Chicago Style SEO Blog

Why is Microsoft Word So Expensive?
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Yesterday will doing my daily peruse of Reddit.com’s pic sub-Reddit (always good for a laugh) I came across the headline, “Bing Fail.” Being in the SEO biz, I had to click on it and found the image at the right (click to enlarge). The original can be seen here.

The poster had searched for “why is microsoft word so expensive?” in both Google and Bing. The results were strikingly different. Google’s first two results were clearly web pages discussing that very question: one on MacRumors.com and the other on Ibibo.com. A look at Bing made me scratch my head…just as the post had intended. It’s first response was to the question, “Why is Manhattan so expensive?” If, in Bing’s algorithm, “microsoft” is the same as “manhattan” I think they need to check their programming. The second and third results were about the differences between various versions of Word.

So, I decided to do a little experimenting on my own. I opened up a Google search tab and a Bing search tab in my trusty FireFox browser. My first question was if Google would disrespect it self? Would it serve up the mud people were flinging at it, which based on the experiment above Microsoft wasn’t willing to do. I thought about the most common criticism of Google and typed it in, “is google too powerful?” (Do the search for yourself on Bing and Google…maybe the results have changed.)

Is Google Too Powerful?
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The results (on the right) on Google seemed to show that Google was very willing to let you know people were talking about this issue. And they didn’t just return “Bob’s Paranoid Blog To Share the Insanity.” No…they returned heavy hitters like BusinessWeek.com, The BBC, and SearchEngineJournal.com.

So, next I clicked my way to Bing to ask the same question. Bing returned the same three articles as Google, but they’d helpfully stripped of any and all text that didn’t repeat the question. Hmmm…I don’t recall Bing doing that for other searches.

I also found the difference in the quoted text from the pages interesting. Google’s quotes somehow seem softer and focused on buyouts. Bing’s quotes seemed to use stronger words like, “dominate” and “crush.” Same articles…different quotes? Hmmmm….

So, I did a few other tests and found that Bing doesn’t always cover Microsoft’s rear end. Bing reports well on the recent controversy over Outlook 2010 rendering HTML using Word. They displayed fixoutlook.org in the second position. On the question of why Microsoft doesn’t seem to like following establish standards, Bing dished up quite a few articles, but they felt slightly less pointed than those Google served up—again mainly because of the quoted text. I’ll let you do the searches yourself and see what you think. Please let me know.

Is Microsoft Evil?
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I scratched my head and tried to think of what accusation people level at Microsoft that they might not like. Then it hit me, Google’s motto of “Do no evil.” I typed into both search engines, “is microsoft evil?” and again the differences were jaw dropping. (Try it for yourself on Bing and Google.) Google is happy to spit out articles from TheRegister.co.uk talking about Silverlight, a poll on the topic at Mashable.com, and in the third spot, perhaps a post that actually might defend Microsoft, or at least appears to question those that ask the question. Hmmmm….

Then I turned to Bing and was dumbfounded. For the first time in my playing with this topic, Bing returned a news story in the number one position. And…the story was about Google, “How Good (or Not Evil) Is Google?” from the New York Times. The second news listing talks about the pros and cons of proxy servers?? And, the third news item is about Microsoft giving away money. Hmmm…. After that Bing does dish up the dirt with a  link to microsoftisevil.com, but they quickly shift to focusing on how Microsoft is killing evil software bugs. Hmmm…

So, what do you think? I’d love to hear of your comparisons on how self-revealing the search engines are. Please leave your thoughts and links below.

Bing Simplifies Its Local Directory Confirmation

When Bing first came out, we at Chicago Style SEO immediately went in to claim our local listings (as everyone concerned with their web site’s SEO should do for all search engines and directories). I was a bit displeased when I went in to find that Bing was going to mail me a postcard with a pin number on it rather than what has become the common practice of doing the process by phone.

Google’s Imperfect Local Listing Claiming System

Take Google for example. If you want to claim a Google Local listing, you search for the business or enter a new business into their system. The final step in the process is for you to prove you are connected to the business. It only makes sense—you don’t want your competitors claiming your business and then saying you don’t accept credit cards, have no phone number, have no parking, and have the business hours of 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. So, Google gives you call and gives you a pin number. You then have to type the pin number into Google’s system, thereby proving you have some connection to the company since you can answer their phone.

I thought about Bing’s system of mailing the pin and decided that it did make a bit more sense to do the mailing since a phone number does not necessarily have any connection to a location. (Not like when I was a kid with rotary dial phones that had cords!) In Google’s system, the listing is put in their map system, but the phone number not only is not connected to a physical location, but can also be changed in the listing after it is confirmed, as can the address. So, Google’s system isn’t perfect, and it seemed like Bing was trying to get more accurate information by sending post cards.

So yesterday, while working for a client, I went into Bing to claim the client’s local listing and found that Bing now allows for phone confirmation. It’s just a slight twist on Google’s system. Bing gives you a pin and then calls the business’ number. You then have to enter the pin into the phone. It worked like a charm for our client.

I Still Haven’t Received My Bing Postcard

Since I’m still waiting for my Bing postcard, I decided that Bing has smart people working for them…they must allow people waiting for the postcards to go in and use the new phone system. I looked and looked and couldn’t find a way to “cancel” the post card and use the phone system. It appears to me that there is no way of changing from the postcard to the phone system. The curse of early adopters I guess.

<sigh> Come on post office! Or mayby the whole reason they changed the system is Bing couldn’t get the postcards out quickly enough? Who knows…I just know I want to claim my business with Bing and can’t.

If you get 1000 visitors a day to your site and 2% convert into customers, you will have 20 customers a day. At Chicago Style SEO, we are obviously proponents of always looking to increase your relevant traffic, but at a certain point, it becomes much more efficient to work on increasing your conversion rate. In the above example, an increase in the conversion rate of 1% would net as many customers as 500 more visitors a day. In some of the cases I will be highlighting, the conversion rate has been increased by 5% or more. In this example, that would be the equivalent of 2,500 more visitors per day!

Rather than trying to convince a customer to buy something, I find it helps to think of cart optimization as removing barriers to that goal.  These barriers are mostly mental blocks: lack of trust, uncertainty of getting a good deal, and confusion.

Simplify the Checkout Process

1. Simplify Forms and Design
Start by removing any unnecessary form fields, keep only the ones that are absolutely required. (Honestly, who even has a fax number anymore.) Ideally, you can use smart AJAX to hide rarely used fields that you have to have, like special required info for certain credit cards. Use white space and good design to create a calm and visually appealing form, use descriptive field names and section headers, and add helpful tips where they may be needed.

2. De-clutter and Reduce Exit Options
De-clutter checkout pages by removing page elements. Often, sidebars can be removed entirely as there is no need for featured items and the like—they end up being distractions.  The same goes for most of the site navigation, sending a customer back into the catalog makes them think about the products, increasing the likelihood that they will reconsider the purchase.

3. Reduce Steps and Add a Guide to the Process
Add a progress bar showing all of the steps in the checkout process and highlighting the current step. This Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog post has some great examples from well known sites.  The Get Elastic post also recommends reducing the number of steps to as few as possible. Most studies suggest that three is the optimal number of steps, any more and the process is too long, any less and each step will be asking for an intimidating amount of information.

Show Signs of Trust and Security

4. Show Off Your Verifiable SSL Logo

Place your SSL logo in a highly visible place site-wide, and again in close proximity to secure form submission buttons. The “highly visible” part is really important. From the Invesp Blog:

After some A/B split testing involving security logo appearances and different placements on the homepage, Lazarchic and his analytics team found that conversions on Petco.com increased by 8.83% when the security logo was above the fold, very high on the page and to the left- in other words, when the logo was in a natural, “readable” position for customers. When the security logo was below the footer and on the bottom right, conversions were a mere 1.76%.

5. Independent Security Verification
Independent verification badges from services like McAfee Secure provide an extra level of security and trust. Some sites report an increase conversion rate of 10% from adding one badge alone. (Eric Enge from Search Engine Watch has a much more detailed breakdown of an actual test.)

6. Show Off Professional Organizations
Displaying badges to professional associations signals to your customers that you care about your profession and are invested in the industry.  This is a subtle trust cue that often will net you a very high quality inbound link as a bonus. The Better Business Bureau is another good program that lets customers know you are serious about customer service (and you get a link to boot!).

7. Standard Site Pages
Privacy policy, security policy, shipping info, return policy, testimonials or reviews, guarantees…this information should be accessible on every website with a shopping cart. Sadly, this information is often buried or non-existent. I like the idea of an “assurance center” with quick links to these pages right next to the checkout forms (pop ups, of course, you don’t want the customer to leave the page).

Analyze and Test Everything

Every website and situation is going to be different and the execution method will change everything. Before making any changes, make sure you have a detailed path analysis for your shopping cart process. Don’t start testing until you have at least a few weeks worth of data to provide a good benchmark for improvement, and map out your changes in advance.

It is easy to be overwhelemed with these changes. My advice is to break them up into manageable smaller changes. This will also allow for testing and evaluating which changes are making an impact.

First of all, congrats to Rod Holmes for passing the Adwords Professional test.  He actually passed it last week, but there was a minor snafu on the back end getting the credit to show on our account. Thanks to the help of a very friendly Adwords team member, we managed to get the reporting fixed.

Adwords Qualified Company

We are pleased to announce that Chicago Style SEO has met all of the requirements and can now call ourselves an official Google Adwords Professional Qualified Company.  What does this mean to you, the potential customer?  In Google’s words:

Like many advertisers, you may not have a significant amount of time to invest in learning AdWords and managing your own advertising account. Hiring a professional can help save you time while maximizing the return on your investment.

If that isn’t enough to convince you, we also have a number of promotional credits we can apply to new Adwords accounts.  They are a 1-1 spend match up to $100 dollars.  We are applying them on a first come basis, contact us today to check for availability.

Yeah, I’m talking about you.

I have been looking at quite a lot of source code from websites lately, and I’m struck by just how rampant bad semantic markup is on the web. I’m not talking about whether sidebar headers should be H3 or H4; I’m seeing whole sites with the same title (or none at all), non-existent H# tags, and meta-description tags. I’ve even seen some severely misguided (yet, oddly endearing) examples, like the guy who wrote <div id=”h1″>. From the Pearsonified Guide to Semantic Web Markup for blogs:

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme that I’ve come across in the past year fails a simple test for truly semantic (and Google-recommended) XHTML markup. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that these failures are by no means fatal flaws. At the same time, though, I find it extremely unsettling that an inferior markup structure is prevailing in the face of an absolutely correct way of doing things.

Now, I think there are some gray areas that allow for differences of opinion. I’m sure you could look at the source code of this site and find some choices you disagree with, but the basics are there—and the choices were made with an understanding of the consequences.

What Is Semantic Markup and Why Is It Important?

If you are new to this, you may be asking yourself what the heck is this guy talking about? In a nutshell, semantic markup means using markup (XHTML tags) to define the content it surrounds. For example, a paragraph of text is started with a <p> tag and concluded with a </p> tag.

There are a number of reasons why using proper markup is a good thing, but I am going to ignore most of them and focus solely on the value for on-site SEO. Just as designers use size, color, and layout to help users properly understand the importance of elements on a page, semantic markup is your way of expressing that same information to a search engine. For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on the elements that will have the largest impact on traffic to your site:

1. Titles
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Header Tags (H1, H2, H3…)

1. Proper Use of Title Tags:

The title tag is probably the single most important on-site element in terms of search engine traffic. Keywords in the title tag are given quite a bit of weight with search engines. However, don’t go off stuffing them with any keyword you can think of. Title tags are also the heading text (and link) back to your website in the search engine results! Title tags should:

1. Be concise – remember there is a limit to what will be read and displayed by search engines
2. Accurately describe the page – search engine value will be amplified by matching content and title; plus misleading a user to click isn’t going to win you many customers
3. Be compelling – when you do show up in a search, your title is basically your ad copy to convince a user to click through to your site instead of one of the others

The most common mistakes I see in title tags are:

1. No title at all
2. Branding and nothing else – when I search for “blue widgets” and see the result “acme company,” it doesn’t let me know if you are selling, reviewing, or doing something else with blue widgets
3. The same title throughout the site – often, site designers will write a decent title tag for the homepage of a site and then copy it throughout. Just like #2 above, the title may accurately describe the homepage, but not really any other pages
4. Keyword stuffed – any given page should only have one or two key concepts anyway; if you do manage to rank for any of your myriad of terms, you will be presenting a very ugly and not very compelling choice to the search user

2. Do I Even Need a Meta Description?

Not really, but you might want to anyway. The prevailing opinion is that the meta description doesn’t effect search rankings much (if at all). On top of that, Google and the other engines will automatically grab and use text from the page that they think is relevant to the search query. Sometimes they do this even if you have a description defined.

So, why bother? Well, the auto matching can do some funky things, and it takes no time to write a good description. (For more information about titles and meta descriptions, see our earlier post about PDF optimization and SEO)

3. Which Header Tag Goes Where?

Header tags go from H1 to H6, in order of importance, with the H1 being the most important. The H1 tag is supposed to signify the main idea of the page and, given this, there should only be one per page and it should be unique to the page.

The biggest mistake is simply not using H# tags. Aside from the various advantages for design and accessibility, the H# tags are a great way to signify extra importance for keywords to the search engines.

Another common mistake, and one that really gets under my skin, is using the site name or tagline as the the H1. I have had a few arguments with designers about this one, even WordPress suggests this as the correct thing to do. (This page is very wrong WordPress—please change it!)

Take this post as an example, and ask yourself what the main theme of the page is: Chicago Style SEO or semantic markup? Of course the term Chicago Style SEO is relevant to the page, but it is obviously not the main concept. The same goes for the blog tag line “Comprehensive Internet Marketing…” This is very relevant to what I am talking about, but this page is specifically about semantic markup.

Think about this in terms of search rankings. The objective is to get specific pages to rank for the ideas they contain. I may want to rank for “Internet marketing,” but it would be very ineffectual to push this for every page on my site.

The remainder of the H# tags can be used more than once and, I feel, there is a bit more interpretation as to the best method to use. Personally, I use H2 for the tag line and H3 for post subheaders and sidebar headers. I could see valid reasons for switching this around: maybe H2 for the subheaders, H3 for the tagline, and H4 for the sidebar headers? The important part is to use them logically and consistently.

Other Semantic Markup

Beyond the H# tags, there are quite a few other tags for semantic markup. Barry Wise has a pretty good list with descriptions of each. While these don’t have quite the impact as the ones I’ve already discussed, they all help search engines to signify and define your content.  In the world of SEO, this is a major step toward higher, relevant rankings.

All of us at Chicago Style SEO would like to congratulate Ben Robinson for completing the last step in becoming a Certified Google Adwords Professional: Ben passed Google’s rigorous exam last Wednesday.

Ben Robinson Is Now A Certified Google Advertising Professional

Actually, Ben said that the test wasn’t that tough; we chalk that up to not only his years of working in the industry, gaining a huge amount of experience and knowledge, but also to the hard work and hours he put in to studying.

What is a Certified Google Advertising Professional?

This means that Ben has not only passed Google’s test, but that he has demonstrated he has experience managing a significant dollar volume of Google Adwords and he has done it over a significant length of time.

That’s what he had to do to in order to get the certification. But what does it mean to our clients and potential customers? Most importantly it means that they know that the person handling their Internet marketing has been recognized by Google. the undisputed leader in the industry, as a knowledgeable, skilled professional.

However, in Google’s own words, it means Ben is entitled to, “A warm, fuzzy feeling for this grand accomplishment.”

What’s Next for Chicago Style SEO?

As our other principal, I am next up to take the Adwords Professional test.  I am currently lining up the paperwork that is required and preparing to take the test. As soon as I’ve passed the test, it will mean that Chicago Style SEO should have finished all of the requirements to be an Adwords Qualified Company. This is something we want to accomplish for ourselves and for our many valued clients.

Good News for New Customers

Ben’s professional status also comes with credits that can be applied to new client accounts.  They are $100 in value and are applied as a 1-1 match spend.  We only have a limited number, so contact us today to make sure we still have some left.

2008 has been a very good year for Wandertec, Inc. :

• They have seen traffic increase on their flagship store, Bike Trailer Shop, by over 300% and overall sales are expected to surpass 400% (in comparison to 2007).
• In the midst of a flailing economy, they have hired 3 full-time employees with plans to begin hiring more in the summer of 2009.
• They opened a new webstore in November (The Bike Bag Shop ) to very strong numbers, despite winter being the very slow season for the Bike Industry.
• They are currently working on a new store, The Bike Kids Shop, which will open early Q1 2009 and have plans for 3-4 more shops opening throughout the new year.

How did they do it?

While we have no doubt that the rising gas prices played a role in the overall boom in the bicycle industry during 2008, there are a number of steps that Wandertec, Inc. took to position themselves to be a leading player in their niche.  While much of the work Chicago Style SEO has done with Wandertec, Inc. is very specific to the bicycle industry (keyword research, link building and creating contacts), most of the broad strategies can be applied to just about any field.

Gathering Data:

At Chicago Style SEO, we always start with a Free Website Evaluation to determine strengths and weaknesses and create a rough game plan.  This is a pretty basic approach that tells us where major problem areas are and where to start digging deeper. During this phase, we also overhauled their analytics and audited their Google Adwords.  Both were actually set up very well and our work consisted of connecting the two and adding some filters to help fine tune the data.  We also started some experimental Adwords campaigns to help do more thorough keyword research.

On-Site SEO

While the data was being collected, we started what we like to call a website tune up.  For Wandertec, this meant URL rewriting, adding important metadata, creating better category structures, and much more.  We also ended up moving their blog (Bike Trailer Blog ) from a hosted Blogger account to a semi-custom WordPress install.

The WordPress transition warrants a bit of explanation: we knew that a totally original design wasn’t needed, but we wanted to make sure it was completely optimized and looked good.  We based the design off of the Cutline theme by Chris Pearson. If you ever find yourself setting up a site in WordPress, I highly recommend his themes.  They are great looking designs and equally importantly, they are very tightly optimized. The only downside is that 2,938,239,487 other people will be using the same theme.

We were lucky in that one of the driving principals of the trailer shop was to provide extremely detailed product information (see the product descriptions and reviews on the Burley Nomad or the bike trailer comparison chart for examples).  Not only is this information helpful to customers, but it provided us with a great launching point for our SEO efforts. Though it is not impossible to rank a homepage for many keywords, having numerous content pages about specific products or ideas provide a much easier opportunity to optimize and rank for the product or idea keyword.

Creating Connections

While there are often divisions in any industry, the bicycle industry is one of the most diverse I have ever seen.  I am not just talking about “lots of different people use bicycles,” but rather, there are vastly different groups of people who have built lifestyles around cycling. As an example, think of the differences between road racing teams, hard-core bike messengers, bike touring junkies, and mountain bike racers; the differences in the cultures are quite striking.  Of course there are lots of overlaps, but creating these broad buyer profiles helps to understand who is more likely to buy and which sites are likely to appeal to a particular audience of buyers.

More than just buyers, the authors of sites that appeal to these small niches are the most likely to be interested in Wandertec’s products.  They are much more likely to write about Wandertec, to link back to the Wandertec site, to engage in the conversations on the blog, and to help spread the word in many more ways.

Connecting with these websites is much more than just asking for links. It really becomes the heart of a much broader strategy of being informed of the happenings in the industry and becoming a part of the conversation.  As Wandertec owner Josh Lipton puts it,

“Using blogging as a marketing tool for our website has not only helped us to achieve high quality traffic and improve our search engine results for targeted key-words, it has also become a centerpiece in our involvement with the bicycling community, leading the way for both our customers to become much more aware of our business and broader range of interests and for our business to become much more aware of issues and opportunities in our industry.”

The net result has been a strong networking effect, but also a lot of really good quality back links that send customers directly to the site (defensible traffic) and have the added benefit of moving the store higher in the search engine results.

In general, people who are into bicycling have a very low tolerance for marketing BS. All of the authors we interact with have a deep and abiding passion for cycling and they can smell a phony from a mile away, luckily, Josh and his team are all truly avid bike enthusiasts. Take care to be sincere and open in your intentions, get to know their site before you contact them, and make sure you have a real reason (not just to ask for a link).  You would think that this might be common sense, but sadly, in the SEO industry that isn’t always the case.

For the Future

Though the winter is the slow season for selling bike trailers, Josh and his team haven’t been idle.  The explosive growth of 2008 has made them believers.  Not only did they just launch the new store, they recently started up a social bike news aggregation site called Spoke and Word, they are sponsoring a womens racing team with a new website and teaching them to blog, and they are working on starting up a new blog based around the concept of utility cycling.

It is starting to look like 2009 might make the growth of 2008 look tiny in comparison…

The relationship between Wandertec and Chicago Style SEO has resulted in Chicago Style SEO becoming an expert in many aspects of the bicycle world. If you are in the cycling industry and are looking for a partner to drive your Internet marketing and search engine optimization, we’re an obvious choice.

On May 16, 2007, Google announced the beginning of universal search:

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

Since then, Google has worked to expand the role of universal search in many ways.  The importance of universal search in SEO simply cannot be overstated, and it is only likely to become more important in the future.

What is Universal Search?

People often don’t realize that Google actually has a number of search engines: blogs, books, video, etc.  These are known as “vertical” search engines.  As Danny Sullivan puts it:

Regular search - when you go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or any general-purpose search engine - is a “horizontal” search in that you are searching across a wide spectrum of material. Information from sports sites, news sites, medical sites, shopping sites - the entire horizontal spectrum of topics is represented.

With vertical search, you slice down vertically through one topic area. You search only against the news sites or against the medical information, for example. This type of focus can make for more relevant results.

In many ways, a regular Google search was always “universal” in that it contains much of the same information, they key differences are the way the information is ranked and the manner it is displayed.  Traditional search is ranked by backlinks and on-site factors that show relevance to the query, vertical searches have a whole set of other factors such as price (for products) or newness (for news).  On the display side, you will always see a list of web page titles and descriptions for traditional search, while with verticals this would not always make sense (think images).

Universal search takes the traditional search results and adds in the vertical results.  This has taken on many forms, from the traditional OneBox at the top of the search results page, to expanded OneBoxes and blended results.  Over time, Google has been adding the number of universal results as well as the frequency.

For example, at the time of this writing, if I do a search for chicago seo I see a results page dominated by a map with 10 local listings, and then 10 regular results with an additional news listing blended in.

Categories of Google Vertical Search Engines:

1. Web Search
2. Local Search (Maps)
3. Product Search
4. Google News
5. Video Search
6. Image Search
7. Blog Search
8. Book Search
9. Patent Search
10. Scholar Search

And I am sure there are plenty more in various stages of development and use.  The categories on Google Base might give some clues as to what is in the pipes.

Impact on Search Marketing:

Blended results began as mostly subtractive, meaning they “bumped” a natural search result off of the page they were on, keeping the total results at ten.  Today blended universal results are additive, meaning there are always ten natural results with the addition of whichever universal results are deemed worthy.

Even with the additive results, many internet marketers are understandably upset.  Overnight, you may see your very good and hard fought #3 ranking turn into the equivalent of a #6 ranking, or even worse.

While you may not particularly like these changes, a smart marketer will adapt to realities instead of rallying against what we can’t control. The good news is that Google universal search offers quite a few opportunities to large and small organizations (and individuals) who use them effectively.

1. The first thing to remember is that the verticals themselves are often used directly.  This number may be tiny compared to regular search, but still significant enough to be worth the effort.
2. Because the verticals are often evaluated quite differently, a website with significantly less resources and exposure can often achieve the equivalent of a “first page” ranking in the SERPs, bypassing extremely competitive areas.
3. There are opportunities to literally dominate results pages.  It wouldn’t be unheard of to have a double regular listing, an Adwords listing, and one or two extras from universal results.  Add in a site-wide listing and a sub domain or two and, well, you see where I am going…

How to get Indexed in Verticals:

Over the next few weeks, I will be detailing how to get indexed in vertical search engines as well as exploring the best ways to improve rankings in each.

Rod’s last post about the evolution of SEO got me thinking about the evolution of link building as it pertains to Internet marketing. I like to use the term Internet marketing, as opposed to SEO, to describe what I do because the work entails so much more than a focus on search engines implies. Back before the search engines held so much sway, the true way bring steady, new traffic to a site was to build backlinks that acted as true conduits for click-throughs.

The value of a link

As a person delves into the world of Internet marketing, it becomes easy to focus on the search engine results pages (SERPS) for traffic, thinking of links as a kind of currency to achieve rankings. We lose sight of the underlying value of building relationships and having a link placed in the midst of a steady stream of interested users. There are quite a few tools out there to help you determine the value of a link, usually focusing on things like anchor text, number of other links on the page, number of backlinks to the page, etc. While these things can be important, they are focusing on the secondary effect of ranking in the SERPS, when, in fact, you should first take a look at the first-order effect on your direct traffic and bottom line (that people will follow the link to your page and buy something).

Search Engine Rankings

One great thing about focusing on acquiring quality links from a first-order value perspective is that, quite often, these same links are some of the best in terms of the second-order ranking value. It is a subtle change, but focusing on the first order, direct value in determining link targets usually makes a dramatic difference in the amount of time it takes a site to become profitable. As links are acquired, quality traffic instantly starts trickling into the site, even before the rankings are achieved. Most importantly, it creates a much more solid foundation for the underlying business as you are automatically creating diversified streams of traffic.

Defensible Traffic

Matt McGee had an excellent post about the need for defensible traffic.  In it, he describes the plight of a small business owner who had to lay off employees after a Google algorithm update dropped traffic by more than 50%. He concludes by saying:

It’s time to think in terms of “defensible traffic,” about having a variety of traffic sources so you can survive the whims of any one traffic source, such as an algo change, or the introduction of “quality score” into PPC, or whatever else might come next. Social media, developing a loyal blog readership, or using newsletters to grow your business those are all examples of creating defensible traffic.

Whatever you do, don’t rely just on Google. A business plan that relies on free traffic from an outside source you don’t control is no business plan at all. Spread your eggs around. Changes will come — you can be sure of that. Question is: Are you prepared? Are you diversified?

As Matt points out, defensible traffic is about diversifying traffic sources. This means organic search, pay-per-click, social media, etc. as well as, traditional media and advertising, and email marketing. Matt is right on the money with this thought, and if I can add one more to the list while getting back to my original thought, we should also focus on getting links that actually bring us quality traffic.

While search engine optimization (SEO) is a great thing to work on, don’t forget to step back and focus on the real job at hand, internet marketing.

In his book, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber lays out a fascinating case of how the world is continually evolving and how with every step along the way, everything gets more and more complex. This is most certainly the case with SEO.

In their posts  Social Interaction & Advertising Are The Modern Day Search Engine Submission & Link Building and The Evolution of SEO Aaron Wall and William Flaiz, respectively, describe how search engines have evolved over the years in their strategies of how best to return results to a search. And, as the search engines have changed and improved, so has how to optimze for the search engines.

In this post I’d like to expand a bit on their thoughts. As they point out, there have been basically four steps in the evolution of SEO:

1. Submit Your Site

When the Internet first began, the way to get your site found was to make sure the the search engines knew you were there. They all had submission systems that allowed you to tell them where your site was and what it was about. This allowed them to put your site into a directory.  Some sites even had people check out your site before being added to their database. SEO at this point simply meant that you had to fill out the right forms and that would get you traffic.

2. Page Optimization

Next came the SpiderBot: software that allowed the search engines to have a computer crawl around the web by following the links they encountered as they roamed. As the spiders crawled the web, they archived (indexed) all of the information so that it could be searched. At this point, SEO had to up its game a little; this development meant that the pages in your site had to be spider-friendly. If the spider couldn’t see and crawl through the links on your site, only a part of your site might end up in the search engines’ databases. You had to make sure the links on your site followed the rules that the spiders followed.

3. Link Building

Soon the search engines realized that simply collecting all this information wasn’t enough. They had to figure out how to determine which sites that had the words and or the phrase “best hot dog in Chicago” were the best to send to the searcher. Along came the idea of looking at how many other web sites linked to a site. The thinking was to count each in-bound link to a page (links on other pages pointing to a page) as a vote. However, each link/vote couldn’t have the same weight–not all links are equal. A link from the New York Times or CNN was certainly needed to be a bigger vote than a link from the same site linking to other parts of itself. Page rank was the answer–the more useful information a page had, the higher its rank and the stronger its vote. Google, of course, was the company that developed this idea and captured the lion’s share of the search business because of it.

From an SEO perspective, this meant everything had to change. To get the search engines to point to your page, you needed to make sure that other sites had links pointing to your page. And, you needed to make sure that those links were done correctly, with strong anchor text. And you had to make sure the content of your pages was strong. And, and, and, and…the rules began to multiply exponentially. Making sure the search engines liked you got more and more difficult.

4. Advertising, Branding, Viral Marketing, Public Relations, & Social Interaction

As the Internet grows, Google gets more and more information and gets smarter and smarter. Google basically wants to reward pages (by returning them high in search results) that are well connected and are all over the Internet. They want to see that bloggers are writing about you and linking to your site. They want to see that your ads are all over. They want to see that newspapers and magazines are linking to you. They want to see that people are talking about your page on sites/services like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other tens of thousands of social web sites. As Josh Hallett among many others point out, the more interesting your content, the more people talking about your page/site on the web, the more Google likes you.

Once again, this changes everything for SEO. To truly optimize a page or a site, SEO now how to help create a buzz on the Internet–get as many people writing about and linking to a site from as many different locations as is possible. Gone are the days of putting a single simple link on a high ranking page in order to increase the rank of your page. It’s far more complex than that now…you have to have buzz.

Final Thoughts

Is this the end? Not a chance…it’s just going to get more and more complicated. It’s going to get harder and harder to get over the hump and unseat the site that is now #1 for your key words. Roll up your sleeves and get busy!