A friend of mine in the Real Estate business came to me a few months ago to ask for some advice on SEO. I went out to lunch and gave her some pointers, then got back to being busy and simply forgot to ask her how it was going. On Saturday she called me asking if I could help out with her desktop machine, as it had become badly virally infected. While working on that, I asked her how the her site was doing.

“Oh, I hired a company to do that for me” was the reply. Then she turned round and handed me a manila folder with some documents in it. “Here’s what they did for me”.

I pulled out the first document. It started off with screen-shots of submissions to the major search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN & Alexa?… ok, not a great start, but I continued through this document… there were submissions to directories. Ok, let’s take a look at those… hmm, never heard of the majority of them, and quite a few aren’t even in English , this looks like a default directory submission from some tool…

Ok, next document. It’s the invoice for $1750, with “no refunds, no cancellations” typed on it. I ask if she has a contract, or even an email outlining their work, the reply was negative. From the sounds of it, she was cold called, and promised the earth, or #1 rankings in G, Y & M for local Real Estate terms, which amounts for the same thing. The salesperson obviously did a good job, because she gave them her credit card details and sat back. Well, she didn’t quite sit back, she kept calling them to see why she wasn’t #1 yet, and their response was “It’s organic, give it a little more time”.

The next document was a copy of the code on the website, but it looked a little strange, so I went to her site and looked at the code. They didn’t match. This was puzzling, had they only given her recommendations and not implemented them? Then I noticed the URL at the top of the page… it was for a different site.

Yes, a different site. So I asked her if she owned that domain? “No, they did that” was the reply. I reviewed the code. The title tag contained her name, and her name alone, none of the keywords that they were going to magically get her to the #1 spot for, just her name. The same was true of the H1 tag. (Note: this new site doesn’t even rank in the top 50 for her name).

Content on the site was terrible, with keywords stuffed, more strong tags than you could shake multiple sticks at, poor look & feel, all on an extremely long home page. The sub-pages were even worse. In order to save time, given that theirs is obviously a volume business, they had scraped content using the title of the page. Yes, this could potentially work for unique terms, but when you sell Real Estate in a place with a name like Sterling, you may want to check the results…

What else did I notice in the code? Well, the most interesting thing was a nice big ad on the page for USA SEO Pro’s, which wasn’t the name of the company that she had hired. Since I can’t imagine that they’d altruistically put a link and an ad on for a competitor, it must be the same company (in fact the testimonials on their website refer to the initials of the company that she hired, so they are the one and same company), but why didn’t they use their own name? A quick search for usaseopros reveals why…

Now, wherever they have a negative listing, such as on the Real Estate Blog, or on Ripoff Report, you can see that they’re actively going into those sites and responding to the criticism. Of course, the responses that show up are from ’satisfied customers’ and ‘proud employees’ both of which, based on my experiences with my friend’s site, are false.

So where does this leave my friend? She paid $1750 with no contract, and no defined deliverables. They ‘did some work’ and ‘delivered some documents’. The site they’ve ‘worked’ on doesn’t belong to her, they can take it down at will, there’s no guarantee that they’ll transfer the domain to her if she asks them to (which is what I’ve asked her to do, despite the fact that it shows not one incoming link, I guess those Lithuanian directories really take time to register). As for their #1 ranking promises, all verbal, nothing in writing. What can she do? Most likely not much, except warn others about her experience, and take this as lessons for the future.

1. If something sounds too good to be true… it is
2. Get everything in writing
3. If you know someone with experience in that particular industry, drop them a quick note to get their opinion, and find out what questions you need to ask.

I’ve told her that I’ll give her a hand when I can, and that in the meantime she should read and learn from real SEOs who have experience in the Real Estate market, not scammers.

Today I wrote a post on Duplicate Content issues over on the RBDRodeo.com blog, it talks about the issues that I encountered when working with one of our client sites.  I was thinking of reposting it over here in it’s entirety, but that would defeat the purpose wouldn’t it?

My latest post on Search Engine Guide went live yesterday. The topic: a review of 404 error pages.

Sometimes you, and by you I mean I, have an idea for the perfect post. Hopefully you’re near a computer, a pad and pen, or your blackberry, and you can jot it down.

Eagerly you rush to the computer, and start typing. Waiting for the moment that Neil Gaiman describes thusly

..that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it… and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

Then it happens, either the post starts to head in a different direction, and you’re not happy with the way it’s gone, your beautiful six year old daughter runs in and distracts you, you get half way through and don’t think that what you’re saying is worthwhile, or you get done and before you post it you go to your feed reader and someone else has covered the same topic in a much better way.

In this spirit, I thought I’d go through 4 posts that stare back at me from their draft status every time I open up wordpress, and say why they didn’t make it.

Why SEO is like a game of pool

Seemed like a great concept, well at least when I was in the pool hall wasting time before a hair cut. You have to play your shot, get the ball in the hole, but that’s not enough, you also have to position yourself for the next shot. Your SEO plan should always be thinking one step beyond where you are now, getting ready for the next ’shot’. After about a paragraph the analogy started to wear too thin, so it went over to the draft pile.

Ethics and Anonymity

This post was about how anonymity really doesn’t exist on the web, and people who believe that it does, will eventually get found out. This was triggered by the scandal involving the Whole Foods CEO who was posting anonymously on a finance site about a competitor. I put this post aside and other people did a much better job of covering it. A few weeks later though, I did return to this topic and completely rewrote it over on the RBDRodeo blog.

How Important is your Title Tag?

This is a post that could go live any time, all I need to do is go back to it and finish it / tidy it up. I think I have enough in there to differentiate it from other posts on the same topic.

Running with Analytics

The post was written and scheduled to go up a week ago. It talked about how preparing for running a marathon (less than 2 weeks until I attempt my first) you should listen to your body and determine when you can push yourself to go to the next stage, and when you should make corrections to your running based on feedback from your body (my poor knees). Obviously I then tied this into analytics, and how you should use them to know when to modify your site, and when to push it to the next level. Then, the day before the post was scheduled to go live… the Chicago marathon debacle happened. With one person dead and over 300 hospitalized, I figured it wouldn’t be a good idea for that post to go live, so instead I rewrote it and put a post on Continual Measurement with Analytics on RBDRodeo.

So there you have it, 4 posts that have been sitting there, begging with me to do something with them, and now that I have I can put 3 of them out of their misery, and let the 4th one sit there in the knowledge that I’ll return to it at some point.

• Dog days
• may be comin’ to your town
• getting better all the time
• Speak of the Devil
• goggling
• A moment of coolth
• Notes from a vegetable
• I feel like a cork

All of the above are actual titles of blog posts from the same blog over the last 3 weeks. Do you have any idea what this blog is about? Actually, can you guess what any of the posts are about? Ok, maybe the “may be comin’ to your town” post, but the rest? No. Would it shock you to know that this blog ranks in the top 10 for all of these phrases, even a fairly common phrase such as “Speak of the Devil”? How does it manage that? Looking at the site, it doesn’t even bother with metatags, but it is ranked 312th in Technorati, and has lots of links. This is all due to the content. Well, it’s all due to the author of the content, this is the blog for the author Neil Gaiman.

The posts vary from discussions on his books and films, to Q&A with readers, to finding a stray dog, to wondering what’s going on with the bees in the back of his garden. But the important thing is that the content is what people expect it to be, and as such they bookmark and visit the site. I can’t imagine that he gets much search engine traffic on the topics of feeling like a cork, or getting better all the time, and with his movie not doing as well at the US box office as hoped, he may be feeling that it might have been a good idea to try to get more traffic to his site, in order to get the word out more, as optimizing his site would most likely pull in more fans or even potential fans that were unaware of its existence.

I was reading my feeds tonight, and I came across a post by Gord Hotchkiss about bad implementations of site search. This made me recall how poor the Search Engine Watch search used to be. Given that they, and the ClickZ network, released their redesign the other day, I thought that it may be worthwhile me giving their site search another go. What to search for? Well, since Danny Sullivan used to be the guy over there, and should probably have more results over there than anyone, why not his name?

So with the first result being a page called null, it’s not looking promising, especially when it says that page has 100% relevance (which in actuality it does, given that it leads to a listing of all of his articles). The second result is even worse, there’s no title displayed. Is the actual page relevant? Who knows because the title is the clickable element that takes you to the page; no title = no href. The third result is his contact form, that’s pretty relevant, the fourth is an interview he did with Barry Diller, again relevant. The fifth result titled “test”? It’s a blank page.

So, to sum it all up, 2 out of the top 5 results are good, the rest… not. Maybe it’s just because it’s Danny, after all he’s not involved with SEW these days. Let’s try searching for some of their current columnists and contributors:- Jessica Bowman, Duane Forrester and Kevin Newcomb…

Well, I guess it’s not just Danny…  it looks like SEW needs to have someone go through their pages and make sure that they all have title tags.  If you want to replicate this, just don’t try the search from their blog (not the best 404 page I’ve ever seen).

I saw an interesting post from Barry at SER today where he talked about chained 301 redirects not passing link love. Thinking about it, this would explain a situation I hit last year where a site was doing fairly well up until a rebranding forced a domain name change. Development implemented a 301 chain (301, followed by something else that I can’t recall, followed by a final 301). After the rebranding, the new site took a long time to build back up, almost as if it were a new site. If chaining the 301 means that the benefits of the 301 are not realized, then that’s exactly what it was to the engines - a brand new site… Good to know.

“Do you use a lame algorithm?” asks Ask. Well, Ask, how about not using an algorithm, but instead using human editors to write all of the content? Is that lame enough? Yep, I’m talking about the ‘new’ search engine Mahalo, launched in alpha mode yesterday, run by a certain Jason Calacanis. Mahalo currently claims to have landing pages for the top 4,000 search terms prepared, with a further 6,000 to follow. Interesting, I wasn’t aware that Jason Calacanis and Sequoia Capital were top 4,000 search terms, but I guess you live and learn. Interestingly enough, given that the results pages that they do have links to a lot of wikipedia pages, there’s no entry for wikipedia…

Other interesting results, no pages for the most supported soccer teams in the world - Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona, etc, or even a nation like England. However, according to this site, the South African National Football Team is a top 4,000 search term…

What about local search? Well, there’s some in there, handy if you’re looking for Lisbon Hotels, although if you’re looking for a hotel in Lisbon you’re forced to select your SERP, as the ‘algorithm’ will only return the exact SERP on an exact match, even when there’s only one result - i.e. Bafana. As for other locations, it would seem from their plans that if you’re going to be looking for a locksmith in Lincoln, NE, this site will never have a result for you.

A human edited site will just not be able to scale to grab all of the long tail results that people are going to want. Yes, it may have some nice results for some searches that you’d want to do, but when you need to find something in a pinch, and you get the message that that SERP hasn’t been created yet, you’re going to stay away from it in the future.

What about relevancy? SERPs change, new data shows up, events happen. What’s the turn around time on the SERPs getting updated? What happens if there’s some major event in one of his categories, and Jonathan is out sick / doesn’t hear about it?

Then there’s the whole Calacanis factor. For those who don’t know, Jason Calacanis came out at SES Chicago in December last year and announced to a packed room of Search Marketers that SEO was BS. This, and his later statements comparing Search Marketers to Snake Oil Salesman have not endeared him to this particular crowd. Yes, it’s helped him to get exposure, and I know that there’s the old saying that anytime you get your name out in front of people it’s good, but I can’t imagine that the exposure that he’s been getting for this project is what he, or Sequoia Capital were hoping for. For example, Todd Malicoat, Andy Hagans, and Jennifer Laycock, to name but a few, have said their piece on Mahalo, and I can’t say I disagree with any of them, but given that I started this post by calling Mahalo lame, I guess you could have already figured that out.

So what could be done with this site to make it a destination site? I would say that the scope needs to be narrowed. Having it as the Search engine for 4,000-10,000 ‘popular’ terms is asking too little of a search engine. If they were to target a category such as celebrities, then they could become the goto site for celebrity information, similar to the way that imdb is the goto site for movie and actor information. Another alternative is for them to forget the search engine altogether and just become a data provider for other sites, I’m sure that IMDB would love to be able to easily expand out their results pages with the extra information that can be found on the Mahalo pages (for those actors that have had their SERP created).

Looking at Craigslist I came across an ad for…

Yes, they’re looking for a ‘true professional’ who can ‘guarantee results’. If someone were to guarantee results, they may be a true professional, but the question would be - a professional what?

(interestingly for a site that had allegedly tried other services, and has been around for 5 years, they only had 42 links site wide, and the title of their home page? “Home”. So maybe these other services gave them a ‘true’ misrepresentation of what professional SEO is).

So you want to put a website up for your business, or you already have one up, and you know enough to know that to make your website work for you, you have to do some Search Engine Marketing. But where do you start? Well, I’ve put together some links below to resources that will at least explain what you didn’t know you didn’t know, and get you moving in the right direction. These links are not the be-all and end all of information on these topics out there, but they’re good enough to get you thinking and point you in the right direction, too many links may make you feel overwhelmed.

Education

The first step is Education. Before you start running, you need to know how many legs you have. Attending a conference, reading a good book, and taking certification courses all help. The link here is a poll, which gives you an idea of how some of these courses and conferences rank, but it also gives you links to their websites.

Best Conferences and Certification Courses

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for your site. If you don’t do it correctly you have no idea as to whether your site is visible to as many potential customers as possible. The right keyword research can lower costs for pay per click, and just generally increase your sales. The article linked here has a full discussion on keyword research from Lisa (”The Lisa”) Barone at Bruce Clay.

The 5 steps of Keyword Research

Page Optimization

So now you know what to target, the next question is how to target. If you can incorporate them into your URL i.e. nashvillebuggywhips.com, then that’s great, but more likely than not you’ll want to go with your brand as the name. So what’s the first element on your website that you want to target? The title tag. This article describes everything you want to know about the title tag.

All about Title Tags

Next you want to work with your meta tags. Remembering that while these elements may not have the power they once had, they’re still worth looking at and getting right (especially the ROBOTS tag, which can impact indexing on your whole site).

The Meta Tag primer

Next, you want to make sure that you have good content on your site. The search engines love good, unique, relevant content. If you have plenty to say about your company and it’s products / services, do it. While you want to weave the keywords into your content, just remember that all of the text on the page will be indexed and so you may pick up searches for a long tail search such as “premier buggy whip supplier in nashville”. These searches don’t happen too often, but they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for your company. This next article talks about using your content to help your site

Content is King

Link Building
Now that you have your site up, the next step is to make sure that people know about it. Just building a site and optimizing it does not mean that it will rank well in the Search Engines. Their current algorithms are based largely on trust, and one of the ways that that trust is generated is through links to your site. The more high quality, relevant links that come to your site, the better. How do you get links? Well there are several ways. You can contact other site owners and get them to link to you (you may have to link back to them though), there are directories, both free and paid that accept links, there are paid linking services, and then there is linkbaiting, where you write an article / put out a video / do something different, that spreads virally, and results in them linking to the site. There are many companies out there now that specialize in linkbaiting services, especially to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites such as Digg. The first link below is to a running section of SearchEngineLand that deals specifically with link building topics. The second is an example of a linkbaiting campaign from SEOmoz.

Link Week

The Super Digg

Analytics & Reporting
So you have a site, it has incoming links, the search engines have indexed it. How do you know how well it’s doing? You need to have an analytics solution in place. Are they expensive? Well, it depends on the level of analysis, and whether you need real time analysis, or you can afford to wait until the next day. The link below discusses six packages that can provide analytics data for your site without costing you a penny.

Analytics on the cheap - six free stats packages

Alternatives

What else might you want to look into? Well, there’s blogging, podcasting, and social media sites, the number of which seems to grow fairly regularly. Here are the final 2 links, the first addresses how you may want to use podcasting in promoting your business, and gives you a list of resources, the other describes using one off the social media sites - Flickr.

Podcasting for small businesses

Marketing on Flickr