Will Google be forced to ban its own browser from its index?

Google paid for links. Will they blacklist themselves? I’m guessing no.

“My competitors are here, so this is where I need to be.”

“They’re ranking for keyword x so I should be too!”

“They’re advertising on www.nytimes.com so that’s what I need to do.”

How many of you have thought or heard similar sentiments? On the surface, it makes sense. Why would your seemingly successful competitor be there if it didn’t work? Why reinvent the wheel with your own keywords and tactics?

I think, though, that there are several reasons you might not want to be where your competitors are.

Reason 1: You don’t know whether it’s working.

Unless you’ve got some killer competitive intelligence, or somehow your competitor is definitely succeeding and only employing one tactic, the fact that they’re employing a tactic doesn’t mean it’s working for them. Sadly many companies do things like bid on unprofitable keywords for extended periods of time for various reasons, such as internal politics, neglect and faulty information. Don’t follow them blindly off a cliff!

Reason 2: The same thing may not work for you.

Let’s say that your competitor’s tactic is working for them. Maybe they’re bidding on a very competitive head term and it’s actually making them money (it usually doesn’t). There may be a reason it works for them that doesn’t apply to you. For example perhaps their overall budget is much bigger, so they can afford that head term as well as its more profitable brothers and sisters way down the tail. Maybe their landing page converts better. Your challenge is to find the tactics that work for your unique set of strengths and challenges.

Reason 3: There’s competition there.

Here’s what it really comes down to. I want you to imagine two scenarios. One, you’re talking to a group of potential customers. Two, you and your competitor are both trying to talk to the same group of potential customers. When you follow your competitors around, you’re essentially forgoing scenario one and guaranteeing scenario two.

Competitor research is a great way to get ideas. You can find out through competitor research who your competitors are targeting and how. But it’s a terrible basis for ultimate decision making. Instead, begin by targeting the same people in a different way, or try targeting a different group of people with their tactics. Then expand based on what works. In the end, you should be so successful they start looking to you for new ideas.

Photo by Dav.

Ah, pagination. On e-commerce sites, it’s mostly a holdover from back in the day when connection speeds were slower and it took a long time to load large pages. On content sites, it’s mostly a bid to ramp up page views.

Part 1: The Problem

Let’s quickly go through some of the SEO problems pagination can cause.

First, few people think to give each page of pagination its own title and description tag. And as we all know, each page needs its own title and description tag.

Also, the content on page 1 can look very similar to the content on page 5, especially in the case of product variants. If page one is full of links to product pages that only differ from each other in one respect, such as color or size, and have the same product name and description, you’re looking at duplicate content.

Since we know Google tries to exclude duplicate content from the index, Google might never crawl to your third page of pagination. So when someone searches for “large blue widgets,” if your large blue widgets are linked to from the third page, you won’t rank, because you’re not indexed. Problematic!

The third way pagination can cause duplicate content is that sometimes your CMS will attach the page number to the URL of pagination. This is fine in the case of page 2, 3 and so on. But it’s problematic when it happens to your first page. A very common scenario is when the link to the first page from the main navigation is www.example.com/blue-widgets. But the link to the first page of pagination from the other pages of pagination is www.example.com/blue-widgets-page-1. Now you have two URLs showing the same page. Bummer. Ian Lurie’s got a great writeup on this problem on his blog. Check out Duplicate content sin #1: Pagination. For an example of the problem, look at the New York Times. If you click on a link to the story, you get this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dawkins.html. But let’s say you get done reading the story and want to link to its first page. If you click the 1 link in the pagination, you arrive at this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dawkins.html?pagewanted=1. Now the link juice that would’ve gone to the story goes to this imposter URL.

Part 2: The Fix

First, just add the words “page x” (x being whatever page it is) to your title tags and meta descriptions. Bam, no more duplicate tags. This can usually be done programatically.

Next, create a view all page, with every item on every page of pagination linked from that page. Add a rel=”canonical” tag to the head section of all your paginated pages. The URL you’ll want to make canonical is the View All page. Now you can make it more likely that Google will crawl all those links. Easy peasy!

Screenshot by Designing Web Interfaces.

By now we’re pretty familiar with the standard operating procedure for guest posting. Write the post, include a bio with a link back to your site/blog. But Tiffany from I am Style-ish said screw-you to all that and went above and beyond.

Everything began pretty standardly. The blogger introduced Tiffany, then Tiffany introduced herself with a short bio and a link to her blog. All’s normal here.

The post was A Newbie’s Guide to Designer Shoes and was good if you’re also fantasize about buying designer shoes (don’t judge me).

But then, at the end, she knocks it out of the park. Take it away Tiffany:

And if you’re interested in how I store all my shoes, check out my shoe closet video!

Why yes, Tiffany, if I’m interested in your post, about beginning to buy designer shoes, I would certainly love to watch a video about how to store them! This is brilliant, and makes me weirded out that I’ve never done it, or seen it done before.

You bet your butt I’ll be doing this from now on, and I’d suggest you do the same!

Birmingham’s BarCamp was this weekend. I think it was Birmingham’s fifth. I’d never been and didn’t plan to present but then bam, I’m presenting first round to a whopping ten people. Nervous! Of course I did Basics of SEO. The group was awesome, asking questions, answering mine. Here’s a list of BarCamp Birmingham 2011 sessions and speakers.

My favorite session was, ironically, What is Awesome. Ironic because I meant to go to How to Grow the Digital Community. Also ironic because I went to the event for tech talks but enjoyed a non-tech talk the most. What made What is Awesome so, well, awesome, was the discussion. Really, smart, funny, cool group of people in there. Questions included, can you be awesome and an a**hole at the same time? Conclusion? Yes. Example: Barney Stinson. How is being awesome at your job search like being awesome at dating? Conclusion? Look for ways to help the other party. Don’t be desperate/use the shotgun approach. Bring something to the table. Example? Life, man.

I was also really challenged by the Critical Thinking talk. Again, a non-tech talk.

I had a great time, learned a lot, met some really cool people, and ate delicious BBQ from Jim & Nick’s. All in all a great day and I’d highly recommend you head out to next year’s.

Photo by Josh Self.

SEO is something you could do every second of every day and never really finish. Eventually you’d experience diminishing returns, but most of us never even approach this level of perfection. For most of us, we have a limited amount of time we can spend on our sites, so we need to be efficient in our optimization efforts.

There’s little more daunting than starting a project you know you’ll never really finish. SEO is less a project with a set end than a series of processes that you constantly refine.

This is where I’m supposed to come in with some instructions to solve the problems outlined already.

I was recently instructed to go through ten sites’ home page’s title tags and report back whether they’d been optimized. It sounds simple, right? Keywords or no? But there’s actually no such thing as optimized. Because those title tags will never be fully optimized. They’ll never be perfect.

So my job is to determine how far they are from perfection. But to do that I’d need to know which keyword phrase would be the best one to target with each home page. I can do research and make my best guess. But really that should start with talking to clients to determine the site’s goals and objectives. Is that what I should do for this assignment? Do I need to hold a meeting with each site’s marketing manager to determine site goals?

There comes a point where you’re aware enough of the right things to do that you stop being able to do things half-assedly. Where once you charged in and changed title tags willy nilly, not really knowing how it should be done, excited about the possibility that making that change would help the site, now you just sit there daunted by the amount of work required to do a good job changing a title tag and unsure you’ll get enough benefit out of it to make it worthwhile.

The truth is that I haven’t had a big win in a while. And there’s nothing less motivating than losses without wins to balance them out.

Sorry to get all SEO diary on you, but the point is that I’m going to have to get over it and just begin again. Do my assignments, use my best judgement, and try hard until I start seeing wins once more. And if you keep optimizing long enough, and ever get into a funk, I think the same will be true for you.

Image by i am marlon.

This month, Google introduced schema.org. They called it ”A new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.” Here’s what that actually means and why small business owners should care.

What is schema.org?

First what does Google mean by “schemas for structured data markup on web pages?” Basically, using structured data markup = giving a block of text a label. Let’s say you wanted to add a recipe to your web page. Up until now, the HTML code you’d use to create your recipe would look just like the HTML code you’d use to create a short story with a list.

Search engines would have to use the actual text and context to figure out whether you’d created a recipe or a short story. If your short story was about food, this could be tricky.

How does schema.org help searchers?

Many times searchers are looking for a specific type of data. Maybe they want an address, screenplay or job listing. Google has a much easier time giving the searcher the type of information he or she wants if data is marked up properly and clearly identified. That means the searcher has a much greater likelihood of getting the data he or she wants in one search.

Taking it further, adding tags for data like calories in a recipe would mean searchers could find recipes for chicken dinners that come in under 250 calories per serving in one search.

In addition, when a search engine knows for sure what kind of information it has, it can determine how to best display it in the search results. Maybe a searcher looking for a recipe wants to see a full list of ingredients with each search engine result. Or perhaps someone looking for a screenplay wants to see the name of the screenplay, who wrote it and the year it was published in the search results page.

How does schema.org help webmasters?

Marking up your data makes it more likely it’ll get into the hands on the people who want it. Here’s how SEO Book put it “If you are the first person in your vertical to leverage these new formats that can help your listing look more appealing & help you capture a bit more of the traffic (for a while).”

The Google blog post on schema.org says “With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.”

How could schema.org hurt webmasters?

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book explains that there could be a dark side to helping search engines display your data the way they want to. As a general rule, search engines stop making money as soon as you click on an organic search listing. Both searchers and search engines want everything a searcher needs, be it the whole job listing, recipe or fact, to appear right in the search results page. This makes a click through to the site unnecessary. So the webmaster who provided the data gets no traffic, and presumably no profit, for providing the information.

How can I get started?

 

So, understanding the risks and rewards, here’s how you can start marking up your local business website. First check out the local business section of schema.org, where you can find tags and examples of how to use them.

Here’s a WordPress plugin that helps you add rich snippets. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-gd-star-rating-google-rich-snippet I’m sure there will be more. Found this one via Local SEO Guide.

Once you’re done marking up your data, test your markup using the rich snippets testing tool. Via the Google Webmaster Central blog.

Anyone have any questions or opinions about schema.org? Share them in the comments!

So you want to jump on the bandwagon and set up a Facebook Page for your business. Here’s the easiest, best way to set it up.

Before you begin, here’s what you’ll need:

• An image, preferably a logo, 4MB max
• The date your business was founded
• A paragraph about your business, 255 characters max
• A description of your business, 257 characters  max
• Your business’s mission
• A list of all the awards your businesses has won
• A list of the products you sell, could be services as well, doesn’t have to be exhaustive
• You’ll also need your web address, e-mail address, physical address, phone number, etc.
• It also wouldn’t hurt to go live with some photos and videos to spice things up and make the people you invite to become fans more likely to actually fan you.

As you write or copy this content, try to add keywords where appropriate. Adding keywords can help your Facebook page rank in Facebook internal search and in Google.

Alright. So you’ve got all this together. Now you can get started. First, log into your Facebook account. Then click on Pages, on the left-hand navigation.

Next, you’ll see a list of all the kinds of Pages you can set up. Choose the one that best describes your business.

Then you’ll choose a category, type in your company name and accept Facebook’s terms and conditions.

Then you start by uploading your logo, photos and videos and filling out your information.

The last two things you’ll need to do are suggest to friends and invite fans. When you invite fans, you can use an e-mail address separate from the one attached to your Facebook account. Obviously you want to use the one that has the most contacts associated with your business. Whatever e-mail account you use to communicate with your customers, that’s what you’ll want to use.

After 25 people have chosen to become fans, you’ll get to customize your profile’s URL. This is definitely something you’ll want to do. To read more about why, this blog post on securing your Facebook Page’s username by social media expert Tammy Hawk-Bridges offers a good concise explanation.

You’ll definitely want to add a Like box to your website to drive visitors to your new Facebook Page.

To allow your coworkers or anyone else to make any changes to the new Facebook page, you’ll first need them to add you as a friend.

And that’s it! So easy!

Photo by Lady-bug.

Here’s how you give someone access to your site’s Google Analytics without having to give them your username and password.

After you’ve logged into GA and selected the site you want to give the new user access to, you click User Manager.

Type in the new users e-mail address, highlight the site you want to give them access to, and hit Add. Then, when the highlighted website is in the box to the right, hit Save Changes.

Then you’re done!