My friend Tim Key runs a modular homes website and every now and then asks me for advice. I always enjoy helping him because it is very interesting to see what goes on in the smaller less spammed industries. What I have more commonly found is “innocent search engine spam”.

By this I mean it is only natural that people will want their sites in Google and will try their best to achieve it. Unless you regularly spend alot of time dealing with Google it is not simple or easy to know what to do and more importantly what to avoid. Here are some examples of “innocent search engine spam” that I have found in the modular home industry.
Sins of the father don’t clean themselves up

I came across a modular architect’s website. This modular architect is award-winning and commonly referenced by the press and good quality inbound links. You would expect to see his site do well. It doesn’t because the company that built his site in 2003 used hidden keyword stuffing (white font on white background). How do I know this because when I noticed the hidden text I checked out the html code and there was an actual comment in the code explaining everything. Clearly by the html comments they thought they were doing what Google wanted. The site is managed by a different web firm but the offending invisible text has not been removed.
Pretty Modular Homes Stink

Experienced internet marketers know where this is going - search engines are robots that can only read and can not read pretty images or video. No matter how pretty the site is, if you only have images, video or flash animation the search engines will not show you alot of search love. I have lost count how many sites have pages of quality text hidden from the search engines because it is in flash or images.

Even “Expert” Marketers Make Mistakes

Some of the modular housing sites are doing a great job. You can tell they have put alot of work into building good content with nice usability. But even these “expertly” optimized modular home websites have issues. The most common I notice is the improper use of 301 and 302 redirects. The worst use I have ever come across was a 301 into 302 into 302 into 302 into 302 into a 301 redirect. I would be shocked if the search engines had no issue with that setup. If you think you are an expert make sure to audit your work. It is easy to build up excessive layers over the years for your website. If you audit your website yearly you should be able to identify innocent mistakes that are easy for you to fix.

I am a strong believer in supporting local businesses and helping out your hometown, but I am a little torn right now.  Ya see there is a local florist from my hometown that is sorely in need of internet help.  Many of you already know I do a lot of pro bono internet help but this local florist hasn’t always provided me with 100% satisfaction (not even close).

For the sake of karma and also to provide another case study for people looking to promote a local business WITH SUBSTANTIAL MAIL ORDER POTENTIAL I’m gonna forget the unpleasant history and offer some free help.  Please do not to apply these suggestions to a local pizza shop website.  They won’t truly profit from it.  These suggestions are for businesses that deliver locally for orders taken from a very large area (ie florist shop).

1. Domain Name - Always make your website a .com.  Most people will assume your domain is a .com and type in .com thus resulting in you losing traffic.
2. Make your company name prominent.  It should be the first thing I notice.  Do not think that including a small thumbnail picture of your storefront can replace the need of having your name in easy to see BIG LETTERS.
3. Include substantial text on every page.  Pictures are nice but search engines cant see pictures.  If you have a pretty logo and it contains your street address and phone number, search engines will think you do not have a street address or phone number.  Make sure there are at least 4 paragraphs of text.  If you are wondering if you have enough text on your pages YOU DON’T.
4. Build multiple pages.  No one likes to work but if you want users and search engines to like your site you need to make it valuable.  A lot of pages of good content does just that.  Add testimonials, add a page for each of your top 20 products and write a lengthy description along with situations that the product would be appropriate for, create how-to pages, add pages that show off your portfolio.
5. Don’t stuff your footer with keywords.  It reduces the trust users have for your site and it doesn’t really help with the search engines.  This was a trick that stopped working over 5 years ago.  If you think a keyword is valuable enough to stuff in your footer than it is valuable enough to create a real page for.
6. Make sure each page has a unique and descriptive title tag, meta description tag and text headline.  The title tag and meta description is what shows up in Google’s search results and the text headline will help your visitors know what the page is about.
7. Make sure your website uses pretty filenames.  This is about to get technical but just bear with me.  Some website content management systems (thats the computer program that organizes your website content) use dynamic urls (this means you see “?” and other ugly things in your filenames.  Search engines have a hard time with this and it is also not winning any points with your visitors.  Ask your webmaster to use Mod-Rewrite to transform the urls into keyword rich urls.  Which would you prefer www.example.com/category?id=86 or www.example.com/prettyflowers/
8. Create a simple navigation that is easy for users to understand.  Do not include 100 links on every page.  Break your site up into a few main categories and provide unique subnavigation for each category.  For example your top navigation bar could have 6 links for each of your main categories.  Each of those 6 categories would have a unique subnavigation bar that has 10 links.
9. Now that you have a decent site or at least one that will meet minimum standards, it is time to promote it.  To promote a site you will need to get other websites to link to it.  This is one of the hardest things to do in internet marketing.  If you built a good looking site with a big amount of relevant and useful content than you should have something people will be willing to link to.  If you have a small site with no value then it will be near impossible to get people to link to you.  Here are some suggestions to gain inbound links aka other websites pointing to you.
• Submit your site to the top directories (Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW) and avoid the smaller directories.  Some of the smaller directories are scams and most are just not worth it.
• Ask businesses you deal with to exchange links with you.  If you are a florist it would be helpful to interlink your site with catering halls, photographers, limos, funeral homes etc.
• Contact local bloggers and see if you can do a guest post on their website.  In exchange for offering free information you can include a link to your site.  The readers of that blog will be in a win-win situation.
• Support local organizations.  Everyone loves charity and while helping them ask if they would be nice enough to recognize your charity by posting a link on their site.
• Contact your counterparts across America.  If you are a local florist contact other local florists and start a helpful referral directory on your site.  This will help your local customers who are looking to send flowers to relatives in other parts of the country and it will also help promote all the participating local florists.  Just make sure that you do not create duplicate content that is repeated on many websites - use unique descriptions.
10. Pay Per Click (PPC) - You can also promote your business by buying traffic.  If you spend money with PPC make sure you are analyzing the results.

• How much money was spent? Don’t keep spending just because that is what you did before.  Make smart decisions.
• What time or day brings the best results?  You can control the time and day your ad appears.  Maybe it is best to turn off your ad during the nighttime because it is only clicked on by people in other timezones.
• What keywords were used? Avoid using generic terms.  There are many people competing for “flowers” and thus the price is high.  There are alot fewer people competing for “flowers 90210″ thus the price will be lower.
• What negative keywords and filters are in place?  This will help to prevent your ad from being shown to people that are unlikely to buy.  Using the flower example you might want to include the negative keyword “paintings” to avoid your ad being shown to people searching for flower paintings.
• How many sales were generated?  It is great for the ego to know you have a thousand visitors/day but if they don’t buy anything it is a quick way to go out of business.  Track where the traffic comes from, what pages they visit and if they buy anything.  Google Analytics is a good & simple way to do this.

That should help any local florist and similar businesses get off the ground and enjoy the internet.

It is no secret that links are critical to search engine rankings.  If you have ever tried to develop links for a website you also know it is very hard.  Currently paid links provide the best ROI because you pay once and receive online advertising and a boost in the search engines.  Your marketing dollars are doing a great 2 for 1 job.

What if some search engine that controls over 50% of the market share (not going to name names) says you can no longer buy text advertisements because their algorithm has a weakness and they do not want to fix it.  They want you to change how you spend your marketing dollars.  Since they control over 50% of the market share you are going to be forced to change.  What is the next best ROI after paid links?

Based on my experience social marketing is the next best strategy.  Social marketing is not cheap and has a high amount of flops but the success of the few outweigh the losses of the many.  If you are not familiar with social marketing, it is when you make your idea so interesting the public will spread the word for you.  A good example of this is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube.  Those videos are so interesting millions of people have watched them and many have even linked back to the site.
By making your idea interesting the people will temporarily surge traffic to your site and in the long term they will link to your site.  If 5000 people are exposed to your interesting idea in a day and 1% link back to you from their blogs you just gained 50 links.  In case you are wondering these are the types of links that money can’t buy.

How do you do social marketing?  There are countless ways to do it wrong.  If everything is not perfect than it will never catch on.  Even the experts of social marketing have a hard time predicting what will be interesting to the public.  If you are doing this yourself expect a failure rate of over 90%.  If you want to hire someone to do it for you, you better grab them now.  The good social marketers have at least a 1 month backlog and some have up to 3 months.

Currently the NYC Department of Education website (http://schools.nyc.gov) is preventing Yahoo and MSN search engines from including its webpages in their search indices. If any parent tries to use Yahoo.com or MSN.com to search for information found on http://schools.nyc.gov, Yahoo and MSN will not be allowed to find it for the parent. The parent will be forced to use Google.com which is the only major search engine allowed to index content on http://schools.nyc.gov.

The technical reason why Yahoo and MSN is not allowed on the NYC DOE website is that there is a robots.txt file which is disallowing Yahoo’s Slurp bot and MSN’s msnbot but allowing Google’s googlebot. Combined Yahoo and MSN represent approximately 30% of all internet searchers. I think it is not a good thing that the New York City Department of Education website is blocking 30% of internet searchers from finding information.

It is very simple to allow Yahoo and MSN include the pages from NYC DOE website. The robots.txt file which is located at (http://schools.nyc.gov/robots.txt) simply needs the four lines that reference Slurp and msnbot to be deleted. Thank you for your time and I look forward to having this website available to all internet searchers.

Postnote : I no longer offer consulting but I will be happy to write the new robots.txt file and upload it for free. If you are worried about bandwidth costs I will also be happy to help with hosting. I’d be happy to help make this website a better resource for all.

I use Yahoo alot, as in I use Yahoo for business and personal most hours that I am awake.  Which is why I am surprised that I didn’t notice all of the small little changes they have been making.  After taking a step back and giving the Yahoo SERPs a fresh look I noticed there are alot of changes.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

Yahoo removed the links to the Yahoo Directory.  So if your site is in the Yahoo Directory, users will no longer see a link to your category under your site snippet. Yahoo also added a “near you” local feature.  Now when you search for McDonalds you can click on “near you” and use Yahoo Local to find one.  They also added quick links to key pages on a site.  So for all of the bigger websites out there users can skip a few clicks and get right to the where they want to be.

Personally I think these changes are mostly good.  Of course I am one of the few die hard directory fans out there and I wish they allowed me to personalize the serps and add back in that link.  Often when I am searching for a hard item, it is helpful to find a site in Yahoo’s search engine that is a near miss and then check out the related sites that are in the same Yahoo directory category.

FYI These changes did not happen just today.  They just slowly sneaked up on me and I didn’t realize it.  Now I am blushing with embarrassment for not being more observant and rethinking if I am up for my next poker tournament.  If Yahoo can make multiple changes without me waking up what hope is there for my poker game?

As I was poking around the source code of a site I saw this line

!— 3 links expires 9/30/07—

If I was a search bot I think that just might tip me off that those links were bought and should not be fully trusted.  It is no secret that I am not an angel in the eyes of the search engines, but even I have to say that it just too lazy/stupid when someone puts the actual link expiration in a comments tag.

PS - If you are interested in buying links make sure you take a look at that sites source code.  The link should not be using javascript or iframes.  Also it is generally a good idea to take a site they are already linking to and see if it shows up in the Yahoo backlink search.  Better shut my mouth now before Captain Sprite comes flying along

DMOZ has been broken for the last three weeks.  They uploaded an old dataset so the public could still search.  But all editor functions and site submissions have been offline.  In other words there is currently no chance in getting a new link from DMOZ.

What is a link monkey supposed to do?  Read the rest of this entry »

I often come across money keywords, you know those terms that have good traffic and decent profit margins.  Sometimes they just don’t generate the money they should be.  It’s not because of me, it’s because the user is stupid.  You heard me right.  My mom always told me not to call people stupid, but sometimes some people are just stupid.

I think users are stupid when they search for something that they don’t want.  This is not to say they don’t wany anything, they just are searching with the wrong words.  For example I found that people searching for health insurance rarely wanted health insurance.  Personal health insurance is very expensive and generally limited on what it covers.  However if you showed them a health savings plan, your conversions will go through the roof because that is what they really wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I come across people wondering why their network of sites is having problems.  They think they built it correctly and yet something went wrong.  Here are the key issues I would pay attention to if I were to build a network of sites.

Domains - Use different registrars, on different dates with different whois information and register the domains for varied time lengths.  This will randomize it but it also does create problems since false whois information can cause you to lose a domain.  The alternative is to use the private registration services.  But that will look weird if you have 100 sites all using private domain registration. 

Hosting - Forget about different IP addresses.  You need to use different vendors.  It is easy to compare the IP ownership and see that it is all hosted at one company.

Templates - Do not use the same look and feel.  It is easy to find sites by searching for identical footers or copyright notices.  You need to pay attention to the small stuff and make sure it is all different.

Toolbars - Most toolbars today are tracking your internet activity.  If you have a toolbar installed and you regularly visit your secret network of sites, your repetitive traffic could show these sites are related.

Links - If you interlink these sites it is especially easy to uncover that.  You need to randomize the links.  Also if the only inbound links are from your network, it is easy to determine that as well.  You should add some “noise” to the network and add easy links from outside sources like blog links, reciprocal links, etc.  Also outbound links are another easy item to investigate.  Make sure to add “noise” to the outbounds links as well.  And I think it goes without saying to randomize the anchor text a bit.

Entitlement - Many marketers, search engines and even myself are guilty of this.   We feel that we are entitled to certain things.  Internet Marketing does not guarantee anything and does not give anybody a free ride.  If you find a shortcut, that is great and you should enjoy it.  When that shortcut no longer works you should not complain and say that life is unfair.  Just adapt to the new landscape and move on.  You are not entitled to an easy ride.  Stop bitchin and being envious of others success.

Stepping on Others to Get Ahead - This is definitely not a new concept.  People in the brick and mortar world have been doing this for centuries.  It does not make it any less nasty.  People are purposely starting drama just to gain attention which they hope (and it usually does) lead to links and free publicity.  There are other ways to get publicity without hurting someone else.

Purposely Misleading - I understand you need to protect yourself.  I protect my sensitve information from my enemies.  When you purposley send out misleading information or inaccurate tools to the public it is bad karma.  In the forums people post misleading information and they lie about their research.  The search engines and others release tools that are not accurate and with every upgrade they become less accurate.  I’m not saying everyone is lying or that all tools are misleading.  It only takes a little bit of misleading to help confuse the marketplace.

I’m gonna save my other complaints for later.  What are your biggest annoyances?