When we help organizations optimize their websites for organic search, one of the first things we do is look for “low-hanging fruit”. Is there a technology or architectural decision that’s inhibiting the search engines’ access to content? Are the website’s page titles adequately descriptive and do they include targeted keywords? Quite simply, we start with the basics.

The same approach is often the case with link building. For all the recent hype and arguments regarding the various methods for acquiring links (which I will gladly stay out of), we typically find opportunities for acquiring new inbound links or optimizing existing links staring us in the face. A favorite source of these “low hanging links” comes from partner sites. I’m not talking about traffic partners. I’m talking about strategic partners, distribution partners, business service providers, etc.|
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SEO practitioners and search engines have had an uneasy relationship at times. One might even say the discourse has occasionally been strained.

And why not? Search engines do so much for us who work in the search industry, and how often do we do anything for them in return? Other than facilitating the entry of high-quality sites into their indexes and routing millions of dollars in revenue through their ad platforms, practically nothing.

Until now.

At last, I’ve found a way to thank Google for all the years of employment and high-quality search results. I’m going to help Google fix its 404 error page.

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When my brother, sisters and I were growing up, my father used to throw out all kinds of random euphemisms in everyday conversations. Some are expressions that you’ve probably heard yourself from time to time. One or two of them I actually wonder if he cleverly made up himself because I’ve never, ever heard them elsewhere. “Amy, you’re digging where there are no potatoes!” Huh? These expressions became such common staples in our household that my siblings and I affectionately refer to them now as
‘Mike-isms’.

Though I didn’t entirely grasp the meaning of these expressions when I was younger, I eventually decoded these cryptic metaphors and they have stuck with me into adulthood. In fact, oddly enough I came to the realization the other day that many of these ‘Mike-isms’ happen to have a great deal of relevance in the SEO world.

“Stop Digging Where There Are No Potatoes”

What it Means As a Mike-ism: Wasting effort, energy and/or emotion worrying about something that might never even happen or that is based on mere speculation.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: In the SEO world, digging where there are no potatoes translates to the non-art of arbitrarily picking keywords to optimize your site pages for and spending months waiting for high rankings… just to find out that either a) these are not terms targeted to your audience and therefore they are not driving traffic or conversions; or b) you’ve chosen terms that have little to no search volume because you didn’t bother to use keyword research tools. Essentially, you’ve wasted the past 2-3 months digging where there are no SEO potatoes (or ‘organic’ potatoes if you will).

How to Avoid Digging Where There Are No SEO Potatoes: Quite simply, use keyword tools such as Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or the plethora of other free and paid options to decide which terms to target – not your gut. Focus your efforts on choosing terms that have a balance of sufficient search volume to fuel traffic and conversions, reasonable competition, a direct tie-in to information rich pages on your site and that are well-focused (ie. don’t be foolish and try to optimize for the term ‘car’ simply because you are a car dealer in Boise, Idaho because it will NEVER happen).

Additionally, if you have the means to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for a good 1-3 months before starting SEO efforts, definitely do so! Take advantage of what my colleague Sandra Niehaus refers to as the ‘Ferrari of Search’. PPC represents a unique opportunity to test hundreds to thousands of keywords in the real market and determine which ones truly convert and produce the best ROI. During this PPC test period, be sure to use Exact Match in Google and Standard Match in Yahoo to ensure that the terms that receive reported conversions are actually the terms that were searched.

Also, run a variety of A/B tests on ad copy so that you can learn which elements resonate best with your key audiences. Apply this knowledge to your meta descriptions to increase organic click-through.

View it as a case study. Take this newfound, real-world, valuable knowledge and apply it to your SEO efforts… and this time get your SEO efforts right the first time around.

***And oh yeah… by the way, “Digging Where There Are No SEO Potatoes” is also known as “Barking up the Wrong Tree”***

“Burning Your Candle at Both Ends”
What it Means As a Mike-ism: Doing too much and overexerting yourself.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: In SEO world, this is the practice of over-optimizing. You burnt your SEO candle at both ends when you suddenly and not-so-inconspicuously enlisted 2000 inbound links to your site - seemingly from nowhere and practically overnight. Your target keywords are used repeatedly, excessively and un-naturally throughout your copy. You’ve left no title tag, meta description, alt tag, heading tag or keyword tag unturned. And, being the overachiever that you are, you did it ALL in the course of a day… for all 142 pages of your site. Phew!

Not only have you angered the search engine gods, but you’ve also managed to achieve a hideous user experience as your copy now reads something like:

“We sell red shoes of all types. We have Nike red shoes, Reebok red shoes, Adidas red shoes and many other name-brand red shoes. If you like red shoes, be sure to come check out our red shoes.”

How to Avoid Burning Your SEO Candle at Both Ends: Know that if you are sacrificing user experience for SEO rankings, then you are overdoing it. If you’re lucky you may achieve some fleeting and fickle high rankings, but don’t think for a second that this will be a long term trend. In time, you will inevitably burn your SEO candle at both ends.

Instead, apply logical optimization techniques focusing initial efforts on well-written title tags, meta descriptions (not necessarily for ranking importance, but to entice click-through), alt tags and headings. Make copy tweaks to tie in variations of your targeted terms, but be absolutely sure that any changes you make do not diminish the quality of the copy from a human perspective.

In the midst of all of this onsite optimization, begin the ongoing process of seeking out relevant inbound links that are a natural complement to your offerings.

“Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill”
What it Means As a Mike-ism: Making a bigger deal out of something than it really is.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: Achieving Top 10 rankings (woo-hoo!), but yet those high rankings don’t drive traffic and/or conversions to your site (ohhh…).

A great example of making a mountain out of a SEO molehill, years ago a company looking for SEO services issued a ‘challenge’. They were shopping out several agencies and a so-called ‘competitor’ told them they could guarantee to get them in the #1 position in Google for ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney”. They wanted to know who else could promise the same.

OK… first of all, most of us would have to agree that guaranteeing #1 rankings often equates to false, empty promises. #1 rankings should not be guaranteed, long tail term or not, as we do not control the search engines, we simply influence them.

But aside from that point of contention, I suppose ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney’ sounds really great and all, but upon digging deeper it turns out to have negligible search volume:

(Source: Google AdWords Keyword Tool; Keyword Discovery confirms zero search volume as well)

By all means, anyone with SEO experience could very well get this company to rank highly, even #1, for ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney’ if they chose to focus their efforts here! But they certainly would be trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Any bottom-line focused SEO professional would rather help this company rank highly for terms that are actually going to send potential clients to their website… otherwise what’s the point?

How to Avoid Making Mountains Out of SEO Molehills: Know that Top 10 or #1 rankings are only a means to an end. Don’t assume that just because you are #1 for any given term that your job is done. It’s not.

Gauge SEO success instead by traffic, leads and sales - and make sure you are tracking online activity religiously to prove it. SEO is an ongoing cycle of executing, measuring and testing, analyzing and revising as needed to get it right. If you find that the ‘rock star’ term that you thought was going to bring you search engine fame isn’t proving to be as fabulous as you anticipated, don’t be afraid to change gears and go back to the beginning with new terms to target, if need be.

Lastly, I couldn’t help it… I felt some odd compulsion to bring in a modern day expression translated to a SEO-ism - I suppose for the sake of staying young, fresh and hip…

“Oh no you di’int!” (must be accompanied by a furiously wagging finger).
What it Means as a Mike-ism: Okay… my dad most definitely would not say “Oh no you di’int”. But it can often be heard on Jerry Springer episodes or MTV reality shows.

What it Means as a SEO-ism: What the Google Search Quality Team says right before they put you in the penalty box for black hat techniques. In use…

Matt Cutts: “White on white text? Oh no you di’int!”

How to Avoid Google’s ‘Oh No You Di’int!’: Best put by Jill Whalen in a recent Search Engine Land article: “Good, professional SEO that puts users first while keeping search engines in mind would never be considered spam by any stretch of a search engineer’s imagination.”

Setting Client Expectations for SEO

Show of hands: how many SEO professionals reading this have been asked whether they can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google?

We have. It’s a common misperception that getting a #1 ranking is a reasonable, achievable, and sustainable goal for pretty much anyone who puts their mind to it. And why wouldn’t clients assume this? There are plenty of ads promising guaranteed top rankings, usually phrased like a used-car-salesman pitch and with about as much credibility.

I mean, think about it. If these companies could always deliver what they promised, Google would need a horizontal display to accommodate the multitude of #1 rankings!

Seriously, though. When we’re asked for a guaranteed top ranking we have to respond with, “Of course that’d be great, and it’s certainly something we strive for, but we can’t absolutely promise that. And here’s why….”

Which is so much less compelling than an unqualified YES.

So if we don’t guarantee a top ranking on Google, what can we guarantee? If it’s up to us to define what clients should expect from a successful SEO campaign, what do we tell them?

A Question of Control

At times I envy my colleague Amy Konefal on the Paid Search side of our business. Compared to Search Engine Optimization, PPC is so concrete, so specific, so… controllable. It’s fast. Agile. Responsive - the Ferrari of Search. Want a top ranking? No problem, let me log in and ramp up that bid, or add some negative keywords to the Adgroup. There, try searching again. See? There we are at the top! High fives all around!

It’s really irritating.

It almost makes me happy to see Google’s Quality Score throwing a wrench into all that carefree PPC celebration.

SEO, by comparison, can seem mysterious and arbitrary to clients, a perception not diminished by unpredictable algorithm changes and Google’s often vague, delphic statements about what tactics work, what tactics could trigger an index ban, and what constitutes a quality, high-ranking web page.

So we do our best to set clear, realistic expectations up front, clarifying what’s possible and what the client will have to do to achieve it.

Great Expectations

While setting expectations is usually a custom exercise tailored to each client, here are a few of the common themes we make sure to communicate:

Expectation #1: SEO is not an exact science.

Communicating the inexact nature of SEO is an important first step. Rankings are affected by many factors, not all of which are within our or the client’s direct control. For instance:

• The SEO efforts of competitors
• changes to search engine algorithms
• a client company’s SEO-unfriendly CMS platform, directory structure, file-naming protocol, or META tagging standard that’s not going away anytime soon
• an upper-executive’s selection of keywords to target

All of these and many other uncontrollable factors influence the success of an SEO campaign.

Expectation #2: Rankings are important, but not the whole story

A narrow focus on rankings alone ignores other important considerations, ones that can make the business case for SEO much more effectively and concretely than rankings alone. For instance:

• Traffic from organic search. One of the major reasons for achieving high rankings in the first place is to increase the amount of traffic to a site. If traffic numbers increase noticeably after SEO improvements go live and maintain over time, SEO efforts can receive the credit.
• Conversions from organic search traffic. The quality of organic search traffic can be another measure of SEO’s success and value to an organization. One way to measure this is to track conversions (of whatever type your client’s site offers) from organic search traffic, and compare the quantity pre- and post-SEO efforts.
• Branding, credibility and competitive advantage. While less easy to measure directly, improved rankings (even if not the #1 spot) translate into more visibility for your client’s site and less for their competitors. Every results spot filled by a client’s page is one more chance for them to appear in front of their potential clients and customers.

Expectation #3: SEO is judged by improvement, not arbitrary targets

Moving clients away from a hard numeric goal (”We have to be #1 for ‘music’”) to one of improvement over time is key to managing an SEO project. While we may not guarantee a specific ranking, in our experience we can guarantee overall improvement in rankings, traffic, and visibility.

Expectation #4: Trends are important. Minor fluctuations are not.

Everyone’s experienced it. An optimized and link-built page finally hits the top five, only to drop three positions the next day. Panic time, right? No. Time to note the interesting little change and reassure the client.

Like a strategic stock market investor, we’re more interested in data trends than individual data points. We need a broader view than a single day’s worth of data to give quality advice. Yes, perhaps we dropped three positions today. But when we look at performance over the past month or quarter, what’s the trend? Of course, we slice and dice trends in various ways to gain as much clarity as possible. For instance, we might look at an individual page’s performance for its targeted keywords, or look at organic traffic trends for a group of strategic keywords. And of course we pay special attention to trends pre- and post-optimization efforts.

Expectation #5: Improvements depend on implementation

A caveat to Expectation #3 is this - our recommendations have to actually be implemented in order for them to work. For some clients this is no problem, but many have technical or other restrictions that limit the amount or type of tactic we are able to employ for them. So, to help set expectations in this area we set priorities, indicate which approaches would be most effective for the client, and clearly communicate the possibility of reduced results if the most effective tactics are not implemented.

Expectation #6: A ranking is more valuable if it’s for the right page

Here is an area where we differ with some SEOs, because it goes directly to visitor experience. We think a top ranking for a page that provides a poor experience isn’t much of a win because it’s not sustainable.

Visitors who click through a result listing only to find a confusing, difficult or irrelevant page aren’t likely to return. Or remember your company’s brand with affection, if at all. So what do you have to show for your top ranking but a bunch of useless, bouncing traffic? (unless, I concede, your business model is based solely on traffic numbers).

Success Through Education

We’re firm believers in SEO evangelism and education, which is why one of our service offerings is SEO training. The more a client understands about how SEO works and what factors influence success, the more they’ll spread the word and build consensus among their wider team. Which means when it comes time to change filenames, update the site directory structure, create new keyword-rich content, or get a budget approved, those involved will already be on board.

This, then, is our true long-term strategy for setting client expectations; to create educated clients who already understand what to expect.

Want to increase traffic to an existing blog? Starting a new blog? With more than 120,000 blogs being created every day, you’ve got some heavy competition. Here are 8 important steps for increasing your blog traffic you don’t want to miss.

1. Validate that your feed displays clearly in major feed readers. Whether you’ve chosen to include full or partial content in your feeds, make sure your feed comes through clearly in major feed readers like Google Reader, Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, and Bloglines.
2. Confirm that your blog is indexed by major blog search engines. Conduct a search for your blog in search engines like Google Blog Search and Technorati. If you can’t find it, your potential readers can’t either.
3. Ping the major blog search engines after you’ve added a new post. If your blog platform has an automated pinging script, this isn’t a big concern for you.
   • However, if you’re working with a custom built platform, you’ll either have to add in the pinging script for each engine you want to ping (see Technorati’s automatic pinging script as an example) or manually ping them using a service like Pingomatic or Pingoat.
   • Google also offers a Blog Search Pinging Service API for bloggers who frequently update their blogs.
4. Add keywords to your URL, title, description and body copy. This should be standard practice for every blogger, but it’s worth mentioning because there are so many blogs that lack keyword focus. Even minor differences in keywords can translate into major traffic.
5. Consider guest blogging as a great way to raise visibility to your blog, especially if you can get invitations from high traffic, high ranking blogs. There are two possibilities for guest blogging:
   • Invite guest bloggers to write a post for your blog (with the hope they’ll link to the post from their site, bringing their readers and increased subscriptions for you) or
   • Write an article on their blog with a link back to yours.
6. Get your blog listed on other Blogrolls. This step will increase exposure to your blog as well as add some nice link juice from these other blog sites.
7. Update your blog with a new post at least once per week. Frequent posts will bring your readers back regularly and encourage them to add your feed to their reader.
   • Incidentally, one of the many ways Google Blog Search determines the popularity of a blog is by how many unique subscribers there are to the blog’s feed, which leads to the next point …
8. Make it easy for users to add your feed to their feed readers. If your feed doesn’t support autodiscovery, it should.
   • If you use Firefox, you can quickly check to see if your feed has autodiscovery enabled by looking for the feed icon in the far right of the URL in the browser window:

   

   • And if you don’t offer your readers an easy path to sign up for your blog’s feed, you should. Seriously, stop reading, do it now.
   • Consider that AddThis.com makes it easy and offers a “subscribe” button in addition to its popular “bookmark” button:

   

Of course, there are many other strategies you can use to increase your blog’s traffic. If you’re hungry for more, check out these great posts by Roger Gilliam, another CLM blogger: Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines and How to Optimize RSS and Atom Feeds for Wordpress.

If you’re taking the time to write a blog, it’s a good idea to make sure people can find it.