SEO Stuff

I have read this idea already in the past that Google is going to pursue other media in online advertising, with the success of its pay-per-click schemes.

And it's imminent that they are going to launch the "Pay-Per-Call" service pretty soon. Why? It's because someone just found a link on the Google Click To Call FAQ page.

The scheme works so that when you see the telephone icon on ads served by Google, you can leave your number. Google will then call your number. Wait privacy advocates, it's Google taking the call because it does not disclose the number to the advertiser. Once your number is dialled, you are actually being directed to the number of the advertiser.

You won't get charged with a long distance call though you are charged the airtime on your subscribed telephone plan by your provider.

What I am not sure of is how the arrangement between Google and the advertiser is done (that is, when to call me after I left my number). But wait a minute, how does Google reconcile timezones if I am in Hong Kong and the advertiser is in Boston? I do not want to receive call in the middle of the night.

Just hours after the release of Google Analytics, I immediately signed up and registered Singles For Christ Hong Kong as my initial website to measure stats.

As a web stats freak, I am always fascinated with the information displayed on various aspects of a web site: how did a visitor interact with the content, which referrer delivered the most traffic, which keyword was often used in locating the site, and so on.

Google Analytics is actually Urchin which was bought by the search engine giant early this year, and adjusted the fees a month after acquisition. Not much news was heard about the product until its release as a free product. We in the office thought of changing our web traffic analysis software but good thing this new offer from Google is quite satisfactory. 24 hours after installing it, the data began appearing and it's very interesting.

I wonder what will be the impact of this to other products like WebTrends and Clicktracks which are sold at least $495. Google Analytics has traffic limits being a free service. But most users won't worry since the threshold value is pegged at 5M, something that's quite unreachable monthly for smaller sites like Google Analytics, I immediately signed up and registered Singles For Christ Hong Kong. After Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Talk, and now Google Analytics, what's next?

So far, optimizing pages for search engines has been fun but at times it's also exhaustive, if not downright frustrating. I have been doing SEO for quite a while with a some success and some failure.

The level of success or failure of an SEO project depends on how things get done, how quick recommendations are implemented and on the degree of freedom of modifying web pages. And from the various types of clients I handled I see a variation of results.

I'd like to classify them into three. No funny tags or curious names.

Clients whose websites are built by us. I have brilliant colleagues whose talent are not limited to project management, programming or creative design. There is that out of the box thinking which does not limit us into building sites just for the sake of it. We tend to measure ROI based on converted sales, analyze traffic and of course success in search engine optimization. That is why even before I came in, sites are already doing well in search engines, even if it's in Flash. These sites we built are the most likely candidates to succeed in SEO campaigns. A couple of examples are a property agency in Hong Kong and one restaurant of African motif.

It's because we get more freedom to tweak sites, change page content, easily access traffic statistics, etc. We built the pages, we modify them, we upload them. And do the same cycle if necessary. At the end of sixth month, results were visible. In return, an expected increase in reservations and closed deals in flats and furnished apartments is seen.

Well, initially it was not us who build the property web site, but since the designer himself was aware of SEO, he got rid of frames and listed the web site into Yahoo! Directory (we did submit it to Open Directory shortly).

I particularly like to optimize sites driven by CMS. Simply because they are dynamically generated and I do not have to scan every page to modify each tag. Also it generates content which is what I really advocate on every web site I optimize.

Next stop is the second type of SEO clients.

Yahoo! Search Explorer is now online. It helps you determine how many pages of a particular web site is currently being indexed by Yahoo! and tell whether these pages need to be submitted before focusing on keyword rankings.

Been there, done that.

My current SEO project is making me have headaches everytime I look at the document. Together with a colleague, we divide the job for English and Chinese pages and from the eight pages we optimize, we came up with more than fifty pages of explanations, measurements, recommendations and justifications in Word document.

The more page I add up, more pressure is building up to meet the expectation of this client, one of the biggest banks in the world.

I am in trouble for not explaining properly why rankings do change so often. A client has been requesting a manual -- er, recommendation reports which details how their keywords are ranked. When she checked it, the results were off and asked for explanation.

I myself am not very convinced with my response. Anyway I had to explain. One of the reasons why this happens is that search engines have different data centers which accommodate the millions of searches taking place every single day. Another one is more dubious: search engines update their algorithms that any change in rules and patches will have affected the results.

With this experience, I feelt that keyword ranking is only good to show prospect clients how SEO improved their keyword ranking on search engine results. But doing it as baseline report when closing a deal is not the best option. Real results should come from traffic and sales and real return of investment. Keyword results are at the mercy of MSN, Google and Yahoo! which I have no control at and does not translate to sales.

Ultimately setting up a website, apart from telling the world that you have a new labrador pet, is to generate money.

Often times, we hear many reports of unscrupulous search engine optimization providers who just do nothing but suck client money and masquerade it with technical conversations peppering sentences with terms such as link popularity, backlinks, PageRank, redirection, mod_rewrite and so on. Often times when ranking don’t improve it’s the “gurus” who are labeled incompetent.

This seems quite unfair because in organic search engine optimization, the service providers can’t have all controls in search results. It’s at the mercy of the search engines on how they read each page and value links, content, etc. What if spam blogs are found in Yahoo! search results?

Honestly, it’s a matter of best practice SEO that will propel sites to have improved ranking, plus a busload of patient as these results will not happen overnight.

Take a look at the following signs. If you come across any of these, then you might be working for a bad client.

1. Does not implement all SEO recommendations.


2. Dictates what keywords they want to rank even if many of them are poorly targeted.


3. Complains a month after implementation that SEO did not bring any significant change in rankings.


4. Constantly overrides SEO guidelines every time a page update is done.


5. Performs SEO tasks not recommended (e.g., buying links from free for all sites)


6. Does not communicate properly and seems to doubt the capability of the SEO company.

Or if you are a client, you could be behaving the same way as any of the above. If so, then you’re not exactly the best client SEO companies want to work for.

Not too long ago Yahoo! made an indexing update during the time it went into a numbers war with Google.

Barely two months have passed and Yahoo! search engine results pages are still choked with spam blogs or splogs.

Take a look at this example.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=property+agent+in+hong+kong&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

I am trying to measure the ranking of “property agent in hong kong” phrase for one client over at Yahoo.com. The results are disappointing since I was aware of the update made by Yahoo!

Two of the first three results are German-domain links that redirect to Adsense-built pages.

I would have thought that as Yahoo! made the cleanup it got rid of these types of pollutants by way of detecting keyword patterns. Instead they proliferated as described by Jason Bailey as "riddled with spam – worse than before – yecch."

It’s difficult to justify to clients if you have optimized for keywords that are attractive to spammers, say Cialis, pills, or online lottery. You could have ranked higher but splogs get in the way and you are powerless to eradicate them.

I am astonished to realize that the web site I am maintaining, www.sfc-hongkong.org, is ranked 11th on Yahoo! Hong Kong for “Hong Kong Disneyland” phrase, and number one non-Chinese web site in the ranking which lists 2.05 million related pages!

Having said it, the site is at page two of search engine results and it means not a lot of people are going to reach such page and click our link.

We had a minimal mention of Hong Kong Disneyland (we had a little countdown on its opening day) and not really aiming to rank high on that keyword. But with such good placement, that only shows that best practice SEO isn’t always done in a scientific, drill down, hardcore research and evaluation. Simply, provide what people are looking for and serve it nicely on your web pages.

One thing that I notice about SEO providers as posted on their web sites is that they guarantee search engine placements as if they own search engines
that whoever pays the biggest bid will be on top. As said many times, nobody knows exactly how search engine algorithms work, let alone guarantee search
engine results.

I investigated one provider based in South Asia. It was funny because the sample keywords purportedly used for their client are, yes, number one in major search engines!

Too bad, nobody searched for such phrases according to Overture. So I can have one client believe in me when I say he/she should be number one in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for out of these world keywords like supersonic high efficiency double a battery" or "organic shoe shine box insecticide".

Just as Microsoft prefers the cure rather the prevention, an analogy can be deduced in search engines ability to treat every links equal. Of course they aren't. Some are high valued as links hosted in great, popular sites. That is why it pays to be listed in Yahoo! Directory because one can be assured that Yahoo! keeps a credible list of sites. There are low valued as those links coming from a web page browsed by less than twenty unique visitors everyday.

But there are links that are so annoying that even calling them low valued is not enough. If high valued links have a score of 8 or 9, and low valued links 2 or 3, such annoying links should have 0 value.

What are these links that are annoying? They are the links that are placed on a web site A linking to another web site B just to dupe search engines that web site B is popular and are therefore being linked. How can you tell a web site is practicing this? Simple. You can easily track them in a web page that contains more than ten links pointing to one single web site. Why do we need ten links in a web page to emphasize the importance of a web site? When this is detected by search engine robots, a red flag is raised and the site (not just the page) is penalized by blacklisting it from appearing in search engine results.

So spammers have found a way to get around this: the blog. It used to be known than blog is a very important element in determining popularity of a site. What interests people interests the search engines. Afterall, search engines were made for the people. And the uncanny individuals cash in to the popularity of the blog, making it appear they did the same online journal. Wanna see an example?

http://kks202.blogspot.com/

It's obviously rubbish to humans but was thought to be important to search engines. Until a tag was introduced to get rid of this pollution: the nofollow attribute.

Format is Some Website

While many blog providers such as MovableType uses this, many still do not. It remains to be seen when spam bloggers will realize what they're doing does not do them any good as much as to the annoyed others.

Newly launched sites are often finding it difficult to find their niches in organic search engine result pages (SERPs) especially in Google. This prompted many of us to derive a term called "aging delay" in an apparent reference to this phenomenon.

It won't be a phenomenon if Google explained how its search algorithms work; obviously Google wants to keep this one a secret although one golden rule to be followed is to keep page quality high so as to draw interest from visitors and high rankings on search engines will follow. In other words, the way to Google's heart is through a happy visitor that comes to your page.

But this approach does not effectively rank young websites on the top. It typically takes six months to get the rankings going. I believe at the first few months of launch. The site does not generate much traffic and lack visitors who may be interested enough to link to the site. At this point, I'd suggest pay-per-click marketing to be enforced. This approach not only directs targeted audience to the site, it also gives a decent amount exposure. Another is a press release which will detail the purpose of the site, what people would benefit in coming to the site and the upcoming features.

In a nutshell, new websites are often not as credible sites and so they have to endure a few months of being hidden away from the mainstream web traffic and at this time these websites should be aggressive in gathering resources to make their presence felt in a competitive Internet world. As sites start to gather links pointing to them, they gain popularity, and therefore deserve a worthy notch higher.

This is not always the case as popular brands always have the advantage at their hands. For example, even if Hong Kong Disneyland is just a month away from launching and its website is up for just a few days, its website may have been eagerly anticipated by many people for booking, theme park attractions, etc. so that linking and blogging come freely and most of the time unsolicited. Remember, Google loves links and its one basis of their PageRank service.

And so to conclude, search engines are like humans who don't want to drink recently fermented wine; it must be aged to obtain the desired flavor.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies tend to display their credibility through a list of big name companies who have sought their services to help improve their rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

The earlier the company recognizes the importance of search engine optimization (which they can do it themselves anyway), the better their rankings become and will make their competitors play catchup on their online marketing efforts.

But there are cases when SEO companies prefer to hide the list of clients. I suspect that these companies are curious competitors will look at the list drill on the code to see how this company performs SEO. Apart from linking efforts, quality copywriting and user friendly layout, it's the way they implement titles, use of tags, and anchor text that gives hints to the others. My company should not hide our client list, even if we no longer work for them. Afterall, I am proud of the portfolio we have.

Another reason client list cannot be displayed is that the clients themselves disallowed such companies from putting them in the list. This could be an internal policy imposed by the client so as to be wary of their competitors. Nosy competitors could easily look down the code and implement it on their very pages. Competitors should be warned though, that if they are careless their sites could disappear from SERPs instead of going up in the rankings.

I have been tasked to do search engine optimization for several sites that we develop. And for that reason I got to learn lots of things. Here are five of them.

1. That websites who were built by people who have less preference on SEO or did not know about this stuff are much more difficult to optimize.

2. That clients are more inclined to see results in a field where nothing is guaranteed. Analogous to stock quotes where advisors see the trend but other factors influence the stock prices. With this in mind, a common understanding must be clearly stated in every signed contract the scope and limitation of the project and remind clients that the ultimate goal is not number one ranking in Google but to improve site traffic in hopes to generate more revenue.

3. That clients who have spoken to various vendors find themselves confused as to what is the real score; it's a fact that many SEO providers adhere to a variety of beliefs when it comes to optimization. One says linking is important in Google than Yahoo!, no it's otherwise, says the other. They disagree on the thought that putting targetted keywords to domain names make their websites more vulnerable to closer scrutiny by search engines. Or understanding that letter case and pluralization is not a big issue. And so on.

4. That Search Engine Optimization is an art and not rocket science. There are checklists on how to do them, therefore nothing is secret. Tags, titles, descriptions, backlinks, quality content, yes everyone knows that. But what varies from one provider to the other is how someone performs SEO creatively.

5. That clients are less inclined to perform SEO on documents that are sensitive for fear of being disclosed by us to other clients. Of course, we honor contracts and we won't do such rip offs. The larger company the client is, the bigger bureaucracy we come across at, and the clients whose sites are the ones we built, stand the best chance of adhering to my recommendations. In that sense, I feel assured I get the blame if the performance is weak after 4 to 6 months, and not that company style guide that prevents them from doing my layout recommendations.