Here’s a sneak peek of the new site going live VERY shortly now. We’re working on the final touch ups and the site will be up and running. We look forward to hearing your feedback on the site!

Since we went over the core of what makes up a good SEO project, here is the core of what makes up a bad one. This relates to both black hat SEO as well as flat out ineffective SEO. Follow these rules if you want to make sure your site either doesn’t rank or ends up getting banned.

1.) Hide stuff. Instead of improving the site, create two totally different experiences on the same page; one for users and one for engines. Hide your text content using CSS or something as simple as white text on a white background. This will ensure the engines pick up the SEOd content and the users never see it. A great way to move up in the rankings until you get caught and banned.

2.) Ignore the part of the campaign that is inconvenient. Instead of attending to all aspects of an effective campaign, simply leave out the parts that take too much work. For example, if you can’t write text content, simply ignore that part and continue working on the rest of the items. This will ensure a partial optimization (which is an oxymoron I think).

3.) Make up for weak areas by overcompensating in other areas. This one is super common among SEOs as well as less-than-informed clients. Instead of ignoring parts of the optimization that are inconvenient, we try to make up for it by greatly escalating another area. This is dangerous territory because it always leads to over optimization. For example, let’s say a site has very poor inbound linking. Instead of doing everything in our power to increase inbound links, we would instead bring their keyword density up to a crazy level. This may sound like a good idea, but it’s like fighting fire with gasoline. Now we not only have a site with a poor inbound linking scheme, but we also have a site with spammy content.

Some of these items may sound a little obvious, but almost all SEO mistakes originate from one of them. Often, they just appear more complex, but always go back to either hiding content, ignoring part of the optimization, or overcompensating. In the long term, they never lead to good results. Don’t be fooled.

Every so often it’s important to go back and look at the basics. The fundamentals of SEO may seem obvious to most SEOs, but with so many changes, updates, and tactics out there, the fundamentals can get forgotten. Today, I want to go over the very core of SEO and what we’re trying to do. I like to look at it as a refresher for what we do as a company and what our main goals are. Later, I will continue this with the 3 fundamentals of bad SEO.

1.) Your pages must be authoritative for their keywords. If you don’t write the best content, then you can’t really expect to be ranked high. Assume that each potential visitor searching for your keywords is looking for good information relating to them. Does your site provide that information? If it does not, no amount of ethical SEO is going to overcome that. Also keep in mind that the search engines read the META headers, alts, titles, and formatting tags such as H1 and use them in their calculations. Your page should be very targeted and the best page on the Web related to your keywords. If you create the most authoritative pages, the rest of the optimization is much easier.

Also remember that the search engines base the majority of their calculations on links and text. If your text is very low density, not visible to the engines, or poorly written, you cannot expect to rank higher than someone who writes well thought out articles. Check out your competition and see what they are doing…then do something better.

2.) Your site must be vouched for by other sites. The search engines have placed the burden of determining what sites are credible and which are not on the Web itself. They do this through analyzing the quantity, quality, and relevancy of links pointing to a specific site. The more high quality links you have, the more authority the site has and the easier it is to rank. Link building is an ongoing process and should never stop. Consider it to be public relations for your Web site.

This ties back to the number 1 fundamental. If you write good authoritative content, people will naturally link to it. Getting inbound links is not easy, but it’s much more bearable when you have good content that prompts other Webmasters to link to it organically. Write good articles/content, get the word out there, and watch the links come in.

3.) Your site must have a good history with the engines. It’s no secret that search engines have trust issues with new sites. When a spam site gets banned from the index, the spammer simply puts up a new site. Because of this, search engines are always a little hesitant to trust new sites. The longer the site is around, the more trust it obtains. It is always easier to rank domains with a longer track record than brand new domains. Keep this in mind when deciding whether to use an existing domain or start a new site on a new domain.

The end goal of SEO should always be to improve a site, better target it to selected keywords, and increase its inbound links. This is definitely the 10,000 foot overview, but it’s good to go back to the basics to remind us what we’re doing.

Everyone has a low attention span on Mondays, so let’s just stick with a list for today. The following are compiled from the most common problems I see in client Web sites and on the Web in general.

1.) Make your home page a portal to the site. The home page should be a showcase of all your content which means linking to as many internal pages as possible (within reason). If your home page does not support internal pages, the site will suffer.

2.) Write an informative article and submit it to article syndication sites. People are on the Web looking for information. Provide it and reap the rewards.

3.) Begin converting your site to CSS instead of tables. Tables are a terrible clutter of code space and the search engines have no use for them. Make as much formatting as possible external through CSS.

4.) Cross link your text content. When a keyword from page A shows up on page B, link it to page A. I call this ‘wikipedia style linking’. Having individual content pages support other content pages is a great way to optimize internal linking.

5.) Check the keyword density of your optimized pages. Does the keyword show up on the page at all? The engines will not rank a page that does not even contain the keyword in the text content once.

I think the title pretty much says it all.  Gives us all something to do on a Sunday afternoon.

http://www.google.co.uk/landing/thingstodo/

CNN Money has a great article on Yahoo’s continuing woes. The credit crisis seems to be hitting Yahoo really hard at a time when they’re needing growth more than anything. Years have gone by while Yahoo struggles to turn around the company. It doesn’t help any that the deal between Google and Yahoo still has not been approved by the Justice Department. On top of that, Google is projected to take an even larger market share.

Yahoo is steadily losing market share to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), the leader in paid search. Google will score 73.5% of the $10.4 billion that advertisers will spend on search in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer. Yahoo has a 13.3% share. (In 2007, Yahoo had a 15% share and a 20% share in 2006.)

The continued decline of Yahoo makes me wonder how much longer they’ll be doing what they’re doing. They still have a very large number of users and I know that some other company would love to have them.

Yahoo has introduced two major programs to increase profits in both search and display. The company struck an advertising deal with Google in June to outsource a portion of search ads. Yahoo hopes to generate as much as $800 million from the partnership next year. However, the Justice Department has delayed the deal while it conducts an antitrust review. Yahoo also introduced a new service last month to make selling display ads easier for marketers. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang called the APT platform a “game changer.”

Yahoo seriously needs to consider diversifying a little bit like Google has been (gmail, google checkout, android, etc..). Their biggest deal is outsourcing a portion of their ads to their biggest competitor. I don’t know what they can do to turn the whole thing around outside of developing some new products or purchasing some existing popular sites/applications such as digg.

Today, Yahoo hit a five year low for their stock price.

I talked with someone recently that was reading the Google blog and saw a post about URL rewriting being unnecessary. I wanted to comment here because a lot of people don’t understand the perspective Google is writing many of their ‘how to’ blog posts from. SEO testing has shown URL rewriting does work well and makes it easier for the engines to index pages. It’s also beneficial to have URLs that accurately describe the content in a good hierarchy. Logical layout comes directly from Google’s Webmaster guidelines. The problem with rewriting comes when someone does not know what they are doing and inadvertently causes serious spidering/indexing problems for the search engines.

Google’s stance is always ‘don’t make our job harder’. They have always promoted URL rewriting and apparently there are now more people messing their sites up with it than fixing things so they no longer promote it. The biggest thing to consider in Google’s comment is this:

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?

Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Their main premise here is that it is hard to rewrite URLs and it can cause more problems than it’s worth for novice Webmasters. Basically, Google doesn’t like the fact people can make dynamic content appear static via the URL. If used properly though, URL rewrites can be invaluable to a site.

For your rewrite to be effective make sure you consider the following:

1. URLs should be logical and follow a hierarchy. If your site is structured into categories and products, a good URL would look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/category/product.html. This makes sure a URL is treated like breadcrumbs. A dynamic URL generally shows no hierarchy at all.
2.Make sure you don’t end up with duplicate content on your site.
3. Make sure the rewrite actually works properly and isn’t returning the wrong pages, 404s, etc… It’s best to use some kind of spider simulation tool and spider the site yourself.
4. The URLs should remove as many unnecessary parameters as possible. Simply converting an ugly dynamic URL to an ugly static URL doesn’t help anything. Dividing variables with / instead of & does not a good URL make.

The facts of the matter are that good, clean URLs are better for search engines and users alike. Saying dynamic URLs are better than static URLs goes against all accepted rules of usability. Just don’t break your site with a rewrite that doesn’t work correctly. You really have to be careful what you take from Google’s blog posts because they are aimed at the entire base of Webmasters and not necessarily at mid to high level programmers. This post from Google is basically throwing the baby out with the bath water.

In a pretty under the radar move, Google removed two really important things from their Webmaster guidelines:

“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific
expert sites. “

“Have other relevant sites link to yours. “

Initially, the buzz was over whether or not Google was finally going to officially separate itself from corrupt DMOZ and stop counting directory links altogether, but I think it’s more important to consider Google’s continuing ‘devaluation’ of linking in their official dogma. The reality is the opposite though. A search engine that has built its foundation on linking has to spend the majority of its quality assurance time filtering out poor and manipulative links. They did, however, leave in the guideline relating to engaging in manipulative linking.

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

A Google groups discussion began about it and some Google representatives did make comments about it. John Mu commented:

“This line was removed because we feel that you should not “force”
other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to
each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and
to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we
need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other
sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their
own, it should be their decision not yours.

I hope that makes sense. “

This seems to be classic Google Utopian ideology. Fortunately for them, they are so big they don’t have to worry about getting exposure on the Web. So, not only is Google saying not to buy links, they are expanding their definition to cover being proactive and getting others to link to you. I understand that Google doesn’t want people polluting their system with piles of paid links, but they are really passing the ‘Web exposure’ buck here to other forms of advertising. They seem to believe that a search engine is NOT the place to get exposure.

If links lead to rankings and links should come exclusively as a result of good exposure, then according to Google, rankings should not be for exposure, but instead simply reflect existing exposure. There are millions of awesome Web sites out there that no one will ever see because they are ranked poorly and don’t use banner advertisements. I guess Google’s solution for those Webmasters is to use Adwords and help their stock grow more. Google is increasingly becoming a ‘what’s popular’ engine instead of a real search engine. Apparently, if you want to find new sites with good content, you have to stick with stumbleupon.

As many of you already know, the TreeHouse site is in the process of being redesigned to better reflect our focus.  It should be up very shortly now.  In preparation, we’ve setup the new blog and we’ll be posting here regularly about design, SEO, SEM, and Web development.  Hopefully, you’ll find some of the information helpful for your own sites.

The design for the new site is pretty much completed now and we’re just finshing up odds and ends.  We want the site to be a resource for Webmasters looking for good information on the entire design, development, and optimization process.  We are especially looking forward to launching TreeHouse Labs; our online training and research area.  Detailed SEO information will be available at no charge online to help stimulate conversation and further research in the field.

We are also looking forward to launching an all new Campaign Central.  This will be pushed live sometime before the end of the year.  Campaign Central will be the hub for all of our client campaigns containing project status information, ranking reports and important contacts.  Due to the large amount of development work associated with it, Campaign Central will relaunch later this year and not with the new site.

Please check back over the next few weeks for continued updates on the new site and its launch…