The SEO Girl

Over the last few weeks there’s been a bit of debate in the corporate side of the company I dwell at over the importance of establishing PageRank as a measure of SEO success. PageRank certainly has its place in our industry, but I’m more of the “establish a desired increase in non-paid search engine traffic/keyword traffic” as a success metric. Here’s my reasoning, in a nutshell:

• PageRank is great when determining the quality of a site to connect with for link building or checking out how your competitors are fairing, but a high/low PageRank doesn’t necessarily translate into increased traffic/revenue. A website thrives or dies by the amount of traffic coming to it, and focusing on PageRank, a metric that doesn’t have an exact correlation, just doesn’t make sense to me.
• I’ve had instances where I’ve checked a client’s PageRank only to see it giving me a “0″ PageRank when a day ago it was a “4″. The next day, back to a “4″. With a metric ultimately controlled by Google and so accustomed to variances, it’s just not reliable.
• A high PageRank can be the reward of a great SEO campaign, but not the “end result” a site owner wants to see. As a site owner, you want more people coming to your site as a result of the fruits of your SEO labor, not just an uptick on a tiny green bar.
• You’ve spent time creating a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website, with valuable resources and interesting information on the site. You’ve also spent considerable time in drumming up the site’s grand opening by syndicating press releases, buying ad space, and using social media effectively. You get thousands of visitors the first month the site is up, yet your PageRank continues to be “0″. Other sites in your industry have much more antiquated, difficult to navigate websites, yet have a higher PageRank, and their Compete.com data shows you’re in the traffic lead by a long shot. Now, how much do you care about PageRank?

I’m not discounting the validity of PageRank, I just feel its place is not as a success metric. What about you? How do you feel about using PageRank to determine the overall success of an SEO campaign – yay or no? I promise I won’t bite

Heading up a successful SEO team is no easy feat, especially in these times where clients are hesitant to spend money and tend to want to see results overnight. I’ve held a management role at the digital marketing firm I work at for the last few years, and by sticking to our motto of “Change or die”, we’ve weathered the changes in the SEO industry and the economy. We’re always a work in progress, but I’ve learned some fundamental strategies for managing an SEO team over the years.

1. “Change is the only constant” – Heraclitus: All members of your SEO team must embrace this mantra. Sure, the foundations of SEO have stuck around, but this is an industry that is constantly changing. Sticking to the old ways is going to have you losing customers and gaining a bad rep in no time.

2. Skilled Writers: It’s beneficial to have a savvy SEO programmer on your time, but the bulk of your team should be made up of proficient writers. Whether it’s scripting personalized emails to send to potential link partners or writing SEO copy for a client’s site, they need to be able to write cleanly and professionally. Never underestimate the value of a good writer.

3. Divide and Conquer: Each member of your team has their own strengths and weaknesses. Create sub-departments within your team to solely handle account management, SEO copy, social media monitoring, link building, blogging, press releases, etc. You’ll be building up your team’s confidence in their skills by giving them responsibility for their own mini-departments, and they’ll be able to focus on making their realm of SEO that much more successful.

4. Account Meetings – We hold monthly account meetings, where each client’s account team meets for a half hour, evaluates the stats for that month and develops an outline of the next month’s strategy. This ensures the team is in continual communication about how the account is doing, and we have a forum for ideas and innovation in place.

5. Client Check-in’s - You’re not going to be able to please every client, but it’s always best to take the bad with the good and welcome criticism. We check-in with each client mid-way through their contract term and send them a short survey regarding their perception of their SEO campaign’s performance, interaction with the team, and ways we can improve our relationship together. It may bring some issues to light, but knowing what you can do better with greatly strengthen your team.

These are just a few tips – feel free to share more about your experience managing an SEO team, what has worked for managing your team and ideas we can all benefit from!

I had an SEO discussion with a friend this week over a site that featured 4 “nofollow” links, and then listed those same 4 links a bit below them, “followed” this time and with relevant anchor text, instead of simply “Site.com”. My friend, who definitely knows his stuff when it comes to SEO, explained they chose this tactic so the full amount of “link juice” would only flow to the followed set of 4 links, rather than having to be split between the two sets of links. I replied that yes, the theory behind this is valid, but on a site with a grand total of 8 outgoing links, it’s a bit of a mute point, and may actually raise a spider’s suspicion, as the site is basically shouting out that they’re gaming search engines.

His perspective was that of a technical SEO specialist, mine was more of a natural, visitor-centric SEO specialist. His point is 100% correct, but in this instance, there’s no need to “nofollow” those links. If the site had 25 outgoing links and only wanted PageRank to flow through 4 of them, then the other 21 links should certainly be “nofollowed”. But not for a site with a total of 8 links.

This brings up a good point – if an SEO specialist knows the Google Webmaster Guidelines in and out and applies those principles to their client’s sites, does that make them experienced in SEO? Personally, I feel that knowing when to implement those guidelines is what really shows you know SEO. I’m always learning, but I feel it’s best to learn the technical SEO techniques, and then, and only through experience, learn why they’re beneficial to some sites and how to apply them to best benefit that individual site.

My friend has a wealth of SEO knowledge, and I do look to him for technical SEO questions. SEO duals are nothing new between us and keep us both on top of our game. The art of SEO is about gaining experience on knowing when to apply those SEO best practices, not necessarily in memorizing them.

I’ve been eating out a lot recently, and have wanted to curb my restaurant expenses a bit and more importantly, eat healthier! I’m definitely not one able to just whip up something that tastes great, and needed a little (lots of) guidance. I found Hungry Girl, Lisa Lillien’s very fun healthy eating website and two cookbooks. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Hungry Girl, and after taking a look at and buying both cookbooks, the recipes are actually healthy and pretty easy to make. I’m excited

Their site could be a bit more SEO-friendly by primarily cutting down the number of images used – it’s pretty image heavy. However, the popularity of  Hungry Girl is a lesson for other food bloggers out there, and the marketing tips encompass much more than SEO, but as we know, having a site or blog people actually want to come to, read, and tell others about and link to, can go a long way in having a very successful SEO campaign.

Timely Topics: Eating healthier is a hot topic right now, and sure, people are still hitting their local fast food joints, but healthy eating is getting more and more of the spotlight. Whether they actually cook the recipes is one thing, but searchers are looking for nutritious recipes, and posting about them is likely to get you a wider audience over time. Be sure to also post a photo and nutritional information for each recipe.

Share Your Recipes: Food blogging is much different than publishing a cookbook. Expect your recipes to be all over the Internet, and encourage your readers to share them. Have “Share This” or “Add To Any” buttons on each post to propel your readers to post your recipes on social sites or their own blog.

Give and You Shall Receive: Rather than allow your readers only a glimpse of your recipes, forcing them to blindly buy your cookbook, have a collection of full recipes available on your site or blog. There’s so many cookbooks out there, and potential buyers want to first do their homework and make sure your recipes are actually good. Post every few days with a new recipe separate from the ones in your book. This will encourage readers to buy your book for an extensive collection, and keep them coming back to your site, as well.

E-mail Marketing: The Hungry Girl has a “Subscribe” button on her site, where you can subscribe to her mailing list and receive even more great-tasting recipes! This again helps keep your blog fresh in people’s minds.

Contests: Want to increase the number of links to your food blog and increase buzz? Sure you do. E-mail your blog readers and post about a contest, such as who can create the best variation of your recipe on their own blog (linking to your blog in the post, as well), who can prepare a recipe of yours in the most entertaining way in a YouTube video, etc. Be sure to have an award for the contest, and more than likely you’ll get some exposure for having the contest.

Know Your Audience – The Hungry Girl’s audience is likely not 50-year old retirees. They know they’re targeting twenty and thirty somethings who want to eat healthy without toiling away at the stove. Select your target demographic, and make sure your cooking style and overall theme of your blog match that demographic.

Feel free to comment away with more food blogger marketing tips. Hmm, I seem a bit hungry all of a sudden, time to break out my Hungry Girl cookbook!

I encountered an issue with a client today where their site’s section pages were in JavaScript – the entire site. Search engines basically ignore JavaScript, so they’re passing over nearly ever single page on the site! Not only that, but they had just gotten a site redesign for all their sites and relied on the programmer/designer to be up on his SEO knowledge, as most site owners would, so they had just paid quite a sum of money for four sites that will barely be indexed/rank. It’s just a shame to see what happens when a programmer knows little about SEO.

There’s tons of programmers out there who are phenomenal at creating an SEO friendly site right from the time the site goes live, and I applaud you. I feel that every programmer and designer should at least know the basics of SEO, consult the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and put those guidelines into practice. Save the more advanced SEO strategies for the SEO specialists, but at least give the site a fighting chance. Same goes for us in the SEO industry – know at least the basics of what goes on behind the scenes of a website and the structural elements that can make or break a site’s SEO.

JavaScript can be a great tool, but use it in moderation, just like everything else in SEO. Think like a human visitor would – say the person wanted to link to my client’s section pages, only to find that they’re not real links – they’d be completely confused. Search engines ultimately want to please real, human searchers, so do what seems logical.

It’s no secret that client retention can be very difficult in SEO. Unlike Pay-Per-Click where clients can see an exact ROI (Return on Investment) figure, SEO has no such metrics. Sure, you can measure keyword rankings, traffic, and revenue, but there’s always the clients who simply don’t see the correlation. These clients are very numbers-oriented and success driven, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just very difficult to quantify SEO.

I’d like to hear your take on this – how do you measure SEO ROI? I’m toying with the idea of utilizing the client’s web analytics program to view the non-paid search revenue they made during the months we managed their campaign, versus their SEO management fee. Still not an exact ROI, and works best for sites we started managing as soon as the site went live. How about you?

It may sound a bit cheesy, but I absolutely love the excitement of knowing a holiday is coming up. Outside my window is a gang of warriors shooting off canons in the street (a few 8 year olds with some fire crackers), and everyone just seems to be a bit more excited this week with the 4th of July coming up. I feel the same with the SEO industry – we’ve had a checkered past, filled with spammers, and we’ve now entered the present, where spam is frowned upon and brands with real people behind them who take the time to reach out to their customers are the ones that last.

It’s exciting to imagine the future of SEO – I feel that SEO and social media will continue to integrate, with search engines even giving value to links in social media realms (I know, we’re a long ways off with all the spam still present in social media, but someday!). To all those who say SEO is dead – SEO is constantly changing and evolving, and I read that 75% of searchers click on organic results over paid. If that doesn’t mean SEO has staying power, I don’t know what does.

The old school thinking of SEO as “trumping” the search engines is definitely dead. New school SEO is very much alive and integrates social media elements and knows that the real way to be ranked well these days is by abiding by search engine guidelines and creating a site, and brand identity, that people actually want to talk about and find.

Goodbye, spammy SEO’s, and hello to the new guard. Time to celebrate. Onward!

I took the Inbound Marketing University exam last night, and here’s to hoping I passed! The course was a series of webinars on internet marketing, primarily SEO and social media, presented by SEO greats like Rand Fishkin and Chris Brogan (my heart’s aflutter for those two!).

I find out the results next Wednesday, July 8th. I feel I knew most of the questions, but I’m still nervous!

They’re having another IMU course in August , just go to the Inbound Marketing University site and fill out the form for more info. It was definitely worth my time – even if you’re an online marketing veteran, a little refresher never hurts!

I know this might sound a bit snarky, but I always have to chuckle a bit when an SEO company outs itself as perhaps not knowing as much about SEO as they say they do. 1Choice4YourStore, a Yahoo! Store developer, blogged about a test they were developing to see how fast they could get indexed by Google, in their post “This is to prove how quickly we can get into google”.

Now, anyone who knows their stuff in SEO, and I would hope anyone selling SEO services would (pipedream, I know), would know that getting indexed by Google really isn’t that difficult anymore. The hard part is getting ranked by Google for competitive terms. When you have a new site, you should submit it and verify it through Google Webmaster Tools, but it’s most likely going to be just a matter of days before it’s indexed and ranked for it’s own url. If it takes longer, you could be facing penalization issues, but that’s another blog post.

The focus in SEO should be on the qualified traffic and revenue your site is receiving from your SEO efforts. We’re in the modern age, and there’s no longer much of a need to worry about your site not getting indexed. Once it’s indexed, worry about it being ranked for the competitive terms your audience is searching for. The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is a great place to start.

Moral of the Day: Beware “Oh my gosh! Check out this crazy experiment that shows we know little about SEO!”.

And that is my evening rant. Goodnight, my wonderful readers

You probably wouldn’t think a simply 404 error page could have much impact on an SEO campaign. Ideally, it would be nice if both search engine spiders and visitors to your site didn’t hit on one at all. But let’s face it – some things in life are just destiny.

Optimize Your 404 Pages
Everything else on your site is optimized, so why not capitalize on the advantages of optimizing your 404 error page? Ah, but you ask, it’s not like that page is accessible via your homepage, nor do you want to exactly promote an error page. But what’s an site owner to do when a visitor slams into the bland brick wall that is a 404 page, such as the awful Barnes and Noble 404 Error Page and only slightly better Boston Red Sox 404 Error Page? (But I’d love to score some tix!)

Customize It, That’s What!
Customizing your 404 page is extremely helpful for decreasing bounce rate for both human visitors and spiders. Here’s some guidelines to follow to ensure your 404 Page is both people friendly and SEO friendly:

• Carry the same shell, or template, as the rest of your site.
• Include a search box so visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
• Include links to popular section pages, as well as a link to your sitemap. That way, search engine spiders can navigate back into your site through these links.
• Be nice to your visitors. Apologize for the error page, and offer them a coupon code for 5% off their total page. Not only will they stay on your site – they’ll order, too!

TheSEOGirl applauds well done, well done to these 404 error pages:

• http://whitehouseblackmarket.com/seogirl.html : Includes links to Customer Service, FAQ, has a search box, carries template, and links to major product categories
• http://starbucks.com/seogirl.html : Suggestions for better browsing, link to homepage, carries template
• http://www.vegas.com/seogirl.html : Carries template, ability to choose new travel dates/itinerary directly from the error page. (Yes, I need a vacation!).
  

Anyone have more ideas for ways to optimize your 404 Error Page? Leave a comment. If you’d like some tips on customizing your own 404 page, email me at theseogirl@gmail.com.

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