seo questions Archives by Mark Murnahan

Are There Any Dumb SEO Questions?

I want to introduce you to Michael Colemire, a Kentucky artist, and newly initiated asker of dumb SEO questions.

I talk to a lot of people about SEO and social media marketing. It is my job, so that makes perfect sense. I answer a lot of questions, debunk a lot of myths, and develop a lot of ideas. I brainstorm with industry know-it-alls, and I brainstorm with people who know little or nothing about these topics, but want to grow their business.

Something I found interesting while I recently visited on the phone with my friend and long-time reader of my blog was that he was afraid of asking dumb questions. His name is Michael Colemire, and he is a very talented sculptor and wood carver. He is not a marketing guy, but he has some great works of art to market, so he wants to learn.

Michael said that the reason he often hesitates to comment on my blog is that he didn’t want to bother me with dumb questions. Also, being such a nice guy, he did not want to feel like he was taking advantage of me. After I picked my jaw back up and thought for a moment, I realized that he had expressed a pretty common and legitimate sentiment. I want to shatter any misconceptions about this.

You see, I have a pretty tricky task of writing a blog about SEO and social media marketing. These are topics which reach people from every different skill level and many different schools of thought about best practices. I try to produce something useful that will cover many skill levels, and that is the trickiest thing.

Why I Want Your Dumb SEO Questions

Reader’s comments are very important to me, because they help me to understand what people already know, or want to know more about. Comments (including “dumb” questions) help to keep me sharp with an appropriate answer, and they give other readers opportunities to look at things from other angles, and cultivate their thoughts.

Let’s take a break for an Internet truth:

A sad truth of the Internet is that it is very easy for people to be selfish. A lot of people will not do something for other people “just because”. It is common that if people think it may benefit you, more than it does them, they will just pass on by. They won’t comment, they won’t retweet it, and they won’t share it on Facebook … unless there is more in it for them than for you.

Something I shared with Michael, and I’ll tell you, is that those “dumb questions” also provide other benefits to me, such as better ranking and recognition in lists that measure a blog’s value to readers. No, it doesn’t pay me money, but it does bring me a bit closer, and it is like a big warm hug and a pat on the butt. I think that every writer needs a pat on the butt and an “attaboy” now and then.

I guess you could say that your comments and dumb SEO questions directly benefit me in a lot of ways, but what about how they benefit you?

Afraid of a Dumb SEO Question or Comment? Think Again!

I know that a lot of people will totally overlook this, but when you add your comment to my blog, it will probably benefit you even more than it does me. This is because when you add your comment, you can add a link to your website, which can have a real benefit to your search engine rankings. It also comes with networking benefits as I described in a recent article titled “Why Disqus May Be The Best Social Network of 2011“,

Do you know what a link from a high-traffic and well ranked blog can do to help your search engine rankings? Well, I’ll just say that it is why I delete a constant flow of spam comments from people who want no more than a link from this blog. Yes, I kill the useless spammy comments, but the legitimate stuff stays here.

Your sincere questions and useful answers deserve to be rewarded, and that reward comes in the form of the number one highest valued SEO treasure there is … a link to your website. Not to mention a great opportunity to network with other readers who may decide you are pretty cool.

One more thing: If you are a super great person like Michael Colemire, I may even credit an article to you.

Thanks for the dumb questions and for taking advantage of me, sculptor and artist Michael Colemire.

What SEO Questions are Dumb?

There are a lot of things which I may think are obvious, but then, this is the work I do every day to earn a living and feed my family. These things are supposed to be obvious to me, after about 15 years in the industry. Let me assure you that they were not always so obvious. I have worked hard and spent a lot of time to develop a solid understanding of my job. Practice makes a world of difference.

I can’t carve or sculpt like Michael Colemire, and I probably never will. If I asked him how to carve a piece of wood into an intricate design, my questions may sound really basic to him, but only because I don’t know the answers.

I guess my point here is that the dumbest questions about SEO are simply the ones you neglect to ask. I would love to say that there are no dumb questions, but I am not ready to commit to that, just yet. I have heard some pretty damn dumb stuff over the years. Most of the questions about the work I do, and the things I write about are just kind of like the questions I would ask Michael. Not dumb at all, just inexperienced.

On the topic of SEO questions, I have listed some of the most common SEO questions, created lists of things people should know about SEO, and have a pretty lengthy blog archive. I welcome you to read these, but in any case, I hope that you will never hesitate to add your comment or question about an article I write. After all, answering questions a primary goal of this blog.

So, what are your dumb SEO questions? Bring it on!

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Is Twitter Good for SEO?: Is Ice Cream Good for Hemorrhoids?

I suspect that you want to know, “is Twitter good for SEO?” Either that, or your bum is feeling pretty sore, and you are willing to try anything. I am happy to help with the Twitter part, and I am sorry about your rump. Try pistachio, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.

I am surprised that more people have not discussed the topic of Twitter and SEO to provide their opinion-based answers. I think that a lot of people are afraid to touch on this, for fear of giving an unpopular answer, or being wrong. Well, leave it to me to tell you this: “Yes, Twitter helps SEO!”

Twitter can help with SEO efforts, directly, as well as indirectly when Twitter users share the information in places such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and elsewhere. If somebody tells you otherwise, you are listening to the wrong SEO advice.

I read an article on the widely respected SEOmoz.org blog today that addressed the SEO value of Twitter. It reminded me how much I sometimes forget the importance of bringing things down to a very simple level. I guess I just forget that not everybody has done this “Internet thing” to earn food for the past decade and a half. I try to keep things pretty simple, but I know I can wing one over readers’ heads some days. I try to provide useful marketing and SEO tips, but if I ever forget to make them simple, I apologize. This one should be nice and easy.

I thought that the value of Twitter for SEO was pretty obvious to most users, a long time ago. Sometimes, when I see what other people are saying, I recognize that details like this can slip by some people. Here is a quote from the recent article on SEOmoz titled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“:

“So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.”

The article had some good points, but it really did take me back to grammar school. Quoting the article, “Now that we know” … what? Holy hemorrhoid! I guess I assumed that we knew this kind of thing years ago. Links from my old Yahoo chat groups in 1998 helped my SEO, but is that revolutionary, too? It was kind of funny to me how much it resembled something I said in early 2009 when I wrote the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“. Here is a statement I made in the book, and I stand by it today:

“Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results.”

Heck, maybe the Internet is coming up to speed, or maybe I am just one of those people who are as strange as a pickled duck fart and foresee things in some uncanny way. I don’t know … maybe it is a combination.

Do More Tweets Help SEO?

This should be obvious, but the impact of more people tweeting your website content may be even higher than you imagined. Whenever somebody tweets your linked content, it creates links to your website. The quality and quantity of inks to a website are the most important factors that search engines use to gauge the importance of a website. Also, the links Twitter produces are not necessarily only on Twitter. There are a lot of services which aggregate Twitter’ed content, as well as many widgets and other syndication through RSS in which it may appear on other websites.

It will be far more important for other people to tweet your content than just tweeting your link a squillion times. Don’t bother with that, because it is not going to make you a ton of new friends. A few times is fine, but let’s not go out of the way to garner death threats, and insults about your mother.

Do More Twitter Followers Help SEO?

I am the last person who would wish to promote a “Twitter follower-frenzy”, so I almost hate to say this. Many indicators will suggest that more followers on Twitter can improve the SEO value of a tweet. Yes, a high follower count does correlate to higher SEO value, but I believe it correlates even better with the number of Twitter lists a person is on and other measurements.

I know that a lot of people want to become popular on Twitter, but before you implement some off the cuff plan, be sure to read the article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. If you do the things that many moronic marketers suggest, people will wish a bad case of herpes on you and throw you on a flaming bed of nails before they will care to listen to you … or buy your stuff.

The important factor is being useful and giving people what they want. Here you go … try thinking a little bit more like this video.

There is not much that I dislike more than a bunch of bad marketers out there with nothing useful to say. I think that millions of Twitter users would agree with me on this. Don’t take this as any suggestion that you go and try to gather as many Twitter followers as you can. Instead, I recommend, as I always have, that you be useful. As with anything SEO-related, being useful and providing compelling information is what matters the most. If you can do that, many of the other factors seem to magically fall into place. I am pretty sure it can also help hemorrhoids, even better than ice cream.

Twitter Changed, But it is Still Useful for SEO

Although I still really like Twitter, it changed a lot over time. Twitter had a huge growth spurt, and as the new users poured in, much of the real value of the service dwindled. It is still good for SEO, but what so many people do not grasp is that if you expect people to tweet and retweet what you have to share, it had better be pretty damn awesome to be heard over the excess noise.

How much did Twitter change? I could write another book about this, but I would rather stick needles in my eyes. I will just offer this: I wrote about Twitter retweets on February 29th, 2009. It was titled “Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet” and it received many hundreds of retweets. Tweetmeme says 420, but that data is old, and it was actually many more. In another case, I wrote a really short and basic article (approximately 250 words) about Twitter username selection on April 8th of 2009. It also received a ton of retweets and 158 reader comments. Back in the earlier days, I would measure between 500-1,500 clicks on darn near any link I tweeted, within minutes. Now, a hundredth of that would buzz my radar.

Maybe I just became less “brilliant” with the things people love to share, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. Many Twitter users just don’t see it when they are trying to follow a squillion other people, with hopes of being followed back.

Today, when I tweet something from my blog, I do not count on Twitter to pass it along. In fact, Twitter directly accounts for under three percent of my website traffic. Moreover, I have measured that the website traffic coming directly from Twitter has a low probability of participating and adding their comments to a topic. I think this is because of Twitter-enhanced attention disorders which were there before Twitter. Twitter just made it even more “old fashioned” to actually read things and pay attention. My study on this is forthcoming, but let’s just start the study with whether you will take the time to finish reading and add your comment.

Since the time of these popular Twitter-related articles, I have written hundreds of very compelling and useful blog articles which far exceeded the relatively minor value of those. I can effectively measure the value of Twitter from a conversational standpoint as much lower than it was. The SEO value of Twitter and the Twitter “retweet” is still there, but if you want to break through the noise, it better be something stunning.

As I said in the article titled “Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!“, I must add a basic disclaimer as follows:

“I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines.”

If you came here about the ice cream, I am sorry about your bum. Perhaps you could try eating it really fast to take your mind off the ‘roids. If you came here about Twitter and SEO, please add your comments on my blog. Just type it in and let’s have a good old fashioned ice cream social.

Photo credit to weelakeo via Flickr

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SEO Lesson: Were You Just Browsing and Found This by Accident?

I have a request that you do not be a stooge, and that you do not treat SEO and Internet marketing professionals as stooges either.

During a phone call a moment ago, I was inspired to point something out about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing that is obvious to me, but clearly some people do not already understand. This is an extremely basic SEO lesson.

I make a point of asking people who contact me for Internet marketing a very simple question as follows: “How did you find me?” Of course I already know the answer, but so many people do not realize that we can track everything online.

My question has been answered in many ways, and even as silly as “I was just surfing the Internet and came across your website.” Even that answer is just fine. It is usually not a truthful one, and I actually already know when people contact me the exact way that they reached me. You see, when you email me or surf my websites, I can see your IP address, network name, location, what you searched for, and many other details that tell me who you are and how you found me. I ask people this question because of one important follow-up question that either goes right over their head or totally blows their socks off. That question is as follows: “Do you think it was an accident that you found me amongst the millions of other web pages out there competing for your business?”

This is Friday evening and I have a webcast to prepare for, so I do not want to take a lot of time with silly scenarios and rhetorical questions, but I have one more question to ponder. Now pay close attention and answer this honestly …

Do you think that you found this article on this blog about Internet marketing and search engine optimization by accident?

The truthful answer is that it was no accident at all, and I have created the means for you to find my blog. When people contact me about my services, I often have to remind them that if they found me amongst the millions of others out there, it is because I made it happen. If I did not create this article, and if I did not have the means to help people to find me, they would not find me.

When you approach any SEO and Internet marketing professional because you found them, you must question just how and why you found them instead of a website selling pink pantyhose. If you are confused why you found me instead of pink pantyhose, you should probably turn your computer off and get some rest.

Otherwise, perhaps you will be open to this crazy notion. If somebody can be sure that you find them instead of millions of others in the extremely competitive field of Internet marketing and SEO services, they can probably do the same for you.

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Find Good SEO: Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

Being ranked at the top of search listings on Google, Bing, and etcetera, for the things that make companies money is a very competitive endeavor. The SEO who can produce really fantastic results are few and far between. The demand is high, and the supply is comparatively low. SEO is a tricky business, and to find good SEO is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. What makes it even harder to find good SEO (search engine optimization), is that the best SEO (search engine optimizers) are not seeking you.

Unless you sell fish milkshakes or garlic scented breath spray, you have probably noticed that there are a lot of others trying to attract the same customers as you. I should not need to explain all the reasons for wanting to be at the top of search listings, but I will say that being there is very valuable. I don’t just mean being there for your few “important” search phrases like your company name. I mean being there for the right search phrases, with the right marketing message, and a website that will convert lookers into buyers. I mean being listed for thousands of searches and maximizing your lateral keyword effectiveness. This is a job of the SEO, and we are paid to do the work that makes most people want to pull their hair out and scream at their computer. We do what others cannot do. In fact, maybe we are just a little more like Superman than we like to let on. You know, we try to be pretty humble (even though it is difficult).

Good SEO Are Not Salespeople

It has often been said that a good SEO does not need to seek business. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, there are many great opportunities open to them. This does not mean they do not want your business, but only that they are probably not banging down your door, ringing your phone off the hook, or filling your email inbox with offers of cheap SEO services. Now, I should explain that I don’t mean the ho-hum average SEO, but the ones who really deserve to carry the title of Search Engine Optimizer. There are a lot of fakes, but I have already explained how to tell the difference between good SEO and bad SEO. If you missed that article, you should make time to read and find out.

Why do I think that good SEO are not salepeople? Well, I think most SEO can probably sell SEO if they have to, but for most of us I think it gets pretty aggravating to answer salesy questions that people do not actually even care to know anyway. I mean, do you really think a client needs to know each detail of the work to be performed? Do they need to know everything the SEO knows? If that was the case, they would do it themselves. They just need to know that the SEO is good at what they do, and that they will receive quantifiable benefit from the work. Hell, I hate selling SEO, but I love performing the work. Go ahead and search Google for sell SEO and see if you find me there (Hint: Don’t look down). To me, proof should be all the selling I need to do. If somebody wants more than that, I guess I can take my shirt off and show them my sexy chest, because that would likely mean more to them than my in-depth SEO lesson that will go right over their head anyway.

Good SEO Are Quirky, But Entrepreneurial

As people, the best SEO (search engine optimizers) tend to be a little bit quirky, opinionated, eccentric, clever, and above all, entrepreneurial. SEO do not choose this work just because all the other jobs down at the 7-Eleven were taken. We do it because we have a passion for success, a competitive spirit, and often something to prove … call it a Napoleon complex if you like. SEO is a field filled with some truly astonishing marketing talent that is honed every day by constant studying of people, trends, facts, figures, and of course, the “secret ingredient” that we will never share with you because after all, you are not “in the club”.

Why SEO Don’t Seek Your Business

So, you may still wonder why I say that “good SEO don’t seek your business”, and that is something I am here to answer. The reason is this: A good search engine optimizer can take their skills to any industry, at any time, and invest themselves in that industry and earn a fortune. This is not a myth, and a good SEO can back it up. I would say that it is even true that a “pretty good SEO” can achieve a high level of success if they put enough time, study, and patience into their work in a given industry. In my case, I earned millions of dollars selling wholesale Internet services over the past decade. That did not happen because I was passionate about selling dial-up Internet access and web hosting services to ISPs. It happened because I was passionate about SEO, and I kicked that market in the ass hard enough to amass up to 2,000 resellers. It would have been even easier if I could have just been the SEO all along and not had to work as the CEO, too.

You may wonder why, if a search engine optimizer is good, they would choose to work with clients’ projects instead of selling their own product or service. This is where some people just don’t understand the required focus of SEO work. If I wanted to sell cigars online, you can bet I would corner the cigar market. I am already well listed in Google for cigar related search terms, and I am not even a cigar retailer. I don’t want to sell cigars. I do not want the hassles of operating another business … I just want to sell other people’s cigars. That is why I am a search engine optimizer. As you may have noticed, my blog is “a Web Guy” and not “a Cigar Guy”. I want to focus on making products and services successful with better SEO, and not deal with all the operational headaches of the business.

Good SEO Seek Opportunity

The reasons freelance or agency SEO consulting is so attractive to a good search engine optimizer has a lot to do with our entrepreneurial drive, and our passion for success. In order to be a really great SEO, it takes a lot of focus and love for the work. I will speak for a group when I say that most of us love wielding our success tools and reaching the top of search results and making more business happen. We think like a Mount Everest climber. We have one overall goal in mind, and that is to reach the peak.

SEO will often turn away business for reasons that you may not understand. This is not entirely about money, either. We seek opportunity, and much of the time, the client simply does not have the opportunity we are seeking.

Another reason good SEO do not seek your business is because until you understand the value of our work enough to come to us, you would never pay us more than a small fraction of what our work is worth. Unless you understand that we pay you more in increased business and brand recognition than you will ever pay us, you are just not ready.

Consider how you would react to a qualified SEO with a track record of success and a proposal that he or she will work tirelessly over the next year to make your product or service offering more visible, with better brand recognition, higher conversion of lookers to buyers, higher profit margin, and they can back it up with real numbers. They even come to you with legitimate SEO guarantees that make sense to you. How do you answer to that? Do you say “No, I am totally happy where I am … I don’t really want more customers.” If that is the case, which sometimes really is the case, then why in the name of all things intelligent are you reading this blog? You want more business or you should be reading something a whole lot more suitable to sitting in a rocking chair or moving to Florida to play golf. No, instead, you want more business, and you want to know ways to make that happen.

Once you accept this, the only obstacle left is for you to get up off your wallet and push your marketing “Go” button. Just don’t ask a qualified SEO to start begging for your business or offering you discounts while you are getting more out of the transaction than they are.

Summary: The best SEO are the ones you find, and not the ones who found you.

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Improve Local Search Marketing with Global Authority

I recently visited with a local search engine optimization (SEO) client who did not understand the value of blogging about things outside his local market and having items of global interest on his website. He believed that focusing more on things local to him were of the highest importance. It got me to thinking that a lot of people with a local marketing focus may have similar belief. I want to shed a little light on the subject and explain why globally appealing content can create huge benefits to local search results.

Since I have been in my industry for well over a decade, I sometimes forget to break things down and make them really simple for those who are less familiar with my work. That is what I want to do today. I will try to make this easy to understand.

Local Search Marketing Made Easy

I notice a lot of people trying really hard to accomplish local search marketing goals by focusing on website content about local topics. These things have their place, but a common mistake I find is people attempting to tap into the same local resources that all of their competitors are using. It is a sad shame that many of these people are just wasting a lot of time imitating failure.

If you want to know an easier way to improve local search marketing results, try looking outside of your back yard and appeal to people on a broader basis. With a global audience on your side, beating the local competition is easy.

Website Authority is Authority, Wherever the Location

When you produce information on your website that is relevant to your industry, whether in your local market or globally, it enhances your authority. It can do this in a number of ways. It gives more potential terms that people can search for and find your website, but you just want the local ones … I get that. I understand how you could think that somebody finding your website in an outside market may not seem very useful, but it is! It is extremely useful, and in fact, even more useful than all the locally focused content put together.

You may wonder why this is the case. Simply put, information with broader and less localized appeal will help to enhance and grow the incoming links to your website. This means links that point to your website from other websites. Links create quantifiable authority by showing search engines that other people see you as a quality point of reference. Now you may wonder how the broader appeal will build valuable links to your website. I will explain.

Local Content Means Local Links, But You Need Diversity!

If you spend much of your effort trying to focus only on local matters and excluding the rest of the world, you are making a costly mistake. You may find some people linking to your website, but it will be far less diverse, and far less beneficial than a wider global reach. Sure, a link from your local newspaper or television station is great, and it will certainly give emphasis to your location, but location is not the real battle here. It is easy to show where you are, but you need to be an authority in what you do and not just where you are.

With too much focus on location, you will be less likely to find people linking to your website from all around the world, and geographical diversity of incoming links matters … it matters a lot! The way you get this to happen is by producing things with a widespread appeal that will be picked up by bloggers looking for a resource to cite, users in forums looking for a link to reference a given topic, and other social media users who like your message enough to share it. This will only happen if it has relevance to them. If you focus on local issues that hold little relevance outside your market area, you are neglecting these people who may otherwise share the information with others. They will share it with others by using links to your website.

Do Incoming Links Really Matter?

I think a lot of people will underestimate the importance of the links pointing to their website. The value of these incoming links is not the people who click on them, but rather the search engines that follow those links and add them all up to determine your overall authority within your industry. If you want to know how to do the equivalent of killing a grizzly bear with a looseleaf notebook, you better stick around and read the article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“ When you have enough backlinks (links pointing to your website from other websites), you can put just about anything you want on your website and expect it to rank highly in search engines … local or not. For example, if you search Google for “unicorn hunting expedition” you will easily find my blog right on top. Similarly, if you Google “unicorn hunting expedition Topeka” I am still right there where my local market can find me.

Search Engines Know Your Location

Another factor of local search that should never be overlooked is that search engines pay attention to where you are located when you perform a search. When people search for something that has a lot of local results, all other things being equal, the local results will be given preference. Most search engine users do not override the local search settings of Google and other search engines, and many do not even know they exist. This is just another reason that you will do well to focus on useful and creative content that appeals beyond your back door. Again, I will remind you that you need to show authority in what you do, rather than trying to build emphasis of where you are located.

I welcome your comments here on my blog, or you may respond privately if you are feeling shy.