Dangerous Thinking

Last week I noticed that this post was going to be my thousandth on Dangerous Thinking. It must be some kind of milestone, and I felt I should acknowledge it in some way. But how?

I asked my Twitter followers, and no one came up with the right idea. In fact, there weren’t that many ideas at all!

Should I attempt to summarise the state of the art in SEO? Integrate the SEO and Social Media worlds? Eradicate spam in one fell swoop? Maybe next month…

Dangerous Thinking has been around since December 2000/January 2001, and has gone through some real changes. I’m sure it’ll continue to do so.

Maybe I’ll just say thanks for staying with me and hope you’ll keep reading and commenting.

Some very welcome information from Google today. Actual numbers of searches on key phrases. You can try it on Google’s Key Word Tool.

This is big news for anyone doing key phrase research, providing solid numbers that matter. It should mean no further guesswork and extrapolating from questionable data.

Thank you, Google!

Google’s Matt Cutts is quite unequivocal in this presentation about Web Spam. “Search Engine Optimization isn’t spam,” he explains. He’s also clear about what makes a site spammy.

It’s definitely worth 10 minutes of your time.

You’ll also be able to see why SEO and great content should be one and the same thing.

Easing myself back into this 2008 blogging thing gently, 15 Principles of Internet Marketing from Conversation Marketing had me nodding at its simple wisdom:

75% of your audience uses a search engine to find you. Get used to it. All the banners and ‘viral’ marketing on earth won’t come close to results produced by a top 5 ranking for a relevant phrase.

Kind of fits in with my last post.

I’ve been hugely busy in the run-up to Christmas, and almost missed this very important admission by Google. Somehow, it seems to have attracted less comment in the blogosphere than it deserves.

mad.co.uk in PPC shot down by SEO experts reports:

Stuart Small, industry leader, business and industrial markets at Google, backed up the argument and said that with 85% of all B2B purchases starting in a search engine, paid search ads were vital to any business. He added that Google sees 80% of searchers clicking on organic results, with 20% clicking on search ads. (my italics)

That’s a pretty commercially sensitive piece of information, and one that anyone in SEO or who owns a Web site needs to take on board.

The inference is quite clearly that one should do as much Organically as possible, a piece of advice Paul and I have been trotting out regularly since we founded Web Positioning Centre.

If you’ve been following Dangerous Thinking’s Twitter feed, you would probably have noticed last week that I’d been pondering a Meatball Sundae.

Not anything to do with my interest in food and cooking, you will understand, and certainly not a recipe from my food blog, but Seth Godin’s latest piece of wisdom on marketing.

Although I’m quoting Godin out of context, this quote resonated strongly with me:

Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them. Seth’s Blog

Yet so many people in the Web industry still worry about the number of words we, as SEOs, want to put on the Home page, arguing that people will look at the page and go off somewhere else. Or that the home page has to be different visually. That’s old media thinking – a world where books and magazines need their covers designed in a specific way so they leap off the shelf.

This thinking, then, leads to the thought that the Web is a collection of books.

As SEOs, we optimize copy on a whole range of pages to target selected key phrases. People who search for content arrive at the optimized page, not the Home page, simply because that content matches their search more closely – it’s more relevant. As search engines become more effective and site owners and their SEOs become better at working with them, the concept of the Home page as a magazine or book cover cover will become weaker and weaker.

Still not wholly convinced? Think about PPC. Earlier this year Google changed the rules to stop advertisers directing traffic to the home page (or any generic landing page); instead we must have relevant, good quality, landing pages.

So both Organic and PPC/SEM traffic is coming at the site from an indeterminate angle. Or as Godin put it:

No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them.

So forget about a door for your site. Just make sure everyone is welcomed with the information they’re looking for.

(BTW, I know I’m over-compensating by aligning myself with Godin. I know that lots of traffic is directed to the Home page.)

Writing for search engines is very like writing for people – or is it the other way round?

One of the things we get asked is about headings – like at our presentation at Start-up Day recently – and how they work with HTML’s tags. The rules boil down to common sense if you’re a writer, but they’re still worth listing:

1. You should only have one headline on a page because it’s at the top of the your copy hierarchy – use just one heading enclosed in h1 tags. The second and succeeding headings are ignored by the search engines

2. Put your most important proposition in the headline because that’s good copywriting practice (it speaks loudly to people) – search engines put most emphasis on headlines, so include one of your key phrases (the one you want to get the most leverage for, if it makes sense within the story you want to tell on the page)

3. Break your copy up using subheads. Use those subheads to tell the reader what the page is about and entice them in to read – try to work your other key phrases into subheads between h2 tags.

While search engines are reputed to put some extra weight on a heading between h3 tags, I hardly ever use them. There’s only so much interruption I can tolerate to the flow of my copy. I like simply structured pages.

Questions about duplicate content are probably the most common of all I get asked. For example:

Can I use the same content across two sites on two different domains?

Can I use the same content in my meta tags across all the pages on my site?

Is it all right to use the same Title on all my pages?

Out comes one of Rosam’s SEO Rules of Thumb. The one that says if it’s lazy, the search engines will probably skewer you for it.

Honestly, the search engines will either penalise you or ignore your efforts. So why bother?

Create some real value in your site and everyone will love you.

Sure. Frequent updates to a site are A GOOD THING SEO-wise. Let’s get that out of the way now. And they’re an excellent way to encourage people to make a return visit.

But they’re not necessary if you’re focused on getting top page positions on natural search. There are plenty of wholly static sites we’ve worked on for clients that perform really well on the search engines. Sometimes just with a concentrated burst of off-site activities after I’ve written some good SEO copy, sometimes with ongoing off-site promotion.

An annual content refresh can be enough, if the other measures are effective and properly executed.

Why is this important? Well, I’ve seen many companies getting their knickers in a twist about how they’re going to produce regular content, or whether they should have a blog on their site because they’ve read that they need to do this to get those high SE positions.

Instead, a good SEO supplier will be able to take the whole task off their hands, so they may not need to make a continuous commitment to working on the site, or to having an out-of-house writer contributing day in, day out.

So think about what you want to achieve and your resources before committing to produce often-updated content.

A few weeks ago I asked Is localisation affecting your search engine performance? Obviously, moving a site with a .com domain to a UK-based server will solve the problem of getting the google.co.uk UK rankings.

But my colleague Paul Silver wondered if we we could find another way of establishing this blog’s UK provenance. We ended up registering Dangerous Thinking on Google Local, so Google knew that the blog had a real physical UK location.

We sat back and waited to see if Google Search picked up on the Google Local registration. Some six weeks later, it hadn’t, so we’ve concluded Google Search does not reference Google Local.

Whether Google will join up the two services in the future, I don’t know – it seems very logical to. But they don’t appear to work together now.

Edit (20 November 2007): Burrowing back into my RSS feeds (I always read the most up-to-date ones first), I found Google’s answer to search localisation in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog back in August called Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts.

Here we go:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

So, there we are. IP and top-level domain.