Tag Archives: logic

3 Skills You Need To Be An SEO

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Being an SEO’s not the easiest job in the world. It’s certainly not as simple as understanding, “I need links, and optimized anchor text, keywords and META tags.” How can you develop those links? Why are links important? How does Google actually work? Why does your ranking change in the SERPs? To answer these questions and more, you need more than just knowing the ‘rules of the game.’ There are three very important skills you need to be an SEO, and without these skills, you are at a real disadvantage in the long-run. 1. Communication And Eloquence You have to be able to effective communicate strong thoughts and messages. Your communication skills will allow you to be a good copywriter, which means you can easily generate content that is link-worthy. Even if you have a great idea for a blog post or an incredibly powerful message to send, you have nothing unless you can properly communicate your ideas in a way that’ll evoke an emotional response from other webmasters. Hopefully the response is links to you! Advanced communication skills also come in handy when you are pitching yourself to other webmasters, bloggers and journalists for links back to your website. 2. Critical Thinking You need to be able to understand the logic behind Google’s algorithm, website architecture and the interconnectedness of the web to be a true SEO. You might know the basic rules for SEO, but you can’t be advanced in SEO for a very long time by only knowing ‘the rules’ as they are set today. This year, Google will change their algorithm about 550 times . That’s more than 1.5 times each day! Mastery of SEO means understanding why Google ranks the way it does, and how Spiders crawl websites and properly index and rank pages. By critically thinking about the How? and Why? you will learn to build your strategy for long-term SEO potential, rather than building your SEO power according to short-lived rules that Google may deem ‘adds little weight’ to a website’s authority. 3. Patience You also need to understand that your rankings in the SERPS will not always change overnight. A few factors involved in your ranking include i) aggregate traffic and ii) search traffic relative to your search ranking. Aggregate Traffic You can certainly have a spike in traffic one day or one week, but that doesn’t mean there will be a consistent demand or growing trend to find you in the SERPs. While your ranking may somehow fluctuate to the front page for a relevant search term (when you were formerly on a deeper page, perhaps the 3rd or 4th) this is may only be temporary. Unless there is a consistency or growth in the traffic to your site following a traffic spike, you are not likely to maintain those rankings because the SERPs are time sensitive. They mean to show results that people are looking for when they are looking for it, but if the trend of searching for you and your content dies, so will your ranking. Staying on the front page will mean maintaining the traffic you had during your spike or continually growing your traffic. Search Traffic Relative To Your Search Ranking When you’re ranked in the SERPs, there is an expectation that you will get X% of the clicks from the number of searches for that term that week or month. For example, let’s say (arbitrary numbers) you are ranked 3rd for the search term “Las Vegas SEO.” For the 3rd position in the SERPs, you are expected to receive 12% of the clicks for that search term every month. But if somehow, people are searching “Las Vegas SEO” and click on you a disproportionate amount, or neglect to click on you, your ranking will change. So if you received 20% of clicks for that month, Google may place you in the 2nd position to see how well you perform there – if will you receive the amount of clicks consistent with the proportion of clicks a 2nd position ranking should receive. If you received 4% of clicks for that term that month, your ranking will drop and you will be ‘tested’ in that new, lower position to see if you are the right ‘fit’ for the 5th position in the SERPs. Danny Wong is an in-house SEO expert for Blank Label, an ecommerce startup focused on custom men’s dress shirts designed by consumers with their dress shirt design application . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 3 Skills You Need To Be An

W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and Reality

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A topic that has been discussed extensively by some people in the SEO community is the notion that having a W3C compliant web site is either critical to SEO or it’s not.  Most recently, Edward Lewis and I debated back and forth on Twitter, with Edward holding firm to his long-standing position that compliance is necessary and me taking the stand that 100% compliance is not necessarily a factor in ranking. This latest back and forth was prompted by a tweet I posted while listening to Matt Cutts being interviewed by WebProNews during SMX West.  In that tweet, I summed up what Matt had said regarding SEO and having a site that passes code validation.   My tweet stated : W3C compliance is NOT an SEO factor to Google #MattCuttsQuote #SMX Edward then followed up to our Twitter conversation on this by writing a very lengthy and quite detailed article backing up his position on the matter.  I’ll leave it up to you to take the time to read that article yourselves.   And here, I would like to speak to my own position and the logic behind it. How Much Compliance Is Important? If the goal is to ensure that a client site has the best possible chance at it’s highest organic rankings, then we need to acknowledge that even just factoring in Google, there are about 200 indicators to consider.  Now, I don’t know about you, but here’s the reality.  With 200 factors to consider, I also have just as much of a responsibility to my clients to focus on those factors that I believe will yield the most results for the investment of time and resources. Because of this, I do not check client web sites for 100% W3C compliance as part of my audits.  Even though having a site 100% compliant with W3C standards is a best practice concept, I am not a web developer.  And I have not been hired to ensure that W3C compliance is being met in every way possible. So if a page has an opening paragraph tag without it’s subsequent closing tag, I don’t ultimately care as much to document such findings. Sure, it might only take me a few minutes to run compliance tests.  But as Edward is so capable of doing, documenting a site’s shortcomings at that level could, potentially, just as easily take hours – if you’re going to include details on how to resolve those specific problems.  Multiply that by cross-browser testing work.  Because we all know perfectly well that not one single web browser truly complies 100% with W3C compliance either. So just because a site is 100% compliant doesn’t even mean it’s going to be properly displayed across web browsers.  And that means compliance isn’t so straight forward either. Maximized Return On Recommendations There are so many other fish to fry, that I need to use my time wisely.  Telling clients that their site is not properly validating due to some P tag problem might earn me a pat on the back for being thorough.  Yet if they fix that issue, I do not believe it’s going to have enough of a positive impact on their SEO as compared to them focusing on any one of the dozens of other action items I usually come up with that are direct SEO issues. Competitive Reality Here’s where the two camps differ.  In one camp, if a site is not 100% compliant, it’s not a truly optimized site.  In the other camp, if a site, when held up to the competitive landscape, is just as fast, and has just enough compliance aspects to get by, then an SEO focus is better spent on quality content depth, site architecture from a content topic relationship perspective, internal and external link depth and relationships. Limited Budgetary Resources How many clients do you have where the budget for web initiatives is unlimited? Maybe I don’t work with the right clients, because none of my clients has EVER fit that bill.  Instead, they’ve got specific budgetary parameters from within which they can work.  And if a 5,000 page site has to have its entire dynamically generated URL structure rebuilt from the ground up in order to address just the Page Title to URL relationship for SEO, I guarantee you that this task is infinitely more critical, being specific to SEO, than ensuring there’s a proper closing to a paragraph tag. No Disrespect Now this isn’t about disrespect to people who believe that strict W3C compliance is important.  Let’s face it – while most of us in the SEO industry know that we can make use of image alternate attributes, personally, I make sure I’m very careful in clarifying to clients that making use of them is first and foremost an issue of providing content to visually impaired people that helps them understand the purpose of an image they may not see.  With that caveat in place, I then go on to communicate how this is an opportunity for SEO because the search engines interpret images on a page to be one indicator as to the purpose of that page. So if I have to choose between instructing my clients to work on the alternate attributes of their site’s photos or alternately, making sure paragraph tags are closed, given those aforementioned budgetary limits, I’m always going to go with the one that’s going to help the search engines learn more about the page’s focus or purpose.  Whether a paragraph tag is closed or not does not help or hurt this either way. W3C Standards For SEO In addition to the image alternate attribute, there are several other HTML standard tags, that when properly used (in accordance with W3C guidelines for valid coding of web pages), are clearly SEO best practices as well. Whether it’s proper use of header tags, bolding, bullet point implementation, or any one of dozens upon dozens of elements to HTML, it’s clear that a site IS better off from an SEO perspective, when that site meets those standards. Heck, if a site is so botched up in the validation process, it’s even possible that Google won’t even be able to index it. The Elephant In The Room We Can’t Ignore Any discussion about validation and SEO must, by nature of this arena, include addressing the primary causality of 100% validation not being a “have to”.  One that Validation evangelists refuse to acknowledge as being a serious consideration. There are many millions of sites that already exist,  and millions more being deployed all the time, that are NOT 100% compliant. I’m not here to debate the cause of that or rail against anyone who might have caused it.  Heck.  My own sites fail to meet complete validation.  Because, as stated earlier, I am NOT a developer.  I use OFF THE SHELF solutions.  Programmed by other people.  Because that is what I felt was justifiable in costs to create my own sites. And that’s just reality. If any of the top search engines were to put more emphasis on w3C compliance than on those aspects that help the engine learn the purpose of a site or indicate importance of specific content, or help indicate 3rd party verification of a specific site’s authority, then the SERPs would be spitting out even more garbage than they do now.  Honestly. At The End Of The Day That’s what it really comes down to at the end of the day.  Because even if they DID say compliance is a factor, they could NEVER say it’s more important than those factors that are currently most important.  Because at the end of the day, if two sites are both fully compliant, that’s a one-time thing.  Either they are compliant, or they’re not.  But if two sites have different depth of content, the amount on one site or the other can change at any time.  And the relationships between pages can continually change. And the number of other sites that mention or link to either can change.  Frequently. And even if I tell my clients they have to get their sites to validate, in cases other than ones similar to those I describe here that are clearly specific to SEO, that validation is NOT going to move my client’s site up in the SERPs.  Because while they were busy revamping their P tags, sixty of their competitors were adding new content.  Or building quality inbound links. Yeah, But … Okay so I just said that ensuring a site validates for things that are not specific to current SEO isn’t necessary. Well, if that’s the case, then why is half the SEO industry freaking out over page speed? Clearly, on the surface, page speed has nothing to do with SEO. Except Google has given enough indication now that we are recommending page speed issues be addressed. Because Google has changed their tune. They say that a faster page load is providing a better user experience. Well surely then, if that’s the case, what’s to stop them from saying that 100% validation is also providing a better user experience? Simple. It’s that pesky P tag. Let me know when that changes. Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom , and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and