Kane Jamison
Seattle, WA
Male, 26
I've been managing and marketing websites since 2005, for wide variety of sites. I now run a content and search marketing company where I focus on creating content and getting more traffic to client's websites. We focused on SEO from 2009-2012 and have since made content development the focus of our efforts. I spend my time doing everything from editing code to coming up with content ideas to auditing websites to finding creative ways to get more links to a website we're working with.
Early, Often, and Always. Planning ahead is best. Many of my clients are people who had their site building by graphic designers (who do beautiful work but often have poor code & SEO skills), and they pay me quite a lot of money to audit their site and tell them why it's broken. So, make sure that's a consideration upfront during the design process. Site structure, for one, is a big hassle to change later, so avoiding that issue from the get go is highly recommended. Getting someone who specializes in both SEO & web design is recommended. Then, you need to do some things once, and some things continually. Some things like your sitemap can be set up and will take care of themselves from then on. For examples of ongoing considerations, every time you add content you'll need to do things like make sure the title tags and description tags are good to go, and that images have alt text. Link building is another ongoing consideration - you need quality links, preferably more of them than your competitors have. That's a process that starts as early as you can afford it, and continues for the life of your website. See above comments for info on link building.
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UnPinterested, great name! I feel like I'm answering a Dear Abby column for internet marketing. Just like Facebook & Twitter, it's not a must-use site for every brand. That said, I think most brands can get a little value from it, but shouldn't necessarily prioritize it over proven online marketing methods that are already working. There was some initial hype among the SEO crowd because Pinterest had followed links, although that ended a week or two ago. The links are now "nofollow", which means they're not quite as valuable as they once were. The obvious benefits of ramping up on Pinterest are that it's growing exponentially, and it's supposedly being used by many as an "exploration site" to find things to purchase (whether that's clothes, travel, gifts, home decorations, etc.). The brands that benefit most will be those that offer a cool or interesting product or community, especially one that is visually interesting. That could mean things like photos from a photographer, portfolio examples from a landscaper who does great work, a clothing company that has attractive models (we're talking eye candy here, remember?), or perhaps a blog with great photos. If your site can be interesting to someone, then I think there's plenty of reason to get a Pinterest strategy into place, that coordinates with the rest of your content & social media strategy. The downside is that there is growing evidence that traffic coming from Pinterest to your site is going to be of similar quality to a site like StumbleUpon. What I mean by that is that most visitors will glance at the page and bounce, and few will stick around for more content or to buy something. Before you go overboard with it, test it out. Get a few succesful pieces of content shared on there and see how the traffic performs. Does it bring in email subscribers? Does it bring in sales? Does it bring in repeat visitors? A lot of the value is going to be long-term and related to brand awareness, so you'll have to look at metrics other than just sales. Here's a few tips for making the most of it: 1 - Make awesome content that is branded or gives people a reason to click through to your site. If you share a bunch of photos that look cool, people might repin them but nobody is going to click through to see the link. If you share a bunch of photos that have your logo on them, or an incredibly good title that gives people a reason to want more info, you'll have better luck getting click-throughs. 2 - Once you get the click-through, take immediate advantage of the fact that they're there and try to get them to stick around. For a blog or content producer that might mean, having a Subscribe/Like/Follow-on-Twitter box at the top of the screen whenever your traffic comes from Pinterest (use a plugin like WP Greet Box if you use Wordpress). Those people aren't around for long, so this will have to be way cooler than your average email subscribe box. Offer them something of value and you might get better results. 3 - Dabble with creating Pinterest-focused content. One example is what I have been calling "tall content." If you take a look at the homepage feed on Pinterest, you'll occasionally notice really long images that take up a large vertical space in the Pinterest feed. Here are two examples: http://pinterest.com/pin/146367056609064888/ & http://pinterest.com/pin/162340761537430037/ - Content like this will catch on quickly, so this tactic may not work for long, but that type of cool, Pinterest-only content is pretty clever still and I think it will perform well for repins and likes. Good luck, feel free to ask any clarification questions.
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Broadly I'd say that 45% of ranking is the content on your site, 45% of ranking is related to quality and quantity of links from other sites pointing at your site, and maybe 10% is related to how users interact with your site (such as how many pages they look at, how long they spend on the site, how quickly they leave the site, etc.). To continue the broad recommendations, most sites I review need to do two things to rank better: (A) produce more content, including written content, images, video, etc., and (B) get more backlinks to their site from quality sources. Both can have their challenges depending on your niche. A lot of people will such building great content and the links will come naturally. That's not quite true. You need to build great content, and then proactively go find places that should be linking to you, and tactfully find a way to get them to link to you. There's a billion recommendations hiding within those two suggestions, so feel free to ask another question if you want details on a particular topic. The most reputable source for more specific ranking factors is SEOMoz's annual ranking factors report, which is based on consensus of a number of SEO practitioners: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors In regards to small / local businesses ranking on Google maps and other local searches, I'd also recommend the annual Local Search Ranking factors done by David Mihm: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
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Yes and no. Content + brand recognition is awesome and makes the link building & community development process incredibly easier. But, huge brands have **tons** of technical site issues that prevent them from ranking well in search. Site architecture issues and internal organizational silos that prevent change from happening are two common examples. There's a good presentation that I just saw yesterday by John Doherty (http://www.johnfdoherty.com/) called "The Price of Technical SEO Debt" (http://www.slideshare.net/dohertyjf/the-price-of-technical-seo-debt-final). It talks about examples of big sites that have had poor search performance due to technical issues that had accumulated over the years. So - SEO budget can be reduced but not eliminated. Additionally, a content team *has* to be cross trained in SEO concepts and understand how to implement best practices while maintaining the integrity of their content. It's part art and part science.
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In short, no. The trouble with something like this is that SEO is rarely a short term project (unless it's a matter of fixing technical issues on an established site). So, if a campaign hasn't shown measurable results that doesn't necessarily mean it's been ineffective. In addition, many clients aren't in a position to know whether or not the services have been effective due to lack of knowledge of how to measure effectiveness, so there's an issue with who determines effectiveness and what metrics they use. That said, I think that there are decent ways to include a performance guarantee in a contract if it has very clear criteria/goals/metrics attached to it. But, I don't think the lack of a performance guarantee is a strike against the consultant or company. Also, if those goals aren't hit, I don't think money back is the best solution, I think they should continue service until the goals are reached. My personal approach to this is that I don't do long term contracts with clients. Our engagements are month-to-month, so if we're not showing results, the clients are free to stop service. We combine that with an upfront, honest estimate of how long we think it will take to show results. Not all companies take this approach, and there are plenty of very effective companies that require longer term contracts, but it works for us at our current scale. We may revisit that approach as we grow as a company. The good news is, if a client or company does want a performance guarantee before starting service, there are plenty of firms that operate entirely on a performance basis, so those clients can mitigate that risk if they have to.
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The short version is yes, Google is very dominant. And the more mobile & tablet usage sucks away from desktop, the more they increase that position (Android & Apple devices both default to Google, and make up 98% of the mobile device market. Full statistics can be found on a presentation I did earlier this month (Feb 2013) at http://www.contentharmony.com/2013-internet-marketing-trends/ . Regarding how to target Bing specifically, I don't spend too much time worrying about it because of the volume of traffic, and because I mostly work with small/medium businesses. The only SEOs I've met that do much Bing-specific activity are working for larger websites, where an increase in traffic from Bing can be substantially worth the time to devote to it. Yahoo has different rankings but it supposed to be powered by Bing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Search#Yahoo.21_search_deal - so in theory whatever works for Bing should work for Yahoo as well. In general, I've heard that Bing is highly dependent on sitemaps to index. You need to have a spotless sitemap, that only contains URLs that load properly without redirects. In terms of status code, this means 200 only, none of these: 301/302, 404, 5**, etc. Aside from that I've noticed that Bing can be easy to rank for with an established site and good on-page optimization practices. Not certain but I think they rely less heavily on links. In general though, I'd say there's a lot of overlap in best practices for Google and Bing, and I haven't come across anything that conflicts between the two, it's mostly just differing priorities.
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Hey guys, started working on this as a blog post and got distracted... Will update this comment when it's live.
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