Alex Hochberger

So Facebook’s push for Open Graph integration, where the “Like Button” replaces the direct link, creates new opportunities for businesses to focus on Facebook’s search mechanism.  Some initial tests indicated that it is possible to now optimize for Facebook search, i.e. bringing SEO to Facebook.

Facebook Open Graph allows one to connect their site to Facebook without full integration, simply using new Facebook Meta Tags and the Like Button (a snipped of Javascript code).  Facebook is tracking these likes and building a “graph” of the Internet based upon the recommendations of your social network, and now they are including relevant results when you search Facebook for something.

This creates an opportunity for companies that are bringing their brand to Facebook to get additional exposure through Open Graph, which creates an incentive to use the technology.  This is exciting, as the move to the “walled garden” of social media threatened to disrupt the open world of search.  In the past, users could recommend a page on their blog, creating a “link graph” for the search engines to use, but now it’s easier to just click “share” and send the link out to your friends that way.  Without this part of the link graph, the search engines are missing out on the recommendations that they build their systems upon.

Open Graph brings out the ability to restore this, even if Facebook is the only company taking advantage of it for now.

Whenever the topic of SEO comes up, I always still get questions about how to “hide text” and get good performance.  I’m always amazed that people neglect the basics and focus heavily on tricks.  The overwhelming bulk of SEO is about:

1. Site Structure
2. Links
3. Content

In the early days, the Yahoo Directory was the most useful source of traffic on the Web.  The small, editor managed directory (originally a static site by the Founders) was the “Who’s Who” of the Internet.  As Google surpassed Altavista, bringing relevant search results, the interest in directories died off.  While Hubs and Authorities never quite had the direct impact that was expected, being listed near other relevant results has a huge impact.  You wouldn’t build a car before figuring out an engine, and you shouldn’t build a website without building your core.  Your site structure helps spiders and users understand your site, content makes your site relevant if found, but links are the core of the site.

Submitting to primary and secondary directories will not create traffic over night, but it can create some of the core links that can help engines make sense of your site.  Getting listing in the major directories will give you solid links to help define your site, and additional listings in industry specific directories helps further define yourself.  All the SEO tricks in the world won’t give you quality traffic unless you build a solid Foundation first.

With Dunhill Vacations, we have a collection of directories that will catalog our articles as well, and when we do an industry write-up, we submit it to those directories.  Over time, we are steadily building up quality in bound links, much more effectively than link swaps or other dubious link building strategies.  Quality content with quality links pointing to it, it may not be sexy, but it’s still effective.

Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter to access and utilize their data, and Search Insider is discussing the first impacts of this.  What’s most interesting is that this might be the first major change since “FreshBot” was added to Google (and later became the primary crawler).  Old hand SEOs remember the crazy update schedules of the early engines, but Google’s monthly “Google Dance” as their crawler finished and about a week later the PageRank was computed and the new index went up across their data centers.  Google started crawling and updating with “fresh” data (tagged with the data) with a guestimated PageRank for placement, and as they got faster at computing changes across the Internet, these Fresh results were no longer being inserted, they were the results.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas.  Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on.  While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet.  This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story.  While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites.  Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone.  Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search.  Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

Not a shocked to anyone that knows anything about search, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by Google, both on the official blog and on Matt Cutt’s blog.  I don’t think I’ve included Meta Keywords on a site in almost 6 years, but from time to time I hear people explain to me that they don’t need an SEO expert, they are doing keywords and descriptions… and I just wish them well.

So I routinely get asked by friends for advice on how to get a web business launched with no money.  As I politely steer them away from the idea that I should do it for them, I thought that I should work on a basic guide for getting started.

Step 1: Pick a Good Domain Name

A domain name is your address, what you will hand out, and what you will advertise.  Your goals are short, easy to spell, nothing to trip people up, and keyword friendly.  If you are dealing with cars in Florida, and your name is Jake, then CarsByJake.com would be friendly, start with your keyword, and be easy to spell.  FloridaCarsByJake.com would also be good, but JakesFloridaCars.com gets tricky because without the appostrophy, it sounds like your name is Jakes.  Avoid double consonants (two words, one that ends in a letter and the next work begins with it), and definitely do no “merge” it being clever, people will get confused.  I find dot-com extensions better than alternatives, but it may depend on your industry.  It’s been over 10 years since dot-net was the premium TLD and dot-com a negative one, but dot-net still has cachet in technology sectors.

Step 2: Register with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

You don’t get to play if you aren’t there.  Twitter is important for the ability to move information out there.  Facebook has a tremendous number of users and viral power, and LinkedIn is where the professionals hang out.  While you may not use all these mediums terribly effectively on Day 1, the sooner you open an account, the sooner you are ready to use it.  If you aren’t going to optimize for all platforms, also register with Ping.fm or HelloTXT for content syndication, that will let you move your messages to all platforms at once.  I would recommend picking a URL shortener for social media (I use Bit.ly) and creating an account with stats, this way you can keep your collection of short links and start to see what drives traffic.  For Facebook, you should also setup a Page for your business so people that like your business can Fan your Page, even if they don’t know you personally.

Step 3: Setup the Website and add Content

If you aren’t ready for a serious commitment, using a free CMS system like WordPress.com, or other environment that let’s you publish and bring your own domain name is important.  Make certain that you can export content later if you move.  Despite my historically building my own CMS platforms for SEO reasons, I’ve been finding WordPress.com a great platform for self-publishing, and I can always export to a WordPress.org (self hosted) system later and work from there into whatever I want.  Good content is key to success.  Learning to write 5+ blog posts a week plus updating the core of the site (Pages in WordPress speak, the static content part of any CMS) of information, adding images, etc., is time consuming.

Step 4: Get in the Social Media World and Blogosphere

You need to participate to get involved.  For Facebook, setup the appropriate privacy policies and participate in comments, Wall Posts and pictures.  Wish people well on their birthday, tell them when they put up cute pictures of children/grandchildren, be friends with your friends.  For Twitter, grab TweetDeck, start finding the appropriate Hashtags for your discussions and start sharing information.  With your blog, find bloggers posting questions that you can answer, and either leave a comment (if short), or answer with a link to their entry with software that will ping them with the answer.  Like any form of networking, participate.  Retweet good posts, share your expertise, and build up an online reputation.

Step 5: Using Content and Social Media, Promote your Site which Promotes your Business

This final step is how you pull it all together.  Write good content for your site on the blog, promote it through your new Social Media channels.  The better the content, the more likely you are to get Retweeted or linked to from other blogs.  The more links you get to your site, the better you will do in search engines.  The more you get Retweeted in Twitter, the more likely you are to get Followers.  The more you get mentions and links on Facebook on news feed, the more likely you are to reconnect with friends or come to the attention of customers.  SEO = keywords + good content + links… the more advanced part of SEO, you can get to that later, when you get traction.  If you need to hire an SEO expert, you will already have new customers from your web site plus a great starting point for the SEO who can see your keyword success to get started.  As you add content and social connections, your traffic will build and build, and if your site’s core information is good, you will successfully launch your business.

This is my first draft of this 5 Step Process.  I expect to come back and revise over time.  Comments, suggestions, etc. are all appreciated.  Feel free to Follow me on Twitter and Tweet this Post!

When I started in SEO, everyone wanted a silver bullet.  As the years passed, people still want a silver bullet, but more and more clients and companies realize that SEO is part of the web site design process, not a bolt on service.  Sure you can do bolt-on SEO spamming, but it’s really expensive, time consuming, and only worthwhile for very wealthy companies in hyper competitive areas.

I saw another business blogger talking about Promoting Your Business For Free, and there is a discussion of business tools like blogs and press releases, and using social media to get word out, but not a word about SEO.  What’s a shame is every piece of advice he has on that article is good for someone doing SEO.  Add a little bit of ideas on keyword research, focusing on the topics your potential customers are searching for, and you’d have the basics for writing SEO-friendly copy without getting into the details of keyword density and emphasis.

A press release and a spider-friendly “landing page” aren’t so dissimilar, and it amazes me that to this day there isn’t anyone really offering the combined SEO/PR service (hint, hint, keep an eye on my site, I’m working with a PR firm to put an offering together).  Twitter is a great way to reach like minded individuals, but not necessarily a great way to build sustainable traffic.

The growth of social media has Internet Marketers wondering if these new areas of interest mean the end of search as the heart of an Internet Marketing campaign.  I have always resented the tag SEO for my ideas on the Internet, because the concept of gaming the search engines has been dead for over 5 years now.  The growth of link based engines, starting with Google made gaming the engines less useful than a simple coherent strategy.  By building content with the user’s needs in mind, you were naturally doing SEO with good links, clear text, and simple content rich sites.

The emergence of social media as new avenues for traffic and links only add more aspects to your traffic strategies.  It is no longer “Google or Bust,” when you can generate traffic from Twitter or Facebook.

Good content, useful materials, clean HTML, and publishing your information into social media can all help you gain links to your website, or visitors that may leave comments and enhance your site.  Anyone on the Internet for more than 8 years remembers “surfing,” where you would click around from site to site exploring.  Pre dot-com, websites linked to each other, Google’s wars on spam may have discouraging linking for a number of years, but with the growth of social media, people are out exploring the Internet, and that helps publishers with good content find more traffic.

So I saw on TweetDeck, “#SEO Tip of the Day — If you service a specific city or state, mention it in your website’s title’s and html text!” from @Jacobstoops, Website: Agent SEO.

That hit me.  The SEO campaigns that I ran were generally 6 figures a year, in the most competitive areas, specializing in sub-prime fiannce: Credit Cards, Debt Consolidation, and Pay Day Loans.  In those areas, I’m not targeting local, and I’m competing with big firms and small firms, hundreds of thousands of people looking for traffic.

One area I never figured out, winning business from local businesses looking for local traffic.  That isn’t about SEO skill, anyone can win those, that’s about hand holding the businesses.  If only one person in a market does the basics of SEO, they’ll probably dominate the term.  Those guys are probably happy with 3-5 customers a month, and would pay $250-$500 a month for that success forever.

What I never figured out is how professional SEOs handle these small accounts, but if your potential accounts are looking for local traffic and don’t think to mention the city, it probably doesn’t take much to win.  A local designer selling websites for $500-$1000 should know this… but they probably don’t, and probably don’t want to spend an hour explaining to the client why they did what they did, better to get paid and moved on…

And that’s why a bunch of locals with limited knowledge can earn a living in SEO, which isn’t a bad thing.

So, anyone who is curious what it means when they read/hear about a website being spiderable.  When a search engine crawls your site, it grabs the HTML and starts to make sense of it.  Presumably the modern search engine could grab your CSS and render it internally to figure out what goes where to the user, but that’s a lot of work.  Grabbing CSS files and rendering them are probably just looking for hidden links (where the link isn’t visible because of CSS code) and other spam-detection, probably not a lot of making sense out of your site structure.

If you aren’t using Lynx, the text based browser to review, you can do it online with the SEO Browser.  With modern CSS based layouts, there is no reason to have your content buried, since you can position things where you want.  In the old days of tables, many designers put most of the structure of the site in the header, so the content instead was down at the bottom.  Early spiders had download caps of each page, so if your content was pushed down, it never got read.

Generally, if your site is big and important, the spiders/engines spend time figuring you out.  If you are a small time website operator, why make it difficult?  Structure your website so it would make sense in a 1997 Era Browser, with Titles, H1/H2/H3s, and Paragraphs, and the spiders will understand your site.  You can always move your pretty little design above it with CSS.

Media Post, looking for content, is running a series of “how I got into this mess” articles.  One caught my eye, Summer Stories: How I Became A Researcher.  So he got into search research in 2003, a little after I started my search research projects on behalf of Creditcards.com.  At the time, there was lots of “general” information out there, and lots of really technical detail from the quasi-tech side of the industry.

At the time, I remember a discussion with my father of all people.  A relative was managing PPC campaigns for people, and he was adamant that the organic side of search that I was doing was a waste of time, that the future was all PPC, and Google was going to have to follow Yahoo/MSN to PPC on top.  Why the up and coming search engine would follow that path that knocked Yahoo from top dog to also ran was unclear to me.  I also saw the economics of PPC, in a competitive market, profits go to zero, because as more people bid on the traffic, eventually the PPC price equals the expected revenue, and there is no margin.

Had I not worried so much about the long run, I would have augmented the organic with a nice PPC business.  Nonetheless, it’s amazing what is available now, off the shelf in 2009, that was impossible in 2001-2003.  Back then, mod_rewrite existed, but no other URL manipulation.  Most designers pushed content way down with embedded tables in the HTML, and other things that nobody would do now.  Our single table based layouts that let us move some content to the top was revolutionary at the time, now easily handled with CSS Layouts.

Every designer now understands usability, back then, they refused to read books on it.  The days of being able to grind out a few dozen pages in a competitive area and grab a top-5 rank for years may be gone, and buying PR 9 links for $50/year are gone, but the new opportunities at the intersection of search and social media are fascinating.

When I entered search in 2002/2003, I was a newcomer, because I hadn’t cut my teach in the Lycos/Altavista days.  Now, I’m watching the learning process for a new round of Internet Marketers, and it’s amazing to see what tools they have that we had to build, but then again, they are up against people with a decade of experience and a pile of custom tools on then.