photo credit: krisdecurtis

So, in little over a week, most of the Christian world (and hangers on) will be celebrating Christmas 2008. Also, because of it’s the credit crunch, businesses are counting on the strong sales of Christmas to tide them through.

As an SEO’er, have you approached your client about SEO’ing for Christmas 2008?

If you haven’t yet, too late.

Last Christmas, around November, we obtained a couple of clients who wanted results before Christmas. We told them that they should’ve come to us 6 months ago. Understood, they gave up on Christmas 2007 (well, they switched to a Pay Per Click Model), and focussed on Christmas 2008.

Now, they’re getting real results for the keywords they were targetting. And it took six months. Come Christmas 2008, they are highly ranked and consolidated on top of the search engines (consolidation is a great thing, as anybody can be top for 1 day, it’s trickier to be top for months on end), and are getting an increase in sales.

Both clients sell luxury goods that are popular at Christmas, so they are popular at Christmas, and don’t need a huge amount of “Christmas SEO”. However, some businesses (particularly restaurants & hotels) need some information of their Christmas deals. Here’s what you should do.

• As Soon As Possible, Get The Christmas Details Up for the Site - Suppose we’re optimising for a hotel called “Good Rest Hotel”. The Good Rest Hotel should put up (we’re talking early 2008 if possible) their prices, contact details & schedule for Christmas 2008. Include the phrases “Good Rest Hotel, [location], Christmas 2008″ in the title tag, and phrases such as “Stay in [location] for Christmas 2008″.
• Link from the Home Page - It can be either in the form of a text link or a banner (or both!). First and foremost, the easiest way to get traffic to the page is from elsewhere on the site.
• Don’t Worry Too Much About Link Building - You’re really not pushing your “Christmas Deals” particularly much, but you maybe could get a few one way links, try to focus on relevant areas such as Christmas tourism guides, Christmas Market websites & other local festivities. But you are likely to reach the top of Google using a combination of properly SEO’ed pages & internal linking, so you don’t need to worry about it too much.
• When Christmas 2009 comes around, redirect the 2008 page to the 2009 page - It will be likely that the 2008 page will be ranked higher in 2009 than the Christmas 2009 page, so simply redirect the 2008 page through to 2009 page, choosing an appropriate form of redirection (read my thoughts on redirects here).

And that’s it! Most businesses will not need any for of Christmas SEO, but some will, if you can think of more tips, please share them below!

photo credit: manfrys

Ah yes, there are two things to do when it comes to SEO - optimising pages & link building. Realistically, you should spend about 40% of your time on optimising pages, and 40% of your time on link building. The other 20% should be split with sorting out relevant areas such as google local, froogle feeds, and liasing with your client (should you have one). So I guess that’s three things.

Today I’m going to talk about Link Building. What links do you go for? What links should you go for? Building links is a tricky business, with an insane amount of time and money spent on building links, often from completely the wrong source. What links should you spend time on getting? And more importantly, what should you avoid?

Before I give my list, an explanation of some of the terms I’ll be using. Imagine the website is a website dedicated to - say - Liverpool Football Club (a fan site).  Here’s the order that I will try and get links. I’m also assuming that all links will pass on google juice, as well as traffic.

1. Authoritive Site in Relevant Niche - Pages such as the official LFC website, popular football news sites & blogs.
2. Unauthoritive Site in Relevant Niche - Similar size fansites, player websites & fansites.
3. Authoritive General Site - DMOZ, Wikipedia pages etc.
4. Unauthoritive Site in Irrelevant Niche - Manchester Tourist Guides, Environmental Forums.
5. Authoritive Site in Irrelevant Niche - Government sites on Global Warming.
6. Unauthoritive General Site - General directories, personal blogs.

“Woah DMW!” I hear you shout, “You surely have 4 and 5 the wrong way around!”. No I haven’t, and here’s why (and also why I used Liverpool FC as an example).

A friend of mine was pushing a Liverpool fansite on google. He was doing pretty well, getting 200-300 hits per day, people were going through his site to bet on Liverpool FC (had a number of gambling affiliate sites) & buy things through Amazon & ebay.

His friend was working at the time for the local government authority, managing the Health & Safety portion of the website. As a friend, he placed a link on one page dedicated to fire safety within the local authority.

Two weeks later, the LFC site disappeared from the listings for “Liverpool Football Club” & other similar keywords. But for “fire safety in North Wales”, his site was ranked rather highly. It didn’t matter that everything on his site was optimised on Liverpool FC, Google assumed (because a governmental site was linking to him) that the site was about Fire Safety.

This was a few years ago now, so maybe Google’s ever changing algorithm has stopped this from happening, but it pains me whenever people say “oh, I want a high page rank link”, even if I accept because they’re relevant.

I really only search out 1 & 2 links. I usually get 2, 1 takes a little bit of work. 3 I often search for but there’s not that many. 4, 5, 6 are usually links which other people in their niceness give to me. I usually give them something back, usually a comment or advice, in return for their generosity.

What about you? What’s your Link Building List?

Widgets are like Garden Gnomes. One or two on a blog looks okay, but any more than that and it looks a bit tacky. Also, with widgets, they can cause no end of problems to websites, particularly with loading times.

However, I have taken the plunge and decided to go with one - Google Friend Connect.

Why Google Friend Connect? Well, there are a number of reasons.

The first is that - if it does take off - it could be a great way of building traffic, and for readers to interact with one another without forming a forum. Google by the sounds of it are really pushing Friendconnect, to try and take a chunk of Facebook’s popularity, using OpenSocial code, so - as somebody who is usually late to parties when it comes to new things on the internet - I’m want in on the ground floor.

Secondly you don’t actually need to sign up to join. If you have an OpenID, or an account on technorati, blogger or any one of a multitude of other services, you can simply join my network through it.

Finally, the reasons for not putting on widgets (the lack of customisation & the fact if the servers go down my website will go down) aren’t particularly good. Google provide the same level of customisation that they do with - say - Google Adsense, and if the servers go down, well - it’s Google. Chances are that if the servers go down, the internet will effectively cease to exist.

Like everything though, especially in the world of web marketing and SEO, it requires analysis & testing. If it turns out to be a dismal failure, it will be removed. If everybody joins yet it doesn’t really benefit anybody, it will be removed. If it becomes massively popular, and you all find new blogs, and I get an influx of traffic, then it’ll probably get a more prominent position.

If you’re promoting a site, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels. Usually to improve a site you add things to it. However, sometimes you may need to take things away.

Heh, maybe I did give a useful tip after all.

One such marketer to lose his credibility was Matt Bacak, an “internet marketer”. Matt seems to adopt a very detached style of internet marketing, focussing on Press Release sites with non news, following significantly less people than being followed on twitter, and Digging stories which usually involve him and his “Celebrity Status”. Each receiving less than 10 diggs.

One story however, has been popular, and it’s front page news.

However, it’s not that compliamentary about him.

It’s referring to a press release he posted on PR Web (which I’m not linking to, as the skeptical side of me believes it’s a huge massive conspiracy), where he claims he’s joined the Twitter Elite by having a huge number of friends, and more friends on Facebook than Facebook allow (somewhere around the 5000 mark). Immediately the people on Digg have responded, Twitter as well have hit back, calling him an over inflated ego, and he has done nothing to the community, except peddle rubbish products.

And this is the point with Social Network Traffic. Sure, he got huge numbers, but once everybody has had a look at him, laughed, and then moved onto something else, then what? Even if he does try and turn it into an advantage (by saying he reached the front page of Digg), a quick google search will turn up that press release. The only way to be successful in Social Media is to contribue to the community, make the community feel special, not to tell them that you are better than them.

The most important thing is be yourself as well. Honesty goes a long way in social media. Egos & lies get you “Bacaked”.

Domain goldrushes are fascinating occasions on the internet. Domain launches usually have a ’sunrise’ period before launch, were people can lay a claim on any domain name they want. .asia had one that lasted for 3 months, and it was particularly long. During this time, people (specifically internet marketers) all over the world dream up with their domain names, and pre register them. Once the ‘goldrush’ begins (the launch day), the preregisters get first dibs on the domain names, and the lucky one walks away with the domain at registration value.

Obviously, some people are left incredibly disappointed. But then what happens? Usually two things.

• Domain Flipping is the first and obvious one. Usually, the new purchaser has no desire to keep the domain, so they sell it on at a profit. As soon as they can.
• Domain Dies but then nobody wants said domain, Domain dies.

You see, what people don’t realise is, because they’re not targetting the .asia market or the Montenegro market (for .me*, another recent gold rush), their domains have little or no SEO benefit to them, and people don’t have the time or energy to create a new site. So the sites are just left.

.tel could be interesting, as it’s farily plain - like .org, .net & .com - so it may get a few good sites on .tel domains (remember how nobody had heard of .us until del.icio.us came along?), and then the popularity would increase. Be interesting to see what sort of SEO benefit is put on the domains, like the fact that anything that’s not information (i.e. people trying to sell you stuff) on .info’s don’t rank at all well, yet information does.

Are you going to get a .tel domain?

* .me domains were a little different, due to the way in which you could use that word (”i.e. love.me, bite.me etc.), so they did have a huge brandable value. The rest still stands though!

We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board

I remember when Pownce was launched last summer. Every blogger and their wife were after one of the precious alpha invites.

There was a good reason behind it’s early popularity. One of the chaps behind the launch, Kevin Rose is well known for his ability to create awesome web startups. For one, he created Digg, the popular news website. He’s also been on TV and Revision3, and is one of the few people involved in Web 2.0 that everybody knows his name. Long story short, it was probably going to get a lot of buzz.

And buzz it did. Unfortunately, it couldn’t capture the market, and yesterday Six Apart acquired it, to integrate with it’s blogging platform - Vox.

One problem I believe it wasn’t sufficiently different from Twitter in the way something like, say, Plurk is. Twitter works because people have gotten used to hosting images on Twitpic, or video on Youtube. To get it all wrapped into one, whilst benefitting power users, may have confused the average Joe a little bit.

Another problem I believe was Kevin Rose. He seemed a little reluctant to get behind Pownce, whilst his Twitter Feed was showing a monumental amount of updates (check out his Friendfeed which combines the two). It’s be like Sir Alex Ferguson being seen at Anfield every weekend. If one of the people most associated with a website cannot get behind it, why should the users? This is something Six Apart has immediately addressed in their press release, by saying this:-

For Pownce users, we are very sorry the site will be closing. We welcome you to join us on Vox - Leah and Mike are there! - and we hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future.

Well done Six Apart.

Of course, the question is now which one of these web startups is next? Looking at them, I can’t see any of them making a profit, instead seeming to be a labour of love by the the owners. Be interesting to see if they’ll continue next year or so, especially in these difficult economic times.

Did you have a Pownce account? What did you make of it?

Anyway, whilst looking for a suitable buddy, I found a website for a SEO firm in the sub continent with this claim:

We GUARENTEE a rate of more than 10LPD for your site!

Pretty bold eh? One question though: what’s LPD?!?!

After a email with the sales team of the company, I managed to establish that LPD is Links Per Day. It all sounds very impressive, but I declined.

It’s a great tactic by unscrupulous Search Engine Optimisers. Things such as “Poison Words” (words that cause your google ranking to drop because it’s in the url/title tags - examples include “forum”, “blog” or “directory”), Keyword Density (how many times the keywords you typed appear in the text), KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) were all invented to try and baffle clients with science. Add LPD to it now.

LPD or Links Per Day is a stupid measurement. Sure, you can keep building links, but which would you rather have? 5 links built per day, or 1 link a week or fortnight from a well established site?

Poison Keywords is an example of how SEO goes over the top of the most important thing - usability. Chances are you won’t be anywhere for the word “forum” in google, so SEO’ers would take it out of the title tags, and forums in terms of adsense revenue are generally pretty rubbish in converting.

However, you’re hindering your usability of your site, which in turn affects your search engine traffic. If your site is a “forum” (be it a “football forum”, “dating forum” or whatever), say your site is a forum!

Keyword Density. Again, this another case of how SEO goes over usability. Say you’re targetting “Manchester Plumber”. Which do you think reads better?

Jim’s Plumbing is a plumber based in manchester. If you ever need a plumber for your drains, sinks or toilets and you live in Manchester, Salford or the surrounding areas, give Jim’s Plumbing a call!

or

Jim’s Plumbing is a Manchester Plumber. If you ever need a Manchester Plumber for all your needs for sinks, drains or toilets. Give jim’s Plumbing a call!

Sure, the latter one has a higher keyword density of “Manchester Plumber”, but the first one reads a lot better. You can sneak in keyword phrases easily for “Manchester Plumber”, but it’s a case of being creative, not hitting some arbitary value.

KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is one of those things which, ironically, makes a hell of a lot of sense. However, it can be thrown out to baffle people. It makes sense that a phrase that has only has 50,000 competition and 1,000 searches a day would be easier to bring more traffic than a phrase that has 1,000,000 competition and 10 searches a day. I just don’t believe that clients should know this.

And this is the whole point that many SEO marketers, who look for clients, get it wrong. They baffle people with science and phrases, and in the case of LPD, make stuff up that even I haven’t heard of (and I’ve been doing this for 3 years). Sure, in a blog like this, you can assume some level of knowledge (write “SEO” instead of “Search Engine Optimization”), but if I was speaking to clients, I’d call it “Search Engine Optimization” or indeed “Web Marketing”. That way, the client has a good understanding of what I do, and I don’t baffle them with science.

What SEO phrases do you hate?

Basically, Google’s Search Wiki allows anybody with a Google account to login, and to vote up/vote down search results, similar to what you see on things such as Digg.  These will only be reflected on your results, and (as far as Google are saying) won’t be affecting the other searches.

One thing I would say is I’m unsure how it works. Say if there’s a website (andysbigcars.com), and you search for “big red cars”, it comes 12. You like it, so promote it to #1. Say if you search for “big blue cars”, and naturally andysbigcars.com comes 12 for that phrase too, will it appear at the top? Or only for “big blue cars”?

That aside and personally speaking, I think it’s a great thing, as for too long SEO’ers have been more concerned with getting to the top of search engines, rather than caring what is on your site. Think about it, if say you were ranking second for “cheapest football stickers on the internet”, yet the company ahead of you is more expensive, experienced googlers can promote your site to the top of the listings, remove the #1 result, or even leave a comment saying “they’re not actually the cheapest, these guys are.”.

Of course, with that, comes spamming, so it’ll be interesting to see how the comments are moderated. It’ll be interesting to see if Google release an API for this, so people can put on their website “if you find this site useful, please click here to put us at the top of your search engines for relevant searches.”.

What are your thoughts on it?

• Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase traffic to customer Web sites by achieving top search-engine rankings and failing to deliver other promised services.
• Falsely claiming an affiliation with other marketers including Specialty Merchandise Company, a so-called drop-ship wholesaler.
• Claiming that its customer service representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.
• Failing to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.
• Continuing to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.
• And, failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and failing to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.

So with that said, what really should you look for in an SEO company. I asked around the office (being a web marketing firm ourselves), and these are what we came up with.

“Guaranteed Listings” - AVOID
Nothing is guaranteed in this world, and Google listings is definitely one of those things. To say that they can get you to the top, or even page 1 of Google, is a myth. Sure, with hard work and the right sort of traffic, you will get there. However, if anybody who offers you Guarenteed Listings, run.

Usually the unscrupulous SEO’er would justify his “Guarenteed Listing” by ranking you at number 1 with the phrase “Edwardian Goobledygook“, rather than anything useful.

“Instant Results” - AVOID
Again, SEO work takes time. It has taken us about a year to get to the bottom of page 1 for a one word keyword we were targetting in a fairly busy niche. And we’re delighted with that result. Change it from the plural into the singular, and we’re on page 5.

Is the client worried? No, because we said that these things do take time. Only now, about a year after the work has started, is the client getting a serious return on their investment.

Of course, now we’re there, growth should be relatively straightforward, so once you achieve your listings, then you shouldn’t stop, just keep doing what you are doing.

“Increased Traffic” - BE AWARE
What would you rather have? Increased traffic or increased sales? There are methods out there to buy traffic, some of the less reputable SEO Firms have gone out and bought 100,000 hits (which you can get on forums for around $20).

However, increased traffic can (and very often does) come from an SEO campaign. However, there have been cases where traffic has dropped, but sales have risen. Which would you rather have?

What To Look For
So, what should you look for?

1. Proven Track Results
Often, SEO’ers will give you a list of companies which they have done work for, and their keyword results. First thing you should do is check them. Check them in google, ring up the companies, and ask them. Some may respond, but it’s a good way to refer to what SEO’ers can do to your business, rather than appearing in a search engine in some arbitary place.

2. Easy To Contact
A bit of an obvious one, and something that SEO’ers are generally all over the place in doing. Can you speak to the SEO’er who is doing your work? Do they send you reports? Do they ring you? SEO is considered by many to be a dark art, so if your SEO makes it as bright as possible, then that’s great.

3. Working With You
You know your business better than anybody else in the world, so why should your SEO take over your site? A good SEO will work with you, in finding out what your keywords should be, may even ask for you to provide content for blogs & pages on your site. It’s not done because they are lazy, it’s done because you can create things for your website to make it stick in people’s minds. If prospective customers will love it, then the search engines will follow.

What about yourself? Any tips you can help people find good SEO companies?

How about if you yourself are an SEO company? What do you push?

Anyway, I saw that this site had 4 backlinks from Google (which is great! Usually I use Yahoo Site Explorer to find backlinks, as it indexes a lot more a lot quicker - though not as quick as being on my RSS feed, thanks to SEO 2.0 for listing me as one of the 10 Must Read SEO, Online Marketing & Web Development Blogs), so - clicking on the link button, I tried to explore the links.

Instead I got this.

Has Google banned SEO Quake? I hope not, as I do love it (I will give a guide on how to use it effectively later!). Anybody else had this problem? I’ve managed to replicate it on two different computers. Hopefully it’s only a temporary thing.

Furthermore, I’m I right in assuming that Google in general don’t like these things, because it increases server load etc.?