Search Engine People Blog » Ruud Hein

Cash & SEO: What You Pay For

Ruud Hein — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:47:33 +0000

Two weeks ago the crashing US economy, skyrocketing oil prices, as well as the general unrest in the Middle East was pushed to the bottom of the agenda when the technology blogosphere exploded with the scandal, ridiculousness and/or short sightedness of Anita Hamilton presumed suggestion that paying for iPhone software is bad. There should be free iPhone software “paid” for with ads. I mean, if they really would want money anyway, that is.

I understand you weren’t away that this has taken time away from larger world issues. Probably it hasn’t. OK, I’ll admit: it didn’t. But it did seem like that in that part of the blogoshphere though!

When you read the article it’s utterly impossible to contribute an “all software should be free” stance to its author, but the idea to comtemplate that she actually did suggest something like that (*gasp!*) is tickling. “Tell me again about the time you paid for software and services, gramps!”

SEO is one of those services for which people and still charge and people still pay. That’s special because in theory anyone could do SEO, right? If you do a couple of days of homework you figure out that the title and h1 tag are pure on-page gold and that whether you understand it the simple or the complicated way, almost everything else leads back to getting links.

So why do people buy SEO? What exchanges hands when a client buys SEO services?

I believe two key values are bought, knowledge and experience, which together deliver value through speed and cost-effectiveness.

Knowledge

Having seen most of the tools of the trade I’m convinced I can do all my own plumbing — but I don’t. I know there’s information lacking: what type of material is this and what kind of soldering does it require? Does it require soldering even?! And this round thing here behind that pipe, how is that thingamajig called?

By the time I have this all figure out I’ve lost valuable hours of working time. Although the do iy myself plumbing job seems “free”, I’m paying through lost time. That’s real money. Maybe I’ve bought a book (with step by step photos) or a multimedia DVD to learn how to “replace you plumbing in 12 easy steps and 3 days”.

Had I hired a plumber I would have tapped into that same type of existing knowledge but in a context where it can readily be applied: the plumber already knows stuff. I don’t.

In SEO the same holds true. Yes, the title tag is great for convincing a search engine a page is about keyword X or Y. But how many times should you repeat that word then in the title tag? Should you repeat words even?! If the title and h1 are equally important, should you just repeat the same text and words in both?

And talking about links, does any link count or are some literally a waste of time and effort? Are 5 links from pages that show a green bar of 2 in the Google toolbar the same as 2 links from pages that show 5? And how come people say those values are meaningless? If they’re meaningless, why do people pay attention to it? If a certain amount of links can move your site up in the rankings for a certain phrase, can certain links bring you down? Can my competitor do that to me? If so, how can I protect myself?

Knowledge.

An SEO company already knows all these things, has researched them, tested them — and is keeping up to date with it.

What this means is that you buy not testing on your own site: an SEO company will never use your site as a test bed unless you agree to partake in testing something new.

It also means there is a certain level of service results that can be assured within a certain time frame. Where you or your employer needs time to get up to speed and then apply knowledge effectively, the SEO company has everything in place; it’s up and running, you hit the ground running. This speed of effective implementation is cost effective.

Experience

Again going back to my plumbing example, once I have all the theoretic knowledge and know the names of every thingamajig and thingamabob I will still stumble, fall and yes even fail, simply because I have no experience.

Experience tells you that if you use this tube of stuff on that joint you better wait ten minutes and not the five they claim on the label. Experience makes you check and double-check that the water is turned off instead of finding out it wasn’t. Experience is what costs you really big bucks when it’s lacking in your DIY project.

Once you’ve learned what to put in that title tag and what in that h1 it is experience that makes the keyword research behind it fast and efficient. Experience is knowing, just knowing, that this term is better than that one even though both are searched equally often and have little or no competition.

Experience has an SEO professional look at a page for a split second and move on while you try to dig up contact information on the site to put in a link request. Meanwhile the experience SEO is establishing 2-3 links for every so-so link you got.

Why again?

Experience.

Experience is routine. Experience is routine knowledge. Experience is a service company’s prime asset because there is no other way to come by it then coming by it. Earning it.

Tapping into it by acquiring services is therefore, again, highly cost effective.

Benefits

To sum up, the advantages of premium SEO services are cost effective, speedy implementation through knowledge and experience.

Images courtesy of: suburbanbloke and luciapensache

Cash, SEO and Ethics

Ruud Hein — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:56:44 +0000

Ours is a geek industry where Ethics is a valid topic for conversation, forum threads, newspaper articles and blog posts.

As an example, here’s a small selection of SEO blog posts from June that in one way or another deal with Ethics:

Many of these touch upon our day to day work while most are written from a more or less pragmatic angle.

Indirectly touching our industry there’re larger issues too. What’s privacy in these Google days and who’s responsible for keeping it? Should Yahoo keep the law of the land if the land is China and the law gets a blogger jailed for no good reason? Should Cisco help develop and deploy technology that makes it easy to spy on citizens or filter information? What if that same technology is used close to home?

Outward Ethics

It’s intriguing that most of these discussions are outward focused. They’re about Google and “do no evil”. About whether any company should enter the China market. About how far “they” should be allowed to go, what “they” should owe us, how “they” should be regulated.

Closer to home we’re often mum.

Oh, we might say “I don’t use black hat techniques”. Saying otherwise might make it sound like “yes, I’m a thief”. But the black/grey/white techniques debate is one that disposes us of having to make real choices; it’s a colored hats game in which the world and our work in it is divided among very sharply defined lines of Good and Evil. Much unlike the real world, that is.

Ethics touches upon Moral and for Moral to be of value it has to come from either belief or a framework. To apply yours to your work, or to discover your belief or framework regarding it, you have to ask questions, wonder about the situation.

In doing so we make ourselves conscious of our values before there is a need to be conscious of them while the worst that can happen is that we become a little bit less judgmental about others… Google included.

I’d like us to explore 5 areas together, get to know the lay of the land, and start to recognize the markers that can lead the way.

Link Building

Link building, the land of innocence of yesteryear when we lived in a time when “nofollow” meant nothing. Where do you stand these days and what do you do?

Are you staying away from hacking blogs and inserting your own link spam pages? OK… What about cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities then? How about if you could inject your money term on a PR9 .edu site that way and no-one would be the wiser? No-one would see the link as you would have to follow a very specifically crafted link elsewhere. The users of that .edu site certainly would never notice or be bothered with it! So… what say you?

How about a forum post here or there? Maybe a blog comment, one that is “relevant to the discussion” because, face it, we “never” spam? Is every link you placed one that adds value to the people frequenting that place?

And talking about placing links; how about paid reviews? You buy positive ones usually, right? Have we met anyone who bought that product or service with their hard earned money based on that review? Had you been talking with that person, would you really have gone out of your way to sell that person on it?

How about buying negative reviews then? Drag your competitors through the dirt. All is fair in love and war – so which known bad techniques do you or would you use on your competition? What if you weren’t working for an SEO company but you are the whole company? What if getting this client to #1 is the only way for you to get to the next level?

Report Spam

Report spam! Report paid links! We think some do it or none do it – but what do you do?

Report no site at all, ever? Where’s your threshold? Cloaking? Cloaked porn? Three Adsense units on an empty page? Or do you report any site?

Maybe you only report the competition of the client you’re working on. How are your ethics there then? Report when you come across it while researching the field or go out and weed out and hunt down the competition? I mean, they had it coming to them, right? They’re Google’s own guidelines, no?

Clients

Let’s keep making this harder.

What about representing two or more clients within the exact same field? Would you? If so, do you advise either client of the fact that you’re representing potential competition? And how do handle fighting the honest fight to get each of them #1 for the exact same searches?

You might have no-go zones like gambling or porn or certain types of porn. These no-go zones are usually easy to define. But what about the less obvious stuff?

Would you represent the Moonies even when learning that “Moon vowed that the church’s eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism and the establishment of Moon’s theocratic rule”? If you decide not to work with this, the owner of the Washington Times, how about working for a tuna or other seafood company? Wouldn’t you because the Moonies own that industry? How about other cults?

If you’re religious, and a number of SEO’s are, do you represent other religious organizations even if they’re in conflict with your beliefs? Remember, it doesn’t have to be another religion: within one and the same religion enough divides and separations exist.

If not religious, would you still represent one, promote one, help it to reach more people?

How about other values? Get a pro- or anti-abortion site #1? Help devise ways to reach teens with tobacco related content while staying within the law?

Exploits & Relevance

Our work in no way seems to be aimed, specifically aimed, at making information retrieval via web-based search engines any better. Are we making it better together or just gaming the system?

We tend to search for and then research weaknesses in the information retrieval and ranking system we’ve targeted. Once we’ve found such a weakness we exploit it yet we’re bugged when spammers and scammers do the same to our browsers.

And when or if we find a weakness that makes no sense, something that makes something ranks for no good reason, do you report it? Would you report it?

Deserved

Finally, does your client deserve to be #1 for that phrase?

“Deserved” reeks of merit and virtue. “Deserved” seems to imply excel. Does your client, does your site, excel at what it does?

Are you improving Life and the Quality of life in general – or not? Does that matter? Why?

Conclusion

None of these issues or questions is meant to be judgmental. If it sound like they do, remember who’s judging. It certainly isn’t me.

Some of these questions are easy to answer with a quick “no, never!” or “of course, why not?”. Most aren’t or shouldn’t be. They touch upon belief, value, capitalism, consumerism, advertising. Again, if you read that with a judgmental tone, don’t forget it’s not me doing the judging.

Regardless, those questions are hard or harder to answer for ourselves. Capitalism might not be the universal standard of merit we once thought it was or maybe we mean consumerism. Much of the effects of SEO are as anonymous as the effects of advertising. To prevent unscrupulous work from that angle David Ogilvy worked towards individuals, persona; “the consumer is not an idiot. She is your wife”

Images courtesy of: Qui©he, Jaume d’Urgell and Extra Ketchup

Let Me Count The Ways: Enumerated Sphinn Wisdom

Ruud Hein — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:26:10 +0000

After having looked at one week of Sphinn SEO lessons it’s time to put a number on things.

SEO’s, SEM’s and other abbreviated people within our industry love, love, numbers. Clickthrough rate, how many positions up in the rankings, number of estimated searches per month, links per minute. Heck, even Google is into it: -6, -30, -950, -whatever number penalty. Our very own Tom Tsinas loves numbers so much he’s created a series of “[insert keyword] by the numbers” posts.

Whether there’re 4 reasons why we like lists, 7 ways to write numbered lists or 10 top reasons to avoid top 10 lists here are 44 enumerated pieces of Sphinn (SEO-ish) wisdom from the past 7 days:

5 x 3

For a total of 16 votes or an average of 3.2 votes per enumerated list:

3 x 4

For a total of 9 votes or an average of 3 votes per enumerated list:

8 x 5

For a total of 102 votes or an average of 12.75 votes per enumerated list:

2 x 6

For a total of 5 votes or an average of 2.5 votes per enumerated list:

3 x 7

For a total of 14 votes or an average of 4.6 votes per enumerated list:

1 x 8

For a total (and average…) of 10 votes:

8 Simple Reputation Management Emergency Measures

2 x 9

For a total of 21 votes or an average of 10.5 votes per enumerated list:

12 x 10

For a total of 104 votes or an average of 8.6 votes per enumerated list:

1 x 12

For a total (and average…) of 12 votes:

12 Ways to Link Building that also Increase Website Traffic

1 x 13

For a total (and average…) of 10 votes:

13 FriendFeed Tools for Twitter Refugees

1 x 15

For a total (and average…) of 3 votes:

15 Tweets of Fame

2 x 20

For a total of 16 votes or an average of 8 votes per enumerated list:

1 x 22

For a total (and average…) of 9 votes:

22 Google Laws Leaked

1 x 25

For a total (and average…) of 9 votes:

22 Google Laws Leaked

1 x 104

For a total (and average…) of 1 vote:

104 Social Bookmarking Websites to Submit To

Top 15 Enumerated Lists To Make

So what can we learn from this (forgetting for a moment that we didn’t factor in day, time of day, wind velocity, number of characters in the title and amount of coffee consumed)?

5 [subject] : 12.75 votes
12 [subject] : 12 votes
9 [subject] : 10.5 votes
13 [subject] : 10 votes & 8 [subject] : 10 votes
22 [subject] : 9 votes & 25 [subject] : 9 votes
10 [subject] : 8.6 votes
20 [subject] : 8 votes
7 [subject] : 4.6 votes
3 [subject] : 3.2 votes
4 [subject] : 3 votes & 15 [subject] : 3 votes
6 [subject] : 2.5 votes
104 [subject] : 1 vote

A top 5 list seems to be a nice one to make. Short enough to quickly go through, long enough to provide value.

Image courtesy of Claudecf

Perpetuum Mobile SEO : Reaping The Benefits

Ruud Hein — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:16:30 +0000

Recently, as I’ve hit 40 and somehow my body has just realized this , I’ve been out of the running a little bit as my body seems to be falling slightly apart. As a ~~mental case~~ good SEO everything relates to SEO for me. And thus while giving my body the rest it needed I was thinking “this is why you need some kind of perpetuum mobile of SEO”. I might have mumbled it instead of thinking it as I distinctly remember a person of the medical profession going “come again?” but face it, that’s besides the point.

The point is that despite your wonderful appearances (yes, I’m talking about you) any day might bring the moment that takes you down for at least a 10-count.

Does Your Site Go Down With You?

With you down and out for the count, what happens to your site?

Let me put that another way. Let’s assume your site is your online business . What happens to your online generated income when you go down?

Put yet another way — and now it’s a family man doing the talking – who are you taking down with you when you go down?

The best thing would be of course if your web site can weather the storm for you; if the past active investments you made in time and money pay themselves back by providing residual income, residual SEO.

Past Investments

So which search engine optimization steps could you take that help you now, in the long run and way, way down the line - even when you’re not there to push it forward?

Most of what comes to my mind is traditional white hat SEO.

Make sure your site is about one specific topic. If that topic entails many subtopics, address each one in its own subfolder or category. (See: SEO Siloing, Advanced SEO - Siloing Content, Implementing the Power of Theming and Siloing on Your Blog, PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more)

Then attract links. Build relations within your community, within your niche. (See: Building Link Targeted Content that Works, Divide and Conquer: Creating and Managing Your Link Campaign, There’s No Shortcut for Link Building: A Case for Relationship Building, Advanced Link Building - An Interview With Fantomaster)

Try to invest the time in writing that one single post, that one much needed article, that “if only someone would.” tool and get it linked (see above) so you have a shot at creating self-reinforcing authority for that one piece of content. (See: Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer!, What is a Self Reinforcing Authority)

Part of that ongoing cycle are evergreen social sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us: sites which can drive traffic not once in a spike but continuously, ensuring perpetual exposure to new audiences who in turn can link again or vote up again.

Future Proofing

You need signs of life on your site.

Write at least 8 posts and schedule them to be published, once a week. Schedule them now. You don’t know where you’ll be tomorrow; relaxing at the couch or panting in a hospital bed.

As the scheduled date for a post draws near you can always reschedule the post to a couple of weeks later.

Make sure the posts are timeless. They have to “work” in 2008 . or in 2011.

I’m one of those who believes freshness can only help your site. Think about investing in an aggregator page or aggregator section on your site. You don’t need to pipe RSS blog feeds through it only; you can just as easily pass news items and keyword feeds through it.

You can do this future proofing as simple or fancy as you want. Consider a sort of dead man’s switch where after a certain amount of days your blog states that you’re on a reduced posting schedule.

Share Information

Your tech people, your employees, your business partner, your friend, wife or husband - someone besides you needs to have access to your site and its related information.

Domain registar login, hosting login. FTP login. From which financial resource is this paid? Who needs to be called or emailed in case of emergency? Is there information which should be destroyed or returned to clients or partners? What about Adsense in case of death?

What are you doing to minimize the impact of personal down time? Have you even considered the possibility of your own down time? Is future proofing something that can be folded back into client sites?

Make The Links Come To You: New Image SEO

Ruud Hein — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:13:14 +0000

Links is what makes search really work the way it does: effectively.

Reciprocal links were all the trend, once.

“A reciprocal link directory if a vital part of having a good Google page rank. However there are ways to make it a useful and important part of your website for reasons other than a high ranking in the Google directory.”

Paid links became a fashion; did you know that before 2005, most of the time when people wrote or spoke about “paid links” they were talking about PPC?

“Google allows advertisers to bid for placement of paid links that appear when certain key words are entered on its sites.”

Standards like directory submission and article syndication.

“Write good content [.] Directory listing [.] Article submissions”

But in a world where Google can claim it has basically said not to buy links since 2003 and can be iffy on just how juicy linkbait is allowed to be, seems to me the days of tricks are over .

So. Here’s what I propose we do.

Instead of people copy and pasting your content they now have to link it.

Indiana Jones and the Age of an SEO

Ruud Hein — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:57:35 +0000

This week I watched "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and couldn’t help but realize how far I’ve come. No, not necessarily career-wise but …well… in pure years.

Glancing at my handsome avatar you might easily be deceived and even attempt to argue; "But no way, Ruud, you look like a young grasshopper — and anyway, age is all in the mind, the mind man!"

OK… Well then let me tell you this.

You know you’re old(er) when you know "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is a sequel, the fourth (count ‘m: four) movie.

You know you’re an old hand when you know that for years the only digital medium the Indiana Jones movies were available at was the LaserDisc, a medium you would want to explain by saying "it’s like a DVD but the size of a record" only to realize you dug yourself a hole and now have to explain record. So let’s just say that size-wise LaserDisc is to DVD what wide-screen television is to your wrist watch. It’s friggin’ huge.

The year "Raiders of the Lost Ark" came out, 1981, was the end of innocence as the "free love" era ended in Los Angeles with the first recognized cases of AIDS. I think I speak for all pubescent boys from that time when I quote "hey! not fair!".

Months before, the Sinclair ZX81 home computer has started selling. It comes with a whopping 1 Kilobyte of RAM but no Internet connection. Had it had one you couldn’t do anything with it because Internet Service Providers didn’t exist. There was no pressing need, no urgent market demand, either because there was no world wide web. Tim is plugging away at whatever and it will take at least another 8 years before he slams a document on the desk of his boss and says "let’s hook the suckers up man!"

1984 sees the release of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".

The year of famine in Ethiopia, Live Aid, "Do They Know It’s Christmas Time?". Crack hits the street. Dell Computers start and the Mac’s are sold. The longest baseball game in Major League history is held (over 8 hours played over 2 days). The UK and China sign an agreement to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1987.

It is In the year "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" comes out, 1989, that Tim kick starts the world you and I know so well, the virtual one we live and work in, with his paper "Information Management: a Proposal".

It’s an astounding year, thrilling: change, world wide change, is in the air. Afghanistan is free. Hungary creates a hole in "The Wall" by tearing down miles of barbed wire along its fence. Two million people form a human chain of 600 km/370 miles long to demand freedom from Russian occupation. We watch, and in Europe we celebrate, as Germans from East and West use their bare hands to give physical reality to US President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 challenge: "Tear down this wall!"

Of all people it is the human rights activist and opposition leader Václav Havel who becomes president of Czechoslovakia. Chili and Brazil hold their first free elections in decades. What started out as a small protest became well over 100,000 students peacefully demonstrating at Tiananmen Square.

GPS satellites are launched. The Guildford Four are set free. The Separate Amenities Act in South Africa is scrapped: people of every color will use the same rooms, spaces, transport…

We see it all "live", often on CNN. We see it recorded on the news. We read it in the newspaper (physical copies, often through a subscription).

And today? Today it’s "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in a year that sees a barrel of oil sell for $100 for the first time ever. Smoking bans wave over the world, from Canadian and US cities to Thailand, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and other countries. A US-based mortgage crisis sends shockwaves through the financial world — and ours. Food prices go up so high, so fast, severe riots and so-called "unrest" break out in Senegal, Pakistan, Egypt and other countries.

China and Greece are hit by the worst snow storms in 50 years. A 271 page report says global warming induced climate changes will wreak havoc on U.S. crops and forests.

Google Inc. is 10 years old and doesn’t just dominate web search and the way we interact with the web; it dominates and dictates the web. It terminates an anti-Scientology Adsense account. Wants to judge which hoaxes and jokes will be punished or not. Clones sites that become too powerful or popular. Prescribes Adsense publisher to have a clearly spelled out and labelled privacy policy but fights for the right to hide its own privacy policy.

It’s 2008, as the US broadbrand penetration growth drops to 17th place. "We" in North America are among the smaller Internet minorities with Asia being the largest online group.

Last year Technorati released 2006 numbers showing Japanese to be dominant blogging language with English quickly shrinking.

The era of cheap food is over. Change is ahead. Huge new markets are about to open. If, like Search Engine People, you’re constantly familiarizing yourself with "the world at large" and are able to service potential clients just as easily in Arabic, Spanish, French or Dutch as you do in English, your economic outlook is amazing.

Yes we can!

The world is changing, young grasshopper. It is the right time to press ahead, brother. It is the time to shape our own futures, sister.

Do it now, now.

One Week of Sphinn SEO Lessons

Ruud Hein — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:53:03 +0000

What valuable lessons, if any, do we teach on Sphinn regarding SEO?

A high-level analysis of one week of Sphinn postings.

The Selection

I’m coming at this from an angle where a non-SEO site owner says "hey, I have to do something… now let’s learn from the best".

I sifted through the 900+ items posted between Friday May 9 00:00 and Thursday May 15 24:00, culling the ones that seemed to convey real value for a newcomer and dropping items like "30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots", "Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference", "Exercises For Lower Ab Workouts" or "Is Bebo better than Facebook? Creating a profile network".

As much as possible I dropped questions that didn’t seem to provide a definitive answer of value to the newcomer. I forgot about insider discussions, insider watercooler jokes and a whole bunch of other stuff.

In short, I sat down and looked at what I could learn from Sphinn were I new to SEO and get some answers.

I did 3 rounds. Once picking everything that seemed plausible. Second round I went over those items and picked out the good stuff. Third time around was on the article level where I had to let go of some forum spam, some article directory content and posts that in 100 words would repeat the question they had raised.

The Results

The results were surprising.

After round 1 and 2 I ended up with a little over 90 items that has passed the smell test.

By the end of round 3, which coincided with having compiled the lists, 57 items were left on the table.

Let me be honest with you; I hadn’t expected this. The idea for this post was one that had me doing an evil laugh. The idea was more along the line of a linkbaity "24 Sphinn Contradictions" or "The Top 10 Things Sphinners Disagree On" … But no, if you stick with it and dig down deep enough, there’s actually some pretty solid material to go with.

Hiring SEO

The SEO Basics

A Bit More Advanced SEO

Keywords & Keyword Research

Links & Link Building

Web Analytics

WordPress & Blogging

Duplicate Content

Tools

Theoretical Discussions & Opinion

Images courtesy of Dean Terry and l0ckergn0me

Fumbling Your Site

Ruud Hein — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:03:58 +0000

The Algorithm is Human is a series of post explaining search engine behaviour from a plain and simple human point of view.

Ever had this happen to you?

As you take a cup out of the cupboard another one falls.

Or, just as you put your mug on the table, out of the corner of your eye you see the sugar pot falling.

You see it happen and act immediately!

Your hand reaches out for the falling object and you do reach it in time! Touching it with your fingertips you push the object and fail to grip it. You now made it spin and flip upside down so along comes your other hand, a bit lower, to nimbly catch it here and…. No! You made it bounce to the left! Instead of falling it now slams! into the nice plate — which breaks.

You stand there, looking at the disaster, and can’t help but think how your actions made things so much worse. Somehow it seems it would have been better if you had just let the thing go.

Your Site is Falling

Sometimes this is precisely what we do to our site when its rankings are falling.

We try to go for it (fast!), catch it (in time!), grip it (hard!) and in trying to do all those things at once, we only manage to make a mess.

And then, as with the kitchen stuff, the question comes up: would things have been better if you had just let the thing go?

Overreaction = Obfuscation

The problem now is that all your fumbling has obfuscated the real problem.

Even if you would assume for a moment that all the quick steering and guiding and running and doing has helped — the question remains, what has had which effect?

What just happened?

The initial cause is virtually impossible to determine at this point.

And what worked? What did what?

Did removing your footer link to the sitemap make things better or worse? Has adding your desired keyphrase 20 more times had a beneficial effect or is it what made your site go down 5 positions further?

Did buying some additional high quality, “undetectable” paid links boost you +2 or made you drop -3?

Steers Like a Tanker

Web sites and ranking is like steering a ship with just one difference: things are even slower with search engines.

Turn the steer and initially nothing seems to be happening. The reaction to your action seems to be delayed — and in case of search engines that delay is often measured in weeks leading into months; certainly not days.

By the time you come on deck and think “hey, darn, the ship is turning!” the real action has already taken place — long ago.

The best course of action?

Let it go.

Your web site is reacting to things done possibly months ago. If the professionals you hired are doing what they’re good at, adjustments have already been made — months ago.

What you do today, how you react now… that in turn will determine your course a couple of months down the line.

So, slow and steady smooth sailing vs. spinning steering wheels: you pick.

Images courtesy of The Rocketeer and Jef Poskanzer

How Search Really Works: Grabbing Most Red M&M’s

Ruud Hein — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:19:41 +0000

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Previously: Relevance (2)

Instead of painstakingly grabbing the absolute best matches for your query to then rank those with infinite precision, one time saving strategy has search engines go for “close enough”.

Painstaking Precision

Given all the time, money and resources in the world, here’s what we’d normally do.

Word by word you go through a search. You look in your documents and see which has word one…. word two… word three…. You get the picture.

You give some plus points for every time a searched word appears in a document. How many points? Depends on the TFxIDF score for that specific word.

You add up the scoring into a sum, measured by relevance again. Do the same for the query itself (treating it like a very short document basically). In short: you’re calculating their vector space scores.

Measure the mathematical similarity between document 1 and the query, document 2 and the query, document 3 and… Yup.

And then you can’t just slap all those on the screen. You have to tailor to the searcher’s need and pick and sort the top scoring documents!

Now you could sort all your scored documents at once or just go for the top number of documents needed; say the first or next 10 because the searchers has that set as maximum results per page.

Instead of doing this HUGE sorting routine you throw all values together in a big black hat (mathematicians call this a “heap”), come up with the top 10 documents or so and only then sort them.

Perceived Relevance

What struck me as funny is that this high precision, high-cost way of doing things doesn’t necessarily mean you get the most bang for you buck, the best quality results for your searcher’s patience.

No, the mathematical similarity between our search and those documents is something we perceive as relevant.

That’s a low payback to work for when the cost is so high; comparing a huge number of documents, calculating mathematical similarities…. grabbing the top of the heap…

The perception of relevance is something a search engine can use though by going for “good enough”.

The Inexact Sort Of Top 10-ish Documents You Might Want

Instead of calculating the top 10 with high precision, why not grab a bundle of documents that will most probably be in that top 10?

Just grab a bunch of documents that are in the race to be the answer to the searcher’s query and take the top 10 of that bunch!

Even though this top 10 is not The Top 10 we would have found using our Painstaking Precision method, it will contain many documents that would have been in that top 10 or near it.

It’s like having a bowl of M&M’s and wanting to eat red ones. You could sort them out painstakingly and then go for the red ones… or you could grab in that area where you see most of the red ones seem to be.

In order of appearance, images courtesy of westpark, Irina Souiki and jacalynsnana

SEO, The Economy — and Your Future

Ruud Hein — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:01:58 +0000

At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?

OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.

But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:

Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;

"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."

As rice went over $25 for the first time in history and a rice shortage hits the US, two large US retailers rationed food sales.

These, my friend, are interesting times, to say the least. And it’s only just begun…

As we start to tighten our belts a wave of bankruptcies rolls over retailers across America.

Sure Money For You

It’s my opinion that the above will mean an increase in money spend on the web, both by consumers and producers.

As budgets tighten an Internet connection is the sole subscription which delivers the most bang for its buck. News, video, music, games, books, contact, forums, tips, information, fun and what not — all for the same price of connecting your computer to the web.

Most "rewards", from a drive around town to a trip to the mall and from catching a movie to eating out, will now cost at least twice as much; (1) gas, (2) rising food prices. Getting something from somewhere will actually be very expensive and in most cases you’ll be better of having it come to you. Online sales (those small "rewards" we feel we’ve earned) will be on the up.

As money is going towards the web, producers will want to get their slice. They’ll want to optimize their pay per click and they definitely will want some of that free gold; organic search results.

Prices may change — but your future is secure.

Secure Money For You

Donna Fontenot, who recently did a guest post here, advises those without current means to make money from the online economy to start an online ebusiness:

"Now is the time to start your ebusiness. It may not help you financially in the short term, since few new sites make much money right away. But you’ll be that much closer to pulling a profit from it later on when you need it most, if you start now. While you still have a job, it can begin to supplement your income, helping you pay the extra costs for gas and food."

Freebie Tip

Anything that is real added value will become a huge differentiator. Pennies will be pinched and anything you can add to the consumer’s budget is a step into the direction of a sale.

Does your client, or do you, have free shipping? Calculate the average shipping cost. That is the value the client is getting so make it clear: "FREE $20 in shipping cost".

Go back, calculate again. Maybe it is much cheaper to say "FREE INSTANT $20 DISCOUNT ON ANY SALE" but have people pay for shipping?