February 21, 2013 Leave a Comment

The enduring rule of SEO

I was tinkering with my LinkedIn profile the other day and realized that I’ve been doing SEO in some fashion now for close to 20 years. My first website went up in 1994 and back then, SEO was all keyword stuffing, all the time (veterans, remember white text on a white background in 1996?), and Yahoo was the only game in town. Then came Altavista, and then Google a few years later.

F&M Ninpo Society Online
via The Wayback Machine

Throughout that time, one enduring rule has powered SEO, one rule that is as close to timeless as anything in our industry can be called such:

Create stuff that people want to share.

Look at how all of the search algorithms have changed over time, from the three-way wars with Altavista, Yahoo, and Google early on to today and what search engines value. Look at how newer forms of search, from mobile to Facebook Graph Search to Twitter all work. Everything works on the same fundamental idea that a useful search provides some form of value, and that value is indicated by people sharing. Inbound links are nothing more than a technical indicator of shareworthy content. Mentions on Twitter are an indicator of share worthy content.

Even the newest twist in SEO, where the person is part of the ranking factor (and their content over time is ranked higher) is still rooted in this fundamental idea, that they are creating stuff that other people want to share.

When people find value in your stuff, when people share your stuff, you immunize yourself against SEO algorithm changes better than any other tactic you could do in the short-term. Every algorithm in search in the last two decades has at its heart been about finding the good stuff, and as long as you’re creating it, you will do well in the long term search marketing game. If you’re going to invest money in search marketing, invest it in content creators that make brilliant, amazing, funny, helpful, inspirational, or insightful content.

Create stuff that people want to share.

For the most part, the rest will attend to itself.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software. 		I recommend:

for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
February 8, 2013 Leave a Comment

Very clever SEO hack: naming winter storms

Clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris)

As we sit on the morning of a lot of snow, I was thinking about why The Weather Channel (TWC) even bothers to name winter storms. It’s not a convention anyone else uses, and it doesn’t measurably improve the forecasting.

What does it improve, then? TWC’s SEO – by quite a lot. Go Google for “winter storm Nemo”. Who owns the prime position? TWC, of course. But that also takes advantage of Google’s rumored (but officially neither confirmed nor denied) co-citation algorithm, the one that says even if you don’t link to TWC’s page on the storm, Google will associate the terms TWC and winter storm Nemo together and give TWC a bump in rankings if enough credible sites mention them together.

And because of the nature of keywords, who do you suppose owns the first position for “winter storm”? TWC. Look at the quality of the incoming links and citations, too. MIT, Yale, and area colleges refer to the storm by name and with links, nice .edu domain placements. Tons of credible news outlets leveraging the AuthorRank algorithm. And almost every town in Massachusetts, using their harder-to-get-links-on .gov domains.

If there’s a repeatable phenomenon in your industry or vertical that you can own in the same way that TWC has now effectively owned winter storms, there’s a bounty of search marketing rewards waiting for you. Find a way to capture one, and you’ll see your inbound links explode.

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I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
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for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, Strategy
January 17, 2013 2 Comments

Do this one thing to immediately improve your SEO

If your business has any physical presence at all (meaning not just a PO Box somewhere), even if you don’t take walk-ins, you need to do this:

IMG_0123

This is a Google Local Business registration. You put your business name and address in, and claim your local business on the map. Tag it with the industries that you want to be searched for, put in your business hours and other contact information, and let it rip. The lift is almost immediate. For every business I’ve done this for (and I’ve done it a couple of dozen times), local search traffic has doubled or tripled immediately.

Here’s an example, this is the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. I put the listing in at the local doughnut shop because that’s where I convene with my friend and co-host John Wall. We do have business hours and a physical location, and I put us in as a marketing agency because you could in theory hire us (at exorbitant rates) to come fix up your marketing shop. Look at the effect a local registration had:

Google Places - Analytics

We also see corresponding increases in our broad SEO as well.

Take the time to do this for your business. It costs you nothing at all except the two minutes to fill out the forms and verify your business, and the rewards are worth it.

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Marketing White Belt

Basics for Digital Marketers
is now on Amazon & B&N

I recommend & use:
SEOMoz SEO Software
SEOMoz SEO software. 		I recommend:

for small business incorporation.
Filed Under: Advertising, Marketing, search engine optimization
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