Search Engine People Blog

One Week of Sphinn SEO Lessons

Ruud Hein — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:53:03 +0000

What valuable lessons, if any, do we teach on Sphinn regarding SEO?

A high-level analysis of one week of Sphinn postings.

The Selection

I’m coming at this from an angle where a non-SEO site owner says "hey, I have to do something… now let’s learn from the best".

I sifted through the 900+ items posted between Friday May 9 00:00 and Thursday May 15 24:00, culling the ones that seemed to convey real value for a newcomer and dropping items like "30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots", "Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference", "Exercises For Lower Ab Workouts" or "Is Bebo better than Facebook? Creating a profile network".

As much as possible I dropped questions that didn’t seem to provide a definitive answer of value to the newcomer. I forgot about insider discussions, insider watercooler jokes and a whole bunch of other stuff.

In short, I sat down and looked at what I could learn from Sphinn were I new to SEO and get some answers.

I did 3 rounds. Once picking everything that seemed plausible. Second round I went over those items and picked out the good stuff. Third time around was on the article level where I had to let go of some forum spam, some article directory content and posts that in 100 words would repeat the question they had raised.

The Results

The results were surprising.

After round 1 and 2 I ended up with a little over 90 items that has passed the smell test.

By the end of round 3, which coincided with having compiled the lists, 57 items were left on the table.

Let me be honest with you; I hadn’t expected this. The idea for this post was one that had me doing an evil laugh. The idea was more along the line of a linkbaity "24 Sphinn Contradictions" or "The Top 10 Things Sphinners Disagree On" … But no, if you stick with it and dig down deep enough, there’s actually some pretty solid material to go with.

Hiring SEO

The SEO Basics

A Bit More Advanced SEO

Keywords & Keyword Research

Links & Link Building

Web Analytics

WordPress & Blogging

Duplicate Content

Tools

Theoretical Discussions & Opinion

Images courtesy of Dean Terry and l0ckergn0me

Friday Funnies: If MySpace Were A Person

Tom Tsinas — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:09:02 +0000

source: pcweenies.org

50+ Sites To Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!

Jeff Quipp — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:09:53 +0000

The Problem:
Have you ever had a client come to you in a state of desperation, begging for help to remove a blog post that ranks for their business name, and portrays them in less than a positive light?

Or perhaps you had a very contentious break-up with an old flame, and they’ve since decided to air their beefs with you in a more public forum, and these complaints now appear every time you type your name into Google. Maybe you merely made a mistake one evening after a few too many beverages, but the proof now appears in video form online and as a result has become part of your public resume.

Edit: my friend Glen Allsopp just did a post highlighting 3 women who just took such action … its a good read A New Wave of Reputation Management Issues.

Remember this fiasco … Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Flame

Truth be told … its happens all the time! Its becoming a whole lot more common too with the growth in personal blogging, and people beginning to understand that THEY ARE MEDIA. The service is referred to as Online Reputation Management (ORM).

The reality of the matter is that without legal injunctions and the like, the piece cannot be removed from the search results entirely. In many cases, legal tactics often have the exact opposite effect to that intended, and bring even more attention to the issue. Sure, you could also try Google Bowling it, but you’re likely to just further strengthen the post’s positioning. So, what can you do?

The Solution:
Here’s a relatively simple solution, that will work a large percentage of the time … unless you’re dealing with a more knowledgeable individual where more advanced tactics are needed. You need to bump the negative listing down in the search results to progressively lower positions, reducing the likelihood that it will ever be found. Keep in mind, most people never go beyond the 1st page of search results.

This can often be done by building a profile on various sites. The profile name should be the exact term/phrase that the negative piece is ranking for. Here’s a list of 50+ such sites you can use:

1. Digg
2. LinkedIn
3. Twitter
4. Stumbleupon
5. Facebook
6. Propeller
7. Magnolia
8. Jaiku
9. Simpy
10. Technorati
11. coRank
12. YouTube
13. BlogCatalog
14. Zimbio
15. HubPages
16. Reddit
17. UPCHUCKr
18. BlogMad
19. Curbly
20. Flickr
21. PublicBlend
22. Bumpzee
23. Pownce
24. ViewZoo
25. PeekYou
26. Hugg.com
27. Connotea
28. BlinkList
29. BlogFlux
30. Netvous.com
31. Plime
32. MyBlogLog
33. Giggg.com
34. DotNetKicks
35. Diigo
36. CoComment
37. LiveJournal
38. Faves
39. Indianpad
40. Blogmarks.net
41. MySpace
42. Mixx
43. ZiiTrend
44. FriendFeed
45. MetaCafe
46. Last.fm
47. ZippyVideos
48. Quizilla.com
49. Kirtsy
50. Photobucket
51. Deals
52. Agentb
53. BlogSpot
54. HuffingtonPost

If all goes well, merely building a profile on some of these will push the negative piece to the second page. If not, you’ll have to get more aggressive tactics. I’ve blogged about some of these Intermediate Tactics in this post How to Bury Negative Online Mentions of You - Intermediate Level Tactics

This is a good start for now though. Try it out with a few, and see how long before your profile appears in the search results for the profile name selected.

In the end … these sites can help protect your reputation from unreasonable ex-partners, angry clients, and others who wish to cause you harm online.

A Letter of Apology to my Wrists

Keri Morgret — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:24:32 +0000

Dear Wrists,

Please don’t make me take you in for therapy again. I know I abused you, but promise I’ll treat you better next time. The insurance won’t pay for any more visits to that nice hand therapist that you like so much. I won’t stop liveblogging, but will share what I learned liveblogging my first conference with other liveblogging newbies.

Prepare before the conference

Laptop Batteries

A spare battery is great to have, as you won’t always have easy access to power. I lucked out, and found a second battery for $5 at a local electronics fleamarket. It doesn’t have the full capacity of a new battery, but I also didn’t spend $130.

Extension Cords

Buy a compact indoor extension cord, at least six feet long, three conductor, and three outlets. Conference room electricians designed the space to provide power to A/V equipment, the water cooler, and a spare outlet for two people to sit on the floor at the back of the room.

Bring an extension cord, and you’re always guaranteed an outlet. If they’re all taken, you can plug your extension cord in, then the original user, you, and your future new best friend can all use the outlet. You can even sit in a chair and be close enough to see the presenters.

Laptop Cooling

Keep your laptop from burning your legs. I use the iXoft cooling pad from Thermaltake. It resembles a large potholder, and is filled with a chemical that changes from a solid to a liquid when heated – absorbing the heat from your laptop without using any battery life or making any noise.

Even if the conference has tables, they can be at the wrong height for typing comfortably for several sessions in a row. Putting the computer in your lap gives your wrists a break without having to burn your legs.

Food and Drugs

Cranky, sore, hungry, and thirsty bloggers are not happy bloggers, but you can’t always count on there being any snacks left by the time you publish your post. Extra granola bars stuffed in your backpack can help keep you going until the next opportunity for food. Pack a small bottle of your favorite pain medicine. Watch how many friends you make each morning as people recover from the previous night’s bash, or from the crew in the liveblogging row as they try to get their wrists moving again.

Purpose

Know the purpose of your liveblogging. Who is your audience? How soon do you want to publish? Do you care about formatting, spelling, and grammar?

During the conference

Carve out some time to start a document for each session you’re liveblogging. Go to the conference website, and copy the session name, intro, and speakers’ names and bios. Double-check the spelling on names. Include hyperlinks to the speakers’ companies. I typed in the presentation notes, if given early. This way I didn’t spend time copying down powerpoint slides during the session, but could include more of what the person was actually saying, and give some context for the bullet points. Presenters and presentations do change at times though, so your wrists may still hate you because you made them do extra work that wasn’t included in the final post. Go back to where you found your purpose, and decide how much you want to focus on slide text versus what the presenter is saying.

To appease your wrists, consider using Word to take session notes. The autocorrect features are helpful when typing quickly, and can reduce the time you spend correcting typos. The downside is Word doesn’t always play nicely and give clean code to web applications, so you may end up fighting your blogging software if you used Word to apply formatting. I used no formatting, and just pasted the plain text into email for someone else to post. Next time, I will try writing my posts in Word, paste that text into Dreamweaver and format it there, format in Dreamweaver, then post (or email) that html.

After the conference

Relax, have a drink, ignore housework and the computer, and watch TV once you get home. You’ve missed a lot of shows while you were gone, and it’s time to finally follow the nice hand therapist’s orders and reduce your workload.

Keri Morgret, from Morgret Designs, is a bright in-house SEO at the educational non-profit research institute ISKME where she works full time on the Open Educational Resources project.

Images courtesy of Sue Richards, Jim Youkin, Search Engine People and Roger Lynn

Social Networking Going Mobile

Tom Tsinas — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:36:35 +0000

In last weeks post wrote I that Local Search is predicted to be the killer app for mobile phones based on a Juniper Research report predicting that Local search is to account for 43% of cumulative mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013.

Hot off the heels of this study comes a new Nielson Mobile report showing a growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the pubs, streets and subways!

The Nielsen Mobile report show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking with the U.S. showing similar numbers.

Mobile social networking access by country:

Nielsen Mobile goes on to say:

Approximately 810,000 UK mobile subscribers, roughly 1.7 per cent, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008.
- this percentage was slightly higher than in other major European markets, where 1.6 per cent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

MySpace.com was the leading social networking site among PC users in the US, and also the most popular mobile internet social networking site with 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007.

Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users in December.

In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the UK with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000.

Facebook and MySpace were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008.

In addition, I came across this eMarketer prediction that shows mobile social networks will rise from 82 million users in 2007 to 800 million worldwide by 2012.

“Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and going mobile is the next big thing,” said Jeff Herrmann, vice president of Mobile Media at Nielsen Mobile. It appears as though the demand for social media on go is driving service providers packages. Recently, Vodafone UK’s offered unlimited Internet access as a standard feature of its new monthly mobile price plans, Vodafone to offer a mobile link to European users of MySpace and Youtube and France Telecom’s Orange UK said it would begin offering its customers access to Bebo this summer.

This is easy to understand as ComScore numbers show 403.3 million unique visitors worldwide visited online community sites February alone. What is staggering is that this figure is growing at an annual clip of about 30%! With mobile phones already the hub of most people’s social networks, the combination of the two seems like a natural.

So, was my column last week misleading? Is social media now the “new” killer app for mobile? I’m not entirely sold…..yet! More users will want to join because they can be part of a connected community and this should result in a boom for the mobile carriers. But the fact is that the average time right now an average user spends on social media amounts to just over 30 seconds or just enough time to check the latest message. While the infrastructure is in place for this to continue to improve and scale, its still a way off. However, as i mentioned last week, each of the studies I reference point to one thing; the tipping point is here, mobile search is now a topic of conversation with clients.

Huge Growth + Talent Shortage = Increased M & A Activity

Jennifer Osborne — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:31:59 +0000

Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

But one size does not fit all.

The evaluation of a one man shop is entirely different from that of a large Agency .

THE ONE MAN SHOP
There are many one man shops that are hugely successful. In fact many of our most authoritative industry experts are sole proprietors.

Like it or not, YOU ARE the business. Your business has little value unless you come with it.

Potential buyers - Your potential buyers are likely those looking to “buy talent” and/or credibility. A new entrant to the SEO Industry can say that they’ve been “doing SEO” for as long as you have.

What makes a one man shop desirable?

1) Reputation / Brand - To be attractive to a potential buyer in this scenario, you MUST have a well known name in the industry. Ideally, you will have case studies from recognizable brands. Further, active participation in the industry increases your credibility as an authority.

2) Re-occurring Revenue Stream - A re-occurring revenue stream will also be important to your valuation as it is likely that your price will be a multiple of your revenue. Moreover, your established business (re-occurrent revenue) should be sufficient to pay for your future salary.

3) Top Line Revenues - An EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) calculation doesn’t make a lot of sense to a one man firm as sole proprietors typically realize their profits as they are earned vs reinvesting.

In this case, a calculation should be made based on a multiple of top line revenues.

SMALL TO MID SIZED SEO FIRM (2 – 30 people*)
If a new entrant is looking to fast track it’s success by”buying the talent” that it requires then considerations around the size and strength of your team will be important.

1) Team Attributes - How many years of experience does your team have? Do you have high turnover? Do you have senior people filling key roles in your business?

2 Process - Process is also an important consideration. A new entrant doesn’t want to just buy talent, they want to buy the secret recipe……

How do you sell SEO?

How do you manage the work flow process?

Who is accountable for what aspects of the process?

Do you have checks and balances in place?

What does your reporting look like?

And to what degree is it automated?

3) Cash Flow - Cash flow will be an important consideration (nobody wants to buy a sinking ship) however if you’re having trouble collecting on your receivables, many companies will assume that once they take over, they can do a better job than you are (rightly or wrongfully so).

LARGE SEO AGENCY (30+ *)
For a large SEO Agency, factors that make you attractive to acquisition focus much more on hard calculations than the softer considerations of small to mid sized firms.

*Note: There are lots of web design firms who claim to be in this category when in fact only a handful of their 30 person shop actually do SEO. This article differentiates between firms with an SEO component versus a dedicated shop of 30+ people who only do SEO.

1) Scalability - The strong team you were proud of as a small to mid sized SEO firm is expected of in a large firm. For a large SEO agency to be attractive for acquisition, organizational structure is critical.

Can the structure be replicated easily for growth? Are there established training programs in place?

2) Cross Sell Opportunity - New entrants will be looking for “fit” with their existing markets.

Is there an opportunity to cross sell between the acquiring company’s existing clients and your products?

Is there an opportunity to sell between your clients and the acquiring company’s products?

What about clients? Do you predominately service mom and pop shops while your perspective buyer mainly targets enterprise sized clients? Your firm will be less attractive if the purchaser is discounting too large a proportion of your business due to “lack of fit”.

3) Technology - Have you invested in proprietary technology that would benefit the buyer either by providing them with a competitive advantage or reducing costs?

Not only does an investment in technology give you an edge against the competition but it also shows long term strategic thinking.

The actual calculation
Keep in mind that there is a difference between book value and market value. A traditional “by the book” valuation will typically end up being a multiple of your EBITDA. Six times EBITDA on the low end and twelve times EBITDA at the higher end.

But EBITDA isn’t always the most fair way to measure value. When companies are growing really quickly, profits tend to be lower or non-existent. This does not mean that your company’s value is non-existent.

This is why in a pressurized environment like SEO, a calculation based on a multiple of your top line revenue may be the more appropriate measure even for large SEO Shops.

At the end of the day, what you’re worth really boils down to how much you’re willing to sell for. And with the industry booming, algorithms changing, new markets emerging - it’s still very much the wild west out there.

so…

…how do you put a price on fun?

Fumbling Your Site

Ruud Hein — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:03:58 +0000

The Algorithm is Human is a series of post explaining search engine behaviour from a plain and simple human point of view.

Ever had this happen to you?

As you take a cup out of the cupboard another one falls.

Or, just as you put your mug on the table, out of the corner of your eye you see the sugar pot falling.

You see it happen and act immediately!

Your hand reaches out for the falling object and you do reach it in time! Touching it with your fingertips you push the object and fail to grip it. You now made it spin and flip upside down so along comes your other hand, a bit lower, to nimbly catch it here and…. No! You made it bounce to the left! Instead of falling it now slams! into the nice plate — which breaks.

You stand there, looking at the disaster, and can’t help but think how your actions made things so much worse. Somehow it seems it would have been better if you had just let the thing go.

Your Site is Falling

Sometimes this is precisely what we do to our site when its rankings are falling.

We try to go for it (fast!), catch it (in time!), grip it (hard!) and in trying to do all those things at once, we only manage to make a mess.

And then, as with the kitchen stuff, the question comes up: would things have been better if you had just let the thing go?

Overreaction = Obfuscation

The problem now is that all your fumbling has obfuscated the real problem.

Even if you would assume for a moment that all the quick steering and guiding and running and doing has helped — the question remains, what has had which effect?

What just happened?

The initial cause is virtually impossible to determine at this point.

And what worked? What did what?

Did removing your footer link to the sitemap make things better or worse? Has adding your desired keyphrase 20 more times had a beneficial effect or is it what made your site go down 5 positions further?

Did buying some additional high quality, “undetectable” paid links boost you +2 or made you drop -3?

Steers Like a Tanker

Web sites and ranking is like steering a ship with just one difference: things are even slower with search engines.

Turn the steer and initially nothing seems to be happening. The reaction to your action seems to be delayed — and in case of search engines that delay is often measured in weeks leading into months; certainly not days.

By the time you come on deck and think “hey, darn, the ship is turning!” the real action has already taken place — long ago.

The best course of action?

Let it go.

Your web site is reacting to things done possibly months ago. If the professionals you hired are doing what they’re good at, adjustments have already been made — months ago.

What you do today, how you react now… that in turn will determine your course a couple of months down the line.

So, slow and steady smooth sailing vs. spinning steering wheels: you pick.

Images courtesy of The Rocketeer and Jef Poskanzer

Friday Funnies: Slogan Of The Month

Tom Tsinas — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:49:06 +0000

source: Geek And Poke

Facebook - It’s the new Yahoo!

The Doug — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:26:48 +0000

Image - CasualChatters.com

Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com

Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Now on the skeptical side, one would say that it’s a foolish move to try and fit into these outfits which APPEAR to be losing appeal to developers and has lack of experience in monetizing ads in this very social space, but one must look deeper than that.

Microsoft has never been secret about wanting the people behind the development of Yahoo! and wanted to welcome them with open arms, but now there is a facebook pool of independent developers that Microsoft will most likely be able to scoop at a payscale that will keep each party giggling. NICE! Besides, they already put it on layaway last year with a deposit of $240 million, giving them a 1.6% stake in the social network, and if they are able to buy it out at almost a third of what they were going to pay for Yahoo! then they’ve done well.

Image Courtesy - New Zealand National Youth Council

OH and the YOUTH! Now we all know that facebook has some of everyone from each age group on it, but the hordes of youth who are perfect to target now, as well as those who can be cultivated for future targeting also presents an interesting opportunity.

Image Courtesy - Techcrunch.com

Finally, what can facebook give to Microsoft that Google doesn’t have (which can very possibly make it the hottest outfit available)? Sheryl Sandberg, Elliot Schrage, Ethan Beard, and Benjamin Ling FORMERLY of Google, Gideon Yu from YouTube, and the challenges available to these very noteworthy professionals, who left their former positions due to lack of challenge. It’s very much like choosing to adorn the outfit with diamonds and emeralds instead of rhinestones.

Image Courtesy - Lou Goldberg Jeweller

Anyone wonder what possibilities exist for Microsoft Live, Messenger, Open Office, Hotmail, Spaces, (and the rest) if Microsoft were to own such a social network, with such a market and such an executive body? And what can be built into such a network so that nobody actually needs to open another browser to Google something when the Live search can be executed right there AND the results of the search shared with EVERYONE on your list? (Think paid search ads and display ads)

So this season, maybe facebook is the new black, or at the very least perhaps it is the new Yahoo!

As always, I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

Cheers!

The Doug
aka Doug Gebhardt

25 of Digg’s Most Trusted Sites

Jeff Quipp — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:30:06 +0000

Ever wanted to become a power Digger? Come on now … sure you have.

Here’s how to start.

Its a well known fact that Digg trusts content from some sites more than others. Why not … the larger sites are obviously more conservative and more sensitive to public scrutiny. Such sites are much less likely to publish rubbish for fear of reprisals, lost confidence, and reputation management fiascos. As I talked about in my post last week 4 Pillars of Social Media Algorithms - Trust x4, Digg rewards sites it trusts by permitting them to go hot at lower votes counts than those it trusts less. Makes sense right?

So, lets then begin by identifying some of the most trusted sites by Digg:

1. Youtube.com
2. Yahoo News
3. ArsTechnica.com
4. CNN
5. News.com
6. NYTimes
7. BBC
8. Wired
9. Gizmodo
10. Flickr
11. Reuters
12. RawStory
13. Washington Post
14. Physorg
15. Kotaku
16. ThinkProgress
17. TorrentFreak
18. TechCrunch
19. Guardian.co.uk
20. Nasa and its subdomains
21. Dailymail.co.uk
22. Timeonline.co.uk
23. LiveScience.com
24. ESPN.GO.com
25. NewScientist.com

This is the ideal way to start building your profile … submit from trusted sources. Obviously, there are other factors at work too, but this is definitely one of the biggest.

Enjoy submitting, and good luck!