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Awarding Originality & Content Creation

January 29th, 2011 · SEO

The article Content Curation versus Content Creation over at sazbean.com highlights the very fine line being trodden daily by many people online.  Having been the benefactor of online plagiarism, the perpetrators of which shall remain anonymous on this occasion, for I have beaten them enough with blog posts on the matter, I am too, acutely aware of the problem.

Of course it is one thing to simply copy and paste other’s hand-crafted words into your own blog post, whether you credit the originating author or not, and another to use excerpts for the sake of creating blog roll style posts, but ultimately now, Google is going to have the final say, and recent, and much trumpeted changes to the algorithm are going to start penalising those who replicate content and rewarding those who create afresh.

I think it stands to reason that those who create original and useful content should be rewarded with better search result page ranking, and plenty agree.  The collective groan of the masses has been steadily building as the volume of spam in search results has been increasing, and thankfully it seems search engines are listening.

From the heady and rather idealistic days of the birth of the internet as we know it, to the very harsh reality of today, I think it was always clear that this vision of global intellectualism and the internet being an unsullied font of all wisdom was a vastly over-hyped construct.  Now we have to deal with the mess of opportunism and laziness, and it is clearly proving trickier than some imagined.

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Large Website SEO – Part 1

November 30th, 2010 · SEO

I have talked before about how large organisations have problems in creating and implementing an SEO strategy in my blog post Can Large Organisations do SEO? This was in part written out of my own experiences, but also as a means by which to start talking about issues of search engine optimisation around large online properties, not that there is any correlation of course.  So here goes, my thoughts on the problems of SEO for large websites.

What is a Large Website?

Indeed, you might ask yourself this very question.  I personally would put it at hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions, but an SEO pal of mine put the number as low as 1,000+ pages.  In reality though, there is no hard and fast rule, and the issues surrounding “large” websites have less to do with size and more to do with diverging content needs.

The core issue that defines all, is that not all the hosted content or individual online properties are relevant to one another, and therefore, by proxy, not focused on the same target audience or market.  This basic problem is one which will define your actions at the highest level, and cascade down from there.

The SEO Problems

So we know what the core identifier is for large websites and the main problem surrounding SEO on larger websites, but what are the more ingrained issues surrounding optimsation?  Why is it so hard to create keyword and phrase relevance, whether you are running a popular brand or a popular service?

  • As highlighted, not all content you host is the same or focused on the same audience.
  • User generated content and actions pollute or skew the relevance of terms for content on the site.
  • Dynamically generated pages create duplicate content without little or no unique optimisation.
  • Content is often thin or not original, which means poor quality pages that may look like link farms.
  • These issues compound the fact that short tail keywords face stiffer competition whilst making it harder to achieve top placement for a broad library of researched and selected terms.
  • Beyond the technicalities, it is hard to engender best SEO practice within a large, multi-department team, and to manage expectations of results.

Of course each of these issues will not be a symptom of SEO problems for every single website, but any or all of them might apply.  So how do we go about dealing with these issues more generally?  How can we ensure that all content is being optimised in as easily manageable a means as possible, and how can we ensure that this is being done to achieve long term goals?

A High-Level SEO Plan

To try and overcome these issues you need to look at the following broad action items:

  • Identify core content areas and their associated market or audience.
  • Create bespoke keyword strategies for defined areas involving traditional SEO techniques.
  • Initially optimise for longtail keywords and phrases, and build up from there.
  • Do the basics right, making sure best practice is followed from the outset.
  • Identify SEO quick wins and start implementing them.  Identify the most important traffic driving pages, and optimise those first.
  • Take full advantage of what your size offers in terms of in and outbound links.
  • Integrate Social Media Optimisation (SMO) to enhance your SEO efficiency.
  • Keep content fresh, avoid dormancy, and make user interactivity as simple as possible.
  • Make your website responsive worldwide.  Optimise at a technical level as well as a content level.
  • Set a baseline.  Understand where you are at, and set easy to achieve goals, with realistic time lines.
  • Create a strategy of education for management and content producers, as well as coders.
  • Track results and keep management informed of progress and make sure your goals are always realistic.
  • Be prepared to make the necessary changes to your goals as you go along.

High Level Conclusions

So there you have it, 20+ points that you might want to think about in terms of getting going with your broad action plan in tackling the problems of SEO for large websites, but how do you deal with this at a more technical level?  Well this will be the subject of my second part to this series, which I look forward to publishing shortly.  In the meantime you can ponder the reality that is the problem of SEO for large web sites.

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SEO Experts – Who Needs Them?

November 27th, 2010 · SEO

There’s no doubt that SEO professionals, for want of a better word, are the second hand car salesmen of the web.  Nobody likes them, everyone thinks they are trying to rip them off, and you buy the product and find that it doesn’t quite live up to the billing.

Okay, so that might be a bit harsh but there are most certainly plenty of SEO cowboys out there.  I say this, because I clicked on a PPC some links this morning when searching Google for some SEO terms and what I saw didn’t quite make me kick, scream or cry, but rather it made me laugh.

So-Called SEO Experts

I am not going to bother linking to their site, because I don’t care to give them any benefit from talking about SEO and linking to them, but you can click on the image file and see a full size screen shot.

There are so many issues around the construction of the words and what they promise, it’s a complete joke.  For starters, their promise that “Top of Google = More customers = More profit” is quite a claim.  I think what they mean is more possible audience and potential sales.  They talk about maximizing traffic and conversions, but when flogging a £290 product I doubt their work would stretch even that far.

Their H1 title pronounces “Top of Google in just a few days” but when you look at the graph, and ‘before I started SEO’ the date highlighted is 25 October 2009, yet the end of the chart generating those stellar results is march 2010.  Some 6 months later.  The steady trend is rather unusual too.  It would be nice if this SEO expert had provided a breakdown of the source traffic.

Proven SEO Results

The bit I love the most is the “We can prove our results.”  WOW, great job man, you rank number one for “London Liposuction” that’s some incredible work.  You rank top for a direct match on the domain, the page title, the h1 title and everything else.  Ok so you built a site with ghost content and optimised it in an abnormal fashion and reached the top of Google.  That’s some incredible work there “Mister Griggs”.

The funny thing is, that the moment you search for “Liposuction London” a more likely keyphrase the “London Liposuction” website is nowhere to be seen.  How useful is that?  Not very, I conclude.  I understand that no two combinations are going to return the same search results, but really, if you are ranking well for specific terms like that you should at least retain ranking on the home page of Google.

Cheap and Easy Points

Of course it is easy to slag off others’ work, and score cheap and easy points in the way that they are by effectively pulling the wool over potential customer’s eyes and make themselves look good, when really they are not, but someone has to call bullshit on these idiots, who are not experts by any stretch of the imagination.

There are quick returns to be had, but SEO is really a long term project that has to be worked on, consistently and using social techniques online to achieve goals, that don’t produce returns overnight.  And if you are looking for a cheap SEO option, your site probably needs a whole other amount of work to bring it up to scratch anyhow.

Considered Quality, Not Veneer

As with anything, you get out what you put in, so any effort put into a web site project is well worth it.  If you skim over the surface and think that it will get the same quality return you are misguided.  I recently refused work from a potential client because I knew it wasn’t in their interests, though I know I could have made money out of the process.  Doing what is right and in the client’s interests and making sure that you can achieve the results they are looking for is key.  Appearing to produce quality output and actually wanting to and being able to do it are all completely different things.

On the face of it, “Mister Griggs” and his crew are quite the experts, but if you dig a little deeper it’s obvious that deeper questions need to be asked in looking for an SEO expert, and that you need to be assured you are NOT going to be taken for a ride by some fly by night cowboys.  As one blog post I recently came across pointed out, how can all SEO professionals be experts when not all of them are at the top of the Google search engine results for SEO terms.  And I think that serves the point.  Don’t look superficially at results, start by asking hard questions!

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Google Preview … When Fallback Fails

November 22nd, 2010 · Development, SEO

This morning I got into an interesting back-and-forth with a couple of guys I know on Twitter.  They were making jokes about the Jaguar website and its design, along with the screenshot in Google Preview, of which I have written before about Flash websites failing to show up properly. I was intrigued though to find out, that unlike most typical websites in Flash, Jaguar had actually made the effort to built their site entirely in an HTML lateral universe, like-for-like.  So why indeed is the jaguar.com site not showing up properly in the Google preview?

Here are my screenshots of the 3 states of jaguar.com:


My initial deduction would be that the Google bot is executing the Javascript successfully but then finding that there is no Flash, but then if this were the case, then why do other sites fallback perfectly ok?  Surely SWFembed is designed to understand this case, or is the Google Bot actually reflecting that it retains the Shockwave Flash add-on?  If so then it would be time to call bullshit on Google.

That being said, if you disable JS on the site, the fallback doesn’t occur.  So the Flash movie is being applied by the Javascript, then why in fact is the HTML content not shining through at this point? Upon closer inspection, their lo-fi version of the site has a default setting in CSS of “display: none”, which of course means it won’t show up unless JS switches the CSS settings, but then again, this still doesn’t quite explain why the missing plug-in icon is showing in the preview screenshot.

As one Flash developer friends points out, given the quality of the animations and what they are doing with the Jaguar site, it begs the questions why they bothered to develop the site in Flash at all.  I see no impediment to creating exactly the same version from Flash to HTML and that HTML needn’t be the “poor relation”.  Indeed, the site would definitely benefit being “sans Flash” and is easily replicated.

A closer look at the code begs a whole other set of questions though!  Jaguar might do quality cars, but their website code doesn’t quite engender this brand focus. Whatever it is that is breaking the process that allows the HTML fallback to come through for the Google snapshot bots to capture the website in all it’s glory, it is contained in the mess of non-standardised code that makes up the site.

Whatever way you look at it, as I have said already, ensuring that your site is coded in the best manner and presents itself in the best light is the most important factor.  Any web site is of course a marketing/information tool and how you present it reflects on you.

UPDATE – 24 Nov, 2010 – It turns out that if Google Preview bots are fetching the page from the Google cached view of your site, then they will execute the JS contained within the page, this includes Google’s own Analytics tracking code, which explains why they are generating hits in GA.  Time to call bullshit on Google I suppose …

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Calculating Amazon Kindle List Pricing

November 19th, 2010 · Product

I am not a mathematical genius, but I can still do basic math like 2+2 and 15% of £8.99, but Amazon have seemingly turned the art of basic arithmetic into something that requires a PhD.  Surely when they ask you for the list price of a Kindle eBook you would expect them to ask you for the final price to appear on the site, and from which they can then deduct the VAT, eventual royalties and any digital delivery charges.

I must say that I have always respected Amazon.  Not for their amazing design sensibilities or incredible UI, but because their no nonsense approach to doing business on the web has frequently led to industry accepted standards in UI and Layout.  That being said, in this instance, they have really turned the simplest task into an impossible mess … Either that or I am a complete idiot … Watch it!

For those of you who are not familiar with the process of publishing your eBooks to Amazon for Kindle, here is a screen shot of the relevant part of the publishing screen:

As you can see they have neatly included a nice event to trigger the update of the anticipated royalty per eBook, but when it comes to anything else, how am I supposed to figure it out?  Indeed, if they know the list price I want, they know the size of the file and any charges they need to levy in respect of that, and they know what royalties to pay, surely they can just as easily do the math for the respective selling territories?

I have contacted Amazon, but the frustration as per usual is that any response takes days, not minutes.  Surely they can validate a price change and don’t need to review the eBook every single time!  It seems to be a bit redundant in this day and age to have to tell Amazon how to build better forms, or design for their web site, but in this case it most certainly makes sense to call bullshit on this online shopping behemoth.

Any bright sparks out there with an idea on how to calculate up the price for an £8.99 or $14.99 end point?

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