The world of search engine marketing has been rocked in the past month with events surrounding the link building strategies of JC Penney and Overstock.com.  You can click on the links for more information about each situation, but for the purposes of this article suffice it to say that each site was caught purchasing links to manipulate their site higher in Google’s search rankings for select lucrative phrases.  It should be noted that this was not a case where Google’s alorithm caught something fishy going on and raised a red flag.  No, these sites were outed publicly (JC Penney by the New York Times and Overstock at WebmasterWorld) – forcing Google to either penalize the actions or condone them through inaction.  Cutts & Co. chose the latter with the result being that neither company ranks high for many of the terms where they previously held number 1 positions.  Most of the analysis of this has been done to death by others in my industry, but I wanted to take a look at this from a different perspective – that of Wall Street.

We see an interesting difference in the reaction of investors to the news surrounding these two companies.  Overstock has seen a solid dip (almost a 3% dip in their stock price) since they were penalized.  After an initial drop of almost 1%, JC Penney rebounded and has barely skipped a beat.  The likely difference here lies in the nature of the retailers’ respective businesses.  JC Penney claimed that organic e-commerce makes up a small portion of their business (less than 7% according to the Times article) and apparently stockholders agree.  Of course, that begs the question of why do it in the first place if it’s not going to have a measurable effect on business, but I digress.  Meanwhile, Overstock is obviously a dot-com who does most of its business online, and thus would be laughed out of the room if they made the same claim.  We likely will not know the full effects of Google’s penalties on either company until the next set of financials are released.

While neither of those ticker movements would be considered extraordinarily volatile, they were movements nonetheless.  The ability to predict these movements is what makes or breaks Wall Street careers.  Analysts must do a better job of valuing the stock price than the market as a whole.  Countless factors weigh in to determine stock prices – everything from company balance sheets to the possibility of a terrorist attack.  The question I ask is this:  Is it time to start valuing SEO into these stock prices?

Should Goldman Sachs be hiring SEOs to go over link profiles and analyzing tracking data to effectively predict whether or not a site’s search engine exposure is at risk?  Can anyone say comfortably that a stock (especially for an e-commerce company) is accurately priced if this has been ignored?  For companies that have the brand strength of JC Penney and Overstock, the non-branded organic traffic may only make up a small portion of the bottom line.  But for smaller e-commerce companies, such as many of the dot-coms that erupted into the NASDAQ during the 90s, that only have limited brand strength, the possibility of facing a Google penalty is an enormous risk for any potential investor.  Yet, I would find it hard to believe that many investors are accurately informed as to this level of risk.  Investing in an e-commerce site without analyzing their link profile would be akin to investing in a restaurant without knowing anything about their food supplier(s).

As I wrap here, I would be remiss not to point out Forbes actually felt the wrath of the Google hammer recently as well.  However, since that site was nailed for selling (not buying) links and is also a private company (non-traded) that does not have real-time valuations, it was impossible to include Forbes accurately into this discussion.

In all honesty, I planned this as a blog post on how ineffective automated spamming is. It’s unethical and annoying. It’s poorly targeted, rarely varies anchor text, and can’t get past a site that moderates comments (as all sites should). On top of that, Google recommends against it. In light of all these, it is amazing that anybody would even waste the time to set up a program to generate comment spam that would provide zero benefit.

To prove that auto-spam is a complete waste of effort, I went through a drew a random sample of 50 obviously automated spam comments that I have received to my personal blog over the past 6 months. I compared the sites that were being represented to the anchor text that the spam posts were trying to push and I then analyzed the rankings. The results were surprising, if not outright shocking. Some sites create and push this generic (and often offensive) spam…because it works.

Results (note: given the nature of many sites that spam, and the internet in general, some of the targeted anchor text is a bit risque, so please don’t click on the jump if that is something that you would prefer not to read):

(more…)

1. The the plans and priority items that you set on the first of the year will likely differ greatly from your focuses on the last.
2. Appreciate, but don’t fall in love with your analytics tools – something better will be available next year.
3. Time on Twitter is rarely wasted – if it is important to your friends/followers, other people probably care about it too.
4. It is ALWAYS possible to further optimize a PPC campaign.
5. The only limits to testing are the limits to your own intelligence.  Okay, that is a little mean spirited, but not untrue.
6. The Blue Ocean marketing strategy doesn’t exist [for long].  There always is [or soon will be] competition for any solid plan.  You cannot hide success.
7. Complicated marketing strategies are like (old school) Christmas lights.  If done properly they can work great, but one missing item (bulb) can destroy the whole thing.
8. Remember that your clients goals are often more important than actual quantitative results.
9. Web marketing is about putting your client in the best position to succeed, but it’s not a guarantee for success.  This is actually an old marketing lesson, but it’s important to remember year in and out.
10. Not caring about New Year’s festivities (and being caught in the middle of Oklahoma) gives one a good chance at making the final 2010 post on the company blog.

In case you were wondering what a holiday party at Beacon Technologies was like (and I know that you are), there is video tape from this year’s.  Upper management can be a bit zany in social situations…

- EW

follow me on twitter @ejwestksu

What’s worse than the cockroach under your refrigerator?  It is the bug affecting your software.  At least you can call an exterminator for the roaches.  Sometimes you are stuck with defective software for the lifecycle of the product.  To be clear, I am not talking about viruses or malware, I am referring to unintended errors and glitches that inexplicably made it through quality control and testing.

The onset of this post stems from a reaction some video game bug I have recently encountered.  I am not much of a gamer, so when I do encounter a bug in a game that I like, it frustrates the hell out of me.  EA’s NCAA Football 11 is a game that aims for as real an experience playing college football as possible (for a 5’8, 150 lb web analyst – this is as close as it was ever going to it).  However, this is a very flawed game.  Bugs and glitches have actually led to the game being a step back from editions that came out five or six years ago – when it was only available on lesser platforms than the XBox 360.  Updates and tuners have helped, but the game is still very flawed compared to previous editions.  From 2000-2005, I bought every version for the PS2.  This franchise was a finely tuned machine. What happened?

Speaking of five or six years ago, that reminds me of one of the all-time worst bugs I ever encountered.  The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (yeah, I can geek there) game was one of my personal favorites – good game play, but I especially enjoyed working my way through the plot line.  The sequel offered the same high level game play, but a bug (actually production deadline) led to the plot being unfinished and not holding up.  This was not originally designed and surprising in a game with George Lucas’ name on it…although much less surprising after the Indiana Jones 4 release (really George, I waited 19 years for that?!).

We find similar errors all the time across the web.  Sometimes it is due to server issues or network mishaps – which are often unavoidable from a development perspective.  But other times it is because of poor development that somehow made it past testing (or likely wasn’t tested).  I won’t name any names to protect the guilty, but it is sad how many professional sites are missing content, have empty links, or programming errors that destroy the user experience.

Is it me, or this more prevalent in technology than other industries?  Yes, products from other fields are often recalled because of defects.  But how often do you see those products have a fundamental flaw directly related to their usage?  Maybe it is because the nature of our industry allows for patches and updates to be added after the fact more easily than large scale recalls.  It may be more important to some firms to meet deadlines than have a product operating at 100%.  Their audience can finish the QA testing and they will fix the product as errors are brought to attention.  Just my theory – but I’m open to alternate opinions.

Anyhow, my point is to get it right the first time.  Sure, users are great for pointing out the flaws in a product, but don’t rely on them to point out bugs that should have been caught by your own programmers.  Every user who experiences an error is a potential lost customer (or a lost repeat customer).  It may or may not be reasonable to expect initial perfection, but striving for it should be the goal.

Today, I am going to take on my biggest opponent yet.  Bigger than bloggers, bigger than web marketers, even bigger than Google.  I’m taking on one of the founders of the internet himself, Mr. Tim Berners-Lee.  As the inventor of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is arguably the biggest reason for the internet existing in its current user-friendly format (with apologies to Al Gore).  Specifically, I would like to analyze – and disagree in large part – with an article that TimBL (because Berners-Lee is too long a name to reference for an entire blog post) wrote for Scientific American.  In between raising some good points, TBL succumbs to hyperbole and paranoia too frequently in this article and paints with a brush that is much too broad.

The article is titled “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality.”  Net neutrality has become a popular talking point in our industry over recent months.  With web-based companies/providers continually signing exclusive contracts and trying to beat the competition by sabotaging their opportunities to compete, the concept of net neutrality (along with ethics and anti-trust law) has been evoked frequently.  TimBL designed the web to be open and free, at least in terms of barriers to entry.  He holds very strong beliefs on maintaining that transparency and non-partisanship as much as possible.  And I agree with him.  Where I disagree is in the direction of trends and whether or not any of these issues are really a legitimate threat to the user…or just the monster that he created.

TimBL’s first 2 points are on the importance of universality and open standards.  I agree with him on both of these items.  They are essential to the fabric of the web as we know it.  As such, I don’t see a significant threat to either.  Any system that limits that access limits its own access to newcomers – in a growth based industry, this is a huge deterrent.  The only real current threat is to mobile web.  The question here lies in whether or not the mobile web should be considered part of the WWW or is its own entity.  TimBL himself is quick to draw lines between WWW and the internet as a whole.  I don’t know why you couldn’t draw some distinction between mobile or applications and the web itself.  Let me preface this by saying that I completely endorse net neutrality with all forms of connectivity.  That said, are these really the threats that he builds them up to be?  For instance, one popular application goes strictly closed source, this opens up many advantages to their competitors.  All companies will have to try to balance the advantages of keeping items in house versus appealing to the largest demographics.

I’m not necessarily a big believer in the idea that allowing the free market to operate will result in the greatest ethical result.  But I do firmly believe that most companies operate in their own best interest.  From what I can gather, it’s not in anyone’s best long term interest to shut out neutrality altogether.  Sure, they’ll toe the line with some new products and connecting technologies, but I tend to believe that the chase for the greatest number of users will lead to them opening up their systems before the rest of the world just accepts to join a closed network.

One more thought on open source in general.  Who decides what source is “open.”  I can’t write gibberish and expect it to show up on the web as I intended (no matter what XML parser tells me that I can).  I still have to adhere to set of accepted standards.  Would any new source be any different?  Yes, they could conceivably close their network so that they control its information and application.  But this is more business speculation that an actual threat.  In today’s world of social media and Web 2.0 – user interaction is so important that all sources go the other way, more openness.  It is conceivable that Apple or Google could institute their own platform that operates outside of the web consortium’s ideals.  But odds are that it would still be open or it won’t be popular enough to be a threat.  A new open system is not really against the greater concept of net neutrality; it’s just a different way of going about it.

I guess where we disagree most is in the overall trends.  TimBL sees open areas of the net getting closed off.  I see previously closed areas becoming more open.  Take iTunes for example.  ITunes represents a section of the net that is closed to iTunes users (even with its own protocol), this could be viewed as ‘walling’ off a section of the net.  But, I tend to see it as a previously closed application (local CD player) becoming more open – allowing access for downloads and sharing.  I think it will continue to become more open as time elapses.

I will reiterate that I agree 100% with TimBL’s greater ideals.  Open web is good web.  There is no advantage to the user or consumer to close the network.  I primarily disagree with the threats that he sees.  Perhaps he is a prophet telling a story that I don’t want to believe.  But I think it more likely that he is Don Quixote and the threats are really just windmills.

Ultimately, everybody has some level of difficulty with their babies growing up and moving on.  I think this is an example of TBL struggling to come to grips that his baby may be deviating from how he originally viewed it.  In some ways, that is a good thing, in others – not so good.  I love the concept of net neutrality, but I can also understand occasional situations where it is inappropriate and impractical.  The fact of the matter is that the World Wide Web has expanded beyond TimBL’s original expectations.  There is simply no way that a man who invented the web with one computer, one browser, and one website could have ever foreseen trillions of websites (at least a few of which aren’t porn related) and a culture unto itself developing within 20 years.  He would still like to keep it to its original intentions and framework, but it just isn’t possible to put an animal this large back into a cage that it outgrew a long time ago.  It is evolution and it is unstoppable.

Beacon attended the Internet Summit earlier this week. Overall, it was a terrific event. It has shown strong growth in an economy that is killing attendance at similar conventions. There were some very accomplished speakers and we heard a number of interesting ideas on where the net and web marketing industry will be going in the future.

Given my role with Beacon, I tended to hang around the SEO/Social Media/PPC management related segments. One of my favorite takeaways was where our company stands in the industry. If the convention’s speakers were an accurate representation of where the web marketing industry is currently focused (and I believe they were, visit the site above to see their credentials) – then Beacon Technologies is operating well ahead of the curve. Most of the advice regarding tactics and tools were items that Beacon has been using since I arrived roughly 18 months ago.

Highlights from the Convention:

• Warren Adelman’s keynote speech during lunch on the second day – Definitely the highlight of the Convention. Warren is the president and COO of GoDaddy.com who had to step in for CEO Bob Parsons at the last second. Warren gave an informative and entertaining speech on the formation of GoDaddy.com and the principles that have made the company successful. Yes, the Superbowl ad was talked about extensively.
• Marty Taylor Collins – Marty is the leader of the Emerging Media team at Microsoft. She gave a solid outline of how the technology giant has tackled social media marketing and evaluates the effectiveness of their efforts. Fear not small businesses, Bill Gates’ company has many of the same issues that you do.
• Dana Todd – The CMO of Newsforce gave an outline for where she saw the SEO industry heading (i.e. Application SEO, Sponsored news, Out-of-Home Search, TV Search, et al). I didn’t necessarily agree with all of her conclusions, but I still give credit because it is not overly common for entrenched members of our industry to make strong predictions. It is too easy to check back later and be called out for bull excrement.
• Shocktop Beer – Your standard convention contains the following beer lineup during cocktail hour: Budweiser, Miller Light, Heineken. That’s it. When facing the choice of American mediocrity or Dutch mediocrity, sobriety becomes a more likely option.  Here, we actually had my second favorite wheat beer (#1 being Boulevard – shamefully unavailable in North Carolina), so big time appreciation for that.

Less Impressive Items:

• Playboy Presentation – When Playboy is schedule for a featured marketing spotlight session, there is an expectation of an appearance by Bunnies. Am I wrong? *Crickets* *Crickets*
• Irrelevant SEO Advice – I received advice from an individual representing a PR 8 news site to chase the latest short tail trending phrases. That might be effective when you are representing a site that is already recognized as an authority by Google, but absolutely terrible for most websites looking to build their brand and traffic efficiently on fixed time/budget.
• Buzzword DSP – Demand Side Platform. This is not exactly a brand new concept, but I have never heard the phrase thrown around as much as I did in this convention. It seemed every speaker was trying to work it into their presentation, with varying degrees of actual relevance.

Tip for next year: Cocktail hour should include Maker’s Mark.

- EW

Twitter: @ejwestksu

Do not mess with me before my coffee.

All Hallow’s Eve is upon us. In that vein, let’s take a look at some SEO tactics with a Halloween twist. That makes this blog post dangerous – it’s topical. By November 1, it will be stale and you will probably stop reading about right…here. But I still have 6 to 7 day shelf life upon posting, so I am going to run with this anyways. The following is a list of treats (dos) and tricks (don’ts) to take into account when you are looking to optimize your traffic for search engine traffic.

Trick – Doorway Pages. You’ve seen them – pages that are optimized for loosely related keywords with the sole intention of directing you back to a different domain. Search engines hate them, once they have caught on. While you may get away with doorways and see a traffic spike for a bit, any gains generated are usually quickly lost in the high bounce and poor conversion rates that come from users who don’t like to be jerked around from site to site. Most people are clicking out as soon as they see the domain change. Your competitors are likely reporting you to Google as soon as they find out.

Treat – Optimizing your main domain for the most relevant keywords. Give the users what they want. Your site specializes in something, that’s why you built it. Make sure that the site is optimized for people who are looking in that specialty. I’ll bet bottom dollar that you are not ranking #1 for every key phrase related to your product. Win those phrases before you even think about venturing into unrelated terms.

Trick – Keyword stuffing to the Nth Degree. You’ve built your site and now you are ready to start optimizing for traffic. You’ve got a list of 250 keywords that you start stuffing into every title tag, meta description, alt tag, and content block you can find. I’m sorry, but that’s just not going to work. Not only are you going to (likely) hurt the user experience through over-stuffing, but you are also going dilute the value of your core keywords to the search engines. Optimizing for everything will have similar results to optimizing for nothing.

Treat – Focusing on a handful of phrases that are specific to the pages you are pushing. Go after a few highly relevant, high volume keywords and push hard for them. I have seen sites that are optimized for less than 10 key phrases perform very well.  Focus on who you are and where your strengths lie.

Trick – Spamming Forums/Blogs. Simply put: it’s annoying, it will get you banned from those sites, and it doesn’t work long term.

Treat – Finding discussion boards and posts where your link is actually relevant. Not only will this give you more credibility with search engines when a link comes from a relevant site, but it also has the possibility of generating legitimate traffic in the forms of referrals from that site since you are already dealing with an interested audience.

Trick – Link Exchanges. Run any website long enough and you will get requests for link exchanges. Trust me, when somebody asks you for a link exchange, they almost always will be getting more than they are giving.

Treat – Linking in and linking out where appropriate. The best link building occurs when you find a site that represents your website’s message and you actually converse with the webmaster to get your link posted. Do not offer them an exchange, just show them how a link to your site adds credibility to the page you would like to get linked from. Likewise, when you have content that would be improved by an external authority, go ahead and link out to them. Just don’t forget to use the target=_blank to make sure that the user doesn’t forget about you.

Trick – Article Spinning. For those who don’t know, article spinning is a way of coding a written article so that different synonyms appear every 3-5 words, then sending off numerous copies of the same article. Due to the various combinations of synonyms appear, it makes it very hard for any software to see the article as a duplicated. It also tends to come across as just a bit strange to the user since the words do not flow as well as they typically would in regular article. You may see a short term bump gained from the abundance of “unique” links produced, but because of the awkwardness of the articles, none of these links are likely to survive long term and your rankings will eventually fall back to previous levels.

Treat – Writing good solid content that is actually of value to the reader. I am actually not against the use of free article submission sites. But, if you choose to go that route, do put some effort into your articles and make sure they are more than just link spam. That’s the only way you will gain any syndication links from those sites, which is where you will experience the best SEO bumps.

Trick – Building a website that immediately opens with loud music and bright flashy images just to draw attention.

Treat – There isn’t one. Just don’t do that.

Follow the “treats” and you’ll get candy (traffic and conversions). Try too many of the “tricks” and your site will only be visited by ghosts…and maybe people who still search with Altavista.

-EW

On September 27, the Tampa Bay Rays had a chance to clinch just the franchise’s second playoff birth at home. Only 12,000 people – about a quarter of capacity – showed up for this game. Afterwards, Evan Longoria and David Price, two of the Rays’ best players, tweeted that the team was doing everything it could to win and deserved better support. They called the turnout an “embarrassment.”

We can start with how ridiculous it is for a couple of millionaires to call the number of consumers buying their products embarrassing. Nobody is entitled to sales. 12,000 people told the Rays that they had a great product on that Monday night. The rest of the greater Tampa Bay area told the Rays that their product is too expensive, takes too long to produce, is not available on a level playing field, is more boring than other available forms of entertainment, or any other common complaint against baseball. Longoria and Price are guilty thinking that people should pay just to watch them do their jobs. They, or more appropriately baseball’s upper management, should be thinking about how well their jobs are tailored to the consumer.

As ridiculous as it all is, we see similar complaints all the time in webmarketing (my point emerges). I constantly cross paths with website owners/designers who say that they have worked hard on their web site and spent money on its success, but they do not receive the results that their work deserves. Stop to think if that logic makes sense. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Are you required to buy another business’ product because they have worked hard on it? The work has to be put in the right places.

Is the site showing up where it needs to be? Is it targeted to the right audience? Is it better than the sites offered by the competition? Why should people be visiting it? Here is one more question that is ignored far too often with websites: Does the site represent a product or service that people will want? These are the questions that all website owners need to be asking themselves on a regular basis. You might be surprised how many do not have a great answer.

Admitting weaknesses (or ignorance) in certain areas is not a weakness itself. Understanding our faults shows us where we can improve and need to be able to make adjustments to find forward growth. Remember, if your marketing tactics are currently “perfect” – then your current business represents the peak of what you can ever hope to attain. Now, if you find that your weaknesses and ignorance are common to ALL the aforementioned questions, perhaps it is time to close down the site altogether before it costs you any more money.  But, if you are somwhere in the middle, then you have something which we are always seeking:  opportunity!

Marshall Field made the famous quote “The customer is always right” as a mantra for his department store operations. This quote is total baloney. Individual customers are people, and people are wrong all the time. However, mass consumerism IS always right. If your site is not resulting in the volume that you think it should, it is not the fault of the customers – it is yours. Do not be like Evan Longoria or David Price by blaming the potential consumers for not understanding how great your business is. It will only dig you a deeper hole and ignore the very real issues that you are facing. Understand that lack of business tells you just as much as actual business – and make adjustments accordingly. Hard work (in the right direction) can lead to good business, but it does not entitle anyone to it.

All that said, I worked hard on this blog (well, sort of) – so the internet community better be coming in droves.