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Top Rank Blog

• 5 Ways to Kill Your Search Rankings & Their Solutions 15 June, 2010, 7:21 am
  One of the biggest fears for web site owners that have long relied on search traffic for new business is a sudden drop in search engine rankings.  Some webmasters are experiencing this very situation as a result of Google’s recent Mayday update (Matt Cutts video). In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up it’s search visibility.  In other situations, it doesn’t take much at all. Avoiding mistakes that result in exclusion, penalties and more often confusion for search engines are often overlooked.  Don’t fall victim to carelessness and ignorance when it comes to maintaining the search visibility achieved from years of content and online marketing by avoiding these common mistakes: 1.  Website Redesign Probably one of the most common situations that result in fluctuations in search visibility involve significant changes to a web site’s design, content, internal linking relationships and the new use Flash, Ajax or JavaScript for navigation. Search engines copy websites and the links between pages. Think of it as taking a picture of your site. If you change your site from what the search engine has a copy of, the new form might not include the same content, keywords and crawlable links. The worst case scenario is when a company decides to redesign the website and over write all previous SEO work. Upon finding that search visibility has completely tanked, they call up the SEO agency and demand an explanation. Solution: When significant changes are planned for the company website, work with your SEO to identify how the new design will impact search visibility. Have them map out and prioritize the implications of page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects. 2. New Content Management System (CMS) Along the lines with a new website design, changing content management systems can create a lot of confusion for search engines. Many companies have had websites long enough that the legacy CMS used to launch the site no longer serves the needs of the organization. Large companies may find that the hodgepodge of CMS used by different business units and acquired companies is inefficient and a common content management system would better serve the organization. A change in the CMS means a change in the templates that format web pages, navigation and oftentimes the URL structure of pages.  It’s common that major changes in content are rolled out along with new website software and that can spell confusion for search engines. URLs that change can also create confusion. For example, web page file names that previously ended with .asp and now end with .aspx are perceived as completely different. Solution: While the IT department or web developer will understand the importance of redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts, execution in a search engine friendly manner is another thing entirely. 302 vs. 301 redirects and mapping URLs when there is no logical page in the new system are essential. Identifying the top sources of inbound link traffic to pages and conducting an outreach program to get them to change the URLs other sites use to link to your site is a specialty area for link building SEOs moreso than IT. Simply put, make sure you have a SEO migration plan. 3.  Loss of Inbound Links In the SEO game content is King and links are the Queen. Or content is the Yin and Links are the Yang. Whatever the metaphor, links are an essential mechanism for search engines to discover pages and signal for ranking them.  Companies that proactively acquire links organically, or that earn vs. buy the links, don’t have much of a problem in this area.  The longer other websites link to your site, the better. But some sites may go offline temporarily or permanently. A blog may decide to remove it’s blogroll or a site may simply decide to remove links to your site. If you change your CMS as noted above, other sites that don’t know this will continue to link to your old URL format (.asp vs .aspx) and that will appear as a loss of links.  If you buy links from other sites and they are detected by search engines, those links may be devalued of any PageRank. There are many reasons for link loss. Solution: Active content creation, promotion and social participation are essential for building a significant and relevant inbound link footprint on the web. Those links will drive traffic and serve as a signal to search engines for ranking your content in the search results. The key is to monitor your link footprint on an ongoing basis using link building tools that will identify major fluctuations in inbound link counts. Then you can drill down to see where the link loss has occurred and see if you can do something about it. The best defense is offense, so make sure you have an active link acquisition in place so minor to moderate fluctuations in links will have little, if any effect. 4. Duplicate Content Serving up duplicate content using different URLs confuses search engines. This can happen when sites use queries on a database to display lists of products in a category that can be reached multiple ways. Printer friendly versions of pages, other English language versions of pages or outright copying content from one website to another can all cause duplicate content issues. When an search engine is presented with multiple versions of the same content, it must decide which is the original or canonical version, since engines do not want to show the exact same thing to users in the search results. Anything your website does to make that process confusing or inefficient can result in poor search performance for your web site. Solution: A professional SEO working with website content managers can help manage broader duplicate content issues for a company website and any microsites they’re publishing. With press releases, RSS feeds or articles that are syndicated, it’s a best practice to make sure the original is published on your site first, then to have any duplicates clearly link back to the original. Ongoing monitoring can also help with unintentional duplicate content issues caused by other sites scraping your site’s content. 5. You’ve Become a SEO Spammer! As more content is published and promoted online, more websites are launched and more competition comes into the market, companies will be tempted to achieve the coveted first page listing at any cost.  Many companies that succumb to this temptation do so because of seeing their competition get away with tactics that are clearly more aggressive and manipulative than search engines allow.  Webmasters might see suggestions in forums (often disinformation) or get advice from others doing well in the disposable site, content monetization game. Engaging in simple things like hidden keywords, redirecting pages to present one version to search engine bots and another to site visitors or publishing numerous copies of the exact same web site using search/replace keyword optimization can all result in negative effects. There are far more aggressive tactics considered spam than that of course, but SEO spam isn’t an area we work with and I’m not interested in promoting unsustainable, high risk tactics. Solution: Understand the webmaster guidelines from each search engine: Google, Yahoo, Bing.  Don’t violate those policies with the site(s) that are your bread and butter. If you must test, do so with other websites that are not going to affect your business. Rather than focusing on loopholes and exploits, be a better marketer and understand what your target audience wants, what influentials respond to and develop smarter, more creative marketing that can stand on its own to drive traffic and sales. Include SEO in those “UnGoogled efforts” and you’ll realize the added benefit of great performance from your website in search engines as well. Do you have dropped search engine ranking stories to share? Is the Mayday update affecting your website? What have you done to avoid losing search traffic and sales? Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Kill Your Search Rankings & Their Solutions | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Tell All Q&A With Google’s Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Keynote 11 June, 2010, 7:31 am
  Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google’s approach to helping site owners and shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience. The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session. How did you get to Google? I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years. After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it? We tweak little things in our algorithm all the time.  Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms.  A lot of people were leveraging long tail phrases for lots of traffic but it was frequently done via automated methods.  We’ve looked to eliminate spam, and that’s been a big priority for us.  At the same time, there were people developing not quality content (not a violation of guidelines, but also not providing value).  What it does is for long tail queries, is we now just consider them queries like anything else.  We are going to put as much value in those search results as all search results. So, you can’t just add a bunch of keywords on a page and expect results just on that.  This type of update is continuing and it’s a focus we have.  We have other projects too to help continue making long tail traffic highly relevant. Are you saying with long tail terms, are queries getting longer? Yes, people have evolved as searchers.  With Google when you search for over 3 terms, the snippet link increases in importance as people expect to find long queries and we want to deliver a better experience. What’s the difference between Mayday and Caffeine? Mayday is a pure ranking change – just looking to make the results more relevant.  Caffeine is a huge infrastructure change.  It’s the idea that we can now take our entire index and update it a document at a time.  It gives us the scalability we didn’t have before – now we have the ability to grow even bigger and better.  On top of which, caffeine is really cool because we can attach more meta data to each document.  We have all these ways to push a document out faster and get it to users quicker. Can you talk about snippets for a second?  How do I decide what comes up in a snippet? For most people, when you design a document you’re not thinking about what a snippet is going to look like in your document.  What we take for the snippet is the context of the keyword in the snippet.  The other place we look is in your meta description.  If you put your keyword in your meta description it’s a good idea as then you have control over your snippet.  The reason we used the meta description is it’s one of the few areas that people weren’t spamming.  We do want to give webmasters an option. Is there a specific way people should think about creating a document? Overall there is a strategy you need to have with your site.  What type of users do you want to attract, and what is your call to action?  And so your pages should be designed with that intention.  Think about your content and lay it out in a way that converts.  Titles are important for search engines and semantic markup is still good.  Mayday took out information that was auto-generated or not relevant.  Design each page with an intention of what you want from users. So there’s a big shift in the SEO world.  Everyone was always focused on keywords/ranking algorithms.  Now everyone thinks about social.  Where does social fit within search? There’s a way search is evolving, and when it comes to personalization we want to deliver results that are more and more unique.  That’s where social search comes in for us – it’s expanding a theme we really want to pursue.  For social search it comes from the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph.  But prioritize by having a great website first, then get involved in social media. What are your thoughts on getting better links to your website? When you create a site, unique and compelling products or services content is what matters most.  How can you make yours different from all the other sites on the web?  Your customers will link to you when they think it’s great and that will happen naturally.  But, you can also look for opportunities for links too – not just by emailing a webmaster asking for links but expanding in the same way you’d expand your business.  I.E., forging partnerships and adding value to others. Links are a big part of our PageRank algorithm which is a major component on the 100’s of items in it.  Links are not just based on quantity but more so on quality.  We know on a link by link basis what is valuable to what and we value them all differently.  It is done algorithmically and we also have a manual spam-fighting team.  Just because you have a lot of links doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting value.  Look for quality links not quantity. Am I better off looking in webmaster tools for data than a third party tool? Our mission with webmaster tools is to support webmasters within the Google ecosystem.  Our data is only relevant to Google, not all the search engines.  Our goal is to keep the ecosystem thriving.  It’s about helping webmasters regardless of the size of their pocketbook.  It’s at no cost to you.   There are other tools out there, which you should explore too if you like since our tool is just relevant to Google. Why was site speed recently highlighted as important? The site speed update was purely from our user metrics – we know people like faster performance.  We find that even when slowing results by half a second, they were actually searching less.  When we removed the delay, they went back up but never to the same level (this was actually a costly experiment).  This was just due to latency.  We also found in tests that conversions will increase with sites that load quicker – it’s a very important aspect of your website.  Faster sites can potentially outrank you. Talk to us about Flash – is it really search friendly? If you have a flash site, don’t expect Google to crawl it perfectly – or other search engines too.  It’s just not as accessible.  We’re working actively on Flash but it’s not perfect yet. What about microsites?  Are they a good idea? Microsites were originally created to dominate search results.  It was originally kind of a spammy technique.  I normally don’t suggest it, Mayday and future updates are only looking for quality sites.  If you want to dominate search results, you can do things like add videos/images and other data.  Microsites confuse users, there are links coming in to another site that isn’t your main site, and they are hard to maintain as now you have multiple sites.  It’s a jarring user experience; I don’t think they are going to work in search results in the future as they did in the past. What about for e-commerce sites that are extremely large with lots of products?  We’ve seen sites with fewer items and more information on each product outranking us. That’s what we would expect from Mayday.  Users don’t care if your site has many items, they care about descriptive content.  They don’t want to see content that is just a title and an image.  It comes down to creating unique content on each page.  We crawl what we want to keep in the index and we keep in the index what users want to see in the search results.  The drop off you are noticing is because we are focusing on content-rich pages and less on sites that are just tons of pages without value.  If you link content up and bring the link structure up, we’ll crawl that more often.  But at the end of the day, more content matters. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Tell All Q&A With Google’s Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Keynote | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 6 Tips on Image SEO 11 June, 2010, 5:25 am
  Images as an asset for organic search results and search engine optimization are often overlooked.  Images can drive traffic through image search as well as inclusion in universal search results. There are actually several dimensions to image optimization that involves better placement in search results, optimization for user experience and in some cases, optimization for easier sharing of images on the social web. For image SEO, it can be helpful to think of optimizing images like optimizing a tiny webpage within your page. Things like url structure, anchor text and descriptive tagging are factors for optimizing images for search engines, just like regular webpages. Here are a few tips for optimizing your images to improve their performance on the page and in search. 1. Find the right images Finding the right kind of image is incredibly important. Great images can add another dimension to an article or page that can encourage people to share the page and create some great backlinks. Research shows that while text is still the first thing seen on the page, the image is what sells the page. Here are some of the best places to actually find images: Flickr – Probably the de facto service for finding free images. They have a really useful creative commons search as well. Skellie has an excellent article on how to find Flickr images. stock.xchng – Weird name, but a ton of royalty-free stock images. iStockPhoto – Large selection of stock photos that you can buy. You can also use Google Images to find images for your site, as long as you search with the proper licensing. (They allow you to search Creative Commons and other public licenses.) But you have to be very careful when using images, as if you don’t have the permission to reuse it, companies and sites can take legal action against you. The general rule of thumb is this: if the image isn’t Creative Common licensed or you didn’t buy or create it, don’t post it. 2. Use the keyword(s) in the file name Just like keywords in post urls are important for pages, the same is true for images. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy. For example, the image above was originally named “iStock_000004221245XSmall.jpg” which doesn’t add much information about this web page. It has been renamed to “image-optimization.jpg”. Of course, most images that are not simply decorative like the one above are literal and connected to the content of the page such as a photo of a product.  If the above image were used in an article about eye color, then the file name should reflect that. Google suggests that you should place your images in one folder on your site, mydomain.com/images versus placing them in random folders throughout the site. Another suggestion from Google related to file names or URLs of images is to make sure you use common image filetypes such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP. 3. Create descriptive alt text Alt text or tags are another way that search engines help determine what your image is about. Unlike traditional web content, search engines can’t determine the text content of an image. (Search spiders are pretty smart, but as far as I know they haven’t developed eyes yet.) As a result, search engines need to rely on captions around the image, alt text, file names and other surrounding text. Adding descriptive text in the alt tag helps the search engines determine what the content of the image is. If an image is used as navigation, ie as a link to another page, be sure to use alt text that is meaningful to the content of the page being linked to. 4. The right anchor text Anchor text is another important factor in image SEO. If you decide to link to images with text, your anchor text can play a role in how your image is ranked for keywords. Use descriptive anchor text that describes the image.  For example, linking to an image using a generic term like “image” or “photo” or a file name that doesn’t use keywords doesn’t give search engines much meaningful information on what the image is about. Linking to an image with keywords is helpful to search engines as well as people visiting your site. 5. Make sure the image matches the content The content surrounding the image should be related to all of the things that you’ve optimized thus far: anchor tags, image url, alt tags. When these things align, it helps search engines confirm that you’re not spamming and that the image is of higher quality and relevant. 6. Don’t stuff This goes for all kinds of SEO, but we’ll say it again just for clarity: don’t keyword stuff when filling out things like image alt text. Your alt text, captions and file names should be short and descriptive, not a long list of keywords. Remember to optimize images for your website visitors. Image SEO is as much about user experience as it is about achieving better search engine rankings. Additional Resources on Image SEO: Get up-to-date on Image Search – Video of a presentation by Peter Linsley, Product Manager at Google offering insights into how image search is used, how it works, and how webmasters can optimize their pages for image searchers. Google Webmaster Central Advice in Images – Following these best practices (as well as webmaster guidelines) will increase the likelihood that your images will be returned in image search results. If you want to check many of these image SEO tips on your web pages, try this handy image SEO tool. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 6 Tips on Image SEO | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Getting Marketing & Development Teams Working Together – SES Toronto 10 June, 2010, 8:58 pm
  It’s a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don’t always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light of day. How can you get your marketing and IT teams working together?  The following panel of speakers moderated by Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist at Freestyle Interactive tackle the subject matter: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch Puneet Bhasin, Independent IT Consultant, Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association Casey Rovinelli started things off by discussing that the world is technology driven, and that we need IT to get things done. What are the common types of things IT says to marketing? It’s un-realistic – we can’t do that. Too many changes – it’s not possible with current resources. Where are we going? (And why are we doing this?) They don’t understand – marketers don’t understand our technology. It’s a pain! What are the common types of things marketing says to IT? Not design focused, too slow – why can’t it be done quicker? Too expensive – is that how much it really costs? They don’t understand – we’re trying to build our brand. You’re a pain! We need to fix three things to get marketing and IT aligned: We need to get people talking to people – take accountability, talk and sell.  Create a social contract between IT and marketing.  Talk to each other and communicate so everything is clear, don’t provide unspecific actions.  Build the roadmap together instead of approaching it in silos. Fix the product/process - try out agile development (or some derivative therof).  To succeed in modern digital marketing you need to have some type of development process that’s quick to bring to market.  An inclusive, not an exclusive process. The actual technology – get a sandbox so that everyone can experiment together, prototype in real-time and “just go.”  Work in the sandbox in order to find efficiencies together. Marketing and IT should not be an “us vs them” mentality, they need to develop an iterative process and work together so that everyone is on the same team.  Break barriers down and remove conflicts in order to align team members. Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch Jonathan started things off by sharing Swam Theory:  essentially all birds fly together by keeping an equal distance from the bird next to them.  How does this apply to SEO?  By getting team members to worry only about what matters to them. Create categories and classifications for different groups so they understand who owns what (i.e., search, social media, development, etc.).  Use visualizations instead of words to help team members see what is relevant to whom. Marketing typically does a terrible job of explaining what they want to IT, and IT does a terrible job of explaining what they want to marketing.  How can you get them together? Show goals and examples of what is possible – both groups need to help the other see what they are driving at.  Present to the other group your ideas and get them excited about the possibility of success.  Ensure that all parties actually understand the technologies (and marketing strategies) behind what they want to implement.  IT can understand marketing if it’s explained right and marketing can understand IT if they slow down and clarify. Internally sell different marketing ideas but bring IT with you during that process.  It doesn’t help as much to bring them in late in the process. Puneet Bhasin, Independent IT Consultant Puneet gave an “insider’s guide” to speaking geek.  He constantly deals with “requests vs. reality” and frequently feels like Scotty from Star Trek (i.e. – our website needs more power!).  As an IT consultant, he shared the other side of the coin regarding the disconnect between IT and marketing. Why is there a disconnect? There’s a difference of objectives.  When marketers develop something, they want to build a brand, attract customers and ensure usability. Dev/IT is tasked with building a secure site, and making it work effectively with different systems. IT is usually last in the process after all the planning has been set.  You need to bring IT/developers involved into the process on Day 1. If you give IT your end goal, your objective and do it at the beginning, good IT people will be able to help you get there.  Don’t do it mid-way through the process or after the process is already done, bring them into the planning. “Bump chests, not heads” work together and don’t get upset. Marketers:  ask questions and use tools you are already familiar with to find out what exists before going to IT.  They love to hear about new tools. Three takeaways: Stay informed – make sure both teams know what the other is up to. Give us goals – IT people and marketers should both be given goals for implementation. Get IT involved from day 1 – they can’t help if your plan is fleshed out and you’re not open to changes. Audience Q and A Q:  How do you communicate to non-techies what’s possible on a site i.e.:  I want to add a button right here but IT says that will take two weeks. A:  Teams need to communicate what types of updates are possible and how long they will take.  By having that spelled out clearly, it will save a lot of pain later on.  Also, bringing the teams together socially (i.e. for lunch, team building, etc.) is important and will help your separate teams emphasize with each other. Q:  How do you deal with IT challenges in social media? A:  The problem with sites like YouTube and Facebook is not that they are a waste of time (some CXOs think that).  At the end of the day they’re simply a tool.  The problem is they can take up bandwidth – that’s something that IT monitors closely.  Or if we’re going to get “Dugg” or anticipate large amounts of social traffic, marketers should let IT know so we can prepare. Q:  How did marketers and IT pros get disconnected?  How do they reconnect? A:  Marketers have had to deal with personas, buying types and people.  IT folk had to deal with technology.  Now technology deals with people and intent, and that’s why they intersect.    The real answer is that marketers need to understand technology in order to be effective.  We’ve entered the second phase of the technology lifecycle – where it has moved into being an essential tool rather than a toy.  At this stage, technology is the domain of marketers as much as IT and developers. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Getting Marketing & Development Teams Working Together – SES Toronto | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 7 Benefits of Partnering SEO & PR 10 June, 2010, 4:47 am
  There are many intersections between earned media and organic search engine rankings, so it makes sense that they would work well together. The PR industry is in an interesting situation right now with so much of the traditional media world moving to digital media.  Whether they admit it or not, journalists rely on PR professionals for a pipeline of stories and information. When journalists lose their jobs, media relations professionals lose an essential reason for being in business. Even if PR departments and organizations are digitally savvy, there are a good number of reasons (7 in fact) to incorporate search engine optimization into their processes: Reach Journalists where they’re looking - There are many formal studies as well as our own outreach to the media that have illustrated the changing behavior of journalists, analysts and reporters to use search to do their job of research and reporting the news.  Optimizing news content and digital assets presents a significant opportunity to “be” where journalists are looking. Search extends reach of PR & communications - The content produced by Public Relations departments is of value to many audiences outside of the media.  Employees, potential employees, investors, partners, customers and even prospective customers are influenced by news content.  Whether it’s a press release or an announcement through video, optimizing what can be searched extends the reach of PR and communications efforts far beyond traditional news distribution channels. Increase unsolicited media placements – TopRank Online Marketing and many other web sites that optimize and promote news content receive unsolicited mentions from industry news sites, blogs, online and offline publications. Optimizing news content for discovery by search can have an amplifying effect on traditional media relations outreach efforts. When a journalist receives a compelling pitch via email, the natural instinct is to go to Google an search the topic. When your content shows prominently in the search results it can be a one-two punch to capture interest and show credibility. Bypass media channels: direct to consumer – Increasing numbers of companies are taking to heart, the notion of “brand as publisher” and creating their own content strategies for news. Large companies have owned TV stations, radio stations, newspapers and other publishing channels for as long as they have existed. Why should online media be any different? Optimized content can be searched for and found by anyone: Including consumers or companies researching products and services to buy. Optimized PR facilitates marketing goals – News content is often syndicated and stories re-published. When links are included, they can serve as a link building effort that directly affects marketing objectives through direct traffic to the company site and increase search visibility due to the influence of links. Protect your brand & online reputation - As many brands have discovered, it takes just a few upset bloggers with time on their hands and savvy connections to bring unwanted attention to negative and dissenting views.  Companies that publish content can ensure some of that content is optimized for brand terms, products, company names and any other brand asset they wish to protect in the search results. For the most part, one domain name can only display up to 2 search results for a single query. That means content that lives outside of the main corporate web site, such as press releases hosted indefinitely by wire services like PRWeb, can serve to occupy additional search results for your brand name.  Don’t wait until someone creates a yourbrandsucks.com web site that ranks #1 for your brand name to start working on your search results reputation. Be proactive about optimizing content on and especially, off the corporate web site for brand names. Demonstrate more value from PR & Communications - As budgets are cut in Marketing and Public Relations departments, PR needs to do a much better job of showing value. Despite giving SEO workshops and seminars for PR professionals for hundreds of Media Relations, Communications and PR practitioners over the past 3-4 years, most PR firms don’t incorporate SEO. Those that do, can demonstrate more effective Pull PR results, but can also demonstrate the direct and indirect effect on marketing, customer service, recruiting and investor relations by the search traffic earned through optimized news content. I’ll be discussing these and many other aspects of how companies can enhance their marketing efforts through optimized Public Relations at the Vocus User’s Conference in Washington D.C. today. Actually, I’ll be attending the event today to see Brian Solis and many others. I will be giving my presentation on Friday morning, right after David Meerman Scott does one of his famous keynotes. At the same time, TopRank’s Adam Singer is in Toronto, for the Search Engine Strategies conference. He’s presenting on a similar topic that also includes a substantial consideration of social media along with search engine optimization and digital PR. If you’re attending either event, please be sure to connect with Adam or I afterwards.  If you’re liveblogging either event and these sessions in particular, be sure to let us know so we can link to your post in our roundup. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 7 Benefits of Partnering SEO & PR | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Shopzilla SEO Interview with Michael Nguyen 9 June, 2010, 4:29 am
  Spotlight on Search Interview with Michael Nguyen, SEO Strategist for Shopzilla & Bizrate.com. Helping companies with very, very large web sites increase sales through improved search engine performance takes a unique type of person. Think equally strong left and right brain lateral thinking.  Heavy doeses of technical savvy plus creative problem solving are essential. Shopzilla and Bizrate market millions of products and Michael Nguyen’s SEO responsibilities for those sites are substantial. In this interview Michael talks about Google’s recent MayDay update, a SEO checklist, his top resources for staying current in the field and the unique challenges (including duplicate content) that come with optimizing huge web sites. There’s a bit of a trend as we’ve interviewed lead SEO practitioners for well known brands. They seem to have the combined experience of independent consultant, agency and having worked in-house. Please tell us about how you got into search marketing and how your past experience in these roles has contributed to your current position. Also, what’s the most interesting thing about working with Shopzilla? Sounds like I’ve had a very similar path as your other interviewees. I started my career as a web developer for Aerospace Corporation, mainly building dynamic web sites and internal search engines. I spent a good amount of time testing and understanding search engine optimization on my own during that time – partly out of interest and applicability to my work. From there I did some independent consulting for a couple years and eventually joined an agency (SEO Inc). Spent a few years there working for a variety of clients, small and large. I had a chance to move in-house with Shopzilla about 4 years back and I took it. Been with Shopzilla ever since. I do a lot of technical SEO on our large and complex sites, so it’s required that I understand the technical detail behind the scenes. It’s much easier to communicate with the development team if you understand what’s going on in the backend. The greatest thing about working in the comparison shopping / product reviews space is the challenge. Our market is extremely competitive and there are many large players. You really don’t have time to rest, but it keeps me interested. With Shopzilla specifically, I’m given all the tools I need to do my job – it’s a simple concept, but in reality not many SEOs can say the same. I have access to large amounts of data, analytical resources, development teams, specialized tools, etc all tailored towards SEO. At the highest level, Shopzilla is a company that really understands search and user behavior. It’s the perfect environment for an SEO because we work at the intersection of search and users. Working with large organizations and also companies with large web sites is unique for a variety of reasons. What have you found to be the best advice for getting quality SEO recommendations implemented with large web sites (or companies)? I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but the best way to get things implemented within a large company is through education. Things get done faster when everyone is on board. So that requires constant educating and training. The more people that understand SEO the better. You want advocates for SEO in every area of the business – from engineering to upper management. What are some of the unique SEO challenges that you encounter with a business like Shopzilla with its own network of sites and so much data being published? With a business like Shopzilla, I’m always challenged with the sheer size of our sites. We have millions of products and various different business lines. So keeping everything indexed and ranking is a constant battle. I spend a lot of time thinking about optimal site architecture and site performance. For large sites, even small changes in indexing can equate to significant revenue shifts. The comparison shopping and consumer review market is pretty interesting. Shopzilla not only competes with other shopping engines, but we also compete for organic traffic against informational portals, niche review sites, review aggregators, and blogs. We’re both a head and long tail business. All of us (Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag, etc) start off with the same basic data from merchants. We all aggregate products and provide comparison shopping features on our sites. So in order to drive traffic to our sites, we need to improve our product and provide value on top of that data. In the end it comes back to the user – what does the user find valuable and what is the user searching for? Users want to easily compare a variety of products and make a confident buying decision. So at Shopzilla, we devote a lot of resources to ensure those two things happen on our site. We take millions of products and organize them around what users tell us is the most usable categorization. We allow users to refine by a variety of useful attributes. We help them understand the products they are interested in with user reviews, buying guides, and comments from the point of sale. We assist with merchant selection through our merchant reviews. So while we start with essentially commoditized data, we add a ton of content and value on top of that starting data. Increasing product value results in increased organic traffic. In a sense, SEO is the product and the product is SEO. What advice can you offer about dealing with content syndication and duplication? What are some common situations you’ve encountered and their solution? 301 Redirects and rel canonical are your friends when dealing with any sort of duplication/content syndication issue. It’s pretty common for sorting features (for example a “sort by price” feature) to create duplicate content. Rel canonical is perfect for getting rid of that type of duplication. For content syndication, I recommend placing a variety of signals within the content that helps Google understand the true source of the content. Depending on the type of content this could be: links within the content pointing back to your page, a rel canonical, a URL, or your domain. Can you offer some of your experience and insight regarding Google’s recent Mayday update? What can companies with large sites that rely on long tail traffic do about Mayday? It’s even more important now with Mayday that large sites reconsider the signals they are sending to Google regarding their deeper pages (long tail). Obviously not every single page on a large site deserves to be equally promoted, so craft your navigation around the fact that different pages have varying value. Spend some time building links to deeper pages to support sections with weak indexing. While it’s a little overdramatic, imagine how your site would perform if domain authority did not exist. Start tailoring your SEO strategy with that in mind. If you were to provide a friend a checklist for marketing their new B2C website online, what would you be sure to include” Guess my checklist would be pretty simple: Build something people want Make it extremely easy for search engines to crawl/index your site Get people talking about your site online Keep improving the site Google’s guidelines are really helpful for a new site. What web based SEO or social media marketing tools would you recommend for that new web site? Any tools we’ve probably never heard of? These tools are more tech heavy than your typical SEO tools, but I figured some of these might be new to your readers: 80legs – Crawl your own site (or a competitors) and extract whatever data you want SEOmoz API – Mashup all that juicy SEOmoz data Solr – Great for understanding the basics behind a search engine nutch – Similar to SOLR, this one is great for understanding crawling/indexing Monitoring tools are useful too, setting up a Google Alerts and Twitter RSS feed is helpful for keeping up with what others are saying about your brand online. Once you know what your users are talking about, you can join in on the conversation. You’ve received kudos from people like the GM of your current company for “staying on top of what’s going on in the search marketplace”. How do you stay current? What are your favorite information sources? (Conferences, Blogs, Newsletters, Books, Forums) I used to monitor a ton of different blogs/sites/sources, but I’ve paired it down to handful of sources recently. Here’s what I check regularly: Hacker News SEO Book SMX/Search Engine Land SEOmoz SEO by the Sea If it’s important, it will eventually make it to one of those sites. I’d also love to attend a WWW Conference someday. Thank you Michael! Michael Nguyen is the SEO Strategist for Shopzilla & Bizrate.com. Bizrate enables shoppers to quickly and easily find, compare and buy anything, sold by virtually anyone, anywhere on the Internet.  Find Michael on his blog, Social Patterns or on Twitter. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Shopzilla SEO Interview with Michael Nguyen | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships 8 June, 2010, 4:37 am
  Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around. As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific: Yahoo announced yesterday that they would significantly enhance their relationship with Facebook. According to Yahoo’s Jim Stoneham, VP Communities, “People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks”. Yahoo is expected to launch similar cross platform sharing functionality with Twitter and other social sites in the coming months according to MediaPost. That kind of cross sharing relationship blurs the lines between social and search even more than the one–way integration of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results. When search engines used to syndicate search results from different sources or even each other, it was important to know how to get web pages included in those sources so they would appear in search results where customers were looking.  As the major search engines update their data sources for real-time search and even socially influenced search, there’s an opportunity for marketers to understand how their participation on the social web can continue to provide signal and even content for the major search engines. It doesn’t take much to see that some of the solutions for inclusion and earning top visibility are technical and related to publishing platforms, feeds and certain types of formats. Others are qualitative based on network size, type and topical focus. In the end, what matters is not just the changes search engines make to gain market share over each other, but the ways in which consumers respond in their information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors. While the effect of real-time search on current marketing programs isn’t anywhere as near as substantial as search marketing or even social media marketing, it’s an area that smart marketers would do well to monitor and experiment with. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 9 Essential Social Media Tips for Beginners 4 June, 2010, 4:03 am
  Plunging into social media for the first time can be a bit daunting for individuals or businesses. There is a learning curve when it comes to becoming more social online, and it can take a while to learn what works and what doesn’t.  Here are a few of the best Do’s and Don’ts that can save you time and help grow your social media authority more quickly. 1. Start small You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first. Once you find the right ones for you or your brand, then start to narrow your focus on those. Eventually you may want to scale your social media strategy to include more services, but you have to crawl before you can walk. Start small, and then grow to other social networks as your confidence grows. Success breeds success. 2. Get a widget Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help. Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and the Tweetmeme badge is easy to add to your site as well. 3. Frequently test your buttons and widgets Start testing which social media profiles have the most impact, then drop the rest. For example, if your site does really well with Facebook shares but hardly ever gets voted on Digg, then drop the Digg vote button. Oftentimes you’ll see sites littered with tons of widgets and buttons. Having a gazillion widgets at the end of each article only creates noise and annoys the reader. Figure out which buttons are getting clicked, and drop the buttons that don’t convert. Ideally you’ll only have two or three widgets on each page. You can tell which buttons are effective by using Google Analytics and goals to see who’s clicking what. You can also use A/B to see which types of buttons are getting more clicks. 4. Don’t annoy your followers Sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, lots of companies that are just starting out with social media think the best way to “promote” their brand is to publish coupons, offers, news, and anything else related to their business. Rule of thumb: if it’s something you personally wouldn’t like to receive, avoid it. Your social media goal is to be helpful first. People follow and respect brands that are helpful, not self-promoting shills. Give first, then ask. Try posting useful links to industry articles, answer questions, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will come if you’re helpful first. 5. Don’t fret about follower counts Don’t believe all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Sure, you could do that and it’s not hard. But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you. You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots. It takes a while to organically build up a great social profile. Focus on building great content and being helpful, and the followers will come. 6. See what the pros are doing Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to social media, and sometimes it’s best to take a look at people who are real social media experts. Lee Odden is a good example of someone using Twitter and Facebook to help people, which in turn grows his social media influence. There are plenty of fantastic examples of people who truly understand how to interact and build powerful social media profiles the right way. Check out sites like WeFollow to find influential Twitter users within your niche. 7. Don’t overlook niche social media sites When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites. If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious. Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category. 8. Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these  directories and odds are many will follow you back. Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community. Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later. 9. Stay Humble Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?) As with anything in life, nobody likes a know-it-all. Be humble. Ask questions. Teach, but don’t preach. Let others do the hyping for you. And they will if you’re helpful and humble. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 9 Essential Social Media Tips for Beginners | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 7 Common Social Media Marketing Problems and Their Solutions 2 June, 2010, 5:02 am
  This post is part 2 on Social Media Marketing Best Practices from IMS Minneapolis.  The first post featured Brad Smith from Best Buy who offered insights into their social media principles, guidelines and learnings. This post includes liveblog notes from the presentation given by Adam Singer of TopRank Online Marketing. Adam opened up noting that according to a research study by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, 14% of executives are unsure of social media, yet 70% expect to spend more. That set the stage for some of the common obstacles and barriers to social media adoption which he focused on in: 7 Common Social Media Problems and their Solutions. 1. Flying blind Many companies chase social media tactics with no idea about the who, what, when and where of the social web. It’s essential that companies first develop a listening program to answer those “W” questions.   Listening through social media monitoring is critical to understanding brand, competitors and key terms relevant to your audience on the social web. Without a smart listening effort, companies miss key opportunities: marketing, customer service, sales, recruiting, partnering and public relations. 2. Unsure where it fits – who owns social media? As companies develop their social media programs, responsibilities and resources need to be allocated and that leads to accountability and “ownership”.  For successful social media adoption within organizations, it’s important to establish social media goals and responsibilities in different parts of the organization.  As resources and accountability are identified, the different departments can work to cross pollinate efforts, and work together as a team. Doing so helps leverage combined efforts and from an implementation standpoint, avoids conflicting representation of the brand. 3. Inconsistent participation Companies need to be consistent with their social participation. Our clients at TopRank Marketing with the most successful blogs are those that post consistently. The solution to more consistent participation is to lead from the top, get executive buy-in. Establish goals and provide a feedback loop to contributors. As they grow, the community will provide feedback. Set aside resources, plan who will create content, monitor and engage. Tap passionate community members and activate them to be brand ambassadors. Create efficiencies through the repurposing of content. 4. Not individual or confident Believing that people will listen to and find value in what you really want to say requires confidence. Whether you’re right or wrong might not matter as much as being passionate. Now, more than ever, is the time to show leadership and conviction when it comes to social participation and engagement. 5. Digitally unsavvy team Modern marketers need to understand social media.  Companies don’t “do social”, they “are social”. That means being savvy participants.  There’s good reason for that. According to “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” from Forrester Research: 91% of business buyers read blogs, watching user generated video, participate in other social media 55% of decision-makers were in social networks 43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.) “If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.” Josh Bernoff, Forrester. The good news is that you can learn to be social media savvy through training, participation, listening and engagement. 6. Data paralysis Data should help drive decisions, but don’t let it get in the way of creative ideas from your team. Adam relates the story of one of his clients, Joffrey’s Coffee where he recommended campaign changes based on his personal experience with the social web vs waiting for data to prove a concept. The result was a successful program by all accounts which is often cited as a social media marketing case study by others in the industry. 7. Lack of personalization Use real team members in your social media efforts. Don’t use some faceless person behind “Brand X”. Forge relationships with others. Put others in the spotlight. “Give to get” and be focused on serving and being useful.  Don’t send in legal right away as an initial reaction to social dissension. Read the “Streisand Effect” for more on what happens when that backfires. Embrace personal brands, don’t worry about them getting too popular because their allegiance is to the brand. In the end, companies can win on the social web by developing a strategy, experiment and iterate. And if you get lost, you can always get help. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 7 Common Social Media Marketing Problems and Their Solutions | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Monster SEO: Interview with Matt Evans of Monster.com 31 May, 2010, 4:35 am
  Spotlight on Search Interview with Matt Evans of Monster.com There simply is no substitute for well rounded experience over a period of time to give a search marketer perspective and the skills to handle a variety of problems. Add to that “sink or swim” SEO training and you have a guy like Matt Evans, SEO Manager at Monster.com. In this interview, Matt is generous with sharing his experiences working agency side and in-house, insights toward code SEO, the new Google design, social media, advice for marketers that want to enter the Search Engine Marketing field and how SEO is a lot like Rugby. You’ve worked both on the agency side and now as an in-house SEO Manager for Monster.com. Can you share a bit about that journey and what are some of the big differences between working on the client side vs. agency? What do you like most about working in Search? Previous to Monster I was with a search agency for 6 years. In those 6 years I saw both the organization and the industry grow tremendously despite the bubble burst of the early 2000s. At a time when friends were jumping from job to job it was very easy to stick around because I believed in the services we provided and the future of the search marketing industry. I believed whole-heartedly (and still do) that search is the best way to build an audience, connect with customers, and drive business online. I think the best part of working in Search is the vibrancy of the industry, the smart people, and the value that we can bring to our organizations. One of the biggest differences in client side versus agency is being very involved in the software development life cycle. On the agency side of things you typically provide recommendations to clients, they take them off to their Product people or Engineers and most work happens behind the curtain. Being an in-house SEO means being involved in a project from concept to release – and all the “fun” in between. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tedious, but it’s all a very good learning experience. If I was ever to go back agency side it’s the type of experience which would give me a huge advantage in dealing with clients. Another major difference between agency and in-house is the feeling of ownership you have over your site/s. Because you’re completely invested in one site, you feel so much more accomplished when SEO enhancements are released. What in your past work and education experience best prepared you for your journey as a Search Engine Marketer? What advice do you have for budding SEMs to make themselves more valuable and empowered to motivate change? My initial year or so at the agency was by far the best experience in terms of preparing me for the diverse journey as an SEM. In 2000-2001 SEM was still the wild, wild west. For some perspective, we were still submitting pages to Lycos and HotBot, doorway pages were a legitimate and successful tactic, and GoTo.com was the only paid search engine of note. The company was still small and resources were non-existent, so account managers did EVERYTHING for their clients – from keyword research, to copywriting, to directory submissions, to project management. You learned real quick that you needed to focus your energy on the tasks that were going to get you results fast. Getting results fast was even more important back then because your clients were less likely to understand the nature of search, the fluctuations, and how long it takes for content to be indexed and ranked. As a result, much of our time was spent educating the client, which forced me to learn on the fly. I would urge budding SEMs to think less about tactics and think more about strategies. The tactics will flow from those strategies naturally and you’ll have a much easier time selling executives a strategy rather than trying to explain to them why 301 redirects, XML sitemaps, and verification meta tags are necessary. They don’t care! The strategy should take into account how search traffic will drive bottom line results, because that’s what they care about. It’s also essential for SEMs to understand the value of a search referral to their business. For instance, at Monster we measure the value of organic referrals by equating them to the cost savings driving the equivalent qualified traffic through paid search or online media buys. Ultimately, SEMs should be trying to get away from the perception that we’re one trick ponies. Aim to create a perception in your organization that you’re a well-rounded business person rather than an niche expert in the “dark arts of SEO.” Understand the parts of the business that intersect with search – PR, offline marketing, usability, etc. Too many times SEO experts are pigeonholed and viewed as only a small part of the business when many time the impact they can have on a business is much greater than any other person in the organization. Just ask the businesses who have had their site banned from Google to understand how important SEMs are! What tips do you have for reporting SEO performance within an organization? What KPIs do you pay attention to? What overall performance goals are most important? Any tips on reporting that agencies give their clients? The key to reporting in an organization is to provide tiered reporting based on your audience. The reporting that me and my SEO team review is far more detailed than the dashboard that the SVPs see. Also, we provide more specific reporting for our ecommerce team, Content team, and Product Managers. It’s important to get feedback from all these groups too so that you’re providing data that is interesting and actionable and you’re not wasting your time reporting on useless data. At Monster the KPIs we pay attention to around SEO are pretty typical: visits, UVs, page views per visit, time on site, referrals by engine, and referrals by keyword phrase. The SEO team is mainly measured on the amount of overall traffic we drive, however, in order to prove our traffic is valuable and targeted we also track the number of job searches, job views, applies, new accounts, and new resume uploads that result from SEO traffic. Agencies need to focus less on month to month comparisons and look at year over year. Seasonality is usually a large factor in search trends, so comparing MoM trends provides little insight into actual performance. For Monster, January is our biggest month for search traffic due to New Year’s resolutions to find a new job. December tends to be one of our lowest months due to the holidays. Comparing December to January may look great in the chart, but to get a real understanding on SEO success you need to look at year over year most of the time. How important is ongoing & proactive SEO vs triage? What do you think companies should be paying attention to on an ongoing basis to achieve, maintain and improve their SEO performance? I need to balance between both triage and proactive strategic planning due to the speed at which the industry changes and the size of a company like Monster. Try as I might to be aware of all changes that happen to the site in a given release, it’s just not humanly possible to know everything. Also, since our site is so large it takes a while to figure out how search engine algorithm changes affect us. Much of my time is spent understanding how these changes might have affected our SEO performance. Monster is a global organization and has many, many priorities and a very competitive development roadmap. As a result I need to also be proactive and be thinking about what we need to launch 6-12 months down the line in order to hit our goals. It makes it busy, but very interesting. Companies need to leverage the webmaster tools offered by Google, Yahoo, and Bing in order to maintain and improve their SEO performance. Beyond SEO, these tools give a company valuable information about how your site performs for users (which includes search engine spiders). Google especially has been adding a lot of great tools to their console to improve SEO performance and we’ve been trying to spread the word throughout our organization about the kinds of information that can be mined. As a result we have Product Managers in all the countries reaching out to the SEO team with problems they’ve found and it really creates a great sense of teamwork. There’s some debate about the future interplay between code level SEO, structured data and sitemaps versus page content and social media. How do you see SEO evolving technically in the next 2-3 years? Ultimately, because links are still so important to search engine algorithms I think that content and social media will continue to be king when it comes to SEO. Great content will always lead to more links and social is just the latest channel to distribute those links. However, I believe the number of technical levers search engines will provide to SEOs in order to improve and tweak how their site appears in search results will continue to grow. I think search engines need all the help they can get in crawling, indexing, and presenting the best results to searchers and giving more control to webmasters is one way to go about it. I predict we’ll see many more announcements from the engines supporting new technical innovations like we’ve seen in the past with canonical tags, XML sitemaps, rel=”nofollow”, and RDFa tags. What are your thoughts on the new third column Google design? Do you see any SEO opportunities that weren’t there before? Are you planning on or doing anything differently? What are your top 3 signals of SEO influence? As a power searcher I don’t find the third column design nearly as offensive as some users do. I see it as redundant navigation that’s aimed at luring the average searcher into exploring Google’s different engines before going back up to the search box and modifying their query, which they tend to do. I’ve found it useful when I’m trying to understand what type of content exist out there on a given topic. I wouldn’t say there are new opportunities, but I think the opportunities that have always been there are magnified. If blended search results didn’t convince you that a universal search strategy is important, the new left hand navigation should. There are new plans to change our strategy. We’re already on a path to improve our PR SEO and our Social Media presence to correspond with the emphasis the engines have put on real time search. We’ve built out a strong team in those areas and the SEO team regularly partners with them on initiatives. What SEO (and/or PPC) tools would you recommend to an in-house marketer that wears a SEO hat among others? Do you have any SEO project management tools that you like? They absolutely need to use Google Webmaster Tools if nothing at all. The data provided is just too valuable. I also am a big fan of the SEO Book toolbar for Firefox. It’s a great tool for a quick snapshot of what’s going on with a page. What resources do you use to stay current? (Blogs, conferences, newsletters, books) What role do direct observation, testing and networking play for you in staying current? I find Search Engine Land’s SearchCap newsletter the best source of news for the industry. It compiles all the best blogs and forum threads in one daily email. As for books, Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is my bible.  It sits on my bookshelf and I pull it down from time to time to refresh my memory on certain topics. The forecasting/modeling information is invaluable for those SEOs who are continuously asked to quantify the opportunity of an enhancement or new content. If you were to compare SEO to a sport, which would you pick and why? There is no question on this one – Rugby. I’ve played many team sports in my life – baseball, soccer, basketball, dodge ball – but none of them comes close to the ultimate team sport of Rugby. I played for 4 years in college and 5 years after and you learn pretty quickly that a team’s success is completely dependent on execution by all 15 players on the pitch (that’s a field for the uninitiated!). The backs can’t score tries if they don’t receive the ball from the scrum half, and the scrum half can distribute the ball unless the forwards ruck and secure the ball. Everyone depends on each other to do their job. SEO is much the same way. The SEO can’t drive traffic to the site if the UX folks don’t design the architecture of the site right, or if the developers don’t code the page correctly, or the copywriters don’t use the proper keyword phrases in the copy. You are dependent on others within your organization to execute properly, and with a large, global organization like Monster, this is what makes the job difficult. It’s also what makes projects that much sweeter when we are successful! Thanks Matt! Matt Evans is SEO Manager for Monster.com, the premier global employment solution for job seekers with a presence in over 50 countries. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Monster SEO: Interview with Matt Evans of Monster.com | http://www.toprankblog.com