We’ve all seen the graphic shown below or one similar to it, haven’t we? Sure, it’s the typical image of the evolution of man. In fact, you may even have pictured this image in your head while you were reading one of Julie Joyce’s famous SEO Chick posts, Could A Chimp Do SEO? Heck YES! or SEO Easy, A Caveman Can Do IT!, back in October and July of last year. (I’m pretty sure Julie watches The Planet of the Apes series every few months, and that’s why she’s obsessed with that particular theme). I’ve decided to continue Julie’s recurring theme and present to you, The Evolution Of A Newbie SEO.

In the beginning, a newbie webmaster (who did not yet know SEO existed), created a web site. The newbie webmaster sat back, satisfied with his first attempt at HTML (which looked very similar to a 1997 geocities site I once owned), and waited for the instant wealth that would be bestowed upon him. Five minutes ticked by, and the newbie webmaster couldn’t understand why he’d not had the millions of visitors he’d expected by now. In fact, he’d had not even one! WTF? What happened to “build it and they will come?” At about the same time as the newbie webmaster was pondering this, he received a fortuitous email in his inbox. It read: 50,000 Visitors To Your Site For Only $19.95! And so the noob began his journey into the seedy realm of purchasing untargetted (and often imaginary) traffic from shady sites and exit popunders.

The newbie webmaster later begins a slight evolutionary process as his web travels introduce him to a new term: SEO. Filled with wonder and excitement, the newbie webmaster becomes immersed in this new world known as search engine optimization. He now understands that a site sits empty and alone if it cannot be found, and so begins his quest to rank well in search engines. His first exposure to SEO, again through his wondrous email inbox, details the riches to be gained by hiring a firm to optimize his site’s meta tags, and subsequently submitting that site to thousands of search engines each and every month. It costs $99/month, but surely that is nothing compared to the massive amounts of money that will be made once his site ranks in the top 10 for over a dozen phrases chosen by the SEO firm in at least 50% of the search engines they submit to. Wow! Thousands of search engines…50% of those get top 10 rankings…for more than a dozen phrases! The riches are right around the corner! Until they aren’t.

At this point, the newbie SEO has learned to be wary of the promises made in unsolicited emails that land in his email inbox. Another turn of the evolutionary wheel has been made, and the newbie SEO wanders out into the realm of the … SEO Forum. There lies all the answers…and all for free! The newbie SEO now makes the leap into optimizing his site himself, as he spends all of his waking time (which is close to 24/7) reading every post, in every thread of the SEO forum he has tumbled into. He soon learns that METAS aren’t the holy grail of SEO, and that submissions to search engines are silly and outdated. Instead, he skips off down the brown-brick road of recip links pages, sending form-letter emails requests demanding reciprocal link exchanges of thousands of site owners, optimizing his home page for 30 important keyword phrases, and including every keyword phrase he can think of in teeny-tiny light gray text at the very bottom of his home page. Then, he checks his rankings every day for every keyword, and gets really excited when he finds a few ranking in the top 100! Finally, the riches will come! Until they don’t.

As the months roll by, and the recip directory on his site reaches 30 pages of spam-filled links, but the rankings and traffic aren’t at the expected levels, the disgruntled noob seo begins to wonder where he went wrong. He now turns an important corner in his forum world, as he emerges from his “lurker” status to ask for feedback on his site. He is shocked when his amateurish attempts at optimizing his site are ridiculed and mocked. He is suddenly faced with new theories of content, long-tail, and one-way linkage that causes his brain to hurt as it is remolded and reshaped so intensely, that his skull actually begins to change shape (and will continue to do so over the next evolutionary stages), and he realizes that he needs to stand a little taller to be able to grasp this higher level of learning. Still, his past experiences have so shaped his thinking, that he still sees the need to take this new knowledge and twist it into a form that can be easily added to his site. So he listens again, despite his wariness, to the emails in his inbox that offer to help him generate lots of content on his site with the newest, whiz-bangiest RSS feed mixer available today! And as a bonus, he’ll also receive a blog comment auto-generator for no extra charge! Thus begins the budding SEO’s use of “automation tools”. He uses his wondrous new tools and the dollar signs flash green in his eyes, as he sees his 3 page site suddenly expanding to 3,000 pages - overnight! - while his blog commenting gizmo increases his one-way links by the thousands with just the click of a mouse button. And because he now has a slightly-straighter posture, he learns to dance a little at the thought of all those riches pouring in. Until the music stops.

One morning, the budding SEO wakes up to find that his site can no longer be found in Google - at all. It has been completely removed, and the tales he has heard of sites being banned suddenly become real for the emerging SEO. His beloved site, his baby, his creation, has been dealt a mighty blow, and he has been banned. The endless days and nights of research into the causes of such penalties creates new neuro-pathways in our SEO’s brain, and his evolution takes a mighty turn. It is at this point that our SEO does one of three things:

1. His evolution stops and his species dies as he abandons his web site dreams forever.
2. His brain calculates the risk vs. reward of automated site building and he buys/builds/outsources new, stealthier, less easily detectable tools that can crank out site after site after site, so that as some are banned, others are bringing in small amounts of money (which all add up)
3. His brain comprehends the many mistakes he’s made in the past, and he seeks out those who can mentor him in search-sanctified methods

At this point, our SEO is well-past the newbie stage and spends his next few years as an experienced (but ever-learning) SEO. His evolution is as complete as it will be for quite some time, and his occasional fashion changes (hat colors) only serve to increase his level of expertise. He has now completely started over, concentrating significant time and resources on either:

• Creating a well-designed site filled with quality content that naturally attracts links, and becomes more marketing-focused as he begins to understand that conversions matter, networking matters, and being unique matters. He spends considerable time doing keyword research and writing strong, compelling copy. He has mastered the the technical aspects necessary to ensure his site is crawlable and provides no roadblocks to search engine bots.
• Immersing himself in the clever intricacies of black-hat technologies, always attempting to stay one step ahead of algorithmic changes, but being able to quickly adapt and change tactics when the search engines occasionally catch up and catch on. His failures are many, but in this game of numbers, it only takes a certain percentage of wins to make it all profitable.

This stage of evolution will sometimes show our SEO occasionally crossing over from one side of the fashion world to the other, and back again, but ultimately, we will likely see him choosing one fashion over the other as he determines his true comfort level. Perhaps in a few years, we will be able to add a few more evolutionary cycles to this post. Until then, happy SEO’ing.

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My name is Julie, and I have a bad client.

OK seriously, HE isn’t a bad client…he just has the misfortune of being bound by some amazing constraints that are coming from all over his company, factors that prevent me from doing, well, my usual SEO tomfoolery. Here’s the list of services that I’m allowed to perform:

1. Meta tag writing. This brings such joy to my life, you simply cannot imagine. I get to flesh out titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. I’m living the dream.

2. PPC ads. Small budget, mostly just brand keywords in quotes…see item 1’s “living the dream” which is also applicable here.

3. Witty repartee with client whenever he wants it, usually on IM and Facebook, occasionally on the phone or in person.

Why do I bother? And don’t be sitting there thinking, a la Basil Fawlty, “didn’t know you did…” please. Because working with this client, whom I’ll call Martin (after the two coolest Martins ever, Martin Fry and Martin Amis), I’ve had to let my ego evaporate. I am not at all in control. That’s actually an amazingly freeing sensation in my day to day working life. I’m there for Martin, providing recommendations on everything from how to handle upcoming site redesigns to whether or not a keyword is worth $5 a click, and sometimes he agrees with me, and sometimes he does but his boss doesn’t, but in the end, I am forced to work with what he gives me, with no gifts involved other than my Christmas tower of chocolate and my birthday cookies.

When I’ve discussed this client with other SEOs, some of them have questioned why I took him on and continue to work with him. It’s actually very simple: I learn an amazing amount about how to effectively do my job when I’m forced to rely on very, very simple things. I’m not able to throw a ton of money around and Martin isn’t funding any conference trips to Las Vegas and Seattle. He expects me to know my boundaries, and to keep him informed about anything that could potentially cause his site to fall in the rankings. That’s not really a lot of pressure is it?

Here’s the real point: if you can’t do SEO well enough to let things go and lose your desire to call all the shots, all the time, you must not be as good an SEO as you think you are. There’s a great deal of ego in this field, as you may have witnessed from time to time. Not every “deserving” SEO client will let you dictate his or her directory structure or agree to invest in your link building program, and if you can’t work with that, you should step back and take a look at why it is that you have to have everything your way. Is it ego? Or is it simple inability to perform without someone doing every little thing that you say?

When your main form of optimization is writing good meta tags, you have to be very, very good at writing meta tags. When your client wants to pay you to be there whenever he has questions, and he has some amazingly good SEO questions at some fairly inconvenient times, then you have to stay informed on everything that’s going on in the industry and be ready to provide your recommendations, knowing that they probably won’t be followed, for whatever reason. You have to stop dictating what pages are named, what long-tailed keywords are good for PPC, and a better way to word the main message on the index page. That’s actually not very easy when you’re used to being the golden child of marketing, having clients throwing money at you to do whatever it takes to get them to the top. It’s very humbling, though, and it’s potentially key to not becoming a pompous asshole as fast as you might otherwise.

When you know that your efforts are most likely fruitless, when you realize that you’re going to spend three hours gathering data on pay per click keywords only to have a marketing department decide not to even bother, you really learn patience. It’s kind of a Zen thing actually, just letting go and existing. And let’s not forget that you’re still in service to this client, as you’re still responsible for ensuring that things go as well as possible, with certain parameters in place. That’s actually quite a bit more difficult at times, because nothing’s easy. However, if you get too comfortable with being the one making the rules, you don’t quite learn how to follow them and let someone else lead. Most good leaders are also seriously good followers, if I may throw in a very trite turn of phrase. Try it, if you can find a Martin, only think of him as a challenging client, not a bad one. You may be quite surprised at how it changes your entire mindset for the better

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Is SEO ever a waste of time and/or money? American Express certainly seems to think so, even going so far as to suggest that search engine specialists will naturally try to trick the filtering techniques of engines and are likely to get your site banned from the engines.

Seriously ineffective SEO firms and individual crackpots with just enough knowledge to fool people into giving them money abound at the moment, unfortunately. It’s quite easy to find examples of clients who have been shafted by someone who did something amazingly stupid and harmed his or her business. There are most likely just as many examples of cases in which, for whatever reason, clients simply did not do well in the online arena. SEO isn’t foolproof, certainly. Nothing is, really, not even marmite.

However, it’s fairly scary when such a large presence as American Express comes out and advises small business owners against employing a search engine specialist in their attempt to boost their online visibility. Not only is it an insult to those of us who know what we’re doing and do it well (usually), it also has the potential to cause even more damage to people who actually heed this advice and take matters into their own hands without the knowledge to successfully perform online. In the past, I’ve dealt with clients who would not do anything that didn’t involve frames, set up session variables that were then transferred all over the site via a querystring (no I am not joking) which caused pages to be indexed with these identifiers and ended up overwriting shopping carts, had nothing but an image on their home page, and spent $30,000 a month on PPC that they insisted on managing themselves only to finally TEST an ad and see that their landing page for these ads had no call to action as they thought it did. All of this nasty business was the result of someone in-house, with no SEO background, attempting to please the engines.

I currently have a client for whom my goal is to not do a single thing that could be construed as trying to please the engines. I am limited to PPC and meta tags, basically, but that’s fine because I’m honest about what I do and the client understands that I am bound by many constraints. This client’s view, which I agree with, is that the business’s offline reputation is so strong that it simply cannot be put at risk in any way. So there you have it…I don’t get to do too much SEO for him, but I am able to make sure that no one else takes advantage of him. That’s definitely not a waste of time OR money.

Honestly, any idiot can sell SEO services. (Notice how I am not taking this opportunity to provide you with any jokes about Jay.) I have dealt with enough small business owners who have absolutely no clue about how to effectively do business online to know that there is a massive amount of vulnerable people out there who can be easily snowed by someone looking to make a few bucks at their expense. I recently had an old coworker ask me to do some PPC work for someone he knew, simply because he had a great deal of respect for the company and knew that they lacked the knowledge to NOT get screwed over by unscrupulous types. As overworked as I am, I did agree to think about doing it, mainly because I’ve seen the money that gets basically stolen from these unsavvy clients who simply have no idea that they’re basically being raped by people who can end up doing major damage to their site and their online efforts.

Stating that SEO is a waste is completely irresponsible. Yes, there are examples of poor SEO but that’s absolutely no reason to advise all small business owners against employing the services of reputable people who happen to have the background and the knowledge to compete in the online arena. And, when you really think about it, that poor advice is really no different than bad SEO…

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Every so often I get irritated and start looking for a job.  It’s only usually when I’m irritated or it would occur to me to use my network and check with them for a job.  However, not everyone has a network – and not everyone knows where to look or what is reasonable.

I went looking recently and was surprised at the amount of variation in salaries offered.  Since I knew of a few SEOs looking for something new, I thought it would be a fun blog post.  There are lots of decent jobs out there but I’ve tried to select a good cross-section of mock-worthy and praise-worthy.  The commentary is my own and does not reflect the opinions or views of my employer or the SEO-Chicks.

Hopefully this will become a regular feature and please do let me know if anyone reading this gets a job as a result of seeing it here.  It would be good to know I helped.

I’d like to draw your attention to the salary survey put out by SEMPO. While it relates to in-house SEOs only, it does give a good indication of what someone with a certain number of years, handling a certain budget could expect to earn.  They are currently conducting an Agency Search Salary Survey

Also – women tend to fail to apply for a job unless they have at least 80% of what is being asked for whereas men will go when they have as little as 30%.  BE STRONG CHICKS and go for these jobs whether you think you have enough or not.  This industry needs more women willing to take a chance!

I did the following searches (links should give search results):

SEO Jobs London – mad.co.uk (aggregator)
SEO England London – SEOVacancies (main site link)
SEO SEM United Kingdom London – JobsInSearch (main site link)
SEO W1 10 miles – Totaljobs 

Search Engine Optimisation Assistant/SEO Assistant/Search Executive - £18-20K + benefits
This is the type of role you want to look at taking to get introduced to search optimising or marketing jobs.  It may not be the kind of impressive salary more senior SEOs get but we all have to start somewhere.  This is a great opportunity to start from nothing – GO FOR IT!

Junior SEO Consultant - to £27,000+benefits
This is a good opportunity to get a foot in the door and get a great salary to boot.  This job doesn’t require anything but a passion for SEO “You may be experienced with SEO or you could be a recent graduate who is passionate about SEO with desire to get into the industry”  WOW!  Jump on this all you budding SEOs in and around London.

SEO Executive - £28k
While these folks are asking for “proven experience” don’t be put off by those strong-sounding words.  All it means is that you’ve done something and can show your work for example changing title tags after keyword research or working on a PPC campaign and the steps you went through.  They will be looking for some hands-on something so even if you just helped with keyword research give it a shot!

SEO/Search Engine Optimisation Specialist - £30000 - £35000 per annum + healthcare, gym membership, bonus
OK… the perks are nice but really – if you have 3 years agency side and 2 years managing large accounts, you’re going to be looking for a head role – and more money with a manager role.  This is most certainly not a “top salary package” as they claim in the ad.  Look elsewhere!

SEO Specialist – Leading Online Fashion Brand - Up to £35k
I’m always wary about people who think they know what thy are doing – asking for a “white hat” to fix a site with “1,200 back links” and a “PR of 4/10” plus want someone “who has the skills and commercial experience to turn their vast links into profitable link juice”.  The pay is not fantastic but if you’re only caring for one site – fashion though it may be – how much work is there going to be after 6 months?

SEO Manager – £35 - 50,000 basic + bonus + excellent package
Oooohhhh… I’m liking the sound of this one – especially if you can negotiate up to the £50k salary.  The request for skills is reasonable, and really the requirements are realistic.  They aren’t asking for the moon and have a good idea of what they want.  I’m not an agency kinda gal and sales isn’t something that ever floats my boat but this looks like an excellent opportunity!

SEO Manager- Online Marketing Agency - 40-45k + Bonus
I’m always wary of jobs like this as it doesn’t really seem like they know what they want.  However, this is for a new team and so you’ll be coming in to an environment where you can mould and shape and grow the team.  This is the perfect kind of job for someone who wants to get in to it up to their elbows and really make a difference.

International Search Director - £40,000 to £50,000 per annum
I’m sorry… is this a joke?  Man management, Google qualified, experience… Ladies, go elsewhere.  What kind of a moron thinks this is enough to pay for someone with skills, qualifications, a degree and a European language?!?!  Seriously!  Don’t apply for this job – laugh at it!

Head of Search - £65 - 80k
This should actually be billed as head of PPC rather than head of search.  A throw-away statement at the end of the job advert makes this clear.  This looks to be a fun position with US and European travel and liaising with non-technical departments.  If you’re looking for that next move to head, I’d go for it.  In fact, I might go for it myself!

Hope you had fun and maybe applied for a few jobs.  The two with search results (madjobs.co.uk and Totaljobs) are a quick way to find what’s gone up recently.  The other two (JobsInSearch and SEOVacancies) you will need to put search parameters in yourself.

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I’m banging my head against the wall; I keep on saying “NO, that’s not it, it’s not just about keywords. Hang on, I’ll explain”. We’ve all been there, trying to explain SEO. Whether it is to a prospect client, a boss, a friend or your mother (mine still thinks I work for Google, and frankly I’ve given up!). But WHY OH WHY, do people have selective hearing. It makes me want to bang my head THROUGH the wall, not just at the wall. I’m in the middle of the presentation, been through the basics of how the search engines work, the potential traffic and ROI, then you move on to the basics of SEO. The second I say keyword, it’s all doomed. For some reason people think they know and understand everything about SEO from this point on.

Prospect Client: “Ahhhh!! It’s all about keywords, yeah I see, of course, that makes sense. Yes you can’t be found for a keyword unless you have it on your website, we’ll just bash it in”

Me: “Erm you need to do some research first, don’t just bash in any old keyword”

Prospect Client: “Nah we got it covered, we know what people search for. We just bang in, I mean spam in, erm I mean input all the keywords from our brochures and stuff”

Me: “have you got a rope?”

In my opinion, and I’m sure most of you will agree, Search Engine Optimisation isn’t something you can have a bash at doing. You can’t try SEO, either you do it (and properly) or you don’t.

But sometimes it’s so difficult to explain it all, you know how important it can be for a website, you got all these facts and figures and even case studies to prove what it has achieved. But when you only have a few hours to pitch, to explain, that you, the SEO Jedi can bring their site to another level. You realise they just aren’t speaking the same language.

If after an hour they are still asking whether they can put keywords in hidden text, target 30 keywords on one page (29 of them being general keywords such as high competitive brand names) and they insist in putting in 200 keywords in the meta keyword tag (just in case). RUN, RUN FOR THE HILLS!

Basically the “moral” of the story is simple; sometimes you have to chose your battles. It’s not likely that someone that think they can do SEO as well as you, after only 1 hour is going to be a client you want!

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(A semi-fictional tale)

Back in the day, long, long, ago, SEO was a simpler time and place. With a little understanding of basic on-page fundamentals, and the knowledge that ‘the player with the most links wins’ (even if those links were bogus or internally generated), a chicklet could own the SERPs. If that gal had a nice network of sites from which to gather backlinks, mo’ betta!

Lots of things have changed over the years. Algos have injected annoying things such as ‘trust’ and ‘quality’ into the mix, and link juice no longer gets distributed evenly and equally, as algos decide whether or not there is enough juice to go around.

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”. No matter how stubbornly he tries to argue that all of his pages should be ranking well, based on the fact that he has internal link juice flowing sitewide, the fact is that the site doesn’t have enough juice to support all its pages. No matter how stubbornly he argues that he’s sculpted the PageRank so that certain pages should be doing well, he refuses to see that there’s not enough clay to sculpt!

Sure, it’s hard work to find trustworty, quality backlinks (outside of our own private networks that the search engines have likely already identified) that will bolster our site’s juice. And yes, it would be easier if we could rely on algos of days gone by. But stubbornness in refusing to do the hard work required is only preventing the site from achieving the greatness he’d hoped for it. This stubborn man can continue doing what he’s been doing all along, tweaking internal links, sculpting and redirecting link juice like he’s some master artisan, but as Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that been working for you?”

Considering that week after week, Mr. Stubborn keeps moaning and groaning about pages not getting indexed, or being relegated to the the supplemental index, I’d have to guess that it’s not working for him. How much time, effort, and energy did he waste on all of that? What if he’d directed that time, effort, and energy at doing something differently? What if his efforts had actually caused the site to obtain quality, trustworthy backlinks?

Hey, I am guilty of laziness many times over. I totally understand the desire to cloak laziness with stubbornness. I have neglected more sites than I care to think about. Some of those sites might have risen to greatness if only I’d put a little more effort into pleasing the algos of today, rather than those of years gone by. Luckily, for me, I’m willing to accept that the issues those sites have aren’t going to be solved by attempting to manipulate the internal linking structure. (Note: There’s nothing wrong with sculpting. Sculpting can be beneficial, however, there must be something with which to sculpt before one can make use of this technique).

All I ask of Mr. Stubborn, is that he squarely face the facts. What fundamental problems does the site have, beyond what you’ve been focusing on? Seriously, if this weren’t your site, Mr. Stubborn, would you look at things a little differently? If you were me (who is pretending to be the Dr. Phil of SEO at the moment), you’d see all that is lacking, and you’d begin to focus on the real problems. See, that’s why it’s easy to diagnose someone else’s problems. Dr. Phil understands that. Now, all we need to do is get Mr. Stubborn to let go of his preconceived notions just long enough to really “hear” what we, and more importantly, the search engines are trying to tell him.

Or, Mr. Stubborn, you can keep doing what you’ve been doing, and keep getting the same results. It’s up to you.

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Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill, NC is closing, after 33 years in business. Apparently the store isn’t getting enough foot traffic, which is insanely difficult to believe considering it’s on the main drag of a massive university town that has a thriving music scene. There was little competition here as far as I can tell, but somehow they’re unable to survive even in the midst of over 30,000 college kids who, by all acounts, listen to music quite a bit. I guess the problem is that these kids aren’t actually BUYING anything in stores. Whether you can blame the high prices of CDs or the ease with which people can quickly download the music that they want, brick and mortar record shops are quickly crumbling. (cough)

I wrote a post awhile back about how the indie music scene didn’t need SEO…my point was that independent music was, so far, mostly disconnected from mass media coverage and, as such, remained true to its very spirit. In this post, I stated that people should personally get up off their arses and seek out new music by actively searching for it without going online, by getting their music news through word of mouth, or by showing up at the local punk rock club for a night.

As I was moaning about Schoolkids closing, even though I haven’t shopped there since 1995 and that was to buy a cheap poster, I started to think about something: has our industry actually been a contributing factor to the demise of my beloved physical record shops? I freaking think so (at least I do at THIS moment) and here is why:

If you do a search for most bands, and let’s take Grinderman as an example since I am such a Nick Cave fan (although I can’t tell my mom the name of their new single (like she’d ask) since it’s got a dirty word in it that rhymes with wussy), you’ll likely see tons of results for their videos on YouTube, their MySpace page, their Wikipedia entry, their Amazon listing, and their actual website if they happen to have one. Nick is well represented in the SERPs, to summarize. You can hear and watch the videos for free, and you can listen to new releases for free. If you happen to buy from iTunes, you can quickly grab a digital song or album and the whole thing’s done in less than a minute. Gone are the days when you accidentally buy an Assuck cd because it was mistakenly put into the Avail section, the store was closing, and you ignored the record clerk who said, looking at your other purchase of The Smiths, “boy you’re all over the place aren’t you!” Your main concern now is that when you got the download of The Mission’s Deliverance, it was actually Tower of Strength which you don’t really like and now you’re out 99 cents. Record shops are closing because of people like you. And me…ok and yes, the photo of Grinderman is only necessary in order to show you how insanely cool Nick Cave is. Sorry.

Seriously, why would you leave the house and go out, in PUBLIC, to risk the flu and ebola and lice and panhandling punk rock kids with $100 nose rings, not to mention having to be chatted up by an overweight and unwashed college dropout wearing a faded and hole-ridden Pixies tshirt who only works at the record store to meet chicks that look like Kim Deal and get a 10% discount on bumper stickers, when you could sit at home in your salt-bagel-encrusted chair and stay safe? Thus, you order online and this record store clerk gets fired, the store owner tries to keep the shop open by showcasing crappy local bands until the landlord sues him for back rent and the only bands they can book are ABC and The Lick Stick (ok I made that one up), and then it all truly goes straight to hell and the next time you show up for your used record fix, you’re greeted by a giant padlock on the door.

When I saw Polyphonic Spree a few months back, the lead singer made a great statement at the end about buying their t-shirts and robes (yes, robes and let me just say YIKES) because they didn’t make a lot of money on CDs anymore and needed the support. Whether or not that’s true isn’t my concern of course. I like the idea behind finding other ways to keep these artists going. He also pleaded with the audience, in his cultlike manner, to support other bands as well by going to shows and buying their assorted rubbish there. For the record (HA!!), I did not buy a robe from P. Spree, since that would just be stupid. I did, however, buy a tshirt in a wildly unflattering shade of light blue.

It’ all evolution, of course, but it does make me a bit sad. This certainly won’t mean the end of music, of course…just maybe the end of walking into a store and spending hours poring over the bins to find something amazing. And what I do for a living is partially to blame.

Ch ch ch ch changes…

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I’ve never really understood why these niche search engines keep cropping up until now…and it involves one of my favorite things in the world. Yes, it’s wine. Glorious, spellbinding wine.

Doug Cook, a former search executive at Inktomi (for those of you who’ve been in the industry more than a few years, you’ll remember them fondly) and Yahoo has just rolled out the beta of Able Grape, a search engine that scours wine sites. The database already contains almost 10 million pages. To use this engine properly, you don’t need to add the usual wine-related terms that would normally be necessary in a regular engine like Google. The example given on the Able Grape website clarifies this point:

“While you need to type Spanish Wine on Google to get good results, on Able Grape, you will get better results than Google by simply typing Spain. Similarly, instead of needing to type Argyle Winery or Argyle Vineyards to get just wine-related results, try simply Argyle. And instead of climate change and wine, try simply climate change. (We have included some great general resources about climate change, but you’ll find that most of the results are wine-specific. Moreover, Able Grape knows that global warming and even cambiamento climatico mean the same thing).”

How successful will a niche engine like this be, if users need to use different search terminology than they would on a traditional engine like Google or Yahoo? There’s no convenient toolbar (yet) and unless users read the bit about how to best use the engine, they may not get the best results.

A search for “Spanish wine” on Able Grape reveals this: and in case you can’t see it there were 348,422 results returned.

A search for “Spain” on Able Grape reveals this: and again if you can’t see it, there were 645,402 results returned.

The recommended “Spain” search gives the user almost twice the amount of results as the search for “Spanish wine.” Obviously, if you learn how to properly use the engine, you’re going to get the best results. Now, the previous example isn’t the best one to use for why Able Grape is better than Google but think about this one:

“If we type in “Barbera,” we don’t want to know about “Hanna.”"

For those of you who don’t know, and I counted myself amongst that group until just a minute ago, “Barbera” refers to an Italian red wine grape variety. If you do a search in Google, the first result returned actually is one for the wine, but most of the other results on the first page deal with non-wine Barbera entries. Bypassing Google and going straight to a niche engine is definitely going to prevent you from having to weed out all those irrelevant results. However, if you have the convenient Google toolbar with the handy dandy search box on your browser at all times, are you going to actually go to another engine like Able Grape? Or are you going to simply take your chances and quickly skim over all of the irrelevant results that are provided? That isn’t too difficult, honestly, and if it’s a choice between letting an engine filter out so-called irrelevancies or doing it myself, I’ll take my chances since I’m a massive control freak.

I am definitely not suggesting that niche engines are a bad thing, of course, but I have to wonder about their popularity. I love wine and buy it often, but if I am looking up a bottle to see how it rates, I’m going to use Google because that’s my default engine. The time it takes to go to a niche engine is time that I could be spending on uncorking that sucker at home you know.

There are a ton of other niche search engines, and I’ve written about them before on this very blog. However, what’s not previously been explored (at least not by the SEO Chicks) is how you can use these engines to your advantage from an SEO’s perspective, NOT from a user’s perspective. How, exactly, does one go about being listed and performing well in one of these engines? Since Google, Yahoo, and MSN all like different things, why would a niche engine be any different? Will optimizing for a niche engine cause you any harm in the main three engines? There isn’t that much information out there about this, unfortunately, at least not that I could find during my 5 minutes of digging. OK that’s a complete joke. I spent a full hour of my valuable time trying to search for data on what these types of engines look for in a site, how they determine the most relevant results…and I’ve come up about as empty as my current wine glass.

As much as Google annoys me, it’s fairly easy to understand their guidelines. The same holds true for the other two engines as well. With such a large presence on the web, there is a literal ton of data out there that tells you how to do well in these engines, what to do and what NOT to do, etc. This isn’t the case, at least not yet, for most of the niche engines. Obviously, in the case of Able Grape, wine-related sites will be the ones that are indexed in the database, but what factors influence the order of their SERPs? If these niche engines want to grow, will they have to drum up this type of information for us, so that we can all try and conquer yet another engine? My head is splitting, and it’s not just from the seriously poor chianti. What’s the future, then, of small engines of any sort? Do they have any chance at all against the big three? Is it possible for me to ask more questions in this post?

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One of the absolute worst songs ever recorded, in my opinion, is Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” While I could make a lengthy post out of my utter hatred of this song, I will spare you for now BUT since I seem to have a pathological need to cross reference music in these observations about SEO that must, by this point, seriously annoy many readers, I thought this truly abysmal attempt at music would be a good one to use. I mean really, it’s not good for anything else…certainly not for listening, or anything remotely like that.

Well, I sure as hell don’t think that the future of paid ads is full of sunshine and light. I may indeed have to wear shades, but it’s to hide my cryin’ eyes. Honestly, the future of paid ads scares the bejaysus out of me and there are three handy reasons for it:

1. Money’s involved and people are really, really stupid when money is involved, especially when there is a LOT of money involved. Stupidity is bad enough on its own, but coupled with the attempt to make more money, it can make you feel like the one vaguely attractive girl at a meeting of the county chess club.
2. Many traditional marketing methods no longer work well, so advertisers are forced to look for alternatives. These alternatives tend to be freakishly invasive and creepy. Just check your Gmail ads sometime after you’ve been emailing your favorite transvestite friend. Ick.
3. Machines will be forced to make judgment calls about what they think you want to see (like with the Gmail ads), and that’s going to be enough to make a freight train take a dirt road. God forbid I ever refer to a cat by the p word.

The Money Plus Stupidity Equation
This usually equals disaster, if I may have a mathletic moment. A Paris Hilton/Jessica Simpson/Lindsey Lohan reference would be too easy here so I’ll spare you. The point here is that when lots of money is being sought or held by people who aren’t overly bright (see above), the world could easily end. I’m sure Timbuk 3 had money, and look at the stupid song that they unleashed upon the world. I wish I had more of a point to make here but I really don’t.

The Personal (AGHHHHH) Touch
Few companies are as high on the shudder factor as Microsoft. They are apparently really interested in audience intelligence, which is defined as “figuring out what kind of person the Web user is based on their surfing and searching habits — and display[ing] ads including video.” Based on my surfing and searching habits, I am one bad seed, let me tell you. I like Cabaret Voltaire videos, knee high leather boots, strawberries and cream, cursing, and the Fibonacci numbers. If I’m being shown ads based on that, god help me. I’ll be expecting some perverted math fetishist to be knocking on my door at any minute. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad…

Process This!
Think about how you slow down when there’s an accident, and you try to get a good look. This certainly does not mean that you are sexually turned on by car crashes like someone in a J.G. Ballard novel does it? Well, if it does, keep it to yourself please, you pervert. Speaking of J.G. Ballard and his infamous novel, aptly titled Crash, if I’m searching for it and buy it, does anyone know who I’ve purchased it for, or does a machine simply “assume” that it’s for me? Will I then be shown ads that tell me where to buy footage of car crashes? Or how to connect with others who so obviously enjoy car crashes? There’s no way of telling the machine that hey, I’m not the perv, JON is the perv, is there?

It’s a grim future to consider, isn’t it? It’s the same feeling that you get when one of your favorite novels is being made into a movie starring Ben Affleck. First you’re incredulous. You quickly become agitated and try to convince yourself that actually, it’s not Ben, it’s most likely Tom Wilkinson and someone’s gotten really confused. Then, once you accept reality, you cry yourself to sleep after a few vodka tonics. It’s not pretty.

What worries me the most is the invasive bit of this…normally I prattle on (and on) about machines not being able to properly interpret meaning from simple words, and while that’s frightening enough, it’s the invasion that freaks me out the most. I’ve been listening to someone on the radio for 45 seconds and not realized that he’s plugging a product. It’s all become so NATURAL, like those pesky product placements in films that gently suggest to you that, since Bruce Willis likes 7-Up, you should go out and get some. I can look away from billboards, and I can completely ignore ads in magazines or on the sides of the SERPs, but it’s really becoming difficult to completely avoid all forms of advertising. And, as you may have been thinking, marketing is kind of the industry that I’m in right? Most likely that means that I’ll become a creepy (or creepier) and invasive presence in someone’s life at some point in the near future. Go ahead and get some restraining order templates ready because you’ll be needing them.

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As universal search begins to dominate results and previous above-the-fold results get pushed below the fold, leveraging all channels possible is becoming essential.  Image search optimization offers several advantages not just limited to simple rankings or just image search.

One definite benefit for anyone involved in e-commerce is the possibility of free product promotion within organic results without looking spammy. Product images in search results can seriously boost click-throughs and conversions.

With image search, you’ve got more optimisation opportunities than organic search alone.  The name of the image, along with the tag and associated words will all factor in to ranking an image.  This gives you opportunities to optimise differently or capture searchers where organic is not doing as well.

At the moment, for those involved in e-commerce, not as many retailers are paying attention to the possibilities of image search and universal search when compared to PPC or SEO.  This means as Universal search becomes more prevalent, those in early will probably get better rankings.

So… what can you do?  Lots!  And most of it can also be done through many CMS systems so never say can’t, never say die, never say never… blah blah blah.

Why not try a bit of alt tag (attribute - I know!) text optimization? When I add an image to a page, I can ad descriptive words for the image.  Make these descriptions specific and include the keyword that you want the image found for.  Don’t be spammy – by being focused you’ll get more relevant traffic.

How about putting the images in separate HTML files named after the keyword (linking to the image with your keyword, using “keyword.html” as the file name)?  Try putting the keyword in the title as well as in your H1 tags on the keyword-named page where the image appears.  Again, keep it specific and focused and remember semantically related text and “buy me” button!

Give your image the name of the keyword you want it to be found for.  So if it is a picture of a box of Chocolate Society champagne truffles, call the image “champagne-chocolate-truffles” and not “1276394”.  Remember that alt tag text of “Chocolate Champagne Truffles”!

Never forget that semantic relativity!  Ensure you are keeping a careful eye on the on-page text.  An image of chocolate covered almonds on a page about white chocolate with strawberries won’t do as well as an image of coca dusted almonds (with the right name) on a page talking about chocolate and almonds.

Remember that to optimize your images for more than a single word, you should use dashes and not underscore.  Matt Cutts has an old but brilliant blog post about how Google sees a dash and why.

Finally, quality is king.  Have high quality images with sharp, clear contrast showing the product with little clutter.  As Google does shrink the image in the results, you will need to ensure you capture interest with not just words but pictures.

Search is changing and we all need to change with it.  It isn’t just text SEO that needs changing though – all elements of our pages can be optimised for search.  Always remember – just say no to spam.

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