Search Engine Optimization

By: Cade Lee

 So by now, if you’re learning about SEO (search engine optimization/search engine marketing), you’ve probably heard of Black Hat SEO. What exactly is spamming as far as SEO is concerned? Ultimately search engines like Google, Yahoo, ask and MSN want to provide the most accurate and complete research results that they can to their target market. At the end of the day, a search engine is only as good as the results that it delivers to those that use it. If their audience does not have faith in their search capability, the traffic will dry out and so will the sponsored listing fees as well, and any other advertising fees that they’re able to obtain.

It wasn’t all that long ago (1994) that Internet marketers used various techniques to trick search engines into positioning their sites high in the search results for search terms that didn’t apply to their site. This was very prominent in the adult entertainment world as a matter of fact. It’s in my opinion; the inception of search engine optimization came from the adult entertainment industry.

Today, these techniques do not work for long-term search engine optimization campaigns. It’s true that you can obtain quick rankings in a very short period using “Black Hat SEO” ; however, usually it takes a great deal of work, and the results do not last very long. Once the search engines discover that you are trying to “Duke” their search engine, many of them may not list your domain at all. Search engines are programmed through their algorithms and robots to detect many of the techniques used in “Black hat SEO.” A few of the search engine tricks that used to work, especially pertaining to website design are:

• Keyword stuffing — several websites repeat the same keywords over and over again on both the home page, and even places that you can’t see. They do this by hiding the keywords in invisible layers such as <No Frames> tag, and in meta-tags. Also, spammers will repeat those keywords over and over again at the bottom of the document. For example:
  

  “Denver attorney, best attorney in Denver, attorneys in Colorado, Denver attorneys, attorneys for Denver, criminal attorney in Denver, bankruptcy attorney in Denver, attorney Denver, Denver attorneys.” There’s been much talk as to what is an acceptable amount of keyword stuffing, or keyword placement within the text of the document. As a rule of thumb I have heard that Google does not like to see more than 7% saturation, while MSN and Yahoo! Do not want to see more than 5% keyword density within any given page.
  

• Hidden Text and Links – another tactic used by spammers has been hidden text and links. What they are doing here is simply hiding keywords from human eyes. By making the text the same color as the background of the website. There is no fooling Google, Yahoo or MSN with these old tricks as the “Google bots” have been able to spot these tricks. Another example of this might be hiding keywords in areas which are not visible, such as placing these keywords in style sheets.
  
• Content duplication — I know that there are several other search engine optimization professionals that are completely against duplicate content, I do think it has its place. Why would I say such a thing? We should probably start as to why search engines do not like content duplication. Take for example a website that you already own, it ranks very well. You decide that you would like to have two sites on the first page of Google so you simply duplicate your first and post it under a different domain. Search engines want to provide unique content to their searchers; they do not want to provide duplicate content again and again. I should probably explain why I think duplicate content does make sense from time to time. If you’ve written an excellent article and published it with E-zine articles for example, I think it is completely within reason to go ahead and post that on your own blog or website as well.
• Page swapping or cloaking — this is where the website owner has taken content from a top ranking site and placed it on their page to achieve the top ranking. Once they have achieved that ranking they replace that page with completely different content. Cloaking is very similar to page swapping. The intent of cloaking is to serve search engines one page while the end-user is served in other, not a good move!
• Misleading Title Changes — making regular title changes so the indexing bots believe that your site is a new site. The desired effect from this is so that the site is listed again and again, this is considered misleading.
• Domain Spam (Mirrored Sites) — this is very close to content duplication. Ultimately this is why the search engine’s do not like content duplication. Some web owners have duplicated their entire website or maybe even slightly modified their site and target under a different domain or URL. Usually the intention was to obtain more than one listing on the first page. In the end all this does is get you banned from practicing this type of technique, once again it is misleading.
• Refresh Meta-Tag — I am certain that you have visited a website and automatically you were brought to a different page within the site, this is the result of a “refresh meta- tag”. At the end of the day you do not want to use a redirect unless it is absolutely necessary and I strongly recommend using a “permanent redirect” (301) which tells the search engines that the page they are looking for has a different home now. The preferred way to use a refresh meta-tag is to use a delay of at least 15 seconds or more and provide a link on the new page back to the page that they were taken from. Often times a website will use a redirect or refresh meta-tag to take visitors from a page that is obsolete and is no longer being used.
• Cyber Squatting — this refers to taking traffic from legitimate websites. So for example let’s pretend that somebody was to operate a website called www.ebey.com it would be hoping to obtain traffic by visitors that have misspelled the domain that they were truly looking for. Usually when companies are doing this they are promoting completely unrelated contents to that of the site that they are trying to obtain traffic from. Google very much dislikes the cyber squatting.

So even if you do not understand anything about search engine optimization or search engine marketing, it is easy to see that none of the search engines tolerate misrepresentation, misleading searchers or tricky techniques. If the technique you are using on your website does not offer value to the end-user and it is done solely for SEO it is very likely that Google, Yahoo or MSN will take notice. Trying to avoid the hard work of real
search engine optimization is practically impossible. Certainly you can avoid the hard work and go with a technique or strategy that will get you listed with Google rapidly, eventually that domain will get you delisted. At the end of the day it is twice the amount of work to optimize two websites quickly vs. optimizing one website in a nice slow and steady manner.

Cade Lee is a Search Engine Optimization Professional in Denver | Denver SEO

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Cade, excited at Christmas about some new socks

By: Cade Lee

Completely new to Twitter (at least only having been there for the past couple of weeks now), I have never been so enthused about a new social networking media. I have been on facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sits but I have to say that I have run into more people in a shorter time frame on Twitter than anything else so far. So with that being said, I was asked by GreigWells (@GreigWells on Twitter) to conduct this post and I was happy to do so. I had never really considered the three types of marketing separate or “versus” one another before, nonetheless GriegWells requested a SWAT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Achievements and Threats also referred to as SWOT, O for opportunities) assessment on the these three internet marketing techniques. In trying to remain objective I must state that I am a strong believer in “search engine optimization” and that includes using all three of the above campaigns for marketing online. I definitely lean more towards traditional search engine optimization and social networking versus pay per click (cost per click) advertising and I will explain this very shortly. So with that being said, let’s begin.

Pay per Click (PPC, CPC)

For those that have not heard this before or are completely new to internet marketing, these are the advertisements that you see on the right hand side of your screen or at the very top of your Google internet marketing and already know this so bear with me for a few seconds while I explain to those who do not know. PPC or CPC advertising is paid for by the advertiser. In a pay per click campaign you will set up an account with whatever search engine you are advertising with, you will “buy” or define keywords that searchers would use to find your product or service and then bid on those keywords. Depending on your bid, you will show up on the 1^st page or perhaps the 5^th  depending on how you bid. You can control the amount of money that you spend on these types of campaigns by defining a daily budget and how much you are willing to pay for the keywords defined in your campaign.

Organic listings are bordered in blue while PPC is highlighted and bordered in Red. Our next figure will be easier "which one of these kids is doing his own thing".

searches. Usually you will notice a “sponsored links” text by these advertisements. I know that many of you have much experience in

Strengths, Achievements: With PPC or CPC advertising you are able to achieve a very high page ranking (as long as you bid high) at a very fast pace or in a very short time frame. You do not really have to work at obtaining high amounts of traffic to your site, it is extremely convenient and time efficient.

So PPC or CPC goes in line with the golden rule, you know, “He/she who has the most gold makes the rules”. You simply pay enough and you are in front of all that coveted “front page” traffic that everyone is after, as long as you have followed the terms and conditions of the search engine that you have placed the campaign with.  

It has been documented in some studies that PPC/CPC advertising attracts 14% of the overall traffic; however, when you consider the sheer volume of some keywords 14% can add up to tens of thousands of searches every day. There are other studies that have shown PPC/CPC obtaining a total of 30% of total traffic. So while it is hard to say just how many searchers trust or look to PPC/CPC to find the solution for their search, pay per click advertising does deliver results and for many companies (especially newer domains or sites) it is a necessity.

Threats/Weaknesses: Man it was certainly tough to cover the strengths and I had to bite my tongue to get here. Threats and weaknesses to a pay per click campaign are many. To start, once you have initiated your campaign for PPC/CPC and “gotten the ball rolling” you can definitely expect to see traffic, but what kind of traffic? Could it be that your jealous competition is simply clicking on your ad to use your budget for the day? Google and other companies that offer PPC/CPC advertising cannot prevent this type of activity from occurring; although they have put some protocol in place to avoid it as much as possible it is still absolutely going to happen. I don’t necessarily condone this type of behavior (clicking on PPC ads to drive out the competition) but, for those that believe business is war (especially among small to mediums sized businesses) I know that this is a daily occurrence having heard it from the mouths of many prospective customers. At the end of the day spending your competitions budget on PPC is a strategy just like any other. The sooner your competition spends your budget for the day, the sooner they can take your advertisement down and then perhaps if they have an ad of their own, theirs will surface from the bottom of the heap where they have bid a much lower amount for the same keywords you have bid on.

Another weakness to PPC is that once you have spent your budget for the day you are off the “board” unless you are willing to go in and change your budget and spend more money. So in PPC/CPC you are sincerely at the mercy of the market. Whether your ad is visible to that prospective customer you are hoping to meet depends on whether or not your ad has been clicked on enough times to spend your budget for that day. If you think about this, what type of advertising have you ever done in the past where your ad disappears? Maybe with passing out flyers, or television ads, both of these campaigns tend to be just as effective in today’s market as PPC (maybe even more effective in my opinion).

Getting back on topic here, I thought I might mention that keywords in PPC/CPC seem to be less forgiving here than in search engine optimization. I say this because it seems to me that if you have not defined the keyword exactly as it is typed in by your searcher than you will miss that traffic as well. An example of this is “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver”. In my experience in the past, if I purchased “Denver Attorney” and did not place “Attorney in Denver” in my campaign, than I would not show for it as a keyword.  Makes sense as Google or any other search engine would not want to take charge of your PPC campaign and just assume that you would want to be in front of that traffic looking for “Attorney in Denver”. Whereas in search engine optimization you will be able to “net” the traffic from misspellings, variations of keywords, etc. I will explain more about this in our assessment of search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

Strengths/Achievements:  It seriously pains me to separate search engine optimization from social networking, but given the request of comparing these three “side by side” I must abide by the rules here. Anyway, search engine optimization for those of you who might have heard the term (who hasn’t latey?), but are new to the concept means that you are optimizing your site in hopes to achieve a page one ranking or improve your ranking in the search results by optimizing the keywords

One of these kids is doing his own thing, can you tell which one? By the way, this has nothing to do with this post.

used within your site as well as making use of meta tags and building links to your site from other credible and relevant sites. As cited earlier, 14% – 30% of traffic (according to some studies) is going to PPC/CPC results which would imply that 70% or more of searchers are going to the organic results. This would only make sense as Google or whatever major search engine that searcher is using has taken the time to find the most relevant site or results for that searchers specified search. There seems to be an inherent amount of trust given to the larger search engines as they have proven over time with their very complex algorithms that they deliver the most trusted and useful results first.  So is it really any wonder that the majority of internet traffic prefers organic results over PPC/CPC results?

In the sites that we manage (we are a search engine optimization firm if I didn’t say that before) we have noticed a lower bounce rate and a higher “lead conversion rate” on our SEO efforts versus the results our customers had achieved through their previous experiences with pay per click campaigns managed by “pay per click” experts. Mind you that some of these customers were using “AdWords qualified professionals” designated so by Google’s very own designation program. In order to qualify for this program (read this) you will read that it is imperative that these professionals have a quota to fulfill before they ever even qualify. This was absolutely amazing to me as I thought Google would want to have the absolute most qualified individuals giving advice on this sort of campaign versus requiring some sort of monthly quota as they have outlined in their requirements.

Okay, okay, back on topic here. Search engine optimization offers stability for those sites which abide by the guidelines stated here. Although Google changes their algorithms and updates their search engine results regularly, I have noticed that by abiding the guidelines set forth and constantly improving our customer’s websites we are able to stay in front of the right prospective customers for the same keywords 24/7 for a myriad of keyword combinations (i.e. “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver). So the biggest strengths of SEO (search engine optimization) is that a site has no daily budget concerns because it is free! Also there seems to be more trust among searchers with organic listings and more stability and dependability as far as showing up at “the right time and being in the right place” when that prospective customer is looking for your products or services. Lastly, the conversion rate seems to always be higher with a well optimized site versus only working with PPC traffic.

Threats/Weaknesses: At any given time, when you are depending on search engine optimization for your results, you are at the complete mercy of the search engine. At any given time a search engine can go through an “update” or change their algorithms and not include your site in their new results for various search terms. So you are at the complete mercy of the unknown here. With PPC/CPC as long as you pay your bill, you do not have this concern.

With SEO, there is no such thing as instant gratification and there is no “known” way of obtaining a 1^st page ranking. All SEO experts have usually deomnstrated some sort of ability to achieve these types of results, but even they cannot sincerely guaranty a page one ranking. Perhaps if you are optimizing for a search term like ,”Rodent racing” as used by Peter Kent in “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” you might see quicker results; however, if you live in the real world it is most likely that there are many competitors vying for that first page result you are looking for. So, there is much competition in search engine optimization not to mention how time consuming it really is. If you are sincere about optimizing your site and obtaining that 1^st page ranking than it is imperative that you work on optimizing your website every day and following an “optimization plan”. I know that there are many other experts out there that would disagree with me, but I sincerely believe that the only way to “white hat” your way to the top is to work earnestly on obtaining that 1^st page ranking every day.

A well optimized site requires regular maintenance, so it is imperative that you continue working on your optimization even when you obtain that 1^st page ranking. PPC/CPC does not require any of this laborious work.

Social Networking

Strengths/Achievements: I strongly believe that social networking differs from PPC/CPC and SEO altogether. If I were to come up with a fair analogy, I view social networking like networking in general.

When I first entered the professional market, I was a sales representative. I trained with a class of other sales representatives and we were taught two basic ways to obtain business. One was through hard work which included marketing, cold calling and basically getting out there in front of strangers. The other way we were taught to obtain new business was in networking. Networking is also hard word, I did not mean to imply that it wasn’t, but it always seemed like so much more fun than cold calling or handing out fliers (I know I used flyers before, who knows both seem acceptable). Social networking online is the same to me as networking. If you can establish you or your company as a trusted source for any particular solution, than when the time is right for the prospect who has been reading your facebook or linked-in page comes, they will contact you (at least that is the hope). These leads are solid as they already know who you are, what you have to say, how many kids you have and where you went to school. These prospects know that they want to do business with you, they have studied your content and they are interested period.

I strongly believe that (personal opinion here) the closing ratio is higher for those businesses and professionals that have obtained leads or prospective customers strictly by networking online versus those who are only using PPC/CPC or SEO. I say this because social networking is more like public relations versus SEO and PPC/CPC which is more in line with advertising. When advertising, it is more likely to get objections from prospective customers about price or value than it is from referrals. I view social networking just like I do networking in real life.

Threats/ Weaknesses: Similar to SEO, with social networking, your ranking and account are always at the mercy of who you have them with. Just as Google has guidelines, so do the majority of social networking sites. So at the end of the day it is not beyond the realm of reason to suggest that the page on linkedin you have been working at so hard to promote goes away over night as they are sold off to a larger competitor or perhaps they change their guidelines and the scope of your page goes against their guidelines now. While my first example might seem more ridiculous (imagine facebook disappearing overnight, right) the second is not so unimaginable. Facebook could change guidelines tomorrow eliminating all references to any commercial product or company within their domain tomorrow if they wanted, and if they did I don’t think they would suffer all that much for it. I am obviously using my imagination here; the point is that anyone depending on social networking is at the mercy of the services they use to network. Take Squidoo for example, many were using this as a way to promote themselves only to have Google disregard the high page rank they had obtained for their Squidoo page and next thing you know they were not visible any longer. The rules can change at any given time.

So, there you have it. The strengths, weaknesses, achievements and threats of SEO versus PPC versus social networking as I see and understand it. Ultimately, I think any professional or company for that matter is insane not to take advantage of all three of these. I am not suggesting that anyone go out and do all three at the same time, but I do believe that the first stage to obtaining good traffic for a new site is through PPC/CPC. I say this because a site that has never been marketed or is newer will not be able to achieve results organically right away (at least not for the long run), so while the search engine optimization campaign is being worked on, PPC/CPC can deliver results immediately.

The second phase of a solid internet marketing plan incorporates search engine optimization and social networking. Both search engine optimization and social networking used hand in hand will deliver the most optimal results for your search engine marketing campaign. First time I used this term right? What is search engine marketing you say? There are several different definitions of this; I am going to give you the meaning I give to search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is any attempt within the “whitehat” world of internet marketing to get a useful message out to the online community about your services or product, period. By making a constant effort to market you, your website and your product or service, I believe you are marketing through the internet and search engines alike.

The third phase of your internet marketing plan should be improvement. Improving traffic, improving conversion goals and education. The internet is obviously changing faster than any of us can keep up with it, so by constantly striving to stay on top of it all and educating yourself on the latest social networking techniques, PPC/CPC and SEO strategies you will be able to keep your traffic and grow.

At the end of the day, any one of these internet marketing techniques is beyond valuable and they have all assisted with the success of thousands of professionals and businesses alike. Used in combination with one another, an explosive internet marketing campaign can be designed for almost anyone.

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