Posted by rebecca Rand recently debuted his new series of Headsmacking Tips (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), which comprise of "Why didn't I think of that?" SEO suggestions, tricks, and recommendations. Today I came across a headsmacking revelation, but it wasn't of the "Why didn't I think of that?" variety; rather, it was more like "Why are they DOING that?!" Thus, I'm officially debuting an "SEO Newbie Mistake" series. Sure, a lot of this is going to be eye-rollingly easy for most of you, but I was surprised at how, as a professional SEO, it's easy to forget that a lot of sites commit some heinous SEO crimes of the most dubious distinction. Well, I discovered a big'un today, and it hits close to home, making me realize that a lot of webmasters and site owners still don't understand what SEO is, how search engines work, or the fact that a lot of the decisions that they make in order to make their users' lives easier actually hurt the website from a ranking standpoint. Now onto the fun part--example time! Most of you know by now that this season I've started dabbling in triathlons. I've done five this season (two sprints, one Olympic, and one half Ironman), and I'll end my season with another half Ironman in Cancún, Mexico later this month. For the past several months, I've learned how to swim, bike, and run better. And I couldn't have done it without Herriott Sports Performance, an endurance training facility that focuses specifically on cycling and triathlon training in Seattle (hey, they got me to lose nearly 15 lbs and become better, stronger, faster--the least I could do is give them some decent anchor text).   When it comes to training, HSP knows their stuff. The owner and founder, Todd Herriott, is a professional cyclist and a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. (He also has a one-eyed pug. No, that is not a euphemism.) My trainer, Teresa Nelson, is a USAT Level II triathlon coach, a freakishly fast swimmer (she swam for the University of Nevada, Reno, and always yells at me to stop dragging my arms when I swim), and often wins top overall female in local and regional triathlons. She's competing in the Kona World Championships in Hawaii this October. So yeah, Todd and Teresa (and the other trainers at HSP) are pretty hardcore. Their website, however, is not as bad-ass. I regularly go to the site to login and see my training schedule for the week, and yesterday I was shocked to see that it has committed SEO Newbie Mistake #2...multiple times. Let me back up for a minute and talk about SEO Newbie Mistake #1, which in turn led to Mistake #2. HSP's website is http://www.herriottsportsperformance.com. It's kind of a long, clumsy URL. It took quite a bit of conditioning on my part to consistently type it in correctly. The URL can be a bit tricky to remember/type in/share, which is why SEO Newbie Mistake #1 is not picking a relatively concise, easily constructed domain name. The longer the URL, the harder it can be to type in correctly or share with others. Also, I recommend, if possible, shying away from consecutive consonants/vowels in the URL. In HSP's case that can potentially be difficult since Todd's company is named after him, and his last name has both a double R and a double T. However, if you can, try to avoid it. Despite my love for all things Matt McGee, I'll use Small Business SEM's website as an example. Their URL is http://www.smallbusinesssem.com. Three s's in a row = me getting a snake slither noise in my head whenever I type out his URL. Plus, I always think I've typed in one 's' too many, so I end up reading the URL over and over again to ensure that I've typed in the correct number. Lastly, try to work a keyword into your URL. It's not a huge deal, but hey, if you can, why not? It'll get bolded in the search results when someone searches for that term, which should help your result stand out more. Also, if other sites link to you using your domain name as the anchor text, you've already got a built-in keyword pointing to your site. Sure, sites like Etsy and Craigslist don't have "handmade goods" or "classifieds" in their domain name and they're doing just fine, but for a small, local business just starting out, every little factor helps. The folks at HSP must have realized that they broke SEO Newbie Mistake #1 because yesterday I came across a post on their site titled "New, Shorter Web Site Addresses for HSP." It read:

For too long, you’ve had to suffer through typing in www.herriottsportsperformance.com. Suffer no more! HSP now works with the following addresses: www.herriottsports.com www.hspseattle.com The old address still works, but life just got a little easier if you want to use the new ones.

I sat there, dumbfounded, reading and re-reading the message over and over again. HSP decided to provide an alternative, more user-friendly URL...twice. And both of these websites, of course, resolve along with the original URL. Thus, we've got three versions of the exact same website which, obviously, is a problem. Most of you already know what URL canonicalization is, but for the three of you who don't, it's when you pick a single accessible version of your website. Out of various URL choices, you pick one that you want users to access, link to, and have the search engines rank. In HSP's case, while the following URLs all bring up the same content, they are technically different URLs because, as Matt Cutts puts it, "A web server could return completely different content for all the urls..." (he has a great post on URL canonicalization, so check it out if you'd like to learn more):

• http://www.herriottsportsperformance.com
• http://herriottsportsperformance.com
• http://www.herriottsports.com
• http://herriottsports.com
• http://www.hspseattle.com
• http://hspseattle.com

All of these versions of the home page can potentially rank in the search engines. They're also exact copies of each other, which can trigger duplicate content issues (Rand does a good job of explaining duplicate content in the search engines and covers what can potentially trigger issues and penalties, and Eric Enge provides some examples of when duplicate content really hurts). And, of course, if you have six different versions of one page, you have six different areas to point links. You're diluting the strength of your page because you're splitting inbound links into six different paths instead of having all of these links point to a single page. It's easier to rank one page that has 5,000 links pointing to it than to rank six identical pages that have these 5,000 links split unevenly among them. What's the solution? Dust off those 301-redirects, because they're about to spring into action! HSP should pick a singular version of their site. If, say, they decide that they want their domain name to be "hspseattle.com", then both herriottsportsperformance.com and herriottsports.com would redirect to hspseattle.com. Additionally, if HSP wanted all of their pages to be the www version, non-www pages would 301 redirect to their www counterpart. Thus, any links pointing to non-canonical pages will automatically be redirected to the canonical source, and users will instantly be taken to this page when they either type in an old URL or when they click on a link pointing to a non-canonical page. Webconfs.com has a handy list of how to create 301 redirects using IIS, ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, CGI PERL, and Ruby on Rails. They also outline how to redirect an old domain to a new domain and how to redirect non-www versions to www pages via htaccess redirect. Hopefully our first two examples of SEO Newbie Mistakes have helped out those of you who weren't aware of these issues and have provided a nice little 101 refresher to the rest of you who already knew about them. I'm sure that Jane, Danny, and Rand will contribute to the SEO Newbie Mistake series in the future, so forgive us for occasionally catering to the less advanced members on SEOmoz. They need some lovin' too, and some of these issues do need to get covered (especially after dipping into Q&A and seeing the large amount of beginner questions and concerns that constantly arise). Stay tuned for the next post in this installment--hopefully by then I will have taught my friends over at HSP some SEO basics. My advice should be worth some free training sessions, right? Or maybe a new time trial bike... :) Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish Tonight, I received an email with a familiar question, asking why the top companies providing SEO consulting and development services rarely ever provide guarantees (and virtually never use it as a marketing tactic). Since the subject has been popping up of late, and since we're just emerging from the summer lull, I thought it was as worthy a time as any to address persistent concerns. Here are five solid reasons that compel SEOmoz as well as the many companies we work with/recommend to stay far away from any "guarantee" of search engine rankings. Reason #1: SEO & Guarantees Have an Abominable History From 1996 through to today, SEO scams have used "guaranteed rankings and traffic" as a slimy catchphrase to lure in gullible buyers with too-good-to-be-true promises. That association has stained the entire industry and repulsed even businesses that might consider using the "guarantee" label. Just look at some of the questionable messaging used by so-called SEO companies that employ this moniker:

(source) Our search engine optimization software comes with the latest link popularity and web site optimization tools for helping you achieve guaranteed ranking. Here is what the Internet's best search engine optimization software has to offer:

• Link Popularity & Link Exchange Tools
• Website Submission Software

Automated software for link exchanges and website submissions? If you've done ten minutes of due diligence into how SEO is practiced, you're well aware that these claims venture deep into the sort of tactics that haven't been effective in the last half-decade.

(source) $399 annual - Guaranteed fast listing on DMOZ, Netscape, Google, MSN, AltaVista, LYCOS, FAST, ASK/Temoa and 100+ other engines and portals! Trace your traffic and guarantee a higher position!

Not only is the listing and traffic guaranteed, it's guaranteed fast. I'm reminded of Homer Simpson's infamous utterance after a crayon is re-inserted into his brain, "Extended warranty? How can I lose?"

(source)

• We guarantee to keep you on 1st-page results each month, or you don't pay for that month.
• We guarantee to optimize your website for up to 100 different keyword phrases.
• We guarantee to provide monthly reports that document all of your 1st-page positions.

Many of the SEO companies that do still guarantee rankings have taken the clever tack of guaranteeing a certain number of keywords that they themselves choose. In this fashion, they can select primarily non-competitive terms and have a fairly high rate of success. Whether those keyword rankings provide any serious traffic is another matter altogether.

The point doesn't need belaboring. Just as time shares have their "free" weekend getaways and used cars have high pressure salespeople, SEO has its own insiduous, stereotyped marketing claims that legitimate providers avoid like the plague.

Reason #2: The Search Engines Expressly Warn Against It

I don't often reference Google's guidelines on search marketing, but since the page ranks so well for a variety of queries related to SEO and guarantees, its virtually unavoidable if a client is performing research about your offerings. This line in particular, stand alone:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Even though the context is meant to put it in a slightly different context ("Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or..."), the messaging comes through very clearly. If your potential clients have read on Google's website that guarantees are bogus, they're likely to carry that bias with them as they peruse what the market has to offer.

Reason #3: Rankings are Inherently Unstable

If I perform a search for SEO Company here in Seattle, then drive 3 hours south to Portland (or 3 hours north to Vancouver) and execute the same query, I'm likely to end up with very different ordering of results. Likewise, if I log into my Google account and get personalized results or hit a different datacenter during the course of my querying. Many searchers have even had the odd experience of hitting refresh on a query and finding the results change or re-order.

Given the incongruous nature of ranking fluctuations and the fact that ranking in a particular position on a given machine at a single point in time says very little about the future or even the present, it's no wonder that savvy SEO firms stay away from the guarantee.

Reason #4: Rankings are a Poor Metric for Overall Performance

Rankings do not equal traffic. A great SEO campaign should be measured by the increase in search engine traffic and (if the contract also includes site optimization for conversions) the rate at which that traffic performs the desired actions on your site. Achieving rankings is (almost) always a means to an end and not the end itself (the one exception being reputation management campaigns).

If your patrons are seeking rankings for posterity or to boost their egos, they might not be the best choice of clients. Those clients who have a solid business model and great content or services to back it up want the kinds of qualified, interested visitors that come from search engines because they've expressed a desire that the website can fulfill. Yes - position #1 will generally get you more traffic than any other real estate in the search results, but plenty of campaigns we've seen and even some we've worked on have been sabotaged by an obsession with pure rankings.

The metric shold always be traffic - increasing search traffic means the SEO is doing their job. Making the rankings of a few top phrases the priority, above and beyond the overall search traffic means that goals are out of whack. Don't forget that 70% of search volume is in the tail of the demand curve - and there's usually a lot more low hanging fruit to be found therein.

Reason #5: Making Guarantees About Something You Cannot Control Carries Inherent Ethical Problems

Politicians constantly fall into the trap of making promises they cannot possibly deliver on. Luckily, since they've let people down since the dawn of government, we've set the bar relatively low. This isn't true, however, in the business world. If FedEx promises to deliver a package by tomorrow, that's a guarantee they can make because they control the means of delivery. On the flipside, if a camera-maker promises that all your pictures will come out beautiful, that's irresponsible - what if you decide to point your lens at Gary Busey?

This same principle applies to SEO.

What search engine optimization companies can & should guarantee is that they'll provide the best advice possible to help your site earn more traffic. They may even guarantee, after reviewing your site, that they can grow your search traffic by at least 10, 20, 30% or more (we've done this in the past, at least verbally, when we've seen sites that had incredible potential and extremely poor SEO practices). But, SEOs cannot control the search results the way FedEx can control shipping packages or Coca Cola can guarantee the taste of their beverage. The search engines alone are responsible for and privvy to the rankings methodologies.

In my personal opinion, there are times when I would be willing to gamble a large amount of money on the fact that we could achieve a certain ranking for a given keyword. However, that's not the same as a guarantee. A guarantee is a promise - a basic contract that necessarily creates an assumption of certainty by the deliverer to the recipient. Anytime you cheat on that logic and make a promise outside your sphere of direct control, you're walking on shaky ethical and business ground.

---

Thanks to the list above, I shy away from even using the word "guarantee" in relation to our consulting business. In reality, we do guarantee that our clients will be happy with our results (and so far, at least, we've made good on that promise), we do guarantee that if they implement our recommendations, search traffic will rise (but that's often a big "if"), and we do guarantee that our work won't put you at risk of penalties from the search engines. I think that these types of promises are perfectly acceptable to make - just stay away from guaranteed "search engine rankings." It's just asking for trouble.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'. I've collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I'd share them on the blog with the hopes of getting greater group intelligence to participate in the guessing game: #10 - Google's Favorite University Apparently, it's the U of...

Arizona? I've seen some strangely biased sitelinks in the past, but this one is a serious enigma. Whatever the sitelinks algo is that triggers results like this, someone needs to turn down the knob. #9 - Wikipedia as Safe Search Try a query for guido, and note the "related searches" returns a single result - guido wikipedia (which I have a tough time imagining is a popular secondary query, but OK). Now perform that search - guido wikipedia - and note that the Wikipedia page describing the slang term has been replaced by two others for less derogatory uses of the word (and less exact matches). Bizarre, indeed... #8 - Jobing for Unrelated Domains

I've purposely moved results 8, 9 and 10 to the top of the screenshot to illustrate result #10 - I'm not sure how Google ascribed that title to a page/domain that has no content, save the word "hello." Looks like several years ago, it contained some related content, but it's been a long time and Google's still giving an empty page front paeg billing. #7 - YouTube; The 1st and 2nd Most Important Site on the WWW? A search for inurl:www inurl:com site:com brings up an interesting listing of important domains, nearly all of which are extremely high PageRank with lots of important links except... A weird YouTube result, the kind that normally only shows when there's a relevant YouTube video in position #2. Looking at the content and the links, I can't figure out what it's doing there. A conspiracy theorist might suggest it's evidence of Google's favoring of YouTube content, but I'm wondering if the lack of keywords in the query just brings out some odd behavior. #6 - Sarah Jessica Reminds us that Google Bombing is Still Alive & Well The next time someone tells you Google-bombing is dead and gone, show them the obligatory click here example, but don't forget about Sex & the City's star, who's apparently "lovely," no matter what the keywords say:

I was hoping they were reading the text in the Flash file, but as that appears to be purposefully inaccessible, I'm guessing they just paid lots of attention to all that "lovely" anchor text. :-) #5 - Your Site Isn't Here Search for "Your Site Here" in quotes and find another disturbingly brazen example of pages ranking for a phrase that doesn't appear anywhere in the text. The weird part is.... Not one of the top 10 results contain that keyword phrase:

It isn't until you get to result #13 that you finally find a URL containing a text match. To be honest, I'm surprise the results don't look something more like this - it's as though they automatically append a -allintitle: parameter to your query. #4 - Gotta Love the Domain Match I think I must have mistyped quality when I sutmbled across this query for - quali. When I performed the search last month, the #1 result was for www.quali.com, which contains no content, has fewer than 5 followed links pointing to it and last featured content in 2001 (when it was, apparently, for sale). p.s. Sadly, it's now slipped to result #13 - poor quali.com. #3 - Where to Get Properly Hitched

I'm a busy man, and I need to rustle up a wedding pronto, so naturaly I searched for marriage license seattle, wa.

Having just stopped by the government building recommended by this map, I can say that it is the proper place to acquire a marriage license in Seattle. However, why no address is provided (even clicking the map, you can't get an address) and why the link points to the wrong page (the correct URL is on Seattle.gov or Metrokc.gov) is something I can't quite figure out. #2 - One of these Domain Queries is Not Like the Others I'm not sure why Google's giving the query about.com the URL information treatment.

Virtually every other domain query from seomoz.org to cnn.com to porcupineliteraryarts.com gets the standard search results, most of them with sitelink. Since domain queries are also very popular searches, I suspect there's a lot of confused individuals out there wondering why About gets such odd results. #1 - Math & the Beatles Now, I'm well aware that a week technically contains seven days, but sometimes, that's just not enough time, particularly when you're in love. Hence, the Beatles gave us Eight Days a Week... But Google's got something strange to say about that:

I believe that's 8 divided by 7, but why it's in the calculator I can't say. I do know that it works for other numbers of days in a week as well - ten, four, eighty-one. Maybe it's just their way of being geeky. Feel free to share your own bizarre search results in the comments, and for our US readers, welcome back from the Labor Day holiday; I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend. Do you like this post? Yes No

This time its the 'BEST SEO TOOLS'!!! Read My Post Here --> List of Best SEO Tools | Web Sack Please, Post Comments Here As Well As On My Blog!!! :)

Posted by Duncan Morris There are lots of people who would class themselves as a developer and would say they can code in any given language. Often the difference between a good developer and a great developer isn't anything to do with the program, how well it works, and how few bugs there are. The great developers make programs that work but they make them in a way that isolates the various components from each other. I want to run through a few examples and apply these very same thought processes to seo. There are a number of places where it would be beneficial to separate the various logical components of, for example a web site. Many of you will have heard of the acronym MVC (Model - View - Controller), which is one example of a software pattern designed to separate the various components of a website. In this case the pattern is designed to separate the information storage (the model), from the user interface (the view). The controller manages the communication between the view and the model. In a large development team you often find experts in each stages of the development, so you have someone who understands the model (which normally maps to a database) and all the business rules. At the front end (the view) you have experts in html and css. I've never quite been able to separate the role of the controller from the model, so I'll skim over that and hope you don't notice. No matter what software pattern is used to code your webpage it is (and has been for a long while) good practice to separate the structure of a site from the presentation of the site. The HTML should contain no information about how to display the page. This should purely be the structure and semantic information required for the page. This is one of the major failings of websites that use tables for layout purposes, which in almost all situations has to place a lot of the presentational information within the HTML. The final level of separation that most websites employ is to separate the content from the structure of the site. This is normally done by placing the content in a database, and embedding this in the HTML when the page is requested. In fact we (and many others) take this one step further and store this content in a text based format with (the majority) of HTML stripped out, and replaced with a markup language called markdown. This means our clients don't have to learn HTML in order to update their website, but by following a few simple rules we can still have semantically marked up code. The theory is all well and good, but how does this help you as an SEO. Just like a development team the main benefit is that you can have different people working on different areas of the site.

1. Technical site review changes

The vast majority, if not all changes we request early on in a project are found in a technical site review which should be implemented by the team working on the backend (or often the template of a site). This can normally be looked at completely separately from any content changes, and can be implemented as such. Those of you without a templating system, will almost certainly know the heartache involved with having to update every page of a site to make a simple change. That was the way most sites were written 6,7 or 8 years ago, and is why most of those sites were rarely updated.

2. Content creation

In most large organisations its hard enough asking people creating content to think in terms of keywords. The last thing you want is for them to also be the ones creating the html. By separating the content from the template you can ensure that the content created by people with no understanding of html or semantic markup is still optimised.

3. Site re-designs

I'm certainly guilty of getting bored with websites quickly, and we have seen two major versions of the distilled site within the last two years, and there have been many more tweaks in the intervening times. All of this would have been much much harder, to the point of not worth doing if our content wasn't stored without any information about how it will be displayed in our content management system. On a side note, one of my pet peeves is when I am digging around the source code and (I kid you not) you see something like the following. <div class="blue-arial-14pt-bold">Text</div> Creating class names like that does not count. Imagine your designer comes along and wants to change the style of the above elements to green text in 12pt verdana. You now have text labeled "blue arial 14pt", which is green and verdana. The guy who takes over updating the css is going to LOVE you for that.

Consistency

One of the issues with sites that have a large number of pages is that without a tool sat helping you it is impossible to look at the code of every page. With the confidence that comes with knowing the site was written using templates or a pattern that includes views, you can be confident that if a given page uses the H1 tag in the correct way then the other pages of a similar type will also. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that having good developers who understand not only how to write good websites (or tools, or programs etc etc), but how to write them *well* will make a huge difference. This isn't immediately obviously an SEO benefit, but anything that can make development easier, or content creating easier will, in the long run make your SEO efforts more effective. Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish In just a few weeks, the SEOmoz blog will be celebrating its 4th birthday (the tools and some of the content has been around since 2003, but we think of October 2004 as the formal inception date). In that time, we've come a long way and attracted many of the best and brightest from the search community to participate and communicate through the Blog & YOUmoz. Up until now, though, we've never had any formal rules governing that participation. To be honest, it's something we wouldn't do if we didn't have to. We love the small, close-knit community feeling of the site and the freedom from formal policies and legalese. In fact, even with the introduction of the blog etiquette policy, we're still striving towards guidelines that provide as much liberty as possible while still serving the best interests of everyone who participates and reads. The goal with these is really to provide some clarity and create the right sorts of expectations. Drama and controversy are, thankfully, rare, but if and when they do arise, we want everyone in the community to have insight into exactly how we'll respond. Most of the rules are self-explanatory and obvious, but I thought it would be interesting and valuable to run over them briefly in a blog post, just to make sure we're all on the same page :-) NOTE: The below are not the formal guidelines (those are in the actual document), they're just my thoughts on each section.

• Offensive content, etc. This one's pretty darn obvious - don't be a turd. If you are, we'll remove your content and if you keep it up, we'll ban your account - pretty simple.
• Content ownership If you write something on the site, we can re-publish it elsewhere (the same policy all the other UGC sites have). Generally speaking, though, we'll try to check with you before associating your name or profile with anything big and public, of course.
• Off-Topic Comments We love them - they create a sense of community and foster the personal sharing environment we all love. That said, we know that a lot of our members get peeved when comments go way off into left field for multiple sets of replies, so we're asking that you limit to three, and if you go over egregiously, we might edit these out. In the future, we're looking into setting up an area for more off-topic types of banter.
• Thumbs Don't abuse them; 'nuff said.
• Account Responsibility If it's posted under your account, you're responsible for it. Of course, if your account gets hijacked, we'll be happy to help you recover it and remove any offending material.
• Misrepresentation If you're not Usain Bolt, please don't create an account with his name pretending to be the world's fastest man. We don't appreciate that and neither do the Jamaican fans (BTW - check out this awesome graphical slideshow from the NYTimes on just how fast he was).
• Promotional Content It's OK to promote relevant, valuable stuff, but what defines "relevant" and "valuable" is at our discretion. Use good judgement and you'll be fine.
• YOUmoz Look-Back If you write something for YOUmoz and we publish and you change your mind, you've got 24 hours to request removal, after which it's at our discretion as to whether to remove it. Obviously, we're hoping this is in very rare use, but there's certainly scenarios (such as when sensitive material is accidentally leaked), when it makes sense to have this as policy.

You'll also find our unchanged Blog Disclaimer regarding the SEOmoz post content, on the Etiquette page. If you've ever got any questions or concerns about any of these, feel free to leave a comment in this post and we'll get back to you (or just email us). SEOmoz is growing; it's true. But that doesn't mean we can't still try our hardest to maintain that fun, small company vibe (and at only 16 people, we really are still quite small). Hopefully we'll never get that teenage stereotype applied to us - "Hey man! You used to be cool... What happened?" - fingers crossed :-) BTW - Coming next week we'll have something on a related topic - our Guiding Principles (you can read more about these from Jim Collins, if you're curious). Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it's a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple - in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV's it might be "tv shows" or "tv news." The problem is that while these keyword searches seem like no-brainers, ranking for them can take a remarkable amount of effort on both the content and link building side. To warrant that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that financial returns will accompany the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those keywords. Buy the keyword traffic for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors via a segmented tracking campaign (check out this post on action tracking to learn more). If the visits that arrive via those searches convert well and produce value, you know that a serious investment is warranted. If, however, they turn out to be tire-kickers and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-focus on higher ROI targets. There's just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you're pursuing this process:

• Paid search traffic can behave differently than organic traffic, so don't take the figures at 100% accuracy. Build in some room for error, and you'll create far better expectations.
• When crafting your PPC campaign for test purposes, make sure to narrow to exact match so you don't accidentally measure traffic that's coming in for longer tail or modified versions of the search query. It's great to do this and measure response in a PPC campaign, but with SEO, you won't be able to naturally rank for those same variants unless you identify and target them individually.
• Make sure to narrow to a geographic area, especially if your keywords contain any potential local intent or local modifiers. Otherwise, you can seriously over/under-estimate.
• Keep seasonal variation/flux in mind. Use Microsoft's Keyword Forecast or Google Insights for Search to help out. Volume fluctuations usually indicate shifting intent as well, so purchasing keywords in a down period can hamper the accuracy of your forecasts.

That's it for this week's headsmacker. I've got a very personal post I worked on during my plane flight back from LA this weekend coming soon (hopefully tomorrow), and we're also launching our new blog etiquette guidelines and some explanations this week, so stay tuned! BTW - If you somehow missed it, go back and check out Danny's brilliant post from last week on analyzing the Top 100 Blogs. It flew under the radar a bit, but is worth a thorough examination. Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire May It Please the Mozzers,   Hollings denies all the allegations against him in his answer to the complaint. It is worth noting that Hollings and The Secret had been engaged in a dispute about money before The Secret filed suit. Hollings had informally accused The Secret of withholding compensation that he was owed. It is possible, although unprovable, that The Secret proactively filed a suit against Hollings to pressure him to drop his informal complaints about unpaid compensation. If that was its intention, it didn't work. Hollings filed a lawsuit against The Secret in May 2007.    

US$8,000.00 per month to broadcast plus a share of 10% of gross margins of all revenues from The Secret website. The revenues you will receive from this, in fact, will exceed the Nine Network's revenues as they have 10% of Prime Time's net profits, which will come after your share.

Hollings claims he never received his 10% share of "gross margins of all revenues" (whatever that means), an amount that he believes is over three million dollars. Hollings also alleges that The Secret sent "numerous communications" assuring him that his portion of the gross margin would be forthcoming and instructing  him to set up an LLC to receive the large sums of money.   I've written before about the dangers involved in commissions-based or pay-per-performance contracts. There is tremendous potential for gain, but also tremendous risk. If you decide to take the plunge, make certain you have a solid written and signed contract. If the SEM in this case had a signed contract, he might not be in his current unenviable situation. Remember to get it in a signed writing! There haven't been any rulings in the case yet about whether Hollings owed a duty of loyalty to The Secret by virtue of his relationship with the company. Generally, an SEO/M probably isn't an agent or fiduciary of his or her client. However, it is possible for an SEO/M to become an agent with special duties of loyalty depending on the nature of the relationship and the agreement between the parties. To avoid unintentionally having a duty of loyalty to a client, expressly state in your contracts that you are an independent contractor, not the client's fiduciary or agent. Clarifying your relationship with clients helps them understand that you can work with their competitors and have no legal obligation to further their interests to the exclusion of others. Best Regards, SarahDo you like this post? Yes No

I am not an SEO, but an experimental physicist The laws of physics that I study are not fixed but are constantly changing. They are the physics of Google.

The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns be­neath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. - Richard Feynman - Lectures on Physics

 

I experiment with links, structure, and content and study their effect on the Search Engine Ranking Placements (SERPs) of websites. The closed system I concern myself with most is that of Google. There are many like me: scientists of the physics of Google. If you’re reading this, odds are you are one of us. Together we form the environment of the World Wide Web.

“How do I ride a bicycle?”

That’s what I hear when people ask me how to make money on the web or to rank in Google. The best way to learn is to get on the bike and start peddling. You’ll fall at first, but eventually you should get it. I can describe the basics and warn of some pitfalls, but in the end you gotta just try it to learn how. Does that mean we can’t learn anything from the masters? Absolutely not. While the best way to learn how to play chess is a brief introduction to the rules and then sitting down to play a few matches, there is hardly a novice alive today that wouldn’t benefit immensely from reading a chess book or two. At a higher level that same player will improve by reviewing the chess matches of grandmasters and coaching. But he still needs to practice to improve. He needs to take what he has learned, experiment, test and refine. In the same way, we who practice the science of ranking in the SERPs and making money on the web benefit from reading and sharing ideas with others who are successful. But experimentation is still the key to success. The novice who joins SEO Black’s Private Forums will be in over his head. Why review Grandmaster matches if you don’t know how to en passant and barely have 10 games under your belt? But the Google Physicist will reap rewards by studying other’s experiments, exchanging new theories and performing new experiments. We are experimental physicists. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of “Eureka!” that accompanies a successful experiment. The only way to find it is through experimentation. No one is going to write a detailed manual for your success. You need to experiment to see what works. Then go back, review those experiments, check it against your results and refine. Then experiment some more. Don’t Stop. Keep experimenting, keep refining, and keep abreast of new developments in your field: The Physics of Google.