As if you weren’t jealous enough, the upcoming trip starts with two nights of camping in Traverse City, MI where we will visit the National Cherry Festival, among other things. From there, my wife and I are headed to the Upper Peninsula (the “UP”) for a week. She is going to be working at the Baycliff Camp as part of her residency program and I am going backpacking on Isle Royale for 4 days.

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My email access will be very limited all week and nonexistent when I’m on the island. See you when I get back…if the wolves don’t get me first!

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How does search engine optimization work? The past few days, I’ve been learning a few of the fundamental principles of SEO, and I am really excited to start putting what I’ve learned into practice.

In the next few weeks, Andrew and I are planning to get me a domain name, so I can get some hands-on experience with SEO. I’m looking forward to doing some basic programming with HTML, finding good ways to get links, making sites very accessible to visitors, discovering the best ways to generate traffic to a site, and making a site rank first when it is searched.  I want to learn all I can about this increasingly important field, and I am especially interested in finding out how SEO fits into a company’s overall marketing strategy.

Once I have completed training, I anticipate helping Andrew make your company even more visible.

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Stephanie Chueh

Hi! My name is Stephanie Chueh, and I’m a high school student at Community High School. In college, I’m going to double major in marketing and engineering. I love writing, watching movies, math, finding out about new things, perusing Fortune magazine, and reading in general. This summer, I am going to start interning at Your Search Advisor, and I can’t wait to get started.

I am very interested in having a career in marketing, and these days, internet marketing has become a much more important component of every company’s marketing strategy. At this internship, I anticipate getting to know more about search engine optimization, networking, marketing strategies, advertising potential with social media such as Facebook, and other exciting things happening in the internet and media worlds.

I will be learning a lot in the coming weeks, and I’m really looking forward to sharing what I learn with you!

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When I look 5-10 years ahead in SEO, choosing quantity over quality is a move in the wrong direction, if you ask me. There are going to be more competitors and more search-friendly platforms for websites. Basic crawler accessibility will be web dev 101. The truly successful SEO will approach search from marketing perspective, not the other way around.

That’s why it’s called Search Engine Marketing.

Penny for your thoughts? Literally. Stop by the Brickyard. I’ve got a mug full of ‘em.

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Interviewer: Scott Suiter, Edited by Tristan Kneschke, Camera: Ji Lee. More details here.

The last frame is interesting:

“Less than 8% of people who were interviewed on this day knew what a browser was.”

What does this mean for your business? Web users are increasingly dependent on search and search engines to find their way around the web. If your website does not appear in the top few organic (non-paid) or paid search results, you are missing out on a LOT of incremental web traffic.

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Finally Back in Ann Arbor!

As of today, my wife Elizabeth and I are Ann Arbor residents once again. After the first two years flew by (1 in Ann Arbor, 1 in Flint), her residency program is entering its final 6 months back at the U of M hospital. We’re both excited to be back in town and closer to good restaurants, friends, cool parks, and my office.

We’re so close to the action that I can start commuting by bike again. Call me “green” if you will, but I do it primarily for the fresh air and convenience. I can ride the 1.6 miles to work in under 9 minutes versus 17 minutes of driving, looking for a parking spot and walking the 3-4 blocks from the “free” parking. Oh, and it’s not very fun on rainy days (like today). I was soaked!

Website Redesign

Continuing the “green” theme (albeit for different reasons), I’m about two weeks away from launching a revamped version of YourSearchAdvisor.com. Ross Johnson is putting together an awesome design concept and we hope to have it up by the end of June.

Here’s a sneak peak of the new logo which will give you an idea of the direction we’re heading:

New Monthly Client Newsletter

Any day now I’ll be sending out the first issue of a new monthly (to start) client newsletter. There’s so much happening in the Search Engine Marketing industry that I’m finding it harder and harder to keep all of my clients up to date on the developments that matter to them. More importantly, I want to make sure they know how each development impacts them and what they can/should do about it.

It’s not just for clients though. Anybody can sign up here:

You will also have the option to sign up for a “Breaking News” email that I will only send if something happens that requires your immediate attention.

Last Call for Internship Applications

I am looking for an intern this summer to help with some research and client prep work. It’s a great way to learn the basics of Search Engine Marketing and help out on some actual client work.

If you or anybody you know wants to learn more about it, here’s the blog post with more details.

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Competition is usually a good thing in a capitalist society, but it’s not always friendly and it’s not always fair. If your website is being outranked by a competitor’s site when you Google your products or services, it may be because they hired a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant to improve their site’s visibility for various high-value keywords.

A good SEO consultant leaves very little evidence of their efforts (other than better rankings and more traffic), but you can spot the work of a competent SEO if you know what to look for.

Here are 7 signs your competitor may have hired an SEO:

1. The rel=”nofollow” Attribute

This little bit of code in a website link is used to prevent search engines from crawling through the link to the destination page. People familiar with SEO use it to keep search engine crawlers from passing PageRank to pages that shouldn’t appear in Google’s index.

A normal link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com">Your Search Advisor</a>

a link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute will look like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com" rel="nofollow">Your Search Advisor</a>

To look for this on your competitor’s site: Click the View > Page Source menu option in your web browser. Use the Find command and search for “nofollow”.

Exception to the rule: Some Content Management Systems (CMS) include the rel=”nofollow” attribute by default on some outgoing links, so your competitor may not even know they are doing it.

2. A sitemap.xml File

An XML sitemap is a “Table of Contents” for your website that is coded in a way that search engines find very useful. Most human visitors will never know it’s there. Search Engine Optimizers use them to tell a search engine crawler where to find each page on the site, when it was last updated and its importance relative to other pages on the site.

To find this on your competitor’s site: Go to their home page and add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL. This is the default location for a sitemap although it can be placed elsewhere.

For example, my sitemap is here: http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com/sitemap.xml

Exception to the rule: Again, some CMS platforms generate a sitemap.xml file by default. Other times, your competitor or their SEO may place the sitemap in a different location to keep it away from prying eyes.

3. A robots.txt File

Similar to a sitemap.xml file, a robots.txt file is a specially-formatted text file that webmasters can use to keep search engine crawlers from accessing certain parts of a website. For example, you may not want pages from the “insider information” section of your website to appear in search results so you would include that section in your robots.txt.

To find this on your competitor’s site: Go to their home page and add /robots.txt to the end of the URL. This is the default location for this file.

4. Google Webmaster Usage

Savvy SEO’s will register websites with Google Webmaster Central to get more detailed statistics about how and when Google crawls their website. To “verify” site ownership, Google provides a META tag that must be uploaded to the website to prove that you own it before sharing the crawling information.

To look for SEO involvement: View the source code of your competitor’s home page and search for the term “verify-v1” in the <head> section. Chances are somebody on their team is knowledgeable about SEO if you see something that looks like this:

<meta name="verify-v1" content="GRFWZR/Xs/Gsomerandomdigitsm4jGWF/BUg=" />

Similarly, the tag for the Yahoo! Site Explorer code looks like this:

<meta name="y_key" content="e7somedigits3c" />

Exception to the rule: The engines provide an alternative method of claiming a website that involves uploading a unique HTML or XML file to their server. These are much harder to find since the file name is random so you won’t find it unless you know what to look for. Your competitor might have registered their site this way and you wouldn’t know it.

5. Claimed Listings in Local Search Engines

Google Maps, Yahoo Local and other local search engines allow business owners (or their SEO or marketing people acting on their behalf) to “claim” or “verify” that they own the business. Once they have done so, they can add or edit the business listing, remove inaccurate information, upload photos, fix incorrect map placements, and a variety of other useful fixes.

To look for SEO involvement: Search either of those sites for your competitor and click on their listing. In Google, it will say “Provided by the business owner” within the “more info” section. If you see that, it could indicate that an SEO consultant encouraged them to claim their listing and update the details.

6. Optimized Meta Data and Page Titles

If an SEO is working on your competitor’s website, they will likely be optimizing each page’s copy for specific keywords. Sometimes they overdo it and it’s obvious which keywords they are targeting.

To look for SEO involvement: Check your competitor’s source code (File > View Source) and look for blatant over-use of high-value keywords in their page titles or Meta descpription and keywords tags.

They look like this:

<title>This is the Page Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="This is the page description which may include blatantly obvious keyword usage." />
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword, keyword variation, another keyword variation, keywords plural, you get the idea" />

7. Links Increasing Over Time

Proper SEO requires improving the quality and quantity of links pointing to a website. If your competitor is utilizing a competent SEO, you might expect to see the number of links to their website increasing over a period of weeks or months.

To look for SEO involvement: Use the Yahoo Site Explorer tool,type in your competitor’s web address and click “Explore URL”. Click the “Inlinks” button and then use the Show Inlinks selector to choose “Except from this domain”. Write down the total number of links. Check again every few weeks and keep track of the link counts. If their link count is rising faster than yours, it might indicate that they hired an SEO to build links to their site.

Exceptions to the rule: If your competitor is doing a lot of marketing, public relations, promotions, or is in the news, it could result in an increase in awareness for their site which could lead to more links regardless of whether they are doing it with SEO in mind.

What Next?

None of these signs are dead giveaways, as mentioned in the exceptions to each rule. But if you find more than 3 or 4 of these elements in your competitor’s site, you may consider fighting fire with fire and learning more about SEO.

Remember, search is a marathon not a sprint. If they have a head start, it doesn’t mean you can’t run a smarter race and beat them to the finish line.

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