Analyze SEO on the Go
March 4, 2010
Novel angle for SEO crossed our desk on March 3, 2010.
Pear Analytics, a San Antonio based SEO firm, has just released their mobile app, Website Analyzer, as an iPhone and soon to be iPad application. The firm’s press release describes the app as a simple tool that “analyzes any website or blog by scanning the site and a variety of data sources to determine how ‘SEO-friendly’ the site is.” The result is returned within 30 seconds as a non-technical report, and will store up to ten reports in memory, or available in e-mail form. In addition, the report includes tips on how to improve ratings or potential issues. A short video demonstration by social media guru Alan Weinkrantz can be found on YouTube.com.
Pear Analytics designed the app for clients on-the-go, including “boutique ad agencies and web development shops,” who counsel others on SEO issues. While Pear develops higher end SEO solutions, this mobile app, similar to their free online SEO Analysis tool, provides keen insight about any site in seconds. The Website Analyzer seems like a promising tool.
Sam Hartman, March 5, 2010
ArnoldIT.com paid Mr. Hartman to write this news item.
IBM: From Mainframes to SEO
February 21, 2010
IBM’s alleged mastery of SEO baffles me. I remember hearing a talk several years ago from another IBM professional . I think the person’s name was Morano, Morone or Morrano (not Murano, that’s the glass place near Venice). I blanked out of the talk because IBM makes life really tough for me to locate information on its Web site. An outfit with an almost unusable search system is not going to have much credibility lecturing me about getting indexed in Google. I received via my trusty Overflight service a snippet pointing me to Writing for Digital. This blog ran an article I found darned remarkable. The story, which I urge you to read, is “Case Study: 2 Kinds of Organic Search Competition.” I am not “into” search engine optimization. I am into creating what I think is useful content for myself. If others read what I develop, okay with me. If others don’t read my information, okay with me. I am in the minority, but I think more folks should create original information and skip the SEO work that fascinates so many experts.
Several comments about this write up:
First, it uses the phrase “link juice” as a tag. I am not sure how many experts, even the SEO experts, use the phrase “link juice” when searching. In the database business, we would use unusual terms to keep tabs on wily vendors. Humans, nope?
Second, presumably “link juice” is in line with the author’s recommendations for high value SEO. This passage caught my attention:
One of the principles of our book is to do keyword research before you begin to even concept, let alone produce a Web page. In the old days, this didn’t happen very often on marketing pages. Traditionally, the messaging for a campaign was determined and the framework for the campaign’s Web copy was written before the search experts were brought in to choose the best keywords for it. That made it difficult to attain tight relevance between the copy and the keywords—leading to poor organic search performance.
Yep, “link juice” matches this info.
Third, how much work is required to get a $100 billion outfit’s boss indexed. Obviously a whole lot. Consider this passage:
Every speech by Sam Palmisano receives a lot of media attention, with good reason. So, the landing page was linked to by such media outlets as BusinessWeek, and others. It had blog mentions galore, including ReadWriteWeb, and others. Within two weeks of the speech, the landing page had more external link equity than all but the most central pages in ibm.com, which have link equity mostly by virtue of the pages in ibm.com that link to them, not as much by external links. After a few weeks, the speech landing page had more external link equity than all but a handful of pages in ibm.com.
In my deep experience as an addled goose, I think this is more craziness than this addled goose can tolerate. You may be different. That’s what makes goose races so exciting.
In short, I encourage you to follow in IBM’s footsteps is you [a] have a $100 billion revenue stream at your back, [b] Provide an almost unusable Web site to the hapless folks looking for documentation for an IBM device requiring a FRU, and [c] are trying to cook up a reputation as a guru in a field that is filled with land mines, potholes, and engineers who prefer clean code and original content.
Wowza! Why not make some changes to IBM.com and provide substantive content?
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I suppose I should report non payment to the GSA. IBM just landed a big contract to fix up the GSA’s computer systems. I will probably send my inputs to an IBM system which will certainly work like most IBM search systems.
The Wages of SEO
February 4, 2010
A not so happy quack to the reader who sent me a long, long diatribe by SEO guru Daniel Sullivan, father of the mega-search engine optimization conferences. These are held seemingly every few days in every city around the world. Fearful marketing managers and snake oil sales professionals meet and greet in a unbridled mating game. The idea is that a fearful marketing manager with lousy Web traffic will speed date SEO experts, and both will go off to click through bliss. Well, that’s the theory.
Let me give you the cast of characters:
- Daniel Sullivan, search expert, SEO guru, and father of giant, zealot-stuffed conferences
- Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, Google critic and basketball team owner with an investment in Mahalo, IceRocket and other properties
- Jason Calacanis, entrepreneur, business seer, and New Yorker who nurtures Mahalo.com, a conference, and a snazzy electric sports car
- Google. Yes, the Google that is the bane of Rupert Murdoch and other publishing executives obsessed with “real journalism” and pay walls.
My goodness. This line up is like a modern version of a Greek drama. Each character is larger than life itself.
You will want to read “He Calls Google A Vampire, But Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Is Doing The Sucking.” I quite liked the screen shots, the red arrows, and the description of the SEO tricks identified by the master himself. If you have some trouble figuring out who is the bad guy in this analysis, you are with me. The basic idea behind the write up is that a basketball team owner is not happy with Google. The basketball team owner sees Google as a company profiting on the labor of others. The SEO guru is annoyed that the basketball team owner has invested in the New Yorker’s search company that uses the SEO methods taught at the SEO guru’s conferences to generate money.
In the write up, the savvy New Yorker (Brooklyn, in fact) is an alleged villain. The write up explains in great detail the SEO tricks used by the New Yorker to generate money via Google’s monetization programs. Keep in mind that these tactics are part of the warp and woof of the SEO guru’s conferences.
The “vampire” Google wants traffic and, therefore, wants to get as many people clicking within the Google world as possible. Web site owners want to ride the money train too, so Web site owners need SEO. The SEO guru delivers the goods; that is, methods for spoofing Google.
What we have in the write up is a description of the feedback loop that has made Web search less effective over the last three or four years in my experience. I can’t figure out who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Maybe the cast of characters, like Greek mythological figures, are a mix of good and evil, deeply conflicted, and sufficiently confused to make really bad mistakes. Remember Orpheus, Sisyphus, et al?
I know a fix.
Why not log on to a social networking system and post a question. You may have a better chance of getting a useful result just asking people. Search is broken. SEO has played a role. Move on.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
Criticism of Google and the MFA (Made for AdSense) Site
January 20, 2010
Quite an acronym MFA. Even more interesting is that Google is now aiding and abetting the killer of content quality—Demand Media. The search engine optimization crowd is running out of tricks. The adaptation is for consultants and entrepreneurs to get into the content game. Read “The Death of the Professional, Brought to You by Google” and you can decide for yourself if Google is making it easy for content factories to control search results. I did a report for a client about Demand Media, and I think there are some interesting upsides and downsides the company’s approach. I cannot reveal the details of our research in a free, marketing oriented blog, but I can highlight a passage in the Search Engine Guide article and offer several comments. For me, here’s the passage I noted:
If your content is good the visitors have less reason to click the AdSense ads. For the most part the visitor has found what they want and are satisfied. That’s not to say that only bad content gets ad clicks, it’s not, but the more lackluster the content, the AdSense ads provide a way to something more promising. And who get’s paid every time an AdSense ad is clicked? The site running the ads gets a percentage, but the lion’s share go to Google. Because Google controls 70+% of the natural search results and the ads on the side, they essentially have a vested interest in helping companies like Demand Media succeed. The more MFA content that comes up in the search results, the more Google gets paid.
The SEO crowd profited from its collective ability to spoof Google. Google has cracked the SEO problem to some degree and created a content play. The Google will chip away at this problem and then find itself faced with another problem. The reason is that folks unable to create magnetic sites and compelling content want an easy way out.
Think back to your English 101 class. How much time did most of the students spend writing their obligatory essays? How many of those were any good? I had to grade and comment on these papers when I was desperate for money in grad school. My recollection is that the crap on the Internet is about the same as the crap in those freshman essays.
Why not blame Google for that situation as well? Better yet, why not improve writing instruction so that the crap generated for outfits like Demand Media gets better. Last time I checked most people find writing difficult and time consuming. Neither a powerhouse like Google or a Web play like Demand Media can do much about this aspect of reality and the authoring process in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January XX, 2010
A no-one-paid-me article. Because it is about writing, I will this painful fact to the House of Representatives where writing great prose is job one.
IBM and Its SEO Guru
January 5, 2010
I read an unusual write up on the DCDCQ.com Web site. No, I don’t know what the domain name means. The article was called “SEO in China Will Never Be the Same as Google’s James Mi, Adverted’s Stephen Noton and IBM’s Bill Hu [sic]”. The article explains how to get a site on the first page of a results list. I find this type of intentional manipulation annoying and usually misleading. But there are some folks who want to put more effort into spoofing algorithms than creating substantive content and providing information of high quality on a particular topic. It takes all kinds. I was going to blow off the article until one section made me laugh.
Here’s the passage that stopped me in my tracks:
The finial speaker, Hunt, might just be the most experienced SEO person on this panel because, china, unlike Noton (who headed to Asia to work with more startups and the upcoming corporate elite) is based, china, in the US and works with the current corporate elite including being the man behind IBM’s Search Engine Optimization success. Hunt’s talk involved him showing some of, China, the work he’s done with IBM, which really complimented, China, the other speakers. Hunt showed how changing text in images into pure text and how proper navigation and title tags can make a clients site like IBM grow from being in the top 100 to being #1 within 3 short weeks.
What! Several years ago at the Boston search engine meeting, there was a presentation by an IBM search engine guru that made zero sense to me. I had one of my goslings follow up with this person on a technical matter and she reported that he had zero clue about search and content processing.
Now we have a Web site that I have pointed out as essentially non functional used as an example of great SEO. Yo, dude. I don’t care what country is the searcher’s home base. I know that if I cannot locate information about a specific IBM product or service, the Web presence is fatally flawed. The notion that IBM can become the number one result for Web queries is interesting but essentially not supported in my experience.
Wow. The New Year is off to an amazing SEO start from IBM. Number one with a bullet. Try this query: “content management system”. Keep in mind that IBM owns FileNet, iPhrase, and other CMS systems. Scan the result list. No IBM on the first page, right? IBM is number one in the query “mainframe right after the Wikipedia entry.
Stephen E. Arnold, January 2, 2010
Full disclosure: A freebie. I shall report to Defense Field Activities when the government opens for the new year.
Computerworld Does SEO the Holiday Way
December 16, 2009
I enjoy irreverence. This addled goose often practices the art, taken his yoga map to the side of the mine run off pond and stretching amidst the acid fumes in Harrod’s Creek. Unfortunately getting indexed in a search engine is a stress inducer. In fact, if an organization is not in Google, that organization may not exist for some customers and prospects. Not surprisingly, making certain a Web site is Google friendly is important and to some organizations no laughing matter.
If your Web site is an also ran in the Google engine results list when you search for your product or firm, you may enjoy “Ten Tips to Make Sure Your Firm Is Ranked by Search Engines.” The idea is that 10 tips for good SEO are packaged in holiday wrap; for example, “Build new toys” is a token for your firm giving Googzilla money for AdWords in order to promote your Web site.
How useful are these 10 tips? I think more effort was invested in creating the holiday bon most than focusing on specific recommendations to readers. Missing from the list are several tips that, in the goose’s experience, are semi useful in making sure that Googzilla indexes a Web site and generates a results list ranking that does not embarrass.
Here are our tips and no faux holiday cheer is needed for these. The goose lacks the literacy polish of the Computerworld wordsmiths:
- Have substantive content that uses concrete words and phrases. Google sucks at poetry, so crunchy words are better than phrases like “Test run on the sleigh”. Google likes the notion of semantic vectors. The goose is not sure about sleighs.
- Make certain that the pages you expose to the Googlebot comply with Google’s Webmaster guidelines. Microsoft and Yahoo sort of track Google’s suggestions, and you may want to follow along.
- Obtain legitimate backlinks that relate to the content on your site.
In short, read the Computerworld piece for some seasonal joy. For some pragmatic SEO, follow the goose’s recommendations.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 16, 2009
Oyez, oyez, National Archives. You need to know I was not paid to point out that the deathless prose of Computerworld was created by someone who was paid for the 10 tips. The goose was not paid anything. Which write up do you think should be placed in the National Archives? I vote for the goose’s.
Google and Mobile Index Tricks
November 24, 2009
I am steadfastly against the search engine optimization baloney. However, when a substantive article finds its way to me I want to call my two or three readers’ attention to that write up. If you have a Web site with both a “regular” Web presence and a “mobile” version, you will want to read and save “Ensuring Your Site is Indexed in Google’s Mobile Search”. The article reminded me that “regular” search and mobile search are different. Then Chris Crum goes through the specifics of getting both the “regular” and the mobile sites indexed by Googzilla. Highly recommended.
Stephen Arnold, November 24, 2009
I want to alert the Kentucky State Police that I did not write this article on my BlackBerry whilst driving. And, almost as important, I was not paid for performing this act of “safe text creation”. These disclosures are better than hitting a Catholic church for confession several times a day.
SEO Tool Run Down
November 23, 2009
Hope springs eternal in the Webmaster’s breast. The Google keeps fiddling with its relevance ranking and causing those who depend on Google traffic to struggle with caffeine induced headaches. For readers who worry about their Google rank, you will want to navigate to “SEO Search Tools You Should Not Live Without”. There are useful links for:
- Keyword research tools
- Site check tools
- Link tools
- Ranking tools
- Analytics tools.
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the SEO. My apologies to Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
I wish to disclose to the US Coast Guard that I was not paid to write about SEO or denigrate the writer’s use of the word “sea”.
Google and Infoserve
November 23, 2009
Short honk: In my new video series, “How to Make Money with Google,” I mention the risks of working with Google. In the partnering video that will be released on November 25, 2009, I point out that Google can change direction without much warning. A good example of this characteristic for one-sided action appears in “Google Blow for Infoserv”. Infoserve will not be a Google partner for much longer. If the write up is accurate, Infoserve will have to work to generate revenue growth. The divorce has had a somewhat downward trending financial impact on Infoserve.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
Securities House, oyez. No one paid me to write this pointer to a case example of Googzilla’s power.
Getting in the Google Index
November 11, 2009
I read “Q and A: Why Doesn’t Google Index My Entire Site?. After two days of meetings at a company working to generate Web traffic, this question was apropos to me. I have concluded that if a Web site is not in Google, that Web site may be quite difficult to find. Microsoft and Yahoo offer Web indexes, and these companies make an effort to be competitive with Google. The operative word is “competitive”. Quite a few people rely on what Google displays and remain content to stick with a Google result set. Running the same query on multiple search engines may not be some searchers’ idea of fun.
What I found interesting about the article was the suggestions for getting a site in the Google index. Let me outline two of the suggestions and offer several observations.
- “Add all your pages to your XML sitemap and change all the priority tags from 1 “ The site map is important. Quite a few sites rely on an auto generated site map. Some auto generation programs are good; some, not so good.
- “Open a Google Webmaster Tools account and verify your site. You’ll be able to see exactly how many pages of your site Google has indexed and when Googlebot last visited. If Google is having trouble indexing the site, you’ll learn about it and be given advice for how to fix it.” Another good suggestion.
Several observations:
- Some Web sites are coded with errors. Errors, even small ones in capitalization in style sheets, can create some issues. Accurate coding should be a priority.
- Writing and content. Lots of text does not immediately translate to an improved position in a Google result list. Content, urls, and tags should be cut from the same semantic cloth. Getting words that generate a tidy semantic vector takes work and time. The effort can pay off.
- Backlinks. A change in the Google indexing method is approaching. There will be dislocations and some unexpected ranking alterations. One way to prepare for the shift is to have quality in bound links to your Web site. Backlink tricks can backfire. Quality backlinks are important.
Are you ready for the Google indexing tweak?
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2009
Don Anderson made me buy him lunch. I disclose that it cost me money to write this article. Federal Research, do you have your ears on?
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