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SEO-friendly Alternate Content for Flash

Published November 7th, 2011 Mobile, SEO 3 Comments

Flash may very well be the bane of SEOs everywhere. Search engine spiders read code, parse out the text, and use that to determine relevancy. Combined with that data and a variety of other factors (backlinks, social signals, site speed, etc.) the engines determine where a site will place in the SERPs. Well, what if the search engine spiders hit a site and can’t find any visible text content? There may be some serious technical issue going on, but more likely, the site is built using Flash or presents its main content via the plugin. Long story short, it’s an SEO nightmare. Before we get on the Flash-bashing wagon, let’s take a moment to review the pros and cons of this controversial plugin. Pros:
  • Super “Flashy”
  • Creative control down to the pixel
  • Can provide great interactive and animated features
Cons:
  • Relies on a plugin to deliver site content
  • Users who don’t have or want Flash get a terrible experience
  • Search inaccessible
There’s a near consensus at this point that best practice on the modern web would be to create your interactive content using SEO-ultra-friendly HTML5 and CSS3. However, that’s not the point of this post. We’re talking about the situations where we have a site that is built using Flash and it’s stuck there. This is about how to make the best of a bad (okay, maybe just not-so-great) situation. So what’s the key to opening up a Flash-locked site to search engines? It’s SWFObject2.

What is SWFObject2?

SWFObject2 is an open-source JavaScript library that can be used to embed Flash while also offering alternative content. Basically, when a user visits a page with a Flash object that is embedded via SWFObject2, a script checks to see if the user can actually view the Flash content. If the user can’t, alternate content is pulled up instead.

SWFObject2, Flash, and SEO

A search engine spider only sees text, which is parses from the code of the websites it visits. Spiders don’t see images, run client-side scripts, or play Flash. So, when a search spider visits an SWFObject2-enabled site, the library does its magic and pulls up the alternate content instead of the Flash object. The search engine spider can then index that content and, boom, the keyword relevancy of the site gets a huge boost.

How does Google Treat SWFObject2 Content?

I like to think of SWFObject2 content as the middle-ground between text-based content and content within a NoScript tag. The SWFObject is hosted on Google Code, so it’s safe to assume that it has at least some measure of approval from the dominate search engine out there. We also see the content presented via SWFObject2 appear in search result snippets on a consistent basis. But how does SWFObject2 content actually stack up against text-only content and NoScript content? That remains to be seen. We’re currently in the process of developing a test that will attempt to judge the quality of results achieved by each content delivery method. If you’re interested in knowing as well, let me know in the comments.

Cloaking Concerns when Developing Alternate Content for Flash

Three words; Play it Safe. Remember that the purpose of SWFObject2 is usability and progressive enhancement. If search engines catch you taking advantage of the fact that the majority of users won’t see your alternate content and you stuff it full of unjustified content, keywords, and links, your site is going to be in a bad way.

Getting Started with SWFObject2 for Flash SEO

To get started with SWFObject2, head over to Google Code. Download the library and brush up the implementation options. If the Flash you’re optimizing is simple (not interactive), I’d recommend sticking with “Static Publishing”; It’s amazingly simple. Then, go ahead and create your alternate content. Remember, you can use anything you want here; HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript…it’s all fair game. Now, go forth and optimize.

How to Disable Flash

how to disable flash

3 Digital Marketing Insights Gleaned from Malcom Gladwell

Published October 20th, 2011 Industry, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Malcom Gladwell Portrait by Alex Beck

Last week, I found a great TED talk by one of my favorite non-fiction authors Malcolm Gladwell which really got my digital marketer mind moving. I have enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s works ever since I read Blink for the first time 6 years ago. While I feel he does gloss over some of the more scientific reasons behind his thoughts, I believe he does a great job illustrating interesting concepts about human psychology and its dramatic effects on our environment. This in my opinion, is what we marketers are trying to do every day. As digital marketers our main goal is to understand our customer’s digital needs and desires in an effort to influence them to purchase or consume our said service, product or content. We spend our days filling the world with fantastic campaigns loaded with wonderfully crafted headlines and magical visuals meant to influence our audiences, but are we being as effective as we could be? Below I will be going over concepts from Gladwell’s books Blink and Tipping Point and his TED talk, pointing out 3 cool insights I feel you can walk away with to increase your success rate as a digital marketer.

While most of you I’m sure have read these books, I will warn you right now, this post contains SPOILERS. If you wish not read these spoilers, I would recommend checking them out at your local library or making the purchase from your favorite book outlet.

 

1)   What can spaghetti sauce and pickles tells us about our audiences?

 

Here is the video of Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk I mentioned above. If you have some time, I highly recommend watching this whole presentation before reading further.

 

The first thing I took away form this video is how often I hear the question, “What is the BEST PRACTICE here?” When my client is talking about a specific web page or marketing tactic, and the term “best practices” comes up, I feel it is used in the same way that the Pepsi and Vlasic folks were asking for the “perfect” product for their customers. In my observations marketers and clients are always looking for the “perfect” marketing solution that covers the bases for all of their target audiences. Which in my opinion always leads to muddled concepts and half-assed attempts at speaking to everybody and really never getting through to  anybody. Gladwell illustrates in his examples about how there is not a “perfect pickle or spaghetti sauce” that works for everyone, but rather “perfect pickleS and perfect spaghetti sauceS” that work for certain clusters of people. In marketing we already cluster through our target audiences, but often we forget that within in those audiences we have rather different groups of customers.

 

I have run into this exact phenomenon while I worked at my previous digital design agency and we were debating a fix for the supposed horrendous side navigation.  My designer and I who we’re “experts” and understood design best practices felt that the current side navigation design made the page look to cluttered and since there was so much copy that side navigation we felt was almost unusable due to the fact that it was really hard to identify any text at all. As we spent the next hour explaining to the client the virtues of cleaning up the nav, she told us, that in fact they had tried to do this the year before and we’re promptly bombarded with support calls and emails form angry customers who now could not find what they were looking for and how dare the company change the navigation which worked so perfectly before. Like most cocky agency folks, my designer and I were not having it, and we wasted 30 minutes of our client’s precious time trying to persuade her that in fact, the way they tried was not properly executed. Luckily she did not budge, she knew the type of  ”pickle” some of her customers liked and no design best practice was going to tell her otherwise. Looking back on this as a more experienced marketer, I would have actually recommended that we run a test where we cookied all previous customers, so that they would always be shown the old side nav and then I would run an A/B test on all the non-cookied visitors testing site interaction and overall conversions for the site to see if a more “best practice” nav performed better if we took out the old customer who likes things the way they are bias out. The takeaways for all of you marketers out there would be; next time you are looking for those best practices that have helped others in the past, take a step back and think about your different audiences and how they are segmented, then ask yourself, am I using the right “pickles”?

 

2)   Getting the “buy-in” that matters

In the book Blink, Gladwell looks at how some very trained professionals can make some extraordinarily big, seemingly calculated decisions in seconds and be almost 100% accurate. My take away from it, was that people who have been doing things long enough just develop a rhythm with their craft through hours and hours of practice and exposure and literally just “go with their gut.” I think most of us have at least some experience in this, but what about in the marketing world? Sometimes decisions are HUGE and if they end up being wrong and you’re answering to your CEO with your reasoning that “it just felt right”, you probably will be clearing out your desk that afternoon.  Usually we are presenting our work unseen by most of the company outside of high level folks who we need “buy in” from. As we prepare our final presentation to the “big-wigs” before final sign-off, have we taken the time to get the real “buy-in”? For most of the companies I have worked with, there are  people have been talking and working with the real customers for decades, and while they may not know how to use Mail Chimp or Sales Force, they can tell you know from their gut whether a marketing message or visual is going to resonate with the customers. Personally one of my favorite clients always gave us a creative brief full of insights from her trusted folks in customer service and the folks who actually manufactured the product we were marketing before any concepts had been created. No matter what, we saw great results every time we focused on those specific insights from the brief. By speaking with people who fight the good fight everyday, we can get great feedback in a minimal amount of time.  Understandably, we need to respect other people’s time, but I would bet there are a lot of successful marketers who are making time for a quick 5 minute conversation with people at the front lines, like their customer service or engineering folks. I would also bet that an ounce of their insight is worth a pound of their execs. So next time you have that big email campaign to send out, or if you’re going through a site redesign, go talk to those great folks who fight in the trenches day in and day out and see what they have to say.

 

3)   What SEO/SEM tactics can The Tipping Point teach us?

 

The Tipping Point, the book that brought the buzzwords “stickiness”, “influencer” and “context” into the lexicon of every modern marketer. I’m not sure if this was the first book to explore how trends and epidemics seem to start in small isolated environments and then almost with out warning, go “viral” and spread exponentially throughout a population, but I’m pretty sure this was the first book that modern business folks read in masses.  The most obvious insights we can glean from The Tipping Point are around Social Media practices. Now there have been numerous posts and presentations about this topic, so I will not write one more word about it. For those of you interested, here is a great presentation on that very topic- Increasing Social Media ROI using Gladwell Tipping Point Framework by Colleen Carrington.

The key-takeaway I got from the book is for those who dabble in the SEO and SEM space. One concept we can take away as digital marketers from The Tipping Point is the idea of predicting trends by watching the trendsetters. For our clients industries there are key people, blogs and publications that represent these trendsetters. Right now, they are using the new “buzz words” that are going to influence how the general population will start to search for terms in your industry in the next few months or years. By identifying these sources and keeping tabs on this content through through RSS feeds or just your weekly readings, you can start identifying these new keywords. Now what are we going to do with these new keywords? Since we are predicting what will be happening in the future buying these keywords and changing copy on our pages right now would not be the wisest move. What we can do though is use Google Insights to track the popularity of these keywords, so when you begin to see an upward trend this is when to start revising content along with getting the jump on some cheap clicks early in the game.  Also, if you use the iGoogle dashboard you can create a gadget for these trended charts to check them out on a daily basis with minimal effort on your part. This simple and straight forward practice can help you start seeing huge gains and make you look like the rock star in your next reporting meeting.

Beyond just Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I’m sure that there is a wealth of knowledge out there as well that we digital marketers would love to apply or own little spin to. I would love to hear from any of you digital marketers, are there are any great not-strictly-marketing focused books or presentations out there that any one would recommend or if you have some other great digital marketing insights you have taken from Gladwell’s works, please let me know in the comments.

The Rumors of SEO’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Published July 15th, 2011 SEO 1 Comment

SEO is DeadSince at least 2003, I’ve been hearing the claims that SEO is dead. I’ll be the first to admit, I haven’t been in this game forever; I’ve only been coding, optimizing, and blogging since 2005. So, before I ever started working on the web in any sort of professional capacity, people were claiming that Search Engine Optimization was dead. Every year, I’ll see buzz around a couple of posts and people will ask me “Why do you do SEO if so-and-so says SEO is dead (or dying)”.

Well, the reason I do SEO is because SEO isn’t dead; it’s alive as it ever was. Now, I know I’m not saying anything new here. For every person who says that “SEO is dead”, you’ll see the same number retort that “SEO is alive and well”. However, this post is simply indented to give you some insight into why I, personally, think SEO isn’t dead and that it will, in fact, be healthy and alive for the foreseeable future.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Therefore, the claim that SEO is dead supposes that search engines have reached a level of sophistication where their spiders can completely crawl any website’s content and flawlessly match that content to user queries entered into their search engine. This assumes that any initiatives taken by webmasters to assist indexing and ranking are utterly futile. We know that this is not the case.

Search engines are still evolving and, with the constant adoption of newer web technologies and standards by the webmasters who create the web, they’ll keep evolving. The SEO’s job is to help search engines understand the mess of code that make up the sites we work on. I’ve seen sites built entirely in Flash that if not for SEO would be utterly uncrawlable. I’ve had to resolve an issue with a site’s age gateway that blocked all search spiders along with the underage crowd. I’ve worked on a hundreds of sites where the tactful use of semantic HTML markup let their pages break onto page one of the SERPs. Sure, a lot of issues that SEO addresses would be non-existent if all developers followed documented web-coding standards (a man can dream), but there are still a host of strategies and tools that SEOs use on a daily basis that can make all the difference between page three and position #1.

A site without SEO

Without SEO

I believe that many of the claims of SEOs demise stem from the (seemingly) age-old mantra that “content is king”. This is true and no one can argue it. The naysayers hold that good content is all that’s needed for success with the search engines; good content is extremely likely to be shared, which results in backlinks to the site, which in turn leads to massive gains in search engine rankings. If that’s all that’s required, why doesn’t every webmaster simply crank out “good content” and skyrocket to the top of the SERPs? Because not all webmasters are capable of creating good content and not all brands have the time and budget to work on producing engaging, shareable content. Furthermore, the web is full of good content already and SEO is often required to tip the scales in a battle between two pieces of equally good content.

This is the way I see it: your content will make or break your site (there absolutely must be some reason for users to link to you) and search engines will follow the links to your content to hopefully award you with precious, precious ranking. However, once the link juice starts flowing, all the SEO’s hard work comes to fruition. Optimized code and high site speed allow search engines to get in quickly and find that valuable content; streamlined site architecture allows a percentage of that link juice to flow though the site and boost the rankings of other pages as well; optimized page titles and semantic markup further demonstrate the relevancy of that page for targeted keywords; and well-crafted meta descriptions appear in the SERPs, fostering increased click-throughs, site interaction, and ROI for the site owner. The benefits of on-site SEO work are huge.

A site with SEO

With SEO

And don’t forget that more often than not, an SEO engaged on a site will have a large hand in creating that “good content” that may have otherwise gone uncreated.

I also think that many of those who are so ready to pronounce the death of Search Engine Optimization are simply frustrated SEOs who once thrived off of gaming the system. Not too long ago, you could win the SEO game by stuffing keywords into your code, creating spammy (keyword stuffed) content, leveraging irrelevant link exchanges, getting involved in link farms, cloaking keywords, and the list goes on and on. These black-hat SEOs were willing to do anything as long as it resulted in a top spot in the SERPs and some of them were quite successful. However, search engines are becoming smarter year after year; from the above list of tactics, none are relevant and useful today because search engines have caught on and have devalued them. Just recently, Google has devalued the weight given to content farms who build out mass amounts of low quality content in an effort to dominate search results. I strongly believe that many people believe SEO is dead because it’s getting harder and harder to make quick wins with minimal effort.

Google and Bing are now using social signals in search, from incorporating Facebook and Twitter data to Google’s +1 feature. Some self-proclaimed gurus and “SEM Ninjas” as saying that this means SEO is dead; I don’t think these developments signal the death of SEO either. “Social signal building” will simply become a part of a well-rounded SEO strategy. Success in this area will come from understanding what types of content are conducive to social sharing and liking. Being successful here will rely on the same approach as modern link building in an effort to enhance social signals; create great content that people want to link to and recommend. Obviously, you can’t pay money to get easy likes or submit your site to a “like directory”, but applying those tactics in the link building arena is on its way out anyway. Assuming that search engines move away from links and focus entirely on social signals, the theory behind SEO strategy would still be the same; make your site accessible, provide a great user experience, and create content that people naturally want to share.

In considering the future of SEO and social signals, people are now asking, “Why ask search engines if you can ask your friends?” The thing to remember here is that it’s all the same. Whether you’re getting your recommendations from a non-social algorithm or your circle of friends, you’re still querying a search engine to get that information. It’s simply the focus of the engine’s algorithm that’s changing. Webmasters will still need to understand and optimize for that algorithm if they truly want to leverage the power of organic traffic generation.

SEO is alive and still viable, yet constantly evolving. Sure, content is (and has been) king and the same tricks that fooled search engines yesterday don’t work today, but true SEO that focuses on helping site owners and webmasters build great content, increase accessibility and site performance, and allow users to really find what they’re looking for out on the web will never be dead.

Summer Fun with Google’s Correlate Tool and Otter Pops

Published June 8th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, News, Paid Search, SEO No Comments

Here at SwellPath we’re interested in data, not your simple hey check it out our visitors have increased by 100 this month data, we’re talking the crazy kind of how can we optimize the marketing campaign for the new Death Star kind of data. Now when Google released their new correlation tool on May 25th, the data nerd inside me was stoked. Imagine the crazy correlations I can illustrate could mean absolutely nothing (REMEMBER: 1st rule of statistics: Correlation does not mean causation), or could they?

First, the basics. What does this new tool do exactly?

The Features

Search correlations in terms of time trends since 2004:

Ever wonder what correlations in total search popularity with “Otter Pops” over the years? Well, it turn out they are very correlated with other summer item terms, peaking in July and bottoming out around New Years . I know, not exactly the Grand Unified Theory kind of breakthrough, but still gets your mind going on what terms could possibly correlate for our clients search terms over time and season. I found real quickly the tool can lead you to some interesting findings about clients. For instance one client we have, Ariat seems to be in sync with the search term “black jackets”. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with this data, but this year’s Black Friday could be huge!

 

“Search correlations” in terms of US locations:

From what I can tell, it’s based on two search terms along with how many people are searching in those locations. For instance ifyou look up “tornadoes” you will see a lot of correlations to terms with tornadoes all in the Midwest where the horrible tornadoes disaster is recently happened. To be honest, I haven’t been able to figure out a good use for this yet. But evidently “Otter Pops” and “Costco jobs” are huge on the west coast. Also, there seems to be a correlation for guns and fox news in the south…yikes!

Upload your own data to compare:

This is the feature that is most intriguing to me as a data hound, but also the most confusing. I’ll admit that it’s been a bit of time since my last statistics class, so the concept of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient took me a bit to get my head wrapped around it and have already started gathering some data together for this upcoming holiday season for our retail ecommerce clients. Hopefully, we’ll be able to show you more in detail later in the year.

The draw tool:

 

By far the most fun feature of this new application, it allows you to draw your own frequency lines over time and see what was popular in search traffic over Google. Ever wonder what was popular in 2005 and now is making a comeback in 2011? Now you can… in seconds, and evidently it’s … Jordan shoes and wristbands (I can see the business plans already). Now is this tool going to give us any practical data we can use? Probably not, but it definitely will provide you a fun time suck for 15 minutes or so.

 

I’m not sure what will come from this new tool in the future, but I do know that us data geeks are sure to find new interesting insights into the world around us. Personally, besides the retail correlations, I’m interested to see if there is some PPC keywords we can bid for that never came up in our initial research. I’m sure there are already 5 hedge funds that are incubating their new S&P crusher as we speak. So, if you have any useful ideas or thoughts on how we can use this tool in the marketing measurement industry or just want to proclaim your love for Otter Pops as well, let us know.

 

Website Redesign: A SEO Checklist

Published April 19th, 2011 SEO No Comments

Wireframes, comps, design — check

Ecommerce cart and product descriptions –- check

New copy, images, logo — check

301 redirects, title tags, meta descriptions, Google analytics code — wwwwhhhat?!?

This is the latest conversation I have been having with several of my clients that are going through website redesigns. Redesigning your look, brand and your web appearance is exciting. You are about to unveil a whole new look to market yourselves and your product to your existing customers as well as new prospects. However, with the new look, navigation and site architecture, you don’t want forget about the search engine rankings that you have already worked so hard to get. The following SEO checklist includes a few things you should have in place for search engines before you launch that new site.

301 redirects

301 redirects are one of the most important pieces to have in place when you launch a new site. If URLs must change in your redesign due to a new CMS, coding or structure, it is critical to redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the redesigned website. 301 redirects pass the URL proprieties, link popularity and page rank of the old URLs, and ensure that site visitors (and search engines) don’t receive 404 errors.

Add your Google analytics

or other analytics platform tracking code. If you are using Google Analytics, make sure you use the new asynchronous tracking code.

Webmaster tools account

Since you will have new URLs, once you have placed your 301 redirects, you should update your XML sitemap and resubmit it to the search engines through webmaster tools account. This alerts the search engines to the changes in the site. You can now use the Google Analytics asynchronous snippet to verify ownership of your website for Google Webmaster Tools.

XML sitemap

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google and other search engines about pages on your site that are available for crawling. Creating and submitting a Sitemap informs Google and other search engines about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by their normal crawling process. Robots.txt Disallow any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines to crawl – login pages, search results pages, shopping cart pages.  Remember to also include a link to your xml sitemap

Custom 404 page

SEO 404 page, 404 page example

 

Having a custom 404 page lets users know that they have landed on your site. Friendly 404 pages should have the same look and feel of your website with a link to the HTML sitemap or site search so users can find what they are looking for. With this, remember to make sure your 404 page actually returns a 404 header response code so the search engines acknowledges that it is not a real page for indexing.

Here is a great example of well-designed custom 404 page that incorporate nice messaging, a little fun, site navigation and HTML sitemap to help the user find what they were looking for.

 

 

 

Keyword Research

Naturally integrate keywords into your copy as well as the following:

  • Title tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Header tags: <h1> <h2> <h3>
  • Alt attributes for images
  • Anchor text for internal links

Keep in mind, this is only intended as a short checklist to get you thinking about SEO and your redesign and I would strongly recommend a complete SEO strategy, which would involve the above and include your site’s overall content, code, accessibility, authority, as well as researching how users search for your products or business.  The outcome of this work will ensure not only a great relaunch of your website and its products, but also the increased metrics and conversions you’re looking to achieve.

Onsite Search Engine Optimization

Published April 13th, 2011 SEO 3 Comments

or

How to Get the Perfect Beach Body in Time for Summer

Successful SEO is essentially a combination of external factors and onsite factors. You can try to influence the external factors, but a lot of it will be up to luck and the subjective quality of your content. Onsite factors, on the other hand, are completely under your control. If you’re willing to invest the time and resources, you have the power to transform your site into a lean, mean search-engine-optimized machine. When you think about it, optimizing the onsite factors of your website is a lot like trying to get into the best shape of your life. Millions of people want accomplish both, but few understand everything that’s required to get there. More often than not, the people who are trying and failing to achieve these goals are focusing on only one aspect or simply lack an understanding of all the factors that go into play. When you boil it down, both fitness and SEO boil down to a few core fundamentals; heavy lifting, fat burning, toning and conditioning, cardio, and avoiding shortcuts.

This may sound crazy, but if you think that list applies only to fitness, think again.

  • The heavy lifting is content development: get that content pumped up and you’ll have a solid foundation.
  • Fat burning is cutting the fat from your site’s code: you want to make sure your nicely developed content isn’t hidden under a layer of flabby code.
  • Toning and conditioning is applying semantic markup to your content: this lets you add some nice muscle definition to that big hunk of content you’ve worked so hard to build up.
  • Cardio is your site speed: having big muscles is great, but if you get winded running across the street, you’re going to have issues.
  • Avoiding shortcuts is avoiding short cuts, plain and simple: cheaters never prosper in SEO or fitness.

Makes more sense now, doesn’t it? Achieving fitness and SEO goals is all about taking a holistic approach; you have to see the big picture and work on your weaknesses. Now let’s get into the details!

Heavy Lifting

If you want to get your body and your site jacked, you need to lift heavy; it’s time to hit the deadlifts, squats, and presses. You’ve got to bulk up your content. For this initial phase, focus on compound movements to build out multiple paragraphs of content. Exercises that use 200 to 300 words are best.

Remember though, shortcuts won’t work here. You can pump your content full of steroids but you’ll likely just end up with spammy, keyword-stuffed rubbish that will only make you look good (to search engines) for a short time. Once the initial effects fade, you’re left with insubstantial content that can’t hold its own. Take the high road on this one. Concentrate on pumping iron the good old-fashioned way and take the time to craft content that is well-written and informational. You still want to look ripped with keywords accentuating and defining your content, but make sure you are balanced and proportional.

Fat Burning

After putting in all the work to beef up your content, you’ll want make sure it stands out. If you pull up your page source and notice that your code is bloated or flabby, you’ve got to start cutting the fat. Stay away from simple, sugary carbohydrates like inline styles and tables. These things are easy to grab when you’re in a hurry, but will really hurt you in the long run. Make sure you don’t binge either by including massive embedded stylesheets and scripts in your page’s code. In order to look and perform at your best, you need to keep things like that external (Don’t put bad food in your <body>. Get it?).

Toning

After you’ve bulked up your content and removed the layer of fat that’s been covering it up, it’s time to work on definition. Headings, strong tags, and paragraph tags are your isolation exercises. Use them to define each area of your content so it looks its best. To start working each muscle group on its own, start by wrapping each paragraph in (you guessed it) paragraph tags. After that you can work on muscle separation by adding heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to break out your content in to sections; working keywords into these headings will provide even better definition.  Finally, make sure you have some visible abs; after all that hard work on your content you should make sure you highlight the good parts. Wrapping important keywords in your copy in strong tags and HTML lists can really make those abs pop.

Cardio

To be in peak physical condition, you need to work on cardio as well. In the 10K to the top of the SERPs, you’re up against hundreds of other runners. Even a little extra speed can help you break away from the pack. All other things being equal, Google’s going to give the gold medal to the site that isn’t ready to pass out at the finish line. To work on your site’s cardio, you’ll want to ensure images have size declarations, compress or minify resources (like JS and CSS) when possible, consolidate resources (again, like JS and CSS) into as few files as possible to minimize transfers, and  set expiration dates on your resources to leverage browser caching.

Avoiding Shortcuts

There’s no sugar coating it: getting into the best shape of your life is hard work and requires some serious dedication. This can make shortcuts look extremely appealing. In the long run though, these never pay off. Make sure your site doesn’t become an asterisk in the record books and avoid drugs like keyword stuffing. Even though you might look great really quickly, Google’s periodic drug tests flag you just as fast. Similarly, don’t waste your money on programs and products that guarantee you a “six pack in six weeks”. That shiny hidden text you ordered from that late night infomercial isn’t actually going to work. Even if it doesn’t leave you with an injury, it definitely won’t help you in any way.

Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll discuss how to market yourself and hopefully land a fitness magazine cover (through some high intensity link building!).

 

Social Search Just Got Real

Published March 30th, 2011 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Google +1 for Social SearchToday, Google rolled out their new +1 feature. The +1 is similar to a Facebook “Like”, but for search. There’s a lot of chatter about Google attempting to compete with Facebook by making search results social, and how much of an influence this will have on search results and user behavior. Here at SwellPath, there are a lot of different views on how this new feature is going to play out and why it may be good or bad for users, advertisers, and websites. Found below are contrary viewpoints on the topic, one on why the +1 is going to make a big splash in the search world and influence users, SEO, and online behavior, and another on why the +1 is going to fizzle out before it really has a chance to get going.

How The +1 Button Is Going to Be Big For Search

by Mike Arnesen
Search Analyst & Strategist at SwellPath and all around web development geek

The +1 button is going to change search, user interaction with results, SEO, and paid search advertising, here’s why:

+1 and SEO

Of course, Google isn’t socializing search just to connect people; they’re doing it to collect more information and deliver better results. So, is the +1 feature relevant to SEO? You bet it is. Just like when Google and Bing announced they were using social signals from Twitter and Facebook as a ranking factor, today’s announcement further inflated social’s value.

Still, when it comes to using +1 to succeed in SEO, how can you optimize user behavior? When it comes down to is, increasing your site’s +1s is entirely in the hands of users. For now, the way to increase +1s requires the same things as traditional SEO: onsite optimization, backlink authority, and (to a lesser extent) management of social signals. All of these factors will help you work your way up the SERPs and that’s what is going to be important in building +1s. Why’s that? A user is much more likely to +1 a result in the top five compared to a result on page three. It follows the same theory as SERP click through rates.

It will be interesting to see how the +1 experiment plays out, but my guess is that it will be extremely beneficial to build +1s to your site. Will Google start using +1s in its algorithm outside of logged in searches in the future? We’ll have to wait and see.

+1 for Webmasters

Similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, Google is planning on rolling out a +1 button for webmasters to include on their pages. This simplifies the whole process of leaving a +1 and puts more control in the hands of webmasters. Once this feature is rolled out, a user who decides they like your website won’t have to navigate away from your site, find you in the SERPs and then +1 you. They can do it all on page.

Like vs. +1

For SEO, the +1 is going to be much more valuable than a Facebook “like”. The Facebook “like” button will send signals to Facebook (to display in profiles and streams) which then has a chance to promote social sharing that Google and other engines can pick up on. With the +1, you’re sending a signal through a direct link to Google. There’s nothing Google has to interpret or rate; the user is telling them explicitly that the page they +1 is a good result.

Why The +1 Button Will Not Have an Impact

by Chris Sullivan
PPC & Media Specialist at SwellPath and general search nerd

In theory, the +1 button does have the potential to transform search, and create more meaningful results for users, however, it will not get enough traction in order to have a significant impact. Here’s why:

Traction With Users

It seems to me that Google is trying to imitate the success and ubiquity of Facebook’s Like, but for search results (which is to some extent already being done through a partnership with Facebook and Bing). There are a few different issues with this. The reason that users Like content on Facebook is because it was posted by people that they already know, that they care about, and that they have chosen to see. The appeal of Liking content across the web is that their built in, pre-existing group of friends will then be able to see this content.

Google lacks this backbone. Because of the massive failure of Google Buzz, people do not have that previously created network of people that they would be +1’ing (is that really what this is going to be called?) a search result or ad to. Without an existing network, the entire appeal of recommending content goes away. For people who do have established networks through Google Accounts there may be an incentive, but I would bet that these networks include many business contacts. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my professional connections to be privy to my search activities and interests.

Searching Has A Purpose

This ties in with the lack of established network I outlined above, but at this point search is an activity that has a purpose. Users search because they want something. They enter the query, click on the result they want, and put Google out of their mind. Whereas on a network like Facebook, users are meant to spend long periods of time, passively clicking through pages, reading updates and comments, and viewing photos and videos.

It is possible that the +1 button will change this behavior by making users want to check and see which pages their connections have +1’ed (again, really?) and that Google could become more of a destination rather than a means by which users find content, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Lack of Integration

Mike outlined how webmasters will eventually be able to add the +1 to their site, so users will be able to +1 content after they click off of Google. Until this feature is released and widespread, I don’t see anyone using +1. At this point Google is expecting users to search, click through, explore the site, and then either run the same query again and +1 the result, or use the back button to return to the SERP. Users simply are not going to do this. If someone were to not go through this process, and to click the +1 before actually clicking through on the search result, this would ruin the entire purpose of the +1. The site that they +1’d may actually be of very poor quality, which is a complete counter to the positive impact this feature could have on search result quality.

Even after the on site integration for the +1, this will continue to be an issue for paid ads. How is a user supposed to know if the ad is +1 worthy before they click through?

How to Get Started With Google +1

Love it or hate it, Google +1 for social search is something to watch in the coming months. Whether or not it catches on and becomes a larger factor in both logged in and logged out search queries and ad serving remains to be seen. Initial reactions aside, we recommend taking Google +1 for a test drive. Let us know what you think.

As of today, Google’s +1 is only available for users through Google.com. The international rollout should follow soon. To opt in, you’ll need to log in to (or create) a Google profile and visit Google Experimental. Find the “+1 button” experiment click “Join this experiment”.

Social Search with +1

Once you’re opted in, try surfing around the SERPs and test it out. Start by pulling up the websites you love and giving them a +1. It’s also interesting to see who in your circle is already using the feature or if you are totally ahead of the game.

Typography SEO Cage Match – Cufón v. sIFR v. @font-face

Published March 2nd, 2011 SEO No Comments

Fonts are an important consideration for any good site design and often convey the overall tone. Similarly, text has always been at the foundation of SEO. Web fonts and typographer are yet another place where good design practices converge with optimization. Historically, there have been few options besides the dreaded image replacement technique. However, within the last 5 years viable alternatives have emerged and good options are now available; with varying degrees of drawbacks. Let’s settle the dispute the best way we know how, with a cage match.

Let’s meet our competitors.

sIFR

mr. perfect - sIFRWeighing in at an uncompressed 16kb, the heavyweight of the event is sIFR. Born in 2005, sIFR entered the arena with big expectations and didn’t let down. Beautiful typography and SEO were now finally playing nice together. However, with Flash at it’s core, sIFR was plagued by slow rendering speeds and issues with implementation and support. SIFR was in line with progressive enhancement and thus became a tool for the SEO community looking to make friends with designers. However, as load times became a variable for search + lack of Flash support on mobile, sIFR has run out of favor with both the design and SEO community. Once a pin-up, now washed up.

Cufón

macho man - CufonEnter Cufón. A javascript-based text replacement solution. No Flash required and faster rendering times made this middle-weight a worthy competitor. The main drawback (sans the legality of embedding fonts) is the lack of text highlighting. Unlike sIFR, a user cannot highlight or copy the text; more a usability issue than anything else. As a rendering engine, Cufón is only displayed to users with JavaScript, thus search engines see all that great HTML. A good juiced-up option for SEO.

@font-face

@font-faceA CSS-based approach to typography makes @font-face a new, strong competitor. Implementation is relatively painless, requiring only a few lines of CSS.  The main drawbacks are the lack consistent cross-browser support of the various font formats and font foundry licensing. Cross-browser syntax for @font-face is well documented at this point and less a concern.

The SEO Smackdown

So let’s get to the main event.

SEO - sIFR, Cufon, @font-face

sIFR comes out the gates swinging with full cross-browser support but quickly gets knocked back due to slow rendering times and heavy code. Cufón and @ font-face are pretty evenly matched but ease of implementation and selectable text give @font-face the upper hand. 

@font-face seo

 

Our Typography SEO Cage Match Winner – @font-face!

 

 


Facebook SEO Now a Reality

Published June 27th, 2010 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When Facebook announced Open Graph and everything that came along with it I wrote about how I thought Open Graph integration would become part of almost everyone’s websites. I wasn’t explicit about the primary way in which I suspected this would happen, but these were the main questions I had at the time:

1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.

2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?

In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.

Facebook SEO

Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?

You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there  is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.

And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.

Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results.  My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.

Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.

Semantic SEO: 5 Keyword Research Techniques & Tools

Published June 7th, 2010 SEO, Social Media No Comments

Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query. However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.

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