When an SEO firm provides an SEO audit, keep in mind that it is pretty easy to “hole punch” any SEO effort. So, be sure to take any audit with that in mind. If you are using this audit to double-check the work of an in-house SEO or to audit another agency, there are always going to be things that an SEO can find to “do better”.

To fully prepare for an SEO Audit, your search team will require the following:

I had never been to an SES before, and looking back on the show, there were a lot of things about it that surprised me. Oddly, the thing that may have surprised me the most was the number of times I heard the term “content is king”. Between search engine reps, speakers, and attendees, the phrase kept getting tossed around the show, like a beach ball in the bleachers at a baseball game.

It probably sounds so silly to be surprised by something like that, but think about it for a second; here we are at a show dedicated to the newest tactics and techniques in search, and you keep hearing this cliche that’s practically as old as SEO itself. It’s like going to a car show where people keep talking about an ’89 Yugo.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in great content as much as anybody. It’s just that, the longer I work in search, the more I find the phrase “content is king” to one of [...]]]> Has it already been a month since SES NYC? What a fantastic show! It certainly did not disappoint, with four great days chock full of the latest and greatest in SEO and search marketing.

I had never been to an SES before, and looking back on the show, there were a lot of things about it that surprised me. Oddly, the thing that may have surprised me the most was the number of times I heard the term “content is king”. Between search engine reps, speakers, and attendees, the phrase kept getting tossed around the show, like a beach ball in the bleachers at a baseball game.

It probably sounds so silly to be surprised by something like that, but think about it for a second; here we are at a show dedicated to the newest tactics and techniques in search, and you keep hearing this cliche that’s practically as old as SEO itself. It’s like going to a car show where people keep talking about an ’89 Yugo.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in great content as much as anybody. It’s just that, the longer I work in search, the more I find the phrase “content is king” to one of the worst things to ever happen to SEO.

Why is “content is king” bad for SEO? For me, it boils down to two reasons. First is good old-fashioned cynicism.  I know search reps didn’t coin the phrase, but they do use it a lot, and it makes me nervous. This is probably due to the fact I’ve always believed listening to search reps talk about content is a little too much like listening to a priest talk about sex.

Secondly, and more importantly, “content is king” is bad for SEO because it takes the attention away from where it really needs to be, the person doing the searching. Focusing on “content” draws the focus of the campaign inward when it really needs to be outward. For SEOs, what is truly paramount is the searcher, why they’re searching, and what they want out of the transaction; not the content you’re hoping to put in their way.

It’s the searcher that’s the king, not the content.

Isn’t saying “content is king” really talking about the searcher? You’d think so, but I don’t think that’s the case. At one point it may have been true, but from a practical perspective, the “content is king” mantra has resulted in too many SEOs and marketers trying to generate “good” content with as little incremental effort as possible. The searcher has been removed from the equation, and now it’s simply about crafting something that will just rank.

This is completely the wrong mindset. The SEOs who are successful today and down the road realize that content can’t exist in a vacuum; they need to figure out what searchers want when they use specific keywords, and much be able to help their clients (or themselves) meet those needs while differentiating themselves from the other sites on the search results page.

That’s the key to good SEO and that’s the stuff more people need to be talking about.

The Google Wonder wheel is a search option that you can use to find out what keyword phrases Google is currently associating with your web site. You can also use it to find related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you’re targeting, but in this search engine optimization tip I’m going to look specifically at VizionInteractive.com, and see the keyword phrases that Google thinks is related to that domain name. Here is how you use this search engine optimization technique:

1. To access the Google Wonder wheel, you will first need to perform a search at Google like this:

2. Click on the “Show options…” link and you will see [...]]]> This is Search Engine Optimization tip number 35 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with finding using the Google Wonder wheel, a part of the search options Google announced (a while back)  to find out what Google thinks about your web site.

The Google Wonder wheel is a search option that you can use to find out what keyword phrases Google is currently associating with your web site. You can also use it to find related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you’re targeting, but in this search engine optimization tip I’m going to look specifically at VizionInteractive.com, and see the keyword phrases that Google thinks is related to that domain name. Here is how you use this search engine optimization technique:

1. To access the Google Wonder wheel, you will first need to perform a search at Google like this:

2. Click on the “Show options…” link and you will see options displayed on the left side.

3. Click on the “Wonder Wheel” link on the left side.

4. You will then see what is called the “Google Wonder wheel”, as displayed below:

As you can see from this, there currently are two phrases being shown that are related to “vizioninteractive.com”, which is “agency” and “search engine”. So, some of the keyword phrases that we would want to target for this web site might be “agency” and “search engine”. Or we could also target phrases that include the word “agency” and the word “search engine”. As a comparison, let’s take a look at the Google Wonder wheel for “Amazon.com”:

I am kind of surprised that Google relates Amazon.com with Target and Walmart, because I first think “books” when I think of Amazon. But, as we can see, there are lots of other products being sold through Amazon, and most likely this is why these other online retailers are showing up in the Google Wonder wheel.

I personally like to use the Google Wonder wheel for a domain name search first just to make sure that there aren’t any keyword phrases being shown that we don’t want to show up there. If there’s a keyword phrase that shouldn’t be there, then that might indicate another problem, perhaps with the links to the web site. That would require further investigation.

Perhaps a better use of the Google Wonder wheel might be using the Google Wonder wheel for search engine optimization purposes like doing keyword research. For example, let’s look at which keyword phrases show up on the Google Wonder wheel for “search engine optimization”:

In this case, you will see several keyword phrases, and what intrigues me the most is “search engine optimization pricing”, which might indicate that someone is looking for the price of search engine optimization services. If you are a search engine optimization firm, you might want to investigate that keyword phrase more, as it might be people searching for the prices, and it might be people looking to hire an SEO firm. By the way, search engine optimization tips are there, as well, and that’s certainly something that you’re reading right now, aren’t these SEO Tips great?

Not following along with our Search Engine Optimization Tips? You might want to take a look at the recap of search engine optimization tips we have posted in the past few months. Our last SEO tip was about the Canonical Tag. The canonical tag lets us tell the search engines that a specific URL is a duplicate of another URL, another web page on your website.

What is a 404 Error? A 404 error is an error that your web server creates that indicates a “file not found” or a “page not found” on your website. Whenever someone goes to a web page that doesn’t exist on your website, your website should tell them that the page (the file) that they’re requesting [...]]]> This is search engine optimization tip number twenty nine in our continuing series of search engine optimization tips. All of our search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific, they should not take too much time to implement, and are meant to be directly to the point. In fact, this search engine optimization tip is pretty simple: check your 404 error pages on your website.

Not following along with our Search Engine Optimization Tips? You might want to take a look at the recap of search engine optimization tips we have posted in the past few months. Our last SEO tip was about the Canonical Tag. The canonical tag lets us tell the search engines that a specific URL is a duplicate of another URL, another web page on your website.

What is a 404 Error?
A 404 error is an error that your web server creates that indicates a “file not found” or a “page not found” on your website. Whenever someone goes to a web page that doesn’t exist on your website, your website should tell them that the page (the file) that they’re requesting is “not found”.

Why Checking your 404 Errors is Important
There are several reasons why checking the 404 errors are important to do. You could be missing out on traffic to your website: and link “credit”. Another website could be linking to a page on your website but when they made the link to you they mistyped something: and the link to your website goes to a web page that doesn’t exist. If you were to fix the link (by redirecting the visitors from that ‘not found’ page to the correct page using a 301 Permanent Redirect), you could get the visitors and the ‘credit’ for it.

You could have redesigned your website at one point and you may have missed a page on your website that still had some traffic and visitors (and links from another website). If you check your 404 errors there’s a good chance that you would see this traffic. As previously mentioned, you’re going to need to redirect that 404 error (actually, you redirect the URL of the page) to another page on your website that DOES exist.

You also could have purchased a domain name that was owned by someone else previously: and there may be traffic and links pointing to old pages on the site: if you redirect those pages (or put content up on those old URLs) then again there’s a good chance that you can redirect the traffic over to the other part of your website.

Your web host may be monetizing your 404 error pages without you knowing it. In fact, some web hosts actually are taking advantage of the fact that you are not using a custom 404 error page on your website. When someone goes to a web page that doesn’t exist on your website, they are served up a page full of ads: and your web hosting is making money for every click that goes through that error page, on your own website!

What is a Custom 404 Error page?
A custom 404 error page is simply that: a customized version of the 404 error. When someone gets the 404 error on your website, your website shows a web page that looks like your current website: and ideally would tell your visitors that they didn’t get to a correct page, or a page that’s valid. Perhaps they then could be offered a way to search your website or even go to another page via the navigation in your website.

The bottom line
What’s the bottom line? You need to go to your website and enter an invalid page/URL address. Something like: http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever-23i39390.html. A page that you KNOW doesn’t exist. Then, see what happens. You should not see a page full of ads and you should see an error. Check your server’s headers to make sure your site is serving up a correct 404 error. You can do that by entering the page (or a page that does not exist) using an HTML Viewer or using a “server header check” tool. You should see a true 404 error, not a “200 OK” or something else. And it should not redirect to your home page.

Many web analytics packages will NOT give you the 404 errors. In fact, Google Analytics, since it relies on JavaScript, will not show you the 404 errors on your website: you must use something that analyzes your website log files. By checking your 404 errors, you could see a lot of traffic and a way to redirect that traffic to the ‘live’ pages on your site. And if there are links to those 404 errors you can fix the errors and help your website’s search engine optimization.

While this may not be new to those who were able to first explore this offering beginning June 2nd, I just received access to it and I am extremely happy with it. I think that the information made available is insightful, actionable and paints a great picture for how your local listings are performing. Let’s also not forget that ultimately it is much easier than digging through Google Analytics for minimal local listing performance data.

To start off, the dashboard provides the same top-level data of impressions vs. clicks. To some, this may be seen as the most critical data to assess. This is the first indicator that your local business listing is not captivating or that you are marketing to the wrong audience. However, seeing this in the past as effective due to a high click-to-impression/action ratio may have been misleading for those who title [...]]]> It was an early Christmas gift from Google for all of us local search marketing geeks out there. Thanks to folks at Google Local Business Center, local businesses now have the opportunity to dig deeper into the performance of their Google local listings via a listing performance dashboard.

While this may not be new to those who were able to first explore this offering beginning June 2nd, I just received access to it and I am extremely happy with it. I think that the information made available is insightful, actionable and paints a great picture for how your local listings are performing. Let’s also not forget that ultimately it is much easier than digging through Google Analytics for minimal local listing performance data.

To start off, the dashboard provides the same top-level data of impressions vs. clicks. To some, this may be seen as the most critical data to assess. This is the first indicator that your local business listing is not captivating or that you are marketing to the wrong audience. However, seeing this in the past as effective due to a high click-to-impression/action ratio may have been misleading for those who title their location solely with their brand. Where Google Local took this pre-existing feature further was to show impressions and actions but break out exactly what actions are taking place. As illustrated in the image below, now you are able to assess how may searchers chose to see more info on your listing, request driving directions or chose visit your website. It is also beneficial that the dashboard also allows you to choose custom reporting time periods.

The next new feature of the dashboard report is the “Top Search Queries” section. Here we can see what search engine keyword phrase queries are driving the most impressions. Now while you do not have the information as to which queries drove actions, it is nice to see where you are showing up. With this information in mind, see if you are getting impressions for keyword terms related to your market focus. If so, this is a great tool to use in refining your listings for the impressions you are already residing within. Instead of having to fully optimize your listings, your listings simply need to be polished.

Lastly, another great offering is the section which indicates by zip code identification which listing visitors requested driving directions. This in itself can be used as a tool for offline marketing as well as within your online efforts. Knowing where a lot of your interested parties are located allows you to fine tune you offline advertising efforts to a certain locality. Knowing where your foot traffic is coming also allows you to provide added usability on-site by providing specific driving directions from these areas. If located within a large city, this specific data gives you the need to re-assess your keyword research at a suburb level as well. While city data is available in Google Analytics and other analytical packages, I have yet to see it at a zip code level.

All in all, Google Local Business Center has really made me happy with the integration of this expanded reporting information. While some of this data can be assessed by digging around in Google Analytics, is is nice to have a clean and concise report available for each individual listing you have.

If you have not been keeping up with the latest Search Engine Optimization developments when it comes to Google PageRank, PageRank Sculpting, and the NoFollow Tag, then this blog post is probably for you. And even if you have been attempting to keep up with it all, then let this blog post serve as an “overview” of what’s going on, and the changes that you may or may not need to make to your website to improve its search engine optimization.

First, you will probably want to go over to Matt Cutts’ Blog (Matt Cutts is a Google Search guru, he works for Google) and read his recent blog post about PageRank Sculpting and how it can effect the Search Engine Optimization of your website. Well, at least that’s what he has titled his blog post. I believe that it’s actually not a very good title for that blog post, especially because it covers a lot more than “PageRank Sculpting”.

After reading Matt Cutts’ blog post, I’ve pulled out the most important points that you need to pay attention to, especially when it comes to search engine [...]]]>  

If you have not been keeping up with the latest Search Engine Optimization developments when it comes to Google PageRank, PageRank Sculpting, and the NoFollow Tag, then this blog post is probably for you. And even if you have been attempting to keep up with it all, then let this blog post serve as an “overview” of what’s going on, and the changes that you may or may not need to make to your website to improve its search engine optimization.

First, you will probably want to go over to Matt Cutts’ Blog (Matt Cutts is a Google Search guru, he works for Google) and read his recent blog post about PageRank Sculpting and how it can effect the Search Engine Optimization of your website. Well, at least that’s what he has titled his blog post. I believe that it’s actually not a very good title for that blog post, especially because it covers a lot more than “PageRank Sculpting”.

After reading Matt Cutts’ blog post, I’ve pulled out the most important points that you need to pay attention to, especially when it comes to search engine optimization and optimizing your website for the search engines:

– Google is doing a lot of very sophisticated link computation. And it is very different than what the original PageRank papers say.
– There is a decay factor. You could estimate that about 10-15% of the PageRank disappears even before it can be passed to an outgoing link.
– The Nofollow tag is a method to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, NoFollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchor text. Matt Cutts says that Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank and Nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.
– Google changed how they count NoFollow links, probably due to the fact that certain website owners were trying to influence how PageRank flows in their site.
– Matt Cutts does not recommend PageRank Sculpting.
– It is more important to create great content that will attract links.
– Use a website architecture that makes your site usable and crawlable for humans and for the search engines.
– Put the most important web pages on your site “front and center” so people and the search engines can see them.

I personally have never been a fan of “PageRank Sculpting” and trying to manipulate which web pages on your site the search engines should pay more attention to. If the page is important, and you’re adding it as a link on your website for a human to follow, then you have to assume that the search engines might follow it, right? Well, that’s what we’re hearing from Google’s Matt Cutts now: they have changed the way they deal with the NoFollow tag, so it appears that PageRank Sculpting is not necessary anymore. They don’t say it officially, but they may be ignoring the NoFollow tag, at least part of it.

What’s more important than knowing about how Google treats PageRank Sculpting and the NoFollow tag, though, are these points:
– Google changed other, larger aspects of how they look at links. They did it a while back and not too many people noticed.
– A better, more effective form of PageRank Sculpting is choosing which things to link to from your home page.
– Whenever you’re linking around within your site: don’t use the NoFollow tag.
– There are some cases where you might consider adding the NoFollow tag, like to pages that change often or require a login. Still, you might consider adding those URLs to the robots.txt file rather than adding a NoFollow tag to the links.
– Do not attempt to hoard your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Make note of this: parts of Google’s algorithm encourages links to good websites. You will rank better in the Google if you link out to trusted, authoritative websites that Google already likes. In fact, I have been personally recommending that whenever you make a blog post, make sure that you do your research first and link out to a few trusted websites on the subject. Why not search Google and link out to a few sites that already rank well?

Linking out is a good thing for search engine optimization. That’s why, for example, I am linking out to a few sites towards the beginning of this blog post: note the wikipedia link and the link to the “Anatomy of a Search Engine” (Google PageRank paper) link.

So, what’s the bottom line? You need to take a look at your website’s internal linking structure and your overall site structure and consider that Google is probably ignoring the NoFollow tags on your website. Do you really need to link to that URL (internal or external)? Is that link good or bad for humans? By the way, did I mention that Vizion Interactive provides a complete site structure analysis?