So without further ado, here are the 31 questions he proposed, with my answers inserted:

1. What does SEO stand for? Usually it stands for Search Engine Optimization, but it is often used also for Search Engine Optimizer.  This can get somewhat confusing - an SEO who practices SEO - so I prefer to call SEOs “SEO specialists”.  (Not “SEO experts”, but that’s another rant for another day.)
2. What is SEO? I define SEO as the combination of steps that lead to improved (higher) rankings in the search engines’ organic (non-paid) listings.
3. Is SEO spam, bullshit, dead etc.? No, but if you expect it to be science, you will likely think it is all of the above.  SEO is much more sport than science - multiple players competing for specific, limited rankings for each keyword.  Think about all the goes into a sports champion - drive, training, strength, agility, equipment, discipline, player size, nutrition, coaching, funding, concentration, massage therapy…  Neither the team that wins the Stanley Cup nor the athlete who brings home the gold medal for diving is tops for all these factors.  The champion is the one that assembles the best combination.  No matter how well you and your competitors do SEO, there will always be ten websites in the top ten.  No matter how poorly  you and your competitors do SEO, there will always be ten websites in the top ten.   Somebody will always be tops - in tennis, in boxing, in bowling and in SEO; you just have to be better than each of your opponents.  

 

SEO is a sport.  Just like bowling, only less dangerous.

4. Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? Because somebody else is.  Read the answer to Question #3 above.
5. Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Often people searching from different computers are sending different geographic data to the search engines (such as a different location for a person’s home and workplace ISP).  Or there are elements of personal search enabled.  Or your wife lives in a different time zone.
6. When will we see results? You start a new softball team with all rookies, no equipment, no training, no funding, no discipline, no muscles and no massage therapist.  Then you hire an experienced coach (an SEO specialist).  How long does it take to win the championship?  I have found many clients want to know exactly when they will achieve a certain position, and then they will own it.  Just as the team that stops playing baseball will fall in the standings, so too the website that stops doing SEO will fall in the rankings.
7. Can we rank for iPhones? Yes.  You can rank at least 2,112,888 for iphones at most search engines with very little effort.  If you want to rank #1 for iphones, you will need:

- lots of money

- lots of time

- lots of strategy

Why?  Please read the answer to Question #3 again.

8. Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? Yes, some countries take home Olympic medals in a wide variety of sports.  But most countries take home medals in just a few sports where they have chosen to concentrate.  In the land of Internet, deciding how big a country you are - or can realistically be - is an important strategic decision.  Indeed, if you hire an SEO specialist, he should be able to help you make that call.  Just remember, the more searches you want to rank for, and the more competitive those searches are, the deeper pockets you will need.
9. How much does SEO cost?  How much does a baseball coach cost?  The little league team down by the park pays their coach with a big High Five after every game.  Rumor has it the New York Mets pay theirs slightly more.  It all depends on what you are competing against, how determined or entrenched your competitors are, and how good an SEO specialist you wish to hire.
10. Why is SEO so expensive? It’s not.  SEO is an investment that earns you money.  But if you plan to invest just $200/month in SEO, don’t expect to see any ROI during your lifetime.
11. How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Just a few minutes, but really the practical answer is that it doesn’t matter.
12. How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.?  I can’t answer any better than Tad did in the original meme post: “You don’t submit sites to search engines these days. You link to them from already indexed sites, you ping them via blog posts and or you submit an XML sitemap.”
13. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? By allowing yourself to get sucked in by a scammer.  It’s actually quite easy, and really quite painless because they only fleece you for a small amount and you learn such a valuable lesson.
14. Do I need an XML sitemap? Most sites do not.  Generally, only sites with thousands of pages spread multiple levels deep really need them.
15. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Meta tags have nothing to do with SEO, unless you need to instruct the search engines not to index or to follow a certain page (which is better done via a robots.txt file). Meta tags are still a good idea  (to increase click-through rates, to get listed in some directories, etc.), but they are not a requirement for SEO.
16. Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? The tighter the competition for your searches, the more important every factor is, including a high PageRank and the size of your site (I added site size for the benefit of visitors from Question 27).  Please reread the answer to Question #3. PageRank is one factor, probably a fairly important one, but there are many others that are extremely important, too.  (Related post on why PR0 links are sometimes worthwhile)
17. What is linkbait? It is any content you put on your site in the hopes that some other websites will link to it.  Interesting history about this.  The proper name for it is “magnetic content”, a name I gave to it before someone more famous than me started calling it link-bait and now I won’t get the movie rights.
18. Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? Absolutely.  Why just last week I asked my brother-in-law, the plumber, to flush out my arteries.
19. Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Absolutely.  Why just last week I asked my brother-in-law, the plumber, to flush out my arteries.
20. Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? You really are not getting this, right?  SEO is a specialty that requires both planning in advance and judgment calls on the fly.  I have seen situations where any of these people have made unfortunate judgment calls that have gotten websites banned from Google or Yahoo because they thought they knew SEO (In fact, they did know SEO, or at least 20% or 30% of it, and a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.).
21. Why should I outsource my SEO? It’s pretty much a full-time job to keep up on the changing landscape of the web.  Outsourcing or having a dedicated in-house team are your best two options.
22. Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? Can’t I just buy good hockey equipment for my team?  Please, please reread Question #3..
23. Does Google hate SEO?  I like Tad’s answer in the original meme post, so this is what he said: “No, Google even offers SEO advice and a plethora of SEO tools itself. It’s an ages old myth that Google fight SEOs. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners. Most SEO companies are big clients of Google as they also buy PPC ads from Google.”
24. Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? First, what Tad said: “Some people still assume that SEO is used to please search bots only. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for users.” Next, let me add that an important part of SEO these days is drumming up interest in your content so that you get talked about on blogs and in social media (and in offline media).  While speaking to the search engines’ algorithms is crucial, you ignore human beings at your peril.  You might also want to refer to my SEO thesaurus post.
25. Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? I consider them all black hat, except buying links.  I very rarely recommend purchasing a link, partly because the “purchase” is in fact a rental.  And partly because the search engines frown on it, which is a bone I have to pick with the search engines (but that’s another rant for another day).
26. Is black hat SEO legal? Yes.  So are evil-looking smiles and teensy-weensy fine print.  I don’t practice black hat SEO because I value my clients’ long-term welfare, but it’s not illegal.
27. Does site size matter? Yes.  See the answer to Question 16 for elaboration.
28. Do domain extensions (top level domains  like .com, co.uk) matter? For the most part, I do not believe TLDs make a difference.  But if your business targets the clientele of a certain country, they do.  I have a number of Canadian clients, and having a .ca TLD makes a big difference ranking at Google.ca .  TLD matters even more for increasing your click-through rate. If you plan to serve Hungarians, you had better have a .hu TLD, or you won’t get anyone to even click on your site.  In Latin America, .com often says “impressive and credible International website”; in Europe .com often says ‘Yuck, an American site.”
29. Do nofollow links count? Yes, they count less than DoFollow links because they don’t pass on PageRank.  PageRank is something, but it is not everything.  Please refer to the answer to Question 16 and also to this NoFollow/DoFollow post.
30. Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? No.  Why not re-read the answer to Question 13?
31. Is blog commenting for SEO spam? This has been debated widely and bloggers are all over the map on this.  On my blog, I look almost exclusively at the quality of the comment and what it adds to the conversation.  Only if the comment is borderline will I consider whether the name makes the comment spammyish or not (So John Block has a better chance of having his comment approved than John the Florida Villas Guy, but if he makes a really great contribution to the discussion, John the Florida Villas Guy is welcome here) .

One final note…if others in this meme wish to link to this page, please do so and let me know, so I can also link back to your answers and connect the meme participants.  SEO is not a science, so there are certainly many items where different specialists will offer different strategies and therefore different answers to a number of these questions.

Comments

If you’ve ever wondered why Wikipedia consistently shows up in the top 10 search results, then the referential landing page type should be of interest. When you consider that Google’s original goal was to catalog the world’s information, and to deliver relevant results, Wikipedia goes a long way to making this possible. Its pages are full of information, which may be disputed at times, but is generally in-depth about its topic matter. As a reference landing page, Wikipedia organizes itself in a way that gets read, with a brief abstract at the top and deeper material down below. There are also images on the right if they are appropriate. For reference landing pages, the old adage that “content is king” is still true, assuming that Google, Bing, or Yahoo trust the rest of the site enough to cite its pages.

Transactional landing pages, however, are what turn visitors into buyers. A Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) landing page is almost always transactional, and has just enough information to get the customer moving. It has clear calls to action, above the fold reinforcement, and plenty of trust indicators (like HackerSafe and BBB logos) designed to reduce Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (AKA “FUD”) while encouraging the customer to start the shopping process.

When it comes to SEO, there is a conflict which is usually addressed by creating a hybrid between reference and transactional landing pages. This is done by making sure calls to action are near the top of the page, while SEO elements and reference content are closer to the bottom of the design. In a manner of speaking, the search engine should like the page enough to get the reader to visit, but the visitor should be so enchanted by the transactional calls to action that the information (which got the visitor there) is basically ignored or forgotten. A side benefit of having hybrid pages is that people who want to know more about the product or service will actually read the content and stay on the site longer, and may bookmark it. Additionally, using a hybrid page as a PPC landing page may improve your quality score because more keyword variations are being covered on the page.

Testing these hybrid pages creates a special challenge that is unavailable to the person who creates transactional landing pages especially for PPC. For one thing, A/B testing on a hybrid page raises the specter of duplicate content or cloaking, since you may be using specialized tools to present different versions of the same page. Most of the time, A/B Testing and its cousin Multivariate testing are done on pages that are not in the normal path of search engine spiders. This kind of testing can also cause problems for classic SEO types, who need to be sure that controls are in place for content and tags, so the search engine won’t be seeing too much (or tool little) keyword content relative to the title and inbound links.

The best possible solution to design for hybrid pages is to use known conversion factors from tested PPC landing pages and try to emulate that information at the top of the landing page. As a caveat, there should also be a follow-up call to action below the fold, or at the bottom of the content, so interested readers won’t jump off to another page before being reminded of the site’s value proposition.

From an SEO standpoint, referential pages will almost always have a head up in search engine rankings. Many people in web design prefer to present pages in a transactional manner, along with graphic design elements which may not be helpful for search engine spiders. SEO consultants have an obligation to educate their customers on a balanced approach to page design, since it is the sales off the website that generally justify the consultant’s continued retention. Although it is not always easy to explain that “people can’t criticize the appearance of your site if they can’t find it,” a blended approach between information and action can generally soothe the client once they see a lower bounce rate, higher quality score, or more sales as a result of an SEO strategy that brings visitors who turn into conversions.

Comments

Hello Bill,
You have a very informative site and thank you for being there for us.

I recently purchased an expired domain name to take advantage of it’s many incoming links. There were a few hundred and “subject specific” for the most part with it and my current active website.
Well I did the redirect deal and now when I go to linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com on yahoo.com, neither the domain I purchased nor mine have the links related to them.

What happened ???

Duane C Long

PHOTOGRAPHER
www.DuaneLongphoto.com

Hi Duane,

There are a few problems with how the 301 Permanent Redirect is set up. Here is what I found:

While the redirect is set up, it’s only set up for the site’s home page. If you go to http://www.photoshop-forums.com/ it DOES redirect. However, the majority of the links to that domain name are links to pages on the site (to pages other than the home page). And when you go to one of those pages, there’s a problem: the pages other than the home page don’t redirect.

Here’s an example: http://www.photoshopcafe.com/cafe/viewthread.php?tid=10604&page=1

That link does not redirect properly. You’ll need to set up those redirects properly. Most likely you’ll need to get another web host where you have more control over the redirects and the type of redirects (Godaddy’s redirect “service” isn’t really a proper 301 Permanent Redirect, it does a 302 redirect to another URL and then a 301 Permanent Redirect). There’s also a way to set it up so that every page on the other domain (even pages that you didn’t know existed) get redirected properly, kind of a “catch all” for everything.

The other issue is that I don’t think you’ve waited long enough. One week is usually not long enough for the site to get crawled and the search engines to give you “credit” for the redirect. One tell-tale sign that Google, for example, may not see the redirect yet is the fact that when you search Google for the domain name (photoshop-forums.com), Google is showing the old home page in their search results. Until they show the other domain that you’re redirecting it to Google may not be giving you the full credit you deserve. The key here is patience, some times it just takes some time, I would give it a full month to make sure that all of the search engines recognize the 301 Permanent Redirects, and some search engines like Yahoo!, may still have some issues with it, as Yahoo! just doesn’t deal with redirects the way Google does.

For future reference, I would have done the following to make sure that you get the proper “link credit” for the 301 Permanent Redirect:

Check the backlinks. Do a “link domain:domain.com -site:domain.com” search at Yahoo! and physically check the backlinks. Make sure that those links are pointing to the domain you own (or the one you want to buy). There are programs and scripts that will crawl the links to make sure they are still there (like OptiLink), which may be helpful to you or at least speed up the process. Make sure that the domain you’re buying (or domain you’re going to redirect) wasn’t itself redirected. That’s important, because the backlinks you’re seeing might actually be the backlinks of another domain name. Make note of any important links that are linking so pages other than the home page.

Get ahold of the domain name and put the old content back up on the site (if you have access to it). Some people might go as far as taking the old content from the Wayback Machine or a search engine’s cached copy of it. There may be issues with using the content, though, so just make sure that you have the proper permission before you do that.

Set up web hosting for the domain. Don’t use a ‘free’ or other “cheap” web hosting, as you may not have access to the site’s log files (which I’ll get to later) and you may not have access to edit the site’s .htaccess file (which is very important to make sure that you can do the proper redirects).

After you have content on the domain that you want to redirect, wait at least a week or two in order to make sure that the search engines are indexing the domain name’s new content. At this point, you may even want to get a few new links to the domain name in order to “help out” the search engines’ crawling and indexing process.

Since you now have ahold of the domain name, watch the website’s stats (based on the log files, not some JavaScript counter like Google Analytics) and make not of any URLs that have 404 errors, as there may be traffic and links pointing to those URLs. You might want to put content on those old URLs, as well, even if it’s not the old content. If there’s a link pointing to an interior page on the site (an interior page is a page other than the home page), then you’ll want to make sure that that URL is indexed again by the search engines. Make note of the URLs on the site that have traffic (you can find them by watching for 404 errors).

Once you’re confident that the site you’re going to redirect has been ‘revived’ in the search engines’ indexes and the pages are showing Google PageRank again, you’ll want to wait another week or two. I prefer to wait at least a month two. Perhaps even longer than that. I usually will spend some time getting a few new links to the site, as well.

Set up the redirects. If there are URLs that you’ve noted before that have important links (like links to pages other than the home page), you’ll want to set up a 301 Permanent Redirect from those URLs to wherever you’re redirecting the traffic. If at all possible, look at the former content of the page that you’re redirecting and redirect that page to another page on another site that has similar content. Don’t redirect everything to the site’s home page. There is a limit to how many pages you can redirect, and I try to keep it under 100 if possible. I prefer only to set up redirects that are “catch all” redirects (like redirecting every page request on a domain to another site) if we’re dealing with a LOT of domains. Otherwise, it’s best to target the traffic as best as you can when you’re redirecting a URL.

It’s important to note that using a “service” like Godaddy’s redirect service is not preferred. Currently, as of this writing, Godaddy does a redirect that’s a 302 redirect to another URL and then they redirect it again with a 301 Permanent Redirect. In this case, it appears that Godaddy is only redirecting traffic from the old site’s home page, and not other URLs that are requested. Those are resulting in 404 errors. Therefore, the site you’re redirecting to is not getting credit for those other URLs, where the majority of the links are pointing to on the site. In this case, I would not use Godaddy’s redirection, I would set up the proper web hosting with another web host and use the .htaccess file to do the redirects.

Duane, I hope this answers your question as to why you’re not getting the proper “credit” for the links. While you’re redirecting, you’re not getting the proper “link credit” because the links are pointing to pages other than the home page (and those pages aren’t getting redirected) and you haven’t waited long enough: Google, for example, is still currently showing indexing of the old home page.

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Comments

Yep. I got three screens full of that jibberish. My first inclination was to hit reply and tell them something was wrong with their newsletter. And guess what their reply email was? You guessed it. It said no-reply@theirdomain.com. I sent it anyway. Made me feel better.

So here’s a lesson for you.

1. Always test your newsletter before you send it to your clients and prospects. There’s no guarantee that your newsletter will look exactly the same to them, but you’ve got a good shot.

2. Have your “reply to” address be a real live address. You’ll learn wonderful things from your subscribers if they can reply to you.

In my fourteen years online, I’ve tried a few newsletter services (that’s an understatement and a story for another day!). A few years ago, I finally found one that seems to be a keeper because it’s not just an online newsletter service.

It’s an engagement magnet.

It’s called aweber and it helps me keep in touch with a lot of people. It’s versatile and has tons of options to meet the needs of pretty much any small business.

If you’re looking for just the right service to help you keep in touch, aweber may just be the ticket for you. (And they have super simple testing options too so you’ll never be embarrassed like my friends above!)

Do you have more lessons for sending online newsletters? Leave your thoughts below.

Comments

This post outlines the method used to set up Google analytics so that you can analyze the search phrase and domain that traffic has come through while your account is linked to Google Adwords using auto tagging. Currently using auto-tagging hides the actual search phrase and referrer domain behind the SE keyword and the source ‘Google’.

This involves setting up a separate profile that filters the same data to display it slightly differently. Strongly recommend leaving the main profile untouched as applying filters may permanently adjust the information in the profile and you will not be able to get this back. Its a good idea to have the main profile as an unfiltered ‘control’ profile.

Steps Overview

1. Set up a profile to track the search phrase in the user defined field
2. Set up a profile to track the referrer domain in the user defined field and referrer URL in the content field.
3. Remove all manual tagging from Google campaigns (GKW, utm_xxx)
4. Ensure analytics and adwords accounts are linked
5. Ensure analytics imports cost data
6. Turn on auto tagging
7. Audit and verify it is working correctly

1. Set up a profile to track the search phrase in the user defined field

Within Google analytics there is a manually set ‘User Defined’ field that you can segment and view sets of traffic on. This allows you to view a parameter that you set in the same manner as you can view the top keyword or campaign reports. To do this in separate profile follows the following steps.

Add a website profile using the same domain.

Add a filter to the new profile as follows from the profile settings page.

Add a filter to the new profile as follows from the profile settings page.

The referral field above holds the value: (\?|&)(q|p|query|kw|searchfor|wd)=([^&]*)

This filter is effectively stripping out the keyword where the referrer URL contains a parameter called ‘q’ or ‘p’ or ‘query’ or ‘kw’ or ’searchfor’ or ‘wd’. Each search engine has it’s own parameter although ‘q’ is the most popular. If you discover a search partner that uses a different parameter other than those above then you can add it to the settings above.

This profile should now start to collect information but will not have access to old data.

You can view adwords and normal campaign traffic correctly in the regular screens and then drill down into the actual search phrase as follows:

OR view the search phrases directly in the Visitors>User-Defined Menu.

2. Set up a profile to track the referrer domain in the user defined field and referrer URL in the content field

Repeat all the steps above to set up another profile. The only difference is the filters that should be set. Set the following filters:

1. Filter to put the referrer domain in the User-Defined field.

. Filter to put the referrer domain in the User-Defined field.

The referral field above contains the following text (so you can paste in): (//)([^/]*)

2. Filter to put the actual referrer URL in the content field. (this will overwrite the content value that auto tagging puts in to give you access to the actual web page that referred the traffic.

3. Remove all manual tagging from Google campaigns (GKW, utm_xxx)

Important note – when auto tagging is switched on it will cause problems if you also manually tag your URLs. For all adwords traffic only you should therefore remove all of the utm_ and GKW parameters from all of you destination URLs. This will also make setting up campaigns a lot easier.

Hope this information is useful to every marketers.