You’ll see many people who feel that SEO is marketed using FUD, that’s Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The assumption is that all those spamming emails you receive offering to get you on the first page of Google use this. You must have thousands of web pages and thousands of back links or you will not achieve this obviously important ranking.

I realized the biggest creator of FUD in this scenario is Google itself.

Discuss Fear and Loathing on the Search Engine Marketing Trail

I’m quite convinced the Google “response” was misdirection. Oh hell. Its a lie.

There is some real disdain being felt right now for the screwy way in which Google has responded to questions about why they made this change. Google has a way of compounding existent frustrations caused by poor communication by then giving conflicting responses to issues like these.

the google reaction was weak. Something is going on. They aren’t being straight.

The wierd results for 7pac/10pacs for advertising agencies (only the plurals) have been around for a while. They were always of the ilk for the current list for Baltimore.

Then this past late Spring/Summer they started getting better with more logical businesses for various searches in various cities. Not perfect…just better.

Then Google made this change where they impacted the weight of the algo that generates onemaps or 7pacs. Far more 7pacs were appropriately showing than before.

Then the advertising agencies data turned wierd again. Then Google decided to kick SEO’s and web designers out of 7pacs.

Cre8asiteforums investigates:Google Slams Seo And Web Designers

The biggest factor to consider on the Internet when planning marketing efforts are the search engines and the way they operate.  The major ones here are Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN.  They bring a lot of visitors to any web page and so it is important to know how to maximize that traffic.

For every other article in this series, it is possible to put down a few key principles that will have a major impact on your Internet marketing effectiveness.  This is not the case for Search Engine Marketing.

There are a great number of tasks that must be done well to be highly visible to the search engines. The search engine field is in continual evolution and what may have worked well six months ago may no longer be all that effective.  To be on top of all this requires a great deal of attention to detail and keeping aware of the latest developments by research or by involving a reliable consultant.  This article will provide a big picture, summary view of the Search Engine Marketing field.  It will give you an indication of the things that are important to consider. Even so this article will be somewhat longer than the target 1000 words that was promised.

To define the terms, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting your web site on search engines keyword report pages. These are often known for short as SERPs (Search Engine Report Pages).  It includes:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the free process to gain natural or organic search engine visibility
• Paid advertising on SERPs
• or indeed any other marketing programs offered by search engines.

Search Engine Traffic

To illustrate how important search engine traffic is, here is a pie chart showing how visitors arrived at the SMM website during the past six months.

 

More than three out of four visitors came via a search engine.  Less than one in 10 visitors came direct, that is typed the address into the address field or clicked on a direct link to the site perhaps in an e-mail newsletter.  This website includes a blog and has been optimized to be very visible in the search engines.  However other web sites would show similar results.

This is the way the Internet largely works.  For this reason, marketing through search engines, or SEM, is a major activity for most website owners.  Most websites will also find that Google provides by far the most traffic to them.  For the SMM website, Yahoo and Live/MSN bring only a small fraction of the traffic.  Other websites with different audiences might find slightly higher numbers.  StumbleUpon is an example of one of the social media and this will be discussed in the next article on SMM (Social Media Marketing).

The Way Search Engines Work

The first major activity search engines do is to find as many web pages as they can and summarize the content into a huge database.  To understand how a search engine then produces a relevant answer to a keyword query, here is how Google explains it.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

Submitting Websites To Search Engines

Although it is possible to submit websites to search engines, it is not absolutely necessary.  Search engines have spiders or robots that are continually exploring the Internet to find web pages to add to their search engine databases.  They do this by following links from other web pages that may point towards new web pages. The time to do this is measured in hours for Google and in days for most of the other major search engines.

There are two important exceptions to this.

• One is the pinging process involved with RSS news feeds, as mentioned in the previous article on The Blog.  This is an extremely effective way of signaling to all the search engines that a new post has been added to your blog.  However your blog software should be doing this automatically.
• The second is that it is now possible to submit a site map file to the major search engines.  Google provides information on how to do this.

Submitting Websites To Directories

Google puts great weight on the hyperlinks pointing towards any given webpage.  They are what are called back links by Google.  In the early days, Google seemed to value most back links to some extent.  If the sources were authoritative than the links were worth more.  Everyone was encouraged to submit their website to the Open Directory Project or DMOZ or one could even pay $299 to Yahoo for possible inclusion in their directory.  If accepted then a further $299 must be paid for each subsequent year.  There are also many other directories that accept submissions for free.

Google measures the authority of any web page by a factor it calls PageRank™.  This is determined by the number of links pointing to that page and the authority of each of those links.  The authority of any link from a directory page is related to the authority of the page divided by the number of links on the page.  A link out from a directory page with 300 references on it will therefore be one 300th of the authority of that page.

The bottom line on all this is that effort spent in submitting to directories is of very dubious value.  Getting a single blog post that refers to the web page will be a much better use of effort.

Reciprocal Links

Since links are important in gaining Google visibility, some webmasters offer to set up reciprocal links  with other webmasters, whereby each displays a link to the other.  Since the sole purpose is to influence their ranking with Google, this is clearly against the Google Quality Guidelines.  Normally this is only a complete waste of time and effort, even though there are now companies offering to do this service for you.  In some cases where the other website might be deemed by Google to be a bad website then this could invoke a penalty.

The Search Engine Robots Are Blind

The following mental picture will help you better understand how the search engine robots work.  You might almost think of them as blind tracking dogs.  These computer processors handle only digital information.  They cannot see a picture or image.  They assess only the text content and the code that makes up the webpage.  Jordan Kasteler has put together a video that provides more details on How a Search Engine Reads Websites.

One way of checking what the spider sees is to do a Google search for the website.  Normally you will find a link in the SERP to the cached version of the website.  Clicking on that cache link and then on the link at the top right to the text only version will show you what the Google spider is seeing.

Making The Spiders Welcome

In addition to providing webpage content that spiders can see, it is also important not to put blockages in their way.  A good assessment of this is provided as part of the Google Webmaster Tools website.  A wealth of information is provided about your website, particularly if you go through the verification process to prove that you own the website. 

Search Engine Optimization

Developing web pages that will rank highly with the search engines is a huge topic that cannot be treated in detail here.  The references at the end are valuable but the following provide more manageable summaries of what is involved:

• SEO Checklist 
  One of the many you will find by doing a Google search for this.  They are usually fairly long and sometimes contain some misconceptions.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Key
  A short list prepared by SMM
• Writing Memorable Search Visible Blog Posts 
  An approach to the most important aspects of any blog post in SEO terms.

Creating Click Through Serp Entries

One often neglected topic is the Title and snippet that Google shows in the SERP.  Your web page may appear in a keyword search at the #4 position but if the Google snippet for your entry is much more inviting than the three above it, then the searcher may click on your entry.

The first important element is the Title of the web page.  Then Google has an automatic snippet creation process that determines what it shows below the title in the SERP.  You can influence that if the meta description of your web page is carefully developed.  For a blog post it should have a description of 138 characters and spaces because Google often will insert the date of the web page before this text.  With such a meta description length, Google will often reproduce that description as the snippet.  For a traditional web page the description can go to 155 characters and spaces since that is the maximum that Google will show.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

In some highly competitive markets, it may be almost impossible to get web pages that will appear at an early position in the keyword query reports.  One can then use paid advertising in the search reports such as that provided by Google Adwords.  Again this is a large topic and the following will provide entry points to further reading.

• Google Adwords Learning Center 
• SEO ++ PPC For More Sales

Analytics

It is important to monitor how effective the SEO and PPC campaign is so that improvements can be made.  Even the raw website traffic logs can give useful information.  However an analytics program such as that provided by Google gives more easily digestible explanations of what is happening.  If you have concerns about Google knowing too much, other analytics services are available, either free or for a fee.  Clicky is one analytics service at modest cost that seems to have good reports.  There is also a comparison with other analytics services on the Home page there.

Conclusion

This summary overview has been quite lengthy and yet has just touched on many of the topics involved in Search Engine Marketing.  Why not add a comment if you think some aspect should be treated in more detail.  We will then determine how best to meet the need you are expressing.

References:
Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, etc., etc. – Donna Fontenot
The following provide up-to-the-minute information on SEO developments:

• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. Google Webmaster Central Blog

The key element is “only a small number of particularly useful sites.” One is bound to hope that they’ll be making these choices very carefully — but you never know. Will they tell you if they’re going to unleash their form-crawling ‘bot on your site?

So here’s the big question: is this going to benefit or harm your web site?

On the one hand, Google will be able to find more documents on your site. If you have pages which are only accessible via form submission — for example, behind entry pages which require you to select your country in order to continue — Google may now be able to locate this.

But on the other hand, Google may now be crawling pages which require agreement to terms of service before they can be visited. You may have assumed that these pages wouldn’t be available because they were hidden behind a form — but now, these documents are popping up directly in the search results pages, and users are jumping directly to them without agreeing to the terms of use. Furthermore, Google may now be generating thousands of search results pages from your site which cause duplicate content problems. Of course, they may be able to detect this.

These scenarios are altogether hypothetical, of course, but they are both entirely possible.

One of the chief problems is that web developers and consultants have long based their choices at least partially on the assumption that Google and other search engines would not crawl forms. As such, using a form gateway was an easy way for reasonably knowledgeable developers to prevent the indexing of the content behind it. Certainly, there were other ways — but there was no reason not to do it like this.

It’s a funny thing — the web is littered with web sites which are blocked from search engine access because of developer ignorance. These sites have blocked search engines via a carelessly created robots.txt file, by form-based entry pages, or through fully Javascript-driven navigation menus. There’s a direct motivation for Google to develop methods to find this content. But there are also numerous examples of developers who have intentionally used the same methods to prevent content from being detected by search engines.

Is Google capable of differentiating by intention? I doubt it, at this point. In the long run, this is just another place where education of webmasters and developers will be critical. We’ll just have to hope that nobody has to learn their mistakes when Google deletes their entire website because they left their administrative area unsecured — except by a form.

Whether the ability of search engines to crawl forms is a good thing or a bad thing depends a lot on the ability of search engines to choose whether they should submit a form. Forms are used for so many reasons online that it’s hard to imagine a logical means to reliably detect the search value of indexing the results of a form. Ultimately, I hope that when this comes into general use (if it ever does) Google will take some steps to warn webmasters of the potential results — or even create a new robots meta tag which allows them to prevent form crawling.

Firstly, there is the problem of measurement. What, exactly, is the problem that removing PageRank, form the toolbar or the algo, suppossed to solve? And what metrics do we use to measure this? Comscore data shows that, despite having over 50% of search, Google increased their market share in August, 2007. The most important metric (market share) seems to favour Google by a wide margin, so i can;t really see that any of this really hurting their bottom line.

The second flaw in the argument is that the removal of the PageRank display from the toolbar would somehow stop link buying. I disagree with this assessment completely, for the simple reason that the cat is out of the bag, and people know that links count in SE algorithms (including Yahoo, ASK and MSN’s). This fact makes link buying pretty much a permanent addition of the SEO arsenal. Removing the toolbar PR will only serve to obfuscate which links are best, with the net result that there will be more link buying (although likely at significantly reduced price points), as people are forced to guess. some might win, some might lose, but the game will continue on, regardless.

Removing the toolbar green bar also wouldn’t attack the specific problem of sellers, who are a tiny fraction of all sites and site owners. Rather, removing PageRank display from the toolbar would be analogous to cutting off one’s leg to kill a small wart on one toe. A PageRank drop targeted at sellers, on the other hand, hits people where it hurts most (the hip pocket), and makes it clear who they are targeting.

So far, I haven’t heard a coherent argument against PageRank, even on the toolbar, but I am listening, and willing to be convinced

For those that don’t know, Google reduced the PageRank for a number sites, in many cases between two and three the toolbar scores/ranks/numbers. This has caused many people to write a heck of a lot of posts, and make me eternally thankful that Blogs use bits and bytes, not paper (I reckon an Amazon worth of trees would have been cut down otherwise).

The reason I want to wade in is simple: I don’t get it. What is the big deal? To me, it seems like everyone is surprised that the 800 lb gorilla in the corner, the one that has been making those threatening gestures, is doing anything. What, you mean those threats were real?

On top of that, the complaints have been strange. TBPR (ToolBar PageRank) has surely and deliberately been downgraded for many sites selling links, but there is little to no evidence that this has been accompanied by any real penalty, like traffic from Google falling.

I think that makes the solution Google implemented near perfect (from their perspective), as it targets the behavior they don’t like (link selling) without affecting anything real. Assuming that this has not affected real PageRank (or whatever link factors they now use internally), then really, it isn’t a big deal at all, and if the sites truly were not selling PageRank, then the reduction of said toolbar score should have zero affect on their sites and revenue.

Thing is, the anger is partly because all these sites were selling PageRank, knowingly or unknowingly, and Google’s removal of a few points of TBPR removes the premium paid on ads which parse PageRank, and this is/will hurt people were it hurts most: the hip pocket. To me, it is odd that, rather than thanking Google for not doing this a year ago, before the text link market was mature enough to pay good money for these links, which would have cost many sites many hundreds (thousands?) of dollars, they are upset that Google took away something they really didn’t have to sell in the first place, and 100% should not have relied upon in any revenue projections.

This situation really points out the follies of using a price determinate that belongs to a third party diametrically opposed to the behavior. relying on TBPR to price ads is kinda like Columbian drug bosses paying bonuses based upon drug enforcement data.

Lastly, there have been comments that nofollowing links is a good idea, and this enforces it. That is really kooky logic, as nofollowing links will only preserve TBPR. This is good so that what, you can then sell PageRank? If you do that you’ll lose your PageRank, in which case you’ll need to nofollow your links… on and on ad nauseam. The issue here is Google messing with your PageRank so you can’t sell it, which is the same as nofollow, in practice, anyway, so either approach is no score draw.

I want to express that I am deeply sorry for all the people who will suffer a drop in revenue as a result of this update. unfortunately the only constant in SEO is change, and if you rely upon advertising for a living, you need to make sure that your offer is compelling enough that this sort of situation won’t overly hurt you in the future.

8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from “friendly” companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Emphasis mine

Isn’t it amazing how time changes, and so does perspective!

Nope. That can’t be right.

Since so many people question the logic and message behind ASK’s ad campaign, I find I’m not alone. Many of you have no idea what the hell is going on either.

Cre8asiteforums’ members are all over this, in Ask’s Bizarre Bad Taste And Weird Ad Placement

The Unabomber killed 3 people and wounded more than 20 others. This is what Ask is now using as a marketing ploy? I’m totally disgusted.

The line in another version of the campaign: ‘The algorithm killed Jesus’.

Now there’s something about “half dressed women with swords”.

One of my favorite things about these video interviews is seeing how people I’ve read for the last few years move and interact. So far, I continue to like us all quite a bit. We share an intellectual generosity and curiosity that I treasure.

The interview itself moved from local search to the proposed blogger’s code of ethics, an interesting mix. Both ethics and local search can find a foundation in personal commitment, yet so much of the online environment is in flux. Great swaths of SEO/M are still chewing through info land with baby teeth.

As technology, social marketing and SEO/M methodology evolve, local search can seem like a moving target. However, at the heart of “local” there is a steadfast potential for individual businesses to promote themselves. In the interview, Bill and Loren mention motivating customers to write reviews on Yahoo, Google or citysearch.com. Creating and verifying a business listing on the map feature of Google or Yahoo is free and opens a door for customer input, even if the business doesn’t have a web site. Mike McDonald affirmed, “Think globally, act locally.”

I feel that the blogger’s code of ethics proposed by Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wells is the well-meaning product of attempting to think a little too globally. A blanket code of conduct can’t take the place of personal judgment on the part of whoever is responsible for a particular site. Regardless, why be satisfied with shooting for a minimum acceptable baseline?

Bill pointed out that the code of ethics is aspirational, directing bloggers to “be a good person,” versus establishing a minimum baseline for acceptable behavior. This doesn’t really say anything because we may have different ideas about what doing our best means.

Bill, Loren and Mike all agreed that blog comments that are acceptable in one place may not be as OK in another. Sometimes passionate discussion with diverse, strongly voiced opinions is natural and desirable and would be missed if it were to be eliminated.

Character is part of community. Watching interviews like this one puts a little color in the black and white text of forum and blog posts. Ideas flow. Plus, there’s nothing quite like putting a voice to a message.

Nice to “meet” you, Bill.

See Bill Slawski and Loren Baker interviewed on Webpronews

Barry Schwartz, of RustyBrick.com writes for SEL:

Apostolos Gerasoulis is very excited about this new algorithm and he told me he feels this will be the most powerful algorithm in search.

Seeds of this news appear in my coverage of social search this morning, posted in SERoundtable. Check out the section by Apostolos Gerasoulis, in Social Search Overview

Ask.com is migrating Teoma and Direct Hit discussion at Cre8asiteforums.