Not that I have extra time on my hands or anything, but last month I started blogging over at CNET. My blog is the Searchlight Blog, part of the CNET Blog Network. Check it out.

Some of my recent posts over there...

• The Cyclical Nature of Search Engine Referrals - a post about the ebbing and flowing of search referred traffic and the reasons behind it
• The Wrong Way to Build Links from Blogs - a post about "blog marketing" at its worst; run from these sharks!
• Digg Bait and Switch - once you've gotten to the front page of Digg.com, earned your links, and disappeared into the archives, here's what you can do to maximize the SEO benefit of those links...
• Embargo Lifted: Secrets from SMX Now Unleashed - some SEO tricks that few know about, courtesy of yours truly!
• Wikipedians backlash against Search Engine Land article - a word of caution if you want to sway opinion about your company on Wikipedia
• Even Google.com Could Use Some SEO - some Google Webmaster Central reports that I was privy to reveal that Google has a big gaping hole in its SEO and usability
• Google Maps - Wading Through a Sea of Franchise Logos? - if this is the shape of things to come, I'm switching to Mapquest

I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour on the phone with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central, interviewing her just over a week ago. Our discussions ran the gamut of SEO issues -- redirects, duplicate content, AJAX, Flash, PageRank, and of course, the wealth of tools and reports that Google has made available in their Webmaster Central.

The interview has been edited down to 40 minutes and is now available for download:

Download / Listen to the interview » (MP3, 9 megs)

Vanessa will be speaking at two of the upcoming American Marketing Association one-day conferences, titled Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. Her colleague Amanda Camp will be speaking at the other one.

I will be conducting interviews of all the illustrious faculty of search marketers over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to get these podcasts delivered directly to you automatically as they are published.

Subscribe to the RSS podcast feed »

These conferences present a unique opportunity to hear -- in a small intimate environment with dozens of delegates instead of hundreds -- the latest tips, tricks, tools, trends and best practices from Googlers Vanessa Fox or Amanda Camp along with search marketing practitioners and gurus Eric Ward, Neil Patel, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Chris Smith (SuperPages.com), Paul O'Brien (HP) to name a few. :-) Oh, and I'll be speaking too, as well as chairing the events.

Mark your calendars: April 20 in San Francisco, May 25 in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago.

Register now »

Hope to see you there!

It's 2007, so it's out with the OLD and in with the NEW.

What's old, in terms of SEO? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on "trophy" keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over "duplicate content penalties". Relying on Sitemaps XML files to fix your indexation problems (news flash: your rankings will still suck!). Exchanging links.

What's "in" in SEO for 2007? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of Long Tail dynamics. Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general and then reaping the rewards of "network effects." Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it. Link baiting.

So how the heck do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff?

These new paradigms call for some new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Addressing Long Tail SEO specifically, we at Netconcepts came up with the following KPIs (props to my colleague Brian Klais for coming up with a lot of this!):

1. Brand-to-Nonbrand Mix
2. Unique Pages
3. Pages Yielding Traffic
4. Keywords per Page Yield
5. Visitor per Keyword Yield
6. Index-to-Crawl Ratios
7. Engine Yield

For definitions and explanations of these seven new metrics, have a read of Brian's article Beneath the Surface of Search, hot off the presses at Multichannel Merchant.

The fifth of in my series of SEO Report Cards for Practical eCommerce magazine led to the "deconstruction" of AirTroductions.com, which is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 17,000 registered).

I found it to be a solid website, which, with some tuning, would make for a better ride in the search engines. And with fewer than 30 pages in Google, there was indeed room for improvement. 

I've highlighted a few of my findings from this SEO mini-audit:

• Opportunities abound to get many more pages indexed. For example, every airport code search result (like this one) should be indexed, but currently the only way to these pages is through a web form. Remember, spiders can't fill out forms.
• Every page indexed has the same title tag. This makes it significantly harder for the site to effectively target a range of keywords. That's because each page has its own "song" based on the page's keyword focus, and crafting a unique title tag for that page based on its keyword focus is essential to really make the page "sing" well to the search engines.
• The home page (http://www.airtroductions.com/) is a 302 (temporary-style) redirect to http://www.airtroductions.com/Anonymous/Login.aspx, which may be causing some loss of link gain. A 301 (permanent) redirect would be better here than a 302. But a "rewrite" would be best of all, since in that case the URL wouldn't appear to change at all upon loading the home page.
• Pages at airtroductions.com (without www.) are appearing in the search indices in addition to www.airtroductions.com pages, leading to a dilution of link gain and indexation of duplicate pages. Permanent (301) redirects from airtroductions.com URLs to corresponding www.airtroductions.com URLs would be just the thing here.

Get the rest of my findings in the full article here.

The fourth of my SEO Report Cards led to the "deconstruction" of online golf equipment retailer Golfgods.com, whose president Jason Mischel was lamenting over the "quality" of the site's 5000-6000 visitors per day. Their #6 ranking in Google for "golf clubs" wasn't to be sneezed at, however it wasn't the hole-in-one they hoped for. 

Some of my findings...

• Inbound links of any real importance were in short supply. The Google PageRank score for the home page was 4 out of 10 (which is quite low considering that PageRank is on a logarithmic scale).
• The home page contained hundreds of links, which is way more than Google's recommended maximum of 100 per page.
• From the home page, the brand pages were only available through a dropdown nav (remember: spiders can't fill out forms). The most popular brands should be text links.
• Golfgods.com has a blog, which is very forward-thinking from both SEO and branding perspectives. Unfortunately, there were no text links to it to pass it link gain, only JavaScript-based links to individual posts which the spiders can't crawl.

For the rest of the findings, read the full article here.

UPDATE: There has been some confusion whether my critique was of the old Golfgods site or the new one. And the answer is that the critique is of the OLD site -- the one that was NOT developed by my company, Netconcepts. Just thought I would clear that up.

Yesterday my company Netconcepts released a research report / white paper titled "Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search." The analysis was based on data garnered from 1.2 million unbranded natural search visits to 5,000,000 pages in January 2006 measured across 25 branded online merchants.

According to our research, here's what the "average" well-branded merchant's Long Tail profile looked like:

• Roughly 73,000 unique, indexed pages. Yet only 14% of those pages yield search traffic. These "yielding pages" each generate search traffic at a rate of 4.6 unbranded keyword visitors per month.
• 189,000 brand searches conducted per month. 80% of search traffic comes from brand keywords and only 20% from non-brand terms.
• Total market potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000 searches per month, roughly 100 searches for every unique page, and 38 times greater than total brand searches.

"Brand searches are a small minority of searches conducted every day. Yet most E-tailers rely on them for their natural search traffic. Imagine taking to your next management meeting, a concrete prediction of the value of search traffic available from non-brand searches. Until now, it has been difficult to find the numbers to justify investment in natural search optimization or quantify a site's potential search traffic."

We've come up with a concept we call "Page Yield Theory", a method for estimating the potential value of the unbranded natural search tail. We believe it's possible to make a robust and scalable prediction of long tail potential. We've even devised the scientific equation to calculate it:

[2.4 KPP x 1.9 HPK] / 4.7% CTR = 100

It's solid research; months of hard work and deep thought went into the analysis. I think it's a must-read for any online retailer. Download the report now »

Search engine optimization will undergo a huge transformation over the next several years. If you want to hear me prognosticate, then you'll want to check out my article titled "The Shifting SEO Landscape", published on page 58 in the brand new DM News' Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Download the PDF of the Guide here (5.2 megs). Enjoy!

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that's just scratching the surface of CSS.

Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really humming:

• Reorder your content to sit above your top and left navigation in the HTML. That will boost the keyword prominence on your pages, which is good for SEO. Then use CSS to get the page to still display as you want. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this in action... for example, notice how the HTML doesn't change between this layout with left-side nav and this one with right-side nav; it's only the CSS that's changing.
• If you must use graphical navigation or headings instead of text-based, then use the CSS "image replacement" technique to substitute in a text link or heading tag, respectively, when the CSS is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit). For example, northland.edu uses this technique well. Currently, this is much more effective for SEO than ALT tags. Note though that in time, search engines will look at CSS files and disregard text that is off-screen.
• Learn to code in "CSS shorthand." With shorthand, hex codes for colors, margins, box dimensions and borders can all be abbreviated, for instance. More about this here. The efficiency of CSS shorthand translates into not only a speedier download for your customers, but also compact and tidy code that's easier to maintain.
• Make code that "degrades gracefully." Creating a separate "low-bandwidth version" or "printer friendly version" or "mobile version" of your site will sound ludicrous in years to come (heck, I think it sounds ludicrous NOW!), because CSS makes such a thing unnecessary. Check out how gracefully gotomedia.com degrades on a cell phone or PDA, for instance.
• Correct for browser incompatibility snafus with browser-specific CSS. Does something look awry in your page layout when loading your site with the Safari browser, for instance? Internet Explorer doesn't always play nice with the other browsers. Until the days where all the browsers follow all the same standards to the letter, browser-specific stylesheets are a useful crutch.
• Separate the presentation layer from the content layer as much as possible and move it into an external stylesheet (in other words, a separate .CSS file). That way it gets cached by the web browser and doesn't have to reload with each new page.
• Plan for site-wide changes. Things change -- colors, sidebars, ads, copyright dates, etc. Utilize CSS files and/or server-side includes to make future site-wide updates as painless as possible.

• Make use of the cascading nature of CSS. Most of the styles you define will be used site-wide. Some will only be for one particular page. Then there will be occasions where you'll want to "cascade" styles, and have certain sections of your site adopt a particular look/layout/theme that overrides or branches off from the site-wide styles. Clever use of cascading styles can lead to very efficient and elegant code.

  Warning! Geek speek ahead:

Just be careful of overriding previously declared statements. And also be aware that specificity is important in the cascade. Declare all your tag styles first then declare your id and class selectors down the doc. That way the cascade works and can be overwritten with new selectors. (Thanks to our CSS guru Darren for this last bit of advice.)

CSS coders: the Web Developer Firefox extension is an awesome tool for coding, debugging, and tweaking style sheets. You can display the stylesheet and the rendered page simultaneously side-by-side and then interactively edit the CSS, immediately viewing the effect of the change on the rendered page. And it makes identifying errors (be they validation, CSS, or JavaScript) a piece-of-cake. Did I mention the plugin is free? :-)

Wouldn't it make sense to take your very best posts, regardless of posting date, and endow them with a maximum amount of link gain so they have the most opportunity to rank well in the search engines? 

Putting together a Top 10 Posts list for your home page will do exactly that, by strategically passing link gain from your blog's home page directly to these posts. 

The great thing about a Top 10 list is that you can be as arbitrary as you want in determining which posts get onto this list. It could be the ones that lead with your most important keywords. Or the ones that most effectively soft sell your products or services. Or simply the posts you personally like the most. Just be careful to choose "evergreen" posts that won't lose their appeal or value after a few days or weeks. 

I really like the way Darren Rowse has done his featured posts list on ProBlogger, where he's listed them in a box labeled "introduction: key articles". He's also sprinkled a couple more into his "tips and hints: toolbox" and "problogger news" boxes, along with links to category pages. The links are very enticing to users, and of course they are text links with great anchor text in them, so they are appealing to search engines too. Nice job, Darren!

If you're happy to leave it up to your readers to decide, then simply install a 'most popular posts' plugin such as the Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress. The plugin automatically compiles the list based on which posts get viewed the most. You can publish the list on the home page and whereever else you see fit.

If you read Marketing Profs, you may have seen my two-part article over the last couple of weeks Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines. 

The tips involved...

1. Specific customizing of your title tags 
2. Ways to clean up your URL structure and aggregate link gain to a single definitive (canonical) URL (i.e. reduce duplicate page issues) 
3. Adding a tag cloud and tag pages to your blog and then optimizing those tag pages 
4. Offering text links to related posts
5. Adding a Top 10 Posts list to your home page with text links to those posts that you most want to pass link gain to 
6. Improving your anchor text on permalinks and on external links to other content of yours
7. Adding intro copy rich with keywords to the top of the page through the use of sticky posts 
8. Use of heading tags 
9. Use of bold or emphasis tags in the body copy of your blog posts 
10. (For blogs with multiple authors) Creating an author page for each contributor and linking to their site directly from your home page to pass them link gain using keyword rich anchor text. 

The complete article is around 3000 words and goes into much more detail. It includes suggested WordPress plugins to use and even sometimes specific PHP code to insert into your blog. 

If you are not a MarketingProfs premium subsciber you won't be able to read the article, so either sign up, or most of the information from the article is available on my blog optimization tag page.