additions to this checklist in the comments below.

Need SEO, SEM, or Social Media help? Hire Squareoak!

With all that’s happening with the economy as of late I’ve been very interested to learn how the current and future economic state will affect the search marketing industry. The guest economist is a good friend (featured on the Squareoak blog before) who is an economic consultant for a research firm in New York City.

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.

My Pleasure

I’d like to pick your brain about how the economy’s downturn might affect the search marketing industry. Year to date, Google’s stock is down, Yahoo is laying off between 10 and 20 percent of its staff…things seem to be happening that would indicate an economic recession. As search marketers, what do you think would be the best indicators to look at in order to best gauge how our industry is going to perform?

I would expect that search marketing would fit general advertising trends, at least to some extent. It’s expected that advertising will trail the economy in a recession: advertising budgets are usually committed in advance, companies don’t want to cut back on advertising and decrease their sales unless it’s clear that consumer spending is going to be less responsive to advertising, and they’re not likely to make big moves on their advertising budgets until they feel the effects of decreased revenues. Search marketing isn’t exactly like other advertising, however. Search marketing seems a little more essential than a huge Superbowl ad, for one. Also, search marketing — just because of the nature of the internet — can be more international than other advertising, so it might be less affected by a US recession. But it is certainly not immune — and when consumers stop buying as many goods online and companies don’t have the money to spend on campaigns anymore, search marketers are sure to feel that.

So say the economy is totally screwed and we are in fact going into a recession. Do you have any advice on how to protect ourselves?

Well let’s first back up to how that would even affect you. A lot of people will speculate on it — but to find out with a little more specificity, you’d want to regress, or find the correlation, between overall advertising budgets and various economic indicators we’re seeing now — consumer goods (particularly non-essential goods), changes in the Dow, the consumer price index, even what people call “leading indicators” like Starbucks revenues (supposedly go down before a recession) or lipstick sales (supposedly go up in a recession because they’re a small indulgence). Once you predict where advertising is going in general, then you want to find trends in online advertising as a part of those overall budgets — if online advertising is growing as a percentage of overall ad spending, then search marketers are much less likely to feel the recession than print media, for instance. Basically, that’s what you want to focus on — showing that returns per dollar spent on search marketing are larger than those for print media — and that those returns are less elastic, or responsive, to overall changes in consumer spending. Furthermore, you’d want to show your customers that search marketing is a necessary cost of doing business – just as important as any of their fixed costs. People aren’t going to take down their company website during a recession unless they’re bankrupt. If people believe that showing up in a search query is just as important as having the website in the first place, they’re not likely to cut down on those budgets.

Also, you could seek out customers in recession-proof industries. These are often thought to include health care, pharmaceuticals, groceries, utilities, and even “necessary vices” like cigarettes and alcohol (but I’d seek out Miller, not Krug)

So for the most part you’re saying that our industry is probably ok? Or at least less susceptible than other advertising channels.

I would think that it should be less susceptible than other advertising channels, but even very recent history reminds us that internet companies like Yahoo are certainly not recession-proof. Nevertheless, there are certainly equity analysts like Piper Jaffray on your side, who say that online advertising should be immune to a recession.

That’s a relief. I just hope I won’t have to get into online lipstick sales [smile]

Another boost to you is that people will be spending a lot on online advertising for the upcoming elections.

This is true…

Looking at Techcrunch today…there is a lot of VC dollars being thrown around. One acquisition includes that of Cleverset for $10 million to Art Technology Group which is an e-commerce software company. If there are people making large investments in e-commerce then I should hope that the online economy has a slightly different agenda.

Certainly. Analysts and investors certainly seem optimistic about online advertising and business, which means that dollars are more likely to be coming your way — but that said, this is a sector that we’ve had little time to observe in terms of how it responds to macroeconomic shocks. Analysts certainly miscalculated the future of wild growth in Silicon Valley. This doesn’t mean that online advertising will follow a similar path, but it does reinforce that a lot of this is pure speculation. Nevertheless, the forecast is good.

So turning back to the US economy as a whole, what are some other economic indicators to look out for? Starbucks sales should drop and lipstick sales go up? What else?

Well, the Conference Board follows an index of leading indicators that are supposed to predict where the US economy is headed. They found that this past December, four of the ten indicators increased: namely, were vendor performance, real money supply, stock prices and manufacturers’ new orders for consumer goods and materials. However, 6 of the ten took a turn for the worse: were building permits, average weekly manufacturing hours, manufacturers’ new orders for nondefense capital goods, average weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance (inverted), index of consumer expectations, and the interest rate spread.

Historically, are presidential elections seen to hurt or help the economy?

The effect of presidential elections on the economy is not uniform, but a study published in the Journal of Financial Research in 2006 finds that in elections that do not have one dominant candidate, stock market volatility (risk) and average returns rise. Also, special interests play a role in elections, and candidate-favored businesses or firms are likely to do better (or worse) based upon polls and eventually, the outcome of an election. I would imagine that if the population considers that the incoming president had a strong economic policy, there would be a short-term positive effect on the economy as a whole and consumer spending. Long-term, any changes would depend on the actual efficacy of the president’s policies. Researchers are puzzled, however, by the fact that the excess return in the stock market is higher in Democratic than in Republican presidencies, which is not explained by business-cycle variables.

I’m not as familiar with how elections affect the economy once it already seems headed for recession — even if there is a significant effect, I’m not sure how long-term this would be. This 2008 election will certainly be driven by economic factors. That’s clear just from hearing the debates so far. People are very concerned about spending policies, balancing the budget, social security, and protectionist/free trade policies.

Well with all that has been said it’s comforting to learn that our industry is more impervious than others when it comes to economic recession. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about this today.

My pleasure. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. [smile]

As will I [smile]

Also, not everyone (silver surfers) are up-to-date with the whole RSS thing and still do everything via email. Feedburner can allow your visitors to subscribe via email. You can specify when they get your emails, what the subject or title says, and even brand them by inserting your own logo. This is quite a fantastic service that’s easy to implement all while saving time and money by circumventing older email campaigning services.

Don’t forget to activate these great (not to mention free) services. Your blog will love you for it!

So my question is, how could this be applied to SEO, SEM, SMO, marketing or online sales in general? One thing you could do is create content or an affiliate program based on the most popular names in English speaking countries. While doing a quick search on most popular US names, this is what comes up as the top five for boys and girls from 1960 – 1990:

The five most popular names of the 1960’s were:
Boys: Michael, David, John, James, Robert
Girls: Lisa, Mary, Susan, Karen, Kimberly

The five most popular names of the 1970’s were:
Boys: Michael, Christopher, Jason, David, James
Girls: Jennifer, Amy, Melissa, Michelle, Kimberly

The five most popular names of the 1980’s were:
Boys: Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, David
Girls: Jessica, Jennifer, Amanda, Ashley, Sarah

The five most popular names of the 1990’s were:
Boys: Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, Jacob
Girls: Jessica, Ashley, Emily, Sarah, Samantha

So from this data we could surmise that THE most popular names of children born between 1960 – 1990 start with the letters (M, J, S, A, K).

There are loads of successful ad campaigns that happened when these children became old enough to becoming consumers. Let’s look at some successful ad campaigns from the 1970’s –2000’s that start with or contain the letters (M, J, S, A, K):

Alka-Seltzer, 1970’s
Miller Lite Beer, “Tastes great, less filling”, 1974
Burger King, “Have it your way”, 1973
American Express, “Do you know me?”, 1975
Chanel, “Share the fantasy”, 1979
AT&T, “Reach out and touch someone”, 1979
Molson Beer, Laughing Couple, 1980s
U.S. Army, “Be all that you can be”, 1981
Absolute Vodka: Absolute Bottle, 1981
Apple Computer “1984”, 1984
Levi Jeans, “501 blues”, 1984
Bartles & Jaymes, “Frank and Ed”, 1985
Saturn, “A different kind of company, A different kind of car.”, 1989
California Milk Processor Board, “Got Milk?”, 1993
ESPN Sports, “This is SportsCenter”, 1995

Obviously we would need better data than this to see a relationship between sales and a correlation between the first letter of someone’s name and the products or services they choose to purchase. Based on the data from Newsweek I’d be willing to bet that this information could prove useful for marketing but I don’t think I’m ready to start selling services or writing content whose names or titles only begin with (M, J, S, A, K). However, please note the spelling of the Newsweek article’s title. Think that was intentional?

There are four services that I’ll talk about today but not it great detail. We’ll just get to the meat…do they allow linking or do they not. My all-time personal favorite and relatively new contender in this arena is Fluther. Fluther has a great GUI and is easy to navigate. All links can be followed and since this service is relatively new, the odds of establishing yourself as an authority within your chosen topic are pretty good. My second favorite is LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn Answers has a great question and answers section where the links are again followable. Of course the subject matter is more career oriented but sometimes there are questions that can benefit from a response that both answers the question and helps to promote your marketing efforts. Thirdly there’s Yahoo! Answers. A massive collection of questions and answers on just about any topic. Unfortunately all links are nofollowed so you’ll just have to rely on the link juice from this service. Fourth is Say-So. Say-so is a weird little Q&A service where you can vote on an answer to a question and then add your two cents about it. All comments are stripped of any HTML but you can textually represent links resulting in a direct visit.

Recap:
Fluther: links followed
LinkedIn Answers: links followed
Yahoo! Answers: nofollow
Say-so: no links period

If anyone knows of other good answering services please let the community know!