When I was in school, I was taught that language could be exclusive to certain groups; if you don’t know what the terms mean, you can’t really be a part of the group. Remember Valley Girl speak? Not everyone spoke that way, but if someone imitated it, you knew that they were trying to be (or mock) part of that group. The Catholic Church used to do mass in Latin, as a way to delineate between those who were part of the inner circle and those who were not. Similar linguistic issues have been around for as long as people have had language and have made themselves into groups. It’s the “us” and “them” mentality.

As SEO experts we can be sure there are a lot of terms that we are familiar with that are not familiar to our clients. Giving them a lesson in SEO lingo is the first step to allowing them to see what SEO can do for their businesses. You want to include them so that they don’t look at you blankly; if you get a blank stare your client has no idea what SEO can do and you may as well be talking into the wind.

Rob Ousbey wrote a great article on social media benchmarking that explains some terminology your clients may need to know. He defines the following:

• Domain mozRank: the strength of a website, based on the sites & pages that link to it
• Domain mozTrust: the trustworthiness of a website, based on links from trusted sites & pages
• Unique Visitors: Compete.com’s estimate of the number of monthly unique visitors to a site

Although he uses these terms as a prelude to introducing the numbers proving the effectiveness of various social media sites, his introduction to his readers is the point. He’s teaching.

Our greatest failing as SEO experts can lie in assuming everyone who speaks to us or reads the articles and blogs we write will know the terminology we use. Not teaching our audience can be the pivotal point on which the success or failure of our own businesses lie.

Think about why Microsoft products are so successful: they are everywhere and they are easy to learn. Terms like window, desktop, menu, mouse, scrollbar, and point and click were not familiar to everyone in the computer world even fifteen years ago. Microsoft promotes its terminology and ensures we know what they are talking about. Their products are seen as accessible to everyone for just this reason.

Make SEO terminology accessible to your clients, so that you can include them and work together in forming an SEO business solution for them.

Last week I had lunch with a friend at Celadon House in Oakville. When the owner came by with the bill, he gave me a coupon for 250 CIBC airmiles that I could acquire by returning to the restaurant within the next 45 days.

Awesome! 250 airmiles and all I have to do is show up and pay for a meal at a restaurant that I love to go to. I doubt I would have been back there in 45 days so the restaurant benefits as well. OK, they are Aeroplan miles and my be devalued any second now but still, it will bring me back to the restaurant before I would normally return.

More importantly, it gave me a good feeling when I left the restaurant.

On the flip side, I flew down to Texas last week using United airlines. Wow, United not only breaks guitars, they don’t serve food either. Not even peanuts! And….no TV!  The lack of food was one thing but no TV on a 2 1/2-3 hour flight; unheard in a civilized country like Canada. We flew out of Buffalo for the first time so we didn’t know the policy of no TV for internal US flights under 3 hrs. I will plan my flight better the next time and check out the airplane amenities on Seat Guru.

The Great, The Good and The Ugly Marketing Tactics

Viral Marketing – How about the viral marketing produced by the, “United Breaks Guitars Video”. A campaign any seo company would be proud of.

Celadon Restaurant – Little things mean a lot, especially if they are the last thing a client remembers about your encounter.

United Airlines – Even if you are running a cut rate service, clients still expect a minimum of civility.

Here is why you Need to Listen to the Social Web

If you are a National company and you have logged into your Google Analytics account lately, you’ve noticed that there is a steady increase in visitors coming to your site using a local search modifier with a keyword term.

More and more often , users are typing in seo company Toronto rather than just seo company. Although Google renders results based on your IP location, tweaking the algorithm is an ongoing process and the general population doesn’t know or care about how the results are rendered. They just want local results.

The growth of mobile advertising only serves to increase the urgency for advertisers and advertising platforms to get creative in their approach to local search opportunities.  In an interview with MarketingMag.ca, Marc Tellier, CEO of Yellow Pages Income Fund agrees; “I think we’re going to see a trend in the Internet, broadly speaking, or digital media, to go more local.”

SEO companies have been preaching local search for a couple of years now but it has taken time to develop into  a category that can produce a significant return on investment. Looks like smartphones might be the vechicle to kick it into overdrive.

Sean Michael Kerner of internetnews.com covers the breaking “news of the approval of the new International Domain Names Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush stated that “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.”

“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

On November 16th, 2009, ICANN will allow countries to request their country name as a top-level string with the ability to launch the new extensions in early 2010.

ICANN Announcement (7:10)

There will be some technical issues as indicated in the internetnews.com article , however, Tina Dam, senior director of IDNs at ICANN, points out that, “This is not about ‘the Internet will break suddenly’ or something — the stability is clear and this will be fine and it will be great. It will also be good to have the experience with a limited number of top-level domains and see how it goes, and then build from there. ”

We will be following the story closely to give our take on how it will effect SEO.

With Facebook and Twitter growth flattening out and MySpace US traffic falling off a cliff,it is important to remember that social media marketing is not a replacement for search engine optimization (SEO), it is a growing piece of your internet marketing strategy along with pay per click and e-mail.

A Neilsenwire survey estimates that “roughly 18 percent of users see it [social media] as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase (unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 959% YOY in August) I can only expect this figure to grow.

At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web. If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device. But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.”

Too much information on the Internet. Now there’s a surprise!

Search is still the big dog and I suspect it will to rule for the foreseeable future. I believe that while the Y generation may ask for product/service advice on Facebook, they will still use a search engine to find authoritative websites that support the original influence.

Of course, my wife will claim that I prefer the advice of strangers over hers, so maybe I should stick to social media sites. Could that be a male demographic?

In their continuing effort to provide users with the best possible search results, on August 10th, Google announced the launch of their new caffeine (search engine) infrastructure:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search”

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Mike MacDonald from WebProNews discusses Caffeine with Google’s Matt Cutts at about 1:25 into the following video:

SEOBOOK’s Aaron Wall’s Take on Caffeine

* an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text
* perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
* perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms
tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

Mashable’s testing of Caffeine concludes:

New Google is FAST: It often doubled the speed of Google classic.

New Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.

Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google and Bing. With both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.

It’s partially a response to Bing: At least, that’s how we feel. This new search has a focus on increasing speed, relevancy, accuracy, and the index volume, things that Microsoft really hit on when it released Bing. It feels as if Google “Caffeine” is meant to shore up any deficiencies it may have when compared to Microsoft’s offering, though it’s been in the works long before Bing launched.

Should you Be Worried About Caffeine?

If you are building your website consistently with unique and valuable content that your visitors are sharing through social media or by linking to it, I wouldn’t be concerned about it. Just keep in mind that it is an ongoing process. If Google is spending the time, money and manpower to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy (and) comprehensiveness,” you should be doing the same with your website.

You can check out the differences in search results using Caffeine or compare current Google search results using the Google comparison tool.

Everyday we are asked to take a look at someone’s website, they all have the same problem, their site can be found in the search engines, but only for their website name eg joesplumbing.com, but they want to be found for what their customers are looking for, eg plumber in Toronto. Joe has spend his hard earned money having a website build it looks great, now he is calling us and we don’t have a great answer. Typically we find that 40-60% of the site needs rework!

The html code is way too bloated, the pages haven’t been optimized, the navigation is using very generic terms and we have to undo what their web guys just finished.

How frustrating, time and money wasting is that!

SEO firms also build websites and build great websites, we know what the search engines are looking for, how to make the search engine spider grab the key phrases and ignore the unimportant information. We understand how to bring the search engines spider back to visit your site on a regular basis, and what information the spiders are looking for so they rank your site for the right key phrases. We know page design, what to present on each web page and how to beat out your competition.

The key to reduce rework is to start with the end in mind, the end result being your website attracting new customers and making you money.

Engage a search engine optimization company at the start, they will build an Internet marketing plan that will have your website found, engage your audience, and be able to give you feedback on what your customers are doing every month on your website.
So don’t fall into Joe’s trap, engage the right people from the start of building your new website.

Aaron Wall illustrates one of the main issues with SEO today. By now, everyone has heard of SEO but how many businesses are really doing it? How many people put in a half hearted effort before calling it a day?  Of course, that is the easy thing to do isn’t it. Throw in the towel and claim that SEO doesn’t work because someone doesn’t have the courage to see it through.

Still, there are those clients/entrepreneurs that have the conviction to make a commitment to SEO and see it through. For smaller sites, it may take a while to see the results but for larger sites, benefits can be startling.

In November, we relaunched a website in Toronto with tens of thousands of products. SEO changes to the site’s architecture were completed a month ago. The result was a 45% increase in organic traffic to the site in the first 30 days. We are talking about thousands of potential new clients for the business.

Keep that number in mind (45% increase in traffic) the next time you think about pulling the plug on SEO before you get started. For every company doing SEO, there are dozens of others saying I could’ve , I should’ve or I would’ve but they won’t. And those are the companies who will be playing catch up for a long time to come.

Google Webmaster Tools now provides a single page where you can adjust the settings on your site.

The new settings page includes:

1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control

Geographic Domain – tell Google if your website is associated with an even more specific area than your .com, .ca or .uk indicates.

Preferred Domain Control – Which domain do you want Google to crawl, the www (http://www.domain.com) or non www (http://domain.com) version.

Opting in to Enhanced Images -Allows you to use tools like Google Image Labeler to help improve indexing and search relevance.

Crawl Rate Control – Usually it is a good idea to let Google determine the crawl rate of your site but for larger, more advance sites you can let Google know if there are specific issues they need to address.

Google’s new SearchWiki allows searchers to promote or eliminate pages from their own personal search results. You have to be logged into Google to personalize your results.

This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

While there is some debate about the usefulness of the tool and a small (so far) uproar over privacy concerns, Google continues to move forward in providing searches with better search results.

Search engine optimization will become more difficult as you will be optimizing across behavioral patterns instead of towards a single search engine. The top SEOs are already aware of how personalized search will affect optimizers and are prepared for the future.

You have to forget about rankings and focus in on return on investment (ROI).