ELWsoftware.com

I just watched the movie “Funny People” where one of the characters made a funny cat video that got hundreds of thousands of hits.  He then linked the video to his website.  Of course doing this kind of thing doesn’t necessarily get you the type of traffic you want, but it definitely does work.

Generally, you aren’t going to get a followed link from a site like youtube where anybody can post things.  There are opportunities for followed links on video sites, but I won’t go over them here.  The point of getting links isn’t always to increase pagerank.  99% or more users won’t even know the difference.  You should be interested in traffic generated by people watching your video.  If you can get thousands of views on a video you post, you should be able to get a small percentage of them to come to your site!

It is very easy to become a recording artist these days.  If you have any talent you can probably publish your own songs or comedy for download.  Have you ever noticed when you type in the title of an old song, the first search result is usually a wikipedia entry?  Have you ever looked at the wikipedia entry?  The cool thing is that almost all wikipedia entries for songs have a list of who has covered the song including a link!  Again, this probably won’t be a followed link but nobody will notice.  Anybody can edit a wikipedia page.

The point of this article is that people become so obsessed with getting followed links, that they ignore opportunities for nofollowed links that will likely get them better traffic!  You need to expand your link building horizons.  Every single link can be clicked by interested people.  Keep your eyes open!

The secret to generating very large quantities of content for your web site is to get others to do it for you.  Not everybody is willing to spend their own time writing about the same topic every day.  As long as writing articles or blog entries has a positive effect on search engine rankings, there will continue to be a need for this service.  There is no question that regularly writing articles on a blog will help your site.  Possibly even more than getting inbound links.  The best mix of articles to have on your site should include a wide array of perspectives on a central theme.  Obviously the central theme on the ELWsoftware.com blog is search engine optimization.

People get tired of reading the same stuff over and over again.  It gets boring even if the subjects change every day.  Listening to the same side of the story will drive away listeners.  I suggest trying to outsource your content generation.  There is no shortage of writers out there who are willing to produce articles for you like they are going out of style.  I suggest looking at options that include talented English-speaking writers from another country.  Not only can you get articles written for less money, you increase your site’s familiarity in foreign countries.

Never overlook an option to get more content on your site!

Haven’t you heard of outsourcing?  Through the magic of the internet, anybody can have work done by the lowest bidder as easily as hiring someone locally!  Obviously, all things being equal, you will get your work done by the lowest cost provider.  Wouldn’t it be great if all of your SEO work could be done this way?

ELWsoftware.com tried to be a provider on the Elance website, but soon we realized that we couldn’t compete with the prices offered by an SEO in India.  Instead of crying over this news, we see it as an opportunity!  Simple economics suggests that our ability to sell SEO services at $100 an hour combined with an SEO in India doing the work for $10-15 an hour is smart.  Take a few minutes to think about that!

Think about the current SEO situation and how it works.  A while back I described an idea for an SEO crowdsourcing website.  The idea was to allow users to recommend changes and improvements to a website.  Typical SEO thinking would say that this would mean giving away the secrets of the trade.  My opinion is that there aren’t any secrets.  Everybody knows about keywords, titles, and link building.  Everything else is either black-hat or speculative.  The crowdsourcing part would come in when the site owner would discover that everyone was offering the same or similar services.  At least this would result in a better understanding of their problems.  Maybe it would prevent them falling victim to some graphic designer charging them $1000 for putting some keywords in html tags!

Can you really get 10x the work done for your money with an SEO from India?  I’ll be doing it as an experiment, and I’ll let you know the results in further posts!

The SEO trick for today is a list of chores you might be putting on your list of things to do tomorrow.  I suggest taking a day off and getting some things done.  Let’s do some SEO housecleaning.

1. Do all of your html page titles contain what they should?  Spend a few minutes actually browsing your site to see if everything is up to date.  Are you trying to rank for the same keywords as when you made the page?
2. Are there current links to your best blog posts?  People will only click a finite number of links before they give up looking.  Do you have good articles buried deep in some archive?
3. Can you summarize some of your articles on a free press release site?  Can you write an article for ezinearticles instead of your blog?
4. Can you spend as much effort leaving a comment as you would on a blog post?  I think you would be surprised how willing people are to approve posts that are obviously not spam.
5. Have you written enough blog posts to fill a solid ebook?  Why not put one together and give it away free.
6. Can you add some screenshots to improve an old blog post?
7. Are you currently tracking all the information about users that you could be?  People might be finding your site with queries you aren’t even imagining.  ELW can provide excellent website visitor tracking in PHP.  This means that it can also track users who block Javascript.
8. Do a quick survey of pages that link to your site.  Give some of the better pages a mention in your blog.
9. Try using a different search engine for a while to look up your site.  Searching for a key phrase and clicking on your site in results can’t hurt.
10. Give someone else a link at random.  You can always delete it later!

If there truly could be a holy grail of SEO, it would have to deal with the future of search engines.  Any SEO trick that works on today’s search engines is probably not going to work in the future.  The point is that SEO shouldn’t be about tricking search engines into giving your website a better ranking.  Why would Google want a crappy site to rank higher than a good one?  Search engines aren’t built the way they are because they deliver the best results.  Search engines rank sites they way they do because it it the most economical way they have found.

Optimize your site for the search engines of the future!

1. Algorithms are going to get better at detecting bad content, and spam links.
2. Computers will continue to get faster and cheaper.  It will become economical to track an incredible amount of data about visitors that is impossible now.
3. Don’t expect the “top ten list” method of providing search results to last too much longer!
4. Don’t expect the “browser” as you know it to remain the dominant method of using the internet.

The holy grail of SEO is not a magical technique to improve your search engine rankings!  The great insight should be that there will soon be no more magical techniques!  No more keyword analysis, link-building, or spamming.  I have lost count of how many articles about link-building I have read that say something like the following:  “Links will remain the dominant force in ranking websites for the foreseeable future.”  Do you ever notice how things change as soon as most people think they will stay the same for the foreseeable future?

How long do you think your career as an SEO will last if you focus on keywords and links?

Every good article should have one very quotable part:

• If computers were 8x cheaper, search engines would be completely different than they are now.
• Computers will be at least 8x cheaper five years from now.
• Typing words into a box and receiving a list of pages is not cool.  It’s boring.
• Boring only survives in the absence of cool.

Sometimes I can’t think of any absolutely cutting edge SEO Tricks to write about every day.  Today is one of those days!  How about something that isn’t cutting-edge SEO?  Do you realize that every article you put on your blog helps your site?  Every new article is a new page that could show up in search results for someone’s search query.  Every new article is a “page” with a default pagerank of 1.  All of your articles have a link to your homepage, right?  This means that you can give yourself the equivalent of a link from a pagerank 1 site any time you write something!

Even short articles work well!  If you can write an email that is two paragraphs long, you can write an article optimized for your keywords using SEO tricks.  Don’t tell me that you can’t write two paragraphs a day!  People who think like that deserve to be below you in search results. Can you write 365 articles in a year?  Of course you can!  Little steps make big progress happen.

One of the best responses to an article on this blog was a theory that Google was manipulating search results to fit some political agenda.  This has got me thinking about both sides of the conspiracy.

1. What would be involved in maintaining a conspiracy to manipulate search results?
2. How could a conspiracy theorist benefit from understanding more about SEO?

I think the first question almost answers itself.  Manipulating search engine rankings using human effort for some political agenda would probably be very costly.  That would have to be a very important issue to get that kind of work done.  I just don’t think Google would care that much.  If Google really has teamed up with intelligence agencies to do their dirty work, it would still be unlikely.  Think how much information about everybody needs to be stored just to find a few bozos searching for bomb-making instructions!

I think the second question is more interesting and fun to write about.  A conspiracy theorist could benefit greatly from understanding SEO tactics, and some tricks.  First, we need to understand the motives of the conspiracy theorist:

1. Get people to ask questions that eventually reveal the truth.
2. Provide information that the conspirators don’t want made public.
3. Provide for an open exchange of non-obvious ideas.  The bad guys often hide behind the fact that their methods don’t make sense, or sound crazy.

Number 3 is the most important for SEO!  History is filled with true stories that sounded crazy while they were happening.  The trouble with these situations is that real conspiracies don’t use a language that is appropriate for search engine optimization.  We don’t have a set of words that adequately describes what is actually goes on in a conspiracy, so we are left with slang phrases.  These slang phrases are also used for not-so-big affairs.  We need a set of phrases at our disposal that will accurately describe the evil plans, and that is easily searchable.

The real benefit to using SEO for conspiracy-related articles is in catching conspirators before they commit too many crimes.  By getting an article about a conspiracy a better search engine ranking, it can be found more easily.  What can conspiracy theorists do to improve SEO?

1. Make the titles of your articles as accurate as possible.  Don’t use slang phrases like “in bed with” or “affair”  or “___gate” since these keywords almost guarantee a terrible SEO situation.  Don’t waste headline space on slang!
2. Remember to clarify exactly what is suspected, who is involved, and what evidence you have.  People likely won’t find your article when searching for the names of those people involved.  They will almost certainly find you if they search for the people involved in combination with the suspected crime.  If you actually have evidence like a video or picture, make sure it is also mentioned in the text.  Say it clearly: We have photos and pictures of X doing Y during Z.
3. LINKS! Linking to good content is what makes SEO work.  Links to good evidence is what will bring down a real conspiracy.

Keep up the good work!

SEO is often misrepresented in people’s minds.  Cutting Edge SEO tricks should forget about the “junk SEO” and focus on what your site needs!

Search engine optimization is about being there when your customers are searching!

1. Search results are all ads!  Even if you aren’t paying for your site to show up where it does, it is still an ad.  The goal is the same:  Get the searcher to visit your site!
2. People often tell me that their site is #1 in search results for some query.  The query they mention is always something that nobody ever searches!  You need to get visits to your site for queries related to your product.
3. What are your customers looking for?  Do they find you when they look?  More importantly:  Do they find you first when they look?

Search engine optimization is advertising, with the help of a computer!

1. A computer scientist like the ones at ELWsoftware.com can tell you what it will take to get your site higher in search engine rankings.  The real question is whether being higher in search rankings is worth the effort.
2. If getting your site higher in search rankings is worth the effort, you should do it!  There really isn’t any mystery in SEO, and there aren’t any secrets.
3. Be prepared for the fact that being higher in search rankings won’t increase your business as much as you hope.  Doesn’t life suck?

Search engine optimization is very similar to a chain letter.  In a chain letter your goal is to get people to send you money.  The trouble is that everybody involved wants to get the money too.  For every person silly enough to participate, there are hundreds who won’t do anything!  That is why search engine optimization should be more about visibility!  If searchers are truly looking to spend money, they will spend it on the best option.  More often than not this won’t be the #1 search result.  It will most likely be the most memorable page they find among many they see!

Cutting-edge SEO means looking at the entire search process!

1. Searchers search for multiple key phrases related to what they are looking for.
2. Being higher in search results makes you more visible, but no more likely to be chosen for the purchase.
3. Being found for more than one of these searches doesn’t increase your probability of success.  People only go to your site once while they are looking.
4. What you want is to be remembered.  Not in the mind, but in the search!  You want the customer to open your site in a separate tab, so it is still there when they are making a decision.  You want the customer to bookmark your site, so they can make a decision later.

Don’t worry that a site above yours in search engine rankings has more inbound links, or more keywords, or a better domain name!  If your site is visible, but has what the customer is really looking for, you will be the #1 Choice.

The cutting-edge SEO trick for today is to do some SEO intelligence gathering.  Intelligence gathering means that you automate the obtaining of information so that you can analyze it for patterns later.  It is not at all beyond the capabilities of a typical webmaster or blogger to gather as much information from visitors to their site as Google does.

What information can I obtain about visitors to my website?

1. User agent: Every page visit contains a user agent string that tells you what browser or bot made the visit.  Generally this will tell you the type of browser, and the platform for which it was compiled.  This means that it gives pretty accurate information about you such as mozilla, OSX, Intel, 10.4.  This means that you know the visitor probably used Firefox on an older Intel Mac.  Don’t rely too heavily on this information, since bots can make the user agent say anything.
2. Referral site (often spelled ‘referer’ with one r): This tells you the page the visitor navigated from to reach your page.  This only works if the visitor clicked a link on that page to reach you.  It doesn’t work if they type in your URL manually, or when you use our browser’s back button.  This is also easily faked by bots to say anything they want.  Usually bots do what is called referral spam by putting their website here.  The idea is that they want overzealous webmasters to go to their site thinking that somebody new linked to them!  Don’t bother.
3. Host string: This data is actually pretty useful since it is beyond the ability of mortals to fake.  This host string often includes the visitor’s ISP name and vague location.  Sometimes it only includes the IP, but that can be useful too.  Sometimes on university campuses this data can specify a single computer in a computer lab.  Very nice!
4. IP address: Not all that useful, but it is very difficult to fake.
5. Your data!: Of course you should store data that you know with each visit.  You know the URL they visited, when they visited it, and whether the same person went to other articles on your site.

Keep an eye on small pieces of information and your intelligence gathering for SEO can really improve your knowledge.  I should mention that ELWsoftware.com is the originator of this article, and we also provide consulting on visitor tracking solutions.  The previous sentence is not meant to be an ad!  Our tracking shows that some sites steal our articles and reprint them as their own.  Luckily for us, they don’t change the text!  Wouldn’t if be nice if your site could do this too?

I’m often surprised at the lack of new advice on SEO blogs.  Most SEO tricks, tips, and advice found on the internet is just plain useless and old.  I need to ask myself whether I should be going over the SEO basics that can be found anywhere, or presenting new techniques.  This post will be about the bridge between these two.

SEO Myths and Reality:

1. Myth: Placing keywords in your html titles and descriptions will help.  Reality: This only helps if you had nothing good there before!  Many SEOs get paid a good living to repeat this junk day after day.  This advice is as useless as telling a newspaper that headlines are important.  Don’t go too crazy with html titles and descriptions, since almost anything will work fine.
2. Myth: Links matter.  Reality: Traffic matters!  I sure would like a link from the home page of Google, but if nobody followed the link it would be useless.  How many typical web users (potential customers) actually read the comments on blogs and click the links?  Maybe a few, but so few of them actually buy stuff that it hardly matters.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you leave enough comments, some of the people will buy.  It just increases the probability that your site will be associated with spam.
3. Myth: Content is just filler between keywords.  Reality: Nobody searches for keywords!  Real human beings search for complex phrases that contain keywords.  Being the one page with an exact match somewhere in your article is way better than being the page with the most keywords.  You never know what phrases people will use to find your pages until they find you!

I’ll bet that Google is spending a ton of research effort on automating the process of detecting automatically generated articles.  I regularly find my own ELWsoftware.com articles posted elsewhere with the digits “123″ changed to “one hundred twenty-three” or other nonsense.  Plagiarism is the new spam, but it is SOOO easy to detect.  A message to those posting this article on their site as their own work:  Thank you for being so dumb, and easy to find!