Most of us see the same tweets, read the same blogs and know the same case studies. We know to optimize titles and anchor text, fix canonical issues, write compelling meta descriptions and so on. In the age of social media, trade secrets are now few and far between.
If that’s the case, and we all know basically the same things, what differentiates a great SEO?
The answer is, simply, the ability to get things done.
Here are 10 things you can do to be a great SEO.
10. Be humble: Value goals beyond rankings
A great SEO knows that the ultimate success involves checking their ego. Ranking for an ultra cool term is great chest-pounding material, but the contribution to the bottom line is the currency that spends. Whether the goals are sales, or traffic, ranking for the ugly terms may not be as cool to the world, but it will be to your company.
9. Be a realist: Focus on sustainability
What can your company really expect to rank for? Think like a search engine. Are you really the right answer for a particular search term? If not, don’t spend your resources working hard for a ranking that you really don’t belong in. If you’re building a business model based on a changing algorithm, have a fundamentally sound reason for choosing your terms. If you don’t, create one. No one agrees on how bounce rate affects rankings, but long term I think everyone agrees nothing good will come of a poor performing, irrelevant page.
8. Know your product: Keyword research wins
As more and more keyword research tools become available, making sense of them becomes increasingly mundane. Successful keywords come from real world terms that often don’t jump out in tools like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. You must know what you’re looking for and not just wait for it to be delivered to you. Know how the customers speak, and you’ll know what you’re looking for. Your own internal site search is a great tool for this.
7. Understand your resources: Plan your projects accordingly
Keep in mind, the Paid Search team has a huge advantage here. Their results are relatively predictable. Yours are not. Be certain your project is funded, planned, benchmarked and understood by others. If link building is involved, as it should be, be certain that time is budgeted for a diligent effort. Creating, sharing and following a roadmap will buy you the space to work.
6. Learn your surroundings: Identify potential roadblocks and address them
The worst thing you can do as a SEO is surprise, or ambush, people. You need to assume other departments will already be skeptical of your sorcerer ways. It’s only natural. Identify the people that will block your path. Address them with facts, privately. Do not humiliate someone who doesn’t understand SEO. What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to them. Only if you give respect do you earn the right to command it.
5. Embrace your limitations: Plug the holes
One of the hardest things to do sometimes is admit what you don’t do well. Doing so, however, will earn the respect of others and insure that those holes are plugged by other team members. Work on them as you go, but never hide them. Being great doesn’t mean you need to be great at everything. Asking for help is ok, and very much a sign of greatness.
4. Be a team player: Share the glory
Now we’re getting more into the psychology of a great SEO. It’s easy to want to take credit for a change that reaps huge rewards. Remember the IT guy that implemented it for you? Let him know how rewarding it was for the company and make sure his boss knows it. Not everyone understands how they impact the bottom line. Teach them, and recruit them, and your goals will be that much easier to meet. When people are praised or rewarded, they’ll get on your team.
3. Argue with facts: No mudslinging
Take the high road. Something simple like adding related links to a page may be a no-brainer to you, but may look like spam someone that just doesn’t understand the reason. Stay patient. You probably can’t do their job, either. Explain why your idea is necessary, and use case studies. Show them how the sites they use probably do the same thing, and they just don’t realize it. Show how rankings influence revenue, and how your project influences rankings. People can’t argue with fact-based numbers. At that point, your nemesis will need to justify their reasons with facts, and not opinions. Do this respectfully, and firmly. When it’s done, you’ll win. Or, you’ll realize SEO may be hopeless where you’re at.
2. Choose your battles: There’s more than SEO
Sometimes the decision makers understand SEO, and fly directly against a known best practice. If your company values a project component above SEO, don’t pout or write them off as morons. There’s a bigger picture and sometimes a small SEO sacrifice can reap large gains in other areas. A great SEO lives to fight another day and comes knocking at another door. You see, there’s always more than one answer. It’s your job to figure it out.
1. Understand business models: Contribute effectively
SEO is not just implementation, it’s largely strategy. Sometimes it’s a strategy that may not even be known to your company. Bring a revenue strategy, along with the SEO ability to implement it, and you’ll have gotten out of the box. You see, the key to greatness is being more than just a SEO. Bring ways to contribute to the bottom line, and make them happen, and you will have achieved greatness.
So there you have it. The difference between a great SEO, or almost any other professional, lies in their ability to get things done. Navigating pitfalls, effectively communicating and maintaining superior knowledge all lead to greatness. For future reference, I suggest you bookmark this page. It can serve as a great source for dealing with common SEO issues.
If anyone has any opinions on what makes a great SEO, please feel free to share them below. I’d love to hear how you define greatness.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Top 4 Sites For SMBs Navigating Social Media
I know. You don’t care how important the so-called “experts” tell you social media is. You’re a small business owner and that means you’re busy. You don’t have time to be everywhere or to try the “next big thing”. Luckily for you, you don’t have to. If you’re a small business owner you can still use social media to find new customers without letting it take over your life. And below you’ll find what I think are the top social media sites to help you do that. The trick is navigate through the clutter and find the ones that will work best for you.
Yahoo Answers
There are a lot of Question/Answer sites out there, but Yahoo Answers stands out due to its impressively large user base and its ability to put you in contact with folks asking service-based questions broken down by location. For example, there’s a guy in Boston looking for a painter, someone in New York City looking for a wedding dress shop and a guy in San Jose looking for recommendations on a new car. Those are all opportunities for small business owners to reach out and respond to targeted service queries. You just have to know they exist and how to find them.
Yahoo Answers is also valuable for businesses where your expertise is what you’re selling. By going in and answering questions that benefit the community, you brand yourself as an expert in that category. If you’re looking for a guide to Yahoo Answers, look no further because Matt McGee has already written the book on it.
Twitter
It’s hard to talk about small business and social media these days without mentioning Twitter. Twitter is about conversation. It’s about finding the people talking about you and what you sell and forming relationships with them. One of the most underutilized aspects of Twitter for most businesses is the Advanced Search feature that allows small business owners to search for specific keywords located near a particular zip code. Companies have used it to ward off customer service complaints, to answer questions and to create an awareness that you’re not only an expert, but you’re an expert in their local area.
For example, say you run a day camp and are looking for summer labor. You can perform a search for [summer job near:02116 within:25] and find folks located 25 miles outside of Boston looking for a job for the summer. There’s even a sentiment feature that attempts to determine if they’re happy about not having a job or sad, so you know which users to go after. There are many, many ways to harness the power of Twitter for local businesses, you just have to know where and how to jump in.
Wordpress
A blog is a powerful sales tool for small businesses because it acts as a differentiator between you and your competition. Your small business blog will not only act as a customer service and educational tool, but it will encourage customers to interact with you, will be crucial in crisis management, and can even help you pick up rankings for keywords you’re not targeting with the rest of your site. A lot of businesses lose out on customers by failing to establish a point of difference or personal story. Your blog enables you to do that. It’s your space to show your customers who you are, to listen, and to connect with them on a more personal level. As far social media outlets go, creating a blog is often one of the best investments you can make to boost your business and retain and attract customers.
Flickr
Flickr provides an avenue for small business owners to find customers with product-based needs (different from Yahoo Answers, which targets service-based needs). By going into the Groups section and searching for your particular area, you can find a list of groups that deal with topics either related to what you do or parallel topics that may share a common customer base.
For example, a search for Boston may reveal a group of car lovers looking for classic car parts or a gem in perfect condition someone’s looking to sell. A local group for photography may be seeking recommendations on new camera types. You should try to join the groups related to your area to help monitor the conversations and find places where it makes sense for you to join in. To make this task easier, subscribe to the RSS feed so that you’re automatically updated once a new discussion topic is added. You can also use Flickr for new content strategies.
Other Notable Mentions for Small Businesses:
* GetSatisfaction: A hub for small businesses to address customer service issues head on before they become larger problems.
* YouTube: Create product demos, how-to videos and engage customers in a way that separates your company from the herd of “me toos“ out there.
* LinkedIn: Create a profile for both yourself and your corporation and take advantage of the Question/Answer feature similar to Yahoo Answers.
* Facebook: Offers strong demographic targeting options both in the advertising opportunities (very high conversions for local businesses!), as well as with corporate Fan pages.
Social media remains a cost effective way for many businesses to reach out to customers. Because of your small size, you can create more targeted, more manageable online communities that convert both online and off. The trick to tackling social media is not to be everywhere, but to instead be everywhere your customers are.
Yahoo Answers
There are a lot of Question/Answer sites out there, but Yahoo Answers stands out due to its impressively large user base and its ability to put you in contact with folks asking service-based questions broken down by location. For example, there’s a guy in Boston looking for a painter, someone in New York City looking for a wedding dress shop and a guy in San Jose looking for recommendations on a new car. Those are all opportunities for small business owners to reach out and respond to targeted service queries. You just have to know they exist and how to find them.
Yahoo Answers is also valuable for businesses where your expertise is what you’re selling. By going in and answering questions that benefit the community, you brand yourself as an expert in that category. If you’re looking for a guide to Yahoo Answers, look no further because Matt McGee has already written the book on it.
It’s hard to talk about small business and social media these days without mentioning Twitter. Twitter is about conversation. It’s about finding the people talking about you and what you sell and forming relationships with them. One of the most underutilized aspects of Twitter for most businesses is the Advanced Search feature that allows small business owners to search for specific keywords located near a particular zip code. Companies have used it to ward off customer service complaints, to answer questions and to create an awareness that you’re not only an expert, but you’re an expert in their local area.
For example, say you run a day camp and are looking for summer labor. You can perform a search for [summer job near:02116 within:25] and find folks located 25 miles outside of Boston looking for a job for the summer. There’s even a sentiment feature that attempts to determine if they’re happy about not having a job or sad, so you know which users to go after. There are many, many ways to harness the power of Twitter for local businesses, you just have to know where and how to jump in.
Wordpress
A blog is a powerful sales tool for small businesses because it acts as a differentiator between you and your competition. Your small business blog will not only act as a customer service and educational tool, but it will encourage customers to interact with you, will be crucial in crisis management, and can even help you pick up rankings for keywords you’re not targeting with the rest of your site. A lot of businesses lose out on customers by failing to establish a point of difference or personal story. Your blog enables you to do that. It’s your space to show your customers who you are, to listen, and to connect with them on a more personal level. As far social media outlets go, creating a blog is often one of the best investments you can make to boost your business and retain and attract customers.
Flickr
Flickr provides an avenue for small business owners to find customers with product-based needs (different from Yahoo Answers, which targets service-based needs). By going into the Groups section and searching for your particular area, you can find a list of groups that deal with topics either related to what you do or parallel topics that may share a common customer base.
For example, a search for Boston may reveal a group of car lovers looking for classic car parts or a gem in perfect condition someone’s looking to sell. A local group for photography may be seeking recommendations on new camera types. You should try to join the groups related to your area to help monitor the conversations and find places where it makes sense for you to join in. To make this task easier, subscribe to the RSS feed so that you’re automatically updated once a new discussion topic is added. You can also use Flickr for new content strategies.
Other Notable Mentions for Small Businesses:
* GetSatisfaction: A hub for small businesses to address customer service issues head on before they become larger problems.
* YouTube: Create product demos, how-to videos and engage customers in a way that separates your company from the herd of “me toos“ out there.
* LinkedIn: Create a profile for both yourself and your corporation and take advantage of the Question/Answer feature similar to Yahoo Answers.
* Facebook: Offers strong demographic targeting options both in the advertising opportunities (very high conversions for local businesses!), as well as with corporate Fan pages.
Social media remains a cost effective way for many businesses to reach out to customers. Because of your small size, you can create more targeted, more manageable online communities that convert both online and off. The trick to tackling social media is not to be everywhere, but to instead be everywhere your customers are.
Study On Google Sitemaps
The Google Webmaster Central blog notified us that Googlers have presented a new study on Sitemaps at the WWW’09 conference in Madrid. The study is absolutely interesting and I recommend printing out the ten page PDF document and reading it. For those of you who don’t have time for that, I hope to highlight the most interesting findings from the study below.
The purpose of the study was to measure the past few years of Sitemaps usage at Google to determine how Sitemap files improve coverage and freshness of the Google web index. By coverage, I mean how Google crawls the web deeper and finds more content that it might not have found. Bt freshness, I mean how Google crawls new or updated content faster, when compared to the normal crawl.
Interesting facts from the study:
* ~35 million Sitemaps were published, as of October 2008.
* The 35 million Sitemaps include “several billion” URLs.
* Most popular Sitemap formats include XML (77%), Unknown (17.5%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%) and RSS (0.11%).
* 58% of URLs in Sitemaps contain the lastmodification date.
* 7% of URLs contain the change frequency field.
* 61% of URLs contain the priority field.
The paper discusses the process used by Google for Sitemaps. Here is a flow diagram that explains it quickly.
Google sitemaps crawl process
Coverage: The dataset used to measure the “coverage” of Sitemaps was approximately 3 million URLs, 1.7 millions URLs specifically from Sitemaps and the remainder from the normal discovery process. Duplicate URLs were close to one million during the discovery crawl process, as opposed to only a 100 duplicate URLs in the Sitemaps files. In short, the study found that discovery was 63% “efficient” and Sitemaps was 99% efficient in crawling the domain at the cost of mission a small fraction of content.
* The percent of duplicates inside Sitemaps is mostly similar to the overall percent of duplicates.
* 46% of the domains have above 50% UniqueCoverage and above 12% have above 90% UniqueCoverage.
* For most domains, Sitemaps achieves a higher percent of URLs in the index with less unique pages.
Freshness: How fresh can Google get with Sitemaps?
* 78% of URLs were seen by Sitemaps first, compared to 22% that were seen through discovery first.
* 14.2% of URLs are submitted through ping
* The probability of seeing a URL through Sitemaps before seeing it through discovery is independent of whether the Sitemaps was submitted using pings or using robots.txt
The paper then goes on to talk about coming up with ways to determine the crawl order, either via Sitemaps or Discovery. Concepts such as SitemapScore and DiscoveryScore are brought up and possible methods.
The study seems like a great read for most SEOs interested in understanding how Google Sitemaps work and how it can benefit your sites.
The purpose of the study was to measure the past few years of Sitemaps usage at Google to determine how Sitemap files improve coverage and freshness of the Google web index. By coverage, I mean how Google crawls the web deeper and finds more content that it might not have found. Bt freshness, I mean how Google crawls new or updated content faster, when compared to the normal crawl.
Interesting facts from the study:
* ~35 million Sitemaps were published, as of October 2008.
* The 35 million Sitemaps include “several billion” URLs.
* Most popular Sitemap formats include XML (77%), Unknown (17.5%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%) and RSS (0.11%).
* 58% of URLs in Sitemaps contain the lastmodification date.
* 7% of URLs contain the change frequency field.
* 61% of URLs contain the priority field.
The paper discusses the process used by Google for Sitemaps. Here is a flow diagram that explains it quickly.
Google sitemaps crawl process
Coverage: The dataset used to measure the “coverage” of Sitemaps was approximately 3 million URLs, 1.7 millions URLs specifically from Sitemaps and the remainder from the normal discovery process. Duplicate URLs were close to one million during the discovery crawl process, as opposed to only a 100 duplicate URLs in the Sitemaps files. In short, the study found that discovery was 63% “efficient” and Sitemaps was 99% efficient in crawling the domain at the cost of mission a small fraction of content.
* The percent of duplicates inside Sitemaps is mostly similar to the overall percent of duplicates.
* 46% of the domains have above 50% UniqueCoverage and above 12% have above 90% UniqueCoverage.
* For most domains, Sitemaps achieves a higher percent of URLs in the index with less unique pages.
Freshness: How fresh can Google get with Sitemaps?
* 78% of URLs were seen by Sitemaps first, compared to 22% that were seen through discovery first.
* 14.2% of URLs are submitted through ping
* The probability of seeing a URL through Sitemaps before seeing it through discovery is independent of whether the Sitemaps was submitted using pings or using robots.txt
The paper then goes on to talk about coming up with ways to determine the crawl order, either via Sitemaps or Discovery. Concepts such as SitemapScore and DiscoveryScore are brought up and possible methods.
The study seems like a great read for most SEOs interested in understanding how Google Sitemaps work and how it can benefit your sites.
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