Sk*rt, the social network geared towards women, has rebranded as Kirtsy. Sk*rt, originally at www.sk-rt.com, is now at www.Kirtsy.com. I suspect that one of the reasons they rebranded was that they were not affiliated in any way with Skirt! Magazine (at www.skirt.com), the “Women’s online resource for opinion, poetry, fashion, resources, fun and irreverence.” I fully applaud the rebranding effort from Sk*rt.com to Kirtsy.com. However, from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, they have committed SEO suicide by not redirecting to the new site the right way.

If you go to www.sk-rt.com (or any URL on the old site), you’re going to be greeted with a “splash page” on the sk-rt.com domain telling you that they’ve rebranded as Kirtsy. 5 seconds later you’re redirected to the new URL. The only problem here is that this is not being done properly. A 301 Permanent Redirect needs to be used–I never ever recommend using a meta refresh to redirect visitors. In fact, using a meta refresh to redirect visitors will almost certainly screw up the site’s search engine rankings.

Currently, the sk-rt.com domain name is enjoying 133,000 pages indexed in Google. And there are only about 2 pages indexed of the kirtsy.com domain name indexed in Google.

More importantly, the sk-rt.com domain name currently is showing over 754,000 links according to Yahoo!. If Kirtsy continues to use a meta refresh to redirect visitors from the old sk-rt.com domain name to the new kirtsy.com domain name, they will not receive any “credit” or “brownie points” for those 754,000 links. That’s right. You absolutely must use a 301 Permanent Redirect when changing URLs or you will soon lose just about all of your traffic you’re getting from Google’s organic search results.

To make sure that the search engine properly reindex the new site and pass the appropriate link credit and Google PageRank to the new Kirtsy site, Kirtsy needs to ditch the meta refresh tag and set it up 301 Permanent Redirects to the new URLs. Most likely, the best way to do this would be to set up the 301 Permanent Redirects from the old site to the new site. And, when visitors land on the new URL (e.g., when they’re redirected from sk-rt.com to kirtsy.com), the “notice” that they’ve been redirected shows up on the kirtsy.com site and not on sk-rt.com.

By not using 301 Permanent Redirects, they’re essentially creating pages of duplicate content, as well. If you go to pages on the old sk-rt.com site you’ll notice that same page, which then redirects you to the Kirtsy.com home page. Those old pages should be redirecting with a 301 Permanent Redirect to the new pages.

After some further investigation, I found that the “story pages” have, in fact, been redirected properly with 301 Permanent Redirects. For example, take a look at this page and you will see the proper 301 Permanent Redirect. However, this should be set up for all of the other pages on the site, including the home page (the page that everyone links to). That meta refresh needs to be turned off, and any notice that Sk*rt has changed to Kirtsy should be put on the new domain.

What’s the bottom line? If you change domains or change URLs for any reason, you need to use a 301 Permanent Redirect to redirect from the old URL to the new URL. In this case, when Sk*rt rebranded as Kirtsy, they started to use the 301 Permanent Redirect but didn’t institute on the home page of the site, the most important page. The sk-rt.com domain has a lot of backlinks–and using a meta refresh (not a 301), that data will not be passed to the new kirtsy.com domain name.

Certainly if you’re a search engine marketer or in the search industry and I haven’t mentioned you here feel free to make a comment below to point it out.

Search Engines Promoting Earth Day

My friend Barry (Rusty Brick) and Search Engine Roundtable always does a great job of changing the header of SE Roundtable whenever there’s a holiday or other significant event to promote. That definitely keeps me coming back to their site to see what they’re doing. Earth Day 2008 is no exception, and you need to check out their special header today. I just love their glowing Earth.

SE Roundtable also has a great wrap-up post detailing many of the search engines that are doing something special on their site for Earth Day.

Google has a great logo on their home page for Earth Day 2008. iGoogle, what I’m seeing when I go to the Google home page today, is all pimped out for Earth Day.

I love the Yahoo! Earth Day 2008 logo is very cool, when you mouseover it you can see some recycle symbols. Of course I have to say something about a great promotion that Chevrolet is doing, which is very timely–promoting the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid. That might just have to be my next SUV.

Search Engine Marketing Promoting Earth Day

I took a look around, and maybe I’m not seeing a lot of the promotions, but at this point (yes, today is Earth Day 2008) I’m only seeing a token few true SEOs promoting Earth Day 2008. But, for the ones that are promoting Earth Day 2008, they definitely did a great job.

Bill Slawski over at SEO by the Sea has a blog post which was very informative.

Cre8asite forums is also doing an Earth Day 2008 promotion by changing their header. Cool.

Other Earth Day 2008 Promotions

Overall, though, there are a lot of very cool earth-friendly Earth Day 2008 campaigns going on, so let’s take a look at some great ones:

Service Experts has a great Earth Day promotion going on where they are going giving away 10,000 thermostats during the entire month. So, if you’re reading this you need to call and make an appointment for them to come out and install it. Take a look at the video that they’ve done just for this promotion. It explains why it’s so important for you to replace your thermostat.

Youtube also has done something to their logo today, they have put the map of the earth on their screen part of their logo.

You can also take a look at this Google image search and see the other sites that have done something for Earth Day 2008.

If I’ve missed a cool Earth Day 2008 promotion, then feel free to point it out.

Here are a few other blogs that are talking about Earth Day 2008:

Do something green today
Google’s green initiatives for Earth Day
Earth Day on the Web
Going Green for Earth Day

According to a news release today, Rushmore Drive uses “patent-pending technology, a vertical search algorithm” to deliver search results based on “increased penetration of sites heavily trafficked by the Black community.” It uses technology called SearchPlus, which is apparently technology that combines general search results, news search results, and job search results, with a dynamic layer of Black-targeted search results and user-generated content.

I performed a search for “search engine optimization” on Rushmore Drive and was surprised by the search results.

While I am not surprised that SEO Chat is the first result, I’m puzzled as to why a web design and development firm, a Virginia web design firm, and an Atlanta website design firm show up in the top 10 search results for “search engine optimization”. I do like the addition of the “narrow your search” and related news and video results that are displayed, though. This is the way Universal Search should be displayed; I’m not so sure about including news, video, and pictures right amongst the organic search results.

I also took a look at the search results for “search engine marketing” and found similar search results that could be tweaked a bit. I’m glad to see SEMPO be the top search result (which is appropriate) but again, web design firms, and blackwebportal.com and blackstudents.com just does not belong in the search results for “search engine marketing”.

The suggest a site feature is interesting, and I’m actually glad that a search engine (especially when it’s newly launched) puts such a feature right there at the end of the search engine results pages.

According to Rushmore Drive, as one of their first public awareness initiatives, the search engine will be introducing a featured called “Road to November 4″, an interactive online forum for the Black community that has tools and information about the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. RushmoreDrive.com has officially invited all of the Presidential candidates to participate in the forum–and Senator Hillary Clinton accepted. Rushmore Drive says that “Senator Clinton will share her thoughts on the importance of the election in the Black community and she will answer a question each day from a member of our community from April 10-17, 2008.”

Check out this new black search engine at RushmoreDrive.com.

Unbeknownst to many people, the Google AdWords team has granted exceptions to the policy.

Recently, many Google Adwords advertisers, upon logging into your Google AdWords account, see the following message:

The Google AdWords Display URL Policy was to go into effect on April 1, 2008. However, even though Google AdWords advertisers are still receiving these messages upon logging into their Google AdWords accounts, Google apparently is not enforcing this policy that they warned advertisers about. Google even went so far as to say in the Google AdWords “Inside AdWords” blog that “This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.”

Well, apparently Google is not enforcing this policy. They’re simply asking advertisers to make the change. And they are granting exceptions to certain Google AdWords advertisers.

I spoke today with ReachLocal, one of the companies mentioned in the previous post, and they have forwarded me a statement from Google regarding this policy:

“To ensure a positive user experience, we (Google) require that an ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of the landing page). Exceptions to this policy are granted in limited situations where this agreement is not possible or would misrepresent the destination website. ReachLocal’s domains fall under the latter exception. ReachLocal uses a proxy technology that allows them to provide the same user experience on a ReachLocal domain that would be experienced on the display URL website. This is done for tracking purposes. Advertisers with ReachLocal will not be affected by the policy change.”

The policy appears to have been updated recently with new wording regarding Google’s enforcement (or lack of enforcement) of their Google AdWords Display URL policy:

While no immediate action will be taken on existing ads, we encourage you to make the necessary changes to all ads within your account. This will ensure that your ads run without being disrupted by future disapprovals related to this policy enforcement.

Note that your Quality Score will be effected if the URL that you display in your ad copy does not match the landing page that visitors land on when they click your ad. Keep in mind that this means that if your landing page URL does not match your display URL you will end up paying a lot more for your ad to be displayed on Google.

My personal recommendation is that if you advertise using Google AdWords, you should make sure that your display URL matches your landing page URL.

What are these three letters? RSS. Yes, it is probably not surprising and we’ve all heard it before. Most of the time we associate RSS as being from our own site and our own blog; many blogs automatically create an RSS feed of the content, allowing you to syndicate it on other sites. But did you know that many social media sites (social bookmarking sites) automatically create an RSS feed of everything that you’ve bookmarked?

Most likely you’ve spent time promoting the RSS feed of your blog and you’ve tried to get more people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. But, how often have you looked at the RSS feed of your social media profiles that are available? Did you know that many social media sites give you an RSS feed of everything that you’ve submitted, voted on, or otherwise participated in? By promoting the RSS feed of your social media profiles, you’ll drive more traffic and build links; which will help you in the long run.

Let’s take a look at a few examples. Del.icio.us, for example, makes several feeds available for you. For example, here is my feed that I update on a regular basis. If you have a del.icio.us profile, then your feed is at something like http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/username where ‘username’ is your user name at del.icio.us.

At StumbleUpon, there are two RSS feeds you’ll want to be aware of: the RSS feed of your StumbleUpon reviews and blog (mine is here) and an RSS feed of your StumblUpon Favorites (mine is here). You will have to go to your StumbleUpon profile page to retrieve the URL of your StumbleUpon feeds, as StumbleUpon uses your Stumbler number and not your user ID.

Digg also has an RSS feed of your activity, as well as some other RSS feeds. The main one you will want to be aware of is your Digg user RSS feed, and a sample of it is here, which is my Digg RSS feed. Your Digg user ID RSS feed will be something like http://www.digg.com/users/username, where ‘username’ is your Digg username.

There are tons of other social media sites that give their users an RSS feed of their activity, and I honestly wish that more sites would do so. C’mon Mixx.com, you have given us RSS feeds of the Mixx activity, but where is the RSS feed of everything that I submit to Mixx?

What should you do with these RSS feeds once you have those URLs? Well, there are a lot of different uses for those RSS feeds. But, as an online marketer, I generally like to use those RSS feeds to my advantage: to help me get more links to the items that I submit to the social networks. For example, I may put one or two of those RSS feeds on my personal site; to make sure that if I bookmark my friend’s great blog post they’re given credit for me linking to them. That will hopefully help their search engine rankings, as well as bring some additional visitors to their blog.

Another option is to integrate your social media RSS feeds from your favorite social media sites and import them automatically into your twitter, jaiku, and friendfeed accounts. You’ll automatically notify your twitter, jaiku, and friendfeed ‘friends’ about your latest adds at del.icio.us, and other social media sites that are important to you. And the search engines may pick up those URLs, as well.

By paying a little attention to the RSS feeds of your social media profiles, you’ll be able to help promote the items that you add to your favorite social media sites. Using those RSS feeds to your advantage will help bring more traffic to the URLs that are important to you, and the search engines just might pay attention to them, as well.

The Google AdWords Display URL policy has changed, and the following is a Google AdWords message describing the policy change.

This policy change is in line with other changes that Google has made to their policies, which has typically included a policy to do everything they can to make sure that the URL displayed is going to be the URL that you get to when you click on that URL. This been a goal of Google’s organic search for a while; now it is coming into effect on Google AdWords, and you can find out more information here.

Let’s take, for example, the case of ReachLocal (www.reachlocal.com). ReachLocal is a company that manages local PPC advertising for their clients. They appear to have been hit hard by this latest update to the Google AdWords policy. Local companies (such as a local air conditioning contractor) sign up with ReachLocal. When someone searches for a local keyword phrase such as “Dallas Texas air conditioning service”, a ReachLocal PPC ad shows up amongst the Sponsored Results. ReachLocal sends PPC traffic to their clients.

Before the new Google Display URL Policy took effect April 1, 2008, ReachLocal clients’ website URls were displayed in the search results. When someone clicked on the PPC ad, although something like www.dallas-air-conditioning-contractor.com was displayed in the Google AdWords ad, the visitor was brought to an unique page on www.reachlocal.com. However, after April 1, 2008, ReachLocal, just like all the other Google AdWords advertisers, has been forced to change the display URL in the Google AdWords Ads. Now, the display URLs show something like “dallas-air-conditioning-contractor.reachlocal.com”. The following is a sample screen capture from a recent Google search:

By looking at the ads, I personally would tend to click on an ad that I know is a specific air conditioning contractor. In this case, I probably would click on the first, third, or fourth ad. Before I was familiar with what ReachLocal does, I might not click on that particular ad, thinking it’s just another “yellow pages listing” of a bunch of other ads. Therefore, my conclusion is that ReachLocal and their advertisers must be seeing lower click-thru ratios, which ultimately has an effect on the Quality Score. A bad Quality Score ultimately means that you’re going to pay more.

Another consideration is that Google has an auction affiliate policy as explained here. Google will “only display one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL.” So, in the case of ReachLocal’s local advertisers, ReachLocal can only have one type of local client as their client. If there are more, then those other local clients will “lose out”. For example, if more than one Dallas real estate agent hires ReachLocal, then only one of those real estate agents can bid on the word “Dallas Real Estate”, a highly-sought-after keyword phrase. Google’s auction affiliate policy only allows one ad to show up per domain, which includes subdomains.

Some people think that this lack of attention may be due to a cultural shift in the workforce – younger workers are characterized by their desire for short-term instant gratification and lack the ‘big picture’ focus and spend too much time worrying about the details of a single project – neglecting other items that need addressing. Older workers are characterized by their desire to build a career and may have too much of a ‘big picture’ focus and can often neglect the smaller details. This is not always the case though but it tends to ring true in many businesses.

However, it may not be that culture affects the ability of either generation to focus on multiple tasks and follow through on all fronts of a project. It may actually be that these people have so much going on and just don’t have the ability to go back with a fine tooth comb to ensure that all tasks are being done and done properly – and as Mark J points out, it may be because you have a disease that you didn’t know you have.

The solution? Take the time to figure out how you may be affected and make sure to structure your team of employees to compensate for any bit of SEO ADD that your team has on board. Doing so will ensure that work is done, it is done right, and done to the satisfaction of your clients who are the reason you exist at all.

1. How many keywords are you currently bidding on in your paid search campaigns?

2. How many of those keywords have had some type of conversion in the last 6 to 12 months?

3. Why are you still bidding on keywords that have not had any conversions?

This is one of the most common errors I find when our agency begins managing an existing paid search account for a new client. Would you keep betting on a horse if it continuously lost?

If you are not tracking conversions, bookmark this blog and come back in a month after you begin tracking conversions and read this again.

It seems to me that many prospects who call into Vizion Interactive want to gravitate - almost immediately - to the question “how much do you charge for search engine optimization services”.

This is why I have made it my mission to try and help people understand what goes into a search engine optimization project, so that they get a better understanding why there should not be a “cookie cutter price” for search engine optimization services.

Imagine if you were to build a house. You would probably need to get a quote for the land, a quote for the various builders (quality varies), a quote depending on the square footage, etc.. All of these things must be considered because it’s a unique project based upon what you want.

It’s the same thing with search engine optimization. Some websites are “ready made” for search engine optimization and may require “nothing more” than keyword research, competitive analysis, site structure/Information architecture analysis, standard recommendations for titles/meta descriptions/meta keywords, a sitemap, etc.. However, some other websites may be lacking on content for keywords that the prospect has mentioned that they “must” be found for, or they could have a lot of issues with the way that their site was designed/developed that may need to be addressed.

Certainly, there are firms who offer “Package Pricing” for SEO. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess it’s pretty much the same thing as templated websites. I’ve even seen some SEO firms sell the SAME RECOMMENDATIONS (titles/descriptions/keywords) to several websites in the SAME INDUSTRY. What a rip off, huh? No research. Nothing custom about it. I guess it would have been okay for these websites if the owners had been told “we’re selling you templated SEO recommendations” and if the pricing reflected this. However, this firm was/is charging almost as much as our firm does.

For those of you seeking a “package deal”, I strongly urge you to read/study search engine optimization a little more before you jump into hiring a firm. You should begin to understand that you should be creating a “scope of work” for search engine optimization. At the end of the day, you are paying for time/talent. And, if you’ve ever tried to hire an SEO, you know that the good ones don’t come cheaply. So, the more talent involved in your project, and the more time that it takes, the more that you can expect to pay.

Certainly, there will be other search engine optimization firms out there who may want to offer some suggestions AND I WELCOME THEM! (add them as a comment to this post, and I will try to include them, as we revise this moving forward).

As with all things “interactive”, this document should be a living/breathing thing, constantly evolving to include other key influencers.

I look forward to hearing more suggestions. In the meantime, here is Version 1 of the Search Engine Optimization RFP.