You’ve spent weeks getting your new website up and running. The content is good, the links work, and the site looks great. Now, how are you going to get people to visit? As far as online marketing goes, your two major options are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (SEO). Each provides a unique list of advantages that can be leveraged to improve your site’s visibility and popularity on the web, depending on what stage your website is in.

The problem is that too often, PPC and organic SEO are viewed with an “either/or” mentality, rather than a cooperative one. In fact, most information regarding PPC and organic SEO on the web presents the techniques in opposing, comparative, or “versus” viewpoints.

According to some, choosing PPC as your online marketing platform means you must sacrifice the positives that organic SEO can bring (and vice versa). But why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? Well, if you play your cards (and plan your budget) right, you can. By implementing both PPC and organic SEO tactics to their online marketing campaigns, many website owners have found a winning combination.

Here are a few of the advantages that each online marketing technique can bring to the table:

PPC

• Instant Gratification- your ads appear instantly and bring traffic to site quickly
• Easy to Set-Up and Implement- getting a PPC campaign started takes a short amount of time and is a simple step-by-step process
• Easy to Track- PPC allows you to see how many clicks each keyword is receiving, where clicks are coming from, and how much each click is costing you

Organic SEO

• Provides Long Term Stability- investing in organic SEO ensures that your site will receive quality traffic over a longer period of time
• Its Free- unlike PPC, where you pay for each person who clicks on your ad, organic visitors cost you nothing
• Trusted More By Users- because organic listings are gathered and organized by search engines based on relevance, users are more likely to trust these listings over PPC advertisements.

By looking at the advantages that each technique provides, it is not difficult to see how using both can be beneficial to your site. The ease-of-use and immediate impact that a PPC campaign can provide is perfect for getting traffic to your site now. It can also act as a testing ground for keywords which can later be included in your organic SEO campaign.

While your PPC campaign is bringing your site instant traffic, you can also begin building the foundation of your organic SEO campaign. Although it takes time to build your site’s organic rankings, you will eventually be able to spend less on your PPC campaign for certain keywords that you are ranking for organically. The continuous stream of quality traffic that you can get through organic SEO will be well worth the wait.

Cloaking defined by Wikipedia

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.

From Google’s FAQ section for webmasters you can also find the following statement:

To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.

Webmasters have many different opinions when cloaking can be used and when it should not (you can read more cloaking threads at webmasters.com). In one particular instance I was looking at a website from a Fortune 100 company that I really liked (bcg.com), and it surprised me to find a cloaking technique in their H1 header text.

Are they really cloaking? Yes they are.  A person visiting the website only sees a logo on the top left corner, while the H1 tag is what the search engines index.

How are they doing it?: The company’s cloaking solution uses a simple css technique: they wrap a link around a div (named “logo”) which is then wrapped around an H1 tag.  Here is the html code:

<a href=”http://www.bcg.com” style=”cursor:hand”>
<div id=”logo”>
<h1><span>BCG - The Boston Consulting Group</span></h1>
</div>
</a>

Then they use CSS in order to hide the text behind the logo (so that only the picture logo displays to the user:

#logo {
width: 260px;
height: 111px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background: url(’/img/logo.gif’) top left no-repeat;
text-align: left;
float: left;
}

h1 span {
display: none;
}

Why not separately display the image logo and H1 tags?  Having a visible H1 tag on every page may not look aesthetically pleasant to the end user and some companies would prefer to show just a well recognized logo to their uses.  Cloaking H1 tags under an image logo provides a way to show the logo to the user while still have each page’s H1 tag include their brand name.

Are they alone? No.  Many other Fortune 100 companies (like Qualcomm, Quicken Loans, Ohio Health, Gore Tex, SAS) are also using this particular technique. I don’t believe Google will ban any website from cloaking their H1 tags with their image logo as long as it is clear that they just want to provide a better user experience and not distort search rankings.  In most cases all the companies that I’ve searched and found are just cloaking H1 tags with images for their brand name.

Recomendations on Cloaking Images: Because the sites in question are not already banned from Google’s search index, it’s probably the case that cloaking H1 tags with your brand image logo should be ok and won’t get your site banned.  In this case, it should be clear to Google engineers that you are not trying to change the message you give to people vs search engines,  but want to provide a better user experience.  They keyword here is “should”, so keep in mind that any form of cloaking in the long run is probably not going to be worth the effort - only the search engines know what is acceptable when it comes to what is considered “cloaking” and what is not - so it can become difficult to guess.

Also keep in mind that it’s usually not too difficult for a site to rank well for their brand name because normally there isn’t going to be a large number of competitors with the same company brand name out there.  Keeping a brand text in visible H1 tags, in the site’s title tags and or in backlink anchor text might be a better option instead of cloaking on any level.

I get a lot of questions on Google’s page rank meter. I was asked by a friend of mine:

Question 1: Based on the Google Page Rank, the highest rank I’ve come across so far has been with latimes.com (8 out of 10) and nytimes.com (9 out of 10). Besides Google, Yahoo and the rest that calculate page rankings, do you know of any sites that have a perfect 10 ranking?

Question 2: Last week I saw the LATimes.com site ranked 9 out of 10, but this week it’s back to an 8. Any thoughts on why they dropped?

To be short and sweet, I don’t know of any sites that have perfect 10 page ranking. But should you even care?

Page Rank is one small portion of Google’s total algorithm and only looking at one small portion of a larger picture often times doesn’t give you the best point of view. A site can rank in different positions for many different keyword phrases, so PR isn’t going to, in itself, indicate where in the results you will show up for a given keyword - since your positioning is based how a person searches for your site along with many other factors that happen to include Page Rank in the equation.

Well, what does the Page Rank (PR) meter indicate anyway?

You could say PR tells you how “networked” your site is. PR is thought to be a logarithmic function of the number, and possibly the total quality, of in-bound links a site has accumulated. So, the more in-bound links you have, the higher your PR. But it gets harder and harder to climb up the PR ladder since the equation has a logarithmic base.

Page Rank meter, Not Always Accurate

You may have noticed: the Page Rank meter that you might have installed on your FireFox or IE web browser is not always accurately reflecting Google’s internal Page Rank numbers for 2 reasons:

1. Google updates their PR values once every 3 or 4 months - so the PR value you see for any given web page is not always going to be up to date.
2. The Page Rank meter has to guess a page’s value some times, for example, the meter PR shows a value on the Gmail interface page (which shouldn’t have a rank since your private email messages don’t appear in public web results) - so we don’t even know which pages the meter is guessing on!

With all this said, Page Rank should probably be taken with a grain of salt in that it can be very misleading piece of information.

OK, but how can a site’s Page Rank drop?

A site’s Google PR can drop for a few reasons that I am aware of:

1. a reduction of in-bound links to the site
2. a Google engineer manually penalized the site in question for spammy web practices
3. the meter might actually be “guessing” a page’s PR value to a certain extent, almost like a random number

Is there any value to the PR number of a web site?

Yes. Since the Page Rank number of a web page is updated every 3 months or so, we know we are looking at historical data (an image from the past). For this reason we can usually judge the past activities of a site in terms of in-bound links and how much “link” juice a site receives in general - and if all else equal (the site has not participated in any type of known web spam activity since the last update) then we might even be able to determine the current health of the site - weather or not we want to acquire a link from the site or if we want to link out to the site.

Why does Google make the Page Rank numbers public?

• When you think about it, Google wants to do everything in their power to stop people from gaming their search engine. So why make an internal number from their algorithm public?? (It’s possible that they don’t even use PR in certain ranking calculations, but that’s another story)
• Google uses the PR meter so it’s user population will learn to value sites the a high page rank and devalue sites with a low page rank.
• If they can get you to think in their terms, they can control your fear: what do you think Google does to sites with a healthy page rank that commit “spammy” practices (such as selling links), or anything else they deem as “bad”… they drop the site’s page rank down or even to zero as a scare tactic - sort of like a slap on the wrist and “let that be a lesson to the rest of you!” - even though the site’s rankings, and traffic don’t change - the things they can’t obfuscate with a simple reduction in PR.
• Google uses the “Page Rank” (PR) metric as a means of controlling the behavior of the population when it comes to judging the “quality” or the ability of a site to rank in the search results - that’s why they make the information public.
• The PR meter helps prevent people from spamming their search engine, so they can generate cleaner web search results, make it harder to perform organic SEO and drive more money to their adwords program.

And no, other than Google’s home page, I don’t know of a web page that has a perfect 10 PR, do you?

I recently received a question from a client asking which sub domain would be the most beneficial to create for their new real estate web site, either going with “home.site.com” or “homes.site.com”:

I have one specific question. It was suggested by a member or our marketing staff that for Real Estate sites, “home” gets better results than “homes”, particularly as part of a url. For example “home.site.com <http://home.site.com>” is better than “homes.site.com <http://homes.site.com>“. …. ‘and it wasn’t even close’, I was told.

Can you guess which keyword brings in more interested traffic? Let’s find out:

Search Volume of “homes” versus “home”

According to Google’s trends tool, “home” receives more searches than “homes” by about 2 to 2.5 times as much. At first, the larger search volume would lead you to believe more (in blue) is better…

Wordtracker also reports that “home” has a larger search volume than “homes”.

Google’s adwords keyword tool also reports the same trend:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (just enter the two words)

Keyword discovery also reports similar data (768196 for “home” vs 135921 for “homes”)
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

So there really are many more searches for the singular than the plural version of the word - but there’s more to the story here…

Correlated searches of “homes” vs “home”

As we’ve seen, there are more searches being reported for “home” than “homes” but after looking at keyworddiscovery’s data, for example, “homes” seems to be more correlated with related searches such as “homes for sale” or “mobile homes“, etc., while the keyword “home” includes a lot of search queries looking for things like “work from home” or “home garden“, etc.

It would appear that if you were going to start a real estate related web site, “homes” might be a better choice in terms of traffic quality. Even Google seems to thinks so, they have a link to “Find results for homes in Housing” right above their main search results.

One of the most important techniques that a web master can use to help make their site more search friendly is to properly implement 301 redirects. 301 redirects can be used to tell a search engine that page “A” is really supposed to resolve to page “B”, or we can even make it so that domain “A” should resolve to domain “B”, if needed.

But why should we care about page or domain redirection in the SEO world?

• Cuts down on duplicate content issues.
• Helps to transfers link juice into a concentrated areas on your site
• Helps get your pages indexed
• Helps your site Rank Better - can brings in more traffic

Here are some apache .htaccess and PHP examples of page 301 redirecting that I’ve used time and time again:

301 Redirct page A to page B

Redirect 301 /old.html http://yourdomain.com/new.html

You will also note the “/” before the old.html, which represents your root web directory. The “/” is necessary or your web server will not know where to find the old file. The command also requires you to provide the full URL for the new page.

Redirect page(s) from site A to the same page(s) on site B

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*olddomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$ [L,R=301]

This is a good way of transfering link juice from a domain name that you just bought to another existing domain you already own. The newly purchased site could have many links already built up over time and by properly 301 redirecting all page URLs to your existing site you are better able to take advantage of your purchase.

Note that the “.*” on the RewriteCond above which will catch any subdomain such as “www” and redirect that as well to the new domain.

Redirect all domains to a single domain

# Turn on apache mode re-write
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

# 301 redirect any domain that is not www.yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com
# EX: if olddomain.com is requested then it will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is good if you have more than one domain name pointing to the same web root directory and want to make sure that all requests to all domains get routed (301 redirected) to a single domain. You may run into this situation if you have a new domain that you want to use in place of your old one but want to transfer all the link juice from the old domain into the new one. Note, this solution doesn’t 301 redirect old page URL’s, it just redirects at the domain level.

non-www to www

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This 301 redirect can keep your site from tripping duplicate content filters by search engines. Imagine that you did not implement a 301 redirect from non-www to www, then suppose people were to link to a page on your site using non-www and www at the same time from different places… then search engines can get confused as to which URL to throw into their index and since they have 2 URL’s with the exact same content on your site they will see it as duplicate content - and that’s your fault, leading to the engines probably not trusting it = your page’s SERP rankings will drop.

www to non-www

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect dynamic URL to static looking URL

RewriteRule ^product.php?id=(.*)&category=(.*)$ /$2/newpage.htm [L,R=301]

As an example, here we are redirecting http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?id=231&category=seo

to

http://www.yoursite.com/seo/newpage.htm

This kind of 301 redirection is pretty crucial for a lot of shopping cart type web applications that utilize variables in their URL strings. It’s better to leave out unnecessary information in the URL string that a search engine can’t use for indexing - such as an ID of your product or some other random variable specific to the internals of your site that would otherwise mean nothing to human searchers.

Redirect .htm pages to .php pages

RewriteEngine on
ReweiteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$.php

This code can also be used for different page extensions, just replace the htm with your old page extension and replace php with your new page extension.

Redirect all pages in a folder to a single URL

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^oldproduct(.*)$ /new-landing-page.php [L,R=301]

This could be good for example, if you once had a product that you no longer carry but you still want to transfer any link juice from those old pages into another single page somewhere in the local directory.

Redirect page A to page B using PHP

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

PHP is nice in that it is a server side language (executed before the HTML is returned the search engine) and you don’t need to mess with your .htaccess file or even have an apache server to 301 redirect using this method.

So that’s it for now. I’m sure there are many other methods or cases where you may want to 301 redirect pages… if so let me know and I’ll add them to this post. Happy 301-ing.

I recently consulted with an executive from a lead generation company here in San Diego about a problem they were having with their site not being properly indexed into the search engines. The site only had about 35 pages of their several hundred article and tip pages indexed for organic search. They even had pretty good internal site linking, from what he was telling me. This is what I found after reviewing and FTPing into their site:

• Because they recently switched domain names (within the last 6 months), they had successfully 301 redrected their old domain to their new one but were not 301 redirecting their domain.com to their www.domain.com, creating two indexed domains and potentially tripping duplicate content filters.
• The site was using Google’s Sitemaps application. Unfortunatley, the sitemaps.xml file being served up on their domain had an XML parsing error caused by some rogue “&” being placed into some of the URL strings listed in the XML file. The error was preventing the search engines from reading the file and indexing the corresponding pages! But here is the kicker: becuase the sitemaps.xml file was returning an error, Google decided not to index the rest of the site - even though running through a simple Xenu link check revealed good internal site linking to several hundred pages on the site. (as pictured below)
  In fact, there were about 35 properly formed XML page URL’s listed in the XML sitemap (about the same as listed on Google’s site: command) before the first “&” character was found in the file, stopping the indexing process dead in it’s tracks! This just goes to show that Google’s sitemap application supercedes a site’s internal linking structure and that you need to be very careful when dealing with sitemaps for indexing purposes.

I ran across a great little article (link to article below) today written by William Flaiz, the President of SEO over at Avenue A | Razorfish. William very succinctly, and intuitively, wrapped up the hottest trends for 2007 and explained their impact on search marketers. Social Media and Universal Search were huge in 2007 and will continue to grow in popularity, and use, through 2008.

William also touches on a point in his article that is one of my pet-peeves; the insistence by more and more companies to have a flash based website.  I understand that companies want the latest and greatest website and that they want their websites to stand-out from the competition.  But, if you don’t implement proper SEO planning into the DESIGN phase, then you will waste a lot of money on a site that cannot be indexed properly by the search engines.  It really could not be more simple…you have to plan properly, which means implementing an SEO expert early into the design phase to work along side the site designer.

Ok..enough of the rant.  Take a couple of minutes and check out William’s article titled: New Search Engine Trends, Old SEO Troubles in 2007.

Here’s to a great 2008!!!

A client of mine recently sent me the following snippet of text from his company’s SEO person named “Ron”:

I double check with Ron about what constitutes changes to our site that may cause issues with our SEO and this was his reply:

You can change whatever you want after we have established positions……EACH time major changes… i.e.new pages, new sections, structural changes, etc are made there is the possibility Google will throw you in the sandbox…we never know until you look at them if they are a risk…..minor content changes are USUALLY okay..as long as they are reSEO’d…all I can tell you is go ahead and do what you want…if you lose positions afterward…it is what it is….we will do our best to avoid that from happening….but no one in their right mind makes changes to a site that is just newly changed and being indexed…it becomes a spiral of failure….

When I read this I cringed and couldn’t believe this person is still in business:

• If I were the owner of the company, I’d ask “Ron” why cnn.com and msnbc.com rank very well for “news” on Google, they always seem to be “changing” their content!
• Google’s Sandbox is a set of filters that can apply to new sites in order to reduce web spam results. Old sites have a bit more trust and the filter doesn’t apply.  The site in question is over 3 years old.
• Making changes to a site is not bad, in fact, if you have poor rankings already then you have nothing to lose.
• Adding content or sections to a site can help a domain pull in more customers because more pages (tickets) are being placed into the search results (lottery).
• As long as your pages don’t look like spam, you will generally be ok. Don’t link out to other spammy web sites and don’t organize your pages to be unreadable by a human (don’t stuff keywords)

I was also told by my client that “Ron” advised his client company that changes to the site would be best made every “6 months”.

Do you see where this is going? Yes, we have what you might call an unethical SEO on our hands.

If I could, I would nail this dumbass right to the wall. I hate unethical practice and seemingly ignorant people. I myself have even been accused of being an unethical SEO (before I did any work) by a gullible, desperate person looking to find cheaper SEO labor.

Unfortunatley, and to the best of my knowledge, they continue to use “Ron’s” services while paying “Ron” a lot of money each month to “optimize” their company web site. I’d get a second opinion!

Looking to find keywords that will drive traffic to your site? How about keywords that convert? Here are several tools that I use when looking to find keywords that matter in terms of traffic and conversions:

• Quintura is a nice visual keyword tool that shows keywords and their related terms in a 2D visual graph. Punch in a term or phrase and get back semantically related words that can be mixed and matched, a pretty good way to help brain storm and find words that you might not otherwise think of.

• Try using WordTracker’s Free Tool and compare to Keyword Discovery’s free tool. This comparison can be a great way to find keywords that matter in terms of search traffic, if one term finds it’s way near the top of both search tools then you probably have a winner.

• Google’s Adwords Keyword External tool will show relative search volumes and advertiser competition between keyword phrases. This can be a good way to gauge weather or not one term is popular when compared to other keywords that you already know are popular by using other search tools.

• Microsoft offers a search funnel tool that shows incoming and outgoing keyword funnels. Incoming funnels are keywords people searched BEFORE they searched your keywords, while outgoing funnels are keywords people search AFTER they search your keywords. Another way to see how people think when searching broad keyword topics.

• Use Google’s allintitle command to find web pages that contains words from your search in the title tags. This is good for a few reasons: you can find pages that are actively optimizing for your keywords and see what other keywords they are using in their title tags, meta tags and page copy.

• Run a back link analysis to see what keywords a site uses in it’s link anchor text, this can be another good way to see what people actually target on the SEO campaigns.

You may also want to check out this article on how to find keywords from wordtracker’s website, written by Aaron Wall.

I was just checking analytics traffic for my special effects website and came across a startling number: today alone, as of 2:30pm, I’ve had 138 referral visits from lowcarbfriends.com. “What the hell?” I said to myself… I usually have a LOT less referral traffic to that site. It looks as if somebody liked the video I posted on the fat chick losing weight using adobe photoshop (I love that program by the way). I think from this particular incident I’ve learned a few things:

• Interesting/good ideas spread: not only did one person link to my blog site but there were other people commenting about that person’s link, creating more links to my site in the process.
• Obviously, referral traffic (if you can get it) is good. There are many other ways to gain referral traffic, just take a look at Digg or Del.icio.us
• “Filling the gaps” is key: If you want more referral traffic try playing on people’s interests or unfulfilled concerns. In this case, a weight loss support web site linked to my video about losing weight via photoshop. I wasn’t looking to get links from a weight loss site, but naturally people found what I posted and found it interesting. How about reading forums or blog comments and look to see what questions people pose… then fill the gaps with answers in the form of something newsworthy!

So all in all, I give referral traffic a big thumbs up. Thanks guys.