Twitter just received almost $10 million more in funding, and has a reported $50 million in the bank (or perhaps a more secure place, like under the mattress). The company has no revenue, fewer than 30 employees, and has been criticized as being the dumbest idea ever. Yet Twitter remains the hottest company in the wacky world of Silicon Valley start-ups.
Why, I have no idea. I'm trying to refrain from these sort of instant analyses based on nothing more than my personal opinion--you know, the kind of fraudulent thing that guys like Tom Friedman do.
I can only tell you what my experience has been.I can describe, but I won't arrogantly prescribe, if you don't mind.
I admit being put off when I first heard of Twitter. It was positioned as a way for geeks with no social skills to tell each other that they were buying a Diet Coke with their Subway sandwich, or in a Seinfeld-esque way telling people that they were doing nothing except typing their thoughts into Twitter.
Yet those deep thinkers among us realized the profound "meta" insight that Twitter exploits: bird tweets have meaning.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all said on Thursday they would support a new search engine optimization (SEO) standard that, with extra code on a Web page, allows Web sites to indicate the address of their original, primary URL -- their "canonical version" -- for search engine purposes. How does that help? Well, for Webmasters that have multiple URLs that all point to the same page, it allows search engines to arrive at the original URL and not index multiple pages that all go to the same place. According to The New York Times' citing of several estimates, up to 20 percent of URLs on the Web are duplicates.
There were high-fives all around from companies not exactly known for detente.
"There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk. I think it's going to gain traction pretty quickly," said Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, to the Times.
A posting on Google's Webmaster Central Blog demonstrates examples of how search engines can confuse preferred versions of URLs with their duplicates. Google Indexing Team engineer Joachim Kupke wrote that relative paths can be used to specify canonical URLs, and that Google also allows slight differences in the canonical itself and the content.
The SEO standard is called Canonical Link Tag.
"If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, the format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results," Kupke said. "It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version."
It's Google's baby, but both Yahoo and Microsoft told the Times they were on board.
"We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation," said Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft, to the Times. "It is an important step because all the search engines are coming out with it," added Priyank Garg, director of product management for Web search at Yahoo.
How bulletproof is your SEO campaign? Do you have all your bases covered? Are you getting the most organic traffic available? Smart marketers crave targeted, low-cost web traffic, especially in this challenging economy. When implemented correctly, a finely tuned SEO campaign has the ability to drive traffic efficiently, especially when compared to other forms of marketing.
However, many sites don't take full advantage of the power of a well-honed SEO campaign that has implemented both on-the-page and off-the-page SEO best practices. SEO is both an art and a science, and I view the science part as 90 percent of that balance, even though there is some debate on what true best practices include.
With that in mind, listed here are six common SEO best practices that are often overlooked. The techniques are usually quick and painless to implement and can have dramatic effects on SEO results. You can see the cures for the main mistakes in the upcoming posts.
A recent study from SLI Systems asked 319 respondents about the importance of various technologies and tactics in terms of their effect on ecommerce strategy.
While the sample for the study was not necessarily large, it tended to support many preconceived ideas about which web technologies and techniques are the most effective for online retailers. Search engine marketing and optimization, which embodies both SEO and pay-per-click efforts, were clearly the most important marketing tools in the survey respondents’ opinion, garnering a vote of “Very Important” from 70 percent of those asked.
Email marketing was also an important tactic, a finding which parallels results from a recent Practical eCommerce study.
The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: "If you don't have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?" And, of course you don't have time to do it over. One of the biggest ways to shoot yourself in the foot is at the very, very beginning, when you select your Content Management System (CMS).
With a poor CMS selection you can truly ruin your chances of success. The reason for this is that SEO is a relatively new discipline and most CMS systems were created before SEO was an important consideration. As a consequence, the product managers and software developers who created most CMS systems did not have SEO on their radar. In addition, SEO friendly website code has no real direct relationship to smart coding practices. Here are just three examples (of many) of dire consequences that can occur when you choose a CMS that's not search friendly:
Massive duplicate content issues. A lot of CMS systems create this problem by allowing specific pages on your site to be addressable at multiple different URLS, and then they compound the problem by actually using more than one URL to refer to those pages. As a result, this becomes a guaranteed duplicate content problem, and in some cases, it can occur on a massive scale.
This can really hurt the search engine traffic for a new site by slowing down the crawling of the site. More precisely, every time a search engine crawler spends time crawling a page with duplicate content on it is time that crawler will not spend crawling new unique pages on the site. As a result, indexing of the pages of your new site is slowed. In addition, any links to these duplicate versions of pages are completely wasted. The cumulative link juice (aka PageRank) of your site is a precious resource, and you don't want to squander any of it on pages that will never be included in the search engine index.
No control over meta data. Hard as it may be to believe, there are CMS systems that do not allow you to create unique meta data for your web pages. For example, imagine every page of your site with the exact same title tag. Given that this is the single most important on-page SEO factor that you have complete control over, well, not having control over it seems silly doesn't it?
Or, imagine every page of your site with the same meta description tag. Meta description tags do not affect rankings, but they are often used as the description shown for your web pages in search results. What a wasted opportunity! Well written meta tags tell users why they should come to your page instead of going to the other 9 web pages listed in the results next to yours.
Dynamic URLs that change over time. This is an interesting one. It's kind of like playing "now you see me, now you don't" with the search engines. The content appears on one URL, and a short while later it has moved to another URL. Can this really happen? Yep.
The consequences of this are clear. The search engine will have indexed your content, and will begin to return that content in the results. Users see your stuff in the results, click on it, and land on a 404 page. In addition, the search engine comes back and does not find the page either, and must rediscover it at its new location through crawling. Search engines are not dynamic systems when it comes to understanding your web site, and rediscovering the page could take months. That's another ouch.
Can these CMS problems be fixed later? You can certainly replace a CMS but this is likely to be a huge expense, and it is also likely to set back your SEO by the time it takes to rebuild the site plus a solid 6 months. Ouch. Alternatively, you can use products like Netconcepts GravityStream to retroactively address these problems. This is a great solution for many companies that have been burdened with a bad CMS choice, but it is not free, and also takes time to implement.
Whatever you do, don't come out of the gate with an SEO unfriendly CMS. And, rest assured, there are still a lot of CMS systems that are SEO unfriendly. For the record, I should also state that there are CMS systems that are truly SEO friendly too. The trick is to evaluate this up front, and not simply be satisfied with claims by the software publisher that they are SEO friendly. Make sure they show you some live examples of SEO friendly sites built using their CMS, and have a competent SEO evaluate those sites for you.
Cannibalization can occur when your SEO and PPC activities compete against each other and/or one (usually paid search) is unnecessary or even wasteful due to the success of the other.
It can take place in any of the following scenarios:
* You Already Have a High Organic Ranking
If you have a high organic ranking for your key search terms, you may not want to bid on those terms in paid search, as you may end up diverting potentially "free" (organic) traffic to get users to click on your sponsored search ads (that you pay for).
Keep in mind, it's highly unlikely for a site to obtain a strong organic ranking on every keyword phrase relevant to its audience. So paid search would likely still be important to support your organic efforts and gain presence on the more elusive keywords.
* Your Company and Web Site Has Strong Brand Awareness
If your brand is well known, your audience will probably easily find your Web site without the help of paid search. Your Web site is likely already coming up at the top in the organic listings due to high link value, and many people will go directly to your Web site. In these cases, it may not make sense to "pay" for your brand name or variations of it through paid search.
That said, just because your brand awareness is high, doesn't mean everyone will automatically search for your brand. They might think first of the type of product or service they need and search for that instead (e.g. "iPod") versus your brand or company name (e.g. Apple).
* Your Organic Listing and PPC Ads Are Similar
If your organic listings are identical or similar to your paid search listings, there may not be any added value in undertaking paid search. A key advantage to paid search is that you can control the content of your listing and the landing page you are pointing to. In the case that your organic listings are serving up the right message and page to your users, this advantage is no longer required.
When these three situations occur, you may want to think twice about employing paid search, or evaluate exactly how you will use it.
However, before giving up on paid search too quickly, keep in mind that there are significant opportunities to create synergy with your paid search and organic search activities.
Synergize: It's a Do!
A brand could gain positive synergy from having both organic and paid search in the following scenarios:
* Brand defense. If your brand does not have a high organic position, you will want to be sure that you own the sponsored search SOV whenever your brand name is searched for, and potentially when your key competitor names are entered.
* Enhance your presence. Because you don't have much control over the description on your organic listing, having PPC can ensure that the message you want your audience to see is being delivered.
* Ensure landing page control. When your organic listings are driving to obscure or less than desirable pages, paid search enables you to exert control over which page on your site you drive your audience into based on the keyword.
* Combat negative PR. If your company or industry is subject to negative press, you want to make sure your message is seen first. If you don't have a high organic ranking, paid search can be used to make sure your site is listed above the negative ones, ensuring your audience hears about the benefits of your products and services first.
There are many considerations when deciding whether to employ one or both paid search activities. Ultimately, if SEO and paid search activities are planned strategically, it will exponentially benefit your campaign.
