Janesville SEO

SEO from the Mind of a Janesville Local

RSS

It came to my attention yesterday from a coworker that I should type into Google the following “SEO is”.  And to my <sarcasm>shock</sarcasm> we got the results you see in the picture to the right.  In case you are unable to see the picture I will list them:

• SEO is bullshit
• SEO is dead
• SEO is a scam
• SEO is a Joke
• SEO is useless
• SEO issues
• SEO is overrated
• SEO is bs
• SEO is snake oil

Like many of you I took offense to this and started to wonder how these are the ones being suggested and where are the coming from.  First according to Google:

If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, suggestions are drawn from searches you’ve done, searches done by users all over the world, sites in our search index, and ads in our advertising network. If you’re not signed in to your Google Account, no history-based suggestions are displayed.

So they say it comes from my history and the  searches I have done previously.  I can attest that I have not looked for any of those, except in the past with a recent article about ‘”SEO is Dead.”

The next part indicates that they come from searches done all over the world.  Well let see if that statement holds water by checking Google’s Keyword Tool.

If we search for “seo is” we get the following results with global broad match search volume:

• search engine optimization seo is the: Not Enough Data
• search engine optimization seo is the process: 46
• seo is like: 22
• seo is: 12,100
• seo is a scam: 46
• seo is dead: 170

Well there are at least two of the results, ’seo is a scam’ and ’seo is dead’.  But what about the rest.  Even looking through the rest of the “additional keywords to consider” we do not find any of the others listed.  The next logical step is to look for the exact terms to see what the tool indicates for estimated volume.  We get the following results for global broad match:

• SEO is bullshit: 46
• SEO is dead: 170
• SEO is a scam: 46
• SEO is a Joke: Not Enough Data
• SEO is useless: Not Enough Data
• SEO issues: 320
• SEO is overrated: Not Enough Data
• SEO is bs: Not Enough Data
• SEO is snake oil: Not Enough Data

Okay so there are a couple more that contain some search traffic, “SEO Issues” and “SEO is Bullshit”.  This still does not complete the list.  Okay maybe these are keywords that are trending up right now so let us take a look at Google Insight Trends.

If we do a search in Google Insights for Search for “seo is” we get the following breakout rising searches

• why seo
• seo is dead

Now I am not surprised at all with these results, if we remember there was a lot of recent activity about the “SEO is Dead” topic.  But, once again, we do not see any references for the other keyword suggestions.  To add insult to injury if we do a worldwide search for the term “seo is bullshit” we get “Not enough search volume to show graphs”.  Wow, there just doesn’t seem to be people out there searching for these terms.

Google indicates that they come from ads in their ad network.  Now this one is harder to check, but if I do a search for these keywords, I should see some adds in theory, Right?  Well here are the results of that experiment:

• SEO is bullshit: No Ads
• SEO is dead: No Ads
• SEO is a scam: Ads
• SEO is a Joke: No Ads
• SEO is useless: No Ads
• SEO issues: No Ads
• SEO is overrated: No Ads
• SEO is bs: Ads
• SEO is snake oil: No Ads

The last piece indicates that they come from sites in their index.  Well that is true, there are sites in their index.  We can check that by doing a search for “seo is bullshit“, ~389,00o results, or more precisely “allintitle:seo is bullshit“, ~217 results.  So there are sites in their index with these keywords.  But to counter, a search for “allintitle:seo is easy” has ~3570 results, and has a 36 for Global Monthly Search Volume.  So why is “seo is bullshit” in the suggestion and not “seo is easy.”

So where on earth are these suggestions coming from.  My hunch is they are hand selected.  I can neither confirm nor deny and nor can Google, but it is my story and I am sticking to it.

This may be old news to most, but Google has been for quite some time now adding actual results/links inside the search box. This is seen only on the main homepage of Google and not yet applied to iGoogle. They also provide adds within that same suggestion field, but through my testing lately I was unable to find any. They may be removing them due to unfair advantage that these may give to those lucky enough to get within that search box.

Since I am have not come across the ads as of late, I am not going to comment on those for this post, but just so we are clear, Google still says they include ads in there. However, this post is going to try to take a look at some of the implications that this has on SEM and the general populace at large.

The Good

One thing that is good by providing these straight links within the search box is a cut down on the searches done for a company name. As in the example on the left for CNN, we know the individual is looking more than likely for cnn.com. So instead of wasting my time and Google’s time by providing a long list of search engine results, we are provided the opportunity to click straight on the result.

Why do I call it a “straight link”? The reason I call it a straight link, is because it really is. I took a look at the referral and http header information using a tool like Live HTTP Headers for Firefox we can see that it is a normal link. There is no 302 redirect that is applied as within a typical search results page. Now I am not fortunate enough to have a site that meets the algorithmic guidelines to be granted a suggest a link in the search box, but would be curious to see how this shows up in my analytic reports. Would this be a referral and not a search engine visit? As a side note, you can also tell from the header information that they are tracking and testing this. There are callouts for “source-suggest” and “oi=suggest_nav”.

Another positive that this provides for those who are lucky enough to be in there is going to be reduced amount of competitors being able to bid on brand related keywords and stealing market share. With its current state the amount of any reduction would be small since the amount of links that populate the suggest a link is extremely small and does not even attempt long tail keywords.

Another positive is for Online PR Management. If there are any results that would normally show up in the SERPs that would impact that company negatively for those large brand related search terms, then they would be avoided since the lions share of searchers would simply click on the suggest a link that Google provides.

The Bad

If we take the notion from the previous paragraph about the reduction in brand related campaigns from competitors and look at from the perspective of the competitors then this is a bad thing. If the amount of suggest a links grow, then the amount of keywords that competitors can bid on will be reduced. But realistically, this is a small threat and not a true concern.

Another negative facet to this is that it only favors those with larger amounts of traffic. Since this is dependent on an algorithm to decide when and when not to provide a link, those websites that have a huge amount of traffic will be graced with a suggest a link. This can be seen in the example at the left. By combing information from Google trends we can get a clearer idea that back in early 2008 “fiver” really took off, but it has yet to beat out “fiver tv”

How to Get A Google Suggest A Link

I really am not sure how to get a link and there is really no sure fire way to get one, unless you are already huge. The best answer is that you just need to market the hell out of your company and with large traffic comes a Google suggest-a-link. However, the example to the left seems to indicate a few of the needed requirements in order to get one. There seems to be only one keyword that can be the trigger for each page. In the case to the left it is the homepage. I say page because if you start typing in ‘New York Times Best Seller List” you get a link to the interior page of nytimes.com. Also, I am pretty sure that this is dependent on Google’s knowledge of click through rates and bounce rates since these are the only metrics that would decide if a keyword would be graced with a suggest a link.

My question is what is the cut off for this click through and bounce rate. Do you need to have a 95% click through rate plus a bounce rate of 15% or lower?. I have to assume the cut off is fairly high since the cut off for Google’s Website Optimizer is also high. Needs to be around 98% sure that it will beat the original to indicate a winner.

Little Changes Make a Big Difference

Once again Google has made a small change, but the impact is big.  These types of changes can really mean a significant change to the way things are done in the search world.  The best part of it all is that Google continually tests these changes to see not only what the impact is, but also how big the impact is.  I just wish sometimes that I could see the results from these tests.

I thought it was about time to join the twitterevolution.  I am signed up on twitter @janesvilleseo.  I am also, currently experimenting with a TwitterTools.

Seamless Blog and Twitter Integration

Twitter Tools claims to have a seamless integration between your blog and your twitter feed.  All I can say so far that it installed really easily and I only had to supply my twitter user-name and password to connect.  It is now up and running with this post being the first auto tweet.  Twitter Tools provides a lot more features then just auto tweeting from a blog post.  You can also do the reverse and create a blog post from a tweet.  Not sure if I am going to need that feature on this blog, but it may come in handy a few for one down the road I am working on.  Another feature is the ability to create daily and weekly digest posts from your tweets.  This may come in handy here on Janesvilleseo.com.  That is if I end up tweeting a whole lot.  And of course the last feature is the ability to incorporate your tweets on your blog.

Only time will tell if this plugin is worth its weight, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be more than worth it.

I am currently working a personal SEM project for a family member and I am about to rip my hair out waiting for the name servers to update throughout the world. 

A Little Back Story

The family friend is self employed and is in need of a web site to help promote their services.  Being the great person that I am I decide that I am going to build them a simple website, hosting, and the domain name to boot.  I finally got enough done to go live with the site, but the name servers are taking their sweet time.  I put in the for name server change on Saturday afternoon.  It is currently 10pm on Tuesday.  They say that it takes up to 72 hours for these things to get done, so technically, I have till tomorrow.  The last website I had to do this for, this site, took a lot less time and I even had to do it twice.  The documentation was not updated with the correct info.

I will have to keep my fingers crossed until then.  But, in the mean time I found a great online tool, Whatsmydns.net, to help me keep track of the progress of the Name Server Propagation.  Its a free tool that allows you to track a bunch of different DNS info about a domain as it exists in various servers around the world.

I will keep you all posted as to when the new site is finally up and running.

Data Dimensions, located right here in Janesville, WI just announced that they are expanding their facility by 20,000 square feet.  This expansion will add 50 new jobs to their payroll.  However, although they are expanding their facility which by itself is a huge capital investment, they are not yet fully capitalizing on the potential of their digital real estate, their website.

High Level Market Analysis

In order to get a understanding of just what type of opportunities exist on the web, we need to do some initial research into just how big and competitive the market is.  To keep it simple, we will look at just one keyword, search phrase, that is probably pretty important to Data Dimensions.  That keyword is ‘business process outsourcing’.  Where did i get this keyword. I got it straight on their homepage of their site – http://www.datadimensions.com/

According to Google, this keyword, is searched for approximately 9,900 times every month just here in the U.S.  If we look at the global search volume it is searched for 22.200 time each and every month.  This is huge key term.  Realistically, you are not going to get all of that traffic even if you are number 1, however, if you were in the first position on Google alone, we could estimate about 40% of those searches would result in visitors to the website.  So if we make it an even 10,000 searches and do the math that means Data Dimensions is missing about 4000 visits every month on just 1 keyword and on just 1 search engine.  On top of that if we assume that on average 1% of those visitors turns into a business lead, (1% is normal),  40 business leads alone.  If we continue down this path that means that with an average close rate of 10% that is 4 new clients a month and I am pretty sure that the services are not cheap.

Where Does Data Dimensions Currently Stand

If we do a search for the keyword ‘business process outsourcing’, we find that Data Dimensions does not currently appear on page one.  So where do they appear?  We need to go to page 16, position 151.  Nobody in their right mind goes to page 4 let alone page 16.  This is just for that one keyword.  There are probably a variety of key search phrases that Data Dimensions should, and would more than likely, want to appear in the top 10 for.

A Few Key Areas They Should Address

There are a lot of things that matter when it comes to optimizing a website, but they fall into two categories; onsite (everything on the website) and offsite (usually linking or things not on the website). For the sake of this post, I will just highlight the areas of concern

Onsite Changes

• Proper use of Titles and Meta Data
• Internal Link Structure needs to fall inline with their core services
• Proper use of Header Tags
• Add real pages and not PDFs
• Develop Content, Copy, and Pages that support their core services
• Add a Contact Us Form
• Install Web Tracking on entire site, not just homepage, to measure results

Offsite Changes

• Develop a Linking Strategy
• Properly Format PR releases for the web
• Get Links from everywhere, especially clients

So Much Online Growth Potential

Just from this top level analysis of the size of the online market we can clearly see that there is a lot of potential growth for Data Dimensions if they were to invest into their website.  This could easily translate into real jobs here in Janesville.  We can see that the global market is larger then the domestic one.  That means we can bring new dollars here to Janesville as well.

It has been a couple days since my last post, but that is because I not only have clients to serve, but also a couple personal projects that I am working on.  I am nearly finished with the first section.  The first section is dedicated to a crash course in SEO Fundamentals.  It really is a crash course.  It covers all of the basic tried and true best practices for proper search engine optimization.  Examples of areas that are covered include: Title Tags, Meta Data, Links, Site Structure, No Follows, Robot.txt, Header Tags, Block Level Analysis, etc.  If you are not familiar with these concepts, I recommend doing some studying (Googling), to get a better understanding before you start the course.   Some great takeaways from this section so far revolve around some misnomers; keyword density, no follow changes, and external linking.  I had inklings that all these were true, as true as anything is in SEO, but it was great to see them being spoken to from someone who knows what they are doing.

SEO Training Observations and Comments

After every videocast there is a small non graded quiz that covers what was talked about in each section.  Each video varies in length, but they are all quite long.  Additionally the videocasts are at least 30 minutes in length, if not more.  I can not give an exact time due to the way the videos are broken up.  One possible option that would be great to have would be a way to add it to my ipod (podcast).  I would love to use my1 hour plus commute to listen and study these topics.  There is no official way to do this, but I suspect since it is a streaming video feed, that one can simply grab it if they really wanted to.  Also, I think the quizzes could be more in depth as well.  They are really short almost too short given the length of the videos.  Lastly, it would be great if the videos themselves were of a higher quality.  For the amount of money that we are paying I would think this could be accomplished.  I understand that these Master Certifications and classes are new on the scene so there probably was little to know seed money involved, but going forward, it would be nice.  Kind of like how the SEOmoz Training Videos are.  The second series is way more higher quality.

Even though I am not yet done with the first course, I am pleased with the pace.  Given that this is a Masters Search Engine Optimization Certification Course, the first section should be the most basic and if this is the most basic then the rest should be really great.  I am looking forward to more advanced topics and they even added some cutting edge sections.  One section that should be worthwhile will be SEO for Mobile Devices.  This is an area that is going to explode and I have yet a real world chance to focus any effort into expanding my knowledge on this subject.

My employer, Top Floor Technologies, has been vary generous in alloying me and 2 of my coworkers sign up and partake in the Master Certification Course offered by Market Motive and Search Engine Journal.  I hope to chronicle my experience in the 90 day course.

Day 1: Orientation

Today was the first day and we all had to call into an orientation phone conference.  We went over the syllabus, where and what the assignments are, and what we are going to be graded on.  I am not going to chronicle as much as I can without giving everything away for free.  These courses cost $3500.00 a pop and we used the discount code and saved $1000.00.  The first day of orientation was actually cut a little short.  There was some phone trouble on the instructors and he was dropped from the call.  He did make arrangements to continue the call later in the day and to set aside time tomorrow to finish it up if anybody was unavailable.

My Expectations

I have a lot of expectations going into this training and certification course.  As with you, I was a little leary going into.  I mean is there really any true SEO Certification Course out there that is worth its salt.  As I was learning more and more about the course being offered by Market Motive and Search Engine Journal, the more it sounded like this was worth it.  What I really like about the course is that it is being taught by some of the best people in the field; Avinash Kaushik, Bryan Eisenberg, Andrew Goodman, Andrew Goodman, Matt Bailey, Jennifer Evans Laycock, and Todd Malicoat.  Additionally after watching the Faculty Panel Challenge from the last class, it highlighted that you have to really earn this Master Certification from top industry practitioners.  Michael Stebbins in that video indicated that not everyone made it to this point and not everyone who made it to this point is automatically going to pass.

Initial Overview

At this point, things look pretty good.  There is a nice balance between theory and hands on experience.  There is going to be a self guided e learning video course.  Each section looks like there is a nice range of assignments, mini (non graded) quiz’s, readings, and videocasts. At the end of that, about half way through, there is a final test on this material.  Then we have a hands on project where we get to demonstrate our knowledge of SEO/SEM.  There are also some essay questions that need to be completed and a peer review of  a classmate’s project.

Following my own advice in the previous post by submitting the site straight to Google, I did the same with Yahoo.  Yahoo’s URL submit is a little bit more tricky to find, since they had multiple ways to submit.  One of those is free and the others are paid. You have to do some digging to get to the option. But if your lazy: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit You will need a yahoo account.   No worries if you don’t have one, they are free.

Additionally I am currently ranked #1 for the keyword “Janesville SEO” in Yahoo as well.  This really goes to show that even with a brand new site with no history, the domain name is incredibly important.  However, to keep things in perspective, “Janesville SEO” is not a difficult keyword to obtain.  There is next nothing when it comes to real competition and on top of it all, there is hardly any search traffic for it.  But the good news to that is, if it does start to pick up from nothing, maybe its more brand awareness on my part.  Only time will tell.

Well that was fast.  It only took a day to get indexed since my last post.  I only did two things since that time frame.  The first was submitting my blog to Blog Catalog and I directly submitted my site to Google.

Since I have been doing this Search Engine Optimization thing for quite some time now, I was amazed that this was the most direct way to get indexed.  I say this because I installed Google Analytics, signed up with Google Webmaster Tools, and submitted an XML Google friendly Site Map and there was no indexation by Google.  These are a lot of signals that I provided to Google and yet they did not pick up on them.  So let that be a lesson, if you want to be indexed quickly, submit your site directly to Google. Another interesting fact is that one of the fields that you are able to fill out when submitting your is labeled “comments”.  This indicates to me that someone, a real human and not a bot is actually looking over your submission.  Can you imagine how many submissions they get a day or even a week.   I can only imagine what that job would be like.

Linkbuilding Slowly Begins

The other thing I did was sign up and submit my site to Blog Catalog.  I thought this would be a great initial start in building good backlinks to this site.  This was easy and free to do, which is great.  So if anybody is out there is starting a blog, I would recommend this site and others similar to it to build good backlinks.  Another great benefit for this can be seen in the search engine results page for the search of  “Janesville SEO”.  I currently rank 1, 2, and technically 3.  I say this because my listing on Blog Catalog is in the 3rd spot.

Ranking Results Are In

So in a short while I have obtained the top 3 spots for 1 main keyword I am focusing my rankings on.  The other keyword of choice at the moment is “Janesville Search Engine Optimization”  I am not doing as well there, yet!  Currently I am number 10 (Blog Catalog) and number 15 for janesvilleseo.com.  I am sure within a short period of time I will obtain top rankings for these keywords.  The best thing I have in my favor is my domain name.  Keep that in mind if you have a local service and are in need of a new website/domain.  Get one with the key + city if you can.

Well, I have to admit that I am a little surprised that this site, janesvilleseo.com has yet to be index in Google.  Well I guess I am not really surprised.  This is a brand spankin new website, with little to now content, no backlinks, no domain name history.

What Have I Done Thus Far

I have covered all of the basics:

• Signing up for a Google Analytics account
• Submitting the site to Google Webmasters Tools
• Submitting a XML sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools

What Are The Next Steps

If we keep the two major tenants of SEO in mind, Content and Links, then those have to be the next steps.  As we speak I am continuing to add content to this site.  In the coming weeks and months I hope to not only document my journey to top rankings for the keywords Janesville SEO and Janesville Search Engine Optimization, but also write about other search marketing news and tactics and try to to apply them on a local level here in Janesville, WI.

In terms of building links, I will start with blog directories and local directories.  This tends to be a great starting point for new websites.  By adding to local and topical directories it not only tells Google and the other search engines what you are about, but it can help speed up the process of getting indexed.

I will keep you all posted as to when I get indexed within Google, as well as, Yahoo and Bing.  My guess is that Google will be first and within the next couple of days with Yahoo and Bing to follow shortly.