SEOptimise » local search

Small Business Owners! 6 Quick Ways to Help Your Customers Help You

Shaad Hamid — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:15:31 +0000

Sometime last month, my friends and I did what most people do on a Friday night. Yes, we went out to blow off some steam and in the process, popped in to Pizza Hut to grab something to eat. The problem was, we probably dropped by at a bad time. The waitress seemed like she’d be anywhere in the world except serving at our table. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I weren’t expecting 5-star treatment, but is a little courtesy or even a smile too much to ask for? Like most people who simply wouldn’t bother to complain about how rude the waitress was, we just grit our teeth and left as soon as we could. Fast forward to the next morning and one of my friends suggested that we go to a local restaurant named Joe’s, located in Oxford’s Summertown (isn’t that the best ever name for a town?) so we paid them a visit.

From the moment we entered the restaurant, we were made to feel welcome. The food was absolutely divine, their attention to detail was impeccable and their service was amazing. In fact, their receipt had a handwritten ‘thank you’ along with a smiley face on it!

Apologies for the low quality mobile phone image.

It’s amazing how little effort can make a customer happy. Having enjoyed the food and the service, I felt I must run to the top of a hill and announce to everyone that these guys are amazing and that all my friends should check them out too; or at least the modern method of doing so, which is to tweet about them or to mention them on Facebook. Unfortunately I couldn’t tag them in my tweets or Facebook status as they didn’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook. So here I was, a satisfied customer, looking to give this restaurant a big ‘thumbs up’ and a recommendation to my friends about how awesome they are, but with no natural channel to do so. So I thought I should compile a list of quick and easy ways small businesses can help customers become their advocates. (Please note that Joe’s, to their credit, have now set up a Facebook page).

#1 Out of sight, out of mind

At the very least, make sure you have some sort of social media presence so that, like me, your customers can recommend your business to their friends. This shouldn’t take you long, as setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile literally takes a few minutes. Make sure you include details such as the address, a phone number and a link to your website. If you are unsure or are not confident in doing this yourself, get someone who is tech savvy (like your niece or nephew) to do this for you. If you have the time, here are a couple of great posts on how you could set up a Facebook page and a Twitter page.

#2 A picture is worth a thousand words

Images can convey quite a lot about your business, and this is especially important if you are a restaurant or a retail outlet. This also helps to give your business or your brand some sort of personality. So when you include images of your premises on Facebook, make sure you either invest in a really good camera or you obtain the services of a professional photographer. Although this may sound silly, the images on the web do in fact influence what people think about your business, as it’s the only tangible way they could associate quality with.

If you want to take this to the next level, you could propose to your guests that you can take good quality images and with their consent, upload it to your Facebook page and invite them to tag themselves and their friends on your fan page. This will ensure people will visit, engage and share your page with others.

#3 Consistency is the name of the game

Now that you have set up a Facebook page and/or a Twitter page with about 10-20 fans or followers, it is important to consolidate your existing fans and to grow this number. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, it is extremely important to be part of your followers’ social network experience (which means being visible on their Twitter feeds and Facebook newsfeeds). Having said that, it is also important to not overdo this; there’s nothing more offensive on the social sphere than spam. On average, I’d say 1-2 posts a day is more than sufficient. The secret to maintaining great posts is to make sure your updates add value to your fans and followers. If you are a restaurant owner, sharing little cooking tips to your followers could be quite beneficial to them. For example, you could have a ‘recipe of the week’ post and share a tip to your followers.

#4 Offer incentives

Everyone likes to feel special and it’s the same on social media. Offering your fans and followers a special discount to try out a new item on the menu would help bolster loyalty toward your Facebook fan page.

#5 Save time with tools

I’m sure most small business owners wouldn’t really have the time to constantly be on social media platforms updating statuses and tweets. If you can’t hire someone to do this for you I suggest you use tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck in order to schedule your tweets for the coming week and to monitor what people are saying about your brand or business on Twitter. Make a schedule at the beginning of the week as to what type of tweets and updates you want to share with your followers and also schedule at least half an hour a day to monitor and respond to any user engagements.

#6 “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”
Use Facebook insights to measure and monitor the virality of your posts. Facebook provides a wealth of statistics, from how many people who are talking about your page right now to which demographic and geographic (including which cities) are most receptive to your posts. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. Marketers at one time used to spend quite a lot of money to obtain this market intelligence data which Facebook now provide you on a platter, and all this free of charge. So take advantage of the plethora of data and constantly tweak and improve your campaigns.

Conclusion

I’d like to share with you what an ultra-local business owner mentioned to me recently. His father set up a grocery store on a very competitive and busy high street in Colombo. I remember as a child frequenting his store on a daily basis with my grandfather who bought his loaf of bread, newspaper and his bottle of milk from this store like a prayer. How this business owner distinguished himself against his many competitors was his ability to form relationships with his customers. He knew my grandfather and me by name. He always made us laugh and we always left his store with a smile. So although two generations have passed, and his tiny grocery store is today a chain of supermarkets, he hasn’t forgotten what made his business succeed in the first place. When his son took over, he made sure he continued this formula on a whole new platform; he says that social media is simply a tool to form and develop these very same relationships at scale. None of the original classical methods of marketing have changed. The only thing that has, is where these relationships and conversations take place. Sadly most businesses don’t seem to grasp this concept well. Herein lies an opportunity for small business owners to be a serious threat to large multinationals. For me personally, Joe’s Bar and Grill has won a customer for life, without having to dish out heavy advertising spend.

*Image credit: ActiveSteve on Flickr.

30 Google SERP Changes That Impact Your SEO Strategy

Tad Chef — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:42:44 +0000

Just a few years ago SEO was really simple. You had to be in the top 10 or rather in the top 3 for relevant keywords. Then the traffic came and with it the leads, sales or whatever you wished. Today there is no real top 10 anymore. Even if you are at #1 in the organic search results, you might be below the “fold” so that users have to scroll to see your site on the Google search results page aka SERP.

Google has introduced so many changes to most SERPS that you can’t ignore them and go on as if it’s still 2005. You have to change your SEO strategy accordingly.

While many people already have noticed that Universal search is all over the place, and images, video or news results get displayed frequently, many still behave as if SEO was about checking rankings and aiming for #1 in organic search. These 30 Google SERP changes impact your SEO strategy in a way you can’t ignore.

Ads and universal search push organic results below the fold
There is opportunity in local search results
Paid shopping results show above organic results
There are sometimes more or fewer than 10 results
Infinite scroll allows users to peruse longer lists of results
Author avatars get displayed on the left of search snippet
Bulleted snippets made of list items stand out
Local results show up even without adding a location
For location-based SERPs, organic results almost disappear
Local SERPs may vary significantly
Huge full-page site links for brands monopolise branded queries
Brands tend to dominate their own SERPs
Sidebar menu attracts clicks and competes with the actual results
Social search annotations show up with favicon sized avatars
Google+ bar with red notification distracts while searching
+1 button clicks reorganise your search results significantly
Google +1 counts appear in search results for everybody
Public Google+ profile messages show up prominently in SERPs
Google remembers and adds recent search queries you performed
Your last visited pages get highlighted by Google
Google adds your address from Google Profiles to public search results
Mobile SERPs differ significantly from desktop SERPs
“Searches related to” draw away attention from first query
Google instant search results send people away to partial queries
Google instant previews can lower your CTR and affect conversion rate
Personalisation is taking over the average SERPs
Keyword matching domains can now barely be seen
Google may shorten your URL displayed, hiding “irrelevant parts”
5 years from now SERPs could be completely different
Google can highlight on-site videos in SERPs

So how do we actually deal with these SERP changes? How exactly do they impact your SEO strategy? There are a few common traits you can focus on:

Relying on ranking reports is less and less useful; other metrics and KPIs have to be taken into account, such as traffic, conversions and ROI.
Websites have to be more usable and social in nature to stay competitive in SERPs.
You have to embrace universal search and add other media types than text.
Local SEO is the only SEO many businesses can go after, while for others it’s a new way of getting additional exposure.
Like it or not, you have to pay Google “to get your organic ranking back”, whether by ads or shopping search results.
You need to offer many ways to reach you, both via Google and social media. Organic results are not enough anymore.
You have to step up your SEO efforts or increase your SEO budget. SEO isn’t simple anymore, if it ever was. Now there are so many things to consider that only full time specialists can deal with it correctly.

Any other recent or significant SERP changes I haven’t mentioned? Any other ideas on how to tackle these massive changes? Please add the in the comment section!

* CC image by SomeDriftwood.

5 Reasons You Think You Don’t Need SEO (and why you’re wrong)

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:10:10 +0000

When speaking to small business owners, I often find myself being told that SEO isn’t right for them. Unsurprisingly, I rarely agree. So I thought I’d write about the five most common reasons people give for not adopting an SEO strategy and outline why I think they’re wrong.

Reason one: I’m just a small, local business

There’s a common misconception that SEO will only benefit companies that are already operating on a national or even international scale. Many small businesses only want to attract customers in their local area. Casting a wider net would be a wasted investment as the firm can’t cater for a non-local customer base.

Why you’re wrong

From an SEO perspective, it’s actually much more effective to target geo-specific keyword phrases. Geo-targeting will help attract visitors in your own local area when you optimise your website for search queries with a geographic preference, such as ‘Cheshire chimney sweep’.

Not only does this mean that you benefit from highly relevant, localised traffic, it can also be much easier to rank higher since competition is relatively low. After all, climbing the search engine results for a widely-used term like ‘SEO agency’ is much more competitive than optimising it for ‘Oxfordshire SEO agency’.

Google is passionate about providing users with relevant search results. By linking your business with platforms such as Google Places, you therefore benefit from high quality traffic. Furthermore, the likelihood of localised searches converting into actual buyers is far greater than users searching for generic terms. Hence, in reality as a local business, it would work in your favour.

Reason two: I don’t have the budget

SEO does require some initial investment and many firms are put off – especially if they think they can’t see how they will measure the returns. Many small businesses prefer to rely on more direct marketing, such as email promotions or postal drops, simply because these are tried and tested methods.

Why you’re wrong

Firstly, there are many tools that help measure return on investment for SEO projects and secondly, in a survey conducted by Econsultancy early this year found that search engine optimisation provided the highest ROI for marketers above email marketing.
Furthermore, SEO is a bargain when compared to banner ads and PPC campaigns. The benefits of SEO are long term and residual; hence, you reap high quality traffic even after SEO campaigns are complete.

Reason three: I don’t sell online

A large number of small businesses have only set up basic websites and don’t accept sales or commissions online. Because of that, they often assume that there’s little point working to promote those websites – they don’t really anticipate receiving many enquiries via the web.

Why you’re wrong

Even if your website is nothing more than an in-depth listing, you should make sure it can be found easily – otherwise you’re wasting the investment you made building the site. Therefore make sure that the title and meta tags should all include the city and country where your business is based. If you offer a service, it is very important to include the areas or regions you serve.

Remember to add neighbourhood names, smaller towns in the surrounding areas and any popular landmarks people often use in searches. Place your physical address and phone number on every page of your site, in addition to the contact us page.

Reason four: My key phrases would be too hard to rank for

Some small companies are already competing with larger organisations and so believe that the most relevant search terms are simply too hard to rank for. When larger businesses with far bigger SEO budgets are already ranking for the best keywords and phrases, it can seem like a wasted investment trying to beat them to the top.

Why you’re wrong

There’s no point throwing a massive chunk of your search budget into ranking for those terms when other businesses can easily spend far more. That’s true for SEO and often true for search engine marketing too.

But there are alternatives. Aim to rank for long-tail keywords covering more specific products. These will be less competitive, as well as driving even more relevant business to your site. An example for this is trying to rank for ‘life insurance for over-50s’ rather than the more generic and competitive ‘life insurance’.

Reason five: It’s too complicated without specialist staff

Very small businesses with just a few employees often assume that SEO requires a team of computer programmers with marketing qualifications and a hefty price tag.

Many won’t have bothered investigating how much investment is needed because they simply assume it’s beyond your means.

Why you’re wrong

SEO can be an expensive business but that doesn’t mean that a smaller budget can’t achieve some easy wins.

If you don’t have the funding to bring an agency on board or take on a specialist member of staff, you could still spend time learning the basics of SEO yourself. There are a lot of great blogs and web sites where SEO knowledge is shared freely, not to mention several books on SEO that cost less than £20 and offer terrific information.

According to Mintel there are a lot more people purchasing products online than ever before and a lot more now shifting toward mobile search for product information. Therefore, making sure your business is visible to these prospects will undoubtedly benefit your business in many ways, not to mention your bottom line.

What Does SEO Consist of?

Tad Chef — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:59:12 +0000

Back in the day, SEO was quite a simple process consisting of three parts:

Market and keyword research
On-page optimisation
Link building (off-page optimisation)

In 2011, it’s not that simple anymore. Depending on what niche or industry you are working in or rather what kind of site and business model you have, SEO can be a lot of things. SEO can or even has to consist of more disciplines.

Most importantly, local SEO/Google Places SEO or e-commerce SEO/Google Shopping SEO play a major role for many businesses today. Local businesses that also have an online shop need both.

On the other end of the SEO process there is landing page optimisation or conversion optimisation. An SEO process without it is not really complete.

That’s still not enough though, as without king content there is nothing to get linked to on your site or to rank for in Google, so a decent SEO process entails a content strategy. This might include:

blogging
infographics
videos.

To spread these you need social media outreach and participation, as content does not spread by itself without some traction on social media. So a typical SEO process might look something like this:

Market and keyword research
Local SEO/Google Places optimisation
On-page optimisation
E-commerce SEO/Google Shopping optimisation
Content strategy (planning, creation, optimisation, promotion)
Social media outreach & participation
Landing page optimisation/Conversion optimisation
Website analytics and monitoring

These steps have to be undertaken for more and more sites. Even sites that aren’t considered e-commerce often use check-out forms or shopping carts. Many businesses that are not local by definition also have real-life brick and mortar storefronts or offices. So Google Places and Google Shopping SEO is not rare either.

Even video SEO for YouTube and beyond is mainstream now. There is also mobile SEO to make sure your visitors can reach your site using their smartphones or tablets.

Already overwhelmed? You don’t need to be. You still can stick to the old SEO model and succeed to some extent, but you can gain even more by expanding your SEO strategy to include all of the above mentioned disciplines.

* Image by Ross Spoon.

30 (New) SEO Terms You Have to Know in 2011

Tad Chef — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:44:29 +0000

Recently I bookmarked a good entry level SEO glossary of current SEO terms. A few weeks ago I complained about some people still using obsolete and inaccurate SEO terms such as “keyword density”.

Additionally, I missed many new or important terms on this list which I read about and often use, but many people, on the Web at least, don’t. Thus I won’t assume that everybody knows them already. Instead I want to define here 30 (new) SEO terms you have to know in 2011.

Some of them have been around for years but have been largely ignored by the SEO industry. Others are well known by SEO practicioners but completely off the radar for the general public, it seems. Last but not least there are terms from adjacent industries we now have to deal with in SEO. It’s 2011 – we have flying cars by now! – so it’s time to adopt new terminology as well.

503

Most of you probably know what a 404 code is. SEO pros use 301 redirects as well. What is a 503 though? It’s a code telling the Google bot that a site is temporarily unavailable and not broken for good. You need it when performing site maintenance resulting in downtime. See:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html

A/B Testing

The process of comparing two (or more) versions of a page to find out the best performing one, i.e. the one that is yielding the highest conversion rate. See:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/07/30-multivariate-ab-split-testing-tools-tutorials-resources.html

Advanced segments

Advanced segments allow you to show only particular parts of your site’s traffic in a Google Analytics report. You can customize and save them to return to the same report again. If you are serious about SEO, you use them all the time. A common advanced segment is social media traffic, for instance. See:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/urban-apparel-and-advanced-segments.html

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/google-analytics-releases-advanced-segmentation.html

Citation

Citation is the equivalent of a link for local SEO, but of course it’s not really the same as a link. It’s more a mention and a link on a site that is relevant for the Google Places algorithm. In a way, citations are even harder to get than links, as only a select few sites get counted for citations. See:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/general-marketing/local-seo-citation-is-new-link/

http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2010/03/31/creating-a-citation-plan-to-rank-higher-in-google-local-listings/

Content farm

A content farm is a site, often a huge one, that produces large amounts of keyword laden, low quality content to flood the search engines. Blekko and Google consider them to be almost as bad as webspam. See:

http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/01/21/what-is-a-content-farm/

Via @mmhemani

Content marketing

Content marketing is a new term describing all the means to promote your site online, be it text, images, video or other “rich media”. Content marketing replaces, to some extent, simple copywriting. See:

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-copywriting/

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short, is sometimes referred to as conversion optimization, and is the art and science of streamlining traffic once it reaches your site. In other words, it’s a set of techniques to make the user do what you want them to do on your site, e.g. clicking ads, subscribing, buying. See:

http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimization/conversion-rate-optimisation/

Deep link ratio

Any site with a natural link profile has at least some links leading to its content that is not the homepage itself. Back in the days, overzealous SEO practicioners would build hundreds or thousands of links to a website’s homepage, leading to a very low deep link ratio and thus being obviously “over optimized”. See:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/deep-link-ratio-backlink-profile-natural/

Editorial links

Editorial links are not links in the editorial but links set by site owners, bloggers or content creators within a text itself. Also, editorial links are mostly natural in that they are given voluntarily (in contrast to paid links). While many people talk about paid links even years after they have been discounted by Google, most SEO pundits still rarely use the term ‘editorial links’. See:

http://www.stonetemple.com/blog/?p=196

Internal link hub

An internal link hub is a very important page on your site which has collected many inbound links from other sites, and thus can have a big impact on the overall distribution of your site’s authority. See:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/link-hub/

Intelligent content

The definition of intelligent content is not one you can summarize in one sentence I’m afraid. Intelligent content has many characteristics, like being available in many formats, on many platforms and readable on different devices. See:

http://thecontentwrangler.com/2011/01/17/what-is-intelligent-content/

Jaamit

A jaamit is a very strong link, a human bond that results in a link on a website. A jaamit is a link that outlasts the link building efforts or even the link builder. A jaamit link reflects trust, friendship, mutual respect and overall appreciation.

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-build-links-like-jaamit

LDA

As far as I understand, LDA or “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” refers to the way a search engine might analyze word combinations or context on a page. Example: a page about the sky would also contain the words “blue”, “limit”, “high”, “reaching”, “scraper”. So Google might expect these terms to appear, while on a low quality page they wouldn’t. I’d be glad to find a better definition somewhere though. See:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-is-onpage-optimization-the-seo-secret

Link decay

Link decay is the process of a link losing its value over time. See:

http://searchnewscentral.com/2010112997/Link-Building/how-link-decay-can-cause-cavities-in-your-link-profile.html

Link equity

Link equity is like the link budget you have on a site and the way you spend it. Do you waste it on linking to the wrong places or in the wrong way? See:

http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/spending-link-equity-wisely/

Micro conversions

While conversions ofter refer to major goals a website can have, micro-conversions can reflect any goals you choose to measure user engagement with your site – something like a lead, a sale or at least a subscription. A time on site of more than 5 minutes could be a micro-conversion, or a third returning visit. See:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/03/excellent-analytics-tip-13-measure-macro-and-micro-conversions.html

Microformats

Microformats is a term describing a set of standards to annotate web sites in order to make them machine readable. For instance, you can tell search engines what an address is using a microformat. See:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897

Via @leeodden

http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/2010/10/microformat-reference-guide-for-seo-and-developers/

Natural links

Natural links are links by people whom you haven’t asked for a link. If somebody decides to link to you out of the blue without being asked to do so, the link is natural. See:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/natural-link-building-future/

QDF

QDF stands for the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm by Google, which determines the ranking for newly important queries. Breaking news is a good example. In many cases, a blog or news site can outrank old authority sites for a keyphrase because the QDF algo determines that they are the most current source on that subject at that moment. See:

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/05/agile-seo-using-qdf.htm

http://www.orangesoda.com/blog/does-your-query-deserve-freshness/

QR Code

A QR code is used to enable mobile phones to read symbols from print material. They are real life links or additional data. See:

http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-qr-code-and-why-do-you-need-one-27588

Relevant links

Relevant links are – in theory – links which have a topical connection to your site, e.g. a link from a travel site to a hotel. While the concept of relevant links is controversial in the SEO industry, it’s important to know that some links are more relevant than others. See:

http://seo.site-reference.com/traits-healthy-link-profile-link-relevancy/

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are based on the RDF format or microformats mentioned above. They are machine readable codes and provide additional information that is displayed in Google search results. See:

http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk/2010/01/24/seo-and-rich-snippets-crucial-to-your-2010-armoury/

Sales funnel

While the idea of a sales funnel is not new, it has entered the SEO arena quite recently. The sales funnel can be tracked and influenced on websites. I can’t explain it in one sentence though; you have to see it to understand the idea/metaphor. See:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_94.htm

http://searchengineland.com/attribution-alchemy-mining-your-sales-funnel-18721

Semantic

Semantic means “dealing with meaning”. Semantic search and SEO has been around for a while but it’s still nascent. Bing uses some semantic technologies from the semantic search engine Powerset which it acquired. Google, in contrast, doesn’t understand the meaning of a web document yet. It just analyzes the keywords contained in it. A semantic search engine can, for example, distinguish between spears and Britney Spears, while one that doesn’t will offer you both results. See:

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/semantic-seo-your-website-is-a-goldmine-with-on-site-seo-20

Shopping cart abandonment rate

You probably know the bounce rate – that is, the percentage of users leaving your site after landing on it without performing any other action on it beyond clicking an external link. On e-commerce site the SCAR leaves scars on your revenue as it’s the percentage of customers who have left in the middle of the shopping or checkout process. See:

http://www.pinnycohen.com/2008/12/29/marketing-wisdom/shopping-cart-abandonment/

Slashtag

A slashtag is a customized vertical or niche search engine on Blekko. See:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/11/a-slashers-guide-to-blekko-the-most-advanced-search-engine-ever-created.html

Social CRM

Social CRM refers to customer relationship management before they are customers or forging relationships beyond CRM. It uses social media for that purpose. See:

http://hkotadia.com/archives/2157

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/social-crm-strategy/

User testing

User testing is a form of usability and website testing where you actually invite real users to test your site and watch/record what they are doing and where they fail. You improve the site based on these user testing findings. See:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

Usability is not UX/User Experience (Design); it goes beyond it. It encompasses making the user want to use something for instance. A good example is the iPhone. While many phones might be usable, the iPhone is also desirable in the UX sense. See:

http://uxmyths.com/post/1533970267/myth-27-ux-design-is-about-usability

Wonder wheel

The Google wonder wheel is an excellent Google search tool which allows you to overview keyword clusters which are related to a particular query. It has been around for almost two years now, but many people still don’t use or even know it. See:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-03-24-n84.html

Are there more terms I haven’t mentioned and explained but which you think are indispensable in 2011? Add your suggestions in the comment section!

Using the correct and current terms is a prerequisite of modern SEO. How can you grasp it when you still talk about PageRank, meta tags and search engine submission? So be sure to learn what those above mean; I still haven’t fully understood some of them, like LDA or rich snippets.

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

Tad Chef — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:33:03 +0000

Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

booze by tz1_1zt

Thanks to my Twitter followers @DerekEdmond, @seowolf and @DonnaFontenot for brain storming support on this list. The question I asked was:

What was the most evil black hat SEO technique your dirty, stinking competitors have worked with?

Why don’t you, the SEOptimise readers, answer this question as well? Otherwise just use these 30 black hat techniques ethically or try the many more white hat tactics first.

30 Resources on Google, Search & SEO Changes in 2010

Tad Chef — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:29:12 +0000

Google changes faster than you can blink right now. Just some buzzwords that will bug you in 2010:

Google Caffeine
Google Real Time search
Google Personalized search results
Google Living Stories
Google Phone

I could go on like for a while. It’s not my intention to confuse you even more though. I want to shed some light on the near future of Google, search and SEO. It’s a daunting task as I’m overwhelmed as well.

Thus I picked 30 resources on Google, search & SEO changes in 2010 from around the search industry and some main stream sources.

These articles explain some or several of the upcoming changes.

Google Caffeine

Google Real Time Search

Google Personlized Search

Google Living Stories

Google Phone

Google Breadcrumbs

Misc. Resources

During the holidays you’ll have plenty of time to deal with these changes so print those resources out and take them with you to read at home.

Judging from the incredible pace of change it seems that Google is a Transformer.

You need to become one as well.

55 Local SEO & Search Resources for Business

Tad Chef — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:00:24 +0000

Update July, 3rd 2009: Added 12 local SEO & search resources suggested by readers in the comment section and on Sphinn + some newly researched links.

The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is “going local”. Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there. Additionally the proliferation of smartphones and netbooks accelerates this development even more.

You have to perform in local search and on sites that enable users to find local businesses in their respective area. Classic SEO is just not enough anymore for small business owners and location based big business.

There is already a plethora of very helpful resources that deal with local SEO. While to some extent local SEO resembles traditional SEO with on site measures and link building the substantial differences have even led to a specialization in the industry.

By now we have SEO specialists and publications predominantly dealing with local search issues and local SEO.

Thus I complied a list of the most useful resources, mostly from blogs: 55 local SEO & search resources for business.

Why do I add the seemingly obvious “for business” part in the headline? In most cases you won’t optimize your private homepage to be found in a specific area. Local search is a mostly business only domain.

Local SEO & Search Blogs

Local SEO Overviews for Starters and Lists

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO Techniques

Local SEO Internationally

Local SEO Case Studies

Local Analytics

Other Local Search and SEO Resources

Initially I planned to compile a list of both local and mobile SEO resources due to their obvious correlation. After some research the sheer amount of must read resources for local SEO & search outgrew the combined list quickly. Thus I will publish a new list in 2 weeks from now: 30 Mobile SEO Resources.

As always this list doesn’t claim to be complete. So you’re welcome to add your links or resources you are missing in the comment section. You can also add mobile SEO articles for the next list post to be included.

Last updated: May 18th, 2011.

30+ More Non-Google SEO “How to” Online Marketing Resources for 2009

Tad Chef — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:27:30 +0000

Roughly two weeks ago I elaborated on the 10 non-Google SEO ways to promote your business online in 2009 and presented a list of 35 non-Google SEO how tos, tutorials & other resources. They covered only half of the strategies I suggested as the non-Google SEO ways.

Today I collected links for the remaining 5 non-Google SEO strategies:

Shopping search engines
Yahoo Answers
Review sites
Local sites and local search
Niche communities

So based on these categories here they are, 30+ more non-Google SEO “how to” online marketing resources for 2009:

Shopping search engines or shopping comparison sites like BizRate, Shopping.com or NexTag seemingly exist for ages, some lost steam along the way like Kelkoo did. According to Google Trends their traffic peaked around the Christmas season of 2007. Nonetheless you still can’t ignore them in ecommerce no matter what you sell. Sadly there are only few resources dealing with optimization for shopping search, some of those there are stem from several years ago. They were published as early as 2003 or 2004. They’re still valid though so I included them.

Yahoo Answers is the Google of Q&A sites. It has an overwhelming market share in English, above 90%. Thus I focused on marketing advice on Yahoo Answers. Considering its impact and traffic numbers, here too the number of resources is limited. Luckily the few there are are of very high quality.

Review sites made me struggle even more than shopping search engines. Although TripAdvisor, one of the most prolific social review sites has been around since 2000 I couldn’t find a thorough resource that covers SEO for TripAdvisor, only a short post. Also other resources are scarce. This is partly due to the fact that review sites are not considered a genre by themselves. Also shopping search engines, local sites or social shopping sites are in a way review sites too. So I only link two resources in this category. In case you have more please add them in the comments.

Local sites and local search are considered a crucial part of local SEO. Local SEO is in a way the next big thing in SEO. For years to come we can expect local SEO to become ever more important due to the proliferation of mobile devices and other hard & software leading to more locally oriented search. There are at least a dozen excellent resources for local search optimization:

Niche communities have been a quite revolution in the recent years. Digg-like Sites like Sphinn (for search marketing news) or Tip’d (for finance news) have sprung up in every niche conceivable. In case you’re serious about search marketing you can’t ignore Sphinn nowadays. Instead of wasting your time with Digg for most businesses addressing niche social news sites is the way to go. Sadly here too there are less resources than I’d wish they were. Thus I focused on the two sites I know as an active user and mentioned above plus added a few articles from one source, a problogger who is successfully targeting and describing niche social news sites.

That’s all for now. I’d like to make this list more represantitive though. So make sure to look up in your bookmarks whether you have some resources dealing especially with the 3 categories that are insufficiently covered as of now in this list. Add even more non-Google SEO “how to” online marketing resources for 2009!

Make sure they are how to articles or tutorials though!

What Are The Most Important Factors to Google Maps UK Rankings?

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:00:33 +0000

A common question we’re asked by clients is how can they improve their rankings for Google Maps local searches?

Having analysed many listings, in my opinion the main factors to Google Maps listings in the UK are as follows:

1) Proximity to location – The closer your registered business address is in distance to the centre of a town or city, the more relevant Google will find your listing to a locational search.
2) Keywords within company name – Using product/service keywords within a business name appears to be a very important factor towards obtaining an improved Google Maps ranking.
3) Categories selected – Being listed in a relevant or closely related category to a keyword can make an impact. Keeping the number of categories selected concise should also improve the likelihood of being listed for relevant searches.
4) Local telephone numbers – This may be coincidental, but I’ve noticed local telephone numbers such as 01865 (Oxford) appear to outrank listings which use 0845 style of numbers. I’ve just updated the SEOptimise listing so will test this out.
5) Having a full profile/reviews – Listings which use images, descriptions and contain reviews generally appear to rank well in Google Maps. A high number of positive reviews is also likely to have an influence.
6) Locational information on website – Ensuring your website address details correspond with the companies Google Maps listing.
7) Strong SEO – This doesn’t appear to be of high importance at the moment, but as the Google Maps algorithm develops we may see the relevancy and quality of a website’s content and link popularity becoming a major factor.

If you’re feeling sneaky you could always add a slightly inacurrate business name, so that it contains important keywords, and register a PO Box address located in the centre of your city! ;)

“Pages from the UK” accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:19:20 +0000

Robin Goad from Hitwise posted an excellent report today looking at the search engine market share in the UK.

What I found interesting is that the “Pages from the UK” search option accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic. When you consider that in the UK www.google.co.uk has a 73.74% market share of UK searches (www.google.com has 13.77%) then 13.6% is a very significant number of searches!

Many UK websites are also more likely to convert into sales and leads from referred UK-based traffic so it’s essential you’re listed and ranking well for relevant searches to maximise your exposure from Google UK.

Below I’ve listed 5 important steps to consider towards localising a UK website:
1) Get Indexed: The first step is making sure your site is indexed for “pages from the UK” searches, in order to achieve this a domain name should either use a .co.uk TLD or be hosted in the UK.
2) Set location: Set your geographic target to the UK in Google Webmaster Central. You can even set individual locations for sub-domains or sub-folders if you have a uk.domain.com or domain.com/uk international website.
3) List address information: Ensure your address details are listed on your website, using this in the contact page and footer will help to show Google your physical location and may also boost rankings for “[keyword] in [town/city/county/UK]“.
4) Sign-up for Google Maps: Adding your business to Google Maps is unlikely to improve your rankings but it can’t do any harm and can get you listed for local searches on Google UK and Google Maps business searches.
5) UK link building: Building UK specific inbound links can also help to improve the relevancy of your website for Google UK searches.

Advertise on Google Maps With Just One Click

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:30:00 +0000

I just noticed this new suggestion on Google AdWords:

Google Maps is a great way of getting your ads displayed online to a local audience so I’d recommend taking advantage of this and setting up your own local business ads.

Google Maps location listed in SERPs

Kevin Gibbons — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 01:49:00 +0000

While performing a search today for Bondi Beach I noticed a Google Maps location URL appeared as one of the normal listings in the Google.co.uk SERPs, as shown below.

Click image for full-size screenshot

This is the Google Maps result which is displayed:

Over the last few months Google have been using OneBox results to display maps at the top of the SERPs for local searches. They have also began using an embedded map link, but as far as I’m aware individual Google Maps locations shouldn’t be indexed and listed as a regular search result. Looking into the cached copy of this page shows that it is not indexed, this seems very strange as somehow it’s managed to get into the SERPs.

I haven’t seen this appearing for any other location so far and it doesn’t make sense that a page which isn’t cached is ranking for this term so could this be a test by Google?

Update: I’ve just noticed my own Bondi Beach rankings improve so Google seems to be doing a good job with this search after all!