The SEO Girl

So say you check out a blog or website and are asked to describe that website in 20 random words. Most likely, your word choices will be a little all over the place, but they’ll probably tie together enough to form a picture on what the blog is mostly about. This is the same concept as a “tag cloud” – a tag cloud is simply a collection of main themes on a blog or website – often seem a bit disjointed, but actually do go together to form an idea of what you mainly talk about on your blog.

There’s tons of tag cloud generators out there, and I recently used Wordle to generate a tag cloud for The SEO Girl blog, only the very best blog out there, of course (just nod along). The larger the font in a tag cloud, the more often you talk about that topic or theme. For The SEO Girl, I’m big on “SEO” of course, another was “industry” which makes sense, “blog”, “search”, and “PageRank”. Nearly all the words in my tag cloud related to the search industry, so it looks like despite my rambling posts, I’m on track! I encourage you to do the same with your blog or website – it’ll allow you to get a quick snapshot on the theme of your blog posts to be sure the big topics on your blog are actually what you want them to be, and if the keyword phrases you’d like to rank for on your website show up in a larger font in your tag cloud, chances are you’re on target with your SEO keyword targeting. Happy tag clouding!

Check out The SEO Girl blog’s tag cloud, courtesy of Wordle. Note how “love” is inside the “S” in SEO – how true for me!

Before adding the Akismet spam filter to my blog, which is lovely, I was receiving tons of spammy comments with random links in them. Since the comments contained little relevant text, it appears they left the link solely for SEO value. A tactic which, of course, has little value. I stress the value of personally contacting site owners for link building and giving them a reason to add your link, rather than trying to “game” search engines in this way. Plus, you’re basically wasting your time and your money – links in blog and forum comments aren’t going to boost your rankings.

Thoughtful blog and forum comments can boost your industry cred, though. Take for example the recent post of mine, “I Think I Can, I Think I Can: SEO, The Little Engine That Could”, where I highlighted a person who commented on one of my prior posts and his insightful comments. Spend five minutes giving your opinion on a blog post in your area of expertise, and those thoughtful comments could be worth much more in the long run. You’ll be able to make contacts in your industry and network, show you know what you’re talking about, and perhaps even get the word out about your own website and encourage other blogs/sites to link to you, all without engaging in obtrusive comment spam!

Remember: Keep SEO pure. Show the value of your knowledge and your website, and real people and search engines will notice in time.

I was doing some research today on what SEO companies out there are charging for their services. I found a great article in SEOmoz called “How to Price an SEO Campaign” – excellent job highlighting what a good SEO company will do for your site, and the SEO services you actually need for your site. Of course, it’s SEOmoz, so they can charge quite a bit more than a regular old jane who’s plain fantastic at SEO.

But! I did a Google search for “SEO services”, just for a quick pricing glimpse, and was oh-so-discouraged at what I saw. I did see a few reputable companies in the first few pages, and hats off to them, but then there were the companies who promised “search engine submissions”, “blog and forum comments”, “free directory submissions”, and “meta-tag rewrites”. There was even one company who charged $1K for little more than a simple Website Grader SEO evaluation! The horror, and it’s not even Halloween yet!

Rather than choosing a company that says they’ll get you SEO results fast and cheap, look for companies that not only will advise you on on-page and off-page SEO best practices, but will actually implement those practices. You’re a busy website owner, and you need a professional who will do the work and do it right, even if it’s going to cost you a bit more. Invest the time and money into doing it right the first time. If you don’t see results until month 3 or 4 into your campaign – that’s a good thing! That shows they’re implementing ethical SEO techniques and getting search engine attention over time, rather than buying 100 paid links and washing their hands of your website.

Remember, quantity does not equal quality. Going with a company who presents you with an impressive looking report filled with all the blog and forums they spammed with your link, the free directory submissions they submitted your site to, and a few links they bought for you on spammy sites has relatively little value. Go with a reputable company who spends time crafting creative SEO content, manually contacting only a handful of sites each month for link building with a personalized email or phone call, maintains a blog and writes interesting posts, ensures your site is optimized correctly, and maybe even does a bit of social media is the way to go. Their time is likely worth more money, in the $1-2K per month range, but it’s money spent wisely.

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

I was so touched and inspired by a comment on my previous post, “5 Tips For Managing an SEO Team”. Yavor Milchev wisely commented, “I think motivation is also a very important ingredient. Motivation is very easy to lose and once people lose it, it gets very hard to get it back. I have seen people do amazing things with little knowledge and experience simply because of their devotion and strive for success.”

Yavor hit the nail on the head, especially as I’m sitting here a bit stressed by my own SEO job. Motivation is a crucial personality trait in SEO. Just think of how many times your team has ensured a site is meeting SEO best practices, worked continually on on-page/off-page SEO best practices, and yet the site’s non-paid search traffic and rankings still aren’t what you’d like them to be. Yet, despite wanting to strangle Google, you persevered, tweaked your strategy, and saw results change and improve over time. SEO is one of the most frustrating, “gray” industries out there, and at the end of a busy day, there’s always things on your mind and ideas for working to improve a site’s SEO.

Yet, we love SEO and amidst the stress, we love our SEO jobs. If you want to survive in this industry, you need to be motivated to succeed, always work to help educate your co-workers, and be dedicated to seeing your clients succeed. We work in a very stressful, sometimes thankless industry, but our desire to keep going and push ourselves motivates us through those tough days and SEO quandaries. When you’re having a tough day, take heart (and a drink at 5pm) – the rest of the SEO industry knows what you’re going through, and we commend you for working through it and emerging as a person satisfied with their desire to push ahead and further our industry.

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!

This is more of a poll than a blog post, but I’d like to see which SEO tools the SEO community is using and why they find them effective. I’m on a quest this week to find a tool that includes the following items, and I’d like to see if I can find a match for my needs:

• Keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Suggestion tool and SemRush
• Link building management, with the ability to add link building contacts, assign them to projects/categories
• Content management, with a “project” folder for each client so we can store their SEO copy and blog posts in their folder
• Social media tools – Similar to HootSuite.com where we can post to multiple client Twitter accounts by logging in to only one master account, see stats on the amount of clicks links in our posts receive. Ability to post to multiple Facebook Business Pages would also be a plus.
• Google Analytics integration/Automated reporting tools – Would absolutely love if the SEO tool had white-labeled reports that pulled relevant data from the client’s GA account
• Keyword tracking – Although we stay away from measuring SEO success solely by keyword rankings, it would be nice to have a keyword tracking system so we can sync up changes in rankings to traffic patterns.
• Google Alerts data – Ideally, we’d like the system to automatically search for mentions of the client’s brand name/relevant keywords, a la Google Alerts.
• Project management – A “lite” project management system built in, allowing users to create/assign tasks, view tasks assigned to them and the timeframe for the tasks

And of course if this was packaged into a nice little dashboard with a bow on top, that would be even better.

Have you seen specific increases in productivity with the tools you’re seeing? What’s on your SEO tool wishlist? Leave a comment and let me know, any and all info would be very helpful.

- Thanks for helping an SEO girl out!

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 was talking with a new SEO client yesterday who told me her previous SEO company built her a Facebook Business Page so she get value from the link on Facebook to her site. As you can probably tell, I cringed. Let’s all say it together: links on Facebook do not pass on search engine value to your site (unless they’re coded in Facebook’s markup language, but we’ll talk about that in another post). They carry the “nofollow” tag, making them clickable, but a search engine spider will not pass on value to your site for that link.

That doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t useful for link building. Here’s some ways to capitalize on Facebook as a link building tool, and get people talking about your site!

Links, In Moderation. Imagine taking a leisurely drive and taking what seems to be a nice turn in the road. Suddenly, you’re bombarded with billboard after billboard, all screaming for your attention. Not so fun, right? Same goes for Facebook Business Pages – link to your site where appropriate, such as linking to a fun product every once in awhile, a new blog post, and of course in the “Website” field on the page.

The less obtrusive your page is, the more likely visitors will stay on the page, click through to your site, post on their own Facebook about your site, and grab the attention of their Facebook friends, who just may link to your site on their own blog or website!

People Like Free Stuff. It’s pretty much a rule of thumb that we like free things. Start a contest on your Facebook page where the first 25 or 50 fans receive a coupon code for your online store, with a value large enough to make a potential fan gush “Awesome!” and blog about it, thus resulting in more links to your main site, and of course more Facebook Fans!

I’ll be posting in about a week about Facebook contest ideas, so check back often!

Keep up the posting. I see a lot of really excited site owners posting often on Facebook for the first month or so, and then their interaction fizzles out. Keep up the posting – try to post daily, whether it’s about something interesting from your day or about a cool product on your site every once in awhile. A conversation involves two or more people, so be sure to comment on other people’s posts to spark conversation and get people noticing your page. Don’t be shy!

And When All Else Fails, Beg! Okay, just to be clear, I have confidence your page isn’t “failing” by any means. It never hurts to outright ask for a link. Once you’ve built up at least 25 Facebook Fans, click the “Send Update to Fans” link and ask if they’ll link to you on their site or blog. After all, if they like you, they’ll be helping out their site visitors by providing them with a trusted resource. Include a coupon code in your update. If only 2 out of 50 fans have a site and link to you, your 5 minutes of time still resulted in success.

Think about it this way: What would make you link to a site? Would it be a fun promotion, helpful daily tidbits, or a collection of really unique product images? Think about your audience and what really piques their interest.

I had a discussion with my SEO team today on taking responsibility for our clients’ successes, or sometimes, their unfortunate lack thereof. Let’s be honest, not every client has a stellar SEO experience, just like not every sandwich you nosh on or clothing you try on is going to fit. But I do feel an SEO specialist needs to be accountable for their client’s results after at least 3 months of SEO service. Some may disagree with me and say there’s tons of variables – what if the client has a poor site design, is in an extremely competitive industry, or is uncooperative with the SEO specialist?

Sure, the responsibility also lies with the client. The client needs to incorporate the SEO suggestions and SEO work into their site in a timely fashion. The SEO specialist also needs to  guide the client with site suggestions, branding ideas, and strategies on how to outshine their competition.

You can outline an SEO specialist’s work in the line items of a contract, and after a few months you can say, “Well, I did what I was supposed to. It’s not my fault their SEO didn’t work out.” But in the end, when it comes to whether your SEO business and industry cred lives on, it’s about how much you effort you put into making that individual campaign as successful as possible in the time you have allotted for it. If you can say you gave it your 200%, then I’m convinced you did your job well and showed responsibility for that account, whether the client stays on or leaves. However, if you simply did “what you’re supposed to”, then my friend, it’s time to choose another industry.

I’d like to hear your thoughts – should an SEO strategy be strictly bound to contract line items, or is it necessary to go above and beyond? Is there a middle ground? I may sound like I’m on a lofty soapbox here, but believe me, I’m working on actual client SEO campaigns every day, and I know it’s not an easy question to answer. I sometimes wonder what a 9-5 leave-and-forget-about-work job would be like, but I love this industry and my work way too much. Plus, this SEO Girl loves a challenge

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