The information provided by Google Webmaster Tools once you verify ownership of your website (or client’s website) is extremely valuable.  Any self-respecting SEO should know the ins and outs of what Google Webmaster Tools have to offer.  Here is an abbreviated breakdown of the information provided, and what you can do with it to improve your search engine rankings:

• Web Crawl Erros - Make sure your internal linking is being optimized via PageRank scultping
  • HTTP errors
  • 404 Not found
  • URLs not followed
  • URLs restricted by robots.txt
  • URLs timed out
  • Unreachable URLs
• Content Analysis
  • Title tag issues - Google webmaster tools reports your pages that are missing title tags.  This can be extremely useful when conducting site audits for clients that frequently drop tags.
  • Meta description issues
    •  Duplicate meta descriptions
    • Long meta descriptions
    • Short meta descriptions
• Links
  • Pages with external links
  • Pages with internal links - find out which of your pages have a lot of links pointing to them, and which have few links pointing to them.  Then, in a way that makes sense to the user, anchor text link relevant keywords from high linked pages to low linked pages in order to steer your PageRank in the right directions.
• Tools
  • Analyze robots.txt
  • Set geographic targeting
  • Enable enhanced image search
  • Set crawl rate
  • Set preferred domain
  • Remove URLs

Once you have launched a new website your very first SEO related tasks should be to upload the Google Webmaster tag, verify that you own the site. Then create an XML sitemap to sit on your site like so, yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.  You will then submit this URL to Google Webmaster Tools in order for Google to crawl your entire site faster than it normally would without the submission. Happy SEOing!

I just finished reading the book, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message.  Its all about how and why people are motivated to promote products and brands on their own time without any tangible incentive.  The book discusses many examples of how honesty and full disclosure lead to successful consumer interaction, and eventually a viral response far greater than the sum of its parts.  Being able to harness the power of these bloggers, social networkers and forum participants is a word of mouth marketing tactic that is only becoming increasingly important.

What in the world does it have to do with SEO? Well, many will say absolutely nothing.  They may say that even white hat SEO is essentially gaming the system and has no place among all this truthiness.  For those naysayers I have dubbed this kind of SEO “Pristine White Hat SEO.”  It is optimization for search engines that involves the creating of platforms and interacting with visitors that allows “citizen marketers” to flourish on a given website, and thus attracting the fresh content-hungry search engine spiders.  Build an environment on your website where consumers can naturally and honestly interact about a related topic, and the rankings will follow.  

A cool way to get an idea of what kind of sites the search engines like to crawl is to see where your name comes up in the search results.  Create some profiles on a few social sites, comment on some blogs, and submit some original articles to free article submission services.  Then do a Google search on your name and watch what comes up.  The difficulty level of getting yourself on the first page certainly depends very much on how common your name is.  Be sure to search on your name and “your name”. I myself, Will Fleiss, am currently competing with my distant cousin Heidi Fleiss and Mike Fleiss, creator of the reality tv show The Will.  Admittedly, I am lucky enough to have a rather uncommon name, however if you test a few things out I think you will find that its not that hard to get your 15 minutes (or rankings) in the Google Search spotlight. 

Check out this SEO informational video with interviews of the top guns in the SEO industry.

In the world of search engines, the answer to this question can become less absolute than you may think. My first perception of a competitor, is a company, voice or form of influence fighting to occupy the same space as another. Initially, it all starts in the mind of the consumer. When they get the inclination to buy something, you want your product to take up as much space as possible as the buying thought process moves its gears towards a final decision. Brand marketers attempt to win this battle by sending an over arching message that they hope will slowly infiltrate the consumer’s thinking, while direct marketers cater to their target’s impulses by making their products accessible at strategic times. Despite the different tactics, both methods are competing for the same space.

Unfortunately, the real world does not exist in a vacuum like a consumer’s thought process when they decide to buy jeans. There are so many different influences occupying the same space, that it can be difficult to pick out who is competing against who. A major casino may say, these are our top 5 competitors because they are the other top casinos in the country. On one level those 5 casinos may be their competitors, but type the keyword “casino” into Google, and only two actual casino websites appear on the first page. Are those 8 other websites not their competitors? They certainly want to be in the top position. They are certainly competing for this space. Not to mention the fact that casinos typically have hotels. So their competitors are not only the casino websites, but the hotel and travel websites as well.

These thoughts stem from an assignment I received at work today. I have been tasked with coming up with a standard format for conducting a competitive analysis for SEO. A step by step process that could be performed by an entry level employee. Usually the account service team gives us a list of the clients competitors (in the eyes of the client) and says we need a competitve analysis. In the SEO world, it strikes me this is the wrong way to go about it. I think you come up with a core list of keywords, see who is currently ranking on those keywords, and pick out specific elements of their websites that have been optimized in comparison to the client’s website. I guess ultimately my question is, what is the best way to communicate to the client the distinction between the rankings of who they think are their competitors, and who Google thinks are their competitors?

I hope some of that made sense. Any thoughts on performing a good SEO competitive analysis would be greatly appreciated.

Getting big companies without any internal SEO personel to take a holistic approach to their SEO efforts is difficult. They want to be ranked on top for a host of competitive keywords. They want their web pages to be optimized for those keywords. And they want it all to happen much soon than later. Many of these websites have been around for a while, and have passed through so many hands with different priorities and marketing viewpoints, that architecturally, they are simply in shambles. Marketing executives at these companies can get their heads around the benefits of having the right keywords, but their capacity or desire to understand why they may or may not being ranking well, seems to fall short when it comes to site structure, internal linking, redirects, errors pages, page rank, etc… This, of course, is why us SEOs have a job. We are here to communicate these problems and SEO tactics, however at times it feels like our attempts at explanation falls on deaf ears.

One specific client is hell bent on purchasing and purchasing domains with keywords instead of building content focused pages within their main site. Stopping the use of session IDs in their URLs should be their first priority, and yet every week in our status call they want to discuss what domains they should buy. I see how it is hard to ignore the fact that many of the top ranking sites have keywords in their domain names, but they need to focus on building content on the well trusted domain they already have and making sure the spiders aren’t getting error pages because of their use of session IDs.

There is no doubt that solid keyword research and strategy drives the most effect SEO campaigns, but make sure you are presenting a smooth functioning, well structured website to the users and the spiders before you start expecting high rankings on all your keywords.

The’ve got big names from Microsoft and Amazon running the show.The’ve got the catchy name. Will they eventually come to dominate the second home real estate market as the so adimantly claim?

The answer is yes, and here’s why.

1. SecondSpace embraces Web 2.0 user interaction that online real estate consumers are aggressively heading towards.
2. The majority of real estate listing websites are behind the times when it comes to interacting effectively with consumers.
3. SecondSpace is building out specialized vertical search engines for any and all areas that are necessary for buying, owning, and selling real estate. Specialized search is the feature of the internet.
4. Each of SecondSpace’s verticals (now LandWatch and ResortScape) utilizes semantic search.

For these four reasons SecondSpace will eventually dominate the online real estate market for people’s second homes.

One of our clients has excellent exposure on Google, but on Yahoo they are virtually no where to be found. From reading the search engine forums there is a lot of talk about Yahoo penalizing sites that are optimized with SEO best practices. I somehow find this hard to believe, but what is happening when Google loves a site and Yahoo ignores it?

“Yahoo! Search ranks results according to their relevance to a particular query by analyzing the web page text, title and description accuracy as well as its source, associated links, and other unique document characteristics. ” This quotation comes directory from the Yahoo help section, and sounds pretty similar to the way Google ranks web pages. Below are some more specifics from Yahoo on how to improve search rankings:

• Think carefully of the key terms that your users will search on to find content like yours. Use those terms to guide the text and construction of your page.
• Users are more likely to click a link if the title matches their search. Choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.
• Use a “description” meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.
• Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.
• Keep relevant text and links in HTML. Placing them in graphics or image maps means search engines can’t always search for the text, and the crawler can’t follow links to your site’s other pages. An HTML site map, with a link from your welcome page, can help make sure all your pages are crawled.
• Use ALT text for graphics. It’s good page design to accommodate text browsers or visually impaired visitors, and it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.
• Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages.
  Note: “Link farms” create links between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts. Using link farms violates Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines and does not improve your page ranking.

None of this, however, answers the questions of why a site would rank great for Google and terrible for Yahoo. So we must delve deeper. Upon further research, I have found that many are saying that Yahoo heavily favors those who pay the yearly $299 fee to be included in the Yahoo Directory. In addition, apparently Yahoo like the site-wide interlinking more than Google, so increase anchor link keywords within the site. Another claim is that Yahoo factors in click popularity to their algorithm. Well none of this informing really answers the question of why my specific client is having such difficulty with Yahoo compared to Google. In my opinion, Yahoo is a bit of a mess. There paid inclusion program flies in the face of their claimed attempts to provide the most relevant search results. In 3 years at the most Ask.com will be replacing Yahoo as number two to Google.

Sorry for not really having an answer to this conundrum. If anyone has any input, please share. Thanks!

Its the classic chicken or egg mystery. What came first, the search engine rankings or the organic traffic? Does it really matter?, you ask. It does when you are performing a balancing act between the strict SEO who is concerned only the rankings and the traffic hungry client who demands the direct correlation to their bottom line.

It its not trackable from a traffic perspective is it worthwhile? Search engine rankings can certainly come without traffic. If the SEO does a poor job targeting the appropriate keywords, than it doesn’t matter if you are ranked number one. You’re not driving any traffic because no one is searching on those terms. On the other hand, if an SEO is able to obtain good search engine positioning on strategic keywords, the organic traffic will come in droves. Once the highly sought after rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK are achieved the benefits are reaped for years to come. These desired results, however, take time and it is virtually impossible to equate one thing or another to the reason for success. SEO is a sum of its parts and always evolving with the social trends of the Internet. Find an SEO you can trust with references and then give them some breathing room. They will get you the rankings eventually, which will be followed by the traffic. And always remember, long after you have paid for their services, that traffic is still in rush hour.