Google is a Popularity Contest

Remember voting for the prom queen? The candidates campaigned for your vote and if she got the most votes, she wore the crown at the dance. The google SERPs (search engine results, the listings that appear when you search on a particular keyword phrase) work in the same way. Google organizes it’s search listings on a number of factors, but one very important one is based on the number of “votes” for your site. But what are these votes? And how does google count them? Votes in the google world are links to your site.

Called “backlinks” in SEO (search engine optimization) terminology, these links occur whenever another site has a link back to yours. While I am oversimplifying matters, you could do worse than encourage other sites to link to your website.

Part of a chamber of commerce? Have you spoken at an event? Make sure that any online presence these events have identify you and your business and most importantly: have a link to your web site. You will be on your way to participating in one of the largest popularity contests there is in the business world.

Do you participate in social networking? Do you comment on other blogs? Participate in online groups such as google groups? In all these activities, make sure that your signature in your post includes a link to your website.

Of course you do not want to just post your business name and website without adding some value. While yes any backlink helps, you also want your link to invite people to click on it. That can be even more valuable than just improving your position in the SERPs, especially if you are in a competitive niche. Also many bloggers moderate (review) comments to their blog and will not post your comment unless it provides some value to the conversation.

Many blogging sites tag backlinks as “no follow”. This tells google not to “follow” the link and not count it. However there is some debate on whether google truly ignores it. Yes, it is not as valuable as a “followed” link but some SEOs believe that it still counts in google’s algorithms. And if you want to find blogs that allow “follows” just search in google for “dofollow blogs”.

How do you find out how many backlinks your site has?  In a post I will showcase some tools you install into your Firefox browser (sorry IE users) that will give you this and other SEO information, but for now you can follow the below:  Ready?

1. Go to http://search.yahoo.com
2. Type in the following, replacing “yoursite.com” with your website URL: linkdomain:http://www.yoursite.com -site:www.yoursite.com
3. On the page that appears, look at the upper right for the number of results this query returns
4. This is the number of backlinks your site has … take some time and see who has linked to you. Can you encourage more of them?

The reason for the “-site:www.yoursite.com” part of the query is to remove all internal linking (pages within your site that link to other pages).

As an SEO practitioner I have looked at a number of backlink profiles, some of very large companies. Backlinks can come from interesting places. Google looks very kindly on backlinks that come from educational institutions (.edu) and to a lesser extent the .orgs. I’ve seen very good quality backlinks that come from sponsoring charitable events. One company got quite a bit of mileage from a “cartoon character” shown on TV that the animation industry created many variants of. Viral food for thought.

Here’s another tip. The “anchor text” (the text comprises the clickable link) is important too. Help the folks linking to your site avoid the dreaded “click here” and ask them to use descriptive language (such as “wellness doctor focusing on back injuries”) in the anchor text.

Finally, if your site has no backlinks and no traffic, consider adding a listing in one of the directories. This is a topic worthy of an article on it’s own, but it might be worth paying for a listing in yahoo business directory or best of web. Some directories are free. Look for topical directories that are related to your business. Just keep in mind the tip about focusing on websites that are well regarded by google and stay away from the many “spammy” directories that google ignores. You may also consider approaching a complementary business and asking them to link to you. If you have an interesting blog or articles that might be of interest to their audience, this often occurs naturally, however sometimes it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Link building can be a time consuming activity and many business outsource this work, however it is just another tool in an business’s tool belt and if you keep your eyes open you can opportunistically capitalize on a “backlinking” opportunity as they arise.

Title Tag is top SEO ranking factor

According to a seomoz.org article, page title, or the title tag, is one of the top five SEO ranking factors. After experiencing several phone conversations having to explain what a page title was, and more importantly, helping them locate it (… no higher, above the URL box … at the very top … see it?). I thought I would upload a hastily thrown together image as a reference for future conversations.

Title Tag encircled in red above

But before I did that, I realized I should eat my own dogfood and install the All in One SEO Pack in this wordpress blog. This allows the title tag to be set to something other than the blog post title as well as setting the meta keyword and description tags, eliminating the conflict over choosing a catchy blog post title that is devoid of keywords in favor of a well optimized one.  An action long overdue, especially given that I had installed it on quite a few other blogs already.

However to be honest I have spent very little time on SEO of this blog, the subject matter is frightfully competitive and my SEO efforts are better spent elsewhere.  But it’s just one of those wordpress plug-ins you should just install.

GetResponse vs. AWeber – initial thoughts

A month ago I googled for GetResponse and AWeber product reviews. As the two top leading Autoresponders in the industry, I found that they both had fans and overall pretty decent reviews. The differentiation that initially jumped out at me, is that AWeber had slightly better deliverability stats and GetResponse was slightly cheaper. For 500 contacts, GetResponse will charge you $18 a month, AWeber $19. Both offer unlimited lists and autoresponders, detailed statistics and several types of opt in forms.  One thing that GetResponse offers that AWeber does not is surveys. Users gave AWeber higher marks for it’s reports. Other than that they appeared to be comparable. However there is nothing like comparing the two for yourself.

Recently, I got the chance to simultaneously spend time with both and compare them side by side. Here’s my impressions of the initial use of both products.

AWeber is more intuitive. For the initial user, AWeber has a handy wizard that steps you through the initial creation of your list, customizing the initial emails and generating the web form. In GetResponse, where lists are called campaigns, the setup was a little less intuitive, there isn’t that handy step by step wizard. For example, I had a lot of trouble locating the confirmation email (what is sent to your contacts to confirm they want to be on your list) to customize it. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be located under “languages”.

Both have a variety of choices of confirmation email message subjects that allow limited customization. AWeber allows further customization of the subject with manual review. GetResponse does not. Both allow customization of the template, which is good. I recently worked with another autoresponder that did not, which seemed unnecessarily limiting (with imports I consider being able to personalize the confirmation email an important way to remind the contact how you know them).

Regarding the always controversial topic of enforcing double opt-in (or confirmation), both allow you to turn off confirmation if you know where to look. GetResponse, in this cases, is a a little more intuitive and flexible (you can find this under contact settings), you can selectively turn it off for just email subscriptions for example. However in my account turning it off for import subscribers was greyed out, I guess they have had too much trouble with purchased lists. With AWeber the User Interface (menu option: “Confirmed opt-in”) infers you can only turn it off for Web Form Opt-Ins, however I did not confirm this.

Overall both AWeber and GetResponse are decent products and you can’t go significantly wrong with either one.

Big Brother is tracking you

With all the recent noise over the FTC guidelines regarding product reviews and testimonials from bloggers, you might have overlooked another discussion the FTC has spearheaded about letting users know about profiling and tracking activities that web sites perform.

Here’s how it works. A site (or a collection of sites run by the same entity) gather profile information on their visitors. They watch where the user goes on the site and also gather data more explicitly through account creation and progressive disclosure (this last bit means the site asks more questions as you do more with it). Over time this data about you is number crunched into a profile that indicates what you might be interested in and when you visit the site again a targeted ad, based on your interests is shown to you.

An example could be, let’s say I visit an electronics site and I particularly visit pages on netbooks and low powered computers. The site recognizes this and shows me an ad for a netbook rather than a high end computer suitable for a gamer. Someone else might see a different ad based on their browsing behavior, or even previous buying behavior.

This is not a new concept, Amazon has been doing similar things for a while. It is still recommending video games to me based on a purchase a year ago. However what’s new is that the FTC wants sites to show a certain icon making it clear to the user that this profiling is going on.

To me this is an interesting UX (user experience) challenge, as somehow you have to wrap into an icon the notion that this is a “smart” ad that knows something about you. The wrong approach might just creep people out.

web site speed does matter

If you are into SEO (search engine optimization), you probably know who Matt Cutts is. Matt Cutts is a top software engineer at Google, and has a well followed blog. Recently he commented that google may start taking into account site load time in its rankings.

While likely not a factor in the rankings until 2010, and the impact maybe small, it’s something to start thinking about. After all if your site is slow, page rank might be the least of your problems. Owing to the notorious fickleness of users, if you don’t grab their attention in 2 or 3 seconds, they are on to the next thing.

Google webmaster tools has a new feature for you to quickly assess your site’s performance. Under the labs section you will find a “site performance” link that will tell you the average page load time and how you rank against all the other web sites on the internet. If you are slower than 85% of the other web sites on the web, you have some work to do.

Check out the google webmaster central blog post on the topic.

What’s your brand?

The Economist recently had an article noting the rise of the “faceless bosses”. Outsized personalities such as Jack Welch and Robert Nardelli are gone or retired. Carly Fiorina has turned her attention to politics.

While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.

So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.