Search Engine Optimization

Internet Marketing DON'T List

The internet offers unparalleled opportunities to succeed, but unfortunately, it also offers a wide range of potential problems for its users. I work on the internet all day, that's how I make my living. My life revolves around websites, e-zines, newsletters, email, and a great deal of online research. It can be fun, it can be fascinating, but it also makes me a prime candidate to have to deal with all of those problems and all of the abuse.

In light of which, I have composed a bit of a summary sheet for legitimate businesses. Instead of listing my favorite ways to succeed in interent business, I thought I'd publish a list of internet practices to avoid. These guidelines can help save your business from a quick internet death.

1. Don't break the law. Before you get into business on the internet, do your research and make sure that you aren't violating any state or federal laws. This not only preserves your business reputation but could save your business! Just a few of the potential pitfalls include product infringement, interstate commerce laws, replica products, and bulk email. Although some things are obvious violations, many apparently-innocent practices can get you into trouble.

2. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. Anything you don't really like, your customers probably won't like either. This means excessive use of flashing banner ads, excessive use of pop-up windows, bulk email (aka spam), or misleading advertising tactics.

3. Offer something of quality. Customer loyalty is built by offering quality goods and services, at appropriate prices, backed up by customer service. In other words, your internet business is a real business, and succeeds or fails by the same rules that apply in the "real world".

4. Make it easy for the customer. In every way. If you own a business website, make it easy for people to find the information or product that they need, make it easy for them to contact you, make it easy for them to buy what you are selling. If you offer an internet service such as searches, make it easy for people to submit a site to your search engine, make sure that your results are relevant, and make sure there is enough stability for people to rely on you.

My internet world today has been populated by three different email-borne viruses/worms, 2 websites with far too many pop-up ads, and 2 client sites that are not converting because their order process is too complicated. I have also seen Google and MSN both switch their search results again, and I'm not terribly impressed with what I'm finding in preliminary searches.

Some days the internet is innovative, other days, it can drive me crazy!

Low Cost SEO Revisited

Re-reading my initial post on low cost SEO, I realize that I may have overly stressed the negative. I'd like to clarify a couple of things:

1. Low cost SEO is still better than no SEO at all.
What does that mean? It means that adding good meta tags and submitting to the basic search engines is never a bad idea. Yes, the spiders would find you eventually either way, and yes, most of them don't weight meta tags very much these days. However, it is still better than nothing at all... and can be easily upgraded to "worth the cost" if you are willing to spend a little extra money and a little extra time doing some very basic optimization.

2. Don't expect the budget version of SEO to produce the same results as high end services.
Which is really what I was trying to emphasize the first time around. Although doing some form of SEO and trying to play by the rules will always be beneficial on some level, it's unrealistic to expect it to generate the same results as you would get from full-fledged site optimization and an aggressive marketing campaign. $19.95 simply does not buy what $1995.00 does! This doesn't mean it's not worth spending that $19.95. If that's what you can currently afford, it's a great idea, and might give your business the jump-start it needs to generate a bit more income. Even if the improvement is very modest, it's almost guaranteed that it will be worth far more than the $19.95 you originally put in.

My only caution remains: You do get what you pay for. Have realistic expectations. You won't capture all the top rankings for your products and become a millionaire overnight... but you might see a slow but steady increase in your traffic and a corresponding growth to your business, which is absolutely nothing to be taken lightly.

Do meta tags still matter?

There once was a time when meta tags seemed to rule the world. Nestled up in the header section of the HTML code, the meta tags told the world the name of your website, gave a description, and listed out the keywords that identified what you were all about. Depending on how many tags you chose to use, they could also let the world know who created the site, what program they used, what version of that program, when it was created and when updated. The Dublin Core meta tags, popular in the industry several years ago (and still found on many academic sites created during that time) were designed to help early versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer understand what your site was supposed to look like, so that they could display it properly.

Then came the Dark Ages of the meta tag: The Age of Spam. Lo, it came to pass that meta tags were ruthlessly exploited for personal gain. Flamboyant title, lengthy descriptions, hundreds of keywords. The same keyword would be used 700 times, in every conceivable misspelling, to try to ensure that every person in the world who searched for that term on a search engine would be led to your site, no matter how badly they spelled it, no matter whether or not your site really had what they wanted -- or even matched that term. Exceedingly popular search terms began falling like rain into every site, even though many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with computers, sex, or the television show "Friends".

And so it came to pass that those who programmed the Google ranking algorithm, and the Lycos ranking algorithm, and every other search engine spider, did not look kindly on the meta tags, and tried to make sure that an internet surfer got what they really wanted, and worthy sites would stay on top. And meta tags were no longer the only thing used to determine what your site was about and how you should rank.

You might consider this as one of the first battlefields of the search engines vs. the webmasters, as the internet began to come of age and grow from an underground information source into the big business that it is today. As any internet marketer can tell you, there have been many battlegrounds since, ranging from hidden text to spammed alt tags and most recently link farms. Each, in their turn, have been devalued after being exploited to excess.

So where does that leave the meta tag? The High Rankings Advisor, an industry newsletter that I am almost always in complete agreement with, states the following: "It really doesn't matter how many characters you put in the Meta tags because they're ignored and/or not given weight with the search engines."

For once, I am forced to disagree with Jill Whalen. While it is true that meta tags are nowhere near as important as they once were, they can still be used to your advantage -- provided that you use them properly. Meta tags can reinforce your company name, your site content, your navigation and your alt tags, and they can work as a team to help you out on the search engines. Meta tags are, indeed, completely ignored by many spiders today, but not by all of them. Many spiders still use the title tag, at the least, and some still use the description. However, if either one is spammed, too long, or otherwise inappropriate, it can and WILL be ignored. Here's the quick guidelines: Your title should give your company name. If you wish, you can add a few accurate words describing your company but keep it BRIEF. Likewise for the description. LookSmart used to require no more than 255 characters for the description, but I would personally say this is on the long side. For the description to be worthwhile, it should be short and sweet. 10 - 15 words that read like real English, and accurately reflect your website and your business. Go ahead and add keywords but for heaven's sake be conservative. If you use too many, some or all will be ignored. Keep it to 20 - 30 if you want them to carry any weight at all in the spiders that still care.

AND NEVER NEVVER NEEVER SPAM SPAM SPAMM SPPAM SPPAAMM THEM!!

It's Official: MSN no longer using LookSmart Directory results

As of around noon today, every computer in our office was checked for MSN search results, and none of them are using LookSmart results any longer. Therefore, we are willing to consider it official: MSN no longer uses LookSmart for their directory results.

So just what are they using? They're not saying. However, some results are from Inktomi directly, and they have high ranking, and most other results are fairly close matches to results on other search engines that use Inktomi. Therefore it would seem that MSN is using the Inktomi database, but perhaps using a unique ranking algorithm to rank them, even as they did with the LookSmart results.

MSN is the second most-visited site in the world by some measures, and accounts for a huge percentage of search engine traffic. Their rankings were just turned upside down.

Another day in SEO, another chance to start from ground zero and rebuild!

More search engine changes

It seems that MSN and Yahoo! aren't the only ones experimenting with their future looks. Reports are coming in that some people are seeing a new Google interface, perhaps a test case of things to come. I haven't gotten to see this one, but it sounds fairly standard in terms of offering a new layout and a couple of new features.

The Yahoo! divorce from Google is also a matter of more speculation. Whereas most people seem to feel that Yahoo! will dump Google quickly, others feel they will wait until after Google's IPO, while still others feel they won't dump them at all.

I can see the arguments in favor of any of these occurrences. Yahoo! owns only a small portion of Google, whereas they own Inktomi outright. Therefore, it makes sense to take advantage of the property they own rather than paying for someone else's property when you don't have to. Then again, 5% of Google's IPO might be pretty nice, especially if Yahoo! is still defaulting to Google, which might drive the value up even farther. Finally, Google is still regarded very highly for its search results, and Yahoo! presumably has gotten a positive response for using them.

Personally, I'd vote for option 1 or option 2. If I want Google results, I'll go to Google. If I'm on Yahoo!, I'd like a set of search results that are at least somewhat more selective, especially for businesses. I don't want product sites jumbled up with informational sites jumbled up with weblogs and then a fair sprinkling of old pages and odd, random matches.

But at this point in time, all bets are off.

Yahoo!, Google, LookSmart, MSN, Inktomi: The Winds of Change

The most definitive thing that can be said of the major search engines today, and their interrelationships, is that the situation seems to be in a state of flux.

For 3 straight days last week, my web searches on Yahoo! were not using Google results. Today, they are. Yesterday, I got an email stating that MSN had officially stopped using LookSmart results, but today, MSN searches are showing me LookSmart results for Directory listings.

This sort of thing makes it tough for the honest internet marketer to get a firm handle on how to approach marketing for their websites! Search engine optimization is part art, part science, but either way you need some firm data to begin with, and right now, that's just not available.

These recent fluctuations in listings seem to indicate clearly that the winds of change are blowing through both MSN and Yahoo!, and that we can expect to see some new things in the near future. Smart money is still on Inktomi to take a much more important role on both of these search engines. However, the future is not yet here.

In the meantime, what areas of our marketing do we need to adapt in light of these existing and proposed changes? Should we still try to optimize for Google, since Yahoo! is still using those results? Should we focus our attention on Inktomi, to be ready for the future? Should we still submit to LookSmart to get those coveted MSN rankings, or is it wasting money at this point?

My advice, as always, is to take a conservative approach in your work, while formulating an innovative approach for when the inevitable changes land and become permanent. A properly optimized site for Google will also be properly optimized for Inktomi and a number of other automated search engines, so don't abandon your work in that area. Even after Yahoo! and Google part company, Google rankings will still be very important, and Google will still be able to send a lot of traffic to those sites with strong rankings. Good SEO work and good websites will never loses their importance.

Whether or not to maintain your LookSmart paid inclusion is a harder question. Right now, MSN is apparently still using LookSmart, so perhaps it's a bit premature to cancel those LookSmart listings. Although having a link in a popular directory with a high Alexa ranking (such as LookSmart) does help you on Google, it's not clear whether it will help you enough to offset the cost under LookSmart's new model. In addition, as a previous post mentioned, there seem to be some billing irregularities with LookSmart accounts, and you may not be getting your money's worth. My advice would be to look at each listing on a case-by-case basis, and carefully review your account and your costs. I do believe the day will come when LookSmart will not be worth the price, under their current model, unless they develop some strong new partnerships to replace the loss of the MSN contract.

So the game as I see it is, "Hurry up and wait". Change is in the air, no doubt about it, but it will take a while before the new world map of search engines is in place, and all the boundaries established. Until then, keep your eye on the future, but keep your work in the present!

LOOKSMART WARNING -- URGENT

For all of those who have accounts on LookSmart, we would like to post this warning. We are looking into what seem to be billing problems on at least one of our listings. If the evidence warrants, we will be taking a close look at every other account we have, and taking action.

At this time, it appears that we have been charged on LookSmart for click-throughs that never occurred. We are in the process of documenting and verifying this problem. We have redundant, independent hit tracking on our websites, so we have 2 independent tracking sources. LookSmart claims 427 visitors, while our hit tracking shows a grand total of 80 unique visitors and 121 page views. It's not like the numbers are even remotely close.

I was tipped off to a potential problem when I realized that our LookSmart listing had appeared and then disappeared almost immediately (within the span of a few days). This is a brand new website, only in existence for about 2 weeks, for an industry that does NOT get stellar internet traffic. I looked into the account, and was astonished to see that they claimed 584 total clicks, 427 of which were billable. Quite bluntly, this seemed impossible, so I went into our other hit trackers to confirm.

We are documenting this situation as I write this post, and will be contacting LookSmart. We will also be looking into our other large LookSmart accounts.

WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT ALL SMALL BUSINESS ADVERTISERS ON LOOKSMART DO THE SAME.

Search Engines and Web Business

I received a newsletter from Small Business Newz this morning, containing an excellent article written by Jessica Albon entitled: "Change The Way You Think About Google!"

Although the article was spurred by the furor following Google's major re-indexing a couple of months ago, it contains very sound business advice for any business owner who wants to do business on the web. Aimed particularly at those who were relying on Google for their traffic (something that SEO's have repeatedly warned people not to do), it encourages people to change the way they have approached their marketing, their website, and really their business.

The following points are emphasized:

1. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT THE SEARCH ENGINES
2. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT SITE VISITORS
3. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT FOLLOW UP
4. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT WEB PROMOTION
5. CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR WEBSITE

The basic summary is that it's very unreasonable to think that you will get great internet traffic, tons of visitors and sales, without any investment of time or energy on your part. You may have gotten great Google traffic in the past, but remember that Google does not in fact "owe" you that traffic -- nor does any free service. I've mentioned in earlier posts that you get what you pay for, in the search engine world as with anywhere else, and anything beyond that is just icing on the cake. This article encourages business owners to think of their site traffic in terms of money -- how much is a visitor really worth, in dollars and cents? Then you know how much you can spend to get them there. It also gives some ways to coax them into buying once they've found you, and ways to keep them a loyal customer.

I wish I had written this article so I could make it mandatory reading for all of our clients!

Sharpnet Solutions

Inktomi Takes Center Stage

Another day, another rumor. It hasn't taken long for the rumor mill, once fixated on Google, to start grinding on Inktomi. It's like when an actor gets their first big starring role, and suddenly, they are in all the tabloids. Inktomi is the new search engine star, enjoying a meteoric rise from the lower ranks to the upper echelon thanks to a fortuitous chain of circumstances.

Here's how it worked:

1. Inktomi provides PPC listings for large sites, flat fee listings for smaller sites. Their fees are among the lowest in the industry in many cases, and the submission process is very straightforward. They are a popular submission for many low cost SEO plans for these reasons.

2. Inktomi is used as a secondary index by MSN, after LookSmart. They also provide either primary or secondary listings for a number of the smaller automated search engines including HotBot, InfoSpace, and About.com. This provides them a steady market for their listings.

3. Yahoo! purchases Inktomi in 2003, but continues to use Google, Overture, and Yahoo! Directory results.

4. MSN announces they are not renewing their contract with LookSmart, and instead will use their own search engine. No mention is made of Inktomi, which will apparently remain the secondary.

5. Google announces they will go public in 2004.

6. Rumors begin that Yahoo will dump Google as soon as they go public, either defaulting to their own directory, or to Inktomi. Eventually these rumors are confirmed, but nobody knows what will happen after Google goes away.

7. MSN has not yet unveiled their new search engine bot, although the LookSmart contract is dead. Rumors begin that MSN will default to Inktomi until they finish their own bot.

Suddenly, Inktomi is in line to provide primary listings for two of the biggest, best-known, and best-established search engines: MSN and Yahoo. Between them, they account for 45% of searches, with Google accounting for another 45% (according to recent statistics). That puts Inktomi suddenly on a parallel with Google in terms of the exposure it can offer your site.

Yesterday, my Yahoo searches were showing a different set of results, which were not from the Google database. Apparently, the switchover has begun. MSN is still using LookSmart results as of this date.

Today, I got a newsletter predicting that Inktomi would soon go to a pure PPC model, following LookSmart's lead, and no longer offer flat fee inclusion at a yearly rate. If this happens, many sites will be knocked off Yahoo since they can't pay for it. After an initial panic, I noticed the key phrase: "which some of us are expecting". In other words, there is no basis for this except a degree of paranoia based on the path that LookSmart followed over the past couple of years, and a suspicion that Yahoo will try to milk this for as much money as possible.

Personally I am adopting a "wait and see" policy. First of all, Inktomi clearly separates their PPC from their flat fee, and specifies which type of site should follow which model. It wouldn't make sense for them to switch over to using only the PPC (Index Connect) instead of the flat fee (Search Submit) if the PPC isn't designed for smaller websites. Second, anyone with any business sense is shaking their heads over LookSmart's highly questionable business decisions over the past year or two. LookSmart went from being a reasonably priced flat-fee submission which guaranteed you a listing on MSN, to being a PPC with no major partners, which seems doomed to failure within months. Finally, I don't think it's in Yahoo's best interests to have paid directory listings, paid sponsor listings, and then also demand money for general web listings; people are tired of paying out when Google still provides a strong alternative.

I'm hoping that Yahoo, in the persona of Inktomi, has better vision and a greater commitment to being a good search engine than some of their competitors.

Yahoo Divorces Google!

This just in! The latest, and I do mean very latest, word came through that Yahoo! had officially dumped Google for their primary search results, 3 or 4 months ahead of anticipated. Naturally, I couldn't wait to see, and promptly did a few searches.

I can't speak for listings across the board, but every search I did under Yahoo Web Matches is NOT using Google results any longer. Different rankings, different descriptions. Nor do they match the Yahoo Directory results in most cases.

Yahoo! isn't telling where they are drawing their web matches, but smart money says it's probably Inktomi. To confirm that, I tried doing a few searches on some of Inktomi's other partners, including MSN. Although there were inconsistencies, I saw enough from MSN, HotBot, and All The Web to convince me that Inktomi just jumped up near the top of the heap in terms of importance. I saw similar results on many of these search engines.

One of the most interesting aspects of this was seeing that MSN search results also seemed to be shifting, although their submission process still goes through LookSmart. It would seem that MSN is quietly making their own change-over, even as Yahoo! did -- behind the scenes and with no fanfare, suddenly, everything is new.

I wonder how long the current status quo will last! We'll keep you posted on anything new we find out (even if that means I start updating this blog 5 times a day!).

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