Battle for the Planets? The Difference is more Power Rangers.

Organic keyword research focuses on traffic, looking for quality descriptors for the products, service, or content offered to the visitor. These descriptors are filtered for the search phrases that are the best fitting and for “low-hanging fruit,” ones with low competition and high value to the business.

However, strategies for paid research must be different, because the mediums are used in a different way. In addition to search traffic, competition and metrics that might be overlooked or generalized, like average CPC, must be included in the research. Furthermore, these three additional discovery strategies can help create a more robust keyword profile.

Three Keyword Discovery Strategies

General

Unlike in organic search, general keywords play a central role. Organic keywords, especially for businesses, tend to be of the general pattern *geographic area* *keyword*. However, because a paid search campaign can geotarget its ads, any search using the non-geomodified keyword from the targeted area would also trigger the ad. Thus, someone in Montana searching {window cleaner} will see ads targeted to Montana Window Cleaner.

General keywords focusing on the domain name and business name are also useful for brand marketing. There is a bit of a debate over whether PPC clicks cannibalize organic clicks for this kind of keyword. A few theories and strategies have arisen, with of course the best answer being “What’s best for you,” though problems can arise with attribution.

Long-Tail

Long-tail keywords, searches like {cost of criminal lawyer} or {home security free installation}, while relatively low traffic, are specific searches that strengthen the depth of the research. This way, deep searches you wouldn’t optimize for organic search can be explored and taken advantage of. These deep searches are largely of two types, researching and buying. Phrases like {cost of …}, {buy …},  or client-specific long-tail terms like car models can be used to serve ads leveraging the search intent of the viewer.

Match Types

The three match types are Broad, [Exact], and “Phrase.” These three types are even more important to the research than for organic search, as it can affect CPC.

Broad keywords would trigger on longer-tail searches, synonyms, common misspellings, and word reversals. The broad keyword Criminal Lawyer would show ads on the queries {criminal law}, {attorney for criminal case}, or {criminal lawyer new orleans}.

To save on CPC, [Exact] keywords will run ads on the keywords only in that order, so [criminal lawyer] would trigger on the searches {cost of criminal lawyer} but not {lawyer for criminal case}.

“Phrase” Keywords display ads solely on the phrase entered. The keyword “criminal lawyer new orleans” would show solely on that term, and none others. This one is less necessary for PPC research.

Facebook and Display

The final addendum for any PPC keyword research is that you have to take into account for display ads, whether through Adsense or social media platforms. These ads, though not for paid search, are the bread and butter for retargeting and remarketing or brand awareness. Approaching this match types as keywords may not yield much, but treating broad keywords as categories or thinking laterally and approaching the keywords from demographics and related interests could solidify a bland targeting spectrum.

With the “reimagining” of Keyword Research strategies focused around these three concepts (and one quick point), your ROI will skyrocket from the CTR and quality score increases that come with a well-curated keyword list. What tricks have you used to get the most out of your keywords?

Flash forward to now — I’ve had a whopping year of intensive exposure and training in Internet Marketing: found out what Facebook is really for; why Google might not even find the site I’m looking for; what Google is doing in my status bar, even if I typed in the url; how Google’s ads knew exactly what I typed; that Google’s rankings are always in a state of flux; and even how I like to see the pages I visit. In short, entering this job totally changed how I look at the web.

And I’m happier for it. Sure, people are always trying to create some kind of “Google is Watching You” zeitgeist, whether through their use of AdBlock and Ghostery, or by bringing up the problems Google’s had with European trade officials, or how much Google’s search results have changed since the last time they noticed. People seem to be concerned that someone’s watching their online habits specifically. But I’m now the person who’s watching, and I know how and why I’m doing it.

Is this who's looking at your browsing habits?

To be fair, everyone who’s “invading” privacy is watching online habits. It’s easy to say it’s on a “macro” level, but it’s harder to convince some people that it’s more like an ant farm than an investigation. For internet marketers, not only is it simply not profitable to look at the individual, but it’s becoming less feasible and less legal to do so.

Firstly, targeted marketing based on internet behavior isn’t an unregulated free-for-all on your personal information. 2009 brought a proposal from the FTC for seven “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising,” outline in this Interactive Advertising Bureau report. But for this discussion, it’s important to note that the regulations do not affect collection of data “solely for [the website’s] own uses,” or for contextual advertising like Adwords, “as it delivers advertisements based on the content of a Web page, a search query, or a user’s contemporaneous behavior” — the two main ways marketers use your data online.

What most marketers are concerned with are those non-regulated uses. Google Analytics, found 39 times more than the “average” tracker on the web, is largely for the company’s own use. Google, still the top dog for internet searches, puts its contextual ads right next to its search results — a strong source of revenue for its advertisers.

Analytics, despite privacy advocates’ concerns, is nothing to be afraid of. It’s only to make sites more responsive to their users. One of the greatest tools for the company owning (or managing) the site is to know how people actually use their site. Certainly, most hosting packages do this in a rudimentary way, but few have the immediate gratification of being able to see the site alongside what links are clicked.

Conversions from a Contact Page in Analytics

Landing Page overlaid with In-Page Analytics

The In-Page Analytics shows the percentage of clicks to the various pages in little pop-ups next to each link. Of course, it’s only tracking links to the page, so you have to take it with a few grains of salt if you have contextual linking on the page, but it gives site owners and especially ad campaign runners an idea of how to make their choices more relevant to browsers. The page below shows that almost 2% of visitors hit up the contact page from here, and another view shows us that a fifth of the people visiting the contact page complete a form — whether that’s good or bad is for the marketer to decide, but that information is certainly useful. Should that information not be in the hands of small businesses? The 12000 people searching for “block javascript” in Google think so.

And what about those 12000? How can I know that? Because Google “betrays” its users privacy and gives vague estimates of how much people search for various keywords. Again, this helps small businesses without walls of supercomputers to better gather data so that they can garner a little bit of information to better serve their customers.

Drilldown of Referrals from Other Sites

Finally, what about pages you visit that aren’t part of the site you’re on? Why would a site owner want to know that? Surely, they couldn’t want to know what page you were on before this one! But the internet is the ultimate word-of-mouth; “Who referred you?” becomes “From where were you referred?” and unfortunately, people just don’t pay enough attention to notice effectively on their own.

So instead of ineffective tools and sheer guesswork, the visitor loses a little privacy to help small business owners understand how people came to their site and make it better for those visitors by tailoring the content and design. And this is the mindset behind any loss of privacy for the visitor. Marketers like us aren’t trying to figure out who specifically visited our site and did what — if we were, we’d use other tools that can’t be so easily blocked, and would only be used for malicious visitors.

While some might call it “drinking the Kool-Aid,” I’ve understood more deeply why losing just a little privacy and not trying to circumvent analytics and other tools are a boon for the whole Internet — making it more valuable to the visitor, so that sites give to the reader what they really want. Stop worrying, and support your small businesses on the web.

With a little SEO sauce, your website can go from air-guitar...

If you’re involved in any kind of creative endeavor, chances are you’re waiting to be discovered. The duty of the artist is not just to make art, but to share it with others; this goes doubly for musicians, whose opportunities for media expansion have exploded in the last several years.

Getting discovered by an agent who happens to be at your show is so 90′s. With sites like Myspace, BandCamp, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook, Soundcloud and others, bands now have a wealth of tools to choose from to stay in touch with their audience, as well as personal sites and blogs where they have full control over the message. While maintaining all of these entities can be an overwhelming amount of work, practicing basic SEO and maintaining a strong, cohesive media profile throughout a few selected ones can be just as or more effective than spreading yourself thin.

It’s important to remember that people aren’t just searching text these days; make sure that your music samples, videos and other media knick-knacks are available for your audience. Allowing for streaming makes your music accessible for the casual web-surfer, while putting up a selection of singles for download can increase loyalty and brand retention among those who enjoy your sound enough to hang on to it. And please — if you’re making tracks available for download, make sure your ID3 tag ducks are in a row. You don’t want your listeners to download a track, listen to it once and delete it a few days down the line because they have no idea where it came from. Everything should be consistently titled and formatted for maximum ease of consumption.

On-page SEO is a must, particularly if you’re a hometown outfit. This doesn’t have to be an involved, link-intensive campaign, but covering your touring area is necessary if you want to be seen by the casual Googler. Basic keyword research from AdWords can help with this. Additionally, backlinking from community sites such as Digg, Reddit and various music forums (both local and non-), while not particularly weighty as far as pagerank, can contribute to visibility and drum up community interest — your music connecting with the real ears it needs to find. Similarly, maintaining an active profile on Youtube is a must. Even if you don’t have a full-on music video, the ‘tube is another place to put up tracks and offers more opportunity for keyword insertion.

On the more tech end of things, hreviews are a new and trendy kind of metadata that’s easy-to-implement and offers more bang for your buck than the traditional flavor. Avoid Flash whenever possible, as Google doesn’t index it (and everyone hates unnecessary Flash interfaces anyway), and consider making your site mobile-friendly with HTML5. Making the switch is less difficult than it sounds, particularly for less complex sites, and it allows for the possibility of listeners checking out your product anywhere — on the street, at the gym, and on the way home from the (hopefully) impressive gig you’ve just played. If you’re a smaller band, chances are you’re friendly with other acts in your immediate hometown and greater touring area. Find out whose links are worth more and offer to swap — this will both boost your pagerank and draw in new views from areas you may not have made a significant impression on yet.

Once your flagship .com site is up and running, utilize the wealth of free tools at your disposal to figure out where your traffic is coming from. Google Analytics and Urchin are invaluable to help figure out what you’re doing wrong, what you’re doing right and where to concentrate your efforts. Sonicbids will allow you to connect with the right promoters for your sound, as well as develop an EPK — electronic press kit — which will lend you a great deal of professional appearance and credibility.

Lastly, blog blog blog your little heart out. Besides being an excellent way to stay in touch with fans and a good creative outlet in general (stimulating the old writing muscles can only help your lyrics!), blogging is a fantastic way to continually update your site with fresh information — which, as we all know, Google loves. Let your home base languish with nary an update or new media for eight months and you’ll surely see a drop in both ranking and pageview.

The scary and exciting thing about contemporary music marketing is the immense egalitarianism that presents itself in the face of all these tools. A fledgling band should first and foremost know its audience; the younger and more tech-savvy your ideal crowd is, the more you should invest in your Internet presence. While a good marketing campaign won’t win you mass fan adoration or an instant record deal, it gets your product out there in the public eye (or ear!) to be reviewed, discussed and enjoyed.

Site Load Time

Site speed has been a significant factor since about this time last year. Reading some of the comments on Matt Cutts’s blog post could be an exercise in patience, but as always over-concerned webmasters bring up two good points: javascript and CMS design.

The first is that things like javascript, Flash, and messy implementations of HTML and CSS can slow down a page’s load time. While standard wisdom says to avoid tricky solutions to simple problems, common analytics and advertising packages are among the last things to load on a page and are often causes of frustratingly long load times.

The Big Panda update may have added a factor of ad density to the list, though simply removing ads isn’t an option for many sites. Additionally, removing an analytics package most likely would do more harm than good if you’re tracking your internet business. And to change your entire layout for one factor is farcical at best.

Yahoo’s Developer Network offers a whole host of solutions that don’t involve tons of man-hours put in. Three major best practices are easy to implement and should solve a number of speed issues. The first is to keep scripts and CSS off the page. This makes sure you’re saving time by letting your user cache the component parts of your site. Secondly, keep all scripts on one file, all CSS in another, minimizing the amount of files you have to call per page. Finally, if you’re sure you’re not going to be editing your scripts and CSS, you can Minify your code, which removes white space and comments. This is especially effective for large files, though it can make reading and editing the code more difficult.

But really, optimizing site speed is just clean coding. You shouldn’t be surprised that shrinking your megapixel images to 50×50-pixel thumbnails or making a slough of HTTP requests for each page would keep things slow. What happens, though, when it’s not your fault?

You use a CMS because you didn’t want to have to deal with all that. You expected what “real” coders created would be following best practices. This is especially grating when you bought a CMS and paid good money for it.

Here’s where there aren’t always good answers. To start, CMS’s almost invariably use databases to house their content and other components; this immediately adds steps to your request chain. And while plugins and hard-coding the CMS are always options, these can be either cost- or knowledge-prohibitive. For many CMS’s, simple things like being SEO friendly are hard enough to accomplish without fighting a losing battle against site speed.

Some suggest using a caching plugin, but even a benchmarking report from a year ago shows a forest of options just for WordPress, none of which look different on the surface, but can offer extraordinary ranges of performance. Not to mention the added headache of working “with” these plugins as you write for your site. It almost seems like Google wants you to have a “flat” HTML site.

Take a deep breath. First, remind yourself that this is one factor, and a small one. Linking and on-page optimization are the most important factors. After clearing your head, try to follow the same guidelines as much as you can — Minifying code, using simple solutions, and avoiding inline CSS and scripts will take you farther than you’d think. Once you’ve done all that, do practical tests: how fast is your site from a user’s perspective? Would you be turned off because of it?

If the answer is “Yes,” then you have bigger concerns than just one factor.

Alligator dogs from Dat Dog's Yelp page.

As a stereotypical New Orleanian, I’m obsessed with great food. I have always noticed and been upset when a business doesn’t rank #1 for its own name, or even in the top 3. Recently I saw the phenomenon three times on the same weekend, so I had to blog about it.

I was hungry for something inexpensive, but really good and meaty, which means I had approximately 1,298,450 locations to choose from in this city. Many of these will never have websites. Somehow it came down to Courtyard Grill, Cowbell and Dat Dog (I have been to only one of these restaurants but can tell from the reviews that I’m going to love the other two). Since I only trust hours of operation posted on official websites, I searched for the restaurant names with city names behind them. These were the results (from 3/28/11):

Aesthetically, most would agree that these sites are beautiful, but since Google is a robot, it does not share this opinion. Of course I don’t expect a year-old restaurant to rank #1 for the term Courtyard Grill, but including the city name should be enough to make that happen. Same goes for the other two. Why are these restaurants not ranking first for their name?

Who dat? Ain't Dat Dog.

Yes, they all are getting outranked by Yelp and Urban Spoon pages with a bunch of reviews, but the big problem here is a lack of on-site optimization. Breaking the most fundamental rule of on-site SEO, Dat Dog and Courtyard Grill both fail to include any content on the home page. Furthermore, they all lack meta-descriptions and only one has a decent title tag. Cowbell performs the best in the results because “cowbell” and “new orleans” are mentioned next to each other twice in the text of the home page; not to mention the address is in text at the top of the page.

Unless you have a unique name, or a URL that perfectly matches your business name — (Bouligny Tavern has both, as you can see here) — you will need on-site optimization to save you from these problems. On-site optimization is so important that even Google, which is secretive about their search formula, has written a guide to this which can be found here. I highly recommend it to web designers and webmasters because it expresses the minimum that you should do to be favored in search results.

Who cares if my site isn’t first? I have 4 stars on Yelp!

You should be concerned about making sure that when people are looking for YOU that they can find YOU, and not another site that is talking about you. Otherwise, why would you have a website in the first place? You want to be in control of your own destiny, and it helps to lead the conversation. Let’s say you have 4/5 stars overall on Yelp, but the most recent rating was a 1; do you want a potential customer to have this information branded in their head so early in the relationship? Even if a customer has a good experience, reading bad reviews can lead to Yelp-fulfilling prophecies. Yelp is a great site, and if you want people to see your Yelp page, link to it with a banner, just like Lock Busters did.

I know I’m not first for my name and city, but x means the same thing as my city.

Even though I am talking specifically about NOLA, it’s a lesson we can all learn: think about the words people are saying when they search for your business, and optimize based on those words. Locals often call New Orleans Louisiana “NOLA” (and it happens to be a component of the URLs for the 3 sites we are comparing), but chances are that when someone is looking for you they are not using this word. The screenshot below is from Google Insights. Not only are people searching for New Orleans a lot more than NOLA, but as you can see at the bottom of the image, people are searching for “nola jobs” and “nola news,” which undoubtedly refers to our friends at www.nola.com, and the term “nola restaurant” probably refers to the Emeril’s establishment called NOLA Restaurant.

Nola What? Nola Who?

On-page optimization does not guarantee you will rank for your name, but you don’t have much of a shot at ranking for anything without content and metadata on your home page. There are other ways, like being linked to via anchor text from an awesome blog, which we are glad to do for 3 great local businesses, but small business owners should go for the low-hanging fruit first.

Damn it feels good to be a Panda.

Over two weeks ago, Google scared the SEO community by publicly releasing what even they called a “pretty big” change in their algorithm, “noticeably” affecting 11.8% of queries. This change, coming on the heels of competitor Blekko.com blacklisting certain content farms and the announcement of a Chrome plugin to block websites from search, is part of what analysts at Sistrix call a “quest for quality.” This is old news to anyone paying attention, but a wide variety of opinions are still circling about what this update really meant. Most people pointed at “content farms” as the target of the update; yet it becomes clear that these sites were not the primary target nor were they targeted intentionally as “low quality.”

Pandas munch only on bamboo…

The Big Panda update is the culmination of a long line of work; Matt Cutts, Google’s spam god himself, points to the Caffeine update from way back in 2009 as the beginning of his team really looking at low-quality results. The spiders were finding so many new pages that they had to do something about plagiarists, scrapers, aggregators, and meaningless fluff content. While Cutts was happy with the low amounts of straight V14gR4-style spam, he was worried about that fluff — what he called “shallow content.”

Moving forward two years to the end of this January, Cutts announced a small change which attempted to make some programmer-centric search terms rank Stack Overflow and other providers of original user-created content over sites scraping that content. This affected a whopping .5% of queries, including such high-converting gems as “pass json body to spring mvc” and “aws s3 emr pig.” Obviously, ma and pa aren’t going to see these changes.

But the ones made a month later, seen first on February 24th, are the kinds of searches the average user would be making. Demand Media, owner of eHow and other alleged content farms made an almost-snarky blog post that either thumbed its nose at Google’s change or reaffirmed the company’s legitimacy, depending on how much bile you smelled on the words.

By the time Google officially announced the change on its blog on the 28th, webmasters, SEO experts, and even CNN had weighed in on the change. Website owners noted major changes in their rankings and traffic, and they were rarely happy with the results. Finally, on March 1st, a heart-to-heart with Cutts and algorithm genius Amit Singhai at TED 2011 explained the change in depth.

…Authoritative, quality bamboo.

This talk laid out how Google designed its algorithm. Instead of trying to find factors and hope that said factors are in line with users’ expectations, they asked questions of real people about a variety of websites, then built the algorithm to match the answers to those questions. These questions cut to the core of what’s important on web sites: Would I give this site my credit card information? Would I use this information for my sick child? These questions should be at the core of website development and content creation — unfortunately, Google has to step in and play Gatekeeper and Keymaster.

Jason Calcanis tastes like Bamboo to Big Panda.

The next day, Jason Calcanis, CEO of “education site” Mahalo.com known for quipping “SEO is Bullshit,” laid off 10% of his workforce and halted all written content production in response to the site’s losses in search engine ranking, when a month earlier he boasted of doubling the size of the company this year. While not talking to the press, he tweeted: “We were the right size for a certain market opportunity, and overnight that changed.” Somehow that sounds like AOL and Netscape, too…

Later that day, Google set up a thread in their forum to try to assuage the growing litany of discontented site owners. Google knew people were watching, and they were quickly responding. Most posts complained of losing a majority of income from the algorithm switch, and pridefully stated nothing could have been wrong with their websites. SEO gearheads wagged their heads in frustration and more or less told everyone to chill out. Without copying what Ms. Fox said, not much has changed in SEO — don’t try to “win” at it by doing the bare minimum and don’t base your entire livelihood on search engine ranking. That’s not comforting to someone like the owner of Fonerbooks, who claimed to see everything but his original work in the rankings, or HealthCastle, who saw a 40% drop in traffic and wanted to know “why Google named us low quality.”

Demand vs. “Thanks”

Two companies represent diametrically opposed business plans and responses to the Algorithm change: Demand Media and Mahalo, the well-rounded shrug and the panicked crisis. I think that the differences in approach to content farming truly showed the reason why the sites were affected differently by the Big Panda algorithm change.

Demand Media owns eHow, one of the most egregious of content farms. Yet, according to most data, it rose in the rankings. While this is enough to aggravate “legitimate” content creators, how eHow is supposed to be used sets it apart and mitigates much of the spamminess it’s known for. Adweek explains the concept well:

The company’s evolving media strategy, according to Rosenblatt, is to attract users to eHow and other properties by answering highly specific search queries, and then drive them to other branded channels, hoping they become loyalists. “We are constantly trying to figure out ways of bringing people in [and] give them a much broader experience on our network,” he said.

They use long-tail and specific search phrases to drive traffic to niche branded sites. These sites have meaningful authors and sponsors: Lance Armstrong, Tyra Banks, and Rachael Ray among them. I’ll even admit two Demand Media-owned sites are too often in my history: David Wong’s Cracked.com and Fancylad’s i-am-bored.com. What sets Demand Media apart from some of the other content farms is the high level of community loyalty and interaction these sites enjoy. Most stories and links on these sites have plenty of user comments, and their Facebook pages enjoy a level of curation and personality that rival traditional content providers like bloggers. The links are strongly shared and enjoys some market saturation — an “article” on the flaws in alien takeover strategies has 1.3 million views, 10,000 likes, and 1600 comments over the course of 32 days. That’s better than most SEO companies’ biggest clients.

Branding for the Bored

Compare this to Mahalo, which hardly enjoys the same kind of saturation. A much more broadly marketable subject, “Super Bowl Commercials 2011,” garnered only 37 tweets and no comments over the same number of days. Mahalo, though designed cleanly and conspicuously missing any ads, refuses to market themselves to an audience, happy to provide something that doesn’t work over and over. This piece of poetic gold shows the difference in style of laziness:

DreamWorks forthcoming animated comedy “Kung Fu Panda 2,” featuring the voice talent of Jack Black, had a trailer debut during Super Bowl XLV. The ad features the film’s tag line: “We Will Wok You,” along with the lead character attacking enemies with a wok…

While Demand might pump out three articles on the same fluff topic, there isn’t the lack of attention to meaningfulness seen on other farms. Don’t forget that Mahalo is trying to brand itself as a one-stop-shop for learning, while Demand revels in its content for content’s sake mission.

Big Panda vs. Old Dinosaur

But all this talk about content farms is a red herring. This was not Blekko; this was not a targeted swipe at a business plan. If that were the case, Fonerbooks, who had allegedly well-respected web sites with large amounts of original and informative content, would have no problems with the “Farmer” update. The Wall Street Journal took up his case, citing his innovative computer troubleshooting techniques, and using it as a screed against the latest update’s failure to address the “real problem.” The article compares Demand Media’s eHow 200-word summarization to the detailed article 10 times the length that eHow supposedly “stole.”

Here are the two pages in question: the first link on Google for “toshiba troubleshooting” and the first result for “toshiba troubleshooting fonerbooks.” The difference is striking.

Sure, eHow has two other articles linked that have nearly the same title, though thankfully with different content. Sure, eHow has 7 ads in the first 900 or so pixels of the screen, and even more below the fold. Sure, eHow’s writer has written such crucial treatises on computer repair as “How to Take Crease Marks Out of Posters” and “Fitness Requirements for the Army Reserves.” But what page is more useful to the reader?

Is this really quality?

Is it the one with poorly laid out tables, walls of text, veiled insults to the reader, and links to static gif flowcharts, culminating with an ever-present plug to buy a $25 self-published book? Or is it the one that someone can look at immediately and see if the information is useful? Comparing site statistics shows that users spend the same amount of time on both sites — can you read 2000 words in under 3 minutes?

This isn’t to indemnify the owner of Fonerbooks; rather to show that this update was really about user experience, rather than a content-based punishment. Are you providing a brand to your readers? Will they come back, recommend your site, and consider you a valuable source of information? 4 people “Liked” the eHow link on Facebook — that kind of user interaction is absent on Fonerbooks, excluding buying his prose.

Playing numbers games with Big Panda

At the heart of all SEO is trying to figure out what Google wants. How do we deliver what the algorithm deigns important, while still remaining relevant to the clients of our clients? Eight factors seemed relevant across the posts and stories about the “Farmer” update. Big Panda doesn’t want to play games; the factors suggested are a product, not a cause of good marketing and website design. These factors were culled from a variety of sources, though Searchmetrics’s confidence in visitor statistics like bounce rates, saying they “have obviously been part of the quality guidelines of the update” provided an excellent starting point to develop a way to examine. Search Engine Land’s “Why Me?” post also provided important metrics to test, such as website authority and ad density.

1. Duplication of Content
2. Author Authority
3. Ad Density
4. Overzealously Using NoFollow Links
5. On-site User Engagement
6. Off-site User Engagement, i. e. Social Media
7. Link Profile
8. Visitor Statistics

Using these eight metrics, I tested the top winners and losers from reports by searchmetrics.com, seoclarity.net, sistrix.com, the Google support thread, and other news stories. My method tried to discern if any of these suggested metrics truly held weight.

Using a random article, page, or product linked from the home page of the site, I checked each metric. My method was hardly scientific, and limited by the process of doing it by hand and the subjective nature of some of the variables.

Duplication of content was checked using articlechecker.com or Googling random paragraphs, depending on what gave any results. No duplication was 0; otherwise it was a count up to 20 duplicates on the web. The goal is always 0 duplication, though this method ignored any canonicalization.

Author Authority was a subjective 0, .5, or 1 denoting the author’s specialization of his writing. A writer in a wide variety of fields or with no name received a 0; one who wrote in one general field, such as electronics, received a 1. Those that I felt could have gone either way got a .5. Clearly, more authority should be better.

Ad density was a simple count “above the fold.” My screen is set to 1440×900, falling into the majority of web users according to W3Schools. This helps determine purpose of the page — too many advertisements could mean a low-quality site.

Nofollow links were the percentage of outbound links with a nofollow tag. If a site doesn’t want to pass its link juice, how can we trust those links are helpful to the reader?

On-site User Engagement was a simple count of comments on the page. This usually means a site has repeat visitors and is building a brand.

Off-site User Engagement was split into tweets and Facebook posts. I searched the titles of the pages, long and shortened URLs, and keywords in Tweetscan.com and youropenbook.org. Rarely did these numbers match what was on the site; I’m not sure if this is a weakness or not as Google might not index old tweets or private Facebook pages. Either way, more social involvement means people find your site useful, and should bring your rank up.

The page’s Link Profile was checked via a random smattering of off-site backlinks from the Yahoo Site Explorer. I rated the links on a 5 scale, where 1 is least spammy (AOK) and 5 is most spammy. A spammier link profile should mean a lower ranking, if backlink quality were taken into account.

Finally, visitor statistics of the domain were checked for the most recent time period on Alexa. I checked the bounce rate and time-on-site. Ideally longer is better, though you can’t beat a timewaster like Facebook, who reigns supreme at 32.7 minutes per visit.

The data is embedded and linked at the bottom of the post; I invite anyone to seriously crunch the numbers, but a quick analysis can show “direction,” that is, whether a given factor positively or negatively affects ranking. For a 90% confidence interval, we can see that 4 metrics definitely matter: ad density, social networking, link profile, and visitor statistics. All of these metrics fall in line with the expected effect on ranking described above. In short, Big Panda works.

So what does it all mean?

Deeper study is always needed, but for a designer or marketer, Big Panda brought the web back to the user. The goal, more now than ever, is to create a site that people will want to interact with. Compelling visual designs, interesting and relatable content, and user loyalty both on and off the site will reign supreme.

But that’s been the standard operating procedure of advertising and content production the whole time. In many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Now, Google is whole-heartedly supporting your efforts and rewarding you.

If you’re having trouble surviving with a Big Panda in the room, it’s time to change how you do business on the internet.

Big Panda Data Spreadsheet

Why hasn't Matthew Lesko written a get rich with SEO book yet?

I’m a search marketing guy, have been since my first job out of college (if we are not counting that liquor store on Ponce I worked out for 2 weeks in the summer of ’06. You can’t beat a 30% discount…). Most people can’t grasp what I do or even understand why the company I work for exist (my mother thinks I’m everything from a telemarketer to an Internet panhandler) but it is what I do and love. Recently I have become increasingly more serious about being able to do my job better and become a more rounded internet guy (I mostly just hang out on the fringe of the internet with the /b/tards and tweeps heckling e-celebs for my own amusement). Now I feel I have to pour myself into learning new search marketing strategies in order to keep with the constant changes and competition.

Finding good information is not always easy for search marketers.

There are no continued learning programs for SEO backlinking strategies or creating compelling keyword rich content. So I decided to put together a list of my favorite internet marketing bloggers and explain why you should be reading them if you are serious about SEO.

#1) Matt Cutts is Better Than You

http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

If you don’t know who Matt Cutts is and you are in Search Marketing, ctrl+alt+delete your resume. Best known as being the smilin’ enforcer of Google Webmaster Guidelines, Cutts provides guidance to search marketers through his Youtube videos and blog posts.

Why You Should Care: Matt Cutts is Google’s Prometheus.  He presents SEO guidance in several different formats (videos, blog posts, guest speaking, etc). Having so many different formats make the information he provides easier to digest. If you are like me, hitting the play button is a lot easier to do than reading three paragraphs of insights.

What Should You Stalk: While you can always follow his blog, I find his information most useful from the Youtube Channel – Google Webmaster Central Channel

#2) The eWhisper

@bgtheory on Twitter

bgTheory’s Brad Geddes is a world-class PPC Geek and Adwords affacionato. Besides being the Official Adwords seminar leader, he is also the author of Advanced Google Adwords.

Why You Should Care: If you want to know what you should be doing with your Adwords account, Geddes is the man to follow. He is a well of information and ideas about how you be better use your Adwords campaign for generating and sustaining ROI.

What Should You Stalk: His Twitter account – http://twitter.com/#!/bgtheory

#3) David and the Paid Goliath

@Szetela on Twitter

David Szetela – the occasional snarky owner of Clix Marketing, David Szetela is one of my go-to sources for PPC news and updates.

Why You Should Care: His knowledge of cross-platform paid search is extensive and an quick follow on Twitter will have your timeline full of information on tweets on paid search strategies and general SEO information.

What Should You Stalk: Like with Brad, David is most active on Twitter – http://twitter.com/#!/szetela

#4) Moz-el tov

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

SEOmoz  has some of the most informative blog post on SEO benefits, keyword mining, and PPC tips.

Why You Should Care: I’ve been faithfully reading SEOmoz’s blog for up-to-date information on SEO, PPC, and SMM from some of the best and brightest. If you are not following this blog, you are missing out.

What You Should Stalk: I highly suggest daily readings of the blog – http://www.seomoz.org/blog

#5) Mike Maps It All Out

http://blumenthals.com/blog/

A student of life, political economy & local search, Mike Blumenthal is a Google Maps and local search guru. He frequently authors articles at Search Engine Land and his blog Understanding Google Maps and Local Search.

Why You Should Care: Local search, local search, and local search. Oh and maps.

What You Should Stalk: : Mike’s blog is a warehouse of data points and Google Maps techniques – http://blumenthals.com/blog/

The next thing you know, the site does not rank on any search engine and you turn to a SEO company to see what can be done. After implementing SEO tactics, if your site is still not ranking when searched organically, you may have the great problem of duplicate content.

Many times, companies that create Web sites tailored to particular industries (such as Internet Dental Alliance and Mentor Solutions) use template site layouts and content. All of the information filling your Web site about your procedures or services are not unique and are most likely being used for another client somewhere in the country and what’s worse: it may be used for another client in your area.

In a market as small as New Orleans,  you may still rank on the first page of Google – along side your competitors – in spite of the duplicate content. This is the case for certain New Orleans dentists that have used Internet Dental Alliance to create their Web sites: City Park Dental Care (neworleanscosmeticdental.com), Today’s Dental Cosmetic and Family Dentistry (cosmeticdentistneworleans.com) and  NOLA Dental Care (cosmeticdentalneworleans.com). However, there still has to be a winner and a loser and the winner in the search for  “Cosmetic Dentist New Orleans” is City Park Dental. (Click to enlarge.)

Superficially, all these sites look somewhat different, but they all have a similar structure. Although, there is not duplicate content on every page of these sites, the two dentists above that offer the Invisalign procedure do enter the duplicate content zone. Check out their sites:

City Park Dental Care

NOLA Dental Care

In some ways, the sites are different visually,  but the images are the same and, most importantly, so is the text. The problem of duplicate content has nothing to do with plagiarism, by the way, but search engines can tell when content is duplicated and will grant authority to a site through a varying combination of factors including which has the “original” content, which is has an older domain, or which the greater number of authoritative inbound links. If scales don’t shift in your site’s favor, then you will be pushed down the rankings, especially if your market is highly competitive.

Though there are several factors that deem a site “authoritative,” any way you search for it, NOLA Dental Care does not rank as well as City Park Dental Care for the invisalign procedure. In this case, the only solution is to rewrite and completely restructure the page and its content to increase in rank.

Search Influence Account Manager, Eva Moran, recommends that business owners or staff members write their own unique content capturing their particular voice, sentiment and expertise on the subject and then passing it off for optimization review.

Also, you may think twice before using a service that guarantees you (and everyone else!) an effective Web page. It is worth investing on a Web site that isn’t generated from a template to avoid duplicate content and gain visibility on search engines.

For more information on duplicate content in other situations, Google has some great insights here.

When I was starting out in SEO, I was so confused by what the best practices were and I remember at my first search conference a speaker (I want to say it was Matt Cutts but it probably wasn’t) started explaining the “hats”. There are three different hats a SEO can wear and each color represents how clean they are with their  search engine tactics.

Nice Hat.

White Hat SEO

A simple way to explain white hat SEO is making content for people, not search engines. Instead of worrying about keyword density and h1 tags, you worry about visual appeal and readability. When I think of white hat SEO I usually visualize my mother trying to start a website that is highly revelant to her demographic (middle-aged women who like enjoy natural food receipes, spiritual sessions with lightly muscled tan men, and designer leather handbags). She’s not worried about the order of keywords or what the h1 tags should say – she just wants to make a site that people like her will love. In fact, most professional SEOs aren’t white hat. If a SEO firm promises you page one listing and they say they strictly adhere to search engine guidelines, don’t believe it.

To be effective at optimizing a site, you have to be conscious of how search algorithms work and how you can manipulate them to give your client the best results. In today’s search hustle, there is no way achieve first position in Google (because frankly it is the only search engine anyone cares about) simply by creating great content and having well designed site.

Black Hat SEO

What is exactly is black hat seo? “Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception,” according to Wikipedia.

At the beginning of my search marketing career, I always believed black hat SEO was the most effective way to rank well. It’s fast and highly effective. However I soon realized that cloaking content on the page and creating link-spamming bots got me to the top, but I always fell further than I had previously and would get flagged.

Search engines are smarter now and most legitimate businesses stay clear of these tactics. So if a search firm is suggesting you “hide” the h1 or use deceptive redirects, they likely have dealings with overseas internet pornsites or contact form spam for clients.

Wearing a black hat isn’t a good look for any professional SEO.

Gray Hat SEO

Those who wear gray SEO hat, largerly obey search engine rules but know that in order to beat a competitor, you have to bend the rules. You can think of gray hats SEOs as risk takers who were once white hats but decided getting a little dirty never hurt anyone. They practice the necessary precaution, they develop highly relevant content and webpages, but they use some darker methods to ensure the highest possible ranking.

Whether the SEOs uses link schemes or aggressive keyword stuffing, most search internet marketers are gray hats. It’s just the nature of the beast. Being a white hat only gets you so far and once you’ve put on the black hat you might as well start all over again because you’re going to be banned.

Bottom line, you have to be successful but be aware of the repercussions, you have to take risks… and that’s why gray hats exist.

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/

Basically, what he’s saying is link building is the process of creating inbound links to your site from other sources. There are a variety of  link building strategies one can use to accomplish this, some of which include article submissions, directories, newsletters, and back links. In fact, just look above for an example! By linking to Mr. Lewis’ article, we’ve just strengthened his site and maybe even drove a little traffic there as well.

For those of you reading who may not be familiar with the SEO process, I may have just confused you more than I helped. So let me put it this way: Link building is incredibly similar to body building. Don’t believe me? Through following these exercises, you add strength to your website and bulk up your legitimacy and visibility.  Didn’t think I could do it, did you? Yay puns!

Just as focusing your workout to target specific muscles will increase body mass, focusing link building from relative sources will increase your site’s exposure and visits. The submission of articles to outside sources is one of the easiest ways of doing this. Make it relative to your site, throw in a few keywords that link to specific pages, and you’re on the fast track to becoming one of the strongest sites on Google!

Another way link building is beneficial is that it makes your site seem like a valuable resource. With enough links, your site could be the first to appear in search engines, just like a body builder is the first person people ask to help them move furniture.

...or be their state's governor.

The more your pages appear in places other than your own site, the more exposure it’ll receive, which makes it appear more legitimate. It turns your site from just another pale, puny face in the endless crowd to a bronzed, powerful, incredibly hard to miss shaven gorilla.

Don’t think you can do it all on your lonesome, though. Body builders need spotters to make sure they don’t drop dumbbells on their dumb bell, and reciprocal links serve the same purpose for you. These are basically agreements between two sites to link back to each other, like a partnership of sorts. This will not only add legitimacy, but you’ll surely get a few views directly from the other site.

So that’s link building in a nutshell!

**Note to body builders** Please don’t take my insults seriously. No harm intended. Please don’t beat me up! Seriously, it wouldn’t be any fun. I look like this guy:

Thanks to d_vdm and Marcus Q for the great pics!