We’ve posted a couple different articles about the good and bad of search engine optimization. Here’s a couple articles on Google’s removal of thousands of malware sites from its index, courtesy of Slashdot.
“The attack was directed at Google in particular and resulted in tens of thousands of Web pages hosting exploits showing up on the first page of Google searches for thousands of common terms (PDF).”
Related Links:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SOW
In order to deliver what you promise, you have to understand what you’re promising. The fundamental piece of this puzzle is a statement of work. Any good statement of work should protect the interests of both the service provider and the client. Key components of the SOW include:
- Stakeholders (Client and Provider personnel involved in the project)
- A name and description of the project
- Listing of tasks and milestones (if the project is lengthy or requires client approval before proceeding)
- Listing of deliverables and any caveats to the use of those deliverables (more on this later)
- Project start date and estimated duration (including duration of effort by hours)
- Estimated fees
- Project assumptions (the catch-all, more on this in a bit as well)
- Execution statements and signatures
So, at this point, you’re saying to yourself, “Self, I’ve had Business Law 101, I know you need a contract and those things just make sense.” And you would be right, its pretty basic stuff that SHOULD be common sense. But common sense is like that lazy guy in the next cube who golfs with the boss and seems to be on vacation every other week.
Say you write an iron-clad SOW that follows the text book example to a tee. What’s the worst that can happen? Allow me to share a few of my own experiences. The three biggest pitfalls lie in the middle of the SOW: tasks and milestones, deliverables and caveats, and estimated duration. The biggest takeaway for this article is to really think through things when you write an SOW. Certainly, the statement of work will be derived largely from the proposal and negotiating process. But even once frameworks and milestones are agreed upon, there’s still quite a large margin for error. It’s important to keep these things in mind that I’ve learned over the course of my career.
1. Don’t include a task/deliverable that you aren’t completely sure you can carry out in the time allotted for the project.
2. Don’t include tasks/deliverables that go above and beyond what’s required to fulfill the terms of the contract. There’s plenty of chance to go above and beyond anyway if time and resources allow, but the contract should not stipulate this.
3. Tasks/deliverables included in the SOW should be clear and specific. You don’t want to leave any room for interpretation of what a task truly means. This can lead to significant financial impact in project delays, additional resource requirements, or worst-case, litigation.
4. Stipulations should be included as to how the client can use your deliverables, reports, findings, and intellectual property once the project is complete. This includes sharing with third parties, use of findings for strategic and tactical planning, etc.
At this point, I need to say that I’m not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and any such guidance should be obtained from a lawyer when developing a generic statement of work for future use. Now that that’s out of the way, just a few personal stories on how these things can impact the people actually doing the work.
I’ve found myself on numerous occasions doing work that wasn’t part of the original scope because of vague statements about deliverables or tasks to be completed. In managing the daily activities of the project, I often find myself referring to the SOW to make sure we’re doing everything we said we would. Nothing is better than getting to a line item and saying to yourself “What the hell does this mean?” Because you know the client has a very specific idea of what it means, and of course, the client is always right.
I’ve also experienced cases where the someone wanted to get flowery with the description of a deliverable. If you can promise a report that shows site traffic over the past 6 months, you don’t need to promise a novel that shows the traffic, slices and dices the data 10 different ways, contains pretty pictures, and contains an instant weight loss remedy. If time allows, you can certainly deliver the novel, but then its seen as value-added, and not expected.
In the end, the SOW can determine the success or failure of a project before it even starts. It’s important to set yourself up on the right foot. The nature of projects is that there’s plenty of things that can happen out of your control, make sure you do everything that IS in your control right.
Have you experienced a situation where unclear statements of work caused project headaches or worse? Have you experienced a situation where a provider promised one thing and you were expecting something else? Let’s hear from you.
In my previous articles, I took some more fundamental IT theory and applied it (for better or worse) to SEO. As part of an occasional series, I’m going to pull it up out of the weeds a little bit and focus more on project sales and delivery from my own experience and perspective. My hope is that my own recollections can spur some conversation from readers about their good and bad experiences and that we can all learn a little bit in the process. So without further ado, I give you Part 1:
Know Thyself
Clients are generally smart people. This is something that many professionals in service delivery choose to ignore. In any given proposal process, you may have 10 people on a selection committee, and you may successfully BS 8 of them. But there’s always going to be 1 or 2 naturally cynical people, who through that cynicism fulfill the blind squirrel-nut theory. Keep in mind that during this process, you’ll be standing in a room explaining to this group why your product is the best for them, why the organization can’t get your skills anywhere else, and why they should pay a premium for an outsider to come in rather than do the work in-house.
Based on past experience, “The 8″ (as I’ll henceforth call them) are probably mid-to-upper/executive management from all business process areas. Strategic thinkers interested in the long-term and the financial in nature. “The 2″ are probably direct reports or low-to-mid management. They will be impacted most immediately and on a larger scale than “The 8″. They’re tactical thinkers, interested in day-to-day operations. How do you reach both groups, sell your services, foster partnership, and, hopefully, reap benefits for both parties?
The Value Proposition
Developing a value proposition is one of the most important and time consuming activities a service provider can do. Significant thought needs to go into first deciding what it is that you’ll do, then deciding how you’ll do it. And all the while, you need to be able to articulate how what you offer and how you offer it will provide benefit to the client in a way that separates you from your competition. For established providers, the value prop is easier to articulate and has probably evolved over time. For a startup, it can be daunting.
And so it comes back to the old adage, “Know Thyself”. It can be tempting as a startup to say “We need clients, so we’ll do whatever they want us to do and hopefully something will stick.” But that can lead to an identity crisis for the organization and can distract it from doing what it’s good at or what the original intent was. So how can you develop a value proposition that you can stand behind and can win work.
- What the organization does?
This should be a straightforward, simple sentence (think nouns and verbs with as few ad-words as possible). “ElectronSEO enables clients to better reach and retain customers by…”
- How the organization does what they do?
This should contain the services you provide at a high level. Things like copywriting, linking strategies, reciprocal agreements, website design, etc.
- What are the benefits to the organization?
At this point, you may be tempted to put in some bulletpoints you found on the net about potential gains a client can achieve. But this should be at a higher level. You don’t want to start promising specifics that will never be met. Statements suitable for this can be “Measurable increase in website traffic” or “Enhanced search engine results”. It may seem like a cop out, but it can save you from legal issues down the road.
With a well-developed value proposition, you can be better equipped to respond to RFP’s or to cold-sell your services to an organization. Research will aid you in tailoring the value prop to the specific needs of the organization so that both “The 8″ and “The 2″ will be in your camp.
What are your experiences? Have you been involved in a selection process and one of your potential partners couldn’t tell what they did to save their life? Have you developed a value proposition that worked on the first try or took multiple iterations to get right? Let’s hear your thoughts.
SEO is a great engine for getting results if you know what you are doing. But what fuels that engine? What is it that drives the great mechanical beast that is Search Engine Optimization? The answer is simple: Content. I ran across a great series of articles by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger about what has been successful for him in his SEO endeavors. Hit the jump and check it out. More than that–his articles are the inspiration for this post.
SEO Copywriting like I said previously, is far from an exact science. There is, however, one aspect in which you have total control: The SEO content. Gone are the days of B.S. content, shameless (and pointless) keywording for the almighty click. One of the overarching themes that we see with Clark’s article is the necessity of not just SEO content, but solid, relevant SEO content. Clark uses the term, “Cornerstone,” which I enjoy. Cornerstone content, according to Clark is,
“A cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.”
Phenomenal definition, and kudos to Clark on this. What we see here are the underpinnings of great writing in general–just with an SEO twist. What I am going to focus on is the “essential, indispensable” aspects of his definition.
So, we want content that is Essential and Indispensable. This breaks from the origins of SEO content and copywriting because what we saw back then there smatterings of keywords, random linking, keywords with nothing to do with the topic of the page. Now, we need essential. We need indispensable. Great. What do those mean?
Essential and indispensable; we, as copywriters want our SEO content to be essential and indispensable. Actually, when you think about it, we want all our content to be essential and indispensable. So, take a random keyphrase, Tapioca Pudding Wars. If we were writing SEO content about Tapioca Pudding Wars (TPWs), we would want every person who was interested in TPWs to not only want to look at us, but need to look at us because we are relevant and indispensable.
Because we are relevant, our page fills a need for the searcher. We offer something about TPWs that no one else does. What we say is important. Important enough that Bob doing research for his blog about the TPWs finds our information so profound, that he links back to us. Now, not only does Bob know that we are a great source of information about TPWs, but everyone who reads Bob’s Blog will, in theory, also find our information essential and indispensable. Then, one of Bob’s friends, Bertha finds our page about TPWs through Bob, thinks our content is great as well and also links back to us. So on and so on and so on.
One of the points that Clark makes is that shoddy content isn’t going to do it anymore because search engine crawlers take into account social medias; how many people link to your page, how many views you get a day; have you been Dugg?; etc. The advent of web 2.0 completely changed the game with SEO content writing, in a good way. Now, those people who are expert B.Sers but aren’t don’t actually fill a need are out of the picture, because they won’t get the consumer push because there is no reason for a searcher to go to their site because the B.S. in fact, does nothing. In order to be successful at SEO content and copywriting, you must prove yourself to be reputable, essential, and indispensable. Without that, you will fall off the radar because you didn’t provide a service or fill a need.
You want people to forget that they have a back button on their browser when they hit your site. Solid SEO content does just that because on a base level, it delivers what it promises. It’s not fluff, it’s not pointless, and it wasn’t just a trick to get you to the website. It’s actually pertinent to what the searcher wants.
It seems like this should be pretty self-evident, but even today we find that actually locating something pertinent on the web can be challenging amongst all the drivel. So while it presents itself as common-sense–the evidence is to the contrary. It’s refreshing to know that to those who are willing to put the effort into their sites, and tweak a little bit for keyphrases, they could see themselves on that almighty first results page.
Great SEO content is like the fuel for the engine of your SEO campaign–it doesn’t look like it does much on the surface but without it, you can’t go anywhere.
Till we meet again…
/end Transmission
The use of carefully selected words is one of the optimizers biggest challenges, because what do you REALLY know about popularity of words? Without the proper research you may just be flapping your wings. So what do you do?
Well, you have a couple different options. 1) guess… not usually the best method, 2) steal… well heck, your competitors are using those keywords so why shouldn’t you? again not the best method, but might be a good place to start if you are completely lost, 3) research.
That’s where GoogleDuel.com comes in. Use this site to see which words or keywords are more popular for the world of Google. Play around, I think you’ll like it.
Link:
http://www.googleduel.com/original.php
IT has undergone a shift. Some of this shift has been talked about previously. But right now, I’m talking bedrock principles. Basics, building blocks, foundations, DNA…you get the point.
There’s a little transitive property thing going on. For those like me who are not always strong on basic algebra knowledge:
The transitive property states that if A=B=C then A=C. Follow me as I make a few leaps with this:
1. Search Engine Optimization is the effective and efficient design of an organization’s website in order to garner attention and traffic.
2. A website is an organization’s statement of its central vision and mission (i.e. strategy).
3. A strategy is an organization’s top-down plan for future success.
Put it all together and what do you get? Any effort for search engine optimization should and must be in line with the vision and strategy of the organization as a whole. If executive management says they want to increase their customer base by X number of customers in Y months/years through internet channels, whoever is developing the optimization plan needs to A. stop panicking and B. have passable (or better) knowledge of how SEO can achieve those goals.
So what should this person do? Here’s a short, non-inclusive list:
1. Talk to an organization’s business process owners to understand the existing environment.
2. Talk to executive management to gain historical perspective on where the organization has been, where it is now, and where management envisions it to be in 5 years.
3. Look at the competitive environment. What is the organization’s competition doing? What do they do better/worse? An extension of this is a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
The great thing about this is that although you may move from one organization to another, you take the knowledge about a given product, market, or industry with you. You become a valuable resource that can provide informal benchmarks and deep-seeded expertise. The benefits go both ways.
This year, I have the pleasure of attending the Search Engine Strategies 2007 Conference & Expo. Coverage will start next Monday, so stay tuned.
“Four and a half days of search, all search and nothing but search. SES is the biggest and oldest conference in this space. Seasoned search maven or hopeful newbie, you’ll find speakers who share expertise, new research, horizon’s edge views and knuckles-in-the code tactics. Conference chair Kevin Ryan — himself no stranger to search marketing for companies big and small — has lined up thinkers, doers and visionaries who will send you home with a bagful of fresh approaches. Large companies or small will find search expertise. Search marketing professionals, your next client will be here. Vendors, there will be customers seeking just what you have. Everything you need to keep up with the unquestioned velocity of change in this medium is on this conference agenda.”
—Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink, Member of SES Advisory Board
Link:
http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/chicago/index.html
SEO copywriting is a relatively new, almost universally poorly done enterprise. Not due to lack of talent, but rather a distinct lack of anything resembling experience in writing for search engines. Writing for a machine has a different feel to it than writing for a human audience. This requires those of us writing for SEO to adapt. Here are the top three things I have done to help me with my own SEO Copywriting.
SWIPE FILE
A swipe file is exactly what it sounds like and more is the single most important thing you can do to improve not only your SEO copywriting, but your writing as a whole. A ‘swipe file’ is a file of materials that you ’swipe’ from other people. From headlines, articles, keywords, layouts, basically anything that you see that catches your eye. If it catches your eye, chances are it’ll catch someone else’s too (or in this, bump us up on the results page). A swipe file can be electronic, hard copy, or a combination of the two. It doesn’t really matter what form it’s in, as long as it serves its purpose.
And what purpose would that be, you ask? Why, to help you brainstorm. The whole purpose of a swipe file is like standing on the shoulders of giants. You develop ideas, creative concepts, forms, layouts that you normally wouldn’t have even dreamed of because you used someone else for inspiration—simple but profound concept. The biggest thing for you to remember to avoid the IP police is to never, ever use anything in your swipe file directly. It should only be used as an inspirational material to help you generate ideas. You risk violating more laws than I can count on 2 hands if you use direct material. “Plagiarizer” is a term no one wants to be labeled with.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
Pick a series of keywords–between 15-20. It doesn’t really matter what the keywords are–topic is irrelevant. Then look at the top unsponsored results for each of those keywords as well as a result in the middle, and a result at the bottom. Look over each page for specific wording and verbiage–how many times is the keyword or phrase used on that page? How many words are on that page? What is the general layout of the page? Then, you want to look for common thread between those sites at the top. Because SEO and SEO copywriting is far from an exact science, I could do this exercise and wind up with vastly different results from everyone else. As such, it is very important to try to keep up with what changes and try to figure out why. You should use the same keywords each time so that you can better track those changes.
Then, take those examples that you think are the best–because of layout, keyword placement, keyword count, or just word count in general—and add them to your swipe file. It’s amazing how convenient that is. Since you should have a pool of up to three hundred pages to pull from–an initial file of about 15-20 would be a good start.
You also want to be checking out what’s not working as well, i.e. - someone lower on the search results. Try to highlight the differences between the page which is higher on the list versus lower on the list. This has a very empirical feel to it because it is very empirical. These results could change as much as daily, and so the more you run comparisons and add to your swipe file, the more comprehensive your understanding of SEO copywriting will be.
A GOOD PLACE TO START
So, a good place to start is getting accustomed to writing keyword articles. For those of you who have limited experience in web content, a keyword article is typically a short article, five hundred or less words, about a given topic designed to generate hits on that topic. They do this through “key words,” a word or phrase that repeats itself again and again throughout the article. Keyword articles are a bit challenging at first because they typically require that keyword itself make a specific number of appearances in the article. A standard for when I wrote keyword articles was that the keyword or phrase had to be used at least seven times in the article, be mentioned in the title, and the article at least five hundred words long.
It’s important to realize that keyword articles do not translate into an effective SEO copywriting technique. It has a similar idea, but SEO is vastly more complex than just how many times the keywords appear on a page. Want to have some fun? Count how many times I mention SEO copywriting in this post. Then, consider my motivations for adding that last sentence.
Three tips for getting your feet wet with SEO copywriting. More to come as it becomes available.
Well, not exactly YOUR search, but you get the point. As the 2008 election campaigns start to take form… who will utilize SEO as one of their marketing tools? Who will think, “Hey, maybe it would be good if the #1 hit in Yahoo for my name showed a GOOD website about me… not one that bashed me.”
Our friends at SEOmoz have asked that same question… and the results are interesting. Check out the article here. Also, Alchemist Media follows up that article, with a great piece of their own.
“Take the mind-boggling case of John McCain, a likely GOP front-runner: McCain’s active campaign site currently ranks #68 at Google for “john mccain” and just as abysmally for other terms and iterations of his name. How could this be?”
Links:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whether-dnc-or-rnc-political-candidates-need-seo
http://www.alchemistmedia.com/blog/political-search-marketing-electronic-grass-roots
Whether we like them or not, we have all seen a custom Google Engine interface. Basically what these sites do, is use Google’s API and then take it to the next level. Here is a list of interesting, useful, and just down right weird ones.
You can create your own Google Custom Search Engine here… but the rest is up to your imagination.
1. LivoRobot - Dancing girl reacts to your searches. Try searching for “film.”
2. Google Black - Don’t like that silly white page you keep looking at? Try this.
3. Lijit - This is really interesting… create your own Custom Search out of your experiences and sites. Try it out!
4. JumpUp - More of an example… but you can use Custom Search for all sorts of things. How about a Small Business site?
5. Google Ultimate Interface - “I want to enter a ton of info before I search!” Yeah… we get it.
6. Black Google Search Portal (two) - Ok ok, I already posted a black Google site… but this one has a reflection! They claim it’s easier on the eyes and saves energy. Blah blah blah.
7. Groovle - No search bar that I could easily find, but uses Google Custom Search to to build a pretty sweet image directory. And you can make your own!
8. SoundClick - Artists search site for bands and the like. Browse artists, videos, music, etc.
See? And you thought Google was just plain vanilla. With so many new GCS sites popping up, you might have already used one, without even knowing.
Interesting Links:
* How to Hack Your Google Custom Search Engine
* Running List of Google Custom Search Sites
Alright, so I’m always spouting off things like “you always have to under-assume” or “‘the user should’ should never come out of your mouth again”… and then with this blog, I failed to take my own advice. How can you understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, if I have never clearly defined it? Sure you may have some idea… heck, you may even know more than I do about it. But the first thing we must do is make sure we are all on the same page.
Let’s start where I always do… Wikipedia:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
So, with that in mind, I want you to take a little journey to a magical land I call: LONG AND DRAWN OUT ANALOGY LAND (not the best name for a magical land I know).
Imagine that you need to buy a television. You know your budget, you know that Johnny McTechnology just got a new one down the street, and you know that watching CSI is no fun on a 7″ Black and White RCA… but that’s where your knowledge stops. Now, since the internet doesn’t exist (this land is already losing it’s appeal) you are forced to head to the newly remodeled TV Land Strip Mall, where everyone who sells TVs competes for your business, every brand of TV is available, professionals are on site to help you, past customers are just lingering around to give you their opinions, and when you go in, you are the only customer.
Sound too good to be true? It’s not. So you get in your Honda Civic, drive down to TV Land Strip Mall, open the doors… and… and… and????? Where do you go? What do you do? You do what any person would do… you go into the first shop you see. Keep in mind, you have no knowledge of what’s good and bad at this point. All you know is that you are leaving this mall with a TV and that whatever you get is going to be better than what you have. You start walking around, looking at all the new TVs, reading reviews, looking at comments, checking prices and comparing brands. Then you actually find one that fits your budget… “Wow,” you exclaim, “this is great!” You whip out the credit card, have them box it up, and then they offer to ship it off to your house, so you don’t even have to worry about taking it to your car.
Seems like a great story huh? You get a great TV, you don’t go over budget, and you still get back home time to watch that rerun of Seinfeld that always makes you laugh… only now it’s on a 32″ Vizio LCD TV that’s capable of 720p! And since you budgeted a $1000 on the TV and only spend $950… you treat yourself to some chocolate cake… when just then, Johnny McTechnology walks in… and what happens? Proudly you boast of your conquer… how it was you versus the world, and you came out on top. Your prize? This amazing TV. One look and Johnny says, “This old thing? Yeah they are selling those down at the Strip Mall for like $300 now. I was thinking about getting one for my kid sister” Kid sister? Suzie McTechnology??? NO! $300??? Where did you go wrong? Grasping for air you ask, “Wh…
You just did what everyone does every day on the search engines… you went into the first place that you saw. Now what you didn’t know was that Joe Bob’s Television Shack was once so big and popular that TV Land’s Strip Mall directory service put them as the first store that you can see… just to make it that much easier for you (Search Engine Optimization). On top of that, Joe Bob even went as far as to use all that extra money that they make from marking up the TVs to purchase ANOTHER store right next to their store that just takes you a different way into the main area (Search Engine Marketing). It’s all about convenience.
As crazy as this sounds, this is how many people purchase things online. They do a couple searches and then perhaps check out the first two or three posts and then make a decision to buy, or sign up, or call, or whatever action you are looking for. If you aren’t in those top spaces… you have already lost. So how do you get there? Keep reading my friend… it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Sometimes you have to wonder what possesses people to videotape themselves. I’ve presented in front of potential and current clients enough to know that they have certain expectations when you take time out of their busy day to sell them services.
1. They expect you to be well-spoken…Strike 1
2. They expect you to be well-dressed (popped collars work best in 1985 and NOT on suit jackets)…Strike 2
3. Don’t give off vibes similar to that of a used car salesman…Strike 3, better luck next time
The author of the linked article brings up some good points. Where is the line between spam (which internet denizens have learned to tune out) and value-added content that drives traffic. It seems to me that the key differences are commitment to getting a (good) word out and the intent of the word that’s outted.
Key differentiators :
Spammer (either a product/service provider or an agent acting on behalf said provider)
- Employs automated tools to seek out somewhat related content to blindly blanket a target audience
- Probably has no idea what its target audience is (hence the blind spamming)
- Probably has an inferior product or service
Legit Search Engine Optimizer
- First and foremost, they make an effort to understand the client’s product or service and the market they operate in
- Secondly, they work with the client to identify the target audience/customer demographic
- The content that is posted adds value
- The provider understands their product and why its superior to competing products
It’s important to be a solution, not a contributor to the problem. Doing right by clients is one thing, but choosing the right clients to work with means everything in the world.