This is a quick post since I’m in a busy period right now, with projects and all that, so I don’t have the energy or the time to write as much as I’d like here. However, I’ll try to post at least twice a week.

In other news, I am now a certified Project Manager. Visit my Linkedin page for more details. (under education)

Click here to go to the article about Google.

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I thought I’d do a bit on how an SEO should be these days:

1. Coding smarty - while being an SEO doesn’t usually need you to be an AJAX guru, you need to have at least basic knowledge about HTML, CSS, XML, DHTML, as well as stuff like PHP, SQL and configuring Apache servers
2. Copyrighter by blood - no one can do SEO unless they know how to write content, because SEO is as much about search engine optimization as it is about human optimization, meaning that people need to love those titles so that they choose them from a million optimized titles
3. Marketer - an SEO needs to understand product placement, and target users, and how to include the offline marketing plan as well as branding into the website
4. Restless - sometimes SEO campaigns mean working three days straight with one hour sleep because you need to meet a deadline, or because you need to catch an indexing date (however sometimes you need to wait for a customer to give you content which means dolce vita)
5. A pretty good salesperson - I don’t know how it is where you come from but here people fail to see how SEO is better than online advertising, so you need to teach them like you would a six-year-old and you need to keep pestering them until they say yes. And then you need to justify the cost, etc.
6. An Internet fanatic - an SEO needs to keep up with a lot of data to keep up to date and beat other SEOs. also, he needs to know what tools to use when, and how to find different ways and techniques through which to promote the websites he works on
7. Ex-podcaster, ex-blogger, ex-youtube poster, because he needs to have a background in social media, and an understanding of the problems and opportunities it brings as well as a thorough understanding of how to adapt to fast moving tech discoveries
8. Not on myspace - while I understand that it could be a marketing tool (in the US), it’s a place for immature teenagers and embedded crap. What happened to the personal website? Connect how you want, but try to make it look good (like LinkedIn, or Twitter, or even maybe if there is no other choice Facebook)
9. Launcher of at least one viral campaign which went - experience is key and social media is really starting to offer its perks to those interested in investing in it; just don’t get too attached to one site, they’re not usually meant to last
10. 100% white hat - if there’s one mortal danger in SEO it’s black hat techniques which if not completely brand new and unexplored as well as permanently maintained and refreshed can totally ruin months of hard work making a site usable (i’ll post in a few days about position 60 penalty for buying links)

That’s just a quick list I made to give you some ideas, naturally there’s a lot more and maybe there’s room for a sequel to this list, anyway, leave a comment, let me know Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed or who knows what you’ll miss out on. You can also subscribe by email.

It’s not like this is any news, but it’s been speculated, and pretty easily proven as well that meta keyword tags are as useless to SEO as putting a 1500 keyword list at the bottom of the page: it may have worked in 1994, but not today. However, people still use them as there have been some cases where if the word was in the body text and meta keywords tag it gained a place or two.

Just to make it clear, Google doesn’t even bother with them. At all. Seriously. I’ve made my own tests and Google doesn’t care what you write there. Yahoo seems to, but in a limited way, and who cares about MSN anyway. But all in all, even if they do show up in Yahoo, they tend to have a really limited weight.

However, the legal field tends to misguide people into understanding that meta keywords are like billboards and that by adding a trademark into them you are in some way violating the safety of that brand because you’re telling people you’re them. I mean in theory that’s viable, even if it’s a longshot, but in practice those meta have nothing to do with that. I mean if someone’s searching for Coke, why shouldn’t Pepsi have a say in it. On the other hand, what’s Pepsi to do with people who search for Coke products? It’s debatable, but as a court has ruled recently, it seems meta keywords have zero to do with search optimization.

And that brings us to the main story here, it seems there was a lawsuit around 18th of April, Standard Process vs. Dr. Scott Banks (pdf file) where someone claimed“trademark infringement and false designation of origin” . It all started when the doc was denied resale rights to the products of Standard Inc. because they get their panties in a crunch if they’re sold online. All’s ok here, the doc resold them from pharmacies etc but kept the logo and stuff like that on the site (which I’d find normal since he sells their products) but he was forced to take them off because they “created the false impression that Dr. Banks was affiliated with Standard Process” which was again bad. He even went as far as to include a disclaimer that he’s got nothing to do with them.

However, the guys still sued him and it was their job to prove that they had a reason. But what we’re interested in is “Dr. Banks used Standard Process trademarks in the metatags of his website“. However this was a straightforward case where it was shown that “modern search engines make little if any use of
metatags.”. So a court has ruled that meta tags are literally unimportant. Also, it was seen that even when people search for the keyword and visit the doc’s site they get the original products, and also the doc is not a direct competitor.

It’s an interesting case so I advise you to read the entire PDF from the link above to see more details but all in all the bottom line is simple: don’t bother with meta tags. Actually, my advice would be don’t use the keywords tag anyway since a you don’t want to give your keywords to your competitors and b they aren’t useful for anything…

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A new study in the field of search behaviour has unearthed a few interesting facts about clicking habits of online users, and about what gets clicked how many times. It’s an interesting bit of information for anyone caring, and should offer the people who know what to do a bit of insight into the minds of their visitors.

The main result of the test is that people tend to click on specialized searches when searching for general terms (like they search for golf balls and you give them golf balls images or videos in the results) than when searching for specialized terms.

The first new concept here is blended search results. These are results which, besides normal search results, contain specialized items such as images, youtube videos and so on. Also, these include searches for news items, or shopping items (the top bar from the Google search results).

The results from this step of the study reveal:

• 36% of searchers click news results within blended search results, while only 17% click a news result after conducting a news-specific search.
• 31% of search engine users click image results within blended search results, while 26% click an image result after conducting an image-specific search.
• 17% of search engine users click video results within blended search results, while only 10% click a video result after conducting a video-specific search.
• Images are the most clicked result type after a specialized search.
• News items are the most clicked result type within blended search results.

The second part of the study refers to search behaviour on the first page of results. It seems it is becoming more and more important. It used to be said that first page results are each tenfold separated (first is ten times as effective as second, second ten times as third etc), but it seems this has expanded to 100-fold.

The actual results:

• 68% of search engine users click results on the first page of search results, compared to 62% in 2006, and 60% in 2004.
• Only 8% of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result.
• 49% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for, change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results, up from 40% in 2006, and 42% in 2004.
• 37% of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category, up slightly from 35% in 2006 and 33% in 2002.

So as you can see top page results means you get associated with an authority in the field. For example, I’m considered to be an authority on Google crawling due to some recent articles (for some specific searches). Although this is not far from the truth, the rather short life of the blog (mid-February) makes it rather unexpected.

What we can see from this study which clearly shows page one results as essential is that if you’re not on the first page, you must optimize your website. Also, make sure you hire someone who can write copy, because no matter how good you are at writing copy you may not be specialized to write seo’d titles. This is highly important because no matter how high you are in the results, it’s likely people will click a title that resembles what they thought of when searching, even if it’s lower on the bottom. I’ve even had page five clicks because I write quality titles. Use scarcity, mystery and include a call to action if you can.

For those wanting the study you can get it as a results pdf. We have to thank these guys, this is really important stuff…

In another study, rather unrelated, we find out that out of all web searches 80% are for research, whereas only 10% are transactional (actual purchases), which means you really need to rethink AdWords spending. Are you sure your keywords convert properly? Are they too general or too specific? I’ve talked to a potential client today who had 4 keywords, all very general, and they did not want to give them up because they had a lot of visits, even though they felt leads were rather uncorrelated to the ads. I can’t wait to see conversion ratios and bounce rates because I really feel (in a backed up by research way) that general terms convert like crap… Let’s hope I’ll get a chance to fix their conversion rate, it’s a shame to spend a lot of money on keywords which don’t bring you the amount of business you need at a price you want. I mean it’s a good idea to spend the same amount on many keywords with high conversion rates, proper landing pages and awesome ad copy rather than go general and get less than perfect hits on general terms. I mean, only based on that study and you’re wasting 80% of your money…

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