Tag Archives: SEO

Should You Use .TEL Top Level Domains (TLDs)?


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.TEL domainsPeriodically, someone will launch a new, specialized Top Level Domain (“TLD”), claiming it’s the next big thing on the net. As we’ve seen time and again (such as with the .MOBI TLD), most of these efforts are never going to achieve the same level of recognition or adoption as the .COM and .NET standards, and businesses which muck about with them are likely to expend valuable resources resulting in zero ROI.

Such is likely to be the case with the .TEL top level domain which launched in March. .TEL, operated by Telnic Limited, is intended to be a sort of domain-based authoritative location for contact information – a sort of grand new evolution of phone directories, white pages, and yellow pages. When you obtain a .TEL domain, you don’t manage it on the servers of your choice, but instead it will generate a site hosted on the Telnic service. Justin Hayward, Communications Director for Telnic, is quoted as saying:

“We consider .tel to be the first global live contact site directory. Once contact details are populated in a .tel, anyone can type a known .tel address into any browser or use keywords that describe the person or business they want to find. Keywords are free so the more keywords that are used and the more descriptive they are, the easier it is to be discoverable.”

On the surface, this all sounds good, but the first problem I see with it is one of adoption: if people know to look for you, they will not be likely to type in a .TEL domain name — everyone looks for .COM. Even if you specifically tell someone about your .TEL URL, you’ll expend extra time explaining that, yes, .TEL *is* a type of web URL, and even then they’re just as likely to type it in as “something.tel.com”, which is operated by Tokyo Electron company, and not the proper Telnic page URL.

This is the exact same issue with .MOBI, which was intended to be used as an authoritative URL for the mobile-friendly versions of websites. Most people don’t know/understand the protocol, so they won’t be naturally typing it in when out and about with their mobile devices (and, .Mobi has the additional downside of creating one-letter-longer URLs, which make it that much more tiresome for someone on a wireless device to type in).

From a marketing perspective, .TEL domains have additional downsides. You don’t appear to be able to control the UI or look-and-feel of the generated contact pages, and slapping on yet another domain can split the effectiveness of your natural search engine optimization work. Links pointing at that additional URL will dribble away portions of the PageRank you could be sending or keeping for your primary domain.

And, how will search engines treat it? As with many of the lesser top-level-domains, they’re likely to be more mistrustful. I see zero toolbar PageRank values for the top-ranking .TEL pages, though this may be due to the domains only getting launched recently. But, their public statements touting keywords (“…Keywords are free so the more keywords that are used…the easier it is to be discoverable…”) and the fact that domainers seem to be excited by having another channel to potentially exploit makes the TLD concerning in terms of potential search engine performance.

Bucking standards in favor of creating your own proprietary one, and flying in the face of established adoption rates in terms of internet consumer behavior are not a good formula for success.

In a very self-serving blog post by Telnic CTO, Henri Asseily, titled, “Why .tel and not a free hcard microformat?“, they seem to also be taking aim against the increasingly popular hCard Microformat standard in favor of .TEL. What’s funny about this is that this is comparing apples and oranges, and Telnic has deployed example domains (see emma.tel, henri.tel) which provide a vCard at the bottom of the pages.

It’s absolutely stunning to me that they took the trouble to provide vCard off of their contact info pages when they could easily also embed all the vCard information into the page itself, using semantic markup! Meanwhile, his blog is suggesting that using .TEL in some way should be done instead of using hCard! And, I totally fail to see the significance of protecting info he’s referring to with privacy settings — are the .TEL pages a publicly-findable directory of contact info, or not?!? It’s disappointing that they wouldn’t simply incorporate the hCard and thereby gain additional advantage from the special display treatments that Google has begun applying to microformat-enriched pages.

Telnic is partly promoting their service as a way of providing individuals’ and businesses’ contact info on the internet, “even if you don’t have a website”. Ummm… don’t the online white pages and yellow pages already do this?

For companies considering adopting the .TEL for online marketing advantage, you should seriously reconsider. This is not going to become the defacto online standard anytime soon, and expending time playing with this domain is going to take resources away from efforts which are likely to be far more beneficial. At worst, linking to new .TEL domains could also subtract some of your existing PageRank value to little advantage.

The only case in which a .TEL domain could potentially provide advantage is in the case of a project to improve online reputation, if you’re looking for additional webpages to come up in SERPs, helping you to push down some sort of negative content which may be ranking for your brandname. However, there are a lot more social media sites, business profile pages, and additional strategies which you should be employing in that case, and the unproven nature of .TEL sites in organic search rankings relegate use of the new TLD to the bottom of your list of possible online reputation weapons.

Is Geotagging Worthwhile for Search Engine Optimization?


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I posted an article today on “Should You Geotag Pages For Local SEO?” on Search Engine Land. In it, I describe the cases in which I think you should geotag a webpage.

Geotags

Essentially, I state that locally-oriented webpages for businesses or content pages which have full street addresses should probably be tagged with hCard microformats, as I’ve described before.

Otherwise, if you have a locally-oriented webpage about something which has a place in the physical world, but which is not associated with an actual street address, I believe use of geotagging makes sense. Increasingly, specialized search engines (and even Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Bing Maps) are pinpointing such content and making it readily available for online users.

The other frequently-confusing aspect of geo tagging of webpages is caused by the fact that there’s no clearly-dominant standard for formatting of geotag information. At least four major standards have been deployed out into the wild, with no clear winner! Luckily, one could probably use all four simultaneously on a page without taking extreme measures — and, considering how relatively easy it is to add the geocoding to the page in the first place, I see no reason not to add all four at once if you have a valid reason to geotag the page.

I believe we’re going to see increasing adoption of geotagging as the major online mapmakers make more geographic information available to map consumers. Google’s recent deployment of “Rich Snippets” is a prime indication that more semantic markup data may become enabled in order to enrich online users’ search experiences, and local mapping data is one of the prime areas where they’re likely to add more functionality. (See also my article on Optimizing Search Listings for more details about how semantic markup such as hCard Microformats may position your site for greater online success.)

Do Page Load Times Affect Your Search Rankings?


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How Fast Does Your Page Load?As average internet access speeds have improved, many websites have become pretty lazy about paying attention to how fast their pages load, designing bloated content full of heavy images, multiple Javascript and CSS files, and ads or iframes pulling from dozens of sources. This neglect could affect your search rankings, and here’s why.

First of all, Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, stated in a recent Q/A video that sites’ load times are currently not a ranking factor.

However, there are three reasons to believe that site load times could affect search rankings in the very near future:

  • Matt’s opinion is that it would be a great idea for a ranking factor! And, he leaves open the possibility that it could be used as a ranking factor in the future. He’s influential within Google and is named on some Google ranking patents, so this is significant. Other significant Googlers also have indicated that this may be a focus area of increasing importance to them. Larry Page apparently stated that he wanted Google to be central to efforts to make the internet speedier, allowing users to get pages as fast as turning pages in hardcopy books.
  • Google recently released Page Speed, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc). (This is also likely Google’s competitive response to Yahoo’s similar tool, YSlow, which even Google recommends as a tool for diagnosing speed issues. Combined with these other reasons, I believe there’s cause to believe it’s not just a competitive checklist item, but part of their strategy to speed up the internet experience.)
  • Last year, Google introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google AdWords ads.
  • Internal research at Google has shown that slower page delivery times will reduce the number of searches users will conduct by 0.2% to 0.6%. While this may appear negligible, it undoubtedly would add up to a lot of lost revenue over time for Google, and it proves their point that slowness has a chilling effect on internet use and traffic.

Based on the above reasons I outlined, I think page load times are very likely to become integrated into Google’s ranking “secret sauce” soon, and that sites which seriously neglect page load time will find themselves at a disadvantage.

Classic Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) lists of tricks rarely include mention of improving page speeds, but Google has steadily been evolving their ranking methods to reduce the impact of technical code tricks and moving toward more human-centered design factors. In fact, one part of their process already includes having their quality team assess the webpages found in search results for many thousands of sample queries. If one of your site’s sample pages fall into their sample set, the assessor’s rating of the page compared to competitors could result in an average quality score being applied to all the pages on your site.

I’ve believed for some time already that Google applies some automated quality scoring to natural search rankings, similar to how they’ve applied such factors to their paid search ads.

My suspicion is that there will likely be some sort of scale of site loading speeds which might be used to impact rankings in the future. And, I’d also suspect that this factor would be used primarily as a negative ranking factor, as opposed to a positive one. By this I mean that pages from competing sites which have all other stronger relevancy ranking elements essentially equal could drop lower in search results if their load times don’t meet some minimum standard. Load time might negatively impact a ranking, but likely wouldn’t necessarily help it rise above a page which has slightly stronger relevancy/importance factors unless that page had serious slowness itself.

I’d further expect that Google would apply some sort of adjustment to try to assess whether one Googlebot visit ran across just a momentary lag condition, versus a page delivery speed that’s always slow. So, I don’t see any reason to freak out if you have experienced a server or application issue for just a brief period!

Even if Site Load Time were not to become an official member of Google’s list of over 200 ranking factors, load time could still indirectly affect your rankings. Avanish Kaushik at Google has strongly encouraged webmasters to pay attention to Bounce Rate (a factor determined as a percentage of site visitors that only visit one page and/or who only land on a page for a few seconds before hitting the back button).

Google can also easily see if a user immediately backs out of a page they find in the search results, and such a high bounce rate may indicate a poor quality result for a particular query. One prime cause of a user hitting the back key can be if a page is extremly slow at loading. So, if Bounce Rate is a factor affecting rankings, then a page’s load time may impact it, indirectly affecting rankings.

Finally, let’s go to Google’s original point about why this is important in the first place: good User-Experience. Along with faster network speeds, sites need to load rapidly for endusers in order to provide a positive user-experience. Even if this were never used directly or indirectly by Google in rankings, it will still affect how users experience your site, and that can affect your ultimate conversion rates and repeat visits.

But, Page Load Time / Site Load Time will almost certainly be a direct or indirect ranking factor.

So, how to prepare for this important and basic factor amongst all your site’s various optimization strategies? Well, very easily and cheaply, you could get a copy of Google’s Page Speed extension and run it against samples of your site pages to see what speed factors it might recommend for you to improve upon.

Also, note that this browser-based diagnostic tool does not assess a number of factors which can still affect site load times, such as network connection times and conditions which cause sites to buckle under higher loads.

KeyRelevance has long considered site load times to be of prime importance and has included a number of factors affecting page load speeds in web site reviews that we provide for clients. In fact, we even provide clients with improved compression versions of their site images for smaller filesizes. Speed of access has long been important to a site’s overall user-experience, and Google’s increasing focus in this area is now making it of central importance to keyword rankings in search results. So, if you want to be at the top of your SEO game, you need to be paying attention to your site’s page delivery speed — Google is!

Optimize Your Search Engine Listing for Improved CTR


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Earlier this month when I spoke at SMX Advanced on the topic of “Beyond the Usual Link Building”, one of the suggestions I made in the presentation was about how to improve how your listings appear within the search engine results.

There are a lot of people I’ve met who tend to be hyperfocused on whether their pages rank, and don’t spend as much attention on how those pages’ entries appear within the search results pages.

It seems like common sense that if the entry looks like what a user is seeking, they’d be more likely to click upon it. Therefor, if you were to improve your search engine results page entries, you’d also likely improve your click-through rate — increasing your traffic.

Compare these listings on Google for a search for “Seattle indie records shop“:

Seattle Indie Music Shops Listings in SERP

You can see that the star ratings and review on the listing for “Easy Street Records” is slightly more eye-catching if you were a records shop afficianado — the stars and the dollar-sign price range and the easy-to-read sample review text give it an advantage over the listing for the record shop below it. A consumer who is rapidly scanning and clicking to find what they want is going to be more likely to click here.

How much more likely is such a listing to gain clicks? According to Vanessa Fox, Yahoo! has reported a 15% click-through-rate (CTR) increase on similar types of listing treatments! Their results were based upon comparing the CTR of typical search result listings with CTR of listings sporting their special treatments developed through SearchMonkey. The customized listings really stand out from the other listings, drawing the eye and clicks, too.

Yet, before these research results were released, I’d already seen how merely fine-tuning the listing text alone could improve both CTR and rankings. Using savvy methods for forming TITLEs and Meta Descriptions on pages, one can improve keyword relevance, ranking, and click-through-rates.

Now that Google has launched their own type of enhanced listing treatment, dubbed “Rich Snippets“, there’s starting to be even more options for optimizing listings in search results. The first special treatment they’ve enabled are the ones for reviews and ratings, and it seems clear that they intend to launch more, particularly ones related to the use of Microformats, such as hCalendar, hCard, and hProduct.

One person at SMX who liked this concept of “optimizing listings” for improved CTR was Matt Cutts, who Tweeted out a mention of it:

Matt CuttsTweet re Rich Snippets

While these tactics likely have no direct effect on search engine keyword rankings, I’ve theorized for some time now that they could have an indirect effect upon rank. Google’s frequently-discussed patent for “Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data” includes within its descriptions of ranking methods (“scoring”) the possibility that pages might be ranked according to how often they’re clicked upon when they appear within particular searches. The patent states:

“…scoring the document includes assigning a higher score to the document when the document is selected more often than other documents in the set of search results over a time period…”

Very loosely interpreted, this means that if your page’s listing is clicked upon at a better rate than other pages appearing for the same keyword search, that click-frequency or CTR could actually affect that page’s future rankings for that keyword.

It’s long been controversial as to whether Google implemented many of the methods outlined in various patents like this one, but you already have a good excuse to fine-tune your listings: regardless of theoretical impact on rankings, it could easily improve your click-through rate, improving your site’s qualified traffic!

Quick Tips on Optimizing Listings:

  • Title should be brief and state what the page is about, and who you are.
  • Meta description should be brief and expand upon what the page is about or how it may be better than others listed for the same keyword search.
  • Currently, mentioning deals/discounts/rebates may improve CTR since the economy has pushed people to be more price-conscious.
  • Implementing Microformats now on your site for appropriate types of content will likely position you to take advantage of future rollouts of “Rich Snippets” treatements in Google results.
  • Building a search application with Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey platform will help you to understand how Google’s developing similar types of listing enhancements.

Good listing engineering is a complex task involving semantic tagging, taxonomic research and development, good copywriting, and SEO knowledge. Don’t make guesses when doing this — use a good expert if you don’t have experience with it.

Optimize your snippets and SERP listings, and improve your CTR and Performance!

Why Use Microformats?


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Microformats LogoI’ve written numerous times about how and why to code Microformats into the webpages of local businesses (see here, here and here), yet the question keeps coming up — “Should I spend the time and effort on integrating Microformats into my site’s pages?”

Just during the past couple of weeks, the question has arisen yet again, and along with it there was an additional development which further emphasizes why it’s a good thing and why webmasters should be incorporating the protocol sooner than later. More on this in a minute.

I believe I was likely the first to ever propose using hCard Microformats as a component of local search engine optimization, back in 2006 (see: Tips for Local Search Engine Optimization). Back then, I had seen how Microformats were begining to take off, and I saw indications of converging trends: the sharp interest from the major search engines in local search and yellow-pages-like functionality; the increasing uses for types of open formats and extensible semantic tagging; and, most telling of all, the involvement of a number of key technologists from within Yahoo! in the Microformats movement.

I knew that as search engines attempt to match up websites which they crawl with more formal, local business listing data, they would encounter some difficulties in using algorithms to interpret the data properly. Questions such as: What is the street address of this business webpage? What is the Business Name vs. other text on the page? What is the Street Name vs. the City Name? Other questions arise as well, since website designers mostly design towards their human audience rather than algorithms attempting to interpret meaning from raw data. For instance, what Business Category should this local business website be associated with?

Like other forms of semantic markup, Microformatting labels webpage content behind the scenes, specifically telling what each piece of data is while still displaying the webpage normally for human users. If webpages of local businesses were to incorporate hCard Microformatting, I reasoned, then search engines would have an easier time of associating the sites with map locations and business directory listings. Further, if a site contained such markup, the search engine could have a higher degree of confidence in accurately normalizing their data and matching up with user queries, so such pages could potentially rank better in the future.

However, when I introduced the idea, I was not aware of any search engine that was specifically seeking out this type of semantic data. While some Yahoo! personnel were throwing support behind the movement, there was no clear indication that their search engine would seek out specially labeled data fields nor treat them any differently.

Still, there were additional reasons for using the Microformats: they provided additional functionality for some devices and for users who installed special applications to read such content out of pages in order to easily make use of it. A great example would be the Operator Toolbar for Firefox which could allow a user to easily copy out the contact details from a webpage and save it into an address book, quite similar to how vCard electronic business card info can be transfered and harvested easily from email notes (vCard is supported by such mainstream applications as Microsoft Outlook).

The Yahoo! Local search team obviously believed that people could find Microformatting potentially useful, because they incorporated it into their Local Search results earlier in 2006.

Further supporting my prediction that this was an important and growing protocol, Google subsequently immitated Yahoo by incorporating hCard Microformats in Google Map search results in 2007.

Meanwhile, at conferences and via email, many individuals asked me whether Google Maps was “reading” Microformats from webpages. I’d spoken with a few Google engineers during this period, and they answered pretty uniformly: if sufficient numbers of sites made use of this, they’d almost certainly incorporate it as yet another signal in local search data. I knew that there really wasn’t “sufficient numbers” of sites incorporating it yet, but I continued to see indications that the protocol was growing as a trend, and a number of other optimization experts also threw weight behind supporting it as a component of good, local site design. So, I’d still have to truthfully answer, “no, it’s not any sort of factor that will directly make your pages rank any higher, BUT, you should make use of it anyway!” In most of the cases of local info pages I analyze on the web, it seemed like integrating the Microformats should be relatively low-impact in terms of development effort required.

SearchMonkey LogoIn the Spring of last year, Microformats may have finally achieved a tipping point when Yahoo! announced the release of their innovative Search Monkey development platform. SearchMonkey allowed developers to somewhat customize the display of their site’s listings when they appeared in Yahoo’s keyword search results. More to the point, SearchMonkey showed us that Yahoo’s bot and content processing systems could and did read in Microformats from webpages along with other structured data protocols including RDF and DataRSS. While this did not prove that Microformatting influences rankings in Yahoo! Local, it showed that an important step had been reached in a major search engine which could enable the protocol to be a ranking and normalizing factor in local search.

Now fast-forward to the present in 2009, and the question of whether to use Microformats is still getting posed to search marketing experts. On May 4th, someone asked well-known SEO, Michael Gray whether hCard and other Microformats matter for SEO. I think Michael gave a pretty well-reasoned answer overall, although I believe Microformat protocols are just about excruciatingly simpler than he represents, and I think there’s some good reasons to not be quite as conservative about using them as he suggests.

First of all, I believe the main advantages to using Microformats are:

  • They can help search engines identify Business Name, Address, Phone, and Categories on webpages. Variations in formatting on various sites can contribute to misassociation of data elements. Imagine “Houston’s Restaurant on Dallas Street in Paris, Texas”. If an algorithm is attempting to interpret this in order to index the business/site, how does it know for certain what element is name vs. street address vs. city?
  • They can help search engines in associating the website with their listings within the engine’s directory listings content — a vital step in “canonicalizing” business information. Google gets business listings from data aggregators and business directory partners, and they have to associate all the various sources of data for a particular business location with a single business listing. This is not a simple activity! Differences in ways a business name is spelled, different ways addresses are written, and different phone numbers all can result in businesses’ listings getting duplicated and diluted in ranking ability within Google Maps. So, having Microformats on your business webpage could help it get properly associated with directory listings already within Google.
  • Microformats facilitate the ease by which users can copy off a business’s contact information to store in their address books and elsewhere.
  • Microformats could also help open up content for use by other developers in unforseen and advantageous ways. For instance, by including the longitude and latitude of your business address in your pages, others can easily port the precise location over to the mapping app of their choice — if left up to just using the street address, mapping systems can frequently make significant errors.
  • It’s just not all that hard to add them to sites which display addresses of local places. Some very simple development and coding which could be done within just an hour or two are all that’s required for most sites.

Google actually does a pretty good job of “canonicalizing” classic business listing data from local biz websites, so if my theories on why it could be beneficial for SEO in the future are correct, there are a lot of sites where it likely wouldn’t have all that much impact upon performance even if/after Google begins recognizing it as a local site search signal. It could help them collapse dupe listings down to a single one, which could boost that listing’s ranking weight. But, for businesses with already easy-to-interpret addresses or where Google hasn’t had difficulty in grouping related listings together, it likely wouldn’t have any ranking effect whatsoever.

As of just last week, there’s an even more compelling reason to incorporate Microformats, though: Google is following close upon the heals of Yahoo again and has announced that they’re introducing “Rich Snippets” in Google search results pages — essentially the Rich Snippets are more enhanced search result listings, allowing the display of star ratings and the numbers of reviews for content on the pages. Similar to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey which allowed some customization of search listings, Google is allowing this special content display initially for pages which incorporate hReviews Microformat.

Google SERP listing for Yelp with Rich Snippets

Many of us theorized that Yahoo’s SearchMonkey could be potentially advantageous to sites, since search result listings which look different can stand out from the crowd, attract more users’ notice, and therefor have a greater chance of being clicked upon. Indeed, subsequent research showed that SearchMonkey’s special listing treatment could increase CTR by 15%!

There’s every reason to believe that display enhancements likely could improve CTR within Google search results as well, so there are great incentives to adopt the hReview protocol for those sites which have reviews and ratings content. This is only the first stage of Google’s work in Rich Snippets, however, and it’s pretty certain that Google will introduce more types of structured data into special display within search result listings. hCard and hCalendar content are some top candidates poised for imminent introduction when Google expands this.

We’re now seeing adoption of hCard in even some high-popularity sites such as Twitter now, so it may be time to actually declare Microformats to be “mainstream”!

So you see, there are compelling reasons to use Microformatting in the here-and-now, rather than putting it off. It’s generally not difficult to implement, it enhances site functionality for good user-experience, it generally won’t interfere with existing graphic layout, it could eventually help in rankings, and it might soon help in terms of click-through rates or overall conversions.

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Dallas Cowboys Practice Field Disaster – Citizen Reporting & Photos


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I’m saddened to report that there was a terrible disaster in my neighborhood today – the Dallas Cowboys’ indoor practice field in Valley Ranch was hit by the strong winds in the violent Texas storm that blew through this afternoon, and the lightweight structure collapsed under the wind strain.

Firemen look over Dallas Cowboys Practice Facility Wreckage

It was just shortly after the storm passed that I was listening to the TV in my home with half an ear, relieved that my trees didn’t fall on my home, when I heard the news that the Dallas Cowboys’ facility collapsed. This place is just south of my home a few blocks, and I got really familiar with the location when my kid sister moved out of my house (she’s about half my age and lived with me when she started college in Irving) — she lived literally right across the street from the giant structure.

I call it a gym, but the place was really an indoor field — a large, inflated roof covered the whole thing, much like the roofs over some sports domes. I knew immediately that the storm must’ve really hit the roof hard, and finally gotten ahold of it and ripped it off, similar to how the Superdome roof was ripped off in New Orleans, back during Hurricane Katrina.

I’m an amateur photographer, and I couldn’t resist jumping straight outside to snap a few pics of the collapsed building.

Wreckage and Emergency Personnel - Dallas Cowboys

I speak at internet marketing conferences and write about optimizing websites for search, and one area I’ve often spoken upon is how to leverage photos to get links and to drive traffic to websites. There’ve been a number of occasions when journalists have contacted me, asking to use my photos to illustrate their stories, and I almost always allow them to do so for free, so long as they give me a link back in return. A link is the online, technical equivalent of a by-line or credit-line, and it’s only fair that I get credit for my work.

I’ve had bloggers often ask me how to promote their blogs, and this is an example of how to go about it. Most of us see or attend various news-worthy or interesting events in our lives, and it doesn’t take much to snap photos of them and provide them for others to use in return for a link back.

So, if you’re a journalist or blogger interested in writing on the Dallas Cowboys facility’s collapse, you’re welcome to use any of my photos – click on the ones in this story and they’ll take you to my Flickr account where you can find more, and you can see instructions on how to cite me as the photographer.

My heart goes out to the players who were injured today, and to their families. I really hope that everyone will be okay!

(* I’m right now weathering the second strong storm moving through the area – I sure hope my home and trees survive it, too!)

Why Free Photos = Good SEO


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I’ve written articles and spoken at conferences on the subject of using images for search engine optimization for a number of years now, and one concept that many individuals and corporations miss is the idea that looser copyright restrictions can often equate with wider promotional value and greater SEO power.

Many companies are still operating under “Business 1.0″ mindsets in this “Business 2.0″ world, and that failure to adapt is often resulting in very real lost market share potential.

Photographic images are often a type of content that is still sometimes hard to come by. If you have images of subjects that could be of interest to someone out there, then you can leverage this demand to obtain additional links to your sites. And links to your site are still valuable and worthwhile in terms of increasing your chances to rank higher in search results for keywords that are important to you. A greater number and variety of links equals a greater chance to rank higher than your competition.

But, if you’ve slapped all sorts of restricting copyright notices and language to all of your photos, then you’ve caused a real chilling effect in terms of the links you could be getting.

I post a lot of my pictures to the image sharing service, Flickr, and while I often have each photo’s permissions set to display “© All rights reserved”, I have placed a notice on my profile page that I typically allow journalists to use my photos if they will give me a credit line when stories are posted online, and link my name back to my homepage. On images that I think are particularly newsworthy, I’ll even mention these terms in the description below the image.

The Grapevine Sun officesJust today, this tactic paid off again — it seems that Belo Corporation is closing the small-town newspaper in Grapevine, Texas. The Grapevine Sun has been in operation for something like 114 years, and now it’s closing down like many other newspapers around the country. A journalist contacted me about my photo of the Grapevine Sun office, requesting permission to use it to illustrate their article about the closing. Just as per my terms, they used the logo and linked it back to my site homepage.

This is really a win-win scenario. If I were all uptight about restricting my photos overmuch and forcing people to pay high fees for usage, it would cause all sorts of barriers for distribution for me. It might be one thing if I had some sensational photo of a celebrity doing something fantastic, or a political figure, but for most of my photos the popularity factor just isn’t high enough to warrant pretending I’m the next big photographer of the century.

The journalist got a photo to raise the human-interest feel of their story, and I got a small amount of link promotion value out of my picture. It’s not precisely a “free use” of my image, but it’s close enough from the journalist’s viewpoint, and my providing permission super-rapidly is a sensitive acknowledgement of their story deadline pressure.

News sites and blogs are treated very well in terms of link value by Google’s algorithms, so providing your images in ways that could facilitate bloggers and journalists in finding the images and making use of them can help insure that you could get more inlinks than you otherwise would.

By stating clearly on your photo pages that you’ll allow news and blog stories to use photos in return for a link back to you, you use a very mild and benign form of social engineering to increase the chances that you’ll get some links for your site.

A couple more notes on permissions — most companies and PR departments are too restrictive. It’s understandable to fear that someone might use your images to illustrate stories that could be negative about you, but it’s important to keep sight of the big picture: disallowing photos for this use likely will not stop the story from happening, and even links from negative articles can help in your overall rankings. So, it’s better for you to provide the photos for open use regardless of whether you really like the story or not. It’s completely valid to state that the images may be resized but the content within the image cannot be altered.

Even better, using Creative Commons licensing can help encourage more use, and will allow you to specify terms of use that are standard and more easily understood.

In the Business 2.0 world, companies which are not providing easy-to-find and easy-to-use press kits on their corporate websites which include lots of photos of products, services and people in their company — well, they’re really behind the times. You too can easily gain valuable inlinks from blogs and newspapers, just as I have.

Siloing Your Marketing Can Be a Killer For a Great Online Strategy


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Marketing SilosDo you have a PR Department, a Marketing Department, an SEO Team, a PPC Crew and just kicked off a Social Media Team? For huge companies this is a way of running a business, or they outsources some of these efforts. Medium size companies usually break things out this way too, and smaller businesses tend to lump everything onto 1 or 2 people due to lack of resources to handle it all. While making departments is definitely a great idea, and putting highly specific skill sets together to make a department or team is a wise thing to do, it can be an instant killer to a great online media marketing strategy if each one of these areas are a “silo” that operates in their own vacuum.

So many times I’ve seen this happen with companies. The Public Relations team thinks they own things, the Marketing Team controls some part of a budget and then the online marketing folks really have no control over anything, or have no clue what the PR team has planned event wise. That social media team is too new to even understand they are part of the marketing budget as well. When things like this happen, it only spells one thing – disaster.

By separating out each piece of this marketing puzzle, and putting each into its own silo, a company is doing itself a big disservice. Regardless of how each piece of this puzzle thinks of itself, it’s all part of marketing it doesn’t matter if its offline or online. Each piece understands its particular specialty much better than the others can understand its inner workings. For example you wouldn’t want a PPC person planning your Public Relations events or your PR person bidding on your PPC campaigns. But what you do want is your PR department letting your PPC team know that there’s an event they are planning that they need to get the word out about, or that your PPC team has just found a great niche to work with that they know your PR Team can really use that information to market some events to.

When you start looking at online marketing and what you need to do to be successful in it, you have to pull everyone who has some sort of stake in how your company is perceived into the mix. Marketing and PR Departments need to be part of the planning, not just because “they were there first”, but because they have to be brought into the new media way of thinking about how companies need to reach and converse with audiences. The old way of just “pushing” marketing onto audiences doesn’t work the way it did before the advent of the internet, blogs and social media sites.

Communicating with these areas requires the special talents of a Social Media Champion, having these efforts found requires both a great SEO and PPC team. Knowing what to say and how the company wants to represent itself is part of Marketing’s job but they need to work with Social Media, SEO and PPC that everything is cohesive. Promoting what the company is doing is what PR does best, but these days you can just slap up a press release and think it’s going to go somewhere, that’s where working with the Social Media & SEO teams can come in and make these events shine on the internet.

One of the great keys to creating a successful online strategies is to get all of these teams working together. You need to get each one understanding that they cannot operate in a vacuum anymore. Siloing information in today’s new marketing world isn’t good for your company or the people working on these teams. Each team has to understand that they are very important to one another, that success cannot be obtained unless they understand how each piece of the new marketing puzzle fits together. If you are a company operating in this siloed manner, you might want to stop and rethink your strategy – what’s more important your success online, or feeding the egos of the departments that are siloed? The survival of your company in these tough economic times isn’t going to ride on someone’s ego, its going to ride on successful teamwork!

Are You an Online Marketer or Just an SEO?


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At SES London, Mike Grehan headed up an Orion Panel with Jill Whalen, Brett Tabke, Chris Sherman, Kevin Ryan and Rand Fishkin. The panel was taking a look at “SEO Where To Next”. I’m not going to rehash what went on at the panel, if you’d like a run down Paul Madden did a good summation of it. What I am looking to discuss is our roles, are we just SEO’s, PPC practitioners or affiliate marketers, or, are we online marketers?

What prompts me in asking this, is how in the past 2 years the rise of “Web 2.0″ (I really hate that term) has begun to affect how people consume content, media or anything on the web. Focusing on just SEO, PCC or even Affiliate Marketing, we tend to rely very heavily on the search engines. Heck, we live, die and cry by what Google does. Take a look at the announcement by Matt Cutts about the canonical tag, the search marketing world went nutz!

But what happens when more and more surfers on the internet stop using the typical search engines to find what they need? Confused? Let me explain.

With the advent of the iPhone and its open application system, you no longer need to go to Google to find a nearby restaurant. That’s right, iPhone users have a bevvy of applications that connect them to the internet without a browser and without going to Google and getting a map with a list of restaurants. OpenTable will tell you which restaurants near you have available seating, Urban Spoon does just about the same thing.

It’s not just the iPhone either, AccuWeather just launched a nice little widget much better than than the dreaded desktop “WeatherBug” app(that adds those dreaded tracking cookies that Norton catches). Through the slick Adobe Air backend, AccuWeather tells me my weather without opening a browser and typing in “Weather 19468″. There’s also a nice AdobeAir Application called Tweetdeck to help you manage Twitter, never having to connect to a browser to hold a relevant conversation.

Facebook and Myspace both have phone applications for iPhone, Blackberry or just about any smart phone out there. It’s becoming easier and easier to connect to the internet and the sites you want, and to find the things you want without using a browser or even a search engine.

So with that in mind, I posed this question to the panel. With the ability to connect to the internet w/o a browser, is it the SEO’s job to still work with these types of applications? Only one panel member answered, bravely, Rand Fishkin said he didn’t believe this was the SEO’s job.

I agree, to a point. If you define yourself as an SEO who just optimizes web pages or websites, then yes, he’s right.

But if you have an eye on the future of marketing and are seeing what new technologies are emerging and being embraced in our world, I have to disagree with Rand, in that, that view is really limiting. Businesses are going to have to embrace moving even beyond just the typical web page for an online presence. Search Engines aren’t just browser based anymore, the OpenTable application demonstrates that to a “T”. As responsible online marketers, we have to look beyond just websites and Google, we have to look at the entire online presence, and move beyond the thought that SEO means web based search engines because it doesn’t. So are we SEO’s or Online Marketers, or perhaps both? I guess in the end its how you define “SEO”.

That leads me to wonder this question, is the holy grail of search – the “Google Killer”, just going to be the inevitable change of end user habits? Interesting thought isn’t it? :)

Local SEO Tip: Leveraging Categorizations To Promote Your Small Business


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Many small businesses still rely upon their yellow pages listings to some degree for business referrals. A business’s listing data is not only found online in the internet yellow pages, but that same data feeds into the local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Live Local Search, and a myriad of other directory sites and local info sites.

A really simple way to increase your small or medium business’s (“SMB”s) exposure on the internet is to insure that your business listings are associated with as many apropos categories in online directories as possible.

While it seems a no-brainer, many SMBs neglect to check how various online sites have categorized them, and as a result get ineffectively and insufficiently displayed throughout the internet.

Back when I worked for a major online yellow pages company, I recall how one of our data aggregators had attempted to automatically categorize a great many non-classified establishments by using words in the business name. While this worked to some degree, a bunch of businesses were put into the wrong category. For instance, they’d shoved all businesses with the word “garden” in the name into “Garden & Lawn Supply” categories, but there are a lot of restaurants with names like “China Garden” that got lumped in with them!

So, today’s Local Search Engine Optimization Tip is easy: go out to the top online directory sites such as Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, Yellowbook.com, Google Maps, Local.com, Yelp.com, DexKnows.com, Yahoo! Local.com, and any others you’d expect to find your business in, claim your listing(s), and check to see if they’re in the proper business categories!

Choosing Categories in Google Local Business CenterMany internet yellow pages allow you somewhere on the order of five category associations for free, so you should be able to update and enhance your listing in these services for free.

Try not to limit yourself to just two categories — if the directory site has a rich taxonomy, you may be able to find a number of categories that are exactly right for you business.

Imagine, if your company is only in one category and/or a wrong category, just by fixing this business categorization you could increase your referral rate by a few times over!