Longtail keyword strings are great.

Find the right ones and they can bring you a decent flow of targeted, relevant visitors to your site.

Arm yourself with a wide enough collection of longtails and you can tick another item off your checklist of “Things to do to optimize my website for the search engines.”

But how do you find the right ones and decide which longtails you want to grab?

Identifying Longtails Using Keyword Research Tools

Well duh!  I hear you mutter.  You just plug your target term into any keyword tool worth its salt and scroll down to the bottom of the page, right?

Well, yeah, that can be a good starting point and it’s a great way to brainstorm ideas for content because you’re finding out what terms and phrases related to your target people are actually searching for.

But it’s likely to mean that you’ll need to create a whole load of new material from scratch in order to catch those searches.  And you’ll need to remember to carefully review the list of phrases that you discover to ensure that you’re choosing to target longtail phrases that are likely to bring you visitors who are relevant to your site’s goals.  Sure, they may be searching for something that uses one of the keywords you’re optimizing for, but the rest of the words used in their longtail search will give you a clue as to their intent.  If a visitor who arrives via a search for a particular longtail phrase isn’t likely to convert into a customer or a subscriber (depending on your site’s goals) are they really a visitor that you need to spend time trying to draw into your site in the first place?  Probably not.

What About Longtail Keyword Phrases You Didn’t Realise You Were Already Hitting?

Have a look through your analytics package of choice and check out the phrases that have already brought visitors to your site from the search engines.

I guarantee you’ll see some queries in there that make you stop and think, “Really?  They came to my site looking for that?”

Then ask yourself, “what was the intent behind that searcher’s query?  Would they have found the answer they were seeking on my site?  Do I want to bring more people who are looking for that to my site?”

If you check out Michael Martinez’s SEO-Theory blog, you’ll see that every now and then Michael will write a post where he lists all the odd/esoteric longtail search queries that bring visitors to his blog and he’ll try to provide clear and succinct answers to them, along with links to previous posts he’s written that should provide the searcher with a more detailed answer.
This not only gives him a way of targetting extra long tail queries, but it’s also a good way of encouraging the search engine spiders to crawl deeper into the archives of his older posts.

I always knew he was a clever bloke.

How About The Longtail Queries That You’re Not Quite Hitting Yet?

Now this is an interesting one.

Sure you can do your keyword research and find new longtail terms to target.

And you can cherry pick the phrases that have already sent you a handful of visits and tweak your pages to encourage more people to click through to your site from the SERPs.

But there’s a middle ground between these two extremes that’s a potential goldmine of longtail search visits.  The lowest-hanging of the low-hanging longtail fruit, if you will.

Go and log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

See that link on the overview page for Top Search Queries?  Click it.

Now, have a look at the list that appears on the left hand side of the page.  These are all the search queries (well, the Top 20 anyway) that Google has been kind enough to rank your site for, regardless of whether or not the searcher then clicked through to your site from the result or chose to go elsewhere.
You can segment the results to see which regional version of Google the searcher used and whether it was a straight forward web search or a blog search.

The pane on the right hand side of the page shows you the results that people have actually clicked to visit your site, but as with everything that the Big G is willing to share with webmasters, the data tends to be incomplete and sketchy at best.

But it’s this list on the left that we’re most interested in.  These are your longtail search query also-rans.  The phrases and terms that Google already thinks you’re relevant enough for to warrant a place in the SERPs, but maybe not high enough yet to entice people to actually visit your site for.

These are the phrases that just need a little bit of tweaking, the pages that just want a little sprinkling of that SEO pixie-dust, the articles that just need a couple of extra links with suitably tailored anchor text, or perhaps the starting point for a brand new article or series that will cater to these searchers’ needs more effectively.

So go and check out your longtail query near misses and see which ones you think could bring your site more of the kind of visitors you want.

It’s (a couple of days after) that time of the week again kids, so here we go with another SEOpsCentre Friday Monday Link-Fest.  I know it’s a bit later than normal, but you’ll see why when you read through this week’s links (and it’s not just because I’ve been messing about on Plurk)…

Plurk Is The New Black

Yeah, I thought it was a silly name when I first heard it too.  But all the cool kids are doing it.  Heck, even I’m on there.
For the uninitiated, Plurk is kind of like Twitter, but with a few groovy new toys to play with:

• You’re still restricted to 140 characters per message, but it’s easier to add links with anchor text rather than having to use shrinkers for the URLs like you do on twitter.
• You can post replies to individual messages, making it easier to follow conversations (although it would be nice if they added a bookmarking feature so that you can follow up without having to scroll back through your timeline to find the original post).
• The whole timeline view just looks a lot nicer than twitter and (so far) it seems to be a great deal more stable (but we’ll have to wait and see what effect this week’s mass migration of SEO-types will have on that )
• You can also divide you friends list into “cliques” so that you can send messages just to particular groups of friends.  Very handy.
• They’ve built in this Karma system that builds up as you gain more friends and invite more people to join, rewarding you with new features like animated emoticons.  I’ve already seen more than one person get over-excited by the discovery that they can now post messages with dancing bananas in them (Dazzlin Donna, I’m looking at you).

So if you want to join in the fun on Plurk you can sign up through this link (just so you know, if you do sign up using that link, it’ll automatically add you to my friends and give me extra karma so then I can start using dancing bananas as well )

If you do decide to sign up you should check out this guide to using Plurk, it covers a lot of the basic and more advanced things you can do with Plurk and will have you plurking like a pro in no time.

Speaking of Karma

James Duthie’s back on the guest blogger circuit again this week, following up last week’s visit to help out theGypsy with a great guest post on Shana Albert’s Social Desire blog about how to improve your social media karma.  Which I’m sure will earn him a few extra karmic brownie points.

My Friend Robot(.txt)

The search engines banded together this week to provide us all with some handy tips on best practices for using robots.txt files and the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP for short).  You can read the various posts from either Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! or you can pop over to Matt Cutt’s blog for his round-up of all three which includes a few other tips to boot. 
Good to see them all singing off the same hymn sheet.  But with all that identical information on each page, it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top when the duplicate content filters kick in

How Dark Is It In Seattle? 

Judging by the chatter from a lot of the folks on Twitter and Plurk who’ve been in Seattle for this week’s SMX Advanced conference, the weather there has been pretty awful, with lots more rain than you’d expect for this time of year.  I always thought it was supposed to be like that in Seattle, that’s why they produced so many depressed singers in the early 90’s.

And it sounds like the darkness this week extended beyond the meteorological as Lisa Barone expressed her disappointment on the Bruce Clay blog that a great deal of the talk at SMX Advanced covered strategies from the grey/black hat side of the SEO spectrum.  Danny Sullivan even turned up in the comments to say that he felt this year’s conference was a lot more black hat than he would have liked, which has left him concerned that the ”show may have pushed things backwards rather than forwards.”

Jane Copland posted her own round-up of SMX Advanced on the SEOmoz blog and also covered some of the chatter about the surprising amount of emphasis people were placing on the BH techniques that were discussed.

Now, I didn’t go to the conference so I’m not really in a position to comment (but when has that ever stopped me?)  The fact is that to judge from the abundance of coverage for the conference as a whole it covered a pretty thorough spectrum of SEO tactics, from white hat all the way through to black.  Obviously I don’t know what went on in the Give It Up session (and I won’t find out for another four weeks, when the embargo is lifted and I’m sure we’ll see a whole flurry of post come out detailing the strategies discussed in there).  It just sounds as though the black hat stuff is what stuck in people’s minds after the event finished, whether or not anyone chooses to use it for themselves or their clients comes down to the individual’s own fashion sense.  Personally, I’m sticking with my irritatingly noble preference for alabaster headwear, but that doesn’t mean to say that I’m not just as eager as everyone else to at least hear about what went on in the Give It Up session.  As Rand Fishkin pointed out in the comments on Jane’s post, “I’ve always felt that plugging your ears when black hat SEO comes up doesn’t make you a white hat, it makes you a worse SEO overall. ”

The Funniest Thing I Saw This Last Week

As well as SMX Advanced, Google had their own Google I/O Conference where they gave attendees some natty t-shirts which were supposed to spell out Google I/O in binary.
But, as Michael Arrington points out on the TechCrunch blog, they actually spell Google KO.
I guess the question is, was this a genuine mistake on Google’s part, or were they going for some super subtle uber-geek humour?
After all, there are 10 types of people in this world.  Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Excuses Excuses

So that’s my belated link round-up for last week.  As you can see, the whole pissing about on Plurk thing slowed me down a bit, as did the firestorm that erupted around Lisa’s Darkness of SMX post (I decided to hold off posting until I could see some more of the reactions to it).
Plus I had to go to the hospital on Friday afternoon.  Don’t worry, I’m fine.  I’ve just been feeling under the weather for the last couple of weeks and my doctor wanted me to have a blood test to make sure everything’s okay.
I don’t know whether or not I should be worried.  When the nurse took my blood sample she didn’t use a needle, she just bit me.
Do you think I should have asked her for ID?

When I first started blogging about SEO here at SEOpCentre I made a promise (mostly to myself) that I would not discuss specific details of the sites that I work on or the companies that I work with.  After all, this site is my personal blog about learning SEO techniques and I prefer to keep things general rather than going into detailed case studies of individual sites.

I do want to share with you some of the things that I’ve come to understand about SEO and website promotion by helping other people with their sites.  I’m still not going to say, “Hey, check out this site and look at what I did!” but I will give enough of a general background to help you get a handle on the type of business in question and hopefully be able to apply these insights to your own, or your own client’s, sites.

A Small Business Still Deserves A Big Web Presence

The site in question belongs to a friend of mine who has built up his business over the last few years in a fairly specialized niche market, which has attracted a loyal following among its customer base and draws new business largely through word-of-mouth referrals.  The site has an active forum community of its own, as well as a highly visible presence within a national forum site for its industry.  For the sake of this example, let’s say that they’re involved in the sport of Ten Pin Bowling.  They aren’t, but it fits the example quite well, as far as being a sport with a community built around the team and their involvement in regular “bowling tournaments.”  It’s also a sport which has a far bigger following in the US than it does here in the UK.
Just to reiterate: they are not a ten pin bowling team.  If you’ve found your way here looking for tips about bowling because my use of the term in this example has accidentally optimized this post to show up in Google’s results for searches about bowling, perhaps you’d be more interested in checking out Bowwwling.com they seem to cover a lot more on the subject than I will.

The lay of the land

The current site is a few years old now, built around the Joomla CMS and was developed with little or no consideration given to keyword research or other Search Engine Optimization techniques.
At the time of writing, the site barely ranks at all in Google for anything other than the company’s own name.
Fortunately, very few of their competitors have engaged in any truly meaningful SEO activity either, so with a little research, a bit of relevant copywriting and some general house-keeping we should be able to improve things quite quickly.
They are now in the process of developing a new site (this time using MODx so if any one knows any tips or decent resources for getting the most out of that system please drop a link in the comments) and I’ve been able to have some input towards various aspects of the development and content creation in an effort to ensure that a variety of SEO best practices are followed.
I’ve also managed to convince them of the benefits of having a company blog to run alongside the main site (Yay!  WordPress!  That’s where I get to play).  But it wasn’t easy.

Modesty Is The Best Policy

One of the biggest bug-bears for my friend is that he doesn’t want to create the impression that the company is “bragging” about their successes (he’s generally happy to do that in private, among friends, but is acutely aware that his is an industry where those who openly shout “We’re the best!” are usually perceived as dickheads and are opening themselves up to be targets for others to try and knock down a peg or two).  Getting the point across that the kind of promotion I have planned for him involves demonstrating the years of experience and training that he and the rest of the team have built up, as a way of showing prospective new customers that they will be in safe hands, is not about bragging but is instead about establishing the authority that the company already holds within its niche for a new audience.  These guys have been “bowling” for a great many years and have even received training from a number of ex-professional “bowlers” which has given them a real edge in the sport and is something that they are now able to pass on to other “bowlers” by holding training days and offering corporate team-building events and experience days in addition to their regular “bowling tournaments.” 
They have every reason to be justifiably proud of what they’ve achieved, but it’s important to strike the right tone and not appear to simply be saying, “Do it this way because we said so.” 
A much better approach is to say, “Try doing it this way, because we’ve found it to be incredibly effective for us.  And, by the way, if you know of a better way, please join the discussion and share it with us.”

The Web May Be WorldWide, But The Company Isn’t

This company operates entirely in the UK and nearly all of the customers attending its events are from the UK (with occasional visits from the continent for really big events).  There’s no reason to try and attract visitors to the main site from other parts of the world and the focus will be on building search engine rankings within Google UK.
The blog however (which will be hosted on a blog.companyname.com subdomain) will be actively promoted at a worldwide level.  The online community for “bowling” has a much larger following in the US than it does here in the UK and the blog will provide a great way to attract and engage American “bowlers” while still allowing the main site to focus on promotions to a UK audience.  As blog posts grow and generate links from others in the worldwide “bowling” community, link juice and authority can be passed to the main site through site-wide links to the homepage, forum and other important sub-sections, as well as through more targeted links within specific posts to the relevant pages deeper within the main site.
For example, a blog post about “the best technique to get a spare from a 7-10 split” would be linked to the main site’s page on upcoming training day events for UK “bowlers” to come and learn how to put the theory into practice.

While establishing a blog as a way to help promote a commercial site (even one for a very small business such as this) isn’t exactly a unique or ground-breaking strategy, it’s still one that can be very effective in building a brand and improving search engine rankings.  A great many of the SEO blogs that I read are by consultants who work for much larger, established firms and their advice relates much more towards their experiences performing SEO services for big companies with massive sites.  There are also a lot of great SEO blogs out there by consultants who work on sites for smaller businesses and these will be the ones that I will be turning to for advice and tips.  I know there’s a lot of talk about pricing for SEO services and how the high prices quoted often reflect the higher end of the market, while looking down on more budget friendly services as “snakeoil salesmen” but I’m confident that there can be a middle-ground of competent Search Engine Marketers who specialize in providing advice and services to small businesses with small budgets while still maintaining the ethical standards and effectiveness of the “big hitters.”  And that’s a sector of the market that I’m happy to be working in (at least until the multi-nationals start emailing me with the big bucks offers )

BTW  If anyone out there knows where I can find out the best way to identify all the pages from the old (ugly-URL Joomla) version of the site and set up 301 redirects to their new (friendlier-URL having MODx) counterparts please drop a link to it in the comments.  You will instantly become my new best friend if you do

Just saw this on the Live Search Blog.

It seems that from now on when a search query returns a result from Wikipedia they will actually expand the description beyond the standard couple of lines of text that you, me and everyone else gets and instead they’ll be including the first paragraph from the Wiki article along with a handful of extra links to deeper content sections within the article.

The example given on the the Live Search Blog is from a search for the term Tikal which shows up as the first organic result in the SERPs.

But a quick (and not particularly scientific) test shows that results from Wikipedia are now extended regardless of their positions within the results.

Just look here at a handful of other searches:

A search for Virtual Reality has the Wiki result at number 6 but still gets the extended listing.

Searching for Queensland brings it in second expanded entry and all.

Even the query Video Games which doesn’t display a result from Wikipedia until the third page still has the fully expanded listing.

SEOs have often complained in the past about Wikipedia’s dominance of search results because of the site’s massive inbound link profile and perceived authority in ranking algorithms (especially Google’s) but now there’s the additional favouritism shown by Live Search to contend with.

Will Microsoft continue to expand search result listing for other authority sites in the same way?  Or will this be a one-off thing that they’re doing just for Wikipedia’s results?

What do you think?  How do you feel about Wikipedia not just ranking so highly for so many queries but now taking up even more real estate on the SERPs as well?  Is this  good thing?  Or a bad one?  Do you think any of the other engines will follow suit?  Would you prefer it if they just gave Wikipedia their own little box out result on the side of the page and left the rest of the SERPs as normal?

Let me know in the comments.

It’s link-fest time again folks, so let’s dive right in and see what’s been happening in the world this week.

Guest-posts a-go-go!

It’s been a big week for guest posts on SEO blogs this week.
James Duthie (my buddy from Online Marketing Banter) dropped a great guest post on Dave Harry’s blog to help out while theGypsy himself recovers from a broken hand.
And Shana Albert took a big step this week, asking for help on her blog and opening up to taking guest posts there.
I want to wish both Dave and Shana all the best for speedy recoveries.  It sounds like Dave’s hand is on the mend now and I hope that Shana is able to get herself back to full strength and up to speed soon as well.
I the meantime they both seem to be getting a lot of great help from their guest-blogging friends.
Linda Bustos from GetElastic.com also popped up with a guest post this week on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim Blog, where she gives us some really useful tips about how to set up filters for Google Analytics.  Looks like I’ve got some settings to tweak this weekend

Great Big SEO Controversy Of The Week

Money.co.uk published an official apology following the last couple of weeks worth of hoaxbait-gate and even a mention on Australia’s MediaWatch TV show for the made up story about Ralph Hardy.  In their post they confirmed that, “The contractors responsible for this mistake are no longer associated with money.co.uk in any way.”  But Lyndon doesn’t seem too bothered.
Hopefully this’ll bring an end to it and everyone can go back to what they were doing before this all kicked off.

Great Big SEO Controversy Of The Week 2.0

More in the ongoing saga of Jason Gambert and his spurious attempts to trademark the term SEO.  Now the delightful Sarah Bird has picked apart some of Jason’s more ridiculous claims from the latest round of submissions to the US Patent Office.
Add to that the latest revelations from Arteworks and Michael VanDeMar in tracking down another Gambert sock-puppet effort to dig up dirt on those opposing him by emailing their clients posing as an “SEO Investigator.”  He even contacted a charity that Arteworks helps out pro-bono.
Epic shady-backfire Fail.

How to get advice from Matt Cutts - One word… lapdance

Frank Watson posted his quandry over at the SEW blog.  How do you keep your hat white when trying to provide SEO services for a porn site (an industry which is notoriously rife with blackhat tactics)?
Clearly stating his noble intentions and mentioning Matt specifically in the post’s title seemed to do the trick.  Matt stopped by and left a comment with his advice for Frank about way he may look at building quality links to his client’s site without going down the dark route of spammy p0rn directories.  Turns out our boy Cutts knows a few names to drop from the adult entertainment business.  Good lad

The Funnies

NickCakes, the “Reformed” *cough* BlackHat posted a brilliantly funny rant about how Jason Calacanis is ruining the internet with Mahalo.

Kevin Smith released the long-awaited internet teaser trailer for his upcoming film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” which you can see over at quickstopentertainment.com or just scroll down the page a little to watch the embeded YouTube version right here.  ** Warning - This video is NSFW - Lot’s of potty-mouthed language**

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYm9NuDjgoE[/youtube]

And there we have it for another Link-Fest.
Enjoy your weekend.  And remember, be good to yourselves and each other.

TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations) are everywhere these days and the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is particularly crowded with these random-sounding strings of letters, used as a kind of internal shorthand for people to refer to commonly discussed concepts without having to waste valuable seconds articulating the complete words.

This has become especially important with the advent of services like Twitter where users are limited to just 140 characters per message.  Actually having to write Search Engine Optimization (26 characters) would leave you a lot less room to brag about how good you are at it.

Of course, if you’re just starting to learn about SEO it can be a little tricky to understand what all these TLAs stand for.  Listed below are a selection of some of the most commonly used abbreviations that you’ll encounter.  Some are used specifically within SEO circles, but you’ll also find a lot of them in regular use in plenty of other places as well.

As ever, if there are any other TLAs that you think are missing from the list, feel free to add them to the comments at the end of this post.

TLAs for SEOs

• SEO = Search Engine Optimization
  The art/science (depending on who you talk to) of tuning web pages for better visibility in search engines like Google.
• SEM = Search Engine Marketing
  This tends to be more focussed on promoting websites by using advertising such as Google’s AdWords.  It also covers any marketing activity, such as writing persuasive sales copy, which goes beyond the technical “nuts-and-bolts” of basic SEO.
• SMM = Social Media Marketing
  A relatively new branch within the SEO/SEM field, Social Media Marketing refers to the development and distribution of promotional content through Social Media sites such as YouTube, Facebook or Digg, where the intention is to get users to spread your marketing message to others within their Social Network.
• PPC = Pay Per Click
  A pricing model for SEM adverts where the advertiser is charged each time a user clicks on their advert.
• CPC = Cost Per Click
  The amount charged for a single click on a PPC advert.
• CPM = Cost Per Mille
  An alternative pricing model for SEM adverts where the advertiser is charged Per Thousand (Mille is Latin for 1,000) Impressions (or views) of their advert.
• ROI = Return On Investment
  The ratio of money made (through sales or leads generated) by a campaign, compared to the cost of implementing that campaign (e.g. the charges for a CPC advert).
• MFA = Made For Advertising
  Refers to spammy sites that have been made purely with the intention or drawing traffic to view and click on adverts.
  Sometimes defined as Made For AdSense, referring specifically to Google’s advertising program.
• IBL = InBound Link
  Links to a site or page from other sites on the Internet.  Also called Backlinks or InLinks.
• FFA = Free For All
  Refers to sites which allow anyone to drop a link to their website, resulting in a linkfarm.  Google generally devalues links from such sites from passing any weight in their algorithm.
• SERP = Search Engine Results Page
  Yes, I know that’s four letters, but it gets used a lot, so it still counts.
• PR = PageRank
  No, this one isn’t three letters either, but it will come up a lot.  Although as you learn more about SEO you’ll come to realise that references to PageRank (especially Toolbar PageRank) are largely meaningless.
• ORM = Online Repuation Management
  This is the process of monitoring an individual’s or a brand’s reputation through online sources such as news articles, blog or forum posts (or just about anywhere else online) and developing methods to respond to and counteract any negative or potentially damaging information.  In some cases this may simply be a matter of “burying” negative content by creating content of a more positive nature which will outrank the negative posts in the SERPs.  More ethical ORM involves dealing with the negative issues highlighted, resolving them and potentially turning the “bashers” into “brand advocates.”
• ATF = Above The Fold
  The portion of a web page that is visible as soon as the page loads, without the user having to scroll down.  Regarded as the best place to position important messages and calls to action.
• BTF = Below The Fold
  The rest of a web page, which will only be seen by visitors who scroll down the page (assuming that the content placed ATF was interesting enough to entice them to do so).
• KEI = Keyword Effectiveness Indicator
  A value calculated for a given keyword based on the number of searches for that word compared to the number of webpages where it is found by search engines.
• ODP = Open Directory Project
  A human edited directory of sites on the internet.  Can provide great value to a site to have a listing and a link from this directory, but can take a very long time for a submission to be processed.
• SPAM = Sites Positioned Above Mine
  That means pretty much all of you

TLAs for Internet Technology

• API = Application Programming Interface
  A set of instructions or tools which can be used by developers to create applications based on another provider’s services and information.  e.g. Facebook’s API for creating all those annoying applications that your friends spam you with invitations to add to your profile.
• CMS = Content Management System
  A program, such as WordPress or Drupal, which is designed to handle the “heavy-lifting” of creating web pages, allowing users to focus their efforts on creating the actual content that will be published on a page.
• TLD = Top Level Domain
  The .com (or .co.uk / .net / .org etc) part of an internet domain name.
• URL = Uniform Resource Locator
  The full length address of a specific page on the internet, which appears in the address bar of your internet browser.
• URI = Uniform Resource Indicator
  This means the same as URL.  Ironically, the usage of the term isn’t uniform across the world.

TLAs in Common Use on the Interwebz

• BTW = By The Way
  Used to interject an aside during a conversation, often turning the converstion towards a completely unrelated subject.  e.g. “BTW did you see BSG last night?  6 is sooo hot!”
• BSG = BattleStar Galactica
  The best show on TV.  But if any Americans Twitter spoilers before it airs in the UK (on the Tuesday following when it airs in the USA) I will un-follow you.
• FAQ = Frequently Asked Questions
  Like “What does FTW stand for?”
• FTW = For The Win
  A rally cry for success.  Not to be confused with WTF.
• LOL = Laugh Out Loud
  A long standing favourite of internet chatroom users and moblie phone text messagers everywhere, used to show when they find something funny.  See also ROFL.
• ROFL = Roll On (the) Floor Laughing
  What happens when you LOL too hard.
• WTF = What The F*ck
  Used as an exclamation of surprise, disgust and/or bewilderment.
  As in “Dude, WTF does FTW mean?”

Woo-hoo!  It’s Friday!

And this coming Monday is a Bank Holiday here in the UK, so double woo-hoo!

Now let’s get on with the linkage so I can go and enjoy the long weekend.

Free Tibet!  *when you collect 8 tokens from specially marked cereal packets

Stephen Spencer has launched a campaign encouraging SEOs to use their powers for good by sending links to the Free Tibet website using “Olympics” as the anchor text in an effort to bring greater attention to the situation in Tibet by raising the site’s SERP rankings ahead of the Chinese Olympics.  I can’t pretend to be an expert on the situation, but anything that helps promote a wider spread of information and discussion can only be a good thing.  So…

Olympics

The Great HoaxBait Debate Continues - I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat

Following on from last week’s furore over what Lyndon did, Matt Cutts chummed the waters by making this commenton Sphinn.  Suddenly there was loads of talk about Google penalizing sites for posting false stories.  Except… how could Google tell?  I mean, unless the content’s creator actually admits it in a blog post the way that Lyndon did.  There’s certainly no way their algorithm could possibly automate the process of detecting made up stories.  And manual reviews could only cover so much ground before the idea just stops being practical or scalable.
Some of the SEO world’s heavy hitters weighed in with their opinions on the matter this week, with posts from Lisa Barone on the Bruce Clay blog, Jane Copland on SEOmoz, Dan Horton on DaveN’s SEO Blog and Barry Schwatz at Seach Engine Land.
It seems that common sense is beginning to shine through here as more people point out that it’s not necessarily a matter of “ethics” or whether or not Google can (or should) penalize sites for gaining links in this way, what it comes down to is whether or not the content you create for a client’s site is appropriate for that client and if you’re prepared to deal with the consequences of a negative public reaction to some of your more “creative” work.

Incidentally, for the benefit of all those people out there who take everything Matt Cutts says as the absolute gospel opinion of Google as a whole, here’s a post from the Official Google Blog by Udi Manber  which discusses Google’s Search Quality Team, along with Matt Cutt’s own follow-up post pointing out his role within that teamas the head of the group dealing with webspam.

Besides which, Matt was recently electrocuted by solar panels so he’ll probably be a lot quieter from now on.

Which is more relevant?  A site called SEO Book or a site about an SEO Book?

This week saw Dan Thies release the 2008 update of his eBook SEO Fast Start.  I bet you can guess what’s on my list of things to read this weekend, can’t you?
Dan isn’t a happy bunny though.  Just check out this post from his blog.  I seems some upstart call “Aaron Wall” (if that’s even his real name) is monopolizing the first page of search results for the term “SEO book” even though he doesn’t have a book about SEO on his site.  Proof positive that Dan’s been slapped with a -12 penalty from the big G if ever there was one.
Meanwhile, this Wall-character even gets stories sphunn about what kind of ice cream he eats.

Hee-hee!  Google said C-nt!

Great find here.  Google’s sitelinks for the Urban Dictionarywebsite include a listing for their page on the word “cunt” which the more childishly inclined among us (myself included) think is absolutely f-ing hilarious!

Other Stuff That Made Me Laugh This Week

I’m trying really hard to resist the urge to fall back on my good old geek-comedy standby and just drop a couple of links to the Fake Steve Jobs blog this week (although there have been a few funny posts about the upcoming 3G iPhone launch and Steve Ballmer getting egged- Dammit!  I linked to him didn’t I?  Oh well, Namaste, Fake Steve.  I honour the place where your rants and my Friday round-ups become one.)

Google Reader did me a big favour this week.  In amongst all the rubbish that it regularly tries to recommend for me I discovered this gem of a blog called Put Things Off (it’s kind of like all those GTD sites, but with a better sense of humour).
I couldn’t decide on my favourite post from PTO, so here are the two that made the most milk come out of my nose:
Nomophobia and The Curse of The Mobile Phone
Moleskine Notebooks (the ultimate guide) and How to Rank Your Addiction  (btw - I’m only at Level 3 on the scale, rapidly approaching level 4)

And there you have it.  Another week down.

Enjoy your weekend folks.  Especially if you get to have a long weekend as well.

I don’t often go off on rants here at SEOpsCentre.  That’s what Twitter is for.
But I just couldn’t resist the urge to throw my two cents right into the common-sense, middle ground of this.

If you’re a regular at Sphinn there’s no way you could have missed the debate that’s been raging there over the last few days regarding Lyndon Antcliff’s use of a made up story about a teenager hiring hookers to play Xbox games as linkbait for UK financial advice site Money.co.uk.

No-one can argue that Lyndon’s article hasn’t been incredibly successful in terms of generating new links to his client’s site.  A quick check on Yahoo! Site Explorer at the time of writing reveals over 5,000 links pointing to that page alone.

The bone of contention for a lot of other SEOs out there seems to be centred around whether or not it’s ethical to use an outright lie like that as a way of promoting a client’s site, especially a client in the market of providing serious and (hopefully) trustworthy advice to consumers about how to handle their finances.  The worry is that as an article presented without any caveats to indicate that it was just a fictional yarn and because it was picked up as a real piece of news by so many “proper” news outlets like the BBC, Fox News and many others, this could end up damaging Money.co.uk in the minds of consumers as they may come to distrust anything else they read on the site.

This might be a little extreme.  Chances are that in a few weeks the world at large will have forgotten all about little Ralph Hardy and his dad’s credit card.  Almost certainly, most of the extra traffic that spiked to the site in order to read the article was from outside the UK and probably didn’t stick around to check out any other pages on the site or convert into paying customers.

But the links will remain and they will continue to provide a boost to Money.co.uk in the eyes of Google’s link-based ranking algorithm for a long time to come.  And that seems to be the sole measure of success and the basis for Lyndon’s statement, “I have little interest in discussing the ethics of linkbait, as far as I am concerned if it works and results are achieved then do it.”
Considering the fact that the majority of these links will be using the article’s title, “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers” this will surely have a positive effect on Money.co.uk’s SERP positions for the term “credit card.”  Any additional boost that it gives for the terms “13 year old” or “hookers” will just be regarded as a collateral by-product.

What did Lyndon do wrong?

I’ve got a lot of respect for Lyndon Antcliff.  I regularly read his blog and have found a lot of useful advice on there.  As a fellow Brit, I also appreciate his sense of humour a lot more than some.

Will I stop reading his blog as a result of this debacle?
Hell no!

Do I think he could have handled this situation better?
Well… yes.

As I’ve already mentioned above, there are plenty of opinions going around arguing whether it’s ethical to get links from news outlets for a lie.
Lyndon’s response is that he can’t control who chooses to link to the story and it’s not his fault if they report it as fact without checking whether or not it’s true.

The counter-argument points out that a story presented in this way on a site that is supposed to provide trustworthy financial advice and that isn’t known for (and doesn’t appear to have ever previously posted) “joke” stories, gave the tale an appearance of legitimacy that fooled people into believing it, leading to the story gaining much greater attention than it would have done if it had been posted on a site known for satirical, made up stories, such as The Onion or News Biscuit.
Lyndon’s response was to fall back on the argument that it’s other people’s decisions to link to the story and their fault if they don’t “get” that it’s satire.

On and on it went, becoming a circular debate of “That was naughty,” “No it wasn’t,” back and forth with no-one giving or gaining any ground.
Gradually the debate, in the comments on both Lyndon’s own site and on the Sphinn post of the story, devolved into little more than tit-for-tat name calling, as phrases like “SEO fundamentalists,” “Nigerian email scammers,” and even “Albanian Marxists,” flew back and forth.
Initially, Lyndon appeared to be gaining a perverse pleasure from mocking the “holier than thou” attitude of his opponents, baiting them and inciting less and less productive replies.

Eventually tiring of the developing flame war and realising it was distracting him from getting any actual work done, Lyndon removed his original blog post where he admitted to writing the fictional piece on Money.co.uk.

Lyndon’s big mistake wasn’t writing the article for Money.co.uk in the first place.
It would be naive to think that his clients didn’t have editorial oversight and could have chosen not to publish the story if they weren’t comfortable with having it on their site.

His biggest mistake wasn’t even allowing himself to get embroiled in the bickering, and at times childish, comments on Sphinn and his own blog.
Although that was hardly his, or many other people’s, finest hour.

Lyndon’s big mistake was posting the story on his blog detailing his role in creating this linkbait in the first place.
I can understand why he would be excited and justifiably proud of how successful his work has been.  In the same situation, I’d probably want to shout it from the rooftops as well.  But if the reaction has proven anything it’s that this is not the right way to detail one’s professional successes.
Had this been mentioned as part of a client profile within a portfolio page on his site it would have slipped by largely un-noticed and avoided the negative reactions of so many members of the SEO community, but would have been a far more effective way of illustrating his skills to prospective clients.

Lesson Learned

You rarely, if ever, see SEO bloggers post so openly about the specifics of a campaign that they are conducting for a client.  There are a great many, common sense, reasons for this and the storm that has surrounded Lyndon for the last couple of days serves as a pretty strong reminder of one of these.

It’s all well and good to share abstract tales of techniques that have proven effective.  But disclosing too much regarding a particular client and the work done for them is generally considered to be bad form.  Lyndon surely wasn’t the first SEO to create a fictional story designed with the express intention of attracting links from social media for a client.  He certainly won’t be the last.

The truth of how successful this has been won’t be known for a while, until we can see whether there does end up being a backlash against Money.co.uk, either from consumers losing trust in the site, or from the media outlets who were duped into reporting this fictional story as real news.
But given the reaction that Lyndon has received from a vocal portion of the internet marketing community, he’s unlikely to share too many more details with us in the future.

So perhaps we’ll never know…

Happy Friday everybody!

I know I’ve been kind of quiet recently, but it’s the end of another week and that means it’s time for another Link-Fest.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin…

The Thing Everyone’s Been Talking About This Week

There have been a lot of posts about Online Reputation Management going around at the moment (seriously, it’s like this week’s Twitter).
Glen Allsop’s ViperChill blog is a good place to start with his post explaining what ORM is.
Jeff Quipp at Search Engine People followed this with his list of over 50 sites you can use to help deflect the impact of negative publicity on the internet.
Back to Glen at ViperChill as he demonstrates some of the dangers of upsetting women who have a clue about how to use the internet.
Then Kimberly Bock got in on the act (after taking a couple of days off) with her post on Yicrosoft Directory Girl called It All Comes Out In The Wash.

It’s Official: Google knows there’s a difference between SEO and Spam (Matt Cutts says so)

Matt posted a video of a keynote speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference where he gave a few (very light) details about what Google knows about web spam.  It’s safe to assume that the head of the Big G’s spam team knows a great deal more about the subject that he lets on in a ten minute speech, but it’s a good introduction for laymen (or clients) and at least he makes a point of stating that SEO (when it’s done ethically) is not spam.
Which was nice.

Lots of useful advice on increasing your blog’s advertising revenue (from a man who makes his living from blogging)

Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse has been running a series of posts this week with loads of great tips about how to improve the effectiveness of your blog’s advertising.  He covers everything from ad positioning to design and even split-testing to measure your changes’ success.
I still haven’t made my mind up about whether or not to start placing ads here on SEOpsCentre, but if monetizing your blog’s traffic is your thing, there aren’t many people whose experience and advice is more relevant than his.

Lies, Damn Lies and Linkbait

Everybody from BBC Radio and The Sun newspaper in the UK, to Fox News in the US have been running the story of a 13 year old boy who stole his father’s credit card and used it to pay for a couple of hookers to play Xbox games with him and a friend.
But none of it’s true.
The whole story was concocted by everybody’s favourite SEO from Cornwall, Lyndon Antcliff and he admits it was all a hoax on his blog.
Update:  Lyndon has now removed the post mentioned above from his blog and put up a new one explaining his decision to remove the original post.
What’s really interesting though is the debate that’s developing on the story’s Sphinn page about the ethics of this kind of hoax-baiting.

Shoe “SEO is dead” Money writes a post defining the term SEO

Hot on the heels of last week’s SEObaiting post about the death of SEO, this week Shoemoney asked a load of big names in the SEO world to give him their definitions of the meaning of Search Engine Optimization.
I especially liked Matt Cutts QuadZilla’s definition.

Something For The Weekend

This week the post that is going to take up a large part of my Saturday isn’t an epic essay like the posts that I’ve mentioned over the last couple of weeks.
This time it’s Gray-Wolf’s list of WordPress Plugins.  I’d just finished adding the links to my long-awaited post about plugins for WordPress and was mere moments away from pressing Publish when Michael’s post popped up in my feed reader and sent me scurrying back to the drawing board.

Now I’m gonna have to spend my weekend checking out more plugins and deciding which ones to add to the list.
Bastard.

The Funny Bits

There’s been a lot of things that have made me chuckle this week.  Here are a few of my favourites.

Fake Steve Jobs reveals the secret of how Microsoft designs Operating Systems.
(Hint:  Take a close look at the monitors behind Uncle Bill)

TechCrunch noticed that Yahoo’s search results were flagging Google as a Malware site.  It turned out to be a mistake, but it was funny while it lasted.
On the subject of TechCrunch, there seems to be a fight brewing between Michael Arrington and Betsy Schiffman of Wired following the announcement that TechCrunch is getting syndicated by the Wall Street Journal.  Wired’s even started categorizing it’s posts about TechCrunch under the term “Buttmunch.”
Jealous much, Betsy?

Of course, if you can’t be bothered to read all the back and forth bitching, you could just head over to 1938 Media and watch The Mike Arrington Show.  But if you’re at work you might want to turn down the volume a bit, or maybe plug in some headphones (puppet Mike gets pretty shouty).

The Obligatory Mention for Twitter

It just wouldn’t be a Friday Link-Fest if I didn’t include at least one post about Twitter and this week’s entry is rather more bizarre than most.
Gizmodo UK shared this article about a device that will allow your plants to send you messages via Twitter.

W. T. F?!

And that’s it for another week and another Link-Fest.

Enjoy your weekend and keep it clean you muddy-funsters!

If you’re a regular reader here at SEOpsCentre (yes, both of you ) you may have noticed things have been a bit quiet over the last week or so.

Sorry about that.  I wish I could offer you a better excuse than just saying, “I’ve been really busy.”  But the simple truth is that I have been really, really busy.

Not just, hard-at-work-on-stuff-that-earns-money busy.
Not even, had-a-bunch-of-better-things-to-do busy.
I can’t even claim, hectic-personal-life busy.

But, a combination of all of the above nevertheless resulted in a period of flat-out-like-a-lizard-drinkin’ (quick nod to my Aussie upbringing there) busy which meant that I’ve been rather neglectful of this blog for a couple of weeks.

It’s really hammered home the value of the advice of top bloggers like Darren Rowse to have a bunch of pre-prepared posts in place ready to launch if you need to keep up your momentum during a period where you might otherwise not  be able to devote as much time to your blog as you’d normally like to.

The thing is I do sort of have a few posts sitting in my drafts in various stages of near completeness, just waiting for me to give them a final once over, make sure that they’ve got all the links that they’re supposed to have and then unleash them upon the world.

Rest assured, I’m getting stuck back in now.  There’ll be the regular Friday Link-Fest tomorrow and normal service will be resumed next week.

I promise.