Big Oak SEO Blog » Search Engine Optimization

Search Stories is Good Fun – But Is it Good SEO?

Shell Harris — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:38:43 +0000

Eric Gehler, a search engine consultant, here at Big Oak SEO discovered an absolutely wonderfully fun and addictive toy today. It is called Search Stories and can be found on YouTube.com. You can see the two videos we created in just a few minutes. I’m sure with some additional time and a little brainstorming you could come up with some great ideas.

From our attempts you can see the potential value, marketing your clients in 30-second commercials that are affordable and may help their online success.

It was fun and we had a good time creating these videos, but how helpful will these videos be for SEO rankings or Corporate Branding? As with most things only time will tell.

But it is probably worth a few minutes of your time to test it out. We’ll be watching the SERPs to see if these show up.

Big Oak SEO - A Richmond SEO Company

Not Showing Up In Google Search

Google’s April Fools Joke

Shell Harris — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:10:54 +0000

Google has always added their fair share of April Fools shenanigans to the popular search engine. In years past they have made fun of Yahoo and Microsoft. Currently Google has renamed itself Topeka in honor of a return gesture the Kansas town made to acquire a special Google project.

As part of the ongoing Google April Fools jokes they have adjusted the the search time from seconds to a host of odd units for measuring time.

You can see the full list below in the screen shots. Look to the right to see the time unit. The first one is my favorite, from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail Fame, “times the velocity of an unladen swallow.” Other time units used include microweeks, microfortnights, jiffies, parsecs, centons, centibeats, epochs, nanocenturies, hertz, warp, and 23.00 skidoo

Click each image for a larger view.

SEO as Part of Your Brand Strategy

Alyssa Duvall — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:28:54 +0000

A new LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll had some interesting insights into the minds of advertisers. When asked how they used Internet advertising, 79% said as a branding device. This number was higher than the 65% who said they use Internet advertising to drive information-gathering for an offline transaction or the 58% who use it to drive online transactions. Simply stated, advertisers in this survey are using Internet advertising more for brand recognition than to get people to buy. Interesting.

Internet advertising does offer the opportunity to target an audience based on the content on a page or website. Say a user is on About.com getting information on how to find a part-time job; it would make sense for them to see a banner ad for a site like SnagAJob or CareerBuilder. But not all ad networks can be so granular or have corresponding advertisers thus, while reading about part-time jobs, a user might also get banner ads for toothpaste, gift cards, or paint.

And what if the user hasn’t gotten to About.com yet? What if they’re using Google or Bing to find information? Or, let’s say, they read the About.com article and now want more information so then they go to a search engine. Wouldn’t it make sense for SnagAJob or CareerBuilder to be present in the search engine results thus giving that user another chance to see the brand and click to the website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) gives brands the ability to be found at that crucial point at which someone is actively looking for information (not just passively reading an article). And your site’s content is always a good match with what the user searched on because Google wants to provide relevant search results.

So let’s say, going back to the part-time job example, the user was actually reading an article about part-time jobs for stay-at-home moms. A narrowly focused banner ad talking about part-time jobs and written for a stay-at-home mom audience would be a great match. But would a banner ad be that specific? Not likely. However, if the user went to a search engine and did a search on “part-time jobs for stay at home moms” (very specific and long-tail, no doubt), the pages in the results would be tailored for that search. And hopefully SnagAJob and CareerBuilder would have a page about that topic for the user to read along with the About.com article.

One of the benefits of SEO is targeting by geographic location which can be harder for Internet advertising – even though some networks will target ads based on IP address (which can be spotty). Sure, SnagAJob could put a banner ad on the website of a local TV station or internet portal – but that is a lot of stations to contact and rate cards to evaluate. However, if a user searches on “Wichita part-time jobs” it’s simple for SnagAJob to have a page about that topic with a listing of part-time jobs in the Wichita area that then is found in Bing’s search results.

If you’re an advertiser thinking about how to get more brand exposure online, consider SEO for your website. The search engines are another place for users to find your brand.

Photo by Danard Vincente

Optimization of Search Engine Results in Bing

Alyssa Duvall — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:01:57 +0000

I’ve played around with Bing over the last few days to see what it offers. Most of my evaluation has been of the results page from the user’s point of view.

Are the results I’m getting relevant?
How would I use the tools on the left side (“refined” results, Related Searches, Search History, etc)?
How would I pick which result to click on?

As an SEO company, we know it’s important that the client’s site ranks well and that search engine users click through (more traffic + more sales = more revenue which makes our clients happy). Users only have a few pieces of information to help them decide what site to visit when they’re looking at a results page: the title (that is also the link to the page), a short description, and the URL of the page.

From what I’ve seen of the results in Bing so far, it looks like the results page is pulling the title tag and meta description, which is pretty standard. However, they’ve added a little something extra to help users decide if this is the site they want before they click. When you hover over a search result, a horizontal line with an orange dot appears on the right. Mouse over the dot and a Preview window opens. In that Preview there is copy from the page, maybe a phone number and/or email address for the site, and sometimes even 5 deep links. So where is this information coming from?

It looks as if Bing is pulling the first content on the page and the first links. This isn’t so great if you’ve put a tag line at the top or Global navigation above your more-customer friendly links. Here I did a search for “diamond engagement rings” and found MySolitaire as the #3 result. The Preview included the first content on the page (double bonus, it also contained the terms “diamond”, “engagement”, and “rings”) and the first links.

But wait, there’s more to it. A search on “Lucero CDs” gives us Amazon as the #7 result. But its Preview copy is not what appears at the top of the page (and the code). Instead, the Preview pulls information father down; it is actually a customer review.

In this case it looks like Bing is pulling the first “unique” content on the page since many of Amazon’s pages share the same information at the top. And the content it pulled did not contain “Lucero” or “CDs”. In a few other results for different searches, it seems they are pulling content near the top but not what I would’ve guessed. So it seems like Bing is looking for copy that:

Is near the top of the page
Is unique
Has the keywords in it (which is like when there is no meta description and the SE pulls content from the page, that includes the keywords, for the description of the listing on the results page)

Bing is so new that I’m not suggesting your run out and change the key pages of your website to maximize what could be in the Preview window. But, if you are thinking about site optimization for Bing’s result, you might want to consider what content and links are at the top of your page and the copy around your prominent keywords for the page.

When going the extra mile pays off

Eric Gehler — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:20:44 +0000

Big Oak’s Client Success

Search Engine Optimization, known as SEO, is the ability to rank a website in the top search results. That’s what we do here as an SEO Company. However there are times that clients need more than SEO, they need marketing, website functionality, and a plan to increase their ROI.

Clients either are well versed in Search Engine Optimization and need someone to do the heavy lifting, or they come with no knowledge of the subject, but know they need exposure to their websites and heard SEO is the way to go. The bottom line for most clients is an increase in profits. That’s what is measurable to their business. Increased web site visitors or traffic normally increases the bottom line or profit.

Big Oak SEO Company took on a new client in February 2009. The client had a successful brick and mortar store and ventured into the online arena. The client operates a Yahoo Store with over 300 products in a niche market. As their SEO Specialist along with our Keyword Researching Specialist we optimized their Yahoo Store for their keywords and started a link building campaign.

The net results in just over 1 month was an increase in $2,000 of sales, and a doubling of orders from the prior month. Under normal circumstances we would consider this a huge success. However the client was lacking a fundamental marketing tool for their website, namely a presence in Google Shopping.

This was beyond the scope of our SEO contract, but Google Shopping presence for this clients products would positively effect the clients ROI. After all ROI, Return on Investment is what the client is really after. Being ranked #1 for a term that doesn’t bring in sales will not benefit the client nor keep a happy customer.

It took a several hours over the course of a few days and several tweaks to establish, create and optimize a Google Base Feed for Google Shopping. (BTW this extra effort was free of charge – no extra billing.) In just 3 days after the first Google Feed went live, the Client reported their first sale from Google Shopping. I am still tweaking the feeds for Higher Google Shopping Results and the client is adding more products to the feed, but this is definitely a case where going the extra mile pays off.

In SEO it not only what you know, but who you know at times as well. Having a SEO Company that is well versed in Google Shopping, Google Adwords, Google Maps, Web Design and Web Functionality can mean the difference between Ranking and Rankings along with Increased ROI.

Clients should help their own SEO cause

Shell Harris — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:18:23 +0000

It occurs to me that as you get into more tactics that involve the social web, you should start leveraging the client’s staff (and possibly their customers) for assistance.

For example, what if you created a series of assignments to roll out over the life of your work with the client starting with each staff member tagging the company on delicious, then digging some page(s) on the site that they like, then creating their own lens on Squidoo.com, etc.

Providing instructions for your clients on how to do this would be part of the SEO consulting work you should be doing for your clients.

SEO is hard work and many hands make light work as my Mom used to say. Get your client’s involved and they will appreciate you efforts all the more and feel like they are part of the process and the success.

Using Logic to Prove that Directory Links are NOT Worthless

Will Paoletto — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:37:21 +0000

It’s faddish these days to walk around saying, “Directory links are worthless,” or “Directory links aren’t that effective for SEO anymore.” I don’t know where the people who seeded this myth (or the parrots who repeat it in lockstep) came from, but I know how to make them flip their opinion straight away. By using logic.

Recently a colleague of mine was looking at a client’s backlinks in Google webmaster tools and noticed that about 20 of them were coming from a single directory submission to directory name removed to preserve its effectiveness*. I had included about 20 tags when I did the directory submission, and Google had indexed and cached each page that was created in the directory via tagging. The fact that Google spiders this directory often and felt it was important enough to show as 20 backlinks to a site in webmaster tools would indicate to a rational person that Google trusts this directory a great deal.

Yet there are still people who like to make the generalization that directory link building is dead. Why? Well, the generalization seemed to begin after it became clear that Google was on a crusade to torture directories that sold links. When Google feels like it, it will go to a random directory that sells links, knock down its PageRank, decache half its pages, and make sure it doesn’t rank for its own name.

The fact that the only way Google can handicap the power of a directory is to manually punish it should indicate to a logical person that directory links must carry weight in the algorithm. And based on what we know about the algorithm, the links should carry weight. Google likes links surrounded by similar links, and that’s the essence of what a page in a web directory is–it’s just a collection of links surrounded by similarly-themed links.

Google can’t just devalue all paid directory links in the same way that it can devalue, say, sitewide links because directories don’t leave footprints that the algorithm can discover on its own. As a result, the only way Google can reduce the effectiveness of a directory link is to manually visit a directory in question and punish it. Therefore, Google only punishes directories that sell links to a.) create the public perception that buying directory links isn’t effective anymore and b.) rob directories of power in the only way it can–through manual penalties. Ergo, broad sweeping generalizations like “directory links are worthless,” have no place in civilized culture.

*If you want to know the name of the directory I cited in the second paragraph that Google seems to hold in high regard, email me at Will {at} bigoakinc {dot} com.

image credit: bill barber

SEO Rockstars

Morgan Greenhalgh — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:26:34 +0000

When you think of basketball, you think of Michael Jordan. When you think of golf, you think of Tiger Woods. When you think of swimming, you think of Michael Phelps. These people have elevated themselves, and what they do, to the next level — they are the rockstars.

How about in SEO? Are there any SEO rockstars? If so, do these rockstars help the industry like Phelps has helped swimming?

The Trend-Setting SEO Rockstar: Aaron Wall

When you pop SEO into Google, what do you get? Some Wikipedia entries (naturally), a .org for the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, but one of the entries that catches your eye is probably “Learn. Rank. Dominate.: SEO Book.com.” Learn, rank and dominate? Sign me up; if I put SEO in Google, I’m certainly not looking for Sponsors for Educational Opportunity — I want to learn about Search Engine Optimization!

Such is the star power of Aaron Wall. He, quite literally, wrote the book on SEO — “SEO Book,” which first debuted in 2003. He started very simply with Search-Marketing.info, but quickly learned his trade by trolling through forums, writing articles and eventually setting up his new site, SEObook.com, writing his SEO book and then tirelessly marketing it.

Wall has grown his newest site to a massive scale. He is a sought-after speaker at almost every SEM and SEO conference and everywhere he goes in the SEO world, people follow what he says.

The Community Mastermind SEO Rockstar: Rand Fishkin

Once you start worshiping at the alter of Wall’s “SEO Book,” you eventually realize another great SEO resource exists: SEOmoz.org. People can learn volumes about SEO and SEM here. But, is there one person behind the site? Naturally, and that person is Rand Fishkin.

Fishkin himself wasn’t involved in search marketing until 2002 and then didn’t start SEOmoz until 2004, but since then, this site has become one of the resources for SEO. Why is it so great? With over 5,000 members, an active community commenting on posts, multiple daily articles and an engaged discussion on everything SEO related, really, isn’t that question a little silly?

And the mastermind behind this melting pot of SEO knowledge? He speaks at conferences (you’ll remember him for his bright yellow Pumas), authored the “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” and has helped about a million different companies rank better.

Seriously, who do you think Microsoft went to when they needed SEO help? Yup, Fishkin. Rockstar? Definitely.

The Original SEO Rockstar: Jill Whalen

Wall made his mark late in 2003 and Fishkin was making a name for himself in 2004. Is there anyone who has been around longer than a few years?

Let’s welcome to the stage Jill Whalen. You want longevity? Whalen founded High Rankings, one of the best SEO companies around, in 1995!

Seriously, 1995? Rand Fishkin was still in high school at that point! Whalen is, without a doubt, the original SEO rockstar. You want to add credibility and authority to your speaking panel? Ask Whalen to speak on it.

Both Wall and Fishkin are rockstars who generate big crowds and have huge followings online, but no one can come close to the reverence that Whalen receives — and rightly deserves.

The SEO Rockstar Trend Setter: Matt Cutts

Wall, Whalen and Fishkin are all experts in the field of SEO, but Matt Cutts is the guy who creates and enforces the rules they play by. Who is he? He leads the Search Quality group for Google — and they specialize in SEO issues.

What does that all mean? He’s the one who ensures Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are followed and he keeps an eye on link spam. Most importantly, he’s the face of the Search Group. That means when he speaks at conferences, gives tips on improving your site to rank in Google or anything related, his words are the law and people flock to him like he is the shepherd.

Do the SEO Rockstars Help or Hurt the Industry?

Do these SEO rockstars help the industry, or do they hurt it? SEO is all about getting websites found, and people don’t find things they don’t know about. The same thing is true for the industry itself. If no one knows about it, then there won’t be much business. Consequently, without a doubt, these rockstars are invaluable assets.

Having people who stand out in our industry as experts helps give us credence. These shining stars help the public learn about SEO and get familiar with our industry.

Not only that, but these rockstars help the rest of us agree on certain things, they help us come up with rough guidelines and standards. For an industry that has no specific written rules to follow, it’s good to have people out there, getting the word out, helping shape how we do things and leading the industry.

by Morgan Greenhalgh

Reason 1,000,001 Why Quality Writing Matters

George Perry — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:10:13 +0000

While I’ve discussed why having quality writing is important for various reasons on our SEO Copywriting Blog, the following image shows why not only is writing quality content important, but paying attention to your meta descriptions can be equally important.

While the website bullysticks.com may be ranking in the top position for the keyword “bully sticks”, their meta description “boasts” that their “prices do not compare!” Clearly not the message they meant to send to potential customers. While bullysticks.com seems to be claiming that their prices are higher than their competition, our client, Best Bully Sticks, has a meta-description that clearly states how their high quality product, low prices, and customer service make the difference.

Meta descriptions do get read so make sure your’s says something useful. Amazing how four little words can make a difference.

Google appears to Change Algorithm: Using Capital Letters Creates New Keywords

Will Paoletto — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:18:18 +0000

Keyword research tools may be in for another overhaul. Google’s algorithm now appears to be viewing the capitalized versions of keywords as separate from the lowercase versions. I came across this while searching for the lowercase and uppercase versions of the keyword “engagement rings.” Look at these screen shots from the 216.239.59.99 datacenter.

Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “e” in engagement rings. Click for larger image.

Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase”E” in Engagement rings. Click for larger image.

Searching with a capital “E” gives different results than searching with all lowercase letters, and I also noticed discrepancies between lowercase and uppercase letters with that keyword at the 64.233.183.107 datacenter.

Now, look at the differences in the SERPS at the 64.233.171.107 datacenter for the lower and uppercase version of the keyword “dog tags.” The results change after the second search result.

Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “d” in dog tags. Click for larger image.

Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase “D” in Dog tags. Click for larger image.

Assuming this isn’t a temporary glitch, the SEO landscape will undergo another transformation. If this reflects a real change in the algorithm, keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery will have to be adjusted to compensate. They currently don’t differentiate between searches with lowercase and capital letters. Since the Google search results were believed to be identical for each, they had no reason to.

We’ll have to wait for an official word from Google (if they give one), but right now this is looking at lot less like a glitch and a lot more like a real shift in the algorithm. And it would be a significant one. I would guess that people search with different forms of capitalization as often as they misspell words or use the plural form of words. But it’s just a guess, as there is no keyword research data to back that assumption up….yet.

We’ll have to keep our eyes on this one.