If you’re serious about online marketing, SEO is one of the main areas you are budgeting.  You also have other forms of paid marketing that you’re using to drive immediate leads.  I call this “short-term lead generation”.  The reason for the name is because you can literally generate leads within hours of getting your ads up and running.  Not the case with SEO, particularly if you’re not doing it well currently – but the idea is that as you become better at SEO in terms of driving qualified leads, you can choose to become less dependent on paid sources, particularly if the ROI is not there.  SEO is a long-term strategy, and hence why I feel it is the marketer’s long-term lead generation strategy.

That’s right – I said it.  SEO is more than rankings and traffic.  It’s about the right traffic by increasing rankings for the right words.  But how do you know what the right words are?  You can mine data from paid sources who are actually converting into leads to feed your SEO activities, from premium content to link building to press releases.  After all, you want to fail fast, and fail cheap.  That means if the keyword(s) are not converting well after several tests, then you may be attracting the wrong customers with this keyword.  You will begin to identify which set of keywords tend to drive the “researching” crowd, versus the word sets that tend to drive the “buying” crowd.

Once you have that, you can then nurture the “researchers” by offering free downloads or other resources instead of hard-selling them.  For those who have already done their research and are ready to “buy,” you can present them with pricing and test your call-to-action copy, button colors, and more.

As you hone your SEO performance, you will begin to see that your cost per lead will decrease significantly compared to other paid sources.  But, that doesn’t mean that you should discontinue your paid lead generation.  Determine what your max cost per lead is (15% of your total cost per acquisition, or what you’re willing to spend to get a new customer) and keep your sources under that threshold.

SEO: Long-Term Lead Generation is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The two main forms of search engine marketing includes search engine optimization, or optimizing the organic listings, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  But which will benefit your business in the long run?

Many small businesses come to us with the ultimatum that they have X dollars to spend, and will either choose to spend it on SEO or PPC, but not both.  The fact is, they should consider spending in both areas.  Here is why:

• The PPC ads can provide instant traffic, and simple campaigns can be set up in a matter of hours.  SEO will take weeks to set up, and months to achieve noticeable results.
• Setting up your PPC campaign will provide some of the necessary keyword research to start your SEO campaign anyway (although the targets will likely be different, it’s a good starting point).
• The PPC campaign click-throughs and conversion rates can provide some intelligence back to the SEO campaign; however, be aware that PPC visitors will behave differently than an organic visitor.
• The SEO campaign will force you to develop more keyword-rich content, driving more long-tail searches.  The PPC campaign will force you to create well-designed landing pages that you can A/B test for best results.

So why then is SEO more beneficial to my business in the long run?

It essentially comes down to the cost, and what stays with you after the cash is spent.  Check out the graphic below.  You can see the slow, gradual increase in performance of the SEO campaign, while the PPC campaign is more “instant”.  Once the SEO effort performs well and you start to appear on the first page of results for some of your primary keywords, you get this area of what we call “maximum exposure” – where your paid ad and organic listing appear on the same page.  It has been said that this type of exposure can lead to a higher chance of getting a click – on the organic listing – up to 7 times more likely.  That’s interesting that the paid ad provided the necessary brand exposure to get a user to click on your FREE organic listing.

So let’s consider what happens after you stop spending in both areas.  Maybe you are in a budget crunch, or you ran out of funding.  The PPC ads come down immediately, and you are no longer visible to potential customers.  With SEO, your time, effort and money will sustain itself for weeks, months, or maybe even years.  This means you’re not going to lose your rankings overnight, and the SEO work will still give you exposure to new potential customers and drive more leads and sales to your business, even though you’ve stopped spending in that area.

Also consider the ROI on both programs.  A click in PPC for a competitive keyword can cost you $4 (let’s say), whereas an organic visitor can cost you merely pennies (take you monthly SEO spend and divide it by the total organic visitors during the same period).

So if you only have X dollars to spend, don’t count out your SEO program.  Instead, split your budget across both and get the maximum benefit for your money.

Is SEO Better Than PPC In The Long Run? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly.  With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there.  So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.

1. Trackback pages are temporarily redirected to the main post.

WordPress automatically creates a new page for trackbacks, such as yoursite.com/blog/2010/blog-post/trackbacks/, which is 302′d back to the original post; /blog/2010/blog-post/ (try typing one in, you’ll see it does redirect back, which therein lies the hidden problem).  The problem here is that a 302 does not pass any link juice back to the post, meaning if you had some nice trackbacks from valuable sources, they would be essentially worthless.  The proper thing to do here is 301 them (permanently redirect) back to the original post.  This will pass all of the link juice, helping that page rank better for the terms it targets.  Don’t allow trackbacks?  You’re closing the door on some potentially decent links that could pass some juice to you, so why not pass it correctly? (Disclosure: I did find this solution on Yoast.com from Joost de Valk – a WordPress SEO expert)

To fix this, go to your wp-trackback.php file.  Find the line that has “wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id));” and change it to “wp_redirect(get_permalink($tb_id),301);“, and all of your trackbacks will pass the almighty link juice. Quick update on this one, we’ll have a better solution for this soon because it’s not good practice to update the core files directly, as you’ll lose those changes in the next upgrade.

2. You’re indexing Category and Tags pages.

WordPress also generously and automatically creates separate pages for every category and tag you’ve ever used in the blog.  That’s really nice and useful for searching for something within the blog itself, but we really don’t want Google or other search engines indexing those pages.  In almost all cases we’ve seen, they do nothing but create duplicate content and duplicate tag problems.  The minute you create a post with a new tag OR a new category that has never been used in another post, what happens is that all of these pages end up being the exact same:

yoursite.com/2010/some-blog-post
yoursite.com/tag/some-tag-name (which contains only the one post)
yoursite.com/category/some-category-name (which also contains only the one post)

and that is duplicate content, and you don’t need to have these pages unnecessarily competing against each other for rankings.  Google does penalize less for duplicate content on the same site, but what the heck, why have it if you can fix it, right?  However, for those of you who are more advanced users, you can keep your category pages listed in the index and prevent the duplicate content issue by adding a description paragraph to the top of each category page.  The Wicked Blog explains this in more detail.

To fix this, install the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, and on the Setup page, make sure you check the 3 checkboxes that say “Use noindex for categories”, “Use noindex for archives” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.  Then you can go and remove these pages from the Google index (if they have in fact made it there) within Webmaster Tools if necessary.

These two fixes should only take a maximum of 5 minutes, including the time you need to install the All in One SEO Pack if you don’t have it.  Need help?  Leave us a comment.

Two Simple Settings for SEO in WordPress I Guarantee You Missed is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Here’s the next post in the ‘Small Business Series’, on how a small business can better leverage its strengths. This week we are talking to none other than David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37 Signals, creator of Ruby on Rails and coauthor (with Jason Fried) of the bestselling book ‘Rework’. Signal Vs Noise is one of my favorite startup blogs and we are huge fans of 37 Signals. In this interview I do three quick questions with him:

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics):First David, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. For a small business seeking to be extraordinary, what are some tactics you would recommend to an SMB that could enhance Internet searchability and SEO?

David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals): Our primary technique at 37 Signals is to be interesting. You can try all sorts of tricks or hacks to try to game the search engines, but the most basic is simply to be undeniably good and interesting. Share tips, tricks, and lessons that others want to read and they’ll link to you. Nothing will keep you high in the Google rankings over the long term than having tons of people link to you.

David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):First, avoid interruptions. Nothing will blow up your working day faster than having meetings and phone calls sprinkled all over it. Second, cut out 90% of all planning. Planning is mostly guessing and worrying about what your business is going to look like 5 years from now is a useless exercise when you should be worrying about how to grow your business next week.

David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):

Do less: We try to underdo the competition and I personally try to restate all our hard problems into easy problems.

Don’t grow: Managing people is hard, managing many people is much harder. We’ve tried to keep our headcount unnaturally low for a company of our revenues. It’s really paid off.

3 Questions with 37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is our fifth post in the ‘Small Business Series’ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. This week we are talking to Matt McGee, a contributor for Search Engine Land, specializing in local search. Search Engine Land is one of my favorite SEO websites, which I read to keep myself up to date with SEO news.. Matt’s interest in local was fueled just by the fact that all of his early clients were small, local businesses that wanted to connect with people in his hometown. In the following interview I have focused on businesses who have a local clientele and how they can maximize the value of local search.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Matt, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this.Let’s start with the most important question for anyone with a small business. Why is it important for small businesses to focus on local search?

Matt McGee: It’s not important for ALL small businesses — but it’s a must for those who offer products or services to local customers. The answer to ‘why’ is that search engines are becoming the default way consumers find local information. Stats show that yellow page usage is on the decline and search engines are on the rise for finding local information. This is particularly true for a site like Google Maps, which has grown to surpass Mapquest as the number one site in the Travel/Maps category that Hitwise tracks.

That said, there are plenty of small businesses that offer products or services nationally, or even globally — if they’re not interested in finding local customers, they don’t really need to focus much on local search.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): How creative can one be in the local search space?

Matt McGee: Local search optimization doesn’t need to be innovative, and it’s actually more about taking care of the basics than being creative. What would count as “innovative” in a lot of markets and industries would just be for a small business to

* go out and claim its local business listings
* make sure those listings have accurate and consistent information
* make sure the listings are in the right categories
* add extra content, like photos and videos, wherever their listings allow it

That’s pretty basic stuff where local search optimization is concerned, but it’s actually somewhat innovative because a lot of small businesses haven’t done it yet.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics):For the small businesses out there who have a national/international target market, it can be overwhelming in the beginning to start out. In such a scenario what can they do to compete with a larger business out there?

Matt McGee: Differentiate! Embrace your “smallness” and use it to your advantage. Do things that larger companies often struggle with — amazing customer service, personal communication with customers and prospects via social media, create and promote great content, and so forth. I’m working with a small business in the skin care industry, which is super competitive and has both national and smaller businesses as competition. We first took care of the main web site — made sure it was highly optimized for appropriate terms and had great content and usability for users. We started blogging to create even more great content, full of helpful ideas and advice related to skin care. And we’re using social media — Twitter and Facebook primarily right now — to spread the client’s name and business further.

It’s not easy, but we’re seeing rewards already in the first year since the client’s new site launched. And you’re right that it can be overwhelming — so I always suggest baby steps. Put together a plan and check each thing off as you go. We didn’t bother with blogging until the main site was relaunched. We didn’t get active on social networks until there was a month or two of good blog content. One step at a time — like going up a ladder.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): What are 3 simple SEO tactics a small business owner can do themselves to improve their ability to be found in local search?

Matt McGee: First, claim your local business listings on sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps, etc. Most local search still happens at the big search engines, so those have to be priority one. Make sure those listings are all accurate and consistent — same business name, address, and phone number everywhere. Any confusion between business listings can really hurt your local search visibility.

Second, do the same onthe secondary sites like Yelp, Insider Pages, and industry-specific sites like TripAdvisor (if you’re in the travel industry), Urbanspoon (if you’re a restaurant), etc.

Third, fix up your main web site. Make sure it’s a great experience for visitors. Make sure you’ve taken care of the SEO basics — correct keyword usage in the title tags, good local content across the site, an excellent and detailed maps/location page to help people find you, and so forth.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): What are some common mistakes you see small businesses making with relation to local search?

Matt McGee: The most common mistake is just not doing anything, assuming they don’t have time for it or that it’s too complicated. It’s really not.

Beyond that, I see a lot of mistakes with how local listings are built out — using generic stock photos, choosing the wrong categories for their listing, or even going overboard by putting spammy keywords in their business name and other parts of the listing.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): There is a common myth among small businesses that SEO is very expensive and they will allocate resources for it later, when they reach a certain amount of sales and have money for it. What would you say to that?

Matt McGee: The cost of SEO depends on a lot of factors: where you’re located, what industry you’re in, how competitive the landscape is, what your overall needs are, and things like that. A real estate agent in Los Angeles will probably spend a lot more on SEO for all of those reasons than a landscaping company in Boise. It can be very expensive, there’s no doubt about that. But when it’s done right, the ROI is almost always enormously positive.

I always tell people this: If you have more money than time, hire a consultant. If you have more time than money, learn the basics yourself. There’s a ton of great and correct SEO information online for free (via blogs, articles, etc.), not to mention plenty of good books and e-books written by smart people. There are small SEO workshops and conferences that don’t cost a ton of money. There are so many opportunities out there that there’s no excuse for not doing something, whether you hire a consultant or do it yourself.

The Magic of Local Search is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths.  This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful startups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics).  KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?

Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most businesses make the mistake of not evaluating their metrics over time. How should metrics evolve with as a startup/ small business grows?

Hiten Shah: Before a company has reached “product /market” fit, I’d be looking at a qualitative product / market fit metric. One example is the must-have metric, defined by a veteran marketer named Sean Ellis. He recently did an interview where he talks about it: http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview We also created a product: http://survey.io to help people measure product/market fit by asking the must-have question.

After product/market fit I’d say for most businesses the most important metrics will probably be tied to a/b testing, marketing expenditures and revenue.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the other frequent mistakes we have seen is that small business owners see SEO and Web Analytics as separate entities and do not tie them in with  their business goals. How would you tie in various web analytics data (clickstream analysis, heatmaps) with your SEO?

Hiten Shah: At the end of the day you are trying to convert visitors who come to your website, regardless of what “channel” they come from. So I’d say that you have to setup an analytics system to help you track conversions and than determine how various channels are converting.

Search Engine Optimization is just one of these channels.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most SMB’s I talk to feel overwhelmed by the top positions in Google. Even when the product is remarkable, ranking well in Google can be very  difficult.  In such a scenario which SEO metrics would you recommend a small  business to track?

Hiten Shah: I would focus on the traffic that the business is currently getting and than determine opportunities that the business is missing out on. Many times instead of focusing on keywords that can drive the largest volume, I would focus on long-tail keywords which might be easier to obtain top positions for in Google.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the challenges we see with funnel optimization for small  businesses is that there is no benchmark for funnel optimization. How important are benchmarks? Also, how can an SMB use Kissmetrics the best way to optimize their funnels?

Hiten Shah: My recommendation is to always baseline your own funnel and than use that to drive improvement. There is little value in trying to understand benchmarks for an “industry” without understanding your own current conversion rates. KISSmetrics is designed to help companies optimize their funnels, we start by encouraging people to baseline their funnel and then help them make improvements. Funnel optimization not only requires metrics but also requires qualitative feedback from customers as well as creativity.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Lastly, as a founder of three successful startups, please share with us three  important things you have learned along the the way!

Hiten Shah: Here are my top three :

1. Getting an early understanding of customers and thus your market is
critical to long-term success.
2. Great customer service and support creates lasting loyalty.
3. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, in fact you should go into your
business knowing that many of your assumptions will be wrong.

Understanding Metrics that Matter – Interview with Hiten Shah is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.

Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?

Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : The existing ways of inviting your customers to take a survey can be interrupting, generally in the form of annoying pop ups. What in your experience have been the best ways for asking your customers to participate in a survey?

Ken Hilburn: At Juice Analytics, we’ve always tried super hard to be as un-intrusive as possible to the user’s experience. It’s baked into the way we interact on every level with our community and clients from mailing lists, to surveys, to our applications. We believe that if you create valuable product (be it information, services, or software) people will proactively engage – Seth Godin has been great at reminding us you shouldn’t have to yell at someone to get their attention.
When it came to our recent survey on the whether or not we were helping our fans be more effective in their companies, we decided to use two primary channels for requesting feedback. The first was to post a link to the survey on our blog, which has a very broad and strong following. The second channel was to send an email to those who had opted in to receiving information from Juice. We didn’t believe using pop-ups on the website for survey participation was warranted. Pop-ups are annoying and should only be used in cases where you need to collect information from an otherwise unreachable audience regarding a very specific, quick turn-around topic.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Avinash Kaushik has talked widely about limiting your survey to 4 important questions using the 4q model. Are there any ‘best survey practices’ one should follow?

Ken Hilburn: We’re big fans of Avinash and what he does. And that’s no different when it comes to his 4Q model. However, our survey objectives are a little different from what the 4Q model was intended to address. For instance, in our most recent case we were more interested in learning about the general information visualization environment in our community’s companies, rather than user experience on the web site. As a result, here are the principles we used when constructing our survey:
* Participants have to have the option to avoid it altogether (see question 2).
* It has to be short enough that someone can complete the whole thing in less that 5 minutes – preferably less than 3… or 1.
* The final results have to not only be useful by Juice, but also useful by the participants. We wanted this criteria since we were going to offer the results back to the community.
* Above all, it has to be fun. Juice believes that many see our domain as dry and boring. So, we try very hard to make our community engagements friendly and entertaining. We saw this survey to be the perfect challenge for us to turn the “ultimate boring” into something people had fun doing. Based on the feedback (and responses) that we received, we achieved our objective.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Can you share with us your ideas of how to keep your customers engaged during a survey?

Ken Hilburn: We’re living in an age where attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Folks will only do something as long as they want to. We used several concepts to encourage completion:

* We used a personal, friendly tone to try to get our participants comfortable with the survey.
* Attempted to get participants to look forward to the next question by by transforming typically boring questions into interesting ones. For instance, the very first question was about company size. Instead of asking “is your company 1000-5000 employees”, we asked:

In terms of size, which of the following is your company most like?

• A one man band
• The Dirty Dozen
• The University of Rhode Island
• Microsoft

Finally, questions have to be worded in an easy to read, understand and respond to fashion. When people start having to think about their responses, their progress slows and they start to bail on the survey.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Could you share your experience at Juice Analytics of surveying your readers and what you guys did to achieve a success rate?

Ken Hilburn: Since our readers are engaged because they’re interested in how to look at data in innovative ways, we promised to display results using alternative charting styles. To do this, we had to break the #1 survey rule: stay away from text based answers. In this survey, about half of our questions were text based (as opposed to multiple choice). This required more effort on the back end from us, but think the benefit we got was better participation.
As I mentioned earlier, we posted the survey on our blog first and then did an email invitation to participate. With respect to the email, we had an over 35% open rate, a 45% click rate and a 60+% completion rate. The overall result was that we had over 500 respondents. Again, we have an awesome community that really supports us and the work we do. As a result we treat them with a great deal of respect and try to make our communications feel very personal. People like this.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): There are so many survey tools out there. Which one(s) would you recommend using?

Ken Hilburn: There are a lot. There’s even some good ones (ha!). I think selecting a tool has to be based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Here’s the criteria we used:
* Had to support a wide variety of question types (like rating, ranking, and conditional sequencing)
* Questions had to be easy to enter into the system (spend your time _creating_ a great survey, not administering it)
* The presentation of questions to the participants had to be in format that achieves our very high standard of aesthetic quality.
* The final results had to be easily exportable in their entirety since we wanted to perform some in depth analysis and visualization.
* We preferred that it integrate with our email marketing tool.
We’ve tried several different methods of collecting user information. The first and most flexible is Google Apps forms. We like this because the results get populated directly into a Google spreadsheet which is then easy to manipulate results. We also like Survey Monkey because it’s super simple and quick to set up. For our most important surveys, we have used Constant Contact’s offering because it allows us to target and track our audience more effectively.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): What is your recommended ideal number of participants in a survey which should enable a company takes action on the feedback gained (eg: make changes to a site, add features to a product etc) ?

Ken Hilburn: Being the engineer that I am, I’d love to say: “100% of your user base, of course.” But we all know that’s not really a reasonable expectation. I’d have to say that it has to be a high enough percentage of your user base that you feel there’s a justification for change. However, I’d also say that when it comes to changing the way your customers engage with your site or product, proceeding based solely on a survey should be done cautiously. Once a survey indicates that a change might be warranted, try some A/B testing or more focussed user group sessions to confirm your assumptions. These days both of these options are becoming much more affordable. In the long run, you’ll see a much more positive improvement.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Ken works with the Juice community and customers to help them better understand how to incorporate information presentation best practices into their world. He’s known for applying his structured approach and deep customer experiences to enable clients to implement targeted information solutions.

Once again, check out the totally awesome survey that Juice Analytics created to engage customers. We’ll definitely be trying some of these tactics out with our customer surveys in the near future.

The Art of Creating Super Awesome Surveys is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

As of right now, it’s still not a great idea to mix Flash and SEO unless you really know what you’re doing. If you’re trying to rank higher on search engines, it’s probably a good idea to not overload your site with Flash.  While there have been strides by the search engines to parse Flash files and grab the readable text, unless you set this up properly, chances are the Flash will end up hurting your rankings.

When to use Flash

Flash is a great tool if you have a complicated product that needs more explanation or if you need entertainment value on the website.  Secondly, with the increase in mobile internet use, Flash is still not visible on the latest iPhone and Blackberry, so it’s likely those visitors will be bouncing.  At Pear, we’re getting about 20% of our visitors from mobile devices, so you could be losing out on those visitors with a Flash landing page.

Alternative solutions to Flash

But now we can use AJAX and other javascript techniques, like sliders and expanders, to uniquely display content without bombarding the visitor with content, and yet it’s all still readable by the search engine.  Check out how ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting company, uses javascript sliders instead of Flash to nicely organize lots of information.

Setting up proper use of Flash

If you or your developer still insist on using Flash, there are some ways that you can set up your code to optimize it for SEO, and it has to do with accessibility programming.  This blog post by Jonathan Hochman is a great overview of the multiple ways you can set this up using SWFObject 2.0, or even SIFR in some cases, although I understand SIFR is more used for typography enhancements, where you would like to use a non-standard web font, but get credit for the text in an H1 tag for example.

The SWFObject method provides a way to include alternate HTML content on the page which is visible in your source code, and all it uses is a tiny javascript file.  This stems from the Web Accessibility Initiative which says all multimedia content should have an alternative way of accessing the content.

Is Flash Good for SEO? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

On Tuesday, Google released their SEO Report Card where they did an extensive evaluation of themselves in terms of search engine optimization. The result? Well, not so good. Even Business Insider agrees that Google fails to eat their own dog food by noting that only 10% of their own product pages conform to the proper title tag protocol. Even if you type in “search engine” into Google, they come up as the 5th result, and it’s not even google.com, but a different beta product. I wonder if that’s on purpose.

So if Google sucks at SEO, why do their other products rank #1 for so many search terms? Is Google using their own algorithm on their products, or are they overriding it when it’s convenient?

Search for “apps.” Google Apps is the top listing, not Apple.

Search for “documents.” Google Docs is the top listing, beating out several government related sites.

Search for “video.” The number one position? Google Video. Who the hell uses that anymore? And where is the Google-owned YouTube? Maybe again, this is on purpose.

So, is it possible that Google is purposely not listing themselves on keywords such as “search engine” and “video” to deter attention, and then quietly ranking themselves number one for all of their other products? Sure it is. The search giant, according to HitsLink who publishes search engine market share data, is still commanding an 86% market share for search, and are clearly using the “freemium” model to get high adoption rates on their free products so you’ll eventually buy their advertising – their cash cow. Compare that to Bing’s 3.4% market share despite the millions they’ve been spending in advertising. Nobody seemed to switch overnight from Google to Bing.

Nevertheless, the Google SEO Report Card gives insight into what the search engine thinks is important. Here are a few highlights:

1. Google does not consider the meta description for rankings. It is purely for humans to read what the page is about, so you should write those to grab attention, not to rank higher. (Although, we still see the search keyword highlighted in SERP, so we’re not totally convinced it’s worthless).

2. Google finally says how site links are determined. Ever notice those listings that have links to the site under the title and description? They say that using a hierarchial site structure, descriptive anchor text and avoiding deep nesting of content behind many sub-directories will get you there.

3. Clearly, duplicate content is an issue. In the report, they stress the importance of using the rel=”canonical” attribute to determine the preferred page. They prefer that you consolidate your non-canonical versions and 301 direct them to the canonical version. Of course, that screws up your tracking in Analytics if you are creating multiple instances of a page for marketing – it won’t track visitors on a page before the 301 redirect.

Even Google Sucks at SEO is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The answer is probably “yes.”  The search marketing business is already incredibly large and growing fast, and because of how lucrative it is, it’s attracting all types of “snake oil” salespeople.  According to a Forrester Research study done in July 2009, the search marketing industry is expected to grow to a $31 billion dollar industry by 2014, with 21% of that total on advertisement spending like Google AdWords.  This most certainly is related to the fact that over 85% of all products purchased started with an online search.

It’s also amazing how such a large industry is still very much in its infancy.  Google launched their first version of a search engine in 1998, so the industry is really only 12 years old; yet what’s fascinating is that what you knew back then almost certainly doesn’t apply now.  For instance, in the early days you used to have to “submit” your site to Google in order to let them know you existed.  Today all of that is done automatically through “crawling.”

The other fascinating thing, at least in the SEO world, is how disparate the expert opinions can get.  One says keyword density is a myth, the other says it’s important.  One says the h1 tag matter the most, the other one says it’s the title tag.  It’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone.  Who should you believe?  And why do they charge so vastly different for their services?  One SEO consultant will charge $400 per month, and another one won’t take you unless you spend $5,000 per month.  How are you supposed to evaluate the differences between costs and expertise to make sure you get a “bang for your buck?”

Let’s look at a few basics that you should understand from your SEO:

1.  Does the SEO himself rank in the search engines?

You’ll have to take this one with a grain of salt since you might not readily know what terms the SEO is actually trying to rank for.  They should at least rank for their own name and some moderately competitive terms related to their field.  You can ask them what terms or phrases they are trying to rank for.  Maybe you got to them via a Google search anyway, but you’d be surprised.  I remember responding to an RFP where one of the other respondents was not even following their own advice on their website.

2.  Does the SEO tend to talk about or use old practices?

When evaluating the SEO, ask he or she what kinds of techniques they will use to help rank your website higher.  Beware of words or phrases that involve “keyword density”, “buying links” “one-way reciprocal links” or similar.  Developing inbound links is probably the most daunting task in any SEO workplan, yet can be the most rewarding.  Links are meant to look and feel “natural”, not purchased or manufactured.  Google is smart enough these days to pick up on footprints from link farms and other tricks.  It simply does not work anymore.  We once saw an SEO who built web pages for a client by creating them over 3000 pixels wide so that you had to scroll all the way to the right to see hidden content.  Folks, there are better ways to do this now.

3.  What was the last search marketing event the SEO has attended?

With an industry that can literally change overnight, it is important that the SEO keep abreast of the changes within the industry.  Ask them questions about how Google Caffeine will affect search, or semantically related words.  Or how is real-time search going to affect SEO?  If they don’t have explanations for these kinds of issues, then it’s likely that they don’t get out much or read some of the top search marketing blogs.  Beware of this person.  A good SEO will invest in the time and expense to travel to big cities, which is where all of these events are.

4.  Does the SEO speak at events?

For an SEO to speak at events, particularly search marketing events, it’s likely that this SEO is regarded as a highly knowledgeable and trusted colleague in their field.  They will probably have to present new technology or techniques that are new the field, which means they are more than up-to-speed with what’s going on.

5.  Does the SEO tend to talk over your head showing off their technical prowess?

Beware of these people.  Yes, technical prowess is good, but for most of your audience, they won’t be web developers or IT experts.  A good SEO is able to water down the explanation of what they are doing and why into “Fisher-Price” language so that you can understand it.  If the SEO is talking over your head, it could mean they are trying to over-impress you, and if they know that no one in the room can challenge them, they are probably embellishing most of what they are saying.  An SEO who openly admits for not knowing something is probably worth more and speaks volumes to their character.

Are SEO’s a Dime a Dozen? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.