The SEO Strategy Spectrum

There seem to be two sides of the spectrum when it comes to SEO strategy. On one side are the “content purists” and the “over-optimizers.” I just thought of these two terms off the top of my head, so I’ll explain what I mean.

Content Purists

You know the type, they’re the people who think if you write intriguing and unique content, search engines will magically reward you for this with a top ranking. “Magically” being, you put no actual effort in promoting this content, but expect people to somehow discover it anyway.

This is kind of like performing an awesome speech with lots of awe-inspiring ideas. Except you’re in the middle of a desert, and nobody is around. And there’s no water because remember, you’re in a desert. And you succumb to dehydration and nobody ever hears what you have to say.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Unfortunately for you, there’s a ton of quality content out there that you want to read, but you’re never going to see it because the person producing the content is under the false assumption that search engines will magically find your awesome content. It doesn’t work like that.

Over-optimizers

Hey, who cares if our content is complete garbage and is written by some illiterate automated bot? Just as long as it ranks on the first page is all that matters.

This is kind of like streaking at a popular sporting event. Yeah, people are going to see you, but they’re turning away in disgust and throwing Bud Light bottles at you. And they’ll quickly forget about you soon after stadium security whisks you off to a private holding cell and the sports game resumes.

Sounds embarrassing, doesn’t it? People can quickly recognize crappy content, and they’re going to move on pretty soon once they realize your content is crap. If they see you in the results again, they’ll subconsciously not click on your link because they’re expecting the same crappy quality on that result too.

A compromise (the middle ground)

Here’s a brilliant idea: let’s make great content and then promote it! A pretty simple idea, but so many people fail to do it.

This is kind of like performing at the Super Bowl half-time show. You put on a great show, a huge audience is watching you, and they like it. Basically the best of both worlds from my previous desert and streaking examples.

How to do it

A lot of what I’m about to say will be oversimplified and fall under the “easier said than done” category. However, hopefully the concepts provided here will help you more effectively promote your content.

Step 1: Create something awesome. Think, be creative, figure out what your audience wants to see, and give it to them. Copyblogger has a wealth of great copywriting tips. Even if you think you’re the most awesome content creator in the world, I suggest you check it out.

Step 2: Tell people about it. Identify influential people in your industry and kindly ask them to “mention” it. This can be through an email or tweet, doesn’t matter. They probably won’t, because chances are your content isn’t as awesome as you think it is, so don’t get all huffy if they don’t respond. Just keep trying.

If your content truly is awesome and relevant, these influential people will mention it, and you’ll be reaping all the benefits of extra traffic and heightened profile. Pretty soon, people will be asking you to tweet their stuff. It all comes full circle.

If that doesn’t happen, repeat step 1 until you figure out a winning formula. This may take a while, so be patient.

Wrapping up

Obviously I’ve oversimplified a lot of things like brand building, content marketing, and other things required to create a solid foundation for your SEO strategy.

Bottom line is, search engines want to give users the most relevant results. If Google sees you’re getting a lot of social proof (Facebook likes and tweets) and incoming links, they’re going to recognize that and hopefully reward you with high rankings for relevant search terms.

Google isn’t stupid. Using shady link building techniques (like directory submissions, mass blog commenting, etc.) might work for a while, but eventually will catch up to you. Relying on such strategies is like building your business on a house of cards.

Make great content and promote it. There’s really not a more sustainable, time-tested SEO strategy than that. It’s the middle ground you need to have when deciding where you fit on the SEO strategy spectrum.

I responded saying that I could do it (I wrote a tutorial about it after all), told him about my hourly rate, and that it probably wouldn’t take more than a couple hours. A pretty reasonable estimate.

What he responded with

He came back saying that he doesn’t use a per hour fee for any graphic work. Okay, whatever, I’ll just multiply my hourly rate by the number of hours I estimate it will take and use that as a fixed rate. Simple.

He then went on to say how hourly rates were “really bad business sense” to pay based off of. That’s his opinion, and it’s understandable. Again, it’s not really a big deal for me to convert to a fixed rate. As I explained in my advanced hourly rate to fixed price conversion algorithm, it would’ve been the same price anyway.

The Red Flag

He then stated that using an hourly rate would assuredly “end up with a lawsuit” for me and how he was “forced to file in the past three occasions that [hourly rates] were used for work on [his] sites.”

Do you see the red flag in this statement? First of all, I might cut some slack if it was just one developer who he’d had a problem with and was forced to sue, but three suggests a pattern. A pattern that suggests the client is a little too trigger-happy on resorting to legal action against developers.

While this wasn’t a legal “threat” per se, it was more like “legal peacocking” (a term I just coined). I basically interpreted this as, “I’m not afraid to sue you. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”

That’s fine if I was doing a terrible job, wasn’t living up to my end of the deal, and being an overall “developer from hell” (something I would never do, but still…). But before the project even started with absolutely nothing agreed upon yet, this was too much too soon.

Hourly rates are like blank checks

Okay, I get the concern over hourly rates. As a client, agreeing to pay hourly can be like writing a blank check. What if the developer came back with “oh yeah, this took me 52 hours so you owe me that times my hourly rate of $500. Pay up.”? You’d have a hard time proving that the developer didn’t work those hours unless you were supervising somehow.

This is what contracts are for. This is what estimates and client approvals are for. Clients need to get what they want and developers need to get paid. This protection goes both ways.

I’ve been working at a web design firm for the past couple months, and their billing process is pretty straightforward.

• Client comes to us with their project.
• We write a proposal, complete with the tasks that need to be completed.
• Client approves the budget with agreed upon time estimates and hourly rates.
• We can’t exceed hourly estimates without getting further client approval.
• We finish the project, the client loves it, everybody is happy.

I could’ve got real fancy with a process map but you probably get the point. Hourly rates aren’t some archaic way of billing and they’re not “bad business sense.”

It’s actually pretty standard in this industry, and it doesn’t have to be a figurative blank check if you are thorough with your contracts. Something you should be doing anyway.

Contracts are not a magic solution

You can legally protect yourself with a clearly written contract complete with tasks, and associated time and billing estimates. And remember, a contract goes both ways, and both client and developer legally bound to carry it out unless there’s some sort of breach or you both agree to dissolve it.

However, a contract is not some magic pill that will make all your problems go away. While it helps define what should happen throughout a project, it doesn’t always get carried out. Either side could pull a vanishing act, work doesn’t get carried out to specification, payment isn’t made on time, the list goes on…

This issues can be magnified when you’re geographically located far away. If all other options were exhausted and you did have to meet in court, where would it take place? Would you have to fly out to their location? Would they have to fly out to yours? Who foots the airfare bill? It can get even worse if you’re not in the same country and local laws and other jurisdictions come into play.

Remember, you may be protected legally with a contract, but that won’t help you much with an absurdly difficult client. This is why keeping an eye out for red flags like this is so important.

While I highly doubt any of what I have described above would actually happen if I had taken on this project, why take the risk, especially for such a small job? It’s probably not worth the trouble.

The real issue

The issue is not converting my hourly rate into a fixed rate like the client wanted. It’s not hard for me to multiply my hourly rate by an estimated completion time to make a fixed rate. And it’s not my coding ability. It’s not hard for me to code a widgetized footer in a WordPress theme. These are not the issues.

The fact that this guy even hinted at a lawsuit (especially over such a minor project) before any work had even begun was a major red flag to say the least. I’m a busy guy, as you might have noticed from my lack of online activity in recent months. I have no time for anything more than minor coding projects, and definitely no time to waste in a courtroom.

The lesson

Clients, don’t scare off developers before the project has even begun. I know you want to protect your investments, but try not to mention the following words and phrases when trying to hire someone: lawsuit, hunt you down, chargeback, etc. Any developer who isn’t completely desperate for work will probably be running for the hills and you’ll likely have to settle for second-rate help.

Developers, keep an eye out for red flags when it comes to clients. Difficult clients can waste more time and energy than the contract is worth in dollars, and that’s never a good thing.

While there are a few classic warning signs of a potential troublesome client, the best advice I can give you is to just trust your instincts and use your experience to identify problems before they happen. You’ll be better off.

And for the clients out there, as always, do your due diligence when you’re choosing with a developer to work with. Check out their portfolio, read testimonials, get references, follow up on those, gauge reputation, you know the drill.

• The site ranked in the top 10 for phrases like “free wordpress themes” and “wordpress themes” which are pretty sought after keywords in that niche.
• The site averaged about 30,000 total visits per month from search engines (mostly Google) for other various long tail keywords.
• The site had about 400,000 incoming links from various websites, quality content, and a good reputation within its niche.
• The XHTML validation errors were because of a YouTube video I embedded. The default code YouTube provided caused a few errors in validation.

Anyone with half a brain when it comes to SEO will know that a strong link profile, quality content, and a solid reputation will trump a few validation errors on a page (with the exception of a few edge cases).

Basic Validation Errors

These so-called “SEOs” are probably going to hate me for this, but I’m going to give away some of their secrets right here for everyone to see.

• Most validation errors are caused by unclosed tags. Make sure your code is properly indented so these issues will be easy to spot.
• A common one in XHTML are image tags with no alt attribute and/or no closing slash. Example: <img src="example.jpg" alt="Example" />
• Make sure to convert symbols like ampersands into character entities, common in embed codes. Like & instead of just & will cause an error.

Keep the following tips in mind and you’ll eliminate most of your validation errors, and keep some of the so-called “SEOs” at bay.

As far as edge cases go, Joost de Valk has a pretty good story about how a XHTML validation error caused Google to not be able to crawl a site properly.

Why Google Doesn’t Care

Google’s main job is to provide relevant search results for its users. Not to appease webmasters by ranking their crappy content sites as high as possible because they have valid coding. Google knows that if they placed too much weight on valid coding, their search results would just plain suck and users would leave in droves to the fields of Bing.

Why? Lots of older, reputable websites with great content don’t have valid code. Is Google going to penalize these sites in any way because of invalid code? No, because the users would suffer.

Matt Cutts Says So

Remember, Google uses over 200 factors to gauge the relevance of a page and XHTML validation isn’t even one of them. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Matt Cutts.

Here are a few key quotes near the end of the video.

• “It’s important to realize the vast majority of pages on the web don’t validate.”
• “We have to crawl and index and return results on the web even if pages don’t validate.”
• “We don’t give any sort of boost to pages that validate.”

What Valid Code Isn’t

A lot of what people understand is, your code can still be horrible even if it does validate.

• Valid code is not a guarantee your site will look the same in every browser and on every platform.
• Valid code does not mean your code is good, efficient, and/or fast loading.

If your code is so inefficient that it significantly slows down your pages, then you have a problem and having W3C validation isn’t going to help you with that.

It is pretty well known now that site speed is used in search ranking, so your code should be as efficient as possible.

Why You Should Have Valid Code Anyway

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about having valid code. There are lots of benefits.

• It can help you debug your code to help limit any display issues.
• Efficient coding can help speed up your pages, which is important nowadays.
• If you’re in the PSD to HTML business, you won’t be the laughing stock of your peers.
• You hopefully won’t get any emails from so-called “SEOs” offering to validate your code.

Okay, the last two reasons are in jest, however the main reason you should validate your code is for you and your visitors, not because you think it will help you in search engines, because it won’t.

Conclusion

In case you couldn’t figure it out, the site of mine I was talking about in the first part of the article was Theme Lab. Obviously the so-called “SEO” who e-mailed me didn’t do his homework, because it does very well with search traffic and a few validation errors isn’t going to change that.

What are your thoughts on W3C validation? I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have in the comments!

Who Is Buying Them

As far as the biggest sales go, it appears large corporations are grabbing them up for vanity purposes. T.co, for example, will be used by Twitter for some sort of link shortening service.

Like almost every new extension, a big chunk are being bought up by trademark holders. In case you didn’t notice, .co is extremely similar to .com so trademark holders buying their .co equivalent to protect their brand is pretty much a requirement.

The rest of every single last half-decent .CO domain are being bought up by domainers. I’ll admit, I did pre-register one of them: leland.co (for hopefully obvious reasons). It was picked up by a dropcatcher and probably being auctioned off right now.

Even total garbage domains like lowest-price-web-hosting.co are being registered. Look that one up on Whois.co if you don’t believe me.

Other Previous Extension Fails

This is not unprecedented. Lots of new extension releases in the past have been billed to be the “new .com” but guess what? They’ve all failed, and .com is still the undisputed champion.

• .cc – Remember .cc? It was one character shorter than .com, it was cool, it was hip, it was memorable. 10 years later I don’t think I’ve ever seen a .cc actually advertised in the wild.
• .ws – Oh man, “ws” stands for website! This will be a dot com killer for sure, since the internet is made up of websites, right? It wasn’t (a dot com killer, obviously the internet has websites).
• .mobi – The most laughable of the bunch. Dot mobi was supposed to dominate the “mobile web” but it didn’t. Probably for the simple fact that you can use any extension for a mobile website, not to mention smart phones can render mobile sites just like a normal web browser.

Yes, I’ll admit .co is very different than all of these due to the extreme similarity to .com, but the same old history is repeating itself once again.

With domainers buying up all the best domains in these new extensions, putting huge price tags on them, and no intention of developing them into actual websites they’re ironically killing the very ecosystem they’re trying to nurture.

My Prediction

As usual, the big winners in every new extension release will be the registry. They’ll get their yearly renewal fees from all the trademark holders, and domainers clingy and dumb enough to keep renewing names like lowest-price-web-hosting.co year after year.

And don’t forget about the big money they’re holding out on all the one character domains for auctions and such. They might take all the money and invest it into a new extension. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The general public will get it undoubtedly confused with .com. If someone saw it on a business card, they’d probably think it was a typo.

Some people might get rich off of it. Some people might blow their lifesavings on this pseudo “landrush.” In the end, .CO will be nothing more than a glorified typo.

The Change

While I did get a lot of compliments on the old design, I wanted to go in a more “professional” direction with the site. I’d love to know what you think in the comments!

Oh, and if you’re one of the like…5 RSS subscribers I have here, come on out of your RSS reader and take a look.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Twitter postings from people which essentially mock their customers. Here’s some of the common ones I see from the commercial themer crowd:

• Wow, this clueless customer of mine just posted a total newbie question on my support forum. Check it out! (screenshot link here)
• Haha, someone who used a pirated version of my theme just got hacked and now their entire blog is ruined. Too bad for them.
• This site just switched away from my awesome SEO-optimized theme and now it looks like total crap, say bye-bye to search rankings.

These are somewhat exaggerated examples but if you follow the same group of people I do, you’ll have a good idea of what I’m talking about already.

My point is, your customers read your Twitter stream, so it’s probably not a good idea to insult them (directly or indirectly) for doing something that was probably just an honest mistake.

I’ll admit I’m not a perfect angel about this, but I have been getting better about not posting all the newbie questions I get to Twitter. And trust me, I get a lot of those.

So remember, the next time someone asks you a dumb question, keep in mind that everyone starts out as a noob (that’s right, even you and me) so be patient and don’t be so quick to make fun of them on Twitter.

Even if a lot of your followers would find it amusing, the one person who won’t find it amusing is the one you’re making fun of. Think about it.

In the following screencast tutorial, I’ll show you how to set it up on a cPanel host (I used HostGator):

• Set up a subdomain for your todo list page (optional, necessary in some cases)
• Password protect the directory your todo list is in (optional, highly recommended)
• Download the script from TutorialZine, extract the files, and upload them via FTP
• Set up a database, create a user, and add the user to the database
• Get the database connection details and put it in the connection file
• Import the database structure through PHPmyAdmin

Screencast is after the jump.

Notes

• Remember, you need to download the script from this TutorialZine post.
• A set up a subdomain because using “todo” as a subdirectory conflicted with one of my older WordPress posts. Type in leland.info/todo to see what I mean.
• It’s a good idea to password protect the directory since anyone can edit your todo list if not. Not to mention if you have top secret todo items, you probably want to keep that hidden.

I still love Screenr, by the way. I know this todo list script is pretty simple and there are more advanced third-party options available. I appreciate the simplicity though.

Hope you all liked the tutorial, let me know what you think in the comments. If you have any ideas for non-WordPress-related screencasts, let me know!

• Interest Factor – You should follow someone on Twitter because you’re interested in what they have to say. People should follow you on Twitter because they’re interested in what you have to say. Period.
• Spam Factor – A lot of your new followers are probably spammers just waiting for you to take the bait and follow them back. Then they’ll fill up your DM box with teeth whitening offers and phishing links.
• Fake Ego Boost – If one of your followers is also following 50,000 other people, chances are they aren’t paying attention to anything you say. They might use a program like TweetDeck to filter a small list of tweets they actually do want to see. Who cares if someone follows you if they don’t even read what you have to say?

If someone doesn’t follow you back, don’t take it personally, it’s no big deal. Maybe they don’t check who their latest followers are, maybe you haven’t interacted with them before, maybe they’ve noticed you but your tweets just aren’t that interesting to them. Hopefully people you don’t follow back won’t take it personally either.

If you want to interact with someone, using @replies should suffice. Even if I don’t follow someone, I try to make a solid effort to respond to everyone who replies to me. Obviously this can be difficult if you get a ton of replies, but you can at least try make an effort. This is a much better way to stay “connected” than the superficiality of a straight follow.

Ever heard of Dunbar’s number?

Unfortunately, some people do it so, so wrong. Do you make these mistakes?

List a bunch of people without any context – This is when you tweet something like the following:

#followfriday @arandomperson @totallyunrelatedperson @someotherguy @someothergal @whocares @nooneispayingattentionanymore

What’s the problem? There’s no context. Noone knows why you’re suggesting these people to follow. Who are they? What do they do?

More than likely, the people you recommend in this way won’t get a single new follower, except maybe some spammer bots. You could get more followers by tweeting a keyword like “vertigo” and have doctors respond to you.

Too many Follow Friday tweets at once – This is kind of like the mistake above, except multiple times worse. This is when you list a bunch of random people, and then do it again, and then do it again, and again, until your Twitter stream is completely flooded with useless #followfriday tweets.

Challenge? Try this out and see if your follower count doesn’t decrease.

Recommend yourself (and never recommend anyone else) – This is when you say something like the following:

Hey everyone, remember to recommend @themelab for #followfriday, because I’m full of awesome-sauce and I want as many followers as possible!

And after that, never recommend a single other person. To top it off, never even respond/thank to the nice (but deluded) followers you have that actually recommended your self-indulgent self for #followfriday.

To put it simply, you’ll look like a selfish douche and most of your followers will probably be turned off by it.

The right way – Let’s start with an example of a good Follow Friday tweet, and then go over why.

• It’s put in context – People who see this tweet will have an idea who these people are, they’re familiar with WordPress and/or web development.
• Only two recommendations – Followers won’t be as overwhelmed as they would be with the recommendations maxed out to 140 characters.
• It has me in it – This is an especially awesome recommendation because I (@themelab) am recommended in it. It was also not solicited at all (see “Recommending yourself” above).

Conclusion – So any of you who actually still participate in Follow Friday, I hope you found these tips useful. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Why? Because most of my videos were less than five minutes anyway (Screenr’s time limit), I never used any of those previously-mentioned advanced screencast techniques available, and most importantly, it’s crazy-easy to use. Just record and upload, nothing too fancy. And it’s all web-based, no software to download.

At the present time, there are no paid options for Screenr. Everything is completely free, but there are some limits. It only makes sense to have some paid features/upgrades to remove these limits. Here are my ideas:

• Remove the five minute time limit, or maybe make it some amount that 99% of people won’t ever get close to, like 2 hours, since there’s no such thing as “unlimited”.
• Scheduling, so videos aren’t posted as soon as they’re uploaded. For example, maybe you could record a week’s worth of screencasts, and publish only a certain amount per day.
• Private screencasts, since right now all screencasts are completely public. There may be some scenarios where you would want to restrict who sees your screencasts. Maybe make it “invite only” to a select group of Screenr/Twitter users.
• Editing features, since I record about 10 screencasts until I finally get it right. When you’re recording hour-long videos, you’d probably be pretty pissed if you had to redo it because of a little mistake that you couldn’t edit out.
• Captions would probably be useful for everyone as a free feature, as it might be nice to be able to type in captions to supplement the video content, which would be especially useful where voice recording isn’t available.
• Separate login options, so if something screwy happens with your Twitter account, your Screenr account isn’t by association, screwy, in any way. Again, this might be useful as a free feature as well. Screenr doesn’t need Twitter, it’s not like a Twitter client that would be useless without Twitter.

It’s a mystery to me why some of these features have not already been implemented. I’m not too familiar with the parent company of Screenr, and maybe they can afford all this, but on it’s own Screenr’s 100% free model currently used doesn’t seem sustainable at all.

Hosting and streaming videos uses up a ton of bandwidth which in turn costs a ton of money and I’d hate to see Screenr shut down because they’re losing too much money. Not to mention the development and support costs associated with maintaining the website.

So, you have any premium Screenr feature ideas? Have you used Screenr before, and if so, do you think it’s as awesome as I do? Let me know in the comments.

Oh by the way, if you want to see all of my Screenr videos, check out my Theme Lab Screenr page.