September 6th, 2007
Anthony
Reading over Digg, as I sometimes do, I found this submission on Building a Niche Minisite. The first few comments imply something scary to me.
…it’s SEO, which are the scum of the earth, just behind spammers.
[Above] comment is over generalized but SEO’s are known to hurt the internet experience time and time again. If SE’s didn’t have to fight SEO’s just trying to trick people into making them a quick buck imagine how much more useful a simple google search would become
[Note: I bookmarked that and wrote some notes a while back. The comments I refer to seem to have been removed since then.]
Reminds me of a similar situation, going back a few years, concerning “hacker” vs “cracker”. Originally, hackers were those who hacked software and systems together. They were curious, inventive - not evil. But its a very negative label nowadays, with the inference that hackers are out to cause damage. When this trend started, old-school hackers tried to get the label ‘cracker’ applied to their more malicious counterparts, but failed to do so. Media reports were always saying “Computer hackers broke into such and such”, and the war was over.
I think those of us in the web industry are facing the same battle. To be a Search Engine Optimizer seems to be the same as being a dirty rotten spammer in some eyes. To my mind, this is just plain wrong. The true search engine optimizer works on the following principles:
- Ensure the site is crawlable by engines (missing pages, broken links, javascript menus - all of which are bad for other reasons too, such as limiting a visually-impaired user with a screen-reader from using the site)
- Getting a good balance with respect to keyword density on pages (generally meaning to remove the non-essential stuff from an article - always a good writing tip anyway! Remember English 101? Tell the reader what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you just said.)
- Setting relevant page titles, putting headings in the right places (Titles help when users bookmark pages, and headings are great for breaking up content into readable and digestible chunks)
- Making sure that the site has plenty of internal links (when you link from one page to another - good for your users if it helps them find related information on your site about the topic of interest)
- Getting inbound links from other sites (Helps promote your content so that others can find your pages. If its valuable content, there is nothing wrong with helping people find it!)
Some “black hat” SEO’s will ugly things, like comment-spam on blogs and forums (which counts as inbound links), creating gateway pages, using hidden text, and all sorts of other dodgy behavior. For example, in the digg article, one user points out that the submitter’s user account, and the first few commenter’s user accounts were all created at the same time (yesterday). The obvious conclusion is that the submitter created some fake accounts to vote for his article, raising the odds of it getting to the front-page of digg. In my view, this indicates that the submitter realizes his article lacks in value, so he must try to game the system to get the results he wants.
Sometimes optimizers use black hat techniques because they feel they’ll get a more immediate payoff. Other times, they use black-hat SEO techniques because its the only way to get a site ranked if it has nothing of value. The latter reason is very common, and is what really harms the internet experience.
So those of us working the Wild Wild Web will soon have to find ourselves new job titles, if we cannot find a way to help those on the outside to distinguish between black hat and white hat SEO.
November 24th, 2006
Anthony
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that office workers are turning to the web to find out the cricket scores.
SMH says Akamai (an internet content delivery firm) indicates that Australian news sites are receiving more than 126,000 visitors per minute - thats 70% increase.
This reminds me of the recent Melbourne Cup - I was looking for some info there, and couldn’t find much in Google.
I’m thinking that ’special events’ create a special niche which has not yet been filled. Visitors are currently turning to news sites to find out whats going on. Maybe you can jump on board? Create a site for next year’s Melbourne Cup or Ashes Tour, and just quietly get some content and backlinks going over the next year. Then, come next events, you’re in a good position to get plenty of visitors for specific terms.
Just a thought.
November 8th, 2006
Anthony
Interspire is a software company who I bought some software from a while back for a client. They send me periodic email, most of which gets deleted. Their latest newsletter I liked, thanks to one article titled “The 12 Most Popular Headlines Of All Time”.
They give examples like “They laughed when I sat down at the piano - but when I started to play!“, and explain how this makes people want to read more - “what happened when he started to play? I assume she was really good and nobody knew?” etc.
The article is linkbait (designed to get lots of people to link to them, just like I am doing now) but its a good read, so they’ve earned it!
November 1st, 2006
Anthony
One of the sites owned by my employer (Tailored Consulting) is called Brand Boots.com. Today, Brendon tells me that BrandBoots is ranked #5 in Yahoo for the phrase “ugg boots” - and thats great news.
BrandBoots was a venture by Brendon and Mel to sell Ugg Boots (Ugh boots, Ugg boots, Ug Boots - however you want to spell it!) from an online shop. Over Christmas etc, they would sell LOTS of boots overseas. (Don’t forget, its hot here in Australia - but other countries can get snow, and warm sheepskin boots are great in cold weather).
Read the rest of this entry »
October 21st, 2006
Anthony
Jonathon Mendez has put up a great article titled “Choice Kills Conversion“.
Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy.
Much like Columbus showing how to stand an egg on its end, this seems blindingly obvious now that its been pointed out.
Practical example: If you run an Adwords campaign for Ugg Boots then conventional wisdom suggests you create special landing pages for various keywords and phrases. So if I click an add for Jumbo sized Ugg Boots, then you’ve got a better chance of me buying your product if you don’t show me options to Mid-sized boots too - thats just going to confuse me!
August 2nd, 2006
Anthony
So Matt Cutts has put up some video-blogs to Google Video recently, looking a little like he’s been kidnapped and forced to answer questions put forth by readers of his blog. And good on him, he’s got some great responses in there.
Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
May 19th, 2006
Anthony
This is a new issue, and one that appears to be especially important to Google. What makes google trust your domain?
Well, it seems like there are a few factors contributing:
- Age of domain
- Incoming links (quality, not quantity)
- Historical information (have you been spamming, do you have a history?)
The most important factor, by far, is the age of the domain.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 18th, 2006
Anthony
On Page Factors - what does that even mean?
Well, its everything on your page. Lets look at the basics first…
- Title tag
- Meta tags
- Heading tags
- Keyword density
- Meaning HTML markup
Thats the short list, now lets look closely… Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2006
Anthony
Incoming links are very important to your site’s SEO strategy. The basic theory behind search engines is that the engine will pretend to be a user on a website. The ‘user’ starts clicking links - any links. Eventually, they’ll cover all the sites that have links to them. So the more links to your site, the quicker you’ll be found.
Once search engines started getting huge amounts of pages indexed, they needed to figure out a way to rank the page - to determine how important it is, and what search phrases the page would be relevant for. Engines use a bunch of factors for this, but links are an important one. Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2006
Anthony
Had a little discussion in the office today, regarding SEO. We came up with this shortlist:
- Frequency of content updates
- Incoming Links
- On-page factors
- Trusted domain
There’s more, obviously. But these are the major factors affecting search engine placement. Lets discuss in more detail. This is post number one of a four-part series, in which I’ll go over these four tips.
Frequency of content updates
Read the rest of this entry »