Back in March we wrote a blog post regarding one of our current SEO R&D projects, HD Movie Trailers Online. It’s been about 6 months, so it would be timely to post an update on the progress of that project.

First, we have taken a minimalistic approach to the search engine optimization of this site. We’re doing about as much SEO as the average blogger or website owner might do, except we are armed with a little understanding of how the search engines work. We don’t have any overly grand expectations that we will dominate the niche, but we want to be competitive. We will also gain a better understanding of how we should sell our SEO services to our clients.

The niche that we choose, HD movie trailers, is somewhat competitive with many well-known brands competing in the space such as Apple and Yahoo. There are also a few well-funded start-ups coming into the space. We also understand that this space is not over saturated like consumer products. Understanding this, we can weigh our actual success and how we might apply these tactics to client’s sites.

We selected a small group of keywords to monitor throughout the project. We won’t reveal those exact keywords, but it is sufficient to say that some are more competitive than others.  Here is a breakdown of what we did:

Site Creation and Content

• Used a virgin domain name that was less than a year old.
• Created a well optimized website with a very narrow focus point (high definition movie trailers) using a custom WordPress theme.
• Added some seed content to the site such as movie trailers. A note about the content: The video content is provided by Yahoo and AOL and others. The site does not host any of the video content, but uses JW Player to present the content from the trailer providers. A brief review/summary (text) is provided for each trailer. Usually one or two sentences are written by us at the beginning of the post, and then there is a brief summary that is provided by the production company or a well-known review site. Text length is usually about a paragraphs worth of text for each post. Not all of the text for each post is original.

Initial Site Announcement

• We added a XML and HTML sitemap and registered the sitemap with Google via Webmaster Tools.
• We added a few “Update Services” for our RSS feed such as Ping-O-Matic, IceRocket, Technorati, etc.
• We wrote a simple and basic press release announcing the website launch and submitted it to a few free press release services that provide some SEO value.
• We cross promoted with Blogs we own, operate, or control (where the mention made sense) by writing a brief blog post. (Four in total.)

Ongoing Activities

• We began making minimal updates to the site. Early on, we were making 4-8 updates per week. Most recently, we are making 2-4 updates per week. These updates consisted of posting new movie trailers.
• We began a basic backlinking campaign. This campaign was very minimalistic, but focused on presumed authority sites. Most were “dofollow”, but a few were “nofollow”. We created no more than 10 of these links.
• We promoted the RSS feed, which is multimedia heavy, to major Media RSS sites such as Miro and Podcast Alley.
• According to our backlink profile, we have picked up very few valuable links outside of our network or sites that we pursued.

According to the logs that we kept of our activities, this information is fairly accurate. There maybe one or two things that have been neglected.

The Results

• By the second week of the website launch, Google had indexed 90% of the site content.
• By the end of the second week all the control keywords were ranking on the 3^rd page of Google except for the least competitive which were ranked on the low side of 2^nd page.
• By the end of the third week all keywords were appearing on the second page.
• By the end of the second month the least competitive keywords were appearing on the first page. All other keywords except for the most competitive were appearing high on the second page.
• By the end of the sixth month all keywords are appearing high on the first page except for the most competitive keyword which is bouncing on and off the first page on a daily basis.

Other Results

Search results for a specific set of keywords don’t tell the whole story. Long tail keywords accounted for 50% of the traffic to the entire site during this six month period. We attribute this to the highly optimized structure of the site. We estimate that the Domain Authority and Page Authority of the site remains fairly low, however we were able to overcome this disadvantage by having strong on-site optimization. For those that are always thinking of PageRank, according to Google’s PageRank Tool, we were able to achieve a PR 4 in a short time (within the first 2 months).

Onward and Upward

While the results we achieved in the first six months are very promising, we will continue with our next phase of the project and step a few things up. We will continue to pick-and-choose our content for post, but will post regularly. We will focus a backlinking campaign over the next three to four months on “dofollow” blogs to see how those affect the ranking position of keywords in Google.

You wonder where you should spend your efforts to get those highly prized organic SERPs. Just like SEO, the answer is complicated yet simple. When you get right down to it, SEO is an exercise in common sense. And so is the answer to what has replaced PageRank as one of the most important factors in high rankings. We’ll call it Google Trust and Authority.

Fundamentally, Google Trust and Authority is similar to PageRank, it just involves a few more elements and springs from a different source. I’m still evolving my opinion on Google Trust and Authority and I think most SEOs are, as well. Aspects of Trust and Authority may be independent from each other in the algorithm and some aspects maybe tied together.

One thing remains the same, the backlinks that you have are still important and so is the anchor text. The importance of where those links are has changed whether they are at the bottom of page, top of page, what is the Authority of the site your links appear on, etc.

What is Trust in the eyes of Google? As you might expect, only Google knows exactly what Trust is, but I suspect it has something to do with the age of a domain name, who owns the domain name, what kind of activities have been going on with the domain and sister domains. Do these domains hang out in bad parts of town with other thugs (aka spammers). Or are you hanging out with respected domains that have something to offer to WWW users. I think Google, in part, is looking at your track record.

What is Authority in the eyes of Google? The theory goes, Google has picked out a bunch of Authority Seed sites (like maybe NASA) and authority flows from those sites like PageRank. So, the closer you are to these Authority Seeds in your backlinking structure the more authority you have. Think of it like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. Obviously the person only one degree from Mr. Bacon has more authority on how he likes his eggs compared to the person that is six degrees away.

If you think about it, it makes sense. I’m sure that I have over simplified Google Trust and Authority in this post, but I think that this will get your wheels turning and allow your give PageRank a rest. You may be interested in reading a related article over at SEO by the Sea written quite a while back about this very subject when Google applied for a patent that might control some of this.

We had a couple of design goals when we started:

• Contemporary design with logical navigation that most users would be familiar with
• Clear call to action for new and existing users
• Extend MCA’s brand from their print marketing to the Website
• Animation on the homepage without the use of Flash

We also had some administration goals to keep in mind. MCA’s old Website did not lend itself to updating or changes without a significant amount of involvement from many parties.

Administration Goals:

• Content Management System (CMS) for editing and adding content with ease by staff
• Management of the homepage slideshow from the CMS with the ability to create an advertisement within the slideshow and direct the user to more information with a click.
• Multiple administrative users
• Integrated blogging system for news and updates from MCA

We were able to meet all of goals for the project and deliver a Website to MCA that the can use to extend their brand for years to come with a low cost of maintenance.

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The foundation for any search engine optimization strategy is developing a list of relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrases that searchers type into search engines to find a Web site like yours. Not all keywords are created equal, so we need to set some criteria for the types of keywords that we want to target in a SEO campaign.

Our keyword criteria might look something like this:

• Keywords must be relevant to product or service. It doesn’t help you to be bringing in traffic from people looking for widgets if you are selling gadgets.
• Keywords shouldn’t be generic or too broad in meaning. Not only are generic keywords highly completive, but are less likely to produce any action from the searcher. For example let’s pretend you are a heavy equipment retailer:  A top ranking for “farming” will not likely generate any business, but a top ranking for “farm tractor” would more likely get your phone ringing. Even better would be “farm tractor in Chattanooga”, assuming your equipment business is located in Chattanooga, TN.

Now that we have set some basic criteria for our keywords, we need to determine what the keywords are. The first step is to do a bit of brainstorming. Ask yourself how you would search for products and services like yours. Ask your friends and family members. Ask yourself what kind of problems people are trying to solve who might need a company like yours. Another good way is to look at sites that you might be competing with and try to understand keywords they are targeting.

There are tools online and software packages that can help you. Google might have the best free tools, but sites like Word Tracker can be helpful too. I don’t recommend many software packages, because they can lead you down the wrong path. The best resource you have is your understanding of your products, services and company while anticipating and understanding your consumers.

For this exercise, we will use Google’s Keyword Tool. After you have brain stormed your keywords, you should enter them into the Google Keyword Tool. Google will spit out a list of keywords with numbers for “Local Search Volume” and “Global Search Volume”. You should remove any columns that aren’t relevant. Once you have your list, export it as a CSV file for importation into your favorite spreadsheet program.

Once you have your spreadsheet, you’ll want to remove any keywords that aren’t relevant to keep your spreadsheet lean and mean. Now we will have to gather additional information to determine what our best keywords are. What we are looking for is the most popular and relevant keywords with the least amount of competition. You could be surprised by the relevant keywords that are overlooked by your competition.

To determine the competitive nature of your keywords, you will need to use Google. We’ll use the keyword “farm tractor”. Search this term without the quotes. We are looking for some particular information here. You’ll notice that Google displays something like this on the right side above the results, “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,850,000 for farm tractor.” The number 1,850,000 is what we are looking for, but don’t be too concerned with how large this number appears. This number represents how many pages “farm tractor” appears on.

We really want to know how many pages we are competing with. To determine this, we’ll add an operator to our search like this “allintitle: farm tractor”.  Now we see something like this: “Results 1 – 10 of about 822,000 for allintitle: farm tractor.” This tells us how many pages have “farm tractor” in the title.  This number looks more reasonable. The title is a key SEO element that helps determine search engine ranking. Now we add the number 822,000 to a new column in our spreadsheet. Repeat this for all your keywords.

Once you have completed the list you’ll have a good understanding of the keywords that you should target in your SEO campaign. What you are looking for is keywords that have a high “Global Search Volume” and a low “allintitle” value.

Following these concepts, while somewhat simplified, will give you a head start on your SEO campaign and your competition. This list of keywords will now help you determine the content and menu structure for your site, because now you know the best way to reach your customers.

Understanding that Robert wanted to spend as little time as possible dealing with uploading and editing Web pages we developed Robert B. Mullins – Songs & Music, a simple WordPress site with a few features customized for his purposes:

One interface for management of blog posts, songs, and Web pages.

We designed custom WordPress templates that distinguishes between song posts and blog posts and categorizes and styles them accordingly. WordPress already has a powerful page management system built in, so we employed that system to ease content management difficulty.

Upload and management of MP3s from the same interface with automatic insertion.

We integrated a Web based Flash MP3 player within the templates to facilitate the playing of music on a song by song and page by page bases. We used the custom field and media management capabilities of WordPress to automate and simplify adding MP3s to the Web site.

Robert’s primary goal is to allow as many people to listen to his songs as possible. Believing that potential listeners of his songs might be looking at his site on an iPhone, we implemented some basic browser detection to overcome the iPhone’s inability to view Flash. When an iPhone views a page with the Flash MP3 player, the page presents the iPhone with a media type that it understands.

Our design approach was simple. We had a few goals:

• Bring the site live as fast as possible.
• Focus the site on the songs with an uncluttered and simple design while reflecting who Robert is as a song writer.
• Keep the cost down while not sacrificing functionality.

We decided to approach the site design like Frank Miller approached Sin City. We didn’t waste a single pixel. And we won’t waste your time while you discover some killer rock n’ roll from an extraordinary songwriter and musician — Robert B. Mullins – Songs & Music.

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Our latest project is a Web site called HD Movie Trailers Online. This is the sister project to the music video site we discussed previously. This project has a similar approach, but with different goals and using some different SEO techniques. Not only are we trying some different (or at least refined) SEO techniques we took the opportunity to explore automation and simplification on the back end for CMS (content management system).

The site uses the same basic back end system as the  music video site with some modification and improvements. Using the same back end system allowed us to bring the site live fairly quickly. Our design goal was to keep the site as simple as possible while bringing full attention to the movie trailers. Basically, if the end users ignores our design and watches the trailers without detraction we have achieved our design goal.

The SEO action plan is also simple. We will not pursue aggressive techniques, but rely on the content and user interface to build interest in the site. We will use some traditional marketing techniques to bring some minimal interest and see how well the site performs against mainstream sites such as Apple, Yahoo and AOL.

The site went live at the end of February. We will be carefully logging our activities and the results. The results of this R&D project will determine how we implement the applied strategies into future SEO projects for our clients. The things we learned on the design and development side will pay immediate dividends for our clients.

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The Web site is expected to fully launch the last week of January.

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In the first weeks of January, Google began rolling out a new and more power version of their search engine, code named “Caffeine”.

Is your Web site up to snuff? Has your Web design company or developer taking into consideration the future of Google search and SEO in general? If you are using the World Wide Web as part of your business strategy or if you are trying to figure out how to incorporate a Web strategy, understanding what “Caffeine” has in store is important.

It is believed that “Caffeine” or at least the first incarnation of “Caffeine” will not be earth shattering. Don’t expect search engine ranking position (SERP) to change overnight. However, if your Web site is not on its game, expect to be shuffled out of search results quicker.

Basically the new Google will index faster, be more accurate, and be more comprehensive. This is what it means to your Web site:

• Google will be able to keep up with fresh content better. This means that you need to continually create content for your site to help maintain your relevance. This is not a new concept be is now more important than ever.
• Accuracy… That’s a scary one. Not only will Google try to match the best page to the searcher’s keywords, but they will take into consideration the searchers behavior on the results page and their behavior once they arrive at your page. This puts some power is the searchers hands. This boils down to: A keyword optimized page is not going to be enough. A sites user interface is important as well.
• Being comprehensive is a goal that Google has always strived for. “Caffeine” will allow them to do that better than ever. Themed sites or sites with a specific profile have always done well in Google search results, expect those sites to continue to do well. With more pages being indexed, your site should be comprehensive in terms of content.

In the end a good Web site with good design that is organized and well thought out and features good SEO, will continue to be a good Web site. If you have a good design/development/SEO team, you don’t have to worry too much. Otherwise, you may want to reconsider your Web strategy. Abraxas Web Design & SEO is always ready to help you fill in the gaps.

I use many Firefox plugins for many different reasons, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll stick to writing about three of the most useful for the purpose of Web design and development.

FireBug

If you use CSS, Firebug is a quick way to monitor and debug both your HTML and CSS in real-time from within Firefox. Firebug goes another step and allows you to do the same with JavaScript. Before there was Firebug, you had to hunt through your CSS to find the code that was not generating the desired result on your Web page. Once you found the code and made your edits you had to upload it to your server and hope that it fixed your problem. If it didn’t, you had to start all over again… Firebug eliminates all that trial and error. Debugging time is greatly reduced which means your chances of bringing your projects in on time and on budget is greatly increased.

Read more about Firebug at the Mozilla download page.

MeasureIt

Often times as a designer and developer, I find myself measuring design elements on the screen. Before MeasureIt, I had to look through code, rely on my memory, or make a guess. This simple little tool lets me measure any element on the screen for a quick estimate on how many pixels an element takes up. Again, I find myself saving a huge amount of time over the course of a month.

Download MeasureIt from the developers website.

Web Developer Toolbar

This Firefox plugin has so many uses that I could never cover them in one post. I can perform tasks that are important as a developer and tasks that are important to SEO. Basically it works by adding a tool bar above the browser window. A few things that this plugin will do: Disable and clear cookies for a session, quick access to code validation, browse like a robot, and so much more. This plugin will assist you with many high level tasks that your couldn’t do before or took a lot of time.

Read more about Web Developer Toolbar and all of it features at the author’s website.

These three Firefox plugins will help you design and develop better sites in less time. Don’t give up on your other browsers. I still love Internet Explorer and Chrome and you should always check your pages in all the major browsers.

Let’s get right to the good stuff.

1. Increased Budgets for SEO – Companies will focus more of their marketing budget on SEO. According to Forrester in their report on interactive marketing tactics, the top three areas where marketers feel there is the most potential over the next three years is social media, online video, and SEO. The bottom three is radio, newspaper, and yellow page ads. 2010 may prove the best year yet to be in the SEO business.
2. Binary Search Engine World – Google continues to grow its market share and Bing and Yahoo slip in the latest studies. With Bing to provide organic search results for Yahoo in the near future and the “all but” merger of the two, expect the Yahoo search engine to be marginalized. This is going to leave us with about an 80/20 split between Google and Bing with Google in the lead. This could be a good thing for SEO experts. Looking at and comparing search results from Google and Bing, Bing may be producing more relevant search results. If Bing can continue to produce high quality results 2011 may be their year. In the end search users just want to find what they are looking for in the fastest way possible.
3. Google Gonna Keep its Traffic – Traditionally Google wanted to send traffic to the most relevant web pages based on search terms. These days and the trend will continue to grow, Google is keeping more of it traffic. If you were to search “weather 37412”, Google will give you the current conditions and a 4 day forecast without ever leaving the search engine. You can get the latest baseball scores, track your shipments, and even sample music from your favorite artists. Expect more of this type of information to be available. Bing is also trending this way in much the same information.
4. Yahoo Site Explorer to Disappear – One of the best SEO tools available for free, Yahoo Site Explorer, will vacate the cloud and leave all the SEO experts who relied on it in the dust. I believe this will be a product the Binghoo phenomena. Surely other tools will emerge to take the place of good ole Site Explorer.
5. Real Time Search will Burst the Bubble – All the rage for the last few weeks is that Google is integrating real time search from Twitter. My opinion is that this is truly diabolical in the sense that these “real time results” at the top of the search results pollute the organic results on the first page. It’s akin to digging out bones from a plate of fish. If Google really wants to include these results, they are going to have to find a better way. This whole Twittergate debacle reminds me of the early days of SEO when you could be at the top of Infoseek just by submitting the freshest page. I understand that Google is testing, and I hope they see the light. I’m hoping that the introduction of Caffeine will solve this problem…

Honorable mention: Google Caffeine – It’s a little too early to see how Caffeine will affect SEO, so I have left it out of the top 5. Early results are that search engine ranking position (SERP) will not be affected by Google’s new technology in a tangible way. This technology is expected to increase Google speed in both finding content and displaying pages. Time will tell how it really affects SEO, but let’s hope that it sorts out those absurd Twitter tweets.

There are plenty other things happening in the world of SEO that will affect how web pages get ranked and how we use SEO in general, but these are a fair representation of the 5 trends that will be most apparent. If there is one thing that you can count on in SEO, it’s that nothing ever stays the same.