2009 was a big year personally in my world of SEO. I have done major website moves and domain reorganisation. Hired and expanded my team domestically and internationally. Institutionalised SEO into many divisions and departments including internal training. Optimised websites from the ground up. Commissioned large scale content projects. And we have changed our development process to an agile methodology for projects and a new continuous improvement work stream. Sometimes I wish I could say more, but the really good stuff is secret due to my obligation to my current employer. Obviously I had some help with some/all of this, but you get the idea why I am enjoying a bit of time off over these holidays.

There have been some more shifts, changes and shake downs in my macro world. Bing and Yahoo are doing things together. Google is launching a new product or service every other week. Algo changes towards brands, something about caffeine and social media & “real time”. The ever-ever-flux of the SERPs. Personalisation of SERPs even for people without accounts. New innovations in search from fringe players (love the visual search from Bing). With as much advice, commentary, and noise in the SEO community as every (me included). 2009 has been busy in SEO.

So, at this festive time I thought I would jot down some notes to self and anyone else who wants to read them.

Now the fundamentals won’t change in twenty-ten of:

1. Make accessible pages
2. Understand your audience and how they search and use their keywords and key phrases
3. To build out content and a site that users value and engage with, and
4. Earn inbound links from authoritative site organically or with some help

But on top of this I was thinking about my New Year resolutions for SEO 2010. Here is my provisional list:

1. It’s all about Conversion in 2010

You have done everything you can to get visitors to your site. You have worked on accessibility and site performance. You have even optimized your meta to help with your public SERPs snippet. You need to do one more thing – work on Conversion. This is the next easiest thing you can do to affect your bottom line. If your targets are $£€ then you have your visits, now you need to make them work harder. If you are able do MVTs (Multi-Variant Tests) do so. Keep your best known page for SEO, as the default, but change the order, presentation, layout of your page and content and measure what is best for visitor conversion. A small percentage improvement could mean tens of thousands of dollars per day.

2. ROI, ROI, ROI

Take the reports you have asked for over the last year and really use them. There are obvious caveats about some reports around rankings, pages in the indexes etc etc. But spider reports and onsite metrics you have to trust. We all know there are issues with last click attribution but it is equally wrong for everyone. If SEO is to be taken seriously within the organisation and resources appropriately, senior management have to believe and the easiest thing you can do is find “causality”. If you pay for something; what does it do for you? And if you can prove that with numbers you will be a serious corporate SEO.

3. Team, team, team

There is so much knowledge within your own teams. Use it. Maybe we should hold an internal SEO summit with a real example ‘Show and tell’. You can learn more from things that don’t work sometimes. And if you set up a prefix of total honesty and amnesty you can learn a lot.
This could be with your own team or with other SEOs within your company or family of companies. And if you are brave within your extended network and non-competitors. You can easily set up internal d-lists and allow your widen stakeholders to pose questions, share observations etc etc. Ideas are not exclusive to people with SEO in their job title. The skill of a corporate SEO is the harness this enthusiasm and filter for the nuggets that can make a difference.

4. Read less blogs and rely on my own experience

This year I have found so many blogs from SEO commentators that get recycled extensively especially if they have a great headline or claim to have an inside tip. But much of these have been noise. I think my ego is big enough and knowledge secure enough to read a smaller set of sites/authors that I respect.

5. Sign up for the Webmaster Tools and use them

There is an ever increasing about of real information being shared back within the tools especially Google’s webmaster central. From the simple optimisation, a clue to crawl behaviour and crawl errors, to feedback on sitemaps, to page load speeds and performance to the engines telling you if you have any problems. If this matches to your own bot and user metrics then there is something in it. These tools for robots.txt and parameter handling are especially useful if you work for a large corporate and making the proper changes is difficult to do. Generally a clean site is a healthy site.

That’s my draft SEO resolutions as of the 27th. Maybe I will think of more before 2010 starts?

Tags: Crystal ball, SEO

They change so often. Try doing a search, search again and now…. search again – are they the same?

I am on the phone with you and we are comparing rankings. I am in London and you in New York. I bet we see different results. The major players try to help with geo-targeting results. Especially if you have a geography in the search term.

You see ranking different to me?! Are you logged into your Gmail account when searching in Google. I bet the boss has been obsessing about a competitor, on their site for days. And then searches for us, we won’t be there and the competitor is there in natural search and PPC. The engines believe is you have been to site a lot, then you like it and gives you it more in your personalized results.

Vanity terms. People always talk about the vanity terms of very precise terms/phrases. But being high on this term may not be the terms that will actually make your money. You can always use your PPC campaigns to validate and if necessary educate your stakeholders. Maybe you too focus on these terms and you wonder why with a good position the $$$ isn’t rolling in!?

Universal or blended search. It seems and from bitter experience you get a #1 ranking and then the engines decide to put a map, with listings, reviews, news, stock information or a image above the classic one spot. So your potential click through rate has vanished!

Although I always love a number one ranking. And still a secret objective!

Tags: Pet Hates, Rankings, SEO, SERPs

I have just come across this video as referenced in a Phocuswright round up.  It is a presentation by my new (well as of today) favourite site, Socialnomics.  The video is similar in nature to a good book of “Freakonomics”, mixed with Gladwell’s “Tipping point” blended into the case for doing “something” as a business.

I too can appreciate that social media (SMO) is not right for everyone and everyone’s business. And after some pilots I have run, your customers may point you in the real direction.  But not to act seems to be a lost opportunity.

To measure ROI on social media is difficult if you are comparing to conventional channels.  You should ask yourself whether a Twitter followerer or Facebook fan is worth <, > or = to a newsletter sign-up? And whether a highly engaged internet active, prequalified online early adopter is the type of customer you should be appealing to?

With one foot in the marketing world, I hear my colleagues past and present talk about “customer centric”, “customer engagement” and “top of mind”.  Surely any medium that allows the customer to be in charge of comms/info/receiving deals is a good thing.  And brands that encourage people to engage I predict will be the winners in the long term.

Anyway, watch their video, it is better than I can type here – what do you think?

Tags: SEO, SMO, Social Media

Who needs some caffeine?

First of all, what is all this Google Caffeine.  A bit of old news, but a quick recap to contextualise this link below.

This is an update to Google’s underlying infrastructure and a rebuild of the code to handle their index and runtime indexes.

If you look at the video on MC’s blog.  MC talks about it and it is quite straight forward set of changes most businesses do or should do.  In the long term for businesses with fresh content, timely information, who are continually growing, it should be a good thing.

I am sure at the time, you were asked by some high ranking colleagues about your future rankings.  You will still need to do it one term at a time, but this on the Sembience site is a useful Caffeine checking tool.

Tags: Caffeine, google, SEO

So, relevance wins over TLDs.  Who would have guessed !?

As part of the caffeine update, lots of us saw many .com’s appearing over the top of co.uk’s etc etc.  If you mix the Vince update with Caffeine you get a wired Vince and dot coms able to rank when the previous ground swell of talking heads was you must have a ccTLDs otherwise you would fail in regional Googles.

Oh well.  Here it from the man himself in this YouTube video.  <smug>Supports some of my current projects</smug>

Tags: Domain names, google, How-to, Matt Cutts, mistakes, SEO

Here are some definitions of the 3 main kinds of searches that a user might do. They are important as they hold the intent of the users and if you believe this, might influence the response and what is relevant results from a search engine!.

Navigational Search
A navigational search is a specified search and is successful if your product is a specific brand name. Searches like ‘Tesco’ or ‘Diesel Jeans’ means that that those websites optimising for that brand would appear above all the others so for smaller companies it is not necessarily the best way to optimise your site as it is highly competitive against other more commercial companies.

If you are selling or are the owner of a brand, people are effectively looking for you, but may end up on a site that is optimised for your product. Affiliates and domain squatters can do very well here. This can also apply to events, generics, news items or popular culture.

Informational Search
This is a better way for small businesses to optimise their site. They can aim to rank highly for a simple phrase and make it more plausible. A couple of words creating a generic phrase are far more successful than depending on brand names to get traffic to a site. Phrases such as “tyres Chiswick” can be far more effective for businesses rather than a brand of tyres. The risk of using a brand is that it is likely to be supplied by big chain stores nationwide that already have a good amount of traffic to their site.

This could be a bit of a leveler on the internet.  The internet was meant to allow small businesses to compete with anyone, anywhere.  In practice this is not the case, but especially on local search or map searches smaller players can win and from my hunt for new car tyres yesterday, small businesses who register for local business on Google appeared on a map in the no1 slot and did very well in the map channel.

Transactional Search
These searches are far more specific and contain a lot of words that identify what a consumer wants in finer detail. For example “cheap tyres Hammersmith London (& maybe brand).” All of the sites that contain these words will come up in the search engine results and your company may be there but the amount of people using this method of searching are fewer than the others.

Fewer in quantity, but fairly precise.  The longest keyword phrase I have seen that has come to a site I have worked on was 18 words in length.  Funnily enough, 100% conversion rate to transaction.  Now the quantity of unique long tail terms can be big, but may only happen once or twice per year.  But you might be lucky and if you are in the right business the total volume might be huge!

To conclude
Keywords definitely vary by industry and country.  And depending on your industry, and your type of product, the age/demographics or sophistication levels of your customers and potential customers will depend on your keyword usage.

You will need to understand your customers (marketing 101 don’t forget all that you know from the old world order) and enough you optimise your business and your site to make sure you are found ahead of the competition.

Look at your keyword reports, ask you customers virtually or face-to-face if you can how they found you, how they want to find your service or product.

This is part science, part human skills and a bit of luck.  If you kind of understand your customer you have a chance to satisfy their needs.

Good luck.

Tags: Definitions, General Comment, How-to, Reading, Search Engines, SEO, Usability