Q: Hi! I’m very confused about outbound links. I was told by a SEO firm that outbound links were A Bad Thing as they canceled out your inbound links. But it seems this is not the case.

A: Outbound links are not A Bad Thing and they don’t cancel out your inbound links.  In fact, a “natural” linking profile for a quality website would normally include outbound links, as it is natural for  most quality sites to provide links to other resources.

Outbound links are only bad if they are done as a part of a link exchange or if you’re being paid for providing links that are not tagged with “nofollow.”  In that case, your site could be penalized by search engines.  I would certainly get rid of any outbound links that you may have created as a part of a link exchange scheme of any sort.

You should also check your outbound links periodically to make sure that they aren’t pointing to “bad neighborhoods.”  Sometimes good sites go under, and the domains are taken over by squatters, spammers, malware, porn, etc.  Your site’s status on search engines could be damaged if you link to these – not to mention your credibility with your human audience!

Lastly, it’s reasonable to link to your own website pages as a priority, rather than other sites.  For example, if you have a page on your site that features “tea cozies” it certainly makes more sense from an SEO perspective for your home page text to link to your own “tea cozies” page rather than pointing to some other site’s “tea cozies” page.

My advice is to link out to sites if you think they will benefit your human visitors.  This might include sites that offer related, but not necessarily competing services or products. For example, if you market tea cozies, you might link out to your favorite brands of tea. Outbound links  are also important as part of an overall strategy of social marketing and participatory blogging.  Outbound links can also be linkbait – for example, let’s say you link to a travel blog while criticizing it for missing the mark on the most charming high tea destinations. People in your target audience might be drawn into a conversation.

Naturally, if providing links to other resources feels forced or unnatural on your website, or if you don’t think it will benefit your human visitors, then you shouldn’t do it.

We hear “I don’t know how to sell SEO” frequently from agencies and developers. This post is the first in a series of insights into how to sell SEO.

Our company, Gravity Search Marketing, is a kick-ass boutique SEO firm. We’re very small, we’re very smart, and many people will attest to the fact that we do what we do very well.

Being “boutique” means we don’t have a sales staff – that’s a role I typically fill by myself. We’re not flying completely blind: I’ve observed sales teams in action at other companies, and I’ve even watched Glengarry Glenross, but I’ve never been trained in the art of selling.  Nonetheless, you may be surprised to learn that we do pretty well for ourselves when it comes to selling.

I don’t know how the big guys do it (honestly, I don’t – could someone please tell me in the comments?) but I thought it would be helpful to share what seems to work consistently for me. Today I’ll focus on the first conversation with a new prospect.

Plan for at least a half hour of listening before you start talking

My favorite sales conversations start off like therapy sessions. People are calling with a problem they want me to solve, and I need to know what that problem is. This problem cannot be expressed in a hurry, and it often has many facets. Here are some of the open-ended questions I like to ask:

• “So, what’s going on with your site?”
• “How do you know this is a problem? (i.e., “How do you gauge the performance of your website?”)
• “What have you tried before?”
• “What is working well right now?”
• “What does your team look like?”

Even if it turns out that you don’t land the sale, by really listening, you’ll have added one more “business like this” to your mental database, and that can be helpful in your ongoing selling and consulting work. I find it indescribably satisfying to learn about the cogs and wheels of other peoples’ marketing campaigns. I’m fascinated to hear what their research has told them about their audience segments and their customers’ perceptions and biases. This knowledge adds up, and is quite valuable in informing my consulting work.

Only after you’ve gotten a thorough understanding of your prospect’s needs should you begin to launch into your “About Us” spiel.

Answer the unspoken questions

You might think your job now is to describe your company, your experience, process, and prices. But don’t miss your prospect’s unspoken questions:  What it will be like to work with you? Are you honest and trustworthy? Will I understand this confusing subject of SEO any better if you’re the one explaining it to me?

One common unspoken question is, “Will we be able to phase you out as an SEO consultant and do this ourselves eventually?” Many prospects won’t say it directly, but they hope to reach a point of in-house competency when they won’t need you anymore. This is a reasonable goal. Will your SEO capability transfer to in-house staff? Can you develop “cheat sheets” for your client, to keep them optimizing according to plan? Do you provide SEO training? Is there a provision in your service for on-call SEO Q&A?  You may find that talking about these services early on will increase your desirability.

You also need to prove beyond a doubt that you know your stuff. I’ll focus on tips for proving your SEO skills in a future post.

Gently Redirect Common SEO Misconceptions

Selling SEO involves listening encouragingly as someone struggles to state their goals in your language. This can be challenging for some prospects, and that’s why many goals come out sounding simplistic, like, “We need to rank #1 for [generic phrase]” or “We need to get [audience X] to find us.” Since you want to have a successful business relationship with this prospect, you must be able to identify unreasonable expectations and gently educate until you can rephrase these goals into something more specific and achievable.

When a prospect is unfamiliar with the basic touchpoints of current SEO best practices, you may need to explain things like:

• “Building links” is not a standalone task. Link building these days requires – at a minimum – a serious effort in improving your website’s content offerings.
• What you want from your organic ranks may be easier and cheaper to achieve in the short run with paid search.
• I value your thoughts on keywords, but with your best interests in mind, we always perform our own objective keyword research.
• Even the best social media strategies will not get off the ground without your input and participation.

If you don’t think SEO is the best way for this prospect to spend their money, do not try to sell them SEO

Believe me, I understand it’s difficult to walk away from a budget earmarked for SEO, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do. SEO cannot fix a product that nobody wants, and even the best SEO likely can’t save a business that already has one foot in the grave. Search marketing, by and large, cannot create demand where demand does not exist.  And organic SEO may not be the best choice in a competitive space where a prospect doesn’t have unique value to offer.  Nobody will be happy in the end if the money going into SEO is wasted because it’s not the right service to fill the need.

If you’d like me to focus on a specific aspect of selling SEO, let me know in the comments, or track me down on Twitter.

If you’re building a new site or redesigning one, we think you should switch to meaningful, human readable (aka “semantic”) URLs.  But don’t do it just because we think you should.  Do it because the research backs us up.

If you’re launching a new website, or getting started on a redesign that will require changes to your page URLs, you may be considering the benefits of human-readable, semantic URLs.  We are proponents of these URLs, which we think make good common sense.  But if you need more than common sense to justify an increased level of effort for implementing human-readable URLs, here’s some hard data to back it up:

Semantic URLs Help Search Engine Ranks

• The consensus in the SEO industry is that keywords in page URLs are a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. In our experience, sitewide semantic URLs gives a modest, across-the-boards ranking lift. Don’t expect to jump from third page to #1; but a lift from #11 to #6 is feasible.
• Page URLs are sometimes used as the linking text from other websites; this translates into more keywords in the linking text pointing to your site, which plays a role in the ranking algorithm
• Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that it is helpful to have keywords in the URL – as long as it’s done in a sensible way. (See http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976)

Semantic URLs Increase Clickthrough Rates

Not only can human-readable, meaningful, keyword-rich URLs improve search rankings, they may increase your clickthrough rates.  Here are salient research highlights:

• In one eye-tracking study, business professionals viewing a search engine listing with a long URL ended up clicking on the URL immediately after it 2.5 times as often as those viewing a short URL. (1)
• In another eye-tracking study, when searchers scan through search engine listings, 13-33% of time is spent looking at URLs. (2)
• In yet another eye-tracking study, searchers spend 30% of their time reading the listing title, 43% of the time reading the listing description, and 21% of their time reading the URL. (3)
• There was “overwhelming endorsement”  when participants where asked the question: “When I’m searching the Web, I often look at the URL of each search result to help me decide if the page will be useful.” (on a 7-point scale, 6.4 was the average).  (2)

There are, of course, a few caveats on the effect of semantic URLs on clickthrough rates:

• The effect is greater for navigational searches, and lower for informational searches.  Navigational searches are people who already know exactly what they are looking for (for example, they might type “flickr.com” into the Google search box), and they are probably most interested in your domain name, not so much the individual filenames.
• The effect may be diminished if Google is showing breadcrumbs, rather than a URL, in your site snippets.

We’re pleased that common sense and scientific research are in alignment on semantic URLs. We typically would not recommend changing page URLs for the sole purpose of SEO improvements, but if you’re making changes to your website anyway, we hope you’ll take advantage of this rare SEO “no brainer.”

FOOTNOTES

(1) Marketing Sherpa (2008).  Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2008 (www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf)

(2) Cutrell, E., & Guan, Z. (2007). Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types (research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70395)

(3) Granka, L., Joachims, T., & Gay, G. (2004). Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 478-479). New York: ACM Press. (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf)

Google real-time search launched in December, 2009, and the SEO industry was wild with excitement.  Then, the prominence of real-time results diminished, and the excitement fizzled out.  Does real-time search matter – and what should business owners do to address it?

Since Dec 10, 2009, Google has been displaying real-time results within its standard search results.  You can see examples of this by searching for popular terms such as “Miley Cyrus” or “George Clooney.”   Here’s an example of a real-time result displaying on the top page of results for “toyota recall” on 1/21/10:

In its first week or so, real-time search results were displaying for a wide range of search queries.  Since then, however, Google has significantly scaled back the prominence of real-time search results. While the real-time search results were flowing, we got a good idea of how it works.  Here’s what we think you should know to prepare your strategy for the inevitability of its wider return:

HOW IT WORKS

• Google displays recent posts from Twitter, Friendfeed, and similar sources, as well as breaking news and recently updated websites.  Currently Twitter is dominating these results.  Live Facebook updates are expected to join in the future.
• Real time results appear to be displayed for search queries that qualify as “real-time-worthy”, which is similar to the process Google uses in its determination of which queries should display News, Images, Video, Local, etc. results. This is probably influenced by the volume of Twitter content as well as volume of search queries.  As an example, real times results are not displaying this evening (1/25/2010) for “H1N1 vaccine” but they are displaying for “hope for haiti”  We believe this is because there are not enough tweets, search volume, or other signals to trigger real time results for “H1N1 vaccine.”
• We have only observed tweets displayed up to a maximum of about an hour.  If there are a larger number of tweets on a topic, then individual tweets are displayed for shorter amount of time.
• There is a very short (1 min) lag time between when a tweet is posted and when it is displayed on Google.
• Google has stated that it uses similar “signals of quality” for real-time content as it does for web search; however, there does not appear to be a high barrier for tweets to be included.  Twitter accounts with only a few followers are included in the results.
• An individual Twitter account is not listed multiple times for the same query (in other words, you can’t  keep automatically tweeting the same phrase over and over again to get listed).
• Links that are included in a tweet are expanded and clickable in Google’s real-time results.
• Hashtags in search queries may trigger real-time search results (for example, when we looked today, “detroit” does not trigger real-time results, but “#detroit” does).
• Google will favor the “primary” tweet over any retweeted or aggregated copies.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO YOU

• If your target keywords include highly “buzz”-related terms, such as current news events, celebrity names, or other entertainment keywords, real-time search results will probably display for some of your target terms.  Incorporation of real-time search results may increase the visibility of tweets, news, and other online word-of-mouth about your business.
• We don’t think that increasing the volume of your own Twitter-stream activity will be a strong contributor to increased presence in real-time search results.   It may also turn off followers.   Instead, your Twitter strategy should focus primarily on encouraging others to tweet about you,  your business or your product.
• Although we do not think that optimizing or increasing your Twitter posts will have a major effect, we do recommend some finessing of your current Twitter activity:
  – Timing of tweets becomes more important, because a tweet that occurs at a time when nobody is searching will not be seen.
  – Because Google expands all links that are included in tweets, include links to your site in your tweets whenever appropriate.

THE LAST WORD

For now, real-time search is a small factor in the Google results mix, but be prepared for it to gain in prominence. Real-time search won’t be easy to game, and probably shouldn’t be gamed.  The best way to improve your site’s presence in real-time search is to improve the buzz and online word-of-mouth around your business or product.  And that’s just good online word-of-mouth strategy, isn’t it?

Readers, have you seen anything in real-time search that has really surprised you?  Do you ever click on those real-time listings?

Q: Does Google care if I update my site frequently? Will doing so improve my ranks?

A:  “Yes” to the first question, and “maybe” to the second.

At this moment, the SEOs of the world are still getting used to the new Google landscape of real-time results, as well as searching options that include “Past 24 hours” and “Latest.”

Google now can, and often does, notice and react to new or newly modified text on your site within hours of when you made the changes.

It makes a lot of sense that Google would favor freshness, as delivering fresh results is a big bragging point for Google these days. (And Google does have significantly fresher search results than slowpoke competitors Bing and Yahoo!.)

In our recent client work, we’ve experienced a repeated pattern: Optimize a page properly, rank better pretty darn quickly…in hours, not days or weeks as it used to be.

On the flip side, we’ve also noticed another pattern: The original ranking boost tends to be offset by a subsequent “correction” period, when ranks drop down. This drop is anywhere from a tiny slide to something more significant, but, at least in our experience, not back to baseline.

Why would Google first boost ranks for fresher pages and then kick them downward? It’s not necessarily to allow fresher content from competing sites to take over the top ranks. (That may be the case in high-chatter-level industries on the web, but it’s not the case in some of the sleepier industries in which we’ve seen this happen.) This phenomenon could be for a couple of reasons:

With the increased importance of real-time search, Google may be sacrificing quality assurance in favor of freshness. Google may have a “rank first, vet later” approach, and the downward correction may occur after Google takes the time to fully process the page relative to competing pages.

Just like a new text ad placed into rotation in AdWords, Google may be giving updated pages a little extra exposure, to get a chance to gain clicks and inlinks. In other words, Google may be temporarily increasing exposure to updated pages to quickly gauge their “performance.”  This puts additional pressure on you, the site owner, to publish useful, compelling, meaningful content that’s properly targeted to your audience.

What does this mean for your site?

• Consider optimizing your site or launching new content in phases, not all at once, to keep a “rolling inventory” of your pages in play in Google’s search results, and to send a signal to Google that your site is frequently updated.
• When you find that pages with fresh content have gained higher ranks, don’t be upset by a subsequent drop. (But DO be upset if you drop below your baseline!)
• Don’t modify a page randomly (Change “the” to “a” in the page title, for example) and expect rank improvements. Google may be a lot of things, but it isn’t dumb enough to reward you for that. Make real improvements or real updates, or expect poor results.

We’d love to hear from you about your experiences with fresh content. Have you experienced this up-then-down scenario before? Tell us about it in the comments!

Something’s different around here!

We’re pleased to announce the debut of our new website, and we hope you’ll take a look around.

This redesigned site has many of the SEO resources our readers have come to rely on, and lots more:

• From our Book, “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day:” templates, worksheets, and SEO resources that will help you in your quest to improve your ranks, traffic and sales.
• From our day-to-day experience as SEOs in the trenches: our Ask the Experts blog, which contains all of our previously published goodies, like articles, interviews, and tips, and will continue to grow with useful, trusted SEO knowledge that you can use to benefit your own site. If you can’t bear the wait for new posts, get your fix at Twitter from @jengrappone and @gradiva
• An in-depth menu of SEO Services at Gravity Search Marketing, Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin’s SEO consulting firm. We consult for major brands, one-person shops and everything in between. Let us know how we can help you!

We don’t know how we did it all, while keeping up with our SEO consulting for a broad range of clients (did we mention that Gravity has fabulous clients with the most fascinating SEO challenges? We are so lucky!), but we did, and we’re very proud of the new site.

We hope you’ll enjoy finding what you’re looking for!

As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

In our previous post, we discussed how Google personalized search will affect your business. Now, we look at how a business can influence personalized results, and whether we think that’s a good idea.

Should Businesses Try to Influence Google Personalized Search Results?

Some blackhat SEOs will say “of course, businesses should game the system any way they can.” Others might say that trying to influence personalized search results in any way is unethical (but those people probably work for Google – which, last time we checked, is neither a non-profit organization nor a branch of government). Clearly, the techniques described above could be abused; for example, an unscrupulous SEO company could trick its clients into thinking their ranks are getting better and better, or into thinking the SEO company’s ranks are higher than they really are.

But working with the system is not necessarily abuse. We always advocate 100% ethical SEO, and we advise the following: go ahead and be smart about personalized results, but never use any tactics that you wouldn’t want your potential clients or customers to find out about. Your potential customers are the last people you want to alienate – and they don’t want to be tricked or manipulated.

Influencing Google Personalized Search Results

Here are a few ways that a company could influence personalized results:

• Create a promotion with an unique or unusual name, and build a page for it on your site, for example, “Bring on the PicklePal Pickles!”. Wait for your page to indexed in Google and check to see that you’re ranking #1 for this unusual phrase. (Don’t forget to opt out of personalized search before you check!)  (As we’ve said in our book, it’s easy to get a #1 Google ranking for a unique phrase. Now there’s a good reason to do so.) Then promote the Google search results page via Twitter, for example, “Free Pickles this Tuesday! Click on our link here:http://[point to the Google page, not your website.]]”
• If you’re absolutely certain you have very high ranks for a particular phrase, you could include links to your Google results for this phrase – rather than directly to your site – in email campaigns.
• Run print ads with a callout to a Google search rather than your website. (“Hey kids, Google ‘PicklePal Pickles Forever!’ to get your pickle fix!”)  Just be sure your site stays at the #1 spot for the phrase! You may have seen something like this on billboards for the movie 2012, which suggested searching for the term “2012.”
• Run an AdWords campaign that includes a call to action telling users to perform a Google search that returns your business’s website. Keep in mind that Google has strict editorial guidelines and this tactic may require some trial and error on your part.
• Seed forums and blog comments with a search call to action where relevant and appropriate. For example, in a forum thread about finding discount pickles, a business can post a reply saying: “We are currently running a discount pickle promotion at www.mysite.com – you can Google ‘discount PicklePal coupon’ [link to the Google search result for this term] and click on the link to see the coupon.”

Caution: We haven’t tried these tactics yet – and we may not recommend them to our clients. We’ll keep you posted as we embark on this new SEO journey.

Any minute now Someday, Facebook status posts will begin to display within Google search results. Here are three simple steps to take control over your Facebook privacy settings.

The default privacy settings on Facebook leave much of your information waving in the breeze. Things like photos and status posts might be public without your knowledge. Fortunately it takes only a few mouse-clicks to reign in this information and keep Facebook as private as you want it to be

This is where you tell Facebook who can see which elements of your FB profile (“About Me”, “Birthday”, “Religious and Political Views”, “Photos”, and so on.).

Why you might want this private: You are probably posting status updates, photos,and other information, assuming that only your friends can see them. Double-check here to be sure that’s actually true! Otherwise these things may end up viewable by everyone.

Why you might want this public: You may prefer to have all aspects of your profile open to everyone – and even get comments from total strangers!

How to change it:

• Click on “Settings” in the top bar of the Facebook screen
• choose “Privacy” (click the word “manage” next
  to Privacy).
• Choose “Profile Information”
• Scroll through each of the items listed to choose your preferred
  level of access.
• Pay special attention to photo albums — each album can have a separate
  individual privacy setting.

The default settings on Facebook allow applications that your friends run (things like “Which Harry Potter Character are You?”) to access all of the information that your friends can access. Then the owners of these applications can do whatever they want with that information.

Why you might want this private: You are probably posting status updates, photos, and other information assuming that only your friends can see it. If applications can gather this information, they can use it for advertising or marketing purposes, identity theft, or just about any other evil, creepy deed you can think of.

Why you might want this public: You may prefer to have all aspects of your profile open to everyone, including companies you’ve never even heard of.

How to change it:

• Click on “Settings” in the top bar of the Facebook screen
• choose “Privacy” (click the word “manage” next
  to Privacy).
• Choose “Applications and Websites”
• Next to “What your friends can share about you” click
  on “Edit settings”
• Scroll through each of the items and UNCHECK them to make them private.

This is where you tell Facebook whether you want the public portion of your Facebook profile to be indexed in search results (both in & out of Facebook).

Why you might want this private: If you don’t want everyone on the web to be able to find your Facebook profile – only Facebook friends.

Why you might want this public: If you DO want people who are not already your FB friends to be able to find you by searching for you on Google or Facebook.

How to change it:

• Click on “Settings” in the top bar of the Facebook
  screen, then choose “Privacy” (or “manage” next to Privacy).
• Choose “Search”
• For Facebook Search Results, the default will be to allow everyone
  access. Choose your preferred level of access.
• For search engine indexing (eg. Google), the default will be to
  allow indexing. Choose your preferred indexing.

Readers: did you take these steps yet?  Any other Facebook Privacy tips you’d like to share?

As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

Google’s expanded personalized search is a game-changer in search engine design. It’s a big deal but it has gone largely under the radar. All Google searchers will now get customized results that are influenced by past searching and clicking behavior, bookmarks, and other factors. Any time a user clicks through from Google to a website, it gives that site a boost in that user’s future search results. Organic search results – previously considered an “objective” third-party viewpoint – now differ based on who is doing the searching.

Personalized search is activated for all Google searchers whether they are logged into a Google account or not, unless they opt out. We don’t expect many people to opt out.

Why isn’t this making more headlines? For one, we’ve all grown comfortable with seeing localized results (“bakeries near San Francisco, California”). Plus we’re all starting to get used to more and more personalization in advertising, particularly on Facebook screens (“37 year old woman in San Francisco California? Click here”). Enhanced personalization of search results is a natural evolution.

Personalized search will affect your business

The full ramifications of this change are still unknown, but here are our preliminary thoughts on what personalized search means to website owners:

• When you check Google, don’t assume that the ranks you see for your site are the same as what your customers are seeing. To turn off personalized search, opt out, or add the tag &pws=0 to the end of the Google page URL.

For example, if you search for “early reader comic books” in Google you may get a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books

But you’ll get unpersonalized results with this URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=early+reader+comic+books&pws=0

• Personalized search will increase the importance of search queries that occur early in the buying cycle. If people click on your site during the browsing, comparing, and information-gathering phase, you’re likely to get increased Google exposure later, when they’re ready to buy. Does your site offer a good destination for keywords containing “compare” and “review?” Do you know what people search for in the early stages of buying your product?
• The advent of more personalized search places a higher value on clickthrough rate (how many times a person clicks from Google search results to your site). Your clickthrough rate can be improved with compelling, well-written titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.
• Personalized search may increase the percentage of site visitors who are repeat visits. Does your website offer something useful for the second and third visit and beyond?
• Do you have a website with an easy-to-remember or easy-to-guess domain? Lots of people are probably typing your URL directly into the browser instead of finding you in Google.  This is very good for your site traffic in general, but now there is a down side to having an easy-to-remember domain name: if users are less likely to use Google as a navigation tool for your site, you  might be at a disadvantage in personalized search.
• It isn’t clear what percentage of Google search results are personalized. If personalization is very heavy, it may be more difficult for newly established websites to use SEO to gain market share from already-established business.

Can personalized search results be influenced? Certainly. Your website’s ranks in personalized search results will be improved by any method that encourages people to navigate to your site using a Google search.

In our next post, we’ll discuss ways to influence personalized results.

Q: We have tons of great videos on our website. How can we get those little video thumbnails that sometimes show up in Google search results?

A: When Google understands that there is a video presented on a web page, it will often display a special thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:

For the best chance at getting video thumbnails for your pages, you should embed videos on your site in a way that Google can easily recognize AND send Google as many signals as possible indicating that you have a video on the page. Here are some tips that can help:

• Include each video on a separate URL
• Embed your video in Quicktime or a standard Flash video player [Gravity has created a Video SEO test site to more fully understand how the embedding format affects video thumbnails, and will report our results here!]
• Create a Google Video Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: click here for Google’s video sitemap instructions.
• To add even more signals that Google can read, tag the videos using RDFa: click here for Google’s video RDFa instructions.

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