SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

Most website owners rely on quick website tweaks and the right tools for measurable website success. That’s not wrong but that’s also not enough. Being serious about business, a webmaster must get links to get additional exposure via search engines, of course predominantly Google.

Google still judges a website mostly based on the number and quality of links pointing to it (backlinks). So even today you got to get links, be it via outstanding content, viral campaigns or just conventional link building. Still most people do not take all the measures easily available on the Web today. Some have been around for ages, others just popped up recently. Check the 30 easiest ways to get links and exposure.

Instant Link Building
1. Submit to paid web directories free ones are often low quality lately
2. Submit to a few quality article directories
3. Send out a press releases via a few online services
4. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers etc. and in forums
5. Add resources to user generated content sites like Zimbio, Associated Content or others
6. Ask your friends, family, employees to link to you
7. Add your link to your profiles on Web 2.0 services like MySpace, Twitter (in the Bio) or Propeller

Common Linking Incentives

8. Get a Delicious badge, and display the number of bookmarks as well as the tags
9. Offer a badge of honor, something like “a carbon neutral site”
10. Offer a button for voting to install on other websites & blogs
11. Offer a widget for bloggers, something useful that will spread by itself
12. Stage a contest, it should be fun and the prizes should be worth it
13. Organize a blog carnival choosing a topic that matters for many people
14. Link out plenty, especially to bloggers, some will link back others will bookmark, some links will appear directly as ping and trackbacks
15. Contact people who might link to you (I do not mean a reciprocal link request)
16. Mirror a popular high traffic site, all the webhosters do it that way
17. Give away content with a creative commons license, especially if you can offer images or music (or other audio)
18. Let people translate your content and republish it for free

Link Bait Ideas and Practices

19. Praise experts in your area who have blogs
20. “Pull a Calacanis” - Say something stupid to stir controversy (like “SEO is bullshit” or “Web directories are Web 3.0″)
21. Be the first to break a story, indeed check original sources first before just recycling news
22. Write a useful list, “100 ways of something” always get linked
23. Give away a real freebie, a fee version of your product, should be valuable for users
24. Use images of barely clad ladies, sorry I mean beautiful women to illustrate your point
25. Support a cause, like Blogcatalog does
26. Write something unbelievable, intriguing or that “strikes a chord”
27. Do something useful for the Linkerati, a list of Digg users who blog for instance
28. Create something for the lowest common denominator, best topic is cute cats
29. Declare something alive and kicking dead but in a way it makes sense
30. Say something funny like “SEO is Dad”

Please not that I intentionally did not include some not entirely ethical grey hat methodes like “submit to social bookmarking sites” or “comment on dofollow blogs” as these tend to become spammy in the wrong hands.

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.

• Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
• Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
• Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?

The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:

Business Metrics

People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.

ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.

sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.

leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.

conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.

subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.

Usability metrics

While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.

returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.

pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.

time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.

time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.

bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors from Digg with an bounce rate of 95% means that in fact only 5.000 actually visited your site. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.

form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.

next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.

links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?

eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?

internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.

SEO metrics

SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.

number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).

quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?

Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.

Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.

Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)

Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A site:yoursite.com search in Google is enough to find out.

PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.

Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or les trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.

Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.

Social Media metrics

In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:

bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?

bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some “SEO India” service to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites do not even know of.

social news submissions
Do really thinks getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? Well, it isn’t, it just proves you’re main stream, political correct and have the best girls on your site while using Apple. Everything else gets buried. If Digg front page popularity reflects real popularity then why is McCain the republican candidate and not Ron Paul? In contrast the number of submissions tend to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get submitted all over the place. Every SEO knows that. You can submit the best SEO relates resource and it won’t get on Digg frontpage due to the “bury brigade” there, the it will get submitted to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx. My own SEO blog has been submitted to Mixx over 70 times in 10 months and I did it only a few times myself.

tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.

niche social site sites votes
In marketing circles and for SEO blogs it is a widely known fact that the search marketing social news site Sphinn is the destination to submit your work. Being successful here means recognition by experts and a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it Hugg for “green” news, YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.

number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds at Digg or Reddit social browsing sites like StumbleUpon are populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here, not on Digg.

StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.

Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.

Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using AideRSS.

Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.

You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.

Business people often ignore many simple fixes for websites. Their sites don’t get found or scare away visitors who do land there. Web developers often underestimate the plethora of ways to tweak a website for more visitors and higher sales. SEO has been around for 10 years but still many sites fail to take advantage of most little fixes Google needs to assess a site and visitors need to get what they want.

This list of 30 really “quick and clean”, mostly one minute fixes will enable you to give Google plenty of these so called “signals” it needs as well as the clues your visitors need to find what they want and ideally also to buy. I assume that your site has already some keyword research done, some basic on-page SEO measures implemented and some backlinks gathered.

Titles

• Add one more keyword to your title-tag if your site is already performing well in Google, substract one if your still a little weak in Google. Strong? Then follow this example: Before “SEO Blog”, after “SEM & SEO Blog”. Weak? The other way around.
• Add an often searched modifier to your title, something like “cheap”, “affordable” or “London”, “Glasgow” or “shop”, “services”.
• Remove your company name or shorten and move it to the end of the title. Wrong: John Doe Industries SEO Services Glasgow. Right: SEO Services Glasgow - J.Doe

Meta Tags

• Repeat the keyword/keyphrase at the beginning of the meta description: If the title is “SEO Blog” then the meta description should be: SEO blog: The UK’s leading SEO blog offering global search marketing news about SEM, PPC and more.
• Remove al other meta tags, they just clutter your code and make your “code to content ratio” look bad. Google ignores most, others are nice to have, not more.

Headlines

• Add a h2 headline which is a sentence explaining your h1 headline. Example: h1 - “SEO Services Glasgow”, h2 - “We’re the first professional search engine optimisation company in Glasgow offering SEO services since 1995″.
• Add a h3 headline with a teaser, something that kicks ass, example: “Seoptmise - The SEO blog that will kick your ass like Beckham”. It can be a longer one. Do not repeat keywords too often.

Page Elements

• Change your menu item “shop” or “services” to something that reflects what you offer or sell, e.g “SEO services”.
• Change your homepage link from “home” to “SEO Blog” or whatever your site or blog is about.
• Add your address in the footer.
• Create a big bold link or button with a “call to action” like “buy now!”, “subscribe here!” or “join now!”.
• Add a large phone number in bold at the top of your page
• Delete an element on your homepage you never click on other websites
• Change the anchor text of a “more” link to the keyword the “more” page deals with

Backlinks and PageRank

• SMS your mother/daughter/sister or father/son/brother and ask for a link to your site.
• Link out to your favourite site on a topic similar to yours. Recommend it explicitly.
• Add a sentence like this “Like us? Link us! <a href=”http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/”>SEO blog UK by SEOptimise</a>”
• Add a “permalink” link to your pages
• Add the nofollow attribute to your “contact page” link.
• Add a “Bookmark to Delicious” badge or button, Delicious bookmarks often automatically appear on blogs

Copywriting

• Mention what you offer exactly on your site/page, use brands and exact product names
• Mention where you offer it “SEO Services Manchester”
• Mention why you offer it “We offer recycling solutions because we believe that clean business is profitable business”
• Mention to whom you offer it: “Web hosting solutions for small business”
• Make an unordered list which reflects the 3 most relevant topics of the page you’re tweaking and put it on top adding the words “this article deals with…”
• Explain one key term the page e.g your homepage contains: SEO (Definition: search engine optimisation, the process of making websites more search and search user friendly)
• Add 5 tags to your page by adding following text: “Tags: tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5″. In our case it would be probably: “Tags: SEO, optimisation, website, traffic, sales”
• Replace your homepage images with smaller ones in byte size (below 50 kb) so that non-broadband users stick with you
• Convince! Start the first or second sentence of your page with “We will make you number 1 in…” instead of solely describing “X offers…”
• Add your name to the text: John, CEO of John Doe Industries. People trust people not companies.

This “quick and clean” fixes will help already tremendously. Many sites miss these opportunities. Do you want to spend more time than half an hour fixing your website to get more traffic and higher sales? Well check out this huge list of 5 minutes website improvements.

While searching Google earlier today I was very surprised to notice that one of the listings returned in the top 10 was an FTP site!

Digging a little deeper and I found that there are actually millions of ftp://ftp.domain.com addresses indexed in Google, all of which appear to have read access permissions granted to the folder structure. I admit that I know very little about hacking but surely having this information available is a potential security risk to webmasters?

I assume Google have always indexed FTP URL’s, just without ranking them very well in most cases so I haven’t noticed these appearing before. But seeing that they don’t index file extensions such as .exe or even .0 because these are considered as a risk to users, I would have expected the FTP addresses to be blocked too - this time as a security risk to web servers and hosting packages instead.

These FTP files have obviously been indexed because the URL has been linked to, normally as a document download from within the main site. The URL’s are certainly useful to the website users (which is why Google probably has an argument for indexing these), but webmasters should really be hosting this on an http:// address and I wouldn’t have expected Google to index these URL’s so that they are open to view for anyone searching.

I’d be interested in hearing any other thoughts about this. I expect this is something many people may already be aware of, it might also explain how some people do link building on .edu domains!

Sadly even in 2008 most SEOs fail at writing, even SEO copywriting. Reading most SEO sites is still awful although the dark ages of too obvious keyword stuffing seem to be gone. So as even I, as a SEO, barely can stand it, imagine your average John Doe search engine optimisation help seeker…

That’s why I collected here 10 most basic SEO copywriting rules you should abide by if you do not want to scare off your potential clients immediately.

1. “SEO Services SEO Company India Search Engine Optimization (SEO) India” as a title, are you kidding me? I’m not a bot, I won’t click that, use a page per keyword ideally. Especially if your closest competitors are “SEO Company India, SEO Firm, SEO India, Search Engine Optimization and Link Building Services India” and “SEO India,SEO Services India,SEO Company India,SEO Services,SEO India”
2. Do not call yourself a “SEO Expert” I won’t believe you anyways. If you’re one others will tell me.
3. Make sure to write a little about the place you’re from and the SEO market there if you insist on “Search Engine Optimization Los Angeles, SEO Los Angeles, Los Angeles Company SEO”
4. Are you offering “SEO, SEM and PPC“? So why the hell should I hire you instead of the myriad of others who offer exactly the same stuff? Offer something unique or at least use a different angle in describing it.
5. Do not overload your page/s with copy. My eyes hurt! Make it scrollable, hide and show (I don’t mean “hidden text”) on demand.
6. Use images and text otherwise I will bounce.
7. SEO, SEM, PPC, ROI, WTF? Don’t use more acronyms than the average spy.
8. Use a memorable slogan like “An SEO Services Provider You Can Trust“
9. Mention real people with real names instead of anonymous “SEO experts” or cool sounding company and brand names. People trust other people unless you are the Coca Cola of SEO.
10. Remember that SEO etc. is the means not the goal. So do not focus on what you do but what the outcome will be and try to convey the message. Btw, what is the goal of SEO? Rankings? Traffic? Conversions? Sales? ROI? It’s higher profits.

This should suffice for the beginning. I’m afraid most SEO copywriters won’t learn very fast though. So support these rules by not paying attention to those who fail to abide by them.

On a side note, if you’re looking for “SEO Company UK, SEO Firm, SEO UK, Search Engine Optimisation and Link Building Services UK” you might try as well SEOptimise

As a German SEO Consultant I worked with UK and US SEO companies and other clients on many internationalisation or localisation projects in recent months. The international sites we tried to optimise in many cases failed to compete with even much smaller local competitors. Also the SEO measures undertaken were far from sufficient due to structural limitations of these projects.

Thus I want to introduce 10 most common fatal localization mistakes English language sites face when entering other markets.

1. No local domain, instead using internationalcompany.com and having no local domain like .fr for France, .de for Germany or .pl for Poland. Thus everybody will link to the .com domain and the non-English speaking audience will bounce off it before finding the small flag in the right top corner. In the meantime a domain grabber will make big bucks off your brand.
2. Translating before doing local market research. Ever tried selling beef in India? Or freedom fries in France? Not all mistakes are that easy to spot. Nonetheless most companies just translate their sites without even taking a look at what a new market demands.
3. No local server. You need a German server to rank high in Google for Germany. The difference is substantial.
4. Translation full of grammatical and spelling errors. I’m astounded how many business sites fail at that and how bad. Nobody will trust you if you can’t even spell correctly trying to sell something. Hire a translator who is a native speaker of the language you want to localize to and actually lives there not someone living next door.
5. Setting up a completely new domain for a new country days before you enter the market. Basically you should register the most common international domains months or years before you enter the markets. It might be gone already later and you risk ending up in the Google sand box not being acknowledged as an authority and thus not ranking.
6. Being far too late on the market. I’m still amazed by the companies which need months or years to offer a product or service in Germany fisrt offered in the US. Why give away 100 million German speaking potential customers to copycats and local businesses? Coming too late (like Facebook in Germany or eBay in Poland) means you will probably never be the leader on the market.
7. Not having a local address or representation. With the rise of local search and a plethora of local websites and services that replaced directories you won’t even get a link without a proper address.
8. Not offering payment via PayPal or other locally accepted or wide spread payment methods. Unlike in the US e.g people in Germany don’t use credit cards much.
9. Broken character sets: Recently I joined several ad networks and affiliate networks and those sites which were translated had in many cases broken German “Umlauts”. In most cases I will leave such a site.
10. No local blog. If you do not have a “company interface” in a local language you won’t reach the public. You rely solely on search engine traffic but you won’t get it for the reasons above for a while. No useful localized content means no local links. Without local links you won’t rank, even as an authority domain.

Are there more issues? Yes there are, but most sites fail to implement these localization basics. On the other hand: These 10 fatal mistakes are easily avoidable.

In recent weeks someone reading about SEO probably had the impression it has something to do with punk music. All the talk about “no future” and “SEOs not dead” everywhere. Also if you look for “no future” in Google you will find “SEO has no future” right in the top 5 just behind the Sex Pistols. If there was a band called SEO pistols it would be the time when it’s front member has been declared dead.

The original Sex Pistols reunited in recent years and punk is still around like rock or pop. Now I won’t stretch this allegory too much. While the original post that started all this craze is nothing more than a short rant of somebody who is not even an expert on SEO as he himself states I was nevertheless amazed by the sheer number, length and fervor of the replies he got. I just want to let the numbers speak for themselves, as I miss them in this debate. At the same time that the “SEO has no future” has been proclaimed, in fact three days earlier, an article in the Times was published that described what’s really going on in the market. May I cite the most important part of it:

[Forrester Research] forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

So next time someone tells you SEO has no future, instead of explaining in a huge post why not just point at the numbers.

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

Are Wikipedia’s ranking fair?
There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this!

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?

Search engine optimisers are often treated like the plumbers of the web. In many cases they have to clean up the mess architects and construction workers left. Also they get treated as if they do some kind of dirty work. The ensuing reputation problem comes along with a low self esteem of many in the SEO industry. Now the newly revived concept of findability can make this problem a woe of the past.

What is is findability? To be honest the current concept of findability proposed by the author of the book “Building Findable Websites” resembles simply on-page or on-site SEO best practices. There are some added novelties like Microformats which haven’t been widely adopted by the SEO industry yet. All in all findability is about website optimisation for searchers and users alike, or in other words making a website work both in search as well as from the user standpoint who already is a visitor. While there are also references to off-page factors the focus is clearly the “building” of “findable websites” like the title of the book already suggests.

There are a few great introductions into the findability concept so I won’t add another one. I want to make you aware what findability means for the SEO industry and/or community:

1. Findability, usability and accessibility are interconnected along with other facets of information architecture
2. Findability is marketed as the last missing ingredient in website design and development, it’s not as seemingly detached discipline like SEO might appear
3. There is no black hat findability
4. There is no findability reputation problem
5. The concept of findability allows others, non-SEO people, to do the groundwork

So basically the people who often for years ignored or frowned upon SEO finally will realise that they were wrong: The information architects, web designers and developers as well as the copy writers or other content creators. Findability is all about making these people do their jobs properly. Now will this make SEO specialists unemployed? It won’t. It just means the we can finally let others do the dirty work or simply groundwork as I do not really assume that SEO is dirty work. People out there do though.

SEO is a dirty word. Findability isn’t. It’s nice and clean. So offer findability along with usability and accessibility, formerly known as SEO services. This way you also don’t have to explain the acronym S.E.O over and over again as findability is a simple English term everybody has some basic understanding of just based on the well known verb to find.

So how will SEO experts survive this? SEO long ago ceased to be about making websites findable. It’s much more than that by now. SEO by now is the work of translating websites into profits, whatever it takes, be it findability, SMO or viral marketing. The SEO industry is the fastest evolving online industry. I don’t want to deal with h1 tags and image based menus. The basics must be implemented by those who are originally responsible for them, I want to do the really cool work, the link baiting, the viral videos, the blogging. Reclaim true SEO!