SEO Skeptic

In honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 Sept), today's SEO Skeptic post is brought to you by Cap'n Long John K'yword, a veteran of pillage, terror and search engine optimization on the high seas.  The Cap'n is here to briefly offer some practical pirate solutions to a few common SEO problems, with some other nuggets of search marketing advice.

Avast! Me Rankings Are in Davy Jones' Locker!

Afore ye were riding pretty, the finest sloop on the digital seas you were. Then your pretty rankings fell to the briny deep!  Gar, what's a sailor to do? Continue reading this post…

This slightly cranky post is geared toward people that have a Twitter account that they use chiefly for business or professional purposes.  I personally think that the type of tweets enumerated below are bad form even for the most closely connected friends, but if you don't care about - or even have - an online reputation you're fostering then by all means blather all you want.  But if you want to properly engage with other professionally-facing users on Twitter, you'll want to think about the types of things your tweeting, and to avoid the following common faux pas.
Continue reading this post…

For my sins, I'm a chocoholic, so I'm often cruisin' the candy aisles.  And when I'm there I almost always see a new, derivative candy bar that I know is doomed to failure in a few months.  Did the world really need or want a Smarties Bar, or a Terry's Raspberry Orange (though I kind of admire the perverse logic that wants to turn something round into a bar, and an orange into a raspberry)?  Their future relegation to the bargain bin is as clear an indication as any that the answer is no.

I can see the logic at work here.  You have to keep creating new products to be a leader in the marketplace, and to capture a larger proportion of market share - at least that's the pitch doubtlessly made at product development meetings that result in some bizarre, unwanted and unloved chocolate bar.

I'm beginning to get the sense that the search engines are experiencing a similar devolution in product innovation.  That is, they're producing new products or features for the sake of producing new products or features, rather than introducing innovations that really improve usability or provide more relevance to searchers.  Here are two recent examples.
Continue reading this post…

Top 20 SEO DOs:

1. Make changes that benefit users.  Focus on the user and all else (including rankings) will follow.
2. Create and maintain sensible and consistent navigation paths.
3. Be continually aware that each and every page on your site is a potential customer entry point.  Think laterally.
4. Label each and every page clearly; describing its content in words your users would most likely employ.
5. Pay attention to detail.  Google takes hundreds of factors into account when ranking web pages, and so should you. Continue reading this post…

Ben Parr's Mashable Post that Google may launch a microblogging (Twitter) search service has ignited a storm of speculation in the SEO and SMO communities.  Perhaps most interesting object of speculation is how Google will calculate authority in order to rank tweets in search results.

Jordan Kasteler has written a thoughtful post on this issue in which he introduces the notion of "InfluenceRank" for social media ranking (at least I haven't seen the term coined before), following a couple of patent applications relevant to social media chronicled by Bill Slawski.

As Parr points out, Google is probably seeking to extend the hub/authority model (à la Hilltop) to social networks.  There, are, however, unique challenges posed by Twitter.  Twitter is somewhat of an untamed frontier from an optimization perspective these days, with very few spam controls and filtering options - almost analogous to the ease of gaming the <meta> keywords tag back in the good old Alta Vista days.

Continue reading this post…