SEO Blogging Archives by Mark Murnahan

Google PageRank Changes and Fools Still Listen

Remembering Farrah Fawcett and Google PageRank

Google PageRank? Seriously, just get out your checkbook right now and write me a blank check. Don’t worry, I will go ahead and fill in the dollar amount. You just be sure to sign it.

I was thrown back into yesteryear by a blog article I read at Search Engine Journal that discussed Google PageRank. No, it was not something from deep in the bowels of their 2003 archives, but rather a real life demonstration of sad linkbait published only yesterday. I don’t need a pissing match with these guys, but it was sad to see a long-dead topic like PageRank being exhumed for public consumption.

It reminded me about who I write for, and why. I write for you, and I try to make useful facts and good ideas spring to life with a touch of entertainment value. Once in a while I will throw in my Murnahan Cheez Whiz style to keep you on your toes and make you say “what?!”

My objectives include reducing the abundance of blatant SEO lies and myths that search engine optimizers promote. Sure, I may not be able to fix the whole world, but I can do my part to blow the “bullshit whistle” on bad SEO information.

Since I want you to subscribe to my blog and come back, I try to overlook topics that will be genuinely useless and guide you wrong. You know, topics to scare you into putting crap in your brain like Google PageRank changes.

The article I am talking about brought acid to the top of my throat and reminded me just how easy it could be to scam people out of a blank check. It touched on just how “unknown” this SEO business I am in really is, and it made me feel like one hell of a nice guy for telling things straight.

I will go ahead and link to the article, so I guess their “linkbait” idea worked. The article is titled “New PageRank Formula May Change Your SEO Priorities.” Below is my comment, in which I replied to my friend and fellow long-time SEO who also criticized the article, Jim Rudnick of Canuck SEO:

OMG, are people seriously still writing about PageRank? Maybe we can throw some meta tags into the conversation. While we are at it, I want to break out my old Farrah Fawcett poster and leave my mom a “surprise” under the bed, too.

Agreed, very old news. It is funny to me that somebody recently mentioned the PageRank of my blog and my first thought was as nostalgic as my Atari 2600.

I have not even looked at the “Green Fairy” of PageRank in half a decade. If you are doing the things you should be doing, people will love your stuff enough to link to it. If it is relevant content for a given search, on a reasonably decent website, and other people crave it, the site will rank well. Isn’t that a whole lot easier than waiting for Google to give you a number?

The remembrance of Google PageRank brought to mind the different qualities of search engine optimizers that I enjoy just enough to squash them to pieces and bury them in a shallow grave.

It is easy to understand how people could get confused about SEO. It is an industry that begs for naivety, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty. Sadly, these things are in great abundance among website owners and want-to-be SEO providers, alike.

Lay Down Your Google PageRank Gun and Listen!

Don’t shoot the messenger, but if you are looking at measurements like Google PageRank as an indicator of progress, your efforts are a hot mess. Save yourself some grief. A far better answer is to create something useful, creative, interesting, and relevant to people. These are the things which compel people like crack cocaine. These are the things which cause people to reference you and link to your website content. These are the things which make a difference, and not some misunderstood 1-10 measure that Google itself tells you to ignore.

I do not even understand why there is still a Google PageRank measurement, because Google has made it damn clear for many years that the most important thing is to give people what they want. If you concern yourself a fraction as much about what you are delivering to people as you concern yourself with Google, you will very likely rank a whole lot better. Plus, your PageRank will go up, too!

Note: I am not one of those people who only preach the gospel of “Content is King” and that writing a bunch of stuff on a blog will make something rank well. There are a lot of things which go into good SEO. Google PageRank is not in my list of SEO lessons, and I don’t think it was anywhere in my SEO blog archive, either … until now.

OK, doubters, now that you have heard me out, go ahead and fire your PageRank guns and tell me how wrong I am in the comments section below.

Image via Wikipedia

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SEO, Social Media, and Marketing Balls

I often try to relate concepts of SEO and social media to things that people in other industries can use. After all, who really cares about all of this, unless it can help them do whatever it is they do for a living.

If you don’t have anything to sell, you probably aren’t very concerned about your marketing. But you do have something to sell, so let me give you a hand.

My challenge is to help you translate this into earning profit for your company. In the big picture, two important questions I must address are as follows:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

One way I hope to relate this into your line of work is to use analogies. This time, I will use tennis balls, but it could really be about anything.

Now let’s look at what others competing in your industry are doing.

How Others Sell Balls With SEO and Social Media

A common approach to social media that you may see with your competitors is to create a website and then start tweeting and facebooking things like “I have balls”, “Check out my balls!” After a while, they will figure out that people get really tired of the same old balls, and nobody wants to see them anymore.

This is a common outcome when companies neglect the people they are trying to reach, and overlook creativity in their value proposition. So, it will take a different approach, and they may turn their focus to SEO. They will often fill up their blog with a whole bunch of articles about their balls and hope that will work.

The trouble here is that it will take a lot of time and effort to produce all of that blog content. They may decide to outsource it to India or The Philippines but all of the sudden find themselves sending really mixes messages. Balls are different in other countries, and a lot can be lost in translation.

This is not the path you want to take, so put this out of your mind and let’s think about a better way to move your balls.

A Better Way to Move Your Balls

My experience in SEO and social media has led me to this: I have never found an industry that, with enough dedication, cannot be made more interesting when looked at from the right perspective.

It takes some research and creativity, but every industry has something that makes it interesting. Even paper clips can be more exciting … yes, paper clips!

One of the first things to do is to carefully research who wants your balls. You want to understand them, and what they are likely to look for online. You want to reach them where they are … on their turf. Then you need to get a picture of what drives them to take a desired action. In this case, you want tennis players. More precisely, you want tennis players without balls. In order to find them, you need to think more like them, and develop a sense of what will attract them.

Sometimes you have to look outside of the tennis-related industry to find your potential customers’ other interests. I wrote about this not so long ago in an article about customer modeling titled “Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness“. It addressed how to gather information to produce a better model of your ideal customer, and it is worth a read.

Get Others to Talk About Your Balls!

Once you know more about your model customer, you need to produce information that interests them. If you consistently produce quality information about their interests, it will be much easier to keep their attention. If it is compelling enough, they will subscribe to your blog, your Twitter, your Facebook, and etcetera. Now you have an audience that wants to hear about your balls.

With an attentive audience that likes what you do, it will be a lot easier for your balls to be ranked well in search engines. This is because your attentive audience will share your information with other interested people, in the form of website links. They will tweet it, facebook it, and even blog about it. Now, unlike your competitor who talks about his balls all the time, you will have other people talking about your balls.

This is a huge reward to you, because all of those links to your interesting website are crucial to making it rank higher in search engines than the competition. You will want to be good to these people, and keep them fed with more interesting and useful information. So you add more to your blog, and it grows bigger and bigger and eventually gets even more popular.

The cycle has begun, and you are on your way to greater things. You may even decide to grow your business with bigger balls, like softballs, volleyballs, and basketballs.

Selling Balls Takes Dedication

When I claim that this all requires dedication, it means spending time researching, and doing more than just the same old thing the competition is doing.

Before you put this all to use, it is best to develop some degree of marketing talent. Since you are not in the SEO and social media marketing business by profession, I want to recommend subscribing to my blog and reviewing my blog archive to learn about other things that can help you.

I do a bang up job of ranking in search engines for things in the SEO and social media marketing industries. I am supposed to, right? That way, new people can find me.

This was not always the case. I had to work really hard to discover what people want, connect with them using social media, and produce a lot of compelling information, just like I suggested for you. It does not happen overnight, but with dedication, it does happen in time. It will be worth it.

Now, back to those two questions I mentioned earlier:

What do you do to earn the food you eat?
How can I relate this Internet stuff to something that will help you eat better?

Since you can’t just eat your balls, you are going to need to sell them to buy food!

If you do everything just right, before you know it, people will be begging to play with your balls.

If you need more help promoting your balls, there are a lot of people in my industry who can make this happen for you.

I am always looking for people with balls. In my line of work, I encounter a lot of people every day who have no balls, and I will be happy to help you connect with them.

Balls image credit to shawnzrossi via Flickr
Old ball image credit to basykes via Flickr
Ball in mouth image credit to TCL8TO7 via Flickr
Splashing Balls image credit to ingridtaylar via Flickr
Bored ball image credit to greenkozi via Flickr
Begging image credit to sunsets_for_you via Flickr

SEO and Blogs: How Many Blog Posts Should I Have on My Home Page?

The question of how many blog posts to display on the home page of a blog is a pretty tough call for a lot of people. After all, it affects the page load time, the number of generated pages in your archive, the number of pages indexed by search engines, and most importantly, the user experience.

What is the best number of blog posts per page? The answer will depend on a number of things, but I want to offer some food for thought, and share what I have experienced.

If you don’t already have a blog, you may want to sit this one out, but if that is the case, I encourage you to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“.

As an SEO guy, I am not always right about every SEO topic. I try my best to keep my percentage of being right pretty high, but even I can get it wrong sometimes. It usually happens because of overlooking the obvious things I should be doing, but conveniently neglect.

The reality about SEO is that sometimes the right answers take a little bit of testing. Some people may call it “tinkering”, but that implies doing it without forethought. My suggestion is to stop “tinkering”, but always be testing. In this instance, I do not suggest making frequent changes, so it is good to make your best guess the first time.

Changing Number of Posts Per Page: Think Ahead!

It was not so long ago that I faced the question of changing the number of blog posts per page, on this blog. I had previously displayed ten articles on the home page and on each archive page. It was not a good idea, but then, I get wrapped up in client work and forget about my own stuff. I am often like a cobbler with barefoot children. Once I got around to this issue of blog posts per page, I was really glad to finally address it. I know that others have this question, and in fact, a friend who writes “Social Media Philanthropy” recently had a poll of his readers to see what they think.

Depending on your blog theme, the number of blog posts on your home page will generally be the same number which will be listed in each of your archive pages, too. I don’t mean the kind of archive like my complete archive where I list all of my articles, but rather the pages that are generated for chronological archiving, tag archiving, and category archiving.

If you do not know exactly what I mean, just click on the “older articles” link at the bottom of this page, click on any tag (for example, SEO), or click on a category (for example Marketing). My blog presently lists a total of five articles for each of these types of generated pages, and then has a link to the next page of posts.

Changing the number of posts per page will change other factors of your website, so it is best to think ahead and not do it too often. I will tell you a bit about what it will change.

Changing Blog Posts Per Page Has Multiple Effects

Let’s think about how a change in the number of posts per page will change other things. When my blog displayed ten posts per page, there was the obvious outcome that each page was longer. It makes sense that the potential for keyword phrase matching in a given search engine index may be higher, because of the lengthier content on each page. It also took a bit longer for each page to load, so that was a downside. Plus, consider how daunting a huge long scrollbar can look to somebody just wanting some quick and easy information.

An even greater downside to having large numbers of posts per page is the much lower number of total pages of the blog. More pages can be a really good thing, but of course not just any pages. You can add pages just by adding a bunch of extra blog tags or categories, too, but it is not recommended.

I am certainly not saying that you should go and set your blog to display two articles per page just to bump up your page count. That could be a bad thing. After all, just consider how many times somebody will want to click to the next page, and how annoying that could be. The rule of thumb is that you have three clicks before you lose somebody. Certainly some blogs are much higher, and some are much lower, but it is really important to keep those readers happily surfing on your awesome wave. You do this by having everything just right … or at least as close as possible.

The most important factor is how it will affect the people reading your blog, and not the search engine indexing. If people like your blog, they are more likely to link to it, subscribe to it, and keep coming back. This should always be the primary consideration, but this really can make a big difference in search engine indexing, too.

Fewer Blog Posts Per Page Means More Indexed Pages

This is something I offer with caution. You do not want to aspire to a bunch of frivolous extra pages in search engines. You want search engines to index valuable, useful, and human-worthy content. That is what search engines want, too.

There is a lot of hype on one side or the other about allowing blog tag archives and category archives to be indexed by search engines. There are multiple easy ways to control this, and I use a (highly modified) WordPress plugin called “All-in-One SEO Pack” on this blog. Everything it does can be manually programmed into a WordPress blog, or any other website, but I consider it a handy tool.

A lot of people will argue about the perfect settings, and what to tell the search engines to not index. For example, in my category archive pages, I added the directive for search engines to not index the pages, but to follow the links found within them to other pages. It is in the header of the page and it looks like this:

Example of NoIndex, Follow Directive (click to see it applied):

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”

Against some people’s notion of what works best, I have not included the content=”noindex,follow” directive in my blog tag pages (see example source code). This means that by default, my blog tag pages are being indexed. That is a lot of pages, and when you add up the differences in switching from ten blog posts per page to five blog posts per page, it multiplied the number of indexed pages in search engines. Best of all, it happened without any devious trickery or being spammy to search engines, and it simultaneously improved the user experience.

What About Duplicate Content Penalties?

I know that it is popular for people to wake up sweating profusely after having a nightmare about being penalized by search engines for having duplicate content. Search engines frown on duplicated content, because it has often been used in attempts to cheat rankings. It is the topic of many SEO discussions, and a fright to many bloggers and webmasters.

What is duplicate content? An easy way to describe this is by looking at two given blog tag pages. For example, if you seem my “SEO” tag, it may be significantly similar to the content of my “SEO blogging” tag. I also use the rel=”tag” attribute, but that is another article, and still relatively speculative in search engine recognition, and adherence.

If this gives you sweaty nightmares, stop freaking out, walk to the kitchen, and fix yourself a glass of warm milk (or better yet, Scotch). Then take a calming suggestion from good old Murnahan, and try to get back to sleep. Google and other search engines already have figured this out, and they know how blogs work. Yes, Google and other search engines have this under control, and they have indexed more than just a few other blogs.

It is extremely unlikely that you will be penalized for duplicate content, unless you are doing something to intentionally cheat the system. This is a topic for another blog post, but let me just stroke your hair and carry you back to bed. You will be just fine, and the monster under the bed will leave you alone until another time.

A Summary About Posts Per Page

Every blog is different, and some of us have really long and drawn out content, while others are much shorter articles. I also addressed this in a previous article about whether to use blog excerpts or full-length articles on your pages. The article is titled “Blogging Dilemma: Truncated Blog Excerpts or Full Blog Articles?” It is worth a read if you are on the fence about how to display your blog posts.

Because this can make such significant changes to the number of pages on your website, in your XML sitemap, and number of pages indexed in search engines, I suggest carefully limiting the number of times you change this.

I welcome your input, and if you found this useful or thought provoking, maybe your friends will, too. Please add your comments or questions and pass this along to other fellow bloggers.

The Best SEO and Social Media Tools Are Not As Expected!

Best SEO and Social Media Marketing Tools

It seems that a lot of people talk about the mechanical aspects of marketing these days. When the Internet is involved, people seem to get really hung up on the technical issues … the mechanics of marketing. Sure, it matters, but the mechanics of today’s marketing starts to seem like the equivalent of marketers of the past calling a printing press their best tool.

I am a marketing guy, and a web guy. I write a lot of articles about SEO and social media marketing, and it is something that I know well. I write about topics such as SEO tips, blogging tools, social media measurement, marketing strategy, and much more.

I work hard to teach people how to help themselves, and when they need some extra help, I provide services for hire. Now I want to share an important tip that may very well help you more than any other!

I have expressed this before, but I want to say it again: “The Best SEO and Social Media Tools Are Not What You Think!” Some people will find this to be shocking, but the best SEO and social media marketing tools are not at all what you have likely been led to believe. I want to clear this up for you, and share what I know, without a doubt, to be the best tools for improving your online marketing efforts.

In order to best express this, I offer you this short video titled “Best SEO and Social Media Marketing Tools”.

Coffee and Cigarettes?

Yes, there is my answer … Coffee and cigarettes are my favorite tools for building a brand and for improving search engine optimization and social media marketing. I am crazy, right? It is a challenging concept for a lot of people, but it is often much easier than explaining every nut and bolt that makes a marketing machine run smoothly.

You see, coffee and cigarettes are a part of my brand. I even published it in a book, and I have said it a squillion times: “I take coffee and cigarettes and turn them into better social media marketing and SEO.”

The real truth is that the mechanics of marketing are of considerably small consequence when compared to marketing creativity and talent.

When I call coffee and cigarettes my best tools, it is because they help me to work longer hours, without sleep. They keep me functioning during those long hours of trying to discover something genius about a client’s products or services, and what makes them more attractive to their model customers.

My tip for the day is to consider the tools which are not so obvious. Try something less mechanical and be ready to get creative.

Do you smoke cigarettes and drink coffee? Talk to me … your comments are well-appreciated!

Are You a Participant in Your Business, or Just a Witness?

I blame the Internet. Attack this all you like, but I blame the Internet and its many over-hyped success stories for allowing people to let down their guard and take a “witness” approach to their marketing. We all know that the Internet is a hugely important tool to businesses, but the lack of understanding how and why the Internet is valuable to a company has led a lot of people to throwing their hands in the air and giving up participation in their marketing. It is a knee-jerk reaction people make because all that information about Internet marketing is beyond the comfortable things they understand.

What makes this worse is that as so many people give up trying to be participants in their marketing efforts they give up on even knowing the right questions to ask or directions to take. It is as if they just throw all their fate to Google and a few other websites, and hope they get the right results.

A Non-Participant Seldom Gets Exceptional Results

I received a message a couple days ago that bothered me. It bothered me enough to write this, but it was a message that I see every day from small business people. I want to share it with you, but first, I want to say that this is a good example of why small businesses remain small.

The real problem is the sentiment and lack of attention, and not the actual message content. The sentiment is that of a business owner not really wanting to be a participant, but rather simply a witness to their business. I see this all the time, in a lot of different forms. Obviously, the most common way I see this is in marketing, because that is my job.

I will share the message I received that inspired this topic. On the surface, this may be easy to question how it shows me a lack of business participation, but I will get to the point of how apathy and lack of involvement are common attributes which often destroy small companies. The message reads as follows:

Please provide me with a quote for search engine optimization of my website xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.

Thanks,
xxxx xxxxxx

Maybe you think I read too much into this, but let’s dig a little deeper and consider the implied “hands off” hope of being ranked in search engines … or the hope to sell more goods or services with little or no effort.

The email, which came through a form on another of my websites, did not even include a telephone number or good time to discuss their business objectives (although it is requested in the form). Does this person want three customers per year, or 1,000 customers per month? OK, so they just want a dollar figure. If SEO is a commodity, as many people wish to see it, then why do some people have huge online success and others (most) never see a dollar’s worth of benefit?

You could say that this individual did not understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is much more than just some fancy programming code that is put into a website to magically bring in the business. The page they visited just before clicking on my contact page clearly explained things in human terms, but what confusion did they absorb just before they read what I told them? Maybe they just thought they were buying pink ponies and fairy dust like so many other people in online marketing tried to sell them. Maybe they do not actually believe that search engine optimization also means researching the search terms with the highest possible ROI (return on investment) to rank for, fixing any technical deal-stoppers, creating a strategy, and more than anything, discovering and promoting the reasons anybody would want to do business with the company.

Without a purposeful message and understanding who to reach, how to reach them, and what message to reach them with, the whole effort is lost. I’ll bet this guy didn’t think of that. In fact, I’ll bet he will be suckered out of whatever few dollars he is willing to part with. Yet, he may never consider the cost of his missed opportunities. He will probably totally deny the fact that marketing done well, including proper and accurate mathematic, demographic, and psychographic research, will always provide a positive return on investment. I did not say “sometimes” … I said “always”, and that is a truth that most non-participant business owners fail to grasp. It will often take more money, effort, or time than the impatient non-participant business owner is ready to face, but if they are willing to do it right, it will earn them more money. Tragically, it is also a truth that most SEO fail to grasp. Yes, I said “most SEO”, and if you disagree with that, then you must not have seen how many people with three weeks of marketing experience call themselves a search engine optimizer these days.

How Do I Define a Non-Participant Business?

You may wonder how I define a non-participant business, and I will explain this with an example.

As I looked at the website this individual wants to have optimized, I found that it was created with Microsoft Word. It was a really terrible “do-it-yourself” job with no call to action whatsoever. It has zero known incoming links from other websites, and even the business address was in the form of an image instead of text. It was really a great example website to reflect all the worst possible scenarios for ranking in search engine results, and more than I will get into in this article. It was like one of those awful at-home haircuts you see while standing in line over at Wal Mart. Yes, this person really needs some proper assistance.

What makes this story better is that I took a few minutes, out of sheer curiosity, to make a good estimate on his potential reach and effectiveness in his marketplace. I found that if they were willing to pursue a path for success, they could pave their street with gold.

Will I contact this person with a proper SEO proposal? Absolutely not, and I’ll tell you why. It is a non-participant! Only a non-participant would ever try to develop a website using Microsoft Word and ask somebody to fix it with SEO magic tricks. Only a non-participant would overlook the need for proper marketing instead of believing in the Voodoo which people make SEO sound like. Asking for SEO, while every other available factor in my cursory marketing audit of this company showed horrible results, is not good business sense, and it is not the mindset that makes for a successful outcome in any business plan.

You may recall hearing the term “survival of the fittest”, and I am here to testify that it works exceedingly well in the business world. It works just the way it has for millions of years, except it works even faster when you apply it to Internet marketing.

Simply “SEO-ing” a website to rank highly for search phrases is like spitting on a house fire and telling the insurance adjuster that you tried to save it. Asking the search engine optimization professional to SEO your website in this manner is like calling the fire brigade and directing them to spit on it for you.

SEO is just one tactic in a larger marketing strategy. Until you grasp that concept, you are just spitting.

Please realize for just a moment that money alone will not create success in small business marketing efforts. OK, maybe with huge amounts of money, but not the “get it fast and cheap” amounts of money that most small businesses bring to the table. Success takes participation, and often a lot of it. It means having a direction in your business, being ready to follow that direction, and changing direction as needed.

Why Small Companies Are Small

Small companies are small for a reason. That reason varies a lot between companies, but it is often because of lack of participation and attention to the things which grow a business.

Many small businesses do not have the resources in place to oversee important areas of their business growth. When they lack the needed personnel to manage things like legal, accounting, marketing, research and development, and etcetera, they must improvise. That can create a huge burden, but if it was easy, it probably wouldn’t pay very well.

Putting somebody in charge and delegating your weak points is fine, in fact, it is a great idea. However, when it comes to your marketing, the part of your business where it reaches the customers, you should pay close attention to getting it right. Marketing is what will direct many of the other growth factors in a business. Lacking participation and just being a witness in your marketing can cause a chain reaction that destroys many other areas of a company. Marketing is an integral piece of a company that brings in money for all the other things a company needs.

Try asking a couple of marketing professionals how often they find themselves waiting on clients to complete simple tasks. It is often startling how much a marketing person has to hound clients just to send over the pictures they said they were going to send last week, or the reports they asked for two months ago. Willingness to pay attention and complete simple marketing related tasks is often reflected in the overall success of an organization, and it is what I call being a “participant” rather than a “witness”.

I am not trying to sell you this idea, because you can probably already see it in companies all around you … maybe even your own.

Photo credit to Son of Groucho via Flickr

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