SEO

Bing just got a little more interesting (or not? warning: rant to follow)

May 16, 2012 by Ryan Leave a Comment

I just got an email from Bing Webmaster Center inviting me to “be one of the first to see and experience the new Bing at www.bing.com/new.”

As with the prior version, it’s possible to see Facebook Likes from friends if you’re logged in. But the real action happens in the right-hand sidebar, which offers a high level of integration with Facebook.

Post directly to Facebook from Bing, add links from search into a Facebook post, and – if I recall correctly – see prior tweets from a given link.

But here’s what’s maddening. The nifty new sidebar on the beta side comes and goes. Even when I’m logged into Facebook and searching for stuff I know for a fact my friends will have liked, the bar is gone.

Listen up, Bing. I want very much to like you. I really want you to pose a serious threat to Google. I mean, you’re Microsoft, for crying out loud – back in the 90’s and 2000’s, weren’t you kind of accustomed to terrifying your competitors? But give me a chance to really test and see your functionality. Your best shot at presenting an alternative to Google is through your partnership with Facebook. Just trying to outrun Google on their terms isn’t going to do it. After going (almost) entirely with Bing for a week, Farhad Manjoo said as much:

All that being said, I don’t think you should switch. For one thing, despite Bing’s better design, Google is unquestionably the better search engine. Of the hundreds of searches I conducted in the last week, there were a handful of times that Bing just didn’t seem to be giving me the answer I was looking for. When I turned to Google with the same query, I got better results. This happened once when I was researching the name of a real estate agent; Google turned up some alarming stuff that Bing didn’t catch. Another time, I was looking for a computer scientist who’s an expert on wearable computing. I found a page and contact info for him on Bing, but I got a bounceback when I e-mailed him. When I Googled him, I found an indication that he’d moved on to a new job, with newer contact info—a page that Bing hadn’t turned up in its top results.

Google was better in other tiny ways as well. Sometimes I’d search for a place—the Peets coffee shop near my house, a specific street address—and Bing would fail to show me a link to Bing Maps at the top of its results page. Google always directed me to a Maps page, saving me a step. Bing also doesn’t offer “instant” search, the Google feature that updates results as you type. And most damning of all, I didn’t happen upon any area where Bing is clearly superior to Google. Over lots and lots of searches, Bing mostly worked really well, and one or two times, it didn’t.

The most striking thing about switching to Bing was how enmeshed I remained in the Google universe. During my week with Bing, I found myself reaching for lots of Google products beyond its Web search engine—Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Books, Google Scholar, Chrome, Picasa, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. My editor challenged me to go without using any Google products at all. Could I survive even a day without anything made in Mountain View? I tried. I redirected my mail to Hotmail, I tried to abstain from YouTube, and I attempted to research obscure topics without using Scholar. But I couldn’t do it. Google’s just too good—even beyond search, its products are too useful, too central to the Web to get much accomplished without them. I lasted less than half a day without Google, and it was hell.

And that’s the biggest case against switching to Bing. If you’re never really going to escape Google—and if Bing is pretty much exactly like Google—what’s the point? Yes, Google and Bing are functionally identical. But Bing will need a lot more than parity with the most-popular search engine in the land if it wants people to switch en masse.

As I say, your partnership with Facebook – especially, using social signals to balance out the link graph – is where you can compete. Based on what I heard from Duane Forrester and others at SMX Advanced last year, and based on what I see out of this latest Facebook integration attempt I think you understand as much. But allow me to really see your new functionality in the wild. If it’s not ready for a public test, then for crying out loud, don’t send me an email asking me to check it out.

/rant

Brand and SEO – is it really one versus the other?

January 31, 2012 by Ryan Leave a Comment

Ran into an interesting article (h/t Hal Werner) about balancing brand building and search engine optimization. It’s definitely worth a read.

I would add that even if your first consideration is SEO, you still want to rank for your brand, for the simple reason that it can be a good barometer for the overall health of your site. Put another way: if you aren’t ranking for your own brand or company name, you have a problem, and possibly a big one.

In addition, for many sites I’ve worked on in the past, even for those that used organic and paid search as their main marketing channels, the highest traffic and conversions were around branded search. So it’s a bit foolhardy to focus on nonbranded search to the exclusion of your branded terms.

However, it’s worth remembering that if you’re talking about building brand, then you’re almost certainly talking about offline advertising at some point. In other words, money money money. But your web presence should serve to reinforce whatever you’re doing offline, which leads into my first point above. So it’s not one or the other, as the author says:

No matter what industry you’re in or the type of business you’re trying to build, consider including both brand building and SEO in your marketing strategy. You don’t have to focus exclusively on one technique at the expense of the other.

Link building: outsource it or do it yourself?

March 25, 2011 by Ryan Leave a Comment

A contributor at Sphinn poses this question about link building:

We all know links are a key element of SEO. But it’s also difficult and monotonous work. The tradition of analyzing competitors’ links, creating a list of link opportunities, contacting site owners about getting a link — that’s time consuming and often unsuccessful. In our new “Discussion of the Week,” what’s a webmaster or business owner to do about getting links? Is Do-It-Yourself link building the best way to spend time and resources, or are there other ways to build inbound links? (One obvious answer is to hire a link building company/consultant, but that’s not D-I-Y, now is it?) 🙂

Let me first restate my credentials. I’ve worked as an SEO for an excellent Houston-based web marketing agency, and I very recently moved to doing SEO in-house for a Houston, Texas electricity company. In fact, I’ve recently put the finishing touches on a comprehensive SEO strategy for my new employer (I’ll circle back to this in a minute). So I’ve seen this from both sides of the table. And link building has very much been on my mind recently.

Having established my background, let me turn my attention to the Sphinn discussion. To begin with, I really think the premise is a bit flawed in the definition of DIY. It sounds like the author is saying that if the business owner hires anybody to do any work for them, even if it’s an internal employee, it ceases to be a DIY endeavor. Sounds awfully restrictive to me. Business owners are in the business of doing whatever it is they do, be it provide services or manufacture widgets. Unless the owner is a control freak or just an SEO savant, he or she is almost certainly going to seek some sort of outside help for their web marketing, be it via a consultant, agency or full-time employee.

Trust me, I agree that link building is labor-intensive; it’s one of several reasons that SEO doesn’t scale very well. Little wonder that so many link building specialists have popped up in the industry. However, shady link building agencies can absolutely wreak havoc on your SEO campaign.

I think the question is better restricted to whether it’s better to have link building done by in-house employees or to outsource it. One reason this piqued my interest is because of my aforementioned role as an in-house SEO specialist, particularly my aforementioned strategy development work for my new employer. While discussing the finer details of my overall strategy with my superiors, one asked a rather surprising question:

“What are your thoughts about hiring an outside firm to handle link building – things like directory submissions, and the like?”

This was surprising to me for a collection of reasons:

The inherent risk involved. Just ask this guy – or, of course, J.C. Penney.
They hired me to handle SEO – seems to me link building is in my job description, no?
One of the reasons I wanted to start doing SEO in-house was because of the increasing importance of effective PR with link building. As I said elsewhere, “In my professional work in search engine optimization, the thing that has really come to the forefront is how effective SEO – namely, backlink building – and effective PR are heavily connected. The line between the two has gotten so blurred that I really believe it’s increasingly hard to see where one ends and the other begins.” The more I worked at backlink building in an agency setting, the more convinced I became that there was a huge advantage to working in-house and being able to align my link building work with a company’s PR efforts.
Dovetailing off #2 and #3: in addition to me, we have a full-time social media specialist on staff who is going full throttle on Facebook and Twitter. That work is already helping with our off-site SEO. Do we really need an outside company or consultant for link building?

Here was my answer to my company superiors. “I’m open to the idea. But I will be extremely selective about anybody we have doing this. I want to know exactly what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, and I want to know precisely the links we’re getting. It’s way too important to let somebody do this without very clear oversight.”

For me, here’s where I come down on outsourcing link building:

Be prepared to pay good money for it. Effective off-site SEO is one place where you don’t dare cut corners.
Do your best to bring somebody on board to do it internally.
If you have to bring in a third-party consultant or agency, try to find somebody who will make link building a major component of a comprehensive public relations strategy for your company. As I say, good link building and effective PR are pretty much interchangeable.
Closely connected to #3: make sure social media is in the mix as well.

In short, I think it’s highly shortsighted to look at link building in the absence of considering social media development and public relations efforts.

Yes, social profiles are critical for SEO

December 3, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

Dovetailing beautifully off my prior post on social media and Google, Danny Sullivan delivers a fantastic report on how Google and Bing are incorporating Facebook and Twitter linkage into their search results. The closing graphs say it all:

In the end, it’s clear that Twitter data especially plays a role in web search, these days. Who you are is being understood. Are you a trusted authority or not? If there’s PageRank for pages, both search engines have a form of TwitterRank for people.

Meanwhile, retweets serve as a new form a link building. Get your page mentioned in tweets by authoritative people, and that can help your ranking in regular search results, to a degree.

If you want to get traction online, social media engagement is mandatory, not optional.

Google’s true threat

November 24, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

Many observers of the ongoing search wars keep looking for the so-called Google slayer. Who, they wonder, will finally be able to pose a real threat to Google’s monopoly on the search industry?

This SEO’s two cents? Google’s greatest threat just this moment certainly isn’t Bing, or really any other search engine per se, but a confluence of two factors: the changing nature of how people relate to and communicate online, and the speedy rise of the mobile Internet. But before I get too far ahead of myself, I should explain a bit about the history of search and how Google changed the game.

The first automated search engines (Excite, Infoseek, HotBot) relied heavily on looking at the on-page content of a website to determine its relevance to a given search. Obviously this approach is more than a bit problematic because it’s fairly easy to manipulate. However, Stanford doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a question in the mid-1990s. It’s very easy to look at the content and links on a given webpage – but is it possible to find the links to that page from elsewhere on the Internet, and use those links to determine the authenticity and relevance of that page to a given search query? That is a much more difficult question to answer, because ultimately what you need is a picture of the entire Internet. But the answer to that question eventually evolved into what we know today as Google.

Due to Google’s changing of the game, one of the factors that has become enormously important in search engine optimization is backlinks – in other words, getting sites to link to you. And we SEOs go to great lengths to find valuable links, because building out a quality link structure is absolutely critical to success in organic search. The analogy I like best is that when a site links to you, that site is in effect voting for you. But in the Googleverse, not all votes are weighed equally. So earning quality, relevant links is the name of the game in SEO today.

With that in mind, here is where social media throws a wrench in Google’s gears. This is a screenshot of my Twitter account:

Screenshot of Twitter feed, with nofollowed links highlighted

See all the links highlighted in red? Those links are “nofollowed” – they are blocked from being visited and indexed by the searchbot. That nofollow attribute is applied by default to all links posted on any Twitter account, and there’s no way to remove it. Same goes for Facebook, even if your profile is 100% public.

Herein is Google’s big problem where its search algorithm is concerned: people are increasingly taking the linking activities they used to engage in on widely accessible websites (blogs, forums and the like) to the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. I know in my case, while much of my blog content was composed of giving backlinks, today I’m far more likely to share links I find interesting or worthwhile on my Facebook wall or Twitter feed, rather than on my blog as I would have in the past. As this trend accelerates, the Internet community is stripping out the sorts of backlinks that are integral to Google’s ranking system, meaning Google’s picture of the Internet is developing blind spots.

This isn’t to say Google can’t or won’t figure out how to adjust to this new reality. They’re now crawling Twitter to offer real-time search results, and as an experiment by a colleague illustrates, in some cases Google may count tweeted links in its algorithm. But that’s Twitter; Facebook profiles, which can be blocked to all but friends, is a different matter entirely. It’s clear that Google will have to stay nimble enough to alter its search strategy to conform to ongoing changes in user behavior, which will likely be a challenge as the company grows ever larger.

But what if the way people use the Internet, and especially the way they relate to one another online, is fundamentally changing? Again, a personal example. Some months ago, I bought a Bluetooth earpiece based on favorable reviews I had discovered via Google. But after messing with it for a few weeks, I discovered that it just wasn’t doing it for me. So I tried a different tack: I tweeted and Facebooked a request for Bluetooth earpiece recommendations. Based on suggestions from a Facebook acquaintance, I may have my Christmas present clearly targeted.

There’s nothing original about asking somebody we know and trust for suggestions or ideas on a given matter, especially on something important to us. But Facebook both facilitates and amplifies this behavior substantially. Asking a friend here and there is one thing; instantly polling your entire trusted circle of friends on a whim is another matter altogether. Even amid the rise of the Internet and search engines, word-of-mouth referrals remain the best sales leads around, and if word of mouth spreads that much more easily and rapidly, then on that basis alone Facebook poses a radical threat to Google’s continued success.

And this trend is only accelerated by the arrival of the smartphone. The increasing ability – likelihood, really – of people to have the Internet always at their disposal, with the ability to seek information and poll their trusted circle, marks a radical shift in the information people can access and, especially, the way they access it. To its credit, Google saw this coming way off (hence, Android). But add to this the clear technical challenges in presenting the same level of search engine results on the mobile platform, and suddenly it’s obvious that Google needs to remain remarkably flexible to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

One last point: don’t take these observations too far in any direction. More specifically, I’m hardly saying that Facebook means the end of Google. I recently heard a self-appointed social media expert assert with some confidence that the time was not far off when companies would shut down their websites in favor of Facebook pages, which seems to me premature at best. But in just a few years people now connect socially and integrate the Internet in their lives in radically different ways. Google will have to adjust rapidly to this and continuing changes. It should be fun to watch.