SEO blogging

The other day I was on the phone with a client who was delighted with our SEO services. That always feels good! My client wanted to add a new keyword to his campaign, and when he Googled it, he discovered that, although we had done no specific, targeted work on this keyword, he was already on Page 1!

Since SEOs (including me) emphasize keyword research and keyword selection, how is it that an SEO campaign can help a client site gain ranking on a different keyword? I am going to offer two explanations: One involves the long tail, and one involves authority. Both factor into an excellent SEO campaign.

It’s About Crawling

Before we get into details, it’s important to understand Google’s ability to “read” your content. Google is constantly attempting to understand language, semantics, and context, and every day, it gets better and better at that. That’s great news for you because, if you describe your product and services clearly and in detail, Google will use the language on your site to build a rich vocabulary that might be pertinent to your business.

Here’s an example: Give Google the set “toy, doll, teddy,” and it will predict “bear, plush, and handmade” (among others). But a list of words is one thing, a sentence or sentence fragment is another. Search engines want to understand how we use language. Google “who is pete” and you’ll find St. Peter, Pete Rouse, Pete Seeger, and many more. But change it to “the who is pete” and BLAM, Pete Townsend of The Who. “The” makes all the difference!

Why does all of this matter? Continue reading →

A “tower defense” game is a popular kind of video game. Basically, you defend a fixed location (your castle, home, desktop, etc.) from invading monsters of some kind. A couple of popular examples are Desktop Defense and Plants vs. Zombies (no, really!). A player purchases weapons (“towers”) to defend his or her location. Players start with a tiny bit of some kind of funds (Plants vs. Zombies uses sunshine instead of money), and as the game progresses, they earn more.

Hang in there, it’ll all make sense in a moment.

When you start a game, you have very little “money,” so you buy basic towers that are relatively weak. The thing is, you can lay them down pretty quickly, and a blanket of those inexpensive towers is a big help. As you earn more, you can afford a few expensive, super-powerful towers. You’ve probably also bought things at an in-between price point.

So how is this like SEO?

As with game “weapons,” in SEO, there are a variety of techniques at a variety of price points. Inexpensive link-building works best when (a) it’s done in significant quantity (a “blanket”), and (b) it’s done in conjunction with carefully-selected premium-priced techniques (the “super towers”). Most directory submissions, for example, are a form of link-building that works best as a blanket. The same can be said for most blog posting and blog commenting. Premium press releases, by contrast, are a super-tower technique that delivers significant firepower. Social bookmarking and article marketing fall somewhere in between.

An SEO customer might ask if certain techniques really have any value. Or, they might ask if a premium technique can work in the limited quantity allowed for by their budget. The answer is that using a mix of techniques is ideal, and natural, and effective. By combining techniques that work within a customers budget, SERP can be “defended” from competitors (or invading zombies).

Clients of an SEO company may be alarmed at the changes being implemented in their websites. Sometimes, during the course of SEO services, we’ve even had clients complaining that we broke their website. “You ruined my prose,” they say with alarm, “You changed my beautiful flash into something plain and ugly.”

Clients and SEO companies have to work together, because they have different target audiences. The audience for a website owner is the customer or potential customer. Content is king, they say over and over, and indeed it is. To get conversions (visitor to prospect, prospect to customer) the site owner needs to be quickly appealing. If you want repeat traffic, be interesting and varied. Call for action. Grab attention. All those cool Marketing 101 tips apply.

But the target audience for an SEO company is the search engine. Make no mistake, we care about your customers, but our job, the job you pay us for, is to focus on what the search engines see and the decisions they make based on that.

Let’s take, for example, the presence of keywords. We want your title tag. We, the SEO company, wants absolute and final control over that piece of text. You, the site owner, wants the title tag to have a clever saying. Here’s a place where I’m going to put my foot down with a client and say “No way.” That’s an argument I get to win, because the title tag has enormous impact on search engine ranking. So if there’s a choice between a title tag that says “Keyword Blah Keyword Blah Sitename” and “Clever Clever Clever Dang I’m Clever,” then the smart site owner is going to forgo the pleasures of clever for the business sense of keyword presence.

On the other hand, my interest in placing keywords on your home page might distort your message. This can especially happen when I’m working my on-site language magic on a site whose industry I don’t understand well. Naturally, an SEO does research into its clients’ industries, but I won’t become a chemical engineer overnight. It has certainly happened that my rewrites have shifted subtle shades of meaning in ways unacceptable to the client.

So, the client and I will consult. If the client says “No way” to a change, I’ll convey the intention of that change and we’ll find a better way to do it.

Over the course of creating on-site changes, both sides will compromise. The end result will be a site where Content is King and keywords are well-represented.

If you’re interested in search, you’re interested in Google, the search giant that owns 65% of the market. So when Wired Magazine’s Steven Levy gets an exclusive walk-through the meeting rooms of Google, naturally, that’s an article worth reading.

You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn’t ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren’t ready to concede defeat.

The article covers some of the complexities of search. How can the search engine distinguish between little rocks (pebbles) and Little Rock (the capital of Arkansas)? How can it determine when a piece of text is a last name, and not a profession or a product? It’s really fascinating reading.