Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

We’ve suspected it for a while now but it was recently confirmed by extremely reliable sources (Matt Cutts from Google actually) that social media is having a greater influence on search rankings. A web page stacked up against another web page with the same credentials will apparently be given greater weight if it is shared around on twitter, facebook and other social media sites.

So let’s assume that you’ve taken care of the SEO essentials, this new news certainly presents an opportunity and in most cases, implementation does not need to be difficult. Let’s have a look at a couple of options available.

Wibya – by far the easiest and only mildly obtrusive, wibya places a social media bar at the bottom of your website and remains there even when a user moves from page to page. It takes about 10 seconds to sign up and just as many to add to your website and they have a bunch of options from free to $30/month. We’ve seen it have some influence with our very own eyes so know it works.

ShareThis – I feel like these guys have been around forever and was once our go-to but their button options started feeling a little stale when there were so many others. Well now it’s a different story as they really updated their selection not to mention their additional analytics and branding options. Easily customize your buttons on most platforms, including easy WordPress and Blogger integration and place the code in the appropriate location on your website.

Sharedaddy (by WordPress) seemingly the default option for WordPress users (and there are plenty of them) this plugin is slick and easy.

AddThis – self-proclaimed #1 Bookmarking and Social Sharing website and while this is most likely the case, it wouldn’t surprise me that their popularity is waning. That said, it looks like they’ve rolled out accompanying analytics which really is a very valuable resource. Again, a super simple setup.

AddToAny – also a pretty popular option with alot of options, possibly too many. Mouseover the button and a long list of sharing options pop up. Again, simple to implement.

Overall we see much better reaction to larger buttons with fewer options. Twitter, Facebook and maybe LinkedIn should probably be the only options plus possibly the opportunity for a much larger list. Try a few options and perform some split testing if you must but including these options on your website, especially your blog, has become the norm and as stated, will apparently help your search visibility. Personally I like ShareThis as my main choice but of course we’re constantly experimenting and exploring other options particularly on different layouts, designs and audiences. We suggest you do the same.

Many of us heard about the possibility that Borders could go under and now word comes through that they filed for bankruptcy in New York after four years of sales declines, and now plans to shut about 40 percent of its superstores in the next several weeks. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble have been struggling to adapt in this digital age up against newcomers Apple and Amazon. While I am not one to speculate as to why the company itself has struggled, one area that I can comment on is their Web presence which, as a Web Manager of a book website, I have been observing with keen interest.

The Borders website has been through a few iterations over the past couple of years. My relationship with them officially started in 2006 and during this time, Borders had opted for a very visual, image-based website. Prior to this time it looks as though they have had a fairly primitive website, then they teamed up with Amazon for many years before once again striking out of their own. I recall the Magic Bookshelf dominating their website which I thought was pretty cool at the time.

Border’s latest iteration is more stripped-down and reminds me a bit of Amazon. It’s a lot cleaner, better organized and seems more focussed on doing what it is they do. They’ve also incorporated several essential social elements in their design which is also a notable plus. It’s still a little image-heavy for my liking but that shouldn’t be a big hindrance for SEO.

So let’s have a quick browse through some SEO elements to see how they stack up.

The Home page URL is a strange one right off the bat. Having a well organized site structure is key and already we’re 2 deep with “Online” and “Store” incorporated in the home page string. At least they have set up the <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.borders.com”/> but we’re already going in circles.  The primary domain is chosen as www and they are redirecting. They’ve at least covered a couple of basic best practices it seems.

Digging a little further we see the poor domain structure continue. The Gift Cards URL looks something like http://www.borders.com/online/store/BGIView_giftcards. Certainly not optimal and with the inclusion of an underscore instead of a hyphen, already we’re pretty sure that no SEO has been consulted here. Further in and it gets even worse. Kids New Releases looks like a dogs breakfast http://www.borders.com/online/store/Landing?view=2&type=1&kids=true&nav=5185+501363+5215&simple=false. I don’t care if Sergey Brin himself says that they have no problem crawling URL’s with parameters, they are at a significant disadvantage for many reasons but at the very least by excluding keywords as part of the URL. Not only that but I’m not about to link to that page because it’s painful so they’ll lose a few incoming links.

So drilling into a specific book, let’s go with Silverlicious by Victoria Kann. My URL is still a horrid mess http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0061781231&id=61293569, my title tag is pretty weak but OK with Silverlicious – Victoria Kann – Hardcover (ISBN 9780061781230) – Buy Books, Music and Movies at Borders. I’m also not seeing any category organization, no breadcrumb trail, the book description is pretty light…any longtail benefits I’d hope to achieve is going to be a tough ask. Let’s just have a quick glance at Amazon’s URL for the same item http://www.amazon.com/Silverlicious-Pinkalicious-Victoria-Kann/dp/0061781231/. That’s already better. Rather than go on, I’m going to suggest that all this simply points to the fact that very little thought had gone into SEO during web development.

I’m pretty doubtful that SEO would have had saved the business. There’s obviously more to it than that. It just irks me that all this thought and planning and funds that goes into developing a website and a pretty crucial component would be ignored. Oh and what do I get when I Google “Silverlicious by Victoria Kann? Not Borders.

In the SEO world we see untoward activities on a regular basis. Mostly folks trying to game the system for themselves or their clients to increase rankings or decrease competitor rankings. It can get pretty nasty with so much at stake and not a whole lot of governance short of the Google web spam team who are probably spread pretty thin. So word came through over the weekend (via NYT) of some nefarious SEO activities by large US retailer JC Penney, or more specifically their SEO company SearchDex, who appeared to be employing Black Hat techniques to boost their rankings. And boost their rankings they did!

SearchDex employed a well-known link farming methodology of placing relevant anchor text links (like “Casual Dresses”) on hundreds of websites that are paid (many quite handsomely) for listing these links. Most of the website have nothing of note on them aside from these links that point back to the JC Penney website.

For many SEO’s, we’ve seen this type of activity ever since the inception of the search engine. Many of us have tried these techniques as a matter of course and have probably been pinged once or twice along the way. As one of the higher profile cases, this JC Penney situation has once again shed light on SEO and SEO’s.

1. There is a great deal of pressure for “quick” results and some companies will do whatever it takes to get these results.
2. Search rankings can be very valuable
3. Off-site SEO (specifically incoming links) is very powerful.

Forums have always been filled with companies requesting the services of black hat SEO’s to bring a competitor website down and I wonder if this NYT article will spur companies to be on the lookout similar impact. We’ve seen this problem for years and have always supported Google in their attempts to combat it. It’s gotta be a hard job. Unfortunately, all of our attempts to inform Google when we stumble across some nefarious activities mostly goes ignored which doesn’t give us a great deal of confidence with the process.

Ever so slowly the black hat’s chip away at us. Clients put pressure on us to deliver faster results. We see JC Penney for several very valuable months get some prized placement and most likely a fairly significant boost in revenue, no matter how much they try to deny this as the case. And so for a minute we throw our hands in the air. Then we get back to work.

While this information may be shocking for those who don’t understand how search engines work it really is par for the course in our game. There are a couple of real standouts for me.

- why didn’t JC Penney build their website correctly if they knew SEO was important? Even a cursory glance will reveal that no SEO’s could possibly have been consulted during its build.

- I find it hard to believe that JC Penney didn’t know what they were doing or have someone on staff who didn’t know what was going on.

- All of my points about On-Site SEO seem to be moot in light of how well the website performed despite how few “best practices” it follows.

We’ll be curious to see how G handles this in the coming days.

A number of factors contribute to increasing keyword rankings on a search engine. One of those was the meta keyword tag or  <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword phrase, yet another keyword phrase”>. Once upon a time it was considered a pretty major factor. Even in Google’s early days, they seemed to have a great deal of relevance so for years, SEO’s adopted it as important component to site optimization. Soon enough spammers caught wind of this and would literally stuff a page full of them which caused a few problems for search engines seeking relevance. Gradually their value diminished and for a few years now, those in the know have speculated that meta keywords have little to no impact on a website rankings so most/many have discontinued it as part of their process. Google evangelist Matt Cutts even came out and said that “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search” and I am under no illusion that this is not true. But I continue to use it and have been accused of not knowing what I was doing or not being relevant (there’s way to much gray in SEO to see black or white) so I continue to have justify myself. Here’s a few reasons I’ll give:

1. I still use meta keywords because…while Google doesn’t place any value in it, other search engines do, particularly some of the smaller ones so why not include it.

2. I still use meta keywords because…it helps me to internally organize a page. I can easily go into a page, check the meta keywords (usually do around 3 per page) and make further modifications to the page based on the targeted keywords that we have incorporated.

3. I still use meta keywords because…they may become relevant again. While Cutts has suggested that “I don’t believe it will be” a factor, that doesn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence. So when it does, my clients websites will be ready to go.

4. I still use meta keywords because….some CMS and blogging platforms use it as tagging for their own internal search classification.

So while this particular element isn’t an important search ranking factor, it still has its uses. I’ve been in SEO long enough to know that it’s riddled with complexity and being told that I shouldn’t be doing something that won’t penalize me (yeah I’ve tested it) is short-sighted. It is true that some still place a great deal of importance in meta keywords as a ranking factor (usually web developers who claim that they’re going to SEO your website) but just because an SEO includes it, doesn’t mean that they don’t have their reasons.