This first webisode kicks off JLB’s effort to redesign their client’s website to be search engine friendly and to lay the groundwork for their upcoming brand management and social media marketing campaign.
Each webisode in this series will focus on how Raven can be used by marketing agencies to optimize their client’s websites and successfully market it online.
It all started with a tweet that said:
Don’t click http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6
If you click on the link it takes you to a white page with a button that says “Don’t Click.” And if you’re like me, you’ll click it and nothing happens. However, something does happen! A tweet mysteriously appears on your Twitter account with the same exact message — all thanks to Korben.Info.
It’s done through a very clever technique that utilizes an iframe and CSS. When you visit the page, it pulls in the Twitter reply page and auto-inserts the message. It then repositions the “Update” button over the fake “Don’t Click” button and then hides the “Update” button (all with CSS).
There are so many things you could do with this technique, it boggles my mind. For example, you could theoretically use it to promote an affiliate link. Although the original example was recursive in nature, you could use the same technique to get Twitter users to tweet your link without them knowing about it.
An affiliate marketer could place the iframe on any page. In fact, they could put multiple iframes on one page if they wanted. Then they could overlay it on top of an actionable item. That could be a button, link or anything that a typical user might click on. Then, if they’re already logged into Twitter, it would automatically post whatever message the site wanted to their Twitter account.
The code is remarkably simple for such a significant exploit. Below is a step-by-step example of how you do it.
<iframe src="http://twitter.com/home?status=Put Message and Affiliate URL here" scrolling="no"></iframe>
You can use a button or any other HTML element
<button>Button Text</button>
iframe { position:absolute;width:550px;height:228px;top:-170px;left:-400px;z-index: 2;opacity: 0;filter: alpha(opacity=0); }
button { position:absolute;top:10px;left:10px;z-index:1;width: 120px; }
That’s not for me to decide. If you’re wondering if I’m going to use this technique, the answer is “probably not.” It’s outside of my own code of ethics for how I choose to market. So, you might be asking, then why share this? I’m sharing it because it’s knowledge. If someone wants to use it, fine. They can use it to their own demise or success. However, it can also be used to potentially close the exploit or to further more innovation. It’s really up to you and not for me to judge.
Pete Cashmore of Mashable is reporting that Twitter has fixed this exploit.
Jeremy Rivera recently brought David Harry’s article on reciprocal linking to my attention. David makes the case that reciprocal linking is pointless and points to patents by Yahoo! to help make his point.
The main goal of the patent is to automatically identify (over done) reciprocal links that may be orchestrated to inflate ones rankings (Viagra for PageRank). While they offer the standard machine learning tactics to accomplish the automation, it is still based on initial human input to establish a training set. To me this is often the Achilles heel as new tactics need to be identified to be fed into the system.
The key themes that I got from his article were excessive and scheme. For example, what these search engine patents hope to do is curtail excessive reciprocal linking and detect link schemes. Those manipulations often include massive linking between a domain and it’s sub-domains, three-way and multi-level linking, and suspicious website clusters.
If you still create or currently have a links page that you use in your Internet marketing efforts, stop it! Stop it now! You should have stopped it a long time ago, but regardless, stop it and remove that page. Old school link exchanging has been dead for quite some time and having a links page has been the equivalent of putting a target on your site for some time now.
Link exchanges still exist and can be effective, but they’ve changed form. And like all good search marketing, it takes time and effort to do it right. Modern link exchanging is simply an extension of foot-work link building. Foot-work link building is a way of describing the manual process of building one-way inbound links to a website. Effective foot-work link building involves getting in-bound links from relevant websites, located on relevant pages, and within relevant copy on those pages.
A modern link exchange may include making contact with a webmaster and suggesting that you each write blog entries about the other’s service. It should also focus on the same rules used in one-way link building, including:
As with most Internet marketing communication, don’t let your technical intentions be so obvious. For example, don’t contact someone and try to spell out the SEO implications of linking to each other. Instead, consider briefly mentioning the obvious marketing benefits, but then focus on other aspects, like being a real person and trying to establish a relationship with the webmaster.
Finally, stay away from schemes, don’t over do it, and make sure you target a variety of websites. It won’t help to target websites that all link to each other, so make sure you define clusters of sites and stop trying to exchange links once you’ve achieved a 10-20% penetration (percentage will vary based on size, so use your best judgement.) This may be very limiting for those who are in a niche industry, but for people who market websites within a broad industry, this approach can be very effective and can help grow high quality link exchanges that should keep you off the radar of search engines.
Using Twitter — and I mean really using Twitter — the past few months has been an eye-opening experience. I started to appreciate it the most when I saw how powerful Twitter could be at conferences. Both the leads and true friendships I’ve gained through Twitter have been amazing, and I’ve been wanting to write about the marketing opportunities on Twitter for several weeks now.
Thanks to a suggestion from Taylor Pratt, I recently created a new (wiki-based) resource called the SEO Guide, which is going to be a repository of howto articles on SEO and related techniques. It will also loosely tie in elements of Raven’s SEO tools when appropriate. Although the guide is in its infancy, I had the opportunity to write its first article on Twitter Marketing. In the article I highlight:
All of the articles on the SEO Guide will be organic in nature thanks to the wiki architecture. I’m looking forward to continually updating the Twitter Marketing page — keeping it fresh with relevant content — along with adding and updating all of the other content I have planned for the online guide.
A well thought out information architecture (IA) is crucial for search engine optimization (SEO), in the same way that semantic structure and high quality content is. However, good design can play its part too.
InstantAmber provides an excellent example of how good design can also equal good SEO. Sitening launched InstantAmber about a week ago and decided to submit its URL to some popular design showcase galleries. The site was immediately picked up by almost all of the gallery websites we submitted it to. Then it was picked up — organically — by other online publishers that actively follow those websites. The result was instant traffic to the website and almost instant trust by the search engines for the site.
Although we prefer granular SERP Tracking, like the kind Raven provides, there’s another way to determine search engine result pages without having to ever visit Google. It’s called passive SERP tracking, and it utilizes the information that’s passed through from the referring search engine result page. Using that information, it’s relatively easy to determine the following details:
The last item is the key piece of data. Knowing that the referral came from the first page of Google is helpful information. It doesn’t tell you where the result was ranked on the page — was is number one or number seven? — but it does provide a high level view. Knowing that a referral came from page one, two or ten, is much better than not knowing at all.
We created a proof of concept for passive SERP tracking by making a pepper (an add-on) for Shaun Inman’s amazing stats package, Mint. The SERP Pepper allows you to easily track search engine referrals, and report on which page they’re coming from. Download the SERP Pepper for free.
Every SEO Specialist has their own formula for keyword density. Personally, I prefer to simply have articles written naturally and I try to make sure I’m appropriately mentioning and writing about my targeted keywords. However, many SEO copywriters rely on external applications or online tools to report keyword density — sticking to their tried-and-true formula. If you’re one of those people and you use WordPress to publish your content, you’re in luck. A new plugin for WordPress called Keyword Snatcher provides a quicktag to the “Write” page to easily display the current keyword density.
The plugin is not only easy to use, it’s also easy to install and doesn’t require any modifications. One of my favorite features is that it excludes common search engine stop words — taken from Aaron Wall’s stop words list.
Keyword Snatcher is available for free from impNERD.
The Trouble With SERP Tracking
Monday, April 7th, 2008Why Track SERPs?
There are generally three reasons why people track SERPs: Research, Trends and Performance.
Research tracking allows an SEO specialist or webmaster to know where a website ranks based on a set of keywords. It’s one thing to know if a website is in a search engine’s index, but it’s another thing to know whether or not it shows up in the SERPs. Most people want to know whether or not it shows up in the top ten or twenty results, or if it resides deep in the SERPs where nobody will ever find it?
Trend tracking looks at the affect of an ongoing SEO campaign. That campaign can consist of simply updating the HTML code of a website or involve a sophisticated online link building campaign. Regardless, it’s important to know if the campaign is affecting a website positively or negatively in the SERPs for the target keywords.
Performance tracking relates to the actual traffic that the site receives from search engines. Instead of focusing on where a website resides in the SERPs for targeted keywords, performance tracking only focuses on keywords and traffic that actually send visitors to the website.
The Problem With SERP Tracking
There are major hurdles to SERP tracking. First off, search engines don’t like it. They see SERP Tracking as an attempt to game their system and they also don’t like the burden it puts on their systems (usage that in their mind should only be used for what they consider to be legitimate requests). There have been attempts in the past to provide APIs to allow these type of queries, but search engines like Google quickly determined that their API wasn’t being used for the purposes they wanted it to be used for, and subsequently discontinued it. There is of course a large interest in having access to a commercial API for their search engine, but Google has continually shown absolutely no interest in providing that service.
The next problem is accuracy versus overloading/triggering the beast. The most accurate results are those that would appear for most regular users — ten results per page. The problem is that if you want to get the top ten results for the first one hundred results, you have to hit the search engine ten times! The easiest way around that is to get the top one hundred results from one page (a setting that an easily be made in the search preferences or in the query request of the URL). That way you only have to hit the search engine once — there’s less impact on the search engine’s resources and you have all of the data you need. Unfortunately, those results aren’t entirely accurate.
Several years ago, search engines began to implement indented results — results to the same website that were bundled together, but the second result was indented. This mainly occurs when a search engine’s algorithm decides that there are two pages on a website that deserve to appear for the same keyword search. At first, this was rare, but as time passed it became more common. So common in fact, that if you do a top one hundred search for a popular term, almost every result will have a secondary indented result. If you didn’t pick on what I just said, let me be more clear; The top one hundred search results only have 50 websites!
Indented results occur in greater numbers for result pages that have more than ten results on them. For example, if you do a search that displays the first twenty results, and if a website shows up for the sixth result and also the nineteenth (normally page one and two), the nineteenth result will bubble up and indent itself underneath the sixth result — thus making the nineteenth result the seventh result and pushing everything else down. Now imagine that scenario on a one hundred result page where all of the result’s websites are repeated. The bubbling up of secondary results throws everything off compared to its ten results per page counterpart.
Finally, the elephant in the room is universal, subscription, local and custom search results (I guess that makes four elephants). All of these results can significantly change the search results — especially on the first page. Not only that, they can work in conjunction with each other and also occur randomly.
Future of SERP Tracking Is Passive
It’s only a matter of time when even the typical one through ten search result page will become a moving target. Once that occurs, it will be practically impossible to report any results that have any degree of accuracy. Coupled with search engines’ distaste for people tracking their SERPs, it’s also a matter of time until they implement measures that will make it extremely difficult to track SERPs en masse, or at the very least, affordably. Of course, this could be years away, but I do believe it’s coming.
Ultimately, I believe that the future of SERP tracking will be done passively. Passive SERP tracking involves using the referral data from search engine traffic to extrapolate not only the search engine and keyword, but also what page and/or position the result was on. We recently created a free Pepper (stats add-on) for Mint that captures passive SERPs in order to showcase this method SERP Tracking. There are also companies, like Enquisite, that are currently using passive SERP tracking to create and enhance their own analytics.
The beauty of passive SERP tracking is that it doesn’t require using any search engine resources, meaning, it’s search engine friendly. I recently had an email discussion with Matt Cutts about enhancing passive SERP tracking. He said:
We (Sitening) racked our brains on how to do this — it’s not as easy as one might think — and the best we could come up with was to either incorporate it into Google Analytics (which we believe Google could easily do) or to use Webmaster Tools by appending the links in search results. For example, if you could go to Webmaster Tools and turn on the ability to track the “rank” of a link by using an appended variable, that might work. So, instead of having the SERPs return http://domain.com/, they would return http://domain.com/?rank=4 (where ?rank=4 states the rank as 4). It would be an opt-in ability and if turned on, would affect all links that appear in the SERPs for that domain. The user would also have the ability to specify the characteristics of the appended variable in order to make sure it worked correctly with whatever technology they were using. Of course, it’s never that simple. If you already have a link in your index that fits that variable (?x=#), then Google may need to add an ampersand when it appends it — or they could just say too bad, don’t use crappy URLs if you’re going to opt in for the ranking service.
SERP Tracking Should Really Be About Performance
The only SERPs that really matter are the ones that bring traffic. Although it’s nice to know where a website resides in the SERPs, if you aren’t getting any traffic from it, it’s meaningless. Ideally, if you can connect and relate passive SERP data with ongoing campaign data, the analytics can become quite useful. For example, you can better correlate campaign efforts with increased traffic and conversions. You can also use that data to determine the effectiveness of different search marketing techniques.
For Raven, we’re going to continue to use traditional SERP tracking for monitoring trends, but not necessarily for accuracy. Although we would love to capture ten results per page instead of one hundred results, it’s cost prohibitive and it requires the use of too many resources from the search engines. Coupled with the problems discussed in this article — including the four elephants — we believe it’s only a matter of time until traditional SERP tracking results will become impossible to maintain any degree of accuracy.
Although traditional SERP tracking may always play a role in the Raven suite of SEO tools, we’re going to start focusing on how we can integrate SERP trends and performance with campaign data. We believe that’s where the most valuable information will ultimately be derived.
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