Only about every 2-3 years do I see something new in SEO that I have never seen before. I’ve just been around too long and worked with too many clients. I say this not to toot my own horn. I say these things in order to help you understand where I, and many other SEO peoples, are coming from. The ideas I am putting forth in this post are the same things that my SEO brethren all experience too.

Photo Credit:imnotadoctor

Cost of SEO

I can’t even remember how many people have decided not choose me for their SEO campaign and that end up going for a cheaper package elsewhere. Maybe it’s from India and maybe it’s your nephew who says that he knows SEO. Most likely it’s your web developer or hosting provider that say, “SEO is easy, don’t pay those guys that much, I’ll do it for half that!”

What ends up happening is that the client comes back to me after having wasted their $1000/mo, or $500/mo, for the past 6-12 months and are left with no results. Or at least not the results that they wanted, expected, or needed. Had they just taken my advice in the first place, or gone with a different reputable SEO consultant they would not be 6-12 months behind their competition and would also not be thousands of dollars in the hole. Had they spent just $1000 more per month they could be seeing an actual ROI by now.

But instead they rolled the dice and crapped out. And their money lost has now become part of the cost of SEO, putting ROI even further out of reach. But to me the worst, and most costly, thing that happens in these situations is that valuable time has been lost.

Time Cost of SEO

This can be extremely expensive. The time cost of SEO is heavily influenced by what your competition is doing while you are not. But there are many things that influence the time cost of SEO. Imagine all the sales you have missed out on in the past 6-12 months because you are not ranking. Imagine all the market share that your competition has taken from you in the past 6-12 months. What if your competition has been spending more money on their efforts, with real professionals? Then you are really screwed.

How to Know if You Have a Good SEO Campaign

I’m not just going to carry on about how you need to spend more and choose good people for your SEO campaign. I actually have some ways that can help you understand if you are getting a good campaign.

First, do research on the person or company that you want to work with. Google their names. See if they are referenced in any reputable industry websites. Look for video of them too, its always nice to put a face with a name. See if there are numerous complaints on consumer sites. But be careful here because almost all of these “consumer advocate” sites (Ripoff Report, Complaints.com, etc) allow anyone to anonymously post whatever malice messages they want, and without any warrant of authenticity. But if you see many complaints from what appear to be different people (you can usually tell by the tone and the story that they tell) and on different sites then you can pretty much be sure that the company is bad news.

Get a third party to do an SEO audit of the work being done by your consultant, agency, or in-house people. Now this also comes with a word of caution because everyone has varying opinions of what is most important to the right techniques when it comes to SEO. So you have to take the SEO audit with a grain of salt. I recommend doing this so that you can get an “idea” of whether or not you are getting totally ripped off. This is not for you to nitpick at every little thing that the person auditing the SEO disagrees with. You have to be weary of the auditor wanting to steal your business away. If you can get a few different people to do the audit and that should be plenty to let you know whether or not you are getting totally ripped off or not. I will do another post on SEO audits at a later date so subscribe to my feed for that update when it comes.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I can think of handfuls of reasons not to skimp on your SEO efforts. But most importantly is the huge cost of not getting a good SEO campaign. So please, if you are in getting ready to launch an SEO campaign make sure that you perform due diligence and that you not be afraid to spend on your SEO efforts. After all, SEO is still THE most effective form of online marketing. So if you spend hundreds of thousands on TV, radio, and print you should be spending even more on your SEO. Spend in the areas that have the best chance for an ROI. And nothing fits that bill better than SEO.

Anyways, how about that duplicate content? Well, its not nearly as big of a deal as it used to be. Google has wised up and started to monetize aggregated, syndicated, news content. Therefore they had to change the ways they treated dupe content.

If you have a trusted domain or are not totally, obviously, trying to manipulate the search engines. So its OK to have some duplicate content as long as its not done on purpose and with intent on ranking higher. Having a trusted domain puts you in a whole other category. And it makes sense as most spammers or black hats have dupe content on weak domains. Plus if you have dupe content you will most likely hurt yourself because you will dilute your internal link juice.

1. Go to Google Maps
2. Click “put you business on Google Maps”
3. Sign in or Create an Account
4. Click “Add New Business”
5. Enter your business information
6. Click “Next”
7. If it shows your business is already on there, click “claim listing”
8. If it’s not there, click “add listing”
9. Then you can enter additional details such as business category, opening hours, photos, payment options, etc.
10. Click submit
11. At this point, you will need to verify you business by phone or postcard. After you are verified, your info will appear on Google Maps.
12. Later on, you can go back to Local Business Center to edit your information, see how many people went to your listing, or create coupons.

That’s about all there is to it. There is not a whole lot of work for what could potentially be a whole lot of exposure and added convenience for customers looking for what you offer. You should probably take a few minutes and do this. I have seen merchants make HUGE gains in sales just from a better optimized local listing!

photo credit: UrvishJ

With that I give you some predictions for the SEO world in 2009.

The economy WILL hit the SEO industry despite predicitions of growth. If businesses are cutting costs, then marketing is almost always the first to go! And if client’s cannot or will not pay their past due bills there is not much people can do about it.

This means that if you are an SEO you need to try and collect as much up front as possible when doing work. Make client’s share in the risk with you. Trust me, during these times EVERYTHING is negotiable.

Consolidation is already happening and will continue. So if you have the cash get into acquisition mode. There are so many small to medium sized companies trying to sell of right now it is ridculous. And there are so many good domains for sale at the various domain marketplaces! I am salivating. Too bad I don’t have the cash to take advantage of this.

Local search will continue to be important. It is cost effective and still pretty wide open, although its much more difficult than it was even a year ago to optimize for say, Google Local. SMBs will look to spend small amounts and local search is where that can be an effective strategy. Typically local search produces quicker resulsts which also helps its cause.

Trade show attendance will plummet. If you have ever been to a search marketing trade show then you know how crazy expensive they are.  You will start to see cheaper trade shows popup and I think that this is great news!

SEO will get more and more difficult as Google rolls out more and more updates targeting different metrics. Linking will still be uber important. But so will bounce rate, time on site, etc.

Paid Search, or PPC for short, will continue to get more and more difficult for SMBs as more big players come to the table from traditional media spends.

photo credit: MichaelMarlatt

The organic SEO consultant will become alot more active with blogging and will put up at least a post per week! Ambitous, I know.

I have news for everyone out there, not much has changed. As much propaganda as Google spreads about “paid links” and other frowned upon link building tactics, they are still the foundation of their algos. And that is not about to change now or anytime soon, if not ever. They want you to believe that it is not as important as you think it is and are willing to go so far as to try to scare you away from doing it. But make NO mistake about it, link building is still one of the MOST important factors in ranking.

Now hold on all of your webmasters and web standards proponents out there, don’t get your panties in a ruffle. I am not discounting the fact that a well designed page with valid CSS and XHTML along with a clean architecture will help you rank. It is very important to have a well designed, clean, site. It is almost as important as linking. I say almost because a well designed site with no links will not out rank, on its own, a poorly designed site with links. I think that Aaron Wall was doing a private test by setting up a super clean and strictly valid XHTML and CSS site with keyword rich content and optimized code but no linking, to see if it will rank. We, as professional search marketers know what the result will be but Aaron needed proof for all of the web design guys out there so that they will shut up already and realize that you need professional SEO to rank for competitive terms.

So the jist of the story is that linking will not be going away as one of the most important ranking factors because of how Google has based their technology. But you do also still need good optimization on site to help make the linking more effective. Of course it has been proven thousands of times over that if you only do linking you could still rank with a crappy site. Therefore link building is and I believe always will be paramount to your ranking success!

<title>Organic SEO Consultant | Professional SEO Consultant</title>

As of today I am ranking #1 & 2 for Organic SEO Consultant and #1 for Professional SEO Consultant if that tells you anything!

Well the same holds true for your URLs, you should not have too many words in them. In fact Matt Cutts has noted that any more than 5 words in a URL starts to dilute the weight.

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

So I would advise against using more than 3-5 words in your URLs. It all really boils down to not being greedy. If you try to keyword stuff Google will not like it and they have added measures over the years to combat keyword stuffing. And to boot, there has been recent study that shows short URLs get clicked on twice as much as long URLs! And there you have it, a double whammy, Google does not like long URLs and neither do users.

If you look at the sites ranking for most competitive keywords and look into the backlink profiles using a tool like Yahoo! Siteexplorer you can easily see that they are most likely buying links. Whether it be a paid directory link from Yahoo! Directory or an internal page link on Forbes.com, they are buying links. I have seen the power of the paid link and I am a believer! Ahhh, that felt good too. I have seen paid links work really really well for people and I know their power. But you must do a good amount of research in order to determine what is a good paid link and what is not. I may reveal my honored and time tested paid link analysis techniques in a later post for you, so sign up for my RSS feed, or you might miss out on some really great advice!

The results are staggering. But this organic SEO consultant already knew that the difference between #1 and #2 was gigagntic. I had a client that commanded the #1 spot for his main keyword for a very long time. Well he dropped to #2 and called me up freaking out, he said that he had lost about 40% of his business! Of course I got him back up there right away and he has been back at #1 since. I have many other stories from clients of just how much their business is affected. This study just solidifies, scientifically, what I have been preaching to clients all along. You can view the full story from SEO Researcher.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from this research and its results. When running an SEO campaign it is important to have focus. If the site you are working on has some existing rankings on pages1, 2, or even 3 and some of those terms carry some trafic with them then you need to work hard to get those terms to the top 3. Those terms are just on the cusp of seeing huge traffic gains. And it is much more reasonable to expect to move those terms to page 1 from 2 or 3 than it is to rank a term that the site is not even in the top 100 for. Focus on the terms that will bring good traffic that you can rank in the sortest amount of time. Then, once you have proven your self and provided the client with some gains and ROI, you can start to focus on the other terms.

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html

Now using descriptive URLs is typically a good thing, and I say typically because in this case it is overkill. And if the page that the URL goes to is not relevant to the URL then that is definitely not a good thing. The question that we all ask ourselves is will this trigger an algorithmic filter/flag, or will it simply be something that only a manual review would be able to notice?
photo credit: YoungBlog

He is sad because your URLs are too long.

But first, here is the basic theory of how link equity is distributed throughout your site:

Say you have 10 links on your homepage that go to internal pages in your site. That means that the link equity (juice) is divided in ten and only 10% of the authority from the homepage (which is almost always your strongest page) is sent to each of those pages equally. Now if you used the no follow tag on five of those links off the homepage that were going to pages you don’t care as much about ranking then each of the remaining five links that are followed would get 20% of the link juice! My good friend Ricardo, from eVisibility, has an excellent post with visuals to explain this (those buckets are now famous and have gotten that blog many reputable backlinks!).

This is why people use the follow tag to sculpt page rank throughout their sites. It is a a wonderful technique that has worked great for myself and for clients. However, there are people out there who feel that using the nofollow tag to sculpt your pagerank can set off some sort of red flag to Google and you can get penalized. People have even claimed that this is the reason they lost their rankings! Poppycock! Everytime a site owner loses rankings they look to place the blame on their SEO right away. When this happens to someone, they become VERY emotional and upset because losing rankings can kill your business. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” people cryout, ” that Google has so much power over my situation.” Hey everyone, Google giveth, and Google taketh away. But Google does not penalize or flag your site for using the nofollow tag. They have said repeatedly, and Matt Cutts too, that it is OK to use.

Now I believe that you should not use the nofollow tag excessively, but use it in ways that make sense. Its all about common sense folks! Use it to block Privacy Policy, Sign In, and other useless pages or links. And I only like to use it on the homepage and MAYBE some internal product/service pages. But you must always leave a link to the sitemap or the rest of your internal pages somewhere so that the spiders can index all of your pages.

In part two of this post I will discuss my findings, from stringent testing, on how Google really treats your internal links. I will debunk all of the myths and finally set things straight. I cannot divulge that info just yet as I have made and agreement to withhold our findings until we formally announce them at the San Diego Ad Club Interactive Marketing Day this coming week. Steve Peron, aka imnotadoctor, will be presenting our findings during this event and will be blogging about it over at eVisibility Insider blog as well as our own blogs.