1. Possibly the single most important element for determining the “theme” of a web page, the header tag seems to be often overlooked completely by people new to SEO.

So, I’ve added another article to my SEO-101 section. It’s called “Header Tag Tips” and I think it’s worth a read.

As always, any thoughts, comments, or criticism are welcomed here…

I watch and listen to more than my share of online tutorials, both in audio and video format. I listen on my pc, and I take some for later on an Ipod, and there’s nothing I hate more than being unproductive.

Most of what I choose to view (or hear) is necessary for my work, but I really don’t have any time to spare. Sometimes, the speaker or presenter talks very slowly, or goes on and on, when all I want are the facts. Just give me what I need to know, and give it to me right now.
Recently, I received (again, from Jerry West) a link to a 48 minute video analysis of the Q4 2006 search engine algorithm changes. C’mon, Jerry, are you kidding me?! 48 minutes?

I immediately started searching for a way to speed up the playback time, and it didn’t take me too long to find this great post.

They covered several of my options, and in the comments, there were other suggestions too that could help with nearly any type of media file I needed to play faster.

So, if you are looking for a way to easily speed up the time it takes to playback audio and video files, look no further than here. I saved so much time watching my 48 minute video, that I had some left over to write this…

When you think about the Microsoft search platform, do you call it “MSN”, or “Microsoft” or “Live”?
When Microsoft first began development of their new search engine, MSN was not utilizing it yet for searches. When discussing any examples of Microsoft search, it was necessary to call it “Live” to distinguish between it and the old MSN.  You couldn’t accurately refer to Microsoft search without clarifying whether you meant MSN or Live.

This summer however, “Live” and “MSN” search both began returning identical results, using the “new” search engine, further confusing the issue.

This week I sent a customer an email and ended a sentence using the words, “…in Google, Yahoo and Live” Of course, the reply came back “What’s Live?”.
When I replied that MSN Search has morphed to “Live”, I realized that I should probably call it “Microsoft” again, so people know what I’m talking about.

Most people have not even noticed the switch, and I was surprised myself when I first saw that a search at MSN now shows the “Live search” logo at the top, and a “Back to MSN” graphic on the right.

The problem is that the URL in the address bar for a search from MSN is still showing MSN.com, and not a LIVE.com, like you get if you begin your search from the Live.com home page.

Why is that a problem?

Well I guess it’s not, as long as you don’t mind people being confused. I thought Microsoft was trying to “brand” this new platform, of web services called Live.com. So why not take people from MSN when they search, so that “Back to MSN” actually means that you’ve left MSN in the first place?

Far be it from me to give marketing advice to Microsoft, but if you want people to think of a new brand name, shouldn’t you actually start to use it? Actually, I’m talking about it, so maybe this is just a clever marketing ploy to generate discussion and build inbound links to Live.com?

There, I’ve removed the link that was in my fist paragraph, just in case
Anyway, I’ve long called it MSN, but since it’s not MSN any more, but still not exactly “Live” either, I guess I’ll have to call it “Microsoft”, until their next new version.
Hmm, what other things might we call “Microsoft search”?

On my list of “Top Ten SEO Factors” I’ve never removed ALT tags, because I’ve seen evidence that they were still a determining factor in rankings.

Many experts have been saying for a couple of years now that “ALT tags don’t matter anymore” so they’ve stopped using them in their pages.

I even had a brief “Oh yeah? Prove it!” contest going with someone that believes ALT tags are a waste of time. Finally, after looking at my proof, they claimed that my testing sample was too small to be taken as fact.

One of the things I mentioned in my article “Top Ten Takeaways from Pubcon Vegas” was that ALT tags still matter”, and today I feel vindicated again, as I read that Vanessa Fox of Google offered this advice last week at SES:

• Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as “picture1″ or “logo” doesn’t provide much information about the image. “Charting the path of stock X” and “Company Y” give more details.
• Don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords and try to cheat.
• It’s important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.
• Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Exactly how much do ALT tags figure in to the Google algorithm” Who cares? That isn’t really important, unless you’re writing “for” a particular search engine, and you’re not. What’s important is that ALT tags need to be present on a well designed web page for human consumption. Write well for humans, and the search engines will follow.

Anyway, I’ve continued to recommend ALT tags, and I still use them on every webpage that I build to this day, and I’ve never been sorry that I did. You can read the inspiration for this post on the official Google Blog…

On December 11th, local Portland business owners will be offered a rare opportunity to get live help directly from proven SEO experts, including myself.

The most talented search marketers in Oregon recently formed a group called SEMpdx, and we are having our first educational event, called “SEM Hot Seat”.

Where else can you get such credible advice about the search engines and have the information directly discussed as it applies to your domain? Certainly nowhere that wouldn’t involve waiting in security lines at the airport! Don’t miss it. Find out more about SEMpdx, or sign up for the event here.

Your business will have an easier time getting web traffic and customers if you list it in the Google Local directory, Google Maps.

Instead of having dozens or hundreds of competitors in your neighborhood, you may find there are very few.

This option is not available for businesses that are “online only”, and are only for your “brick and mortar” businesses.
Create an account at Google and follow the step by step directions to get your local business listed in a few short weeks. There will be a physical mailer of a post card to guarantee the legitimacy of your submission, so be sure to watch for that.

If you have multiple locations, be sure to list them all.  Google does seem to favor listings that are closer to the geographic center of the primary zip code of that city.

Google penalizes websites for blatant link farming and other unsavory tactics, but it looks like Microsoft has taken it a step further.

By now, everyone is supposed to know that unrelated links can’t help you, but now Microsoft Search (a.k.a. Live.com) may actually be officially BANNING websites that engage in this practice.
According to this post Barry Schwartz (a.k.a. Rusty Brick) reported that certain webmasters were receiving this letter from Live.com -

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with other sites that are unrelated to your site content.

Various techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated links in order to increase ranking are considered spamming and as a result your Web site has been excluded from our index.

Please contact Live.com once you’ve removed these offending links and we will reevaluate the situation.”

Well, when I visited Barry’s blog, I had trouble finding the article but it’s apparently true, and here it is.

We all know that irrelevant links have long been pointless anyway, and now that they can actually harm you, why not take the time to review the outbound links on your site and clean them up?

Is there really a reason you would want one of your customers to go there? Is it there just because “they” have to verify that your link to them exists, so they’ll leave your link up? If so, then you too are engaging in this practice of attempted rankings manipulation..

Reciprocal linking was all the rage until a couple of years ago. It was an effective and legitimate seo strategy. Then link building abuse software came out, and most “white hat” SEO’s backed off the practice. Now, you can actually be hurt, so clean it up.

I’m the cook in our family, and I decided to make some stuffed mushrooms for a Thanksgiving appetizer.

Naturally, I had to start with the right foundation… very large mushrooms. They couldn’t be difficult for my guests to find, by being made of “Flash”, or images.

Then I had to make the content for the mushrooms…the stuffing. I took equal amounts of onions, green, red and yellow bell peppers and a little garlic, and lighty browned them all in a ton of butter, and added some seasonings nearly everyone would like, such as salt, pepper, sage and a bit of hot sauce.

There weren’t “niche” mushrooms, and I wanted them to appeal to the widest variety of end user, so after the ingredients were cooked, I just added some cooked sausage and a little chicken broth, and let it simmer for another 10 minutes.

Once done, I drained most of the liquid, and added some Italian breadcrumbs , and then put in some crumbled bleu cheese to give it some originality, and make it my own. After all, I couldn’t just have duplicate content in my mushrooms, could I?

After mixing it up real well, I pulled the stems off, and spooned the mixture into each mushroom, packing them firmly with ingredients. These mushrooms were definitely not lacking in content, and had a lot to offer.
I didn’t want to make my guests work any harder than necessary, so I arranged the mushrooms in a logical order on the cookie sheet, so that my visitors could instantly see what the pan had to offer.

Just like with a website, the final step was to wait, so I put it in the oven for about 20 minutes while it came out of the sandbox, and in practically no time, my table was filled with stuffed mushrooms ranked #1 in the SLURPS.

In no particular order, here are the most important things I was either reminded of, learned, or remember from Pubcon.

1. Always strive for perfection, but don’t wait for it before implementation, or you may never get your projects completed, your product ready, or your web pages uploaded, etc. In his keynote speech, Guy Kawasaki said one of his mantras is, “Don’t Worry, be Crappy!”. I’ve always believed this (to a degree), and it was nice to hear the reinforcement.
2. Experts don’t always agree. A funny situation spanned two sessions. First, during the Dream Team Site Review session, Todd Freisen said “There’s never a good reason to do a 302 redirec. In the final presentation, “Search Engine Smackdown” from the show, Peter Linsley from Ask.com had a Powerpoint presentation. One of his slides was “Proper use of A 302 redirect”. Peter had obviously attended the earlier session, because when he came to that slide, he quickly skipped over it with no comment, emitting a chuckle from those in the audience that were paying attention.
3. Buying too many links is bad and will cause penalization of a website in the search rankings. I suppose I’ve known this for a while, but it really hit home when I heard Thomas Bindl’s portion of a link buying presentation. Yes, a site can be penalized for buying “run of site” links, or for having too high a percentage of their inbound links be purchased, or for participating in link farms or cross linking schemes. This same presentation also included Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads, and he too stressed the importance of not buying too many. All the presenters stressed that it’s important to keep a balance between your paid and organic links, and Thomas Bindl actually suggested that buying ANY links was a bad thing, even ones from co-panelist Patrick Gavin. Matt Cutts also said last year that buying links can’t help your ranking, but this year it was made clear that it can hurt them too.
4. Alt tags still matter. This was said not only by a panelist, who mentioned their use, but was also confirmed by an SEO I met from Kansas City. He works frequently on a financial site, where they cannot make ANY text changes without a $140 per page submission to the SEC. He noticed that adding keyword rich ALT text to his images did improve his rankings. That’s why I stand by their continued inclusion in my “Top 10 SEO Tips“ article, despite the fact that most experts claim they’re worthless today. When used properly, they’re still a piece of the pie.
5. Don’t link to bad neighborhoods. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this, I’d be a wealthy guy, but do I listen? Not always… Search your website and visit your link partners. Do they all offer a quality experience? Are they all directly related to your industry? Is there a legitimate reason for you to link there? If not, remove them ASAP. Improve the quality of your outbound links, remove the junk, and your rankings will improve
6. Don’t show search engines session ID strings in your URL’s. Again, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but it was a strong takeaway for me because I specifically found out why. Last year, some search engines were still having trouble indexing dynamic URL’s. This year, they’ve gotten quite good at it, but that can still lead to other problems. If session ID strings are given to a search spider one day, then the next time it comes back, the same page provides a different ID, this can lead to duplicate content issues. It’s important to have programmers provide for this in their code, and set the store up so that if a visitor will not accept a cookie, (like a spider) then the URL will not include the session ID.
7. RSS feeds are going to take over the world. Nobody actually said this, but I can sure see it coming. Already, IE7 will display an RSS feed in a much more user friendly way. Personally, I read blogs and articles through an RSS reader, and seldom visit the actual websites of my favorite authors any more. Last year, products began to trickle in to the market that helped publishers put advertisements right into their feeds. I think I realized this last year, when I put an RSS aggregator on my Palm Treo cell phone. But it was during this conference that I really began to believe that traditional websites might already be dead, and we just don’t realize it yet.
8. Everything goes on your permanent record. During site reviews, it seemed that the first thing Matt Cutts did was to research what other domain names might be owned by the site owner, and then he would visit those domains as well, ultimately questioning the reasons for their existence. Why should it matter to Google what else I do in another domain, or if I have a bunch of domains parked? Well, I guess it does, and got the strong impression that you’d better not have anything they don’t like on any of your property.
9. Resolving the www and the non www versions of a domain to the same place has been sort of an advanced seo secret for a long time, but at the last two Pubcons, I didn’t hear it mentioned in the review sessions. This year however, not a single domain that I saw got reviewed without looking at (and recommending) that 301 redirect for the non www version.
10. 24 hours of unlimited internet access ends when you check out. Some late night activities (official of course) on Thursday kept me from renewing my daily internet access at my hotel Friday morning until about 11 am. Then, Saturday morning, I checked out early, knowing that I had access until I had to leave for the airport at 11. WRONG! It seems that by checking out about 9, I lost my access, and had to pay again just to use it for the last couple of hours before my flight.

Even though there were a few early disappointments, with a 45 minute registration line, and a couple of presenters that didn’t quite have it together, I thought the conference was great, and there’s no question I’ll return in 2007. I met a lot of people, learned some valuable information, and I consider it to be the one of my best educational investments of 2006.

Looking at my notes, I see there are more than 10, so maybe I’ll expand it to the top 20 when I have more time… If you attended Pubcon, what other things stick in your mind?

Don’t let posts like this fool you, it’s nothing but work, work, work at these things. There’s no fun, no relaxation, and only hours and hours of mind numbing education and networking. I didn’t even know they served alcohol… I’m shocked!

Seriously, there’s good advice there, especially his Tips for Pubcon newbies. You’re not attending this event to only hear what’s said in the sessions, you’re there to learn the deep dark search engine secrets that are never shared publicly, right?

Don’t be a wallflower. Take advantage of your opportunity, and buy someone a drink. You can even start with me, although I guess I’m not worth any points…

I’m going to the Webmaster World Pubcon convention next week, and getting pretty stoked. I’m so glad they’re back to a 4 day format now…

The session grid has been complete for a while now, and looks really good. Like always though, it’s hard to be two (or more) places at once.  I’m pretty sure these are the sessions I’ll be attending, but some were a tough call, and I may still switch at the last minute:

Day 1

1. Keynote Address by Guy Kawasaki
2. SEO and Big Search – Don’t miss Jake Bailie!
3. Feeds & Alternative Optimization (tough decision with Eric Ward down the hall)
4. Site Review Forum – Always entertaining
5. Corporate Mega Site SEO Management – (It never hurts to dream big)
6. Jon S. Von Techzner Keynote
7. Ask.com Cocktail Hour

Day 2

1. New Age of Web Advertising Keynote – John Batelle
2. Local and Mobile Local Search  – (This is the future…must dominate)
3. Search Blog and Reporter Forum (Cant miss this one)
4. Optimizing Your Site for Higher Conversion Rates
5. Search and Research on a Rail – (Super Session)
6. Google Event

Day 3

1. Danny Sullivan Keynote – Better be there by 7am!
2. Forums & Communities – Building and Optimization
3. Viral & WOMM Marketing Management – What’s WOMM?
4. SEO Dream Team Site Reviews (skip lunch and get a seat early)
5. Search Engine Smackdown – The original classic

Day 4

That’s a free day to shop, eat and gamble, until 1pm when the actual “Pub” part of Pubcon kicks in, with the location TBA the day before.

This day was the best part of the whole trip last year in Vegas, and after being forced to miss the last day in Boston, I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again, so I’m staying until Friday.

Anyone that’s going to the show from Portland (or anywhere) should feel free to look me up and say “hi”. Let’s hook up and compare notes, talk search, have a beer, win big at the craps table, or whatever. Don’t be a lurker…plan to participate!

That’s the claim of someone that emailed me yesterday.

After reading his email and subsequent replies to mine, I decided to post. Any thoughts? What’s your search engine of choice, and why?
Here’s his original email -

Dear Sir:

I have been reading your pages with great interest.
One thing some expert on SE, like you, needs to do is to try and
determine which engine produces the most relevant results.

I am no MSFT lover, but I think they could win the SE war because they
*deserve* to — their results are far more relevant than Google’s for
most searches.

I know I am right, and as bad as MSFT is, they will win because they
have a better algorithm — once the word gets out. Google is fighting
them on MSFT’s own turf, but Google is ignoring its own bread and
butter. It is going to be fun to watch them self-destruct.

Best regards,
Clayton

To which I replied…

Good points Clayton, but right now, MSFT has quite a long way to go.
They include too many spam pages in their index, and they seem to
indiscriminately rank some sites very high that are nowhere on the
radar of other search engines, which really makes you wonder.

You think they really offer more relevant results? I’d like to see an
example, if you want to point it out.

That said though, they certainly have the resources to take over, but
I don’t know about their “deserving” it…If MSFT “deserves” anything,
they deserve to have lost out to another company like Google, which they
did over the past 5 years. It wouldn’t break my heart to see Google get dinged in
return though…

Scott

Then he came back with this -

Microsoft is a monolithic monstor that deserves to fail, but Google is
becoming an unfair gatekeeper of the Web. Google dictates what is
important in a way that is not impartial but favors Big Business, Big
This, and Big That..

Here’s an example search term, something we both probably are interested
in: Moore’s Law.

Working through the Google results, you quickly start finding pages
with very little content but all of the SEO tricks, intentional or not
on the part of the sites. And, compared to other search engines, one quickly
runs into sites for law firms named “Moore.” Google’s algorithm
favors sites connected with important commercial sources such as CNet,
Ziff Davis, Intel and other large organizations. These sites tend to
draw lots of incoming links but often have very little content, text or
otherwise. (However, Intel happens to be very informative.)

If Google is going to be the gatekeeper of the Web, serving as an
editorial filter, it is very sad that they are favoring commercial
interests. These interests already have enough entree to the public
mind, what with their huge advertising budgets and the controversial
concentration of newspaper, TV station, and cable ownership.

Microsoft’s high-ranked pages tend to be meaty and relevant compared to
Google’s. So do Dogpile’s, but they use better sources as well as Google.

If you try some comparative searches for your personal favorite
subjects, you might find that you will switch from Google as I am
doing. (Also, for many subjects Google Images is a better starting
point than regular Google.) What are relevant results is a subjective
evaluation, but it is worth doing for an expert like you, I think. You
probably want to know who is best, not merely who best explains the
relevancy of their algorithm. We humans are better than mere
algorithms. It is up to us to explain why our opinions are better than
algorithms and to convince others.

Best,
Clayton

And my reply -

Well I’m not committed to either one, so I just tried the “Moore’s Law”
search. Google shows nothing but the correct Moore’s Law info on the
first 3 pages, and so does MSFT. I dug not deeper, becuae people seldom
doo. If it’s not on the first page (mAYBE 2 or 3) then nobody’s going to see it anyway.

Google’s #1 result is Wikipedia, a free site. All 10 on Google page 1 are
articles, with only #10, pointing to PBS being commercial.

MSN’s # 1 result is actually Intel, a commercial site, so I’m still not
quite buying your argument. That said, whoever has the most relevant
results to what I really want is who I’ll use for personal searches,
and I’m sure Microsoft would love to see more people expressing views
similar to your own.

Mind if I put this on my blog? Then you can feel free to add more
comments there, and perhaps others will as well…

Scott

And finally, his last one -

GOOGLE

Result No. 19 on page 2 is about razor blades! What kind of algorithm is that?

If the subject was search engines, I am sure that you, Scott, would have looked at more than the first two pages.

Result 20 on page 2 is about (against!) the Ten Commandments.

The Intel site, result No. 3, is a redirect! Do you think your site could get the No. 3 spot on a redirect? Something is wrong with Google’s algorithm.

MICROSOFT

MSN http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true on moore’s law:

Number 1 is an Intel site on M.L. that, unlike Google’s Intel result, is not a redirect. Numbers 8 and 13 claim to be about M.L. but aren’t.
However, they are closer than razor blades (found on Google), as both claim to be about M.L. and one defines it.

Google has been at this game a lot longer, but I find that Microsoft Live Search has “moore” than caught up.

Microsoft has its monopoly, but Google has one in search and it is not justified by results. I am switching my home page from Google to Microsoft’s Live Search.

Best,
Clayton

With all that’s undoubtedly been written about Moore’s Law, you have to wonder…

Why DOES this page and this page appear on Google’s page two for “Moore’s Law”? Is it really just because the main domains (Economist.com & Slate.com) are considered highly “authoritative” by Google? (showing a Google Page Ranks of 9 & 8 respectively)
So does Clayton work for Microsoft? Even if he does, is he on to something here?