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SEO Punditions: 2 out of 3 ain’t bad

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 6, 2008 in SEO Theory

I found three interesting posts on SEO blogs today. 2 were interesting because they got it so right. 1 was interesting because it got it so wrong. Let’s talk about the wrong-headed post first.

I speak of SEO analytics. Yes, friends, SEO analytics. Who, I ask you, should know about and understand “SEO analytics”?

Who, you say? Why, all of us should know about and understand SEO analytics. And, yes, so many SEOs do manage their analytics by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone came out with some useful SEO analytics software that eased our burdens and saved us some time?

Well, to date, no one has released a useful SEO analytics package. That’s right. Everything out there is still crap, still counting Yahoo! and Technorati links (as if that tells you anything useful), still not looking at the big picture.

Okay, enough about the amateurish aspirations of the SEO analytics software industry. We can come back and revisit this topic in oh, say, maybe a year. In the meantime, you get what you pay for. In my opinion, I wouldn’t pay for crap, but that’s just me.

I love Shari Thurow

Shari takes on the use ‘nofollow’ to sculpt PageRank myth over at SearchEngineLand. I agree with most of what she says, although she doesn’t seem to feel that “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages are important. Perhaps Shari didn’t mean to convey that impression because, frankly, if you think that content isn’t important then you should NOT be putting it on your Web site.

In her conclusion, Shari offers this timeless SEO advice: “I’m not going to use it to sculp PageRank. I have never had to because, unlike most SEOs, I try to build sites that have a good information architecture, site navigation, and cross-linking structure from the onset.”

If you pay attention to nothing else in the SEO punditology world, heed Shari Thurow on that point. That is what Search Engine Optimization is all about. Actually, that is what Web marketing is all about. Search engine optimization only complements what we do with our Web sites.

In fact, that leads me to the third (and second useful) pundit post I found very interesting today.

Hewlett-Packard Gets Search

I like to read Hewlett-Packard’s Web Usability, SEO, and Experience Blog. They don’t post nearly as often as I would like but the staff contributors provide valuable insight into how a large corporation manages its search technology internally.

Hewlett-Packard runs its own search engine. Did you know that? In fact, they respond to something like 60 million queries a month. But do they plan to take on Google, Ask, Live, and Yahoo!? Of course not. Hewlett-Packard’s search engine only handles HP site search.

That’s a lot of site queries that, for whatever reason, Google, Ask, Live, and Yahoo! are not handling. 60 million queries a month. Can you imagine how much traffic the four commercial search engines must be sending to HP.com?

Laura Dansbury, HP’s Global On-Site Search Program Manager wrote about a panel that she, Tanya Vaughan (HP’s SEO manager), and Vicqui Chan from HHO Store gave at eTail 2008. This paragraph in particular grabbed my attention:

As we talked to the participants we found that even smaller companies are not looking at search holistically. They have different people focused on the 3 areas of search and little or no collaboration. Frequently on-site search is managed by an IT team, SEM is done by a marketing team person, and SEO is the domain of a person on the web team. Sometimes landing pages are duplicated and there is inter-team competition for the same keywords. Once someone lands on a page, the focus is on conversion. But what happens if they search again? Are they lost, what didn’t they like about the landing page, do they need more information? How can this step of searching again feed into the design of landing pages and the choice of keywords?

Search engine optimization is not just about getting links, how many links Yahoo! and Technorati report, or getting good positions for targeted keywords in Google’s search results.

If you have a site search tool you need to be doing something to ensure that people can find what they are looking for with your site search tool. If, like me, you’re cheap, impoverished, or too busy to create your own internal search engine you probably use a major search engine’s site search feature to help your visitors find your content.

Now, stop and think about what it means to your site search if you’re using “rel=’nofollow’” on your internal links. Hm. Are you really showing this search engine which of your pages are most important through good site architecture or are you just telling it to ignore pages because some idiot on an SEO blog said that was a good idea?

You can learn more about search engine optimization by improving how your site performs in Ask, Live, Google, and Yahoo! site search than by reading Dan Thies, Rand Fishkin, and every other SEO tool hawker out there.

You can learn more about search engine optimization by looking at your site search, organic SEO, and pay-per-click search optimization and determining if they are duplicating efforts. Some people really do have internal landing pages intended only for site search. Why? Because they want to track conversions from site search. Some people really do use separate landing pages for PPC and organic SEO — and that’s okay — but they should be doing this to track conversions properly, not because they don’t know what they are doing.

If you have more than 1 person managing any aspect of your search visibility you need to have regular meetings to see what each person is doing AND to see if they can help each other innovate, leverage resources, and improve efficiencies. If there are only 3 people handling your search visibility they should be making presentations to each other once a week, at least once a month, in a formal meeting environment. It would be good to include non-technical people in the presentations to ensure the B.S. degrees don’t show themselves.

Search visibility is too important to leave in the hands of tools that only tell you how many links Yahoo! and Technorati are willing to report. And using Google Blogsearch for link reporting is just plain stupid. If you’re thinking that you can only understand SEO through links you’ve been reading the wrong SEO blogs. You need to concentrate on the fundamentals.

Links are for crawling and indexing, not for optimization. You can leverage links to build up your relevance because Google is stupid about links but that doesn’t mean you should abandon good site structure and content organization. Once you get people to your site make it useful enough that they want to hang around for a while.

Everything you need to worry about with respect to search visibility begins with how you structure your Web site. It incorporates how you bind your pages together. Your internal linkage is the glue that keeps your house of electrons from falling apart. Don’t weaken the glue. Don’t dismiss it out of hand just because someone with an SEO blog doesn’t have sense enough to write about it.

You need to think in terms of sculpting Web sites, not PageRank.

You need to think in terms of how much content you can make available (and visible) to people, not how to hide it.

You need to think in terms of how to make your expanding content more searchable, not how to get more links in Yahoo!, Technorati, and Google Blogsearch.

Focus on what works and leave the smoke and mirrors to people who don’t have time for real search engine optimization.