Turkey Mishap teaches SEO

1. Due to appropriate preparation and continuous basting, the turkey browned nicely. It looked good from the outside but this was merely on the surface. Similar to optimizing your web site for search engines, optimizing your titles and metadata isn’t enough. Make sure all elements of your site are optimized, from site architecture to content and multimedia to alt tags. Some of these elements are proving to be more influential and are often overlooked by many so-called SEO practitioners.

2. Once the turkey was in, it was on the “set it and forget it” method. Like cooking a turkey, SEO is not a “set it and forget it” initiative. Just as I should have been monitoring the progress of the turkey, your SEO efforts need to be monitored continuously for progress and adjusted accordingly to achieve desired results.

Turkey Mishap teaches Social Media

1. Although I was mortified by my mistake, I assembled the appropriate team to help me deal with the situation and I didn’t hide from my mistake (although I wanted to). In your Social Media communication it is important to remember that your customers know you will make mistakes, but it is how you handle them that they will be watching. Remember, be human. People make mistakes and don’t be afraid to get others involved to help you solve the issue.

2. There was no mistaking that the turkey was undercooked when we cut into it. Same for your Social Media communication, people will see through the golden brown coating if you don’t have a well planned and executed social media strategy. A good product and great customer service are only two of the ingredients in a recipe for social media success.

3. If at first you don’t succeed, fail fast, and then re-evaluate how to resolve and respond to the situation. Then, move forward quickly, the side dishes are getting cold and people will start to leave if you are unable to respond to the situation or provide an adequate solution.

4. Don’t try to do too many things at once, but if you do, have a plan. Most importantly surround yourself with people who can help you implement and execute your plan seamlessly.

Gobble Gobble Lessons for SEO and Social Media

1. Track and monitor progress; adjust along the way. Don’t get to the end to find out only half the plan worked or yielded you half the results you were expecting.

2. Check to see if the oven is on. Review all elements and components of your Social Media Plan and on-site and off-site SEO. Sometimes it can be the most simple and obvious things that can foil your plan.

3. Share your experience. Mistakes create an opportunity…for content! Case studies, articles, contests, etc. How can you share your experience to benefit your customers or provide added value to others?

Happy to say this year the turkey was juicy and delicious…and cooked all the way through. Picture above. Happy Holidays.

Before you go launching your new Web site, ask your SEO and web development firm(s) if the following has been done before you flip that switch.  If your SEO or web development firm says no or “what are you talking about”, STOP RIGHT NOW. CALL US IMMEDIATELY AT 602-275-3935.

Checklist before you launch:

1. Tracking: Make sure all tracking codes are in place and have been tested on the new site. Missing a few days of tracking could mean missing a few days of knowing how the new Web site impacted visitor behavior and sales.

2. Redirect URLs: If your old site has a good history and has built up some good inbound links to interior pages, or even if it hasn’t and you just have a few inbound links – you still want to make sure you are preserving them when you move to the new site. Make sure old site URLs are mapped correctly so that search engines are notified and pages that are indexed can be appropriately redirected. If you don’t do this and the new site has a different URL structure, any old pages that were indexed in the search engines will send back a nice 404 error, not to mention you may have lost a few new customers.

3. Marketing: Do you have years of vanity domains that you used for marketing? Do you have landing pages that current online marketing or other offline marketing sends traffic too? Make sure these pages are not archived when the new site launches. Make a checklist (in addition to this one) that lists out all of these pages and domains, make sure you to notify your current SEO or web development company of these pages so that they can be moved seamlessly without worry of lost traffic or conversions.

4. Customer Database Management: Very very very very important. I remember when FoodTV and Allrecipes launched their new Web sites. I had my recipe box filled, sure I hadn’t been back in a couple of months but I used my profile and “favorite recipes” box a lot. I went back one day and they said my account didn’t exist. Imagine how upset I was, I had years of recipes that I had collected and without any regard for my feelings they just wiped them all away. They might as well have taken a baseball bat to their brand because that is how I felt about them. So “lesson learned” make sure you transfer all customer information over to any new databases, etc. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Just because your data isn’t as clean as it should be, it is still data and you should hire someone or assign someone to take on that responsibility of organizing it. If your web development company says “let’s blow it up and start all over,” – DON’T LISTEN. Preserving customer information is vital and can save you from having to find a boat load of new customers because you decided to break up with your existing ones by changing the locks on the door. Your customer is your biggest asset, don’t forget that.

If you’d like consultation on any of the above, we are happy to help contact Liberty Interactive Marketing today.

Every SEO expert out there would agree with me when I say Google’s PageRank is not the best way to rate online influence. And what exactly is Mr. Rubel referring to when he says “online influence”? Not to mention that there are an infinite number of ways categorize online influence, be it links, content, subject, history of site, bookmarks, etc.

Many discussions on Webmaster World and from Google themselves have been discussing for the past few years whether to remove PageRank from the toolbar and most recently they will start to pull back it’s presence with new toolbar releases.  The toolbar Pagerank is separate from the Pagerank number that Google incorporates into its search algorithm.  So the number we see has very little to do with rankings at all. It is merely a metric by which the uninformed will be unnecessarily impressed.

I’m not going to argue for or against what PageRank really is because there is no argument. PageRank is useless as two commenters on the original post would agree.  Additionally, I can’t believe that this article would have been posted as a linkbait mechanism because AdAge also chose to publish it in their print addition which is where I first read the article.

My real reason for responding to this article is to disperse any rumors out there and to let people know they should really check their sources and the facts before publishing anything SEO related. Just because you use the Internet doesn’t mean you are an expert on SEO.

Here’s the skinny:

• 87% of home buyers used the internet to search for a home purchased through a real estate agent,
• 72% of non-internet users were more likely to purchase in a private transaction directly from a builder or from an owner they already knew.

What information source did home buyers use:

• 87% Internet
• 85% Real-estate agents
• 62% Yard signs
• 48% Open houses
• 47% Print or newspaper ads
• Fewer buyers relied on home books or magazines, home builders, television, billboards and
  relocation companies.

When asked where home buyers first learned about the home they purchased:

• 34% said a real-estate agent;
• 32% cited the internet;
• 15% said yard signs;
• 7% said from a friend, neighbor or relative;
• 7% said home builders;
• 3% said from a print or newspaper ad;
• 2% learned directly from the seller;
• 1% from a home book or magazine.

Bottom line is that while the real estate industry has remained pretty traditional in method – using an agent, driving around looking at neighborhoods and finding open houses – online is and has been playing a significant role as an information resource to home buyers and you must be there to take advantage of it.  No online marketing company is going to tell you they will sell homes for you, and if they do, you shouldn’t believe them.  Hiring professionals to put together an online strategy that can be incorporated into your marketing plan will be the best bet.  The key is visibility, online presence, and lead generation.  Home buyers want to find the perfect home, and you might just have it, but you’ve got to be online so they can find you, thus providing a forum for them to reach out to you and visa versa.

Get the most up to date Real Estate stats regarding:
First Time Home-Buyers, Current Down Payments, Agent usage by Buyers and Sellers, Foreclosure Purchases, Features and Incentives,  and Additional Demographic Information by reading the full article at MarketingCharts.

About the study:
The 2008 National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers is the latest in a series of large national NAR surveys evaluating demographics, marketing, preferences and experiences of home buyers and sellers. NAR mailed an eight-page questionnaire in August 2008 to a national sample of 133,000 home buyers and sellers who purchased their homes between July 2007 and June 2008, according to county records. There were 10,053 usable responses and the adjusted response rate was 7.9%. All formation is characteristic of the 12-month period ending in June 2008 with the exception of income data, which are for 2007. Because of rounding and omissions for space, percentage distributions for some findings may not
add up to 100 percent.

As a business owner, CMO or Marketing Director, the choice of a Search Marketing Firm will be one of your most important decisions.  In order to fully realize the benefits of Search Marketing, it is crucial to understand what role Search Marketing will play in your organization and choose a service provider that supports this role.

What is the focus of the Firm?

It is very important to understand what the prospective service provider specializes in.  Lately, it seems that everyone is getting into Search Marketing.  There are hosting companies, web design firms, web development shops and traditional agencies all trying to get a piece of the market.  It is often the case that no firm can do it all, or at least not do it all well.   It is best to choose a firm that specializes in Search Marketing.  There is no strong argument for using your web developer or your hosting company for your paid search management to keep it under one roof.  The worst combination is a traditional advertising agency that offers Search Marketing services.  That is like getting heart surgery from your pharmacist, they may have heard about it, maybe even read about it, and may be able to talk the talk, but they don’t do it day in and day out.   No matter what type of firm you are talking to, ask them who will be managing and performing the Search Marketing work.  Is it handled in-house or outsourced to another firm?

How do they view Search Marketing?

Do they believe that one aspect of Search Marketing is more important than the other?  Or do they believe that all initiatives work together and view search holistically?  As you interview service providers it is highly recommended to learn a little about the space.  You don’t have to become an expert, just have some basic knowledge.  Unfortunately there are a lot of charlatan’s and snake oil salesman out there.  By doing an hour or so of prep work on your own, you’ll find it is much easier to avoid many of these scammers.

What are their Search Engine Optimization tactics?

White Hat or Black Hat?  Learn this terminology, especially if your company’s reputation and long term success are important.  Basically White Hat SEO Firms play by the rules of the search engines and understand the uncertainty involved in playing by the rules.  Black Hat SEO Firms will tout quick and/or guaranteed results.  Never has it been more accurate that “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”  Black Hat SEO Firms stretch the rules and manipulate them often to the eventual detriment of their clients.  There is nothing wrong with preferring the Black Hat Route, it does work, usually, but not for long.  Getting banned from Google is real, and blaming it on an SEO firm will not get any sympathy or get you back in.  Make sure you know which side of the fence they are on.

What is their Paid Search Pitch?

Are they guaranteeing clicks, traffic or sales?  Ask how.  Beware of the “We have a relationship with Google”.  I get cold calls on my cell phone from firms claiming this all the time; some of the pitches are quite smooth.  If they had a relationship with Google they wouldn’t be talking to you or offering services, they would be using their relationship for their own benefit.  Saying they know a guy at Google is like knowing a guy at the Lottery Commission.  It is common for an agency to have a Rep at Google, we do too, but that does not in any way indicate an inside track or special arrangement.  Beware the Google Partners or Resellers claim; that means they make a cut off your Paid Search spend.

Do they stress bid management and special software as their competitive edge?  While this was the answer many years ago, times have changed.  Every major Paid Search venue uses some variation of a quality score and smart pricing.  This means that the entire campaign from keyword to landing page needs to be tested and managed, not just the bids.

If fact, the bids are pretty much the least important factor since they are derivative of the account performance as a whole.  Google made $16.4 billion last year from people clicking on ads.  They don’t care if you bid a million dollars a click; if your account has low relevancy to the search term your ad won’t show. If you have a significant spend budget in a highly competitive and fast moving niche there can be a benefit to bid management tools, but only as an enhancement to active management, not a replacement.

And another thing; taking Google or Yahoo! or MSNs advice on how to manage a campaign, or worse yet having them manage the campaign is like having the IRS do your taxes.  Enough said.

Basically, Rand finds that companies spend only a fraction of the amount on SEO as they do on PPC.  Specifically:

SEO: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

Now, there are a lot of good comments on this post talking about how the major reason companies spend this inordinate amount of money on PPC is because it is immediate, measurable, and controllable.  These are all things that HiPPOs like.  One of the inherent problems with SEO is that it requires companies to have patience in seeing the results.  All SEO projects take at least three months of commitment, with the majority requiring six months or longer.

While this is all well and good, I think one of the bigger issues with PPC vs SEO spending is the fact that they are targeting two different types of searchers.  I know that when I am in consumer mode, I will specifically look at the PPC ads, because I know they are offering me something I might want to buy.  More often than not, I consider organic listings to be information oriented, which isn’t a bad thing!  It just means that targeting PPC means you are targeting people who are in ‘buy mode’.  SEO is more of a presence oriented machine that will ultimately increase sales through credibility and relevance.  This is proven by a recent study that showed PPC converts 50% more than organic.

A major problem in the future, I think, will be that SEO will become the base standard of good operating companies and that their relevancy in the organic listings will force purely commercial companies out of the top rankings.  Instead of “God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal”, you might say “Tim Berners-Lee made websites, but PPC made them equal”.

View Quicken’s Top 10 Stock You Wish You Had Bought.

Need help with your SEO? Contact us.

Initially we wanted to just forward everything that went through blogspot to the new blog address, but we immediately realized that blogger won’t allow you to forward to a folder. This means that blogger absolutely will not allow you to forward to libertyinteractivemarketing.com/blog. However, they will allow you to forward to blog.libertyinteractivemarketing.com. I find this ridiculous because google gives more weight to the former example, but I digress. So we made the subdomain, and then 301 redirected from the subdomain to libertyinteractivemarketing.com/blog. So there are two redirects happening, one when you come to our Blogger (using their Custom Domain), and another when you hit the subdomain. This should be fine because no matter what, Google should take into account the final redirect as being the correct one.

The problem ended up being that there are still links on Google and the other search engines referencing our Blogger blog. We also realized that the Blogger custom domain thing made it so any hits to our blogger blog were faced with this:

This is why we can't have nice things

What we wanted

We decided we wanted the blog to remain in existence but only as a forwarding tool and we wanted to NOINDEX it so that Google wouldn’t penalize us for duplicated content. We also wanted each link for a specific Blogger post on the search engine (and in the blog itself) to forward to that same post on our new Wordpress. And finally, we wanted the main Blogger page to forward to our new Wordpress installation. We wanted to do this using SEO best practices, but as you’ll find, blogger makes this insanely difficult.

How We Did It

Setup Redirects

First off, you are going to want to be working in your Blogger template editor, which can be found by going to the Layout tab, and then clicking on Edit HTML.

To Redirect the front page of the blog, you cannot use any 301 good stuff. You must use HTTP refresh simply because if you try to use Blogger’s forwarding you’ll have to see that screen above asking permission to redirect. I think that’s bull poo, but so far I have no good solution to this. Put this in between your head tags.

<meta content='6;url=http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

Display Message to Users

You might want to theme this like your new blog's colors, perhaps not so spammy?

To make it so the user isn’t surprised when they are suddenly sent to the new page, a message is highly recommended. Put this right after your first body tag. Remember to swap out the information in there with yours.

<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 400px; z-index: 5; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;'>
<p><strong>My blog has moved!</strong></p>
<p>You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit<br/> <a href='http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/'> <strong>http://yournewblog.wordpress.com</strong></a> <br/> and update your bookmarks.</p>
</div>

Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

We NoIndexed the blog itself, which was easy enough. Just throw the following code in between your head tags.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX"/>

Forward Individual Posts

In order to make every post forward correctly you have to use very specific code. This code specifically assumes you are using SEO best practice and organizing your posts only by page title. That means www.yourblog.com/post-title. If you’re not, I recommend you head over to Procrastiblog as his solution takes into account the Blogger timestamp.

Look for this code in the Blogger Template:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>

Enter the following right after you find the above code. Make sure to replace “YOUR_BLOG_URL_HERE” with your new blog address.

<b:widget id='Redirector' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<div id='redirectorTitle' style='visibility:hidden'><data:post.title/></div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var new_domain = 'YOUR_BLOG_URL_HERE'
 
function utf8_uri_encode( str ) {
  var high_code = new RegExp(/[\u0080-\uffff]+/);;
  new_str = str;;
  while( m = high_code.exec( new_str ) ) {
    new_str = new_str.replace(m,encodeURIComponent(m));;
  }
  return new_str;;
}
 
var title = document.getElementById('redirectorTitle').innerHTML;;
// [INCOMPLETE] Keep percent signs that aren't part of an octet?
title = title.replace(/&lt;[^&gt;]*?&gt;/g,'');; // remove tags
title = title.replace(/&amp;.+?;/g,'');; // remove entities
title = utf8_uri_encode(title);; // handle UTF-8 characters
title = title.toLowerCase();;
title = title.replace(/[^%a-z0-9 _-]/g,'');; // remove punctuation
title = title.replace(/\s+/g,'-');; // turn spaces into hyphens
title = title.replace(/-+/g, '-');; // collapse runs of hyphens
title = title.replace(/^-+/g,'');; // remove prefixed hyphens
title = title.replace(/-+$/g,'');; // remove suffixed hyphens
var timestamp = '<data:post.timestamp/>';
timestamp = timestamp.split('/');
timestamp = timestamp[2]+'/'+timestamp[0]+'/'+timestamp[1];
var new_page = new_domain + '/' + title + '/';;
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Examples of how this worked for us:

Front page message and HTTP refresh redirect:
http://libertyinteractive.blogspot.com

Forwarded Post
http://libertyinteractive.blogspot.com/2008/03/functionality-before-optimization-web.html

In Conclusion

While insanely useful, especially for established blogs, one unfortunate thing is that if you had only published on yoursite.blogspot.com and you have many people linking to you, you will not be able to pass on link juice. Your page rank may suffer as a result. While you’ll be able to get your users where you want them to (post by post) and therefore improve bounce rates, you wont get the page rank benefits. Make sure to remove and noindex your old blog from Google using Google webmaster tools and next time either use a custom domain or don’t use a hosted solution. Even Typepad suffers from this.

Thanks to: Procrastiblog, and Laffers.net, as they have by far the most up to date and working examples of this stuff. They just needed a little more.

You can think of it as a very large boob tube of Web stuff from web pages to videos. The cool thing is it delivers Web sites to you based on your preferences (e.g. art, photography, search marketing, SEO, gadgets, real estate, etc.) You can change these preferences at will. The system learns what you like and brings you more. If only TV was this easy, right?

You can search sites from their Web site at www.stumbleupon.com or download the toolbar for Firefox IE (recommended).

While it may seem like mindless pleasure to spend hours on end stumbling just for instant satisfaction and entertainment – there really are other benefits to StumbleUpon and it can serve as an exceptional online marketing tool.

Here’s why you should use StumbleUpon:

1. Research and Discovery – you can change your interest preferences to your liking at any time.  For instance, if I am specifically looking for sites or related photos, videos on the topic of Internet marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. I can change my preference interests to show me sites related to this (Internet and Internet Tools). You can basically cut hours of research and discovery time down by stumbling instead of trying to come up with the right combination of keywords to type into search engines.

2. Surf the Web - literally and organically. We are all friends of the remote control and now you are always in control, your roommate or significant other can’t steal your Stumble toolbar from you.  For good entertainment I recommend Bizarre/Oddities, Beer, and Quizzes interests.  Sit back and channel surf – hours of pure entertainment.

3. Search – Dare I say that this may be the future of search? Well, it should be.  While the big 3 are honing their algorithms to show the most relevant results based on backlinks, content, history, etc.  StumbleUpon is backing into it by asking users to rate, review, and tag these sites.  You can actually use StumbleUpon as a search engine for immediate results (versus option 1 above).  Type in anything that you are looking for and a listing of results will show with thumbnails, number of reviews, tags and recent “thumbs up.”

4. Social Networking and Bookmarking - The community and tools on StumbleUpon (SU) are fierce. The major feature to SU is their expansive social bookmarking abilities. It’s not just one way there are multiple ways to interact and connect – you can view all your favorite sites, view sites that your friends like, that people with your interests like, blog it, talk about it, have folks review it, etc.

Maybe in a later post, I’ll touch on marketing and advertising opportunities through StumbleUpon and how they have impacted the SU community and results.

But for now, get out there and thumbs up someone today. Just don’t let the boss catch you after hours upon hours on StumbleUpon.

Adobe announced today that they are teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).  Adobe will be providing the search engeines with optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) that currently is undiscoverable by search engines.  “This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

What does the future hold for searchable Flash and other RIA content on the Web? Read the full article.