Today's column is going to be a case study of a web site that made great progress simply due to basic code cleanup work. What's interesting about this case study is that the things we did aren't the first things you think of when you think of SEO, yet addressing these types of things can often make a huge difference.

The site is Work Coach Cafe. The site is a blog with regular posts on career advice and coaching.

We got involved in the site at the end of December 2010. Because that was the holiday season, there was a natural dip in traffic, but if we look back to November it was doing about 5,000 visitors per week. When we looked closely at the site we found some structural problems:

1. The site performance was slow, with Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times taking up to 15 seconds (slower than 92 percent of sites).
   
   
2. A crawl of the site by Xenu's Link Sleuth revealed up 49,662 broken links.
   
   
3. There were 743 301 redirects in place from pages that were long gone, including double redirects in some cases.

We were concerned about site performance since Matt Cutts had identified performance as a ranking factopr in April of last year. It turned out that one of the big problems was that the site was on a low performance shared server.

We moved the site to a different server where it continued to share space with other web sites, but in a much more controlled environment. For the record, the cost of this new server (from Pair.com) was quite a bit more, but offered a much higher performance. As you can see here, performance improved quite a bit, with average page load times in the 5 second neighborhood:

The SEO impact of the broken links is a little harder to assess. However, given the sheer quantity, we were concerned that it could be affecting the perceived quality of the site.

When we investigated the broken links we found that many of these were related to template specific issues, such as references to missing CSS files or images. Through a lengthy process of fixing problems and then recrawling the site we worked until all broken links were eliminated.

We also dug into the 301 redirects. You may ask why we spent the time on this activity.

However, there is some loss of PageRank through a 301 redirect. I asked this question in an interview with Matt Cutts ast March. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

These were basically the three steps we took. No link building campaigns were undertaken. No keyword optimization was done. More broadly, no other SEO effort was invested in the site.

Results

So how did we do? The results suprised even us. Here is chart showing what they were:

In a very short period of time, traffic has scaled to about 7,000 visitors per week. This is roughly a 40% growth (and for the record about double where the site was on a year over year basis).

Summary

Much of this effort came down to simple web development hygiene. In developing web sites, errors have a tendency to accumulate. If you don't go back and address them, what begins as an infinitesimal impact begins to grow. Eventually, the cost becomes very, very real. Don't overlook this part of your SEO efforts. It is clearly worth the trouble.

Written by Alex Cohen | Feb 15, 2011

You should be doing SEO. You probably should be doing PPC. They work well together.

Those are basic facts of online marketing. Anyone who has been to a search conference and attended a PPC vs. SEO session knows that.

Putting it another way: Paid search as your organic competitor.

Paid Search as Your Organic Competitor

To illustrate this concept, let's use the example of Norton Antivirus -- makers of PC protection software. Consider three different queries:

1. Brand Search Query: [norton antivirus]
2. Head Search Query: [anti virus software]
3. Long Tail Search Query: [adware removal program]

Brand Search Queries: [norton antivirus]

There are two paid search competitors with seven total lines of ads, before the first organic Norton Antivirus result.

Notice that:

• Norton's paid listing is the most prominent result.
  
  
• There are now sitelinks offering four targeted opportunities to capture the click (e.g. "Winter Savings -- 50% Off").
  
  
• The paid search title that looks like an organic listing: "Norton Antivirus -- Now starts, scans and runs faster."
  
  
• The ad title is more relevant than the corporate page title: "Symantec Downloads: AntiVirus, Anti-Spyware, Endpoint Security, Backup..."

Head Search Query: [anti virus software]

In this example, only two of the results above the fold are organic search, AVG Free and avast! We see the same standard results in the premium positions above the organic results with Norton Antivirus in the top position.

Now we see image ads for the first time in the search results in the form of the Google Product Listing Ads, which appear in the top three positions on the right column. In case you were curious about how much of an effect these ads can have on which result people will choose, consider this statistic from Google:

"We found that people are twice as likely to click on a Product Listing Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location."

Reread that quote. Now, let's wonder, "If they click on a paid search result, will they click on an organic result?"

Long Tail Search Queries: [online virus scan]

By comparison, these results look pretty tame and almost antiquated. It's business as usual in both the paid and organic listings.

No ads earn the premium position above the organic results and no new ad formats or text ad features distinguish the ads.

Local Search and Google Boost

Updates to the search results have changed the PPC vs. SEO dynamic in at least one other area: local search.

Ads could always be displayed for search queries with a geographic intent and Google Tags made some results stand out more clearly with offers.

What's new is the beta testing of Google Boost -- keywordless ad buys for local businesses to appear above the so-called "7 pack" of local results (and, I would presume, above Place Search).

It prominently displays:

• A 7 pack like result in the first position above the map, but below the PPC ad. 
  
  
• Extra ad description not featured in other map results. 
  
  
• A distinct blue pin on the map. 
  
  
• An extra link for the advertiser's Google Place Page.

Are we sensing a theme here?

You Only Get So Much Pie

There are a finite number of clicks that can occur when someone searches. We know that, in general, results that are more prominently displayed above the fold are most likely to get clicked.

Searchers may click paid results or organic results. They may click both. They may flit back and forth between pages and results.

The specifics of how people will behave aren't as important as understanding the context in which we are now marketing.

I've always thought of Google as a publisher and each search results page simply as content they need to monetize. These changes are similar to a news site stacking on more ad slots or increasing the size of their ads.

But, where a traditional publisher's ads don't really compete with the content, Google's ads do. Paid search ads may now draw attention away from organic listings and push natural results further down the page.

In essence, paid listings may be getting clicks at the expense of organic listings at an increasing rate.

At the very least, it puts more pressure to be among the top organic listings as they lose prominence in the results. It also adds important context for your SEO analysis, essentially a new set of competitors with new tactics.

On the flip side, paid search ads now offer an increasing number of ways to advertise in the SERPs. There are more levers to pull, formats to try, and offers and messages to test. If you're weak in the organic listings, these new controls may give you an edge.

What's clear is that SEOs must be aware of the changes in paid search results for, at least, their brand and head keywords and consider those changes in their analysis.

For another perspective on these changes, along with great historical SERP photos, I recommend you read "A More Organic Experience."

One final note: not every industry will be affected by these changes equally. In some cases, there are few, if any, paid competitors. For example, media and entertainment searches such as [justin bieber] or [somewhere movie] are dominated by video, image, news, and real time results among the usual organic listings.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce website design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by Eric Enge | Feb 15, 2011

Online reputation management has been a hot topic around the web for some time. This can take many forms, including:

• Sites with negative things to say about your business showing up in the SERPs for searches on your brand name.
  
  
• Negative suggestions showing up in Google Suggest (e.g., "your brand scam").
  
  
• Negative reviews showing up for your business in the local search results.

Each of the above scenarios require significantly different steps to resolve. Today we'll look at what you should do if your business has received a negative review that is hurting the business.

For example, consider the following set of reviews shown on the Google Places page for a restaurant near where I live:

Part 1 and Part 2 of this series have covered how to measure search engine optimization (SEO) performance and why the new Google rankings data from Webmaster tools is so important to understanding that performance.

For this article, I wanted to explain how understanding SEO performance impacts different types of businesses. Specifically, I had planned to illustrate the differences in how mom and pop style businesses, small businesses, and enterprise-level companies use this data on an ongoing basis to augment their SEO campaigns.

As I started to analyze my initial hypothesis that there were significant differences in how these companies use this data, however, I came to the conclusion that these companies really differed because of the amount of resources available, the amount of data available, the amount of work that needs to be done (the amount of opportunity) and the amount of reporting that's needed. But the real revelation was that all of these types of businesses should have a similar strategic approach on how this data should be used to drive the ongoing SEO campaign.

Of course, the tactics of how to then execute those strategies do differ by business type. But, fundamentally what the data is saying, and what you should do from an SEO perspective based on what the data is saying, is the same.

So let's take a deeper dive into how businesses should use Webmaster tools search rankings, brand versus non-brand traffic, and long tail keyword performance to drive SEO beyond just understanding performance.

Webmaster Tools Search Rankings

The first data set we'll examine is the Webmaster tools ranking information. In addition to using rankings to gauge performance, this data set is immediately actionable.

The first thing to do is prioritize which keywords are driving the most revenue (or conversions depending on what you're tracking). Then, identify which significant keywords have moved in the last month, both positively and negatively. After correlating those ranking changes to any changes made from an SEO perspective within the last couple of months, you hopefully have an idea of which ongoing optimization tactics (especially link building) have been effective.

Positive trends based on SEO activities should validate those activities. No movement in rankings over a three or four month period of time might indicate that you should change tactics. A negative movement in ranking immediately requires an audit of content, link structure and technical issues to make sure that the decrease in rankings is not self-inflicted.

Any major algorithm change announcement by search engines as well as overall keyword volume of the keywords in question should also be considered as a possible cause. This exercise is to understand the nature of the decrease and whether you can fix in the short term or if there are long term implications.

Month-to-month trends are important to monitor from a rankings standpoint to understand how well your campaign is growing and to be aware of any negative movements as quickly as possible. Additionally, rankings in the top 30, but not in the top three, illustrate immediate opportunity. These rankings are close enough to be in the top three (which generates most of the traffic for any given phrase) that in many cases, although certainly not all, a relatively small amount of effort may be required to move your site up into the top 10 or even top three and thereby generate a lot more traffic for that keyword.

Brand vs. Non-Brand Traffic

In addition to search rankings, one of the key measurements we talk about in SEO performance is brand versus non-brand traffic levels. In other words, how much of your traffic is related to people who are looking for you specifically and how much traffic is related to people doing general searches for keywords related to your content.

As you would expect, the amount of brand-related search activity that is available is usually correlated to how big of a business you run. Therefore, for larger businesses it's extremely important to understand your brand-related keywords, their search volume, and what your current performance is against those words. That's because brand-related traffic converts the best and is usually the result of other marketing efforts that you're already paying for.

Additionally, the opportunity can be enormous for large brands, especially from a long tail perspective.

For that reason (and this is where enterprise level organizations actually are a little different than smaller companies), it's necessary for websites with a lot of brand-related search activity to monitor which of their brand-related words have the most permutations and how well they rank for those permutations.

One of my clients had a product which had a brand attached to it. The number of search referrals for the brand was around 250 a month, which didn't seem substantial. But when we added up the literally thousands of monthly permutations (many of which are too small to identify manually given how large the data set is), the amount of traffic ended up being more than 20,000 visitors monthly. This painted a much different picture about the importance of this brand-related keyword.

Maximizing your listings around the long tail of your brand is a critical part of any SEO campaign.

Long Tail Keyword Performance

The previous example illustrates the importance of looking at long tail performance from a brand-related perspective. But non-brand long tail performance is also important to measure.

This data set has the same potential as the brand-related data in terms of framing the opportunity and highlighting areas with the most potential for gain. However, unlike brand-related search, there is much more likely to be unrelated or undesirable words in a long tail list of non-brand related keywords.

It is common in SEO to inadvertently target unrelated keywords by your optimization efforts. Therefore, it's important to understand the negative keywords that should be filtered out of long tail, non-brand related keyword lists before using that data to analyze or prioritize resources.

Conclusion

While the size of the business definitely impacts the size of the campaign, especially as it relates to brand-related search opportunity, the fundamental activities based on the data being measured are similar, if not the same. Some of the tactical execution is different depending on resources and scope, but ultimately we need to use this data to understand how our SEO campaign is performing and to prioritize opportunities within the campaign so that we achieve the highest possible ROI

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce website design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

Another excellent benefit and reason of going global is to generate more revenues.  A custom web site design company is going to help you the best they can with selling as many products on your site as possible.  They will provide many different efforts to get the word out about the business online, build a site that works well with the search engines, is appealing to the users, and much more.

If you have a local establishment, hiring a custom web site design company to help you go global is one of the best opportunities you can take advantage of today.  This will help you expand your customer base around the world and generate more revenues while creating a name for yourself around the world.  You can be successful online and the importance is taking advantage of true globalization and what the World Wide Web really has to offer.

Resource Box

Rat Wulf - Website Designer

7strategy Web Design Company

117 N. Cooper St.

Olathe, KS - 66061

When it comes to creating websites for foreign language markets, a few necessities are immediately obvious.

First, the websites need to be in the native or primary language of the country you're targeting. Also, you'll need to take into account consumer behavior and culture in that country -- where's your gap in the market and what's your unique selling proposition (USP)?

You'll also need to work out your search engine optiimization (SEO) strategy, because what's the point of spending all that time and money developing multilingual websites if they aren't ranking in the search engines?

Where to Concentrate Your SEO Efforts

The tricky point to consider here, though, is that while you may be well attuned to the needs and vagaries of Google, the Internet superpower isn't the dominant search engine in every country.

You've likely heard of Baidu, the Chinese search engine, which leads Google China on searches by 52 percent to 33 percent.

There are a few theories on why Baidu is the Google-killer in China. Some pundits believe it's due to Chinese patriotism (despite the fact that Baidu started in the U.S.). But the more likely reason is because the Chinese love to search the web for MP3s (55 percent of Baidu users are MP3 searchers). Baidu is better for illegal downloading because it's held to less strict legal standards than Western search engines.

Among the other Google-beating local search engines, popularity is attributed to their being optimized for the alphabet and language of the country.

For instance, Yandex succeeds in Russia (with a 64 percent market share) where Google.ru fails, largely because it's built around the Cyrillic alphabet and recognizes Russian grammar and inflection.

Then, of course, there's Seznam, the dominant search engine in the Czech Republic. In South Korea, Naver has 70 percent of the search market (compared to Google's 2 percent). Meanwhile, the Japanese inexplicably prefer Yahoo Japan to Google.

Naturally, then, it makes sense that you if you have a Russian website, you would want to concentrate most of your SEO efforts on Yandex, and Baidu for China, and so forth.

Changing Your SEO Strategy for Market-Leading Search Engines

Sadly, there isn't enough space here to outline every difference and similarity. Extensive research can be found online that goes into SEO strategies for each search engine, but the general consensus is that they all operate in largely the same way, with a few key differences.

Baidu doesn't seem to take into account inbound links -- one of the integral parts of effective Google SEO -- so building links with Chinese websites would seem to be a waste of your time. Your money might be better spent on increasing your Baidu PPC advertising budget, as Baidu apparently doesn't take relevancy into account with PPC -- higher rankings are achieved with higher spend.

Yandex, meanwhile, counts inbound links as relevant, and also highly rates relevant geographic location. Interestingly, Yandex will also penalize you for having spam-like roll-over and pop-up ads on your site.

Fortunately, each search engine offers its own keyword research tools, so you're obviously far better off using the data analysis tools of the search engine you're trying to game, than, say, applying your Google China keywords to Baidu.

With Great Effort Comes Great Possibility

Clearly, one size doesn't fit all when it comes to SEO strategies for different countries.

The crucial lesson here: developing SEO specific to each country's dominant search engine is just as important as creating language- and culture-specific websites in the first place. Mastering the tricks of each market's search engine is the key to success.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

Most search engine optimization (SEO) agencies are now accepted as an integral part of their customers' wider marketing strategy -- and that's because it's increasingly obvious that SEO underpins every other online promotional tool.

In fact, my recent post "How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing" showed how SEO can work with many other marketing tools in order to make marketing spend work even harder.

Despite this, some SEOs just don't get it. I was chatting to a young, bright, up-and-coming SEO at a conference recently about the strategy he was employing to boost an already-popular website.

He explained that he was writing some "keyword-heavy guides" for the site's pages, which interested me because he had no copywriting experience.

"Oh, it doesn't matter about the quality," he explained. "For this content, Google is the only customer."

Google is Never the Only Customer

Now, this guy isn't an employee at my company, so he didn't have to sit through the usual lecture I roll out at this point.

Suffice to say, in our industry, Google is never the only customer because it's humans who search, humans who visit the pages after they have been crawled by the spiders, and humans who use the content on those pages to form opinions on the company that supplied it.

It isn't impossible to create articles, guides, news stories, blog posts, and landing pages that are both useful to people and attractive to search engines. You just need skilled, informed writers with a firm grasp of SEO principles.

Google is Evolving

The most successful search engine in the world is so successful because it gives people want they want -- and they don't want keyword-stuffed garbage.

Yes, your website content needs to include relevant search terms because you need to show Google and other search engines that your page is relevant to the customer.

However, Google wants to give people useful information. Google's engineers are constantly working to refine its algorithm to make sure that's what it does.

If you want to future-proof your SEO strategy, you'll make sure your pages are useful and not just "optimized" by having a bunch of keywords crowbarred in.

You Risk Damaging Your Brand

There's a real danger that having poor quality copy on your website damages your brand in the eyes of any humans who stumble across it.

Your website is the equivalent to your shop front, your office reception, even your staff's attire in client meetings -- it's how customers form opinions of your brand.

Poor quality, keyword-stuffed, useless content lowers your brand's value in the eyes of the customer. The customer is the only customer -- not the search engine that brought them there.

Poor Copy Won't Convert

Whatever your website's purpose, poor quality content won't help you achieve it.

Whether you're trying to garner support for a cause, enhance brand engagement, or simply sell a service or product, your content needs to promote that end.

You can't have some copy on the site that you hope humans won't read. Those searchers who do land on it will quickly leave your site -- often with a lower opinion of your company than before.

You Won't Get Any Link Love

A low-quality, keyword-crammed guide on your site might attract the attention of the search engine spiders, but it won't get any humans particularly excited.

However, a well-written, informative industry guide could easily be tweeted, shared, and linked to. That encourages natural traffic and aids your website's optimization, so it's a double win.

Why bother with useless, brand-damaging, short-term copy when a little extra effort could bring you all these benefits?

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Search engine optimizers know what makes a good link. It looks like this -- cheap Viagra -- and it links through to your client's page selling Viagra.

But half the job of good SEO is also keeping on top of what the search engines look for when deciding what's important. The rules are always changing.

How Many Contextual Links Really Look 'Natural'?

There's a slight problem with doubting the importance of quality links with clear anchor text: they work. Without a doubt, the most important element of improving your natural search ranking is to get quality inbound links with anchor text that reflects your target keywords. SEO is still a numbers game at its heart -- do enough of the right things and you'll rank number one.

But this is where SEOs need to think about what the search engines see when they manually check what results are being served and decide if the best suppliers are ranking well, or if it's just the biggest spammers.

What Makes a Link Relevant, Important, and Contextual?

There are plenty of examples of links created by SEOs with great anchor text. But if a gas and electricity link near the bottom of an article on cooking is actually "contextual," then I'm the Pope.

The dictionary definition of "contextual" just to labor the point, means "relating to, dependent on, or using context."

Clearly, anchor text doesn't always make a link contextual. We've all seen examples of irrelevant articles with links at the bottom. This is bad practice, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for SEO.

A truly quality contextual link in real life may not even have specific anchor text. What's more important: a PR4 link with "laptops" as anchor text from a blog about cats, or a URL link from a PR4 website about laptops and the best places to buy them from?

You can certainly make the case that links with relevant anchor text are all that matters -- that "Google isn't actually as clever as you think" -- and the SERPs will back up that view in the vast majority of cases. But staying ahead of the curve is just as important as finding ways to enhance your ranking in the first place. If Google is planning an update to reduce the power of spammers, then this is where they should start.

My Recommendation

Monitor and manage the spread of URL versus keyword-rich links across your client's profile and don't be afraid of getting really high quality links that only use your client's URL.

At a broader level, it's also important to try and build a database of the most important and relevant sites, and even individuals in each sector you target. Try to genuinely engage with them, through direct contact, through affiliate and display deals, and by using other more creative methods (where appropriate) to build strong business relationships online that add value to users and provide SEO value for the engines.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

Remember the days, a few years ago to be exact, when you would hear the common mantra, "We're managing Web 2.0 quite effectively. We have a blog." This was a part of the mentality of "everybody is doing it, so we sure don't want to fall behind."

While some didn't enact a blog on-site for logical reasons, such as the lack of time, resources, proper blog management, or the inability to provide proper content, others ran wild with content thrown to this site section in hopes of catching readers or a viral trend.

The simple fact is that your blog must accurately portray your company and site's message, as well as online intentions, to render it effective and to not cause damage to your search engine optimization (SEO) or other online efforts.

Most often, generating SEO-friendly, keyword-targeted blog posts will draw traffic to your site. These pages often rank well in long tail SERPs.

Also of benefit is the ability to promote blog posts in social bookmarking sites for low value but quick link credibility. With this, you can often captivate readers to the point of receiving inbound links.

However, while all of this seems great, if the content and inbound linking aren't geared toward the overall keyword theme of your site, then search engines will perceive your site as greatly flawed. Is your blog getting off topic? Let's look to Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for some SEO considerations.

Keyword Significance

If much more site content is housed in your blog posts rather than in your site, this can often lead to an overall keyword relevance for terms other than the top keyword terms desired for the site. You don't want a search engine deciding to rank one of your site's top terms in the SERPs if the majority of the site doesn't speak to your intended keyword theme.

• See how this affects you: Take a moment to review your Google Webmaster Tools account. Using the Assess Your Site on The Web>>Keywords section, analyze the significance of keywords on your site. Are they your site's top terms? Is your overall site content delivering the right content?

Anatomy of Inbound Links Across the Site

In a perfect world, we want to have the greatest amount of links traveling to the home page and then see deep links which follow a hierarchical flow to deeper site pages. Too much attention to your blog and not your main site pages can leave you with blog pages holding more inbound links than important site pages and maybe even gasp! the home page.

Another consideration that must be met is the anchor text of links coming to your site. Are they relevant to your targeted keywords or related more to the random blog post titles you might have?

• See how this affects you: In Google Webmaster tools, analyze Your Site on the Web>>Links to your Site. When viewing link amounts by site page, where does your blog main page or posts sit in comparison to the home page and top-level pages of the site? Is there a deep linking hierarchical flow, or are there more links to the blog section than the home page? Next, within this page, look at the most frequently used anchor text of inbound links. Do they match your targeted keywords?

How Blog Visitors Digested Your Content

This can help you gain a better understanding of how on- or off-topic your blog content can be with the rest of your site and the goals of your site.

• See how this affects you: In Google Analytics, drill down in the Top Content section to filter only visits from /blog (or the name of your blog directory) to assess some key factors. What is the bounce rate overall of organic visitors to the blog section of the site? Is this percentage higher than 60 percent? How many pages per visit? Even with amazing calls to action and proper blog main navigation you still won't pull wanting readers into the rest of your site if it's completely irrelevant to the blog post page they began with.

Assess Your Goal Conversions

What percentage of visits performed a desired action? This information lets you ultimately decide, if not for accurate link building, draw of quality site visits, or a branding effort, what your blog is doing for you. A rogue blog will show up throughout your site analytics, whether it's increasing your overall bounce rate, exit rate, or decreasing your time on site, pages per visit, or simply clouding your ability to gauge the effectiveness of your organic efforts by filling your data with irrelevant keyword referrals and organic landing pages.

While I've tried my best to scare the hell out of you, for the most part the above will likely affect smaller sites instead of large sites. Larger sites usually have a vast amount of links to top site pages as well as a large amount of content to pages outside of the blog section to counter against an overpowering site blog.

Regardless of site size, it's still imperative that you realize the goals and intentions of your blog and not let it take over your site for all the wrong reasons.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

For more information about S.E.O, e-commerce web site design, e-mail marketing, web site design service and website development, just visit us at www.7strategy.com 

This question plagues many publishers. They know they need to compete, and it's a dog-eat-dog world. However, they also know that the search engines provide guidelines for what they consider acceptable practices, and if you violate their guidelines they reserve the right to downgrade the rankings of your site, or even remove it from the index.

You want to be as aggressive as you can, but you don't want to be too aggressive, so to speak. So where is the dividing line?

The answer happens to be my favorite answer to all search engine optimization (SEO) questions: It depends. Not very satisfactory perhaps, but definitely accurate.

However, there is a way to do some analysis and get a sense for what you can and can't do. Fair warning, this post represents my speculation on the topic, and I can't declaratively state that the speculation is accurate.

The Basics

Search engines use hundreds of signals to clue them in on how to rank a given web page. One thing a search engine does is break down segments of different markets to understand typical behavior in each market. In other words, to help it decide how to rank a site in a particular market segment (for example, sites about vitamins) the search engines look at other sites in that same segment to examine their behavior.

It's quite possible that they use this information to decide what represents spammy behavior in a given market.

An Example

Consider an issue that used to be the subject of much discussion, keyword density. Crudely measured, you can think of the number of times a particular keyword phrase is used divided by the total number of phrases of the same length on a page. SEOs don't speak that much about keyword density any more because the days of massive keyword stuffing on web pages is (thankfully) largely gone.

But, like most things in SEO, I'd bet that there's still a penalty for excessive keyword use. Consider a page that has a certain three-word phrase in the title, in an H1 header, is the lead phrase in several other heading tags, and repeated use of the key phrase throughout the text, and perhaps the page also doesn't make much use of synonyms for the phrase, because the publisher is so focused on that one search term.

In all likelihood, you're over the line at this point. So where is the line then? It depends on the behavior of the other sites in your same market segment.

Continuing our example, it most likely depends on what the most authoritative sites in the vitamin market segment are doing. A site that is rightfully thought as an authority in the vitamin market is likely to be one that the search engines want to rank in high positions for lots of related queries.

Possible Role of Authoritative Sites

So even if the site that is considered an authority in a market pushes the limits a bit, it would be undesirable for the search engine to punish them for that behavior, because it's still the best search result for many related queries. I'm not saying that search engines don't punish authoritative sites that engage in spammy behavior, because it happens, but they have a strong disincentive to do so.

So if the authoritative sites tend to push the limits in certain ways, such as much higher keyword density then is typical in other markets, is that spammy activity, or the new norm for the vitamin market space?

Certainly, there are still limits as to what they can do. Even Google Japan can be penalized, so there are limits. I believe those limits move, however, based on the behavior of authoritative sites in a market segment.

Purely algorithmic ranking algorithms don't have an inherent understanding of what the norm should be for a market segment. So they rely on the significant players in that segment to help them figure that out.

When you're trying to figure out what to do with your own site, consider what other players in the same space are doing. Bear in mind that an authoritative site is likely to get more latitude than your site (unless it is seen as the authoritative site), so copying their behavior isn't always good idea, but seeing what they're doing can give you some boundaries on the things you might consider doing with your own site.

See the full story at: www.searchenginewatch.com

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In part one of this series, we talked about how to measure search engine optimization (SEO) success. But those measurements are predicated on understanding our organic rankings in search engines for the search terms that drive revenue or leads to our site.

However, some recent changes to the data that Google now offers dramatically changes the way we think of "search rankings" and really underscore the notion that search engines continue to focus on user experience as they improve their ranking formulas. This article summarizes what these changes mean to an SEO campaign.

How Personalization and Localization Changed the SEO Game

Much of what the data tells us is what we have guessed for some time now, but this is the first time that there's hard data to support some of the assumptions. In previous years, search rankings across the engines were more or less static for the same phrase. However, localization and personalization have been affecting the Google ranking algorithm for some time now.

As we look at the changes of the recent update and those in other recent updates, we find that where you search for something and who you are makes a profound difference in what you see in Google for any given search query. Additionally, Google's new infrastructure allows for the engine to make ranking changes much more frequently. And so, Google's new data set available in Google Webmaster Tools, and specifically, the "Average Rank," is now the most accurate metric that illustrates organic ranking performance.

Why 'Average Rank' is an Important New KPI

SEO professionals have historically relied on automated software like WebPosition or WebCEO for "rankings reports," which detail where a particular site ranks on a given keyword in a particular search engine. However, with Google's current environment, these reports end up being a snapshot in time of how a local data set looks for a particular keyword. They may or may not be indicative of the general trend in rankings for this query for most users.

This type of reporting isn't really reliable for judging performance and is no longer suitable data to make business decisions with. Google's average rank is a much better metric because it accounts for all of the variances listed above, namely, personalization, localization, and changes over time.