So let’s go back to August 15th, I was doing a few manual checks of some highly competitive terms (targeting brands) when I found what looked like an organic sitelink. I saw it once, but then it disappeared on reload. A few more refreshes and a cachaca later, I was able to get back into the test.(Sidenote, I should have checked my cookies and used that to get back into the test, oh well). Now come Tuesday the 16th Google announced and update to sitelinks and boy what a change. Let’s dive into some brands.
Marriott

Nike – Can you click anything else than Nike?

Okay, now even my own uBlanket

These sitelinks are based on your navigation and suggest that you should have a LOT of top level navigation elements so you would have as many sitelinks as possible. My instant reaction would be to try and deep linking your top navigation pages, but still testing.

In addition, I am not sure if this was early or not, but I noticed Google is now using a few microformat data in their SERP. Let’s say your signing up for the SAT (like many high school students do this fall), Google “sat test dates” and you can see the dates clearly below the result
Sat, Oct 1 SAT Test Dates
Sat, Nov 5 SAT Test Dates
Sat, Dec 3 SAT Test Dates

In other news, I have been enjoying the Google Profiles (and Images) within the SERP. Thinking of some recent news posts (e.g. Skype + Groupme ) and a quick search later I see authors mugshots right there in the SERP. What stops you from changing your image to a big arrow that points to the right? Anyone?

It might not look great from a friends standpoint, but if it leads to a bump in traffic which gives you a bonus, do you think it’s worth it? Maybe its a bit … dare I say evil? With all these new changes I feel like Google is trying to incentive people to take advantage of theme, okay let’s not be evil and take a look as some other changes.

Last but not least, have you seen how Google has moved the Did you mean… ? and automatically substituted the correct spelling. I guess trying to do a bit blackhat and rank for misspellings is over, oh well.

I would love to get your thoughts on all these new changes. It feels like just last week Google Instant was forced on users and everyone was talking SEO.

Here are 3 MUST KNOWS for any SEOer or SEO wannabe who can’t code, but with a little help from Excel show a who’s da boss is when it comes to building and parsing content.

Say you have a URL string that contains the tracking code, but you just need the domain of the string rather than the actual code. You can easily do this just by levering excel.

=LEFT(A1,FIND(“&”,A1,1)-1)

You can do the same thing for the right side of a URL as well, if you just want the tracking number.
(Sorry if the screenshots are confusing I took them a bit late and realized I swapped the ? and & around, just find/replace)

=RIGHT(A2,FIND(“?”,A2,1)-2)

Now say you have various keywords you want to leverage for URLs, pages or just content that are dynamically generated. So it takes a key or two and adds it dynamically to a sentence to create something unique. Dare I say useful for creating a simple version of http://www.speedppc.com

I would imagine the use of the Concatenate function is somewhat limited in use, but for those SEOers who are still working on pivot tables, here is a great hack. Say you need to create a bunch of google ads with some keyword insertion and slight copy changes. You can build this dynamically and fast with this function. On top of simple ads, you could use this to create unique landing page content for a variety of keywords.

Basic Overview for unique Landing Pages (think local) – Create a few columns or even worksheets if you really want to get really serious of a variety of keywords. Now write a paragraph a text targeting that keyword but broad enough so it’s relative to a list of keywords. Break up the paragraph and separate out the sentences. Now you can dynamically insert and create more paragraphs loosely based on the original with keyword replace. A closer match to unique content dynamically with Excel, pretty slick, eh?

=CONCATENATE(E2,”-”,F2)

I create a simple example of writing 3 similar sentences all unique, but allowing for fast substitution of keywords. You can get to some pretty intense statements in excel and hit some limits, so be sure to plan and test a few before you go off and build a list of thousands and expect to just double-click and expand thousands of rows of unique content.

Enjoy – Remember it’s time to disrupt Google’s Don’t Be Evil!

People, creating strategies to help improve ranking of a website required both technical (html/css, maybe even a programing language to understand how to dynamically display data) and the art/science behind the understanding of search engines.

It’s not 2001 where you could just build thousands of backlinks and boom, rank high for any keyword you want. Times have changed and strategies are required as well as tools to help understand WHY you are NOT ranking high and WHY others are ranking HIGHER then YOU!

Here at SXSWi 2009 I was just blown away by talking to a person who associated snake oil with SEO. I understand there are people who guarantee #1 ranking, which is a MAJOR WARNING FLAG! NO ONE CAN GUARANTEE A RANKING FOR A GIVEN KEYWORD, you can TRY, but since Google and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, then you need to be constantly changing your SEO plan.

SEO is not a one time thing, it requires constant monitoring and updating. Remember when someone says guarantee #1 ranking, ask them on what word? How much estimated traffic does that keyword phrase get? I have no problem explaining all that I do and my background, but if you are going to judge someone before you understand their skill set well then you are someone I DO NOT want to associate myself with.

I could go on and on with this topic, but here are 3 major questions you MUST ask any person who claims to be an SEO expert. Think about it, you would NEVER hire a designer if you haven’t seen any of their work. You can’t even get a freaking hair cut without seeing a hairdresser with their certification next to their chair.

Common Questions you MUST ask any SEOer.

• Can you HAND CODE? If you PLAN to optimize a website, you NEED to know some HTML code
• What is one interesting thing you have done with a search engine? Need some ideas, ask have you Ranked high for a high traffic keyword? Own all websites that rank on the first page for a specific keyword? Any Google Bombing? Maybe even improve ranking for other pages to lower the ranking of a negative comment about your clients? And Last of course for those who still think I sell snake oil. (ever hear of a Search Engine Results Page, ie. SERP?) Checkout define:serp on Google.
• Lastly, Do you rank #1 for your name? Yes,#1 for John Murch

So for any of those who STILL think SEO is a snake oil salesman job, please DON’T TALK TO ME or waste my time.

Update: Was going through my analytics and found I rank high for define:no follow. This isn’t the interesting part, the fact that ~12,100+ people search that a month, as well as has some advertisement competition, interesting.

Continuing my teachings to my visitors, I wanted to provide a very basic SEO glossary. This should cover just the basic (Don’t worry, I got more cool SEO stuff to show for those SEO Experts), I will be adding more as well as creating the ultimate SEO ebooks and videos soon.

301 or 301 Redirect – This is a permanent server redirect – The t (Uniform Resource Locator ) of the webpage/website has been change. These are used to address duplicate content (canonical issues) and can be done with a .htaccess file located on the apache server.

Alt text – This is HTML attributes on images, links, forms, and other HTML tags. These are used to increase SEO by adding a description to various images, links, etc. The alt text is important to search engines because their “bots”/”spiders” can view this text and derive keywords based on the context. Filling out the alt text is a MUST for any SEO wannabe

Anchor text – These are the computer jargon words for visible text links. These links or anchor text are used by search engines to indicate relevancy of the referring site and create a relationship between sites. The anchor text is also important by using descriptive words and keywords when describing a URL. For example a link to Amazon can be coded as the following <a href=”http://www.amazon.com” title=”Amazon has amazing deals everyday!”>Great Deals</a> rather then <a href=”http://www.amazon.com” title=”amazon”>Amazon</a>, the description and title gives more relevancy and context to the link.

Black Hat – This is a term used to describe SEO tactics that are counter or opposed to best practices. The best practices are summarized in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Robots, Bots, Spider and Crawler – These terms are used to describe the programs that performs automated tasks, such as a search engine finding and adding websites to their search engine indexes.

Canonical – (duplicate content) – This is the term used to describe duplicate content. Duplicate content has a lower rating by most search engines.

Content – (text, copy, body) – The words and/or part of a web page that offers value to the user.

In-Bound Link – (inlink, incoming link) – Inbound links such as anchor text/tags from another website.

Keyword – (key phrases) – The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine. It can also be used in terms of content, the keywords that the content is focused on.

Keyword Cannibalization – Excessive use of the identical keyword or phrase on too many web pages and/or within the same web site. Focus on the keywords, but do not go overboard.

Keyword Density – The percentage of word(s) on a specific web page which are keywords. If this value is high, it can have a negative impact on SEO.

META Tags – This is html attributes that are located in the HEAD section of the HTML page. META information is used for displaying the description of the link in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The use of distinct or unique meta titles and descriptions is important for better SEO.

No follow – This is an attribute and/or a meta tag that is used to instruct robots to not follow the link and/or view the page. The no follow meta tag is used for content that a webmaster does not want a user to view via a search engine. The no follow attribute on links is used to NOT give link backs. (IE. for sites like del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, no follow’s are used so a webmaster can not easily create thousands of links to their web page from such a popular site like del.icio.us.)

SEM – (Search Engine Marketing) – This normally is used to describe the act of researching, positioning, and submitting of a web site to a search engine to provided for the most optimal exposer.

SEO – (Serach Engine Optimization) – The process of increasing the total number of visitors to a web site by reaching a higher page rank (SERP – Search Engine Results Page) in a search engine.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

Site Map – A page or organized listing of links which every users is accessible to access on a web site. Most websites contain 2 site maps, one used by the user/visitor and one (XML based) used by a search engine bot/spider/crawler. The XML based sitemap is normally located at the root direction of a web site with the filename of sitemap.xml.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator – AKA Web Address

White Hat – This is a term used to describe SEO techniques that conform t the best practice guidelines and do not try and purposefully manipulate SERPs.