Recently I’ve read one of those awfully misguided anti-SEO posts. It linked to another blog post called SEO FAQ. It wasn’t an actual SEO FAQ though. It was just another awfully misguided blog post from a guy I have never heard of before and who only reveled in the attention he got from displaying his ignorance. People got angry as usual in such cases of blatant provocation and disregard.

Sadly the Google algorithm still sometimes prefers those who raise hell instead of those who provide useful resources.

So that completely useless SEO FAQ ranks at #2 for SEO FAQ in Google.com and misleads lots of people looking for answers to most basic SEO questions.

Thus I decided to provide a new SEO FAQ. I want to outrank this fake resource. Also I want you to copy these questions and to provide your own answers on your own blog.

I want to see 10 or more real SEO FAQs to outrank this crap. So feel free to copy the questions I’ve compiled with the help of some SEO practicionares from all over the Web and to provide your own answers. I will link your answers in this post as well. So steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO questions you always wanted an answer to.

Some of the Q&As might sound funny, especially the original tweets they’re based on. We had a lot of fun while collecting the questions and answers.

1. What does SEO stand for? The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization but by now it’s not only about search and engines anymore. See 2.
2. What is SEO? To define SEO is not an easy task as it’s changing all the time. In 2010 the SEO definition might sound something like this: Everything done to ensure getting found on the Internet and to make sure that the ensuing traffic converts.
3. Is SEO spam, bullshit, dead etc.? Who knows. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, BBC etc. certainly don’t think so. They practice SEO like most of other website owners. Last time I checked all the people who blame SEO for global warming, the Iraq war, the global economic crisis have optimized their websites according to SEO techniques. By the numbers SEO is booming all the time for several years a in a row.
4. Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? You haven’t done SEO yet? You have no content? Your site consists mainly of Flash, AJAX or simply graphics? You have asked Jason Calacanis or Derek Powazek for SEO advice? Also you most probably rank for long tail queries already. Question by @rishil and @peteyoung – Answer by @IngoGuava
5. Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Maybe you need a divorce? No, just kidding. You probably need to disable personalized search. Otherwise Google will serve you the results you most desire.
6. When will we see results? It will take a while depending on what results you expect what for. Some keywords might even take a year or more while others may work after weeks or months. Perform a thorough keyword and market research first to know. Also SEO is basically a continuous process that never stops. Question by @IngoGuava, @tonyboney and @DolphinPromo – Answer by @IngoGuava
7. Can we rank for iPhones? Do you sell iPhones? Are you a representative of Apple? Do you sell iPhones globally or just nation-wide? Do you want to spend 50k+$ on SEO monthly? Then maybe yes. Question by @rhyswynne – Answer by @rhyswynne
8. Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? If you are Jeff Bezos and your site is Amazon you probably can. In all other cases you have to choose and set preferences. You have to determine your main keywords, a few of them, and go after them. Your main keywords are the most popular and profitable ones. A hotel in London would go after hotel london probably and similar combinations.  Question by @maxyRo
9. How much does SEO cost? How much does a car cost, or a house? First we need to know what kind of car or house you need then we can try to assess the price. Otherwise we can just say somewhere in between 1k and 1 million dollars per month. Everything below 1k is low quality and/or automated.  Question by @seowolf
10. Why is SEO so expensive? Why are cars and houses so expensive? Because it takes lots of time, resources and work to build them. Besides SEO makes your website actually earn money while setting up website and designing it by itself does not. So at the end of the day SEO earns more money that it takes. Also remember that SEO is not just like a house or car. It’s more like a shop or a hotel when it comes to the house metaphor and it’s more like a race car when it comes to the car metaphor.
11. How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Google needs minutes to weeks depending on your site to index it or new content appearing on it. Without SEO it might even take forever.
12. How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.? You don’t submit sites to search engines these days. You link to them from already indexed sites, you ping them via blog posts and or you submit an XML sitemap.
13. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? Only idiots do. There are only a handful of search engines that you need at all. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask in the US. Mostly Google in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
14. Do I need an XML sitemap? Depending on your site you may or may not need one.
15. Do I need meta tags for SEO? No, the meta description tag is good for search users though who might decide whther they click on yours based on the description you offer.
16. Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? You need internal Pagerank for your site to get indexed. Toolbar PageRank (the green bar in your Google toolbar) is not a prerequisite.
17. What is linkbait? There are at least two common definitions of linkbait (or link bait). One negative and one positive. The negative one says that it’s luring people to link to you for a reason they normally wouldn’t. The positive one explains that linkbait is a highly linkable masterfully crafted peace of content people not only like but also recommend to others by linking.
18. Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? She probably can cook as well but you probably would go to a restaurant nonetheless. Designers in most case underestimate the importance of SEO and misunderstand it. They assume that the designer should be decide how a website should be build and when the site is done, they, or rather their clients realize that they’re not even indexed by Google. SEO should be part of website design not just a add on. An open minded designer can provide a good findable site architecture that works for SEO as well. S/he in most cases needs an SEO expert to accomplish that task.
19. Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Many old school SEO professionals have started out as web developers. Nonetheless they had to focus on other non-technical SEO techniques. A good web developer can provide roughly one third of the skills you need for SEO. Sadly most web developers are clueless about SEO beyond the most common basics.
20. Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? Programmers often underestimate the difficulty of SEO and attempt to to attain rankings by creating scripts that automatically enhance websites. This is a very risky business as it often crosses the thin line of waht’s allowed by teh search engine guidelines.
21. Why should I outsource my SEO? SEO is a full time job for a person or requires a whole team with several skills ranging from web development, content creation to marketing. Unless you have at least one experienced full time SEO inhouse it is strongly advised to seek assistance from a SEO compnay or consultant. Question by @seowolf
22. Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? You can but it’s not enough. Nowadays most modern CMS and blog software has built in technical SEO capabilities. To outrank others who use mostly SEO friendly software as well you have to stick out.
23. Does Google hate SEO? No, Google even offers SEO advice and a plethora of SEO tools itself. It’s an ages old myth that Google fight SEOs. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners. Most SEO companies are big clients of Google as they also buy PPC ads from Google.
24. Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? Some people still assume that SEO is used to please search bots only. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for users.
25. Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? Some techniques considered by many a s SEO are also considered black hat. Still most them can be used ethically as well so only the context can tell you when a particular measure is black or white hat.
26. Is black hat SEO legal? The question to ask should rather be whether black hat SEO is recommended. No it is not. Most of it is probably still legal, depending on the technique. It pays only for the few who do it on large scale.
27. Does site size matter? Historically it did matter. For a period of time bigger sites by the sheer number of pages seemed to rank batter. By now the pros and cons outweigh each other – so it does not makes sense to inflate the size of a website artificially by adding low quality content.
28. Do domain extensions (top level domains like .com, co.uk) matter? Yes they do. Especially when it comes to country based domains like .fr, .de or .es – for local results in respective countries you should use preferably a country domain to get a small advantage. Also many in the SEO industry assume that .edu and .gov domains are trusted more by Google. Google itself has denied that explaining that .edu and .gov domains get more links and thus Google trusts them more. Question by @Ramkarthik
29. Do nofollow links count? Indeed it has long been known that Yahoo doesn’t discount nofollow links completely. It also seems that Google makes exceptions as well. Plus remember that the main function of a link is to bring visitors. The search engine “juice ” is just a side-effect so a link is a link no matter the attribute. Question by @amabaie – Answer by @amabaie here.
30. Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? You should try some time travel back to the dark past of early SEO. These things are secondary or negligible.
31. Is blog commenting for SEO spam? Like in many other cases, it depends dear london real estate! Try changing your name to some real name and add something of value to the conversation and your comment will be very welcome.
32. I have a question or answer that is not on this FAQ what can I do? There is a comment section! Add your questions and/or answers there. They might get added to the actual FAQ.

OK, now steal this SEO FAQ and provide your own answers. Make sure not to copy both as in this case this would be a case of duplicate content and most likely lead to at least the copy losing ground in the search results.

Also make sure to read this post by Rishi Lakhani where he answers a lot of questions you might encounter in future.

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Steal this SEO FAQ: 30+ SEO Questions You Always Wanted an Answer to

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Image: Happy Beaver by stevehdc.

Welcome back to the weekly Twitter column. Yesterday many people on Twitter cried out in outrage about a misled tweet from @vodafoneuk – in it some apparently tweeting under the influence employee made a badly spelled comment about the hygiene of homosexuals.

Then the person also threatened to hunt for beavers!

This is indeed outrageous! As you probably know beavers are an endangered species and have been extinct a few years ago in the UK. Hunting them just to vent your anger is the last thing to do.

This would have been the end of the story as @vodafoneUK clearly stated that it was a breach of conduct. They will NOT hunt beavers. Sadly someone responsible for the renowned UK technology site Tecchuff made the same remarks twice on Twitter since then. Shame on you!

Do we have to witness a wide spread wave of anti-beaver misconduct in the British technology sector?

Also the British press widely reported the incident citing the tweet to make sure everybody who missed the anti-beaver message could read it.

In the meantime @VodafoneUK got additional 500+ followers in the recent days. According the Google Cache they had 8,500 of February, 2nd. During the “breach” they had 8,663. So it seems the good old saying “any publicity is good publicity” also applies here. Now they have approx. 9,050 followers.

There is even the possibility that this was a publicity stunt to get attention.

They may have “pulled a Calacanis” on purpose. They’ve got their brand mentioned all over the web and on several major British publications. Many of them linked to their Twitter account.

Even in the case it was a true blunder we’ve seen that such misconduct pays off.

Nobody seems to be really angry, not even the homosexuals. They probably don’t regard themselves as dirty while they are glad that VodafoneUK has outed itself as being at least bisexual. Still, animal cruelty is unacceptable. Where is PETA when you need them?

Stop the beaver hunt now!

Poor beaver! Our colleagues from SiteVisibility are outraged as well. In case this was done on purpose @VodafoneUK is really bad at being funny though. They should try some good old classy British humor.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

VodafoneUK NOT to Hunt Beavers!

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This blog post is a bit of fun that might give you some idea of the sorts of  thing that cannot be tracked by your web analytics system…

1. Odysseus Off-Site

Image from Litmuse on Flickr

This intrepid traveller ranges far and wide across the internet but has so far resisted the siren call of your site. People like this are very interesting for online marketers especially if they represent your target demographic but you will not find out anything about them from your onsite analytics. Service like Hitwise or Google Ad Planner can give you information about where on the internet Odysseus is hanging out.
2. Henry In-a-Hurry

Image from boeke on Flickr

Henry decides very quickly if he wants to continue looking at a web page. If your analytics code hasn’t loaded by the time he clicks a link or presses the back button then his pageview will not be recorded. The new Google Analytics Asynchronous code will improve tracking of Henry In-a-Hurry.
3. Nadia No-Script

From notionscapital on Flickr. Also WTF?

For whatever reason Nadia browses the web without javascript. This could be for many reasons; paranoia, browser security settings, browser default settings or browser age. Nadia may be a competing SEO trying to view the web as Googlebot sees it or a geek browsing using only the command line.
4. Christopher Cookie-Eater

Image from zoetnet on flickr

Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Christopher just can’t bear to leave all those cookies just sitting on his hard drive so he eats/deletes them at the end of every browsing session. Chris will be tracked but he will seen as a new visitor even if he visits your site everyday.

5. Deborah Disabled-Cookies

Image from cmaccubbin on flickr

Unlike Christopher, Deborah doesn’t eat cookies at all. In fact, she won’t allow them anywhere near her browser. Some javascript based analytics systems will track Deb’s pageviews but there will be no persistance so every pageview will be seen as the start of a new visit. Google Analytics will not track Deborah at all (probably to prevent your own site appearing in your referrer stats).
6. Thomas Tin-Foil-Hat

Image by jeffhall2069 on flickr

Tom does not like the idea of you having any information about what he does online. He probably has javascripts and cookies disabled but what distinguishes him from Nadia and Deborah is that he has explicitally told his computer to never communicate with Google Analytics. This can be done by editing the hosts file. Thomas may also use a variety of (secure) proxies or Tor so his visits can not even be tracked in your server logs.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

6 Personas that Google Analytics can’t Track

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To be honest: I hate all the Apple hype. I hated it on Digg and I hate it on Twitter as well. Twitter has been flooded with iPad tweets in such a manner that you can’t find the real news anymore.

The real news this week for us is that Twitter changes its recommended users list.

Before I go on with my weekly Twitter column I have to write something about the iPad: It’s not “magical and revolutionary” like the unsolicited email I got from Apple proclaims. I had to download QuickTime some years ago and since then they send me those emails. Tablet devices like this have been around for several months, the Archos 9 is the perfect example. It has several features that the iPad lacks. It supports multitasking, Flash, USB to name just a few.

Until now there was solely a fixed group of celebrities and technology mavens on the recommended users list. Those lucky few got hundreds of thousands of followers quickly. Now Twitter creates this list using an algorithm and based on topical categories. What’s the big news here you might ask, only new users even notice it.

Well, just consider the key term here: Algorithm.

Twitter has created an algorithm to rank users based on up to the minute Twitter activity.

The recommended users vary depending on the time you register with Twitter. Those who have tweeted recently get a better position. So we have a new TwitterRank algo here to speak in SEO terms. Twitter will now determine almost in real time how important you are. This might have some major ramifications for the future.

Will Twitter rank tweets by authority and actual real time importance of the user who tweets?

Possible. The future of Twitter might be a whole lot different then the chaotic past. A built in ranking algorithm might combine the best of two worlds, search and real time. Until now search.twitter.com has been more an annoyance than a search “engine”. I’ve been using Topsy most of the time instead.

Topsy already filters based on how influential a particular user is. This system is not perfect, for instance I know an influential SEO bot but Topsy offers the best results IMHO. Google hasn’t been too successful with ranking tweets yet as we have seen two weeks ago.

We might see Twitter changing the game a bit in the near future as they have in the past. Many Twitter tools have been discontinued after Twitter stopped the access to real time data for not paying tool operators. The Clicky web statistics tool has dropped Twitter follower numbers. Many tools just ended as a 404 error message.

Just test your old bookmarks, tools that have been saved 6 months ago often do not exist anymore. Will Twitter also kill real time search competitors and make the business inhouse? We know that search pays via ads and social networking does not. Why should they give away all the money?



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iPad, iPad, iPad!!! No, Just Kidding. Twitter Recommends Users Algorithmically. A New TwitterRank?

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Installing the Google Analytics code is pretty easy – usually nothing goes wrong, and it is simply a matter of copying and pasting the code that Google provides you with. However, there are some cases where you might want to change the default code:

• Tracking visitors across different domains
• Changing the session timeout
• Setting keywords or referrers to ignore

Google provides clear instructions for these tasks but nobody is perfect so sometimes errors will be made and nothing will be tracked. Normally it would take you 24 hours to realise this, 5 minutes to fix what you thought was the error and then 24 hours to find out that you hadn’t actually fixed anything. Repeat this cycle until you give up or get it sorted. Here is my guide to help speed this process up and make it less likely that a small typo in your Google Analytics code will take a week to fix.

So what do you do when there is no data in Google Analytics?

1. Firstly, visually confirm that the tracking code is on the website. It sounds like a simple thing but you can end up looking pretty stupid if you miss this step out.
2. Then install httpfox or some other program to monitor the requests your browser is making
3. Start up httpfox and perform a full refresh (Ctrl-F5) of a page.
4. In httpfox search for requests made to the google-analytics.com domain. If you see a request for _utm.gif then you know that data is being sent to Google Analytics. Apart from checking that the UA id is correct I have no more ideas about what could be going wrong here.



5. If there is no request for the tracking pixel then something is wrong with the code (duh?).
6. For simple errors (like typos) the firefox error console will give you a pretty good idea of what has gone wrong.
   

   Firefox Error Console shows that I missed of the closing quotation marks when setting the session timeout to 5 minutes

7. For more complicated changes to the code use a more powerful tool like firebug to find out where the error is occurring.
8. Fix the problem and then repeat steps 3 and 4 to check that information is being sent to Google Analytics.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

Finding Errors in Your Google Analytics Tracking Code

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As a search marketing agency, we make sure our we keep up-to-date with all things search by attending the top UK conferences. And at the top of the list for the last few years is SES London.

Image credit: SESConferenceSeries on Flickr

Last year I wrote 5 reasons to attend SES London and these really haven’t changed. In my opinion it’s one of the few must-go-to search events in the UK and this years line-up of speakers is very impressive, most notably with a keynote session from Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik.

You can find the full line-up of sessions online, but it’s a very useful event to learn new ideas (or in my case, from last year, 77 tips and tricks) about SEO, PPC, social media, link building etc – and of course networking with some of the top guys in the industry. The SEOptimise search team will be there, make sure you come and see us!

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

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This week’s Twitter column comes a day late. I think it doesn’t matter when I post my weekly Twitter post. The important fact is that I do at all and the the quality of the post makes it worth reading. So from now on I won’t be that exact anymore. The weekly Twitter column will stay though. It might appear earlier or later in the week, depending on breaking events for instance.

This week I want to speak about Twitter arrests.

It seems Twitter is exempt from free speech and arrests for Twitter usage become commonplace.

I know this is a business blog and we write about Twitter topics relevant for businesses but this is an issue that should matter for all of us.

When I was a few years younger former rapper and by then rock musician Ice T released a song called “Cop Killer”. In it, not surprisingly, he dealt with the killing of police officers. Although this song was quite controversial even then it was nonetheless treated as a work of art. Moreover it was covered by the right to free speech. You don’t like the police? You can fantasize about killing them as long as you don’t try to do it for real. There were other songs like that, it wasn’t an exception but this one got quite some publicity.

These days you can get arrested as a terrorist for joking on Twitter.

While I appreciate the fact that the police cares about the overall security and safety of travelers this reaction is way scarier than the actual threat of a person joking on Twitter. You know Twitter is a very fast and in a way low quality medium. You can’t be very precise on Twitter. The 140 characters limit makes many messages cryptic and unintelligible. So misunderstandings are pretty common.

The fact that the police listens to your tweets and is quick to raid your home for the slightest misstep sounds very Orwellian. Indeed it might kill this still nascent medium.

Now, returning to our focus on business: People who are afraid to tweet will abandon Twitter and you won’t be able to reach them anymore. Twitter as a business tool depends on the basic free speech rights to joke and tweet in any way you like without being afraid that the police is after you.

We have seen several arrests for Twitter activity or even lack of it in the past, see “man arrested for not using Twitter“. Some more bizarre than others. At least one of them seemed justified to me, when a man used Twitter to repeatedly threaten to commit mass murder.

Somebody needs to tell the police that Twitter is not a surveillance tool but a social network where people socialize online though.

While socializing many people tend to become humorous or sometimes even obnoxious but that still does not mean that they are terrorists. Also the police should be able to sense whether a person is joking or not. Don’t they employ psychologists? In the latest case they had one week to study this person. They could have read all of his tweets to find out more about him. According to Mashable they didn’t even know what Twitter is and how it works.

So the message must be clear: Tweeting is not a crime and free speech must be protected. So before pushing the panic button remember that you are safeguarding a democracy and not trying to stifle free speech.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

Twitter Arrests Become Commonplace

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Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

1. Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
2. IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
3. 301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
4. Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
5. Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
6. Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
7. Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
8. Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
9. Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
10. Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
11. Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
12. Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
13. Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
14. Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
15. Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
16. Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
17. New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
18. Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
19. Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
20. Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
21. Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
22. Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
23. Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
24. Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
25. Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
26. Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
27. Different content for search engines than users – Do you use Wordpress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
28. Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
29. Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
30. Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

booze by tz1_1zt

Thanks to my Twitter followers @DerekEdmond, @seowolf and @DonnaFontenot for brain storming support on this list. The question I asked was:

What was the most evil black hat SEO technique your dirty, stinking competitors have worked with?

Why don’t you, the SEOptimise readers, answer this question as well? Otherwise just use these 30 black hat techniques ethically or try the many more white hat tactics first.

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30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

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We are currently looking to recruit an SEO executive to join our great team in Oxford!

Image credit: Flickr

“We are currently looking to recruit for a full-time position in our natural search team. Candidates with a minimum of 1-2 years experience in a search engine marketing role are preferred, with a competitive salary offered based on experience.

The SEO Executive job role will involve working within the search team, assisting with SEO activities, search marketing strategy and client projects.”

More information can be found on the job description page and we look forward to hearing from you!

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We Are Recruiting – Come Join Us!

No related posts.

I don’t have an iPhone. Most of the SEM community are early adopters so many of you will already be using smart phones and many of you will already be aware of what I am about to tell you. I’ll put the important information in bold just here so that it is easy to spot:

When searching on Google using the iPhone…

• There are only 2 sponsored results above the organic listings
• The remaining results appear right at the bottom of the page NOT to the side
• There are only 5 ad slots available

Google results on the iPhone - Top of the page

Google Results on the iPhone - Bottom

One of our clients has an iPhone app that they wanted to publicise. I setup a PPC campaign focusing on keywords like “widget iPhone app”. Surprise, surprise there was very little search volume on these terms.

My next idea was to do a campaign on upper funnel keywords like “red widgets” or “blue widgets” but to display the adverts only to users on smart phones and have the advert and landing page publicise the iPhone app.

This campaign was getting a good number of impressions but the click through rate was very low. This could be because I need to work on the ad text a bit more, or because people searching on the targeted keywords aren’t really interested in an iPhone app but I think it is because the average position of the advert placed it right at the bottom of the page.

Further thoughts.

• Google normalises quality score based on ad position. If they don’t make a distinction between their iPhone results and their desktop results when doing this normalisation campaigns with a large number of smartphone impressions at lower ad positions will be disadvantaged.
• Mobile is meant to be one of the many next big things in search. This will make paid search even more competative because there are only 5 ad slots on the front page.

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PPC for the iPhone

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This week the Twitter Friday column expands as a major Twitter SEO topic is on our agenda. Last week Technology Review published an article titled “How Google ranks tweets“.

In the TR article leading Google engineer Amit Singhal explains ranking factors for tweets.

Some of the ranking criteria are quite clear and obvious while others remain fuzzy behind Google’s veil of secrecy. There is one big surprise: Google hates #hashtags, or at least some (probably you using too many) of them.

It seems Google treats #hashtags the way it dealt with the meta keyword tag in the past: Neither do they really count nor do they count in a positive way in case they do.

In other words: Using hashtags may hurt your tweet rankings. That’s not all of course.

The perhaps most important news is that it’s not the sheer amount of followers that makes you important in Google’s eyes.

Also Google doesn’t include all or the latest tweets in into real time search results once those appear. The tweets that get shown have been filtered in a manifold way before they reach your screen. Last but not least: There is specific semantic filtering involved. Selected tweets will appear when there is a significant amount of recurring collocations. A collocation is a combination of words. In the article the example is the search for Obama on Google.com
Sadly I couldn’t discover any real time results on that query yet to check it out.

Tiger Woods seems by far more popular or trending than the US president, not for his sports career only but due to his notoriety as a womanizer.

I’ve tested some of my theories and official rankings factors using his name.
The Google spokesperson explains that a cluster of tweets combining for instance Obama and Harry Reid may trigger the appearance of tweets actually relevant to a popular Twitter news item or meme.

Based on the Technology Review article and our knowledge of current (link based) ranking factors for Google before real time search I’d like to extrapolate some most probably useful advice on how to optimize tweets to rank better in Google real time search.

#hashtags
As hashtags seem to get treated similarly to the good old meta keyword tags you have either drop them altogether or use them in a manner that seems natural. Just think of regular users using hashtags not you and your fellow SEO practicioners. There might be a few common sense rules of thumb not to mess up hashtags based on that premise.

• number of hashtags – Don’t use too many hashtags. I’d say not more than 3 but I guess Google prefers just one. This is probably the common most common way people use hashtags.
• hashtag relevancy – Does your hashtag consist of a word you already used in your tweet or is it an additional term? I presume that based on the meta tag ranking we’re used to with HTML pages only those keywords that are in the content (tweet) will get supported as hashtags. This is a shame from the user point of view as I’d like to categorize some posts as #seo that don’t contain the acronym in the tweet itself. Spammers often misuse popular hashtags to get attention for their unrelated messages or links though so that may make sense from the point of vie of spam prevention.

authority
In a way Google replicated the PageRank algo for Twitter. This one is not based on links it seems but depends on the number of followers and their “reputation”. Simply put: Even in case you get followed only by a few people but they include Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan and Robert Scoble you’ll get lots of Google Juice for your tweets.

• number of followers – OK, the number of followers counts, most probably in a similar way that the number of backlinks you have counts for websites. So that 10k low qaulity followers migt probably be worth the same amount of juice as one really reputable follower
• reputation of followers – It’s not clear how Google determines reputation beyond the sheer number of followers and their respective reputation. You might want to take a look at the influential users over at Topsy to get a glimpse of who might be deemed reputable or influential. I guess that every sign of authority counts: Number of retweets, replies, favorites (how often your tweets got saved as a favorite), list inclusions, etc.
• average usage – Most probably Google will prefer real people to automated bot accounts. So I’m sure that a Twitter user who never replies and keeps on posting links or self-promoting won’t get a good reputation.

filtering
As in the Obama example explained filtering will mean relevant clusters. Such memes that get hot will determine whether real time results show up and which ones. So in theory it doesn’t suffice to mention Obama all day over and over just to get accidentally shown in real time results once Obama is a hot topic again. You have to be part of the currently relevant cluster to show up. Also you have to

• relevant clusters – “haiti disaster relief” (without quotes) is one such cluster. Haiti has been linked to disaster relief for obvious reasons.
• topicality – In future irrelevant tweets will probably get filtered. For instance someone who would add a popular keyword to his otherwise non-related tweet. Currently off topic tweets still work in many cases.

geo-location
Google is also keen on localizing tweets by finding out where you are and how far away the people who tweeted something are from you. So you’ll rather get to see the tweets of neighbors than those living at the other end of the world.

To prove or disprove the suggestions above I tested some them on the Google.com results for Tiger Woods. I was quite surprised to find out that some of the above ranking criteria do not work very well yet. I was literally able to hijack the results. I added 5 tweets in the course of a few minutes. Most of the were rants, others were completely irrelevant. It was intriguing to see which keyword combinations got included in real time results and which did not:

Showed up in Google real time results:

1. simple rant tweet – “Tiger Woods seems more important than Barack Obama again. Idiocy of crowds“
2. slightly off topic tweet – “The Tiger Woods way of doing Twitter SEO: Cheat Google real time search like [he] did with his wife ;-)“
3. three #hashtags in a row – “Hello Google: This is #tiger #woods #spam Don’t show it!” (#tigerwoods works as well)
4. @keyword – “@tigerwoods Buy less Viagra!“
5. off topic exact match homonymous tweet – “OK, last tweet: Tiger woods and jungles are a dangerous place not only for women.“

Didn’t show up in real time results:

1. off topic no exact match homonymous tweet – “Just testing: In the Indian woods you can meet a tiger“
2. off topic slightly no exact match homonymous – “I love tigers, woods and SEO testing. What about you? ;-)“
3. keyword in domain name tweet – “New blog idea: tigerwoodsseo.com ;-)“

So as you see Google is not as good as it promises and I’d like to see it. Who am i to complain though? Nonetheless I guess Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts have some homework to do over the weekend. They haven’t even filtered the “buy viagra” tweet…

Many thanks to Twitter users @scottmcandrew and @matthewdiehl who have supported me while I was testing for this post.

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Twitter SEO the Tiger Woods Way: How Google Ranks Tweets

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Ford F 150, the biggest Twiter client yet. Image by selfhatingotaku.

Twitter Friday is alive and kicking! Welcome back in 2010! The column paused for two weeks in a row simply due to the holidays taking place both on a Friday. Many people didn’t tweet during the Holiday season anyways so it wasn’t that bad, was it?

Of course plenty of things happened anyways but I want to skip them and write about something that struck me as a very important novelty. Ford goes Twitter.

Well, you probably think, “they’re quite late”. It’s not what you think though. Ford goes Twitter in a whole different way. Ford has been using Twiter succesfully for business for quite a while. Now they take the next logical step. They add Twitter by default to their cars along with other services like Pandora e.g.

Now who cares about Twitter in your car you might ask? Why the hell should someone tweet while driving, or rather get their tweets read for them? It might even be dangerous.

While it’s important not to distract drivers too much Twitter is certainly less distracting than using a phone. It’s comparable to listening to the radio on the road. So it’s not a coincidence that the other tow apps Ford introduces allow to listen to music and the radio.

This post is not about the safety ramifications of Twitter usage in a car. It’s about the business ramifications of it. Well, Ford is, despite the current crisis, still the best selling American car maker after GM and Toyota. The most popular car in the US is a huge Ford pickup, the Ford F. In the UK Ford is hugely popular as well despite ending production here in 2002. In Europe Ford is the second biggest automaker behind VW (Volkswagen Seat, Skoda).

So all these tens of thousands of cars will come with Twitter installed by default. I expect the other car manufacturers to follow soon. This means that Twitter will really go prime time beyond Oprah.

From now on you won’t need to become a nerd and use computers or smartphones to tweet. Your car will tweet for you.

Twitter will become as common as radio. In a way it will become the personalized semi-private talk radio for everybody. Truckers won’t use CB radio they will tweet.

Also people will do “drive by tweeting”. They will drive by your business or drive through your town and tweet about the service or lack of it they’ve experienced while there. Would it be wise to ignore radio in the thirties and TV in the fifties? You might want to step up your Twitter marketing efforts a bit from now on and target not only the geeky “twenty somethings”.

Lets just hope you don’t get caught for any motoring offences!

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Ford Cars & Drive by Tweeting

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30 Fast Life SEO Tactics/Techniques for 2010

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Something we’ve come across recently is a search query to check for URL’s which are listed in Google’s main index. This appears to remove any webpage’s which may be listed in Google’s supplemental/secondary index.

The query to find this is: site:domain.com/*

At the moment I’m unsure how accurate this is, the only reference I can find is a comment from Halfdeck on Jim Boykin’s How to Find if a Page is in Google’s Secret Supplemental Results from two and a half years ago. And since then, despite pleas to bring it back – Google have removed the queries which have helped us to find supplemental pages.

But looking at the results, I think there is some truth to the results – even if these are not entirely accurate.

Example supplemental query – BBC.co.uk
For example, BBC.co.uk has 47.9 million indexed pages – but the supplemental query lists only 1.43 million results:

Believable? It seems a bit low to me, for a high quality site like the BBC to only have 2.98% of their pages listed in Google’s main index – but then again 1.43 million pages is still a lot of content. Amazon.co.uk is a similar story, with 3.22 million in the main index as opposed to 145 million in the full index.

So what about for a smaller site?
The most obvious site for me to review is SEOptimise. We have 3,300 pages indexed in Google’s main index, yet only 647 pages indexed for the non-supplemental query:

So is this one accurate? My honest answer is I’m unsure. I posted earlier this week that we now have 877 posts on the blog, in addition to this there is the main site and other blog pages such as tags and categories etc. So I’d like to think we’d have a large percentage of high-quality content which is well valued by Google. But in actual fact the pages which have built up a strong trust in Google, either via external links or internal linking/navigation/site structure, means that this figure may be very close. The one thing I didn’t understand was that a large number of blog tag pages were listed, often when used only once or twice before – so the number of links pointing to this is likely to be low – as is the quality of the content on the page (which is duplicated from each main post).

And what are the factors which affect this?
If this results are accurate, I’d expect the following factors to have an impact here:

• Link reputation/PageRank to be a large factor for indexation
• Age of site
• History in the search engines
• Inbound links (internal and external) to individual webpages
• Duplicate content
• Volume of content / amount of unique content on-page

So what do you think, have you used this query before and do the results seem accurate? I definitely don’t think they are 100% accurate, but it may be a useful indicator to keep an eye on – especially if you are having problems generating traffic for pages which are indexed for a regular site: command query and the solution to fix this isn’t an obvious one.

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Does site:domain.com/* show you non-supplemental Google indexed pages?

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Since 2006 I’ve written-up a review of the SEOptimise blog in terms of stats and analytics. As it’s an interesting time to look back on how the site has progressed, I’ve continued this by listing some similar stats for comparison during the last 12 months:

Top 10 SEOptimise posts of 2009

1. 10 LinkedIn Tips to Optimise your Profile
2. 30 Twitter Tools for Business
3. 7 Reasons Why You Need to Deal With Search Engine Marketing Change
4. 21 On-Site SEO Tips You Can Give to Your Online Copywriter
5. 30 Web Trends to Watch in 2010
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7. 10 Tips to Boost your Flickr Profile
8. 10 Free Google SEO Tools Everybody Should Use
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10. Social Media Marketing – PR vs SEO – Where Does it Fit?

Total number of SEOptimise blog posts
2006: 293
2007: 518
2008: 723
2009: 877

RSS subscribers
2006: 70
2007: 634
2008: 1,679
2009: 6,798

Technorati Rank
2006: 94,938 – 283 blog reactions
2007: 20,691 – 1,192 blog reactions (Authority 255)
2008: 18,853 – 601 blog reactions (Authority 197)
2009: N/A (trying to fix this!)

Alexa Rating
2006: 82,395
2007: 56,658
2008: 154,688
2009: 25,524

Yahoo Site Explorer external links
2006: 2,758 links
2007: 29,100
2008: 45,445
2009: 51,694

Google SEOptimise query
2006: 9,630
2007: 23,400
2008: 36,900
2009: 41,300

AdAge Power 150 List
2008: 221 Global / 22 UK 2009: 184 Global / 19 UK

Twitter Followers
2008: 959
2009: 10,103

Compete Stats
2008: 63,219
2009: 48,422

There’s a few interesting results in there, the RSS and Twitter count improvements are definitely good to see! More importantly we’ve had a very successful year from a business perspective, achieving amazing results for our clients and some excellent new business wins. Plus we’ve grown and developed our great team and can look forward to an exciting 2010 ahead!

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SEOptimise 2009 – The Year in Review

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Creative Commons image by ahisgett

No matter if you like it or not when the old year fades away and the new year arrives most of us think about the past and the future.

• Was it a successful year?
• Where did we succeed, where did we fail?
• Which of the mistakes do we want to overcome next year?

Most people tend to plan for the upcoming year. Plenty like to be very specific about these plans so they come up with new year’s resolutions they want to fulfill. We’re in the SEO industry are not exempt from it.

What goals do make sense for 2010? I’ve selected 20 of them you might want to use as your resolutions as well, the 20 SEO new year’s resolutions for 2010

1. I will build less links and get more links organically instead
2. I will care less about PageRank, traffic and rankings and focus more on conversions, profits and ROI instead.
3. I will stop “doing SEO” and will make my websites succeed on the Web instead, whatever it takes and no matter how you call it
4. I will try to get more organic visitors and less paid ones
5. I will try to get more returning visitors and instead of just casual social media and search visitors
6. I will reduce my bounce rate by 20, 30 or 40%
7. I will invest more in branding to get more branded searches and less via fickle generic keywords
8. I will stop using social media and start contributing in a meaningful way
9. I will care less about short term results and implement long term strategies instead
10. I will make my current projects succeed and my current clients happy instead of starting more projects and seeking new clients
11. I will get less dependent on Google and diversify my income sources
12. I will make my sites more usable for those users than reach them already to make them stay
13. I will set up more conversion goals to get results beyond sales. Think subscriptions, mentions, social media votes
14. I will combine my SEO, social media and CRM strategies to form a new holistic approach
15. I will stop competing by the price and will start competing by the quality of products and services. Indians will always be cheaper anyways
16. I will stop hiding what I do and rather proudly brag about my clients, employees and partners
17. I will undertake steps to gain foothold in the mobile and local markets by optimizing for mobile devices and local search
18. I will take part in some real life industry events or conferences to get more social for real
19. I will write more tutorials and how to articles to educate my peers and readers
20. I will use more different media formats like images, videos, micro blogging, ebooks and infographics to succeed in universal search

All these resolutions start with “I” in order for you to be able to better identify with them. It’s not solely the “I” of the author. It’s not only me. You can do it too.

You can get better in 2010 as well. Of course I have implemented some of them in the past already but still all of these resolutions make sense in 2010.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

20 SEO New Year’s Resolutions for 2010

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Christmas isn’t Christmas without someone butchering a much-loved song to make a marketing point and this year it’s our turn. Brace yourselves for the SEOptimise Twelve Days of Christmas Special…

Image credit: krisdecurtis

On the first day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me, one golden rule

1. SEO is an ongoing effort

On the second day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me two social media musts

1. Be personable
2. Never pitch in an online social situation

On the third day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me three web copy writing rules

1. Remember humans read your copy as well as search engines
2. Link out to information that adds authority to your opinions
3. Your words represent the company, so be eloquent, intelligent and accurate

On the fourth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me four Twitter tips

1. Discuss and debate, don’t just lecture
2. Let your personality show, Twitter isn’t the board room
3. Monitor mentions of your company and respond to them
4. Respond to relevant questions

On the fifth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me five golden SEO rules

1. Be unique – use original copy on your site
2. Stay onside with Google – black hat tactics risk penalisation
3. Aim to build links from relevant, authoritative websites
4. Rewrite your site – if your website hasn’t been written with Google in mind, redo it
5. Use internal links throughout your site, with relevant anchor text

On the sixth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me six tips for building your brand

1. Tweet regularly and often
2. Keep an up-to-date blog
3. Offer guest posts
4. Use social media platforms
5. Attend industry conferences
6. Socialise in industry-specific social sites & forums

On the seventh day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me seven hints for press releases

1. Make the news angle obvious
2. Target appropriate journalists with the release
3. Follow up the email with a phone call
4. Release responses to relevant industry events
5. Don’t let quality standards slip – use a spell check
6. Link to your own pages using relevant anchor text
7. Make it as easy as possible for the (overworked) journalist

On the eighth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me eight email marketing rules:

1. Don’t bombard customers
2. Keep your content relevant
3. Make your copy sparkle
4. Use intriguing subject lines
5. Review your emails in different browsers to check they look right
6. Send the message at an appropriate time
7. Test messages on a small group first
8. Respect your recipient at all times

On the ninth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me nine linkbait tips

1. Add value with guides and how-to’s
2. Use lists like top tens, golden rules and so on
3. Offers industry news and current affairs
4. Use multi-media like podcasts and video
5. Blog regularly and comment on other blogs
6. Don’t be afraid of controversy, it attracts links
7. Offer services like industry-relevant calculators and tools
8. Respond and listen to visitor feedback
9. Don’t simply sell

On the tenth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 10 tips for LinkedIn:

1. Complete your profile
2. Bag your vanity URL
3. Make your profile public
4. Connect with everyone you know
5. Request recommendations (where appropriate!)
6. Join relevant groups
7. Use LinkedIn Answers to boost your reputation
8. Use a descriptive job title
9. Link to your website using keyword-rich anchor text
10. Register your company’s profile

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 11 pay-per-click tips:

1. Review competitors’ campaigns
2. Target a relevant geographic region
3. Manage your budget carefully
4. Choose enticing text
5. Carefully choose the destination URL
6. Monitor performance often
7. Don’t just target the most popular keywords
8. Monitor your conversion rate
9. Avoid running b2b campaigns at weekends
10. Use negative keywords to avoid irrelevant appearances
11. Be ready to adapt the campaign for game changing rules or if conversion falls off

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my SEO agency gave to me 12 blogging rules:

1. Use short paragraphs
2. Avoid unnecessary punctuation
3. Check spelling, then check it again
4. Double-check grammar
5. Don’t exceed your vocabulary
6. Ask a colleague to proofread your copy
7. Link to relevant articles and information
8. Avoid repetition, even of keywords
9. Go beyond keyword stuffing
10. Use unique meta data
11. Post often
12. Be interesting

So what do you think? Surely it’s more festive than Rage Against the Machine! Have a great Christmas SEOptimise readers! ;)

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

The 12 Days of Christmas – SEO Agency Edition

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Why does the “Iranian Cyber Army” use the red star, a communist symbol from the soviet era?

It’s Twitter Friday again! Welcome back to my weekly column. Apparently Twitter or rather its DNS got hacked. DNS is that little thingy that assigns real Internet addresses (like Twitter.com) to those so called IP addresses or rather numbers websites hide behind. This is what we know. The rest of the story is quite questionable though.

To be honest I don’t believe the “Iranian Cyber Army” is real, like there is an organization of hackers behind it.

Also the footprints they’ve left neither look like real hackers nor like real Iranians. I’ll explain why.

The “Iranian Cyber Army” does not sound like Iranians. Why?

• Iranians speak and write Farsi while the hacked sites did not contain any Farsi messages. There was some broken English and an image with Arabic on it. It looked Arabic to me so I asked an native Farsi speaker and he confirmed that it’s Arabic not Farsi.
• Iranians, at least those from Iran supportive of the current Islamic government don’t use soviet era communist symbols. The “Iranian Cyber army” mimics the red army star though. In fact the Islamic rulers of Iran prosecute communists. Most of them had to flee the country after the Islamic revolution had succeeded.
• Hacking Twitter is really bad for Iran. Almost everybody in the West dislikes Iran anyway and wrongly assumes that it’s the biggest threat since the cold war. So they really, really need some sympathy and this is the worst press they can get now.
• Some people argue that this might be some kind of retaliation for Twitter role in the support of the protests after the election. Remember, the US State Department ordered Twitter to postpone a downtime so that news about the anti-government protests can get spread. Back then it would have made some sense to hack Twitter, but now?
• It might be a false flag operation to further get support for measures against Iran. Both people in the US and Israel use cyber warfare against Iran.

The “Iranian Cyber Army” does not sound like hackers. Why?

• Hackers usually don’t put GMail addresses on compromised pages.
• Even in case Iranian hackers would want to use an email address on a hacked page, especially such a big one like Twitter they would probably not choose US based GMail for this task as those emails can easily get intercepted by the US government. Also the sheer number of emails they’ll get renders this step useless.
• The English on the hacked Twitter page was awful. Don’t hackers know proper translation tools and spell checkers?
• Usually hackers, especially those of the political kind don’t target the DNS. They look for code vulnerabilities or they use DoS (Denial of service) attacks by sending too many requests to websites. The US based hackers who hacked Iranian sites after the election did just that.

I’m not a computer security expert but I’ve seen plenty of hacks and compromised websites and there are patterns. This attack is quite unusual. Also it does appear to be highly illogical.

• Why use soviet era red army stars instead of Islamic or Iranian symbols?
• Why write in broken English and publish an image with Arabic text?

This seems to be a case where everybody is made to blame Iran but it’s highly unlikely that Iranians did this. Also the theory about renegade hackers seems inappropriate. The “Iranian Cyber Army” hasn’t appeared in the past before the recent attacks (another site has been hit as well). Google can’t find any results published before these two hacks.

The question is: Who gains support by this attack? Certainly not Iran. It’s really embarrassing for them. Also Iranians don’t like Arabs so why use Arabic? They fought a war a few years ago. Remember the Iraq – Iran war where the West and most Arabic monarchies supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion?

I know that reality sometimes is stranger than fiction but this case is obviously too weird to be what it seems to be. What do you think?

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Who Has Hacked Twitter? Probably not Iranians, Hackers or Iranian Hackers

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Robert Scoble by Alex de Carvalho

In the attention economy the attention rich win over those who get less attention. As controversy and ignorance creates more attention than common sense and boring expertise we have to deal with the phenomenon of SEO bashing every now and then. People pointing fingers saying “look at that, how stupid they are bashing SEO again” create even more buzz.

Web 2.0 celebrities can use this attention gap in order to push their own interests. Failed entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis have done that in the past repeatedly to ride the wave of negative hype. So this time I was a little bit astounded to hear it from Robert Scoble the web pundit everybody seems to listen to.

I seldom listen to Mr. Scoble as I’m too busy to listen to my trustworthy friends and my own echoes on the Web: I’ve just been nominated as one of the 100 most influential online marketers of 2009. Not sure I am but if others say so, I maybe am. So let’s use a little of my perceived influence.

The real search and SEO experts already have explained once again, like they always do, that SEO is still alive and kicking so what the hell is this post about?

It’s about how Robert Scoble’s ironic video advertorial confused the masses and the search marketing industry. Yes, you heard right. It’s ironic and it’s an advertorial.

It’s ironic and an advertorial because these guys Scoble talks to are from an SEO company themselves.

In fact they even compete with us, SEOptimise, in the search engines. So I just did a little checking with some tools everybody can use to take a look at any website to find out why they deserve such attention. The guys in the video advertorial represent a company called roiworks.com

Keep in mind that the guys from roiworks.com present their site as a “Search Engine Marketing Firm”. Search engine marketing of course entails SEO, PPC and other online marketing tactics SEOptimise offers as well. Indeed we even have similar keywords in our HTML title: UK Search Engine Marketing Agency.

So let’s compare our rankings for search engine marketing firm:

• roiworks.com is nowhere to be found. Neither in the US/Canada nor the UK.
• We’re at 13 for search engine marketing firm in the Google UK results in spite of not having the actual word “firm” in the title at all.

OK, OK, we know search engine rankings don’t mean much, I’ve said it myself more than once. Let’s take a look at the backlink numbers via Yahoo Site Explorer then:

• roiworks.com – 183
• seoptimise.com – 54,612

Yahoo backlink numbers don’t show much as well some people will argue. So let’s take a look at web analytics. roiworks.com exists at least since 2001 according to Archive.org but Google Trends or Google Ad Planner can’t find any data on them. So let’s try Compete.com! roiworks.com is an US company and Compete measures US traffic quite well so let’s take a look at the numbers for visits in November:

• roiworks.com – 1,768
• seoptimise.com – 48,784

In case you wonder why we lost so many visitors over the recent months: I’ve been quite lazy lately. Aside of this there must be something wrong with these numbers, after all, they get featured by Robert Scoble and we don’t. Did they actually sleep with him? Or maybe they’re just friends.

The video setup by itself is also quite funny. You have those two awkward guys talking like for ages. The one, more the Woody Allen type is keen on stressing that black hat SEO is very, very bad while the other dressed in black and wearing a black hat like in a mafia movie might be his bodyguard.
They talk about SEO, search and search marketing all the time telling us how important it really is. For instance they argue that local search is crucial etc.

Update: Make sure to read the statement by George, CEO of roiworks.com

So Robert Scoble’s post asking whether SEO will not be important anymore in 2010 is just a rhetorical question. It’s as if you’d ask: will the sky still be blue in 2010? Will the sky be blue in 2010? Yes, it will. I recommend a post by SEOMoz which, among other predictions, shows a statistic according to which 78% of questioned marketers assign more importance to SEO in 2010.

Btw. Robert Scoble admitted the baiting of the SEO industry later on. Mr. Scoble is not stupid, but the reaction of the SEO industry is too predictable by now. Thus I don’t link to such SEO bashing posts and advise you to refrain from doing it as well. The company Mr. Scoble is featuring really needs attention and all those links. They barely got any. Unlike more “traditional agencies”.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

SEO not Important in 2010? Robert Scoble’s Ironic Video Advertorial Confuses the Masses

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Many people read a huge amount of blog posts each day in order to learn and stay ahead of the game in SEO. I used to read loads of posts myself from the industry leading blogs all of the time. But I think you get to a point where, despite it being great to know what’s going on out there, there’s probably only a very small percentage of this information which directly benefits how you do your job. This post from Todd Malicoat about the important things which change in SEO is definitely worth a read.

Image credit: Flickr

I’m certainly not saying don’t subscribe to these blogs – if you’re learning about search marketing you definitely should – but I’ve found that I now skim over far more posts than I used to in order to grab any information which I may find useful, new or interesting. One of the main reasons for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and interacting on sites like Twitter and Sphinn is often to build relationships and a reputation online.

But my main point is, that while reading these blogs you could quite easily learn upto 90% of what you need to know about SEO, it’s often the extra 10% which people prefer not to give away that can really help you to learn some very useful tips and tricks to push your site/clients forward that extra mile.

So what do the top bloggers do?

These people clearly know what they’re talking about, so you could probably learn a lot from what they are actually doing for themselves. Some of this things they won’t tell you, so you just need to look a bit deeper and read between the lines!

• How do Search Engine Land optimise their own site?
• What information does Matt Cutts include in his robots.txt file?
• What are the quality backlinks pointing to SEObook.com?
• How did SEOmoz actually react themselves to the change in PageRank sculpting?
• How do Mashable promote RSS subscription to users?
• When/why does traffic peak to Blogstorm?
• How do TopRankBlog promote themselves on Twitter?
• Why is the ProBlogger homepage layout formatted that way?
• What is common blog platform or URL structure used by these bloggers?
• What writing style/use of images help to make Copyblogger so popular?
• Why does Lyndon ask controversial questions which you’ve always got an opinion on?

So don’t just read about the bloggers opinions about the topics your looking to learn about, actually look at what they are doing themselves too!

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter.

Don’t Just Read What Top Bloggers Write – Look at What They Do!

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