Author Archives: Tarla

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Black Hat Link Building – Why Cheaters Never Prosper

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Link building made front page news this week, or at least front page of the business section of the NYTimes. J.C. Penney was caught red-handed engaging in what is considered black hat link building techniques. Although they claim to know nothing about it, someone on their behalf was littering the web with anchor text links having in most cases no relevancy to the site it’s living on. For example, a sidebar link for cocktail dresses found on an auto repair blog. The most disappointing part to this story is that it was working. They were outranking the competition on a number high volume keywords such as “skinny jeans,” “area rugs” and “furniture” because of these low blow techniques.

It’s tactics like these that make SEO success for the rest of us more difficult. The reason so many companies, both agency and in-house, engage in these shady linking practices is because they are cheaper, easier and faster than doing things the right way. We know that as well as anyone. It takes a lot of time and effort to acquire the right kind of links, and many companies are not equipped with the staff to make that happen. It’s just an effortless solution to pay a vendor or off-shore link supplier and, voila!, SEO problem solved.

This then begs the question, why shouldn’t everyone do it? If so many companies are in on it, and the results appear to be there, why not just join the party?  The reason to stay with the light is that times are a’changing and cheaters are going to feel the wrath of Google. Google really does want to create the best user experience, which is why they are constantly updating both the algorithm and the search results, trying to deliver the best possible results in the best possible way. It’s black hat tactics like this that threaten the very quality of Google’s service, and they won’t stand for it. Google continues to work to find these less than kosher links and penalize the sites that use them, and has made great strides. J.C. Penney can account for that, although many would say that they weren’t penalized enough in the SERPs for their offense. It is for this reason amongst several others that we choose to follow the rules.

Reading the NY Times article made me feel pretty great about the kind of SEO service we provide for our clients. I’m always stressing the importance of the way we conduct link building: a manual, personalized approach of building ongoing relationships with each individual webmaster. Of course this is a time consuming project and takes a good number of people to accomplish it, but at the end of the day the quality over quantity approach will win out.

Measuring Link Building ROI

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My colleagues often tease me for my slight obsession with reporting. Probably annoyed because every month I make them revise their SEO reports with some new piece of data or chart. And while I do feel bad for causing everyone the extra work, I know that every little change will help provide better insight into our campaign performance. I’ve seen many SEO reports from various sources, and most of them fall short in really providing a comprehensive picture.

One key feature that I have yet to see anyone provide is referral traffic from links acquired. If your team is spending time developing a high quality backlink profile from relevant sites, then not only should those links be increasing the organic ranking, but they should also be driving traffic and maybe even conversions. Just last month we contacted a local blogger who was more than happy to write a post about our client, whom she was already a fan of. In a matter of days we saw a significant increase in traffic to the site, visitors who also spent an average of 6:51 minutes on the site (more than the average of 4:12) and viewed 12.51 pages (6.5 pages more than the average).

Link Referral Traffic

Another client that we’ve been working with for the past 2 years, and therefore have acquired a good number of links, obtained 10 leads this month just from those links. These are of course ideal scenarios and will not always be the case, but with 5 visits here and 10 visits there from multiple link sources, it can still be traffic worth counting.

SEO – Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late!

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Do you ever read a blog or an article and just want to give the author a big hug for saying exactly what you’ve been thinking? That is just how I felt reading the article from Search Engine Land posted yesterday: “4 Tips For Search (And User) Friendly Design. The whole post provides great advice regarding dos and don’ts when designing and creating a website, but in particular the first section is what inspired me to throw in my two cents.  Here is the dialogue between the author of the post and a client:

CLIENT: Just sent you the link to the page. What do you think? ME: I can’t review it.

CLIENT: Huh? We can call back later if that’s better… ME: No, I mean, there’s nothing to review.

CLIENT: (rolls eyes – I couldn’t see them but I could practically hear it) ME: See, the home page is 100% graphics. The body copy, headlines, even whitespace is a graphic. There’s nothing for a search engine to see.

CLIENT: So? How do we fix it? ME: Change all of the body text and headlines to real text.

CLIENT: We can’t. ME: OK, so I can’t review it.

CLIENT: Oh…

Funny as it may sound, this is a pretty common occurrence, companies thinking about SEO too late in the game. There are so many pieces of a website that can affect the way it ranks organically, such as URL and navigation structure, use of code or images (as mentioned above) and CONTENT. Say you’re building a site for a local therapist, and you decide to create a “services” page that lists all of the different types of therapy you offer: family counseling, hypnotherapy, marriage counseling, corporate services, etc. Well then you are doing that therapist a disservice. Instead, create a separate for every service well optimized with keywords a user my search to find that specific service, therefore providing the best possible scenario for ranking on a much wider variety of keywords.

These are just a few examples, and there are many more instances where involving an SEO consultant early on in the discovery and research phase of a website build can be so beneficial to the end goal of high organic rankings. And when you do engage an SEO expert, remember to keep them in the loop throughout the development process to make sure you are fully utilizing their skills and your investment.

Bing Algorithm Factors in CTR – Good or Bad?

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With the recent inception of Binghoo! and their steadily increasing market share, it’s becoming progressively more important for SEO’s to figure out as much as they can about the Bing algorithm. In the spirit of information sharing that is so often appreciated in the digital marketing community, last week at SMX East, Search Engine Land reported that the Bing algorithm does takes click through rate into account when determining organic rank.

I see this as being both a positive and a negative. The obvious upside is that it will help push down results that users don’t want to see ranking for their particular search terms, whether due to a lack of relevancy or result itself is not as appealing as the others around it. This may give more incentive for websites to provide better titles and descriptions, and to not target keywords that aren’t related enough to the page. However one downside is that it’s already hard to uproot sites in the first few positions, but since they are naturally going to be harvesting the majority of the clicks, this will help to solidify their place at the top. Good for them I supposed, just bad for those who might equally deserve a chance at those golden rankings.

However it’s important to remember that this is just one of many ranking factors, and who knows how strong the CTR influence really is. As Bing has stated before, the best strategy is one of a solid website foundation and a quality backlink profile, so really it’s just business as usual.

All’s Fair In Love And…SEO?

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There’s a saying that goes, “The cobbler’s son is always barefoot.” It means when you sell a product, it’s hard to make time to provide it for yourself. Or maybe just that the cobbler doesn’t like his son much. The same principle applies to marketing firms- it’s important to use your expertise on your own projects, not just your clients. Over the last year or so my agency has been working on that principle, and as the SEO manager I was asked to optimize our agency’s website. As many know, search doesn’t always bring in the quality leads for a business like ours, ironically enough, so it was hard to find time to do something that doesn’t directly bring in profit. I’m glad I finally got around to it though, because as it turns out, ranking well on certain terms does have some pretty sweet payoffs!

We ambitiously chose the key phrase “digital marketing agency” and strategically placed it in titles and content, standard procedure. Then we reached out to our media partners and marketing bloggers for some much needed link love. After just a few months, our site popped to the front page in Google. While I was proud that our team’s hard work paid off, as expected, the leads did not come a knockin’.


Let me back up here and tell you a little about myself. I’m a single twenty-nine year old female living the dream in beautiful Denver, Colorado. I’ve been sans relationship for just over four years, which is more like twenty in girl years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed every minute of my footloose lifestyle and have certainly made the best of it, but it can get a little lonely sometimes. So naturally, I may have dabbled just a wee bit in the dating scene. Alright, if dating were an Olympic sport, I’d probably be on the cover of a Wheaties box by now. There were a few here and there that caught my interest, but none that were ever “right.”

Fast forward to about four months ago, our creative director Ryan brought a new friend into the office to meet the team and potentially interview for a position. He’d just moved here from San Francisco, where he started and ran his own digital shop. I instantly busted out my best move- the prolonged eye contact where you hold on just long enough to make it obvious, but not so long that it turns creepy. You know what I’m talking about. I actually turned to my computer the second they walked away and emailed Ryan, “So…who’s your friend?”

Ryan informed me that since he was interviewing for a position, he was off limits due to our very strict no inter-office dating policy. That did not make me happy. To make a long story short, the interview never happened, and we finally got our first date a couple months later. That quickly turned into the second, third, fourth, etc…and now, for the first time in four years, I am in what one might call- wait for it- “a relationship.”

So what does any of that shmoopy-ness have to do with SEO you ask? Last week my gentleman caller was in the office to discuss SEO, PPC and social media services for one of his clients. I was walking him out when we ran into our CEO, who of course couldn’t miss the opportunity to comment on the “adorable couple” and laugh at my instantly rosy cheeks. This turned into a larger conversation about what he’s been doing since moving to Denver, what sort of projects he’s working on, etc. Then our CEO asks, “So how did you find out about Location3 in the first place?”

“Well” he responds “when I decided I was moving to Denver, I Googled ‘digital marketing agency’ and found you guys near the top, so I reached out to see what sort of opportunities there were here.”

Yup, you heard it right. All that SEO work we did for our own site that we thought would never amount to anything did in fact generate one quality lead to conversion. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I SEO’d myself a boyfriend!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my SEO team, JD, Emily and Forrest for all of your hard work on our internal marketing efforts. Much appreciated.

BlueGlass Interactive Merger

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Mergers and acquisitions happen every day in every industry and rarely (ok, pretty much never) do I feel compelled to write about them. So what makes this one different? If you have ever attended a conference on search and/or social marketing, whether that is SMX, SES or PubCon, you’ve most likely seen the prime suspects strutting their stuff on stage. These are people to know in the search/social industry, and now they are joining forces to bring their collective knowledge together under one virtual roof.  Chris Winfield of 10e20, Brent Csutoras of Brent Csutoras Inc, and the team from Search and Social have come together to create BlueGlass Interactive, an agency offering everything from Social Media and PR to Pay Per Click and SEO (much like another agency you may have heard of…ahem…Location3).

BlueGlass Interactive is a Tampa based company, with 40 employees across 4 major cities: Salt Lake City, New York, Tampa and LA.  One criticism is their complete oversight of the best city in the US. What, you guys don’t like to ski?

After speaking with both Chris and Brent at the last SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, their enthusiasm for this merger was infectious, so much so that I am excited to say that we will be working with them on some big projects in the near future. Bringing all of their various strengths together can mean great things for those posed to take advantage of their services, and we look forward to doing just that.

Tip of the Week – Reporting on Keyword Sets for SEO

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When digging into the site analytics to determine the performance of your SEO campaign, be careful not to get so keyword centric that you lose sight of the overall impact of your efforts. Often times when we are link building for specific keywords, it’s easy to judge the effect by reporting the traffic and conversions directly brought in from that exact phrase. However, a much better indicator is to use keyword sets to show the impact across any variation containing elements of your keyword, so as to capture short and long tail keywords that alone may only bring in 1 or 2 visits, but together account for the vast majority of traffic and typically convert at a much higher rate.

When pulling data for a keyword set, simply use advanced filters pull results containing the main piece of your keyword, meaning the word(s) that sets it apart from other keywords. Here are a couple filter variations:

Analytics Keyword Group Filter

In this example, when targeting both “graphic design services” and “graphic design agency”, the main part of the keyword that you want to track is “graphic design” as that will tell you whether or not your campaign is working, plus you may find in the results that “graphic design company” is the real winner. Just make sure you separate “graphic” and “design” so that you capture all variations.

How the Mayday Update has affected SEO

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It’s a fairly well known that Google updates it’s algorithm on a more than regular basis, somewhere between 350 and 500 times in a given year. Most of these tweaks are too small to be noticed, but sometimes an update is big enough to cause a commotion, even warrant a catchy name. Most recently, the “Mayday” Update that took place in the last week of April. From what SEO’s have speculated and Google has partially confirmed, the shift is putting more emphasis on higher quality websites and pages when ranking for long tail phrases, which typically accounts for a high percentage of a site’s traffic.

According to Vanessa Fox from Search Engine Land, the shift was not affecting the crawling or indexing, but the rankings themselves. Google is trying to deliver higher quality to their users, which they are doing by focusing on pages that receive more traffic and inbound links for these long tail phrases. Typically, it’s the subpages of a site that rank for the long tail as they are more specific to the topics than say the homepage or high level navigation pages. However subpages also tend to get less link love than those same pages, especially the deeper into the site they go. Pages that are buried too far into the site, more than a few clicks from the homepage, are likely to have lost their high rankings with the Mayday update. Yet another reason why a solid internal linking structure that can get a user to the right pages within a couple easy steps is so important.

Much to my relief, I’ve not seen the Mayday update having any noticeable impact on the sites I care about most and I haven’t felt the need to alter the way we approach our SEO strategy. As Vanessa put it “Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.”


New Google Webmaster Tools Data – Yay or Nay?

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Last week, Google announced a few new reporting features to their Webmaster Tools. I don’t think I have been this excited since I heard Kate Gosselin was going to be on Dancing with the Stars. OK, I couldn’t care less about watch Dancing with the Stars, but I am thrilled about the data we are now able to pull regarding impressions and click through rate on organically ranked keywords.

Up until now we’ve done a solid job of reporting SEO success based on data pulled from the analytics in conjunction with search result positions, but that leaves out significant details about what is occurring in the search results before the user reaches the site.  Now in GWT, we can dig into individual keywords and see what positions they have ranked on over the designated time frame, approximately how many impressions they received within those given positions and what the click through rate was. This comes at a perfect time, as we are testing out various title structures to see which ones work best in terms of CTR. It’s as if Google was reading my mind and said, here Tarla, maybe this will help! Thank you Google, I think it just might.

query-data-expanded-ds

Uh oh, but is this data accurate? I’ve heard speculation on the side of “nay”, and my own observations are worrisome. Some comparative research from Carla Marshall showed significant differences between the data provided by Webmaster Tools, Adwords keyword tool and the Google Analytics. If the source for all these points of data is Google, why the discrepancy, and more importantly, which one do we believe? I think for now this information may still be useful in testing the effectiveness of various titles on the search user, but we should still approach the results with caution.

If you’ve had a chance to try the new reporting, leave a comment and let me know what you think.