I remember the day I went to buy a new PC. Vista just came out and I heard some bad things about it. Bugs, bugs, bugs and you guessed it…bugs. So like any shopper I tried to play it safe by buying a PC with Windows XP on it. After several trips to several stores I quickly found out that Microsoft took every machine with XP off the market and/or upgraded them all to Vista. I was trapped. I recall asking a sales associate where I could find a computer with Windows XP still on it.

Our conversation went something like this…

Me - “Can I still buy a PC with Windows XP on it?”
Sales Guy - “Uhh, not gonna happen.”
Me - “You mean to tell me Microsoft is forcing you to buy Vista.”
Sales Guy - “Whoa, whoa, whoa buddy, Microsoft isn’t forcing you to buy anything.”
Me - (Pause….) “You’re an idiot.”

Ok, I didn’t say, “you’re an idiot.” But that’s what I was thinking. After all, I built my life and career around a PC. Much like a cell phone, if you take it away, will I survive? Yes. But society, work, and life in general are built around these things and I’ve adapted to them. Long story short, I needed a new PC so yes, I bought Vista.

With in 2 months the first bug hit. It seemed as if Internet explorer vanished of my PC. I’m serious it was gone. So, like any PC user I tried using the Help feature. Whoops “Help” is built directly into IE and my IE went MIA. So I called support. Their answer was to package it up and send it in. One problem. I use my PC. Oh, and I use it everyday. So, I never sent it in. 3 months later as miraculous as it disappearing it just reappeared. But it was too late. The non-stop spyware, pop-ups, viruses, virus protectors and everything else turned me off for good.

Someone once said to me, “Mac’s makes Windows look like a cheap knock off.” Nothing could be more true. That’s exactly how I felt with in hours of using my new Mac.

But if you still want to try Windows 7 here’s the system requirements and the best video review I saw on Youtube.  Comment on what you think?

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

If you, your web design company or your SEO company are having a tough time deciding what directories to submit your website to then keep reading. I’m sure you don’t want to waist money and I know you don’t want to get penalized or banned from Google. To begin…yes, buying links are a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and a violation could cause your website to be dropped in the search results. So, I have compiled a list of the top 9 free and paid directories that are Google approved.

Before scrolling down to all the directories, play the video of Matt Cutts, (Head of Google’s web spam team) talking about what to look for when submitting to directories. (This is what I mean by “Google approved”)

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1. Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

Cost: Free

DMOZ is maintained by volunteer editors and has strict guidelines and criteria all websites must meet before being accepted. Also, the listings in Google’s directory (http://www.google.com/dirhp) are pulled directly from DMOZ.  Need I say more.

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2. Yahoo Directory

Cost: $299.00 per year

The Yahoo Directory is a human edited directory comparable in size to DMOZ.  The reason this directory is so highly regarded is because they have very strict submission guidelines.  In fact, the $299.00 is just to get their editors to review and respond to you.  It DOES NOT guarantee your submission. So, if you are not accepted you do not get your money back.  If you’re worried, don’t be. Just follow the Yahoo Guidelines before submitting.

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3. Best of the Web (BOTW)

Cost: $99 per year or $299.00 one time fee

Best of the Web has been around since 1994. Upon submission your website will be reviewed in 3 days but does not guarantee your website will be accepted, just a review and response. NO REFUNDS. Criteria for Submission

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4. Business.com

Cost: $299.00 per year

Business.com has 40 million websites and 8+ million unique visitors per month.  Business.com is not only a good backward link but also a good source of traffic. They are very strict and don’t accept Gambling sites, adult sites, multi-level marketing sites and retail tobacco sites.  Here are their submission guidelines.  Read them before you submit.  There are no refunds.

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5. Joeant.com

Cost: $39.00 one time fee

JoeAnt is edited by humans and has strict guidelines and criteria all websites must meet before being accepted.  http://www.joeant.com/guidelines.html

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6. Jayde.com

Cost: Free

Jayde.com is edited by humans and has strict guidelines and criteria all websites must meet before being accepted.

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7. Librarian’s Internet Index

Cost: Free

This site is very hard to get into. They do not accept sites that are strictly commercial with no freely-accessible information. This site is edited by humans.

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8. GoGuides.org

Cost: $69.99

This directory is edited by humans and has strict guidelines.  But if you’re rejected you get your money back.  Try it. It only takes about 24 hours to get your response.

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9. Starting Point

Cost: $99 one time fee

This directory is edited by humans and has strict guidelines.  All rejections are NON Refundable.

1. While this is usually considered SEO 101, we see it time and time again - a site will be beautifully optimized except for the fact that the images either lack alt tags or have something generic.  It is such a simple step but apparently it is easy to overlook.  For more on optimizing your alt tags, check out our post - How Important Are Alt Tags?

2.  Wikipedia pages are highly coveted by the SEO community and marketing types alike, and for good reason.  However, not every brand or individual deserves a page, and creating a Wikipedia page that sticks is easier said than done.  That said, if the site/brand you are working is worthy, creating/editing and keeping their Wikipedia page accurate and up-to-date with relevant links is a must.

3.  Use your or your client’s address book.  Think about how many people you know that have their own websites, especially other business owners.  By networking offline within your industry and community, you can get free quality links simply by taking advantage of your social graph.

4.  Targeting just the home page can work for some SEO projects, but for larger sites with fifty plus keywords, it can be a mistake to only focus on the home page as the only doorway through which visitors arrive.

5.  Never linking out to interesting, useful, or entertaining sites.  Don’t be afraid that your users are going to disappear forever once they leave your site (they found you once, they’ll know how to get back - especially if you are on page #1 of the search results).  Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

6.   Links from .edu domains are given extra weight by the search engines.  Search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors - you could support a local school’s charity event.  Also consider posting internships or entry level jobs with university career services, since most of them have job sites specifically for students and alumni.

7.  Neglecting the basics like adding your listing in the Google Local Business Center or setting up Yelp and Citysearch profiles when applicable.  LinkedIn is another big one that companies often don’t take advantage of - you and your employees should be linking to your company’s website and social media presence.

8.  Microsites purely for their own sake.  Sometimes microsites are the right call for a particular marketing campaign, but much of the time they are unnecessary - keep all the valuable content and links coming to the original domain instead of spreading it out.

9.  NoFollow fails- either there is no use of the nofollow attribute at all, especially on larger sites with hundreds of pages that probably need it in order to direct the search engine crawlers where you want them to go.

Happy 9/9/09 everyone, and hope the day was lucky for you!

Like a good lawyer, a good SEO consultants understands how to structure an argument/website in order to get the ideal verdict/ranking.  By building the right components into the website, choosing the keywords that make sense for your objectives, and establishing a content and link-building strategy that presents your site in the best possible light to the search engines so they rule in your favor/rank you highly.

Fellow SEOs, what do you think about this analogy?  Do you sometimes feel like the lawyers of the internet?

On the other hand, bigger companies (we’re talking at least a couple hundred employees) have different issues to deal with.  There may be trade secrets, legal issues, and other questions to answer about what employees are putting out there online, so creating a document that details the “rules of engagement” can be the ounce of prevention that prevents future disasters.  There are few key questions to ask before creating these rules of engagement:

• Language - is your industry conservative or not?  This affects the type of language you and your employees use when representing the company online.  For instance, I can say “That’s a damn good website, no SEO fails there.” while perhaps a financial consulting firm would not want their employees using the same language while representing them.
• Legal - any copyrights, trade secrets, patents, etc. should be addressed and your employees should know what they can and cannot disclose.
• Learning - is there any training your employees will need before they get started representing your company on the social web?
• Launch time - do employees know what will be expected of their participation in social media?  Do they know what they have to do daily/weekly/monthly?  Providing some kind of checklist or ideas and examples for them can be very helpful.

Check out the article for a great list of social media guidelines from some of the world’s biggest brands - and if you are currently creating a social media guideline for your company, email us (or Twitter - @SEOGroup) and see how we can help!

Therefore, the entire team at The Ocean Agency is going to liveblog Mad Men as a group this year, starting with the opening episode that is less than a week away (personally, I don’t know how I’ve made it this long without a weekly fix of Sterling Cooper style).  Of course, we are far from the only people live blogging Mad Men, but I think we are putting a unique twist in that we are a creative agency ourselves - and we like to think that if Sterling Cooper existed in the present times, they would be a small, agile firm that worked with major brands as well as entrepreneurs who want to change the world.

Check back this week for a post on how we think Sterling Cooper would react to the way that technology in general and search engines in particular have changed the way advertising companies do things.

Of course, creating something worthwhile and getting the message out there through organic SEO, social media, and other delivery methods is easier said than done, and we are not surprised that some companies do find it easier to simply throw some money at the problem instead of developing quality content or a linking strategy that involves more than just spending some money.  For instance, developing partnerships with other companies (for instance, firms in related industries, like interior designers if you are a real estate agent) is one way to get natural high quality links.  Another strategy would be to create something helpful like a how-to guide that your users will share with their social network, or something really entertaining that they would want to forward to all their friends.

Developing a link building strategy that does not rely on paid links is also important since the FTC has begun to crack down on paid links if they are not clearly described as “sponsored” or given some other indication that this link is not a natural one (and of course, Google has their own guidelines).   Of course, clearly defined paid links are not going to hurt you, but natural links that come from having content that others want to share are going to have a much more significant impact on your rankings in the long term (although paid links can be great if you need immediate results).

Overall, it is important that you make sure that your linking strategy is clearly within the FTC guidelines - you might get away with it for a while, but determining a strategy that will help you acquire natural links is the way to long term success.

Our initial opinion?  It is not going to drastically change anything overnight.  Google still has most of the market share and in a way, combining the two lesser search engines actually will save SEO types time and effort in the long run, since they are not dealing with rankings on two different engines with different algorithms.  If you use Yahoo Site Explorer or other tools on a regular basis, you might want to consider finding alternatives - with Bing taking over, these may not be available for long.

What are your thoughts on the new Yahoo powered by Bing - do you think it is an attempt to join forces against the Goliath that is Google (two Davids are better than one?) or do you think that is a smart  move that will change the online search game?  If you work in SEO, do you think that this move will affect your work?

Around the office we use delicious to internally share and comment on interesting news and opinions in the internet marketing world. Here are some stories that got our office buzzing this week.

First, from Sheli Israel’s blog, the introduction to her upcoming book, Twitterville. The introduction paints a fascinating portrait of the power of Twitter, and how it has changed communication forever. I’ll look forward to reading the book when it comes out later this year. It’s really cool to think about how Twitter takes away geographic constraints, and is restructuring the way we communicate. On the other hand, i’m not sure that i’m sold on the idea that Twitter is the innovation that will help the economy  rebound. Only time will tell.

Second, on the social web, boring old SEO news can get overshadowed. It’s back in the news today after Esquire’s creative keyword use to improve its SEO and attract male readers. They included the words “Mary Louise Parker Naked” in the title of the online interview with her.  This story, while amusing, also reflects a slight PR failure on Esquire’s part. Now they are going to be known as the magazine who tries to trick web surfers into viewing their articles. No good.

Third, we’ve had a lot of discussion about online PR and the future of PR in our company this week. Mashable had a great article about the coming “twitter sized press release”. Now, PR has always been about leveraging relationships and getting your voice heard in the right places and in front of the right people. Social media allows for this to happen, and most times it is free. Companies must be careful of their PR efforts on social media however–remaining open, engaged, and informative is just as important as spewing a press release everywhere.

Hope your week was enjoyable and enjoy your weekend!

1.  Missing or duplicate meta data - Having no meta data or having it simply repeat the brand is an obvious SEO problem that is easy to fix most of the time.  The same goes for duplicate meta data - sometimes the developers will repeat the same meta tags throughout the whole website, which the search engines may read as duplicate content, resulting in a failure to rank.

2.  Text as images - Content is king online, so don’t lock up your text in Flash or as images, no matter how cool it might look.  If you don’t give the search engines content to crawl you will have a hard time ranking no matter what else you do.

3.  No internal linking - A solid internal linking strategy helps your users navigate through your site and it ensures that the search engines crawl and rank your website.

4.  Missing or irrelevant alt tags - If you have images on your site, it is a simple matter to ensure that keywords are placed in your alt tags, and it will definitely have a positive effect on your rankings.  Also, it helps users who cannot view the images for whatever reason (they are visually impaired, they have a slow connection, or they are using a substandard browser like IE6) understand the content on your site.

5.  No robots.txt file - This file tells the search engines what pages of your site should be indexed and what should be ignored.  Even if there are no pages on your site that you want to leave out of the search results, this file is still essential as it helps the search engine crawlers determine what to do with your site’s pages.