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@peterryan I'm sure the penalty trigger is more complex than just keyword density, just as it is on a text page. There are plenty of legitimate lectures, discussions, and articles where words get repeated over and over again. Google does a greate job of cutting out the riff raff on the text side, I think they'll get the formula right for multimedia as well.
It's been said before, but thanks for saying it again. It never fails to amaze how people fail to grasp that social networks are pretty much the same as offline networks. The more private ones (like Facebook) are like big parties where coworkers, colleagues, friends, and family are all in attendance. Networks like MySpace, which can potentially allow anyone to see your page, are even more hazardous.
Having said it again though, there's no reason to believe it will cease. People have a long an illustrious history of being stupid, online and off.
Great interview Duane. It's always insightful and motivating to hear from Marshall.
Story: Don't Always Blame The SEO
Thanks so much for writing this. I've been an in-house SEO in my last two positions and this rings true.
In my prior position at a Fortune 500, I was already doing SEO but not doing enough to call it "SEO" when our top executives heard the buzzword and declared it, as you said, a silver bullet for all our woes. SEO was supposed to fix our broken website plus solve global warming and defeat Al Queda.
My co-developer and I handed them a roadmap of 11 basic tactics to knock down in the next 12 months. These were simple things like unique title tags, meta tags, text links to overcome javascript navigation, and a more complex URL rewrite. While we pushed on a few of these, the company also did a 4 month RFP, hired one of the most expensive big SEO agencies in the country, who promptly told us we needed to do all of the things on our original roadmap. 12 months after hiring the agency and $300,000 in consulting fees later, we still hadn't completed all of the original tactics and many were still outstanding.
Like us, the agency realized that the real issue wasn't identifying the basic tactics, it was getting the project pushed across the different stakeholders in our company: IT, marketing, web, and our local divisions. Many big organizations have different management silos with competing interests, and these issues are way bigger than SEO. My new position has been markedly different, and I came into an organization that already had buy-in.
I think one key to working in a big organization is to realize, as you pointed out, while they often live off branded traffic and they often have untapped link equity, the biggest issues are internal buy-in and coordinating across departments. If you do get buy-in, you may only get one shot, so your first one needs to count. And keep expectations low. You don't just have to show positive ROI for your tactics, but you have to show that time spent on SEO is more valuable than time and money spent elsewhere.
A lot of good agencies come in and set the expectation that SEO can take a year to yield results, and companies hear that and then still expect instant results. If they're not already doing PPC you might start them there (most are already doiing it), or you might go for the lowest of low-hanging fruit and one or two easy tactics like title tags. Honestly, this is tough one and I can't claim to have figured it out.
I'm looking forward to your next post!
This is exciting, but very expected. As mentioned by Erik, natural language processing is a few years out.
As to the future of SEO, alot of SEO tactics have become commodities and this may make even more obsolete. But the field has always been in constant flux. If you ask any developers if they've been able to coast for a few years without updating their skillsets, they'd laugh in your face. SEO may become even more specialized, or (my guess) it will take on more and more web analytics and usability concerns. Instead of trying to game the engines, I think we're all moving towards being better partners to them.
When I first saw this in my own account, it was so different than what I was used to seeing that I gazed right past it. At that moment I was actually demo'ing the Keyword Tool for a coworker and quipped "it must be broken or something, there's usually bars here". Then it hit me. Wow. Numbers.
Until now, I have never really cared for keyword tools that give actual keyword volumes because I never trusted the data sample size. I implicitly trusted Google's data bars more than many sources' keyword estimates because Google has the sample size and the intelligence to make it work. The exception had been the now-defunct Overture, which had a reliable enough sample size to see what terms really bubbled the to top, albeit solely in that engine. Now that Yahoo is opening up its engine, maybe we'll see a resurgence of tools based on Yahoo's keyword volume.
All in all, both of these announcements are great for search. It will be interesting to see if Google exposes their keyword estimates to the API.
Patricia, Good post. The folks in the web analytics community, such as Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson have been blowing this horn for a while. I love the bucket analogy.
There are always a few exceptions to every rule, and companies need to be smart about this. One reason you would throw good ad money at a poorly converting site is because there is a limited window of opportunity. For example, you might have a short sales promotion or there might be an unexpected run on a product that you sell. In this case, the business opportunity is too urgent and even a poor conversion rate will net a huge upside. Many people also spend so much on untracked offline events that they are insensitive to online ad spend, which is typically lower per acquisition even on a poorly converting site.
Companies are always, always better off testing and re-optimizing their sites for better conversion. The question of whether to reduce their ad spend in the meantime (and by how much) should be driven by their opportunity and anticipated ROI.
SEO HAS turned a corner. More on that in a second. First, I want to thank Danny for hosting an excellent show in Seattle. I've attended some of your other shows and this was my favorite. I also appreciate your openness and discussion on Lisa Barone's thread. I was late on that one because I was travelling, so I'm glad I can speak up here.
SEO has turned a corner, and I'm happy to say it's for the better. As an in-house, I was thrilled to see that I had a lot of peers confronting the same issues. Many of us are the first in-house SEO people ever at our company, and we're defining our positions as we go. I think that's also redefining what it means to be an SEO.
I was a analyst and a developer before I was an SEO. Those jobs don't require much explanation or much justification for a hiring manager to create and budget. SEO used to be perceived as a collection of tactics -- use H1 tags, make a sitemap, add meta descriptions, get rid of JS obstacles, etc. That's a pretty one-dimensional view, and even a few years ago most companies looked at SEO as just a project engagement. In the past, I saw so many engagements fail due to lack of stakeholder buy-in. The fact that we even got hired in-house speaks to how much has changed.
Advanced can mean a lot of things. I think it does mean a greater understanding of how our work touches everything from development to usability, design, ecommerce, and analytics. We're also coming into our own as strategists and online marketing managers. There is no one-size-fits all way to handle even fundamental tactics. We can argue whether PR sculpting is advanced. From a technical standpoint, it may or may not be. What is advanced is (as Nathan suggested) following a rigorous decision process as to whether it's the best use of your time, bang for buck, and if so, how you would measure its results. I've spent months analyzing engine data, the search landscape, web analytics, our customer profiles, you name it. One of the major "advanced" initiatives I'm undertaking is drilling titles and alt tags with our writers. Why is that advanced? Because I've looked at my resources, my opportunity, and my expected outcome and in my long-term strategy, this is the right short-term move for my specific situation, for our team, for our site. Advanced does mean staying abreast of the cutting edge of tactics. Advanced also means the set of critical thinking and soft skills to actually get things executed in organizations of all sizes.
As to whether there were too many grey/black hat tactics, I wasn't so offended. I agree to some extent with points made by Graywolf and others on this thread and Lisa's at Bruce Clay. There is learning going on in the black/grey arena, and it does benefit even those who can't touch those tactics (although again, I think perhaps next time less of that material out of consideration for the target audience). I do agree that grey/black is going to innovate for net positive just as they do for negative. I wish Google/Yahoo/MSN could spend all their time innovating their algo's and tools instead of defeating spammers, but that's the world we live in, and I'd rather have it out there for discussion.
The only thing I would say about SMX is that I wish the tactics had been framed better at the beginning of each session to state why the tactic might be controversial but why it's being discussed nonetheless. That being said, we're all intelligent enough to realize that just as "you didn't get into marketing to be a moral person" is a hugely flawed generalization, the converse is also incorrect.
There is no clear understanding of where white ends and where black begins. It's like porn, you generally know it when you see it. I think it's much easier to think about the spirit of the law rather than the letter. As my teacher used to say: "integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching." Think about what's important to you, what's important to your company, and to your brand.
Great conference Danny.
I didn't know anything about Bauhaus Day, and this graphic led me to read up. Now that I know enough to be dangerous, I thought this graphic was extremely well done. I think it's important that Google does branch out and not stick to well known holidays. Their executives will tell you that the company's mission is to index the world's information for the purpose of increasing the world's knowledge. Driving curiousity about lesser known events and culture supports that mission.
I too was wondering if no one phoned to report the quake -- or screamed, sent smoke signals, or semaphore for that matter. I'm waiting to hear that Twitter is building shelter for refugees in Myanmar and that Twitter is also distributing food and medicine in Sichuan Province.
Sarcasm aside, I am over all the Twitter hype, and though I'm a big Scoble fan, when I see posts like that one I think it detracts from his credibility as a media visionary.
The quake probably did end up as a tweet before USGS got it. In addition to being a bureaucratic agency, USGS has to confirm and make sense of what it reports. It has a reputation and can't go willy-nilly throwing out 140 character outbursts without doing due diligence. So no, it doesn't surprise me that the "twittersphere" was alive with posts. But how valuable are those posts really? I'm guessing most of the posts were "OMG something is happening..." Even if you had anything valuable to share, you only had 140 characters, so good luck being articulate. That's not even touching the argument that Twitter is so cluttered and fragmented that anything potentially valuable is going to be buried; anytime something actually happens, Twitter turns into the online version of a mass-panic, so you'll have even more tweets by people who also don't know what's going on. In that way, the lack of actionable information and chaos on Twitter probably ressembled the street-level frenzy in China.
I've been spending less and less time on Twitter and can say I'm better for it. It's a great tool for people who can afford to spend all day on it, and I'm glad some of you can, but I can't (if everyone spent all day on it, our world would grind to a halt). If something remarkable happens, I know you guys will hash it out and put the conversation together in a coherent blog post so that I don't have to read 600 tweets to get the 2 pieces of valuable information out of it.
There is a lot of fascinating interaction and communication going on in the Twitter community, and that there is an exciting future for this kind of on-everywhere short communication, I also don't believe that Twitter is the company to take it to the next level. But that's another conversation about technology.
Thanks @Winooski. That was very clear-headed of you.
When I responded on Scoble's blog, I caveated my remarks by saying I'm a big Twitter skeptic. I probably should've also added here I quit drinking coffee today so I'm a bit edgier than usual.
I just commented on the blog thread...
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Most practitioners of SEO are used to dealing with small, nimble companies that can turn on a dime. As mentioned, big companies have complex IT structures, cumbersome tools or CMS systems, and many stakeholders who many be in different silos (IT, Marketing, operations, etc.). Even after they agree, implementation may be a beast.
The SEO practitioner would do well to adjust their approach. Go for quick wins first. Give them something they can tout. It might take you 6 months to get more ambitious (even fundamentals) implemented, and in that time, the whole landscape may have changed. Take the long view and plan for this adaptability. For example, you might have engineering build a toolset to re-tune the basics (titles, descriptions, etc.) rather than have them implement one-off changes. Or, look at people processes rather than tools.
Finally, I’ll play devil’s advocate. Of course, many big brands don’t “get” SEO. But some of them don’t need it. SEO is at the highest level a set of tactics, not a strategy. A strong brand trumps most other factors, you don’t build brands with SEO. In some cases, you may even commoditize them. There are many ways for a brand to reach new customers who have never heard of them. Long tail SEO is one, but viral, WOM, social media, or recommendations from friends are a few other arrows in the quiver.
@hugoguzman, @cam
I'm an SEO guy, so obviously I see the benefits of our craft. I may have been too white/black about strong brands need for SEO.
Hugo is right, users do perceive a higher quality for listings in the top spots and perceived quality is a brand attribute that will be further affected by onsite factors like usability/design. These might be the "first impression", and that's when the brand has to deliver.
However, I really want to distinguish building the brand vs. giving it visibility. I regularly use search to bring in people who've never heard of us and try to convert them to regulars. That grows my overall brand awareness and brand traffic, but I would only consider a small part of that to be brand building. SEO is a big megaphone and allows us to reach a lot of people, but the message (the brand) already exists.
I bought a $10 battery the other day from an online company I'd never heard of. It was top 5 for what I searched on... but, it also had free shipping, and it was a cheap commodity purchase. I'll forget the name in a week and if I ever need another battery, I'll go with whoever is cheap and easy. There was no brand equity for me there. Even if I became a habitual buyer, product selection, service, our interactions, and reliability would have done more to drive my feelings about the brand.
Startups have toppled the giants and sometimes they do grow dramatically with SEO, but there's almost always much more to the story. Many new companies come from nowhere and topple the giants because they reinvent a space, create a market, or bring a solution to a problem people didn't even know they had. SEO may put a new company above the giants on page 1, but the company needs to deliver a brand promise to be successful.
Interesting. One thing I've noticed is that I need to be logged in with my Google Account. I see the box when I'm logged into my FF browser, but I don't see the search bodx on my second browser (cache cleared, not logged in). That would make sense that this is part of Universal search and that they're only showing you search boxes for the sites you frequent most. Also, not all sites seem to get this secondary box
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Story: Google penalizes Video Bloggers for Keyword Stuffing [HUMOR]