In a bold move to snatch up a longtime business colleague to strengthen our team, SEO Moves is proud to announce the addition of Phil Leahy. (this is pronounced “lay” and we will all roll our eyes if you make a Filet Mignon joke when you meet him)  Phil will head up the Australian and all Asian Pacific Operations.

With Phil on our team, we still intend to remain small enough to offer the personalized, intense service that our clients expect, more than any Australia SEO company.

Both John and I have worked with Phil in our previous ecommerce lives, mainly through the ECMTA and Pesa organizations. His business skills and online marketing sixth sense are amazing to behold.  We just spent the week with him at PubCon and his enthusiasm and positivity is inspiring and contagious.  Phil’s sense for building businesses, for seeing the big picture, for making profiitable networking connections across verticals even, will benefit our Aussie clientele well beyond the internet marketing they hire us for.   Welcome Phil!

We’re coming up on holiday season in the United States, and for those of us in Internet-related fields that might take on a different meaning than for others. For online retailers like Amazon and Overstock, as well as for the online arms of brick & mortar giants like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, this is the most profitable time of the year by far. But for the many sites that make their money off another Internet business model – no charge for content, profit through advertising – the impact on the bottom line might be quite different.

The collection of holidays celebrated in America at the end of the year is impressive, from Thanksgiving to Hanukah to Christmas to New Year’s. These holidays mean more time spent way from work, more time spent traveling and vacationing, and less time on the computer. The real drag on web traffic, however, is the vacation-prone summer months. XiTi Monitor, a web survey institute, reports that between 2002 and 2007, the months of June through September all displayed negative seasonal effects on web traffic. August was the biggest culprit, with a seasonal drop in traffic of 14%.

How can your site avoid these drops in traffic? Stay away from content that is too season-specific, for one. Sparkplugging, a blog and community for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, noted major changes in traffic to specific articles regarding tax write-offs and regarding keeping kids busy during the summer. The tax article saw a quick buildup until its apex on April 15, followed by a steep and permanent drop (until the next tax season). The second article, about how parents can keep kids busy, saw a decline after summer ended and kids started going back to school.

To a certain extent, these examples show the danger of existing completely within a niche. While niches can be profitable and often represent a smart strategy, it’s hard to build a successful revenue model around a site that only gets real traffic for two months out of the year. But on the other hand, if your content is diverse and you play your cards right, you can take advantage of each one of the various shifts in traffic. Although it sounds like common sense, it can still be done much better by many companies. Adapt your content to each season when the time calls for it, and then shift back when it’s no longer relevant.

Research the impact that summer and seasonal web traffic trends have on your website, and adapt your strategy accordingly.

PubCon is next week. If you are planning on attending, we’d love to meet up face to face. Let us know, drop us an email at info@seomoves.com

PubCon is one of the largest industry events, covering all Webmaster topics.  The education is phenomenal and the networking is even better.  It’s held in Vegas, at the convention center, Nov 11-14.  It is one of the more affordable events of the year, and one of the most important.  More than SEO, it will cover design and programming issues, ppc, social media, branding, affiliate marketing.

Please let us know if you will be out there so we can say hello!

Well low and behold, Google has yet again tweaked the search results for us.  Just today I noticed something new just today, they are now geo-locating by city in your search results. Now it is a known fact that the search results change based upon your local Google data center, but this is the first time I have seen Google displaying this for us to see.

Notice the new little note the post in the upper right hand corner; “Customized for the Metro Washington DC Metro Area”, they are kind enough to let us know they are at it again.

Just a Little FYI.

After a client implemented their company blog this week, they asked how often they needed to update it. You know, they didn’t start their website to be a writer, and they didn’t plan of having to update their site weekly, daily, even monthly. So the VERY next question is: Why is Fresh Content Good for SEO?

I realized that the answer(s) are not obvious to many site owners. They’ve read that they have to do this. They have been told by their SEO company. They really don’t wanna. So WHY is it that they have to?

Several reasons come to mind. Of course, not even considering SEO perspective, having a company blog does add to a user experience and can potentially turn clicks into conversions. Potential Client gets to know you, Potential Client learns about how to choose a product, Potential Client realizes you are an expert in your field, etc.

But without the SEO value, some site owners could still skip the whole blog/fresh content bit, and still be successful. The SEO reasons I can think of are:

1. Frequent site updates encourage frequent indexing. You want Search Engines to visit your site often. When a search engine visits your site and finds nothing new over and over, they will visit less often. If they visit 1x a week, and there is new info, they will visit more than 1x a week. If they visit daily and there is always something new, they continue to visit daily. Remember a search engine wants to index the most recent relevant information to deliver to its readers, so it doesn’t want to miss out on anything you feed it.
2. Google values content. So SEOs do it. I personally am frustrated by this. I read SEOs going on about how much better your website will be with tons of content; become an authority on your topic; don’t build a blog for the search engines, build it for clients; the only way to rank is to be an authority; give people something worth linking to. This is definitely true, but what about the sites that just don’t lend themselves to unending content? What about someone that can say all they need to say about their wedding invitations in a handful of guides, how much more relevant news are we going to read about wedding invitations? Write about weddings, advice, tips they say—well why do I need to buy my wedding invitations from a wedding expert? I just want beautiful invites, and a good guide or two is plenty. Selection, customer service, and pricing are more important to me than scads of articles on weddings, or even than a guide. However, Google decided that more content is better, and so we do it. This is artificially manipulating a search engine just as much as link building if you ask me, but it’s what the search engines like, so you have to do it. Nuf said.
3. More content gives you more opportunity to tell Google what your pages is about. Continual fresh content will naturally be keyword rich and very very often some long-tail niche keywords will naturally occur in your text. The more chances search engines have to determine what the site is about, the better.
4. A recent article has a very good chance of ranking in the top 10 temporarily, especially a dated article as in an blog. Again, SEs want the latest news, so they will value a new item and potentially rank it higher.

So bite the bullet and find ways to add content to your sites. You do not need to go overboard, even 1 article a week is sufficient. I’ve shared some content ideas on a previous entry. Honestly it gets easier as you get used to it, and worst case you can always hire it out.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

A little off topic here, but if you spend as much time as me online, you want to get around as fast as possible. Once you have a T1, Cable or Fios your well on your way, but few people know that what internet browser you use can determine how long a page takes to load and how each website is displayed. Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most dominant player in the world of web browsers, with Mozilla Firefox a close second. There are some niche players like Opera and then you have the recent release of Google’s Chrome, which has been fairly quickly dismissed as an average offering and not currently worthy of a download.

Firefox is currently offering a new browser called Minefield, which has claims of being 10-15% faster then any other browser around, I know most people are like 10-15% but that does add up, if you log 12-15 hours a day online (like me) they you can save yourself 1 hour +, not bad from a free piece of software eah?

**Warning** Minefield is currently in the Alpha mode, meaning that it could get all buggy and bring your computer to it’s knees. I have not read anything negative about it, and I have been using it for about 24 hours now without an issue.

I have found it to indeed be faster then any other browser, it has not acted buggy at all )which is saying alot because it is in Alpha testing) the only thing is that it does not support all FireFox add on’s currently. So if the speed at which you surf the net is important to you and you will not be too upset if the browser starts acting buggy, then give Minefield a try.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Always on the look out for good tools for on site search engine optimization, stumbled accross a great tool that is Open Source; it is called URL Rewrite.

The apparently works fairly well and will certainly help those save this part of their budget for off site optimization.

Google is playing with search results. About 3 or 4 months ago Google slipped in a little sentence in the upper right hand corner of the search results.

If you click on details, you will see some Google fast talk about how they are going to add an additional layer of results on top of the normal or traditional search engine results. Have a look:

Now up until today (October 16^th 2008) it used to have sentence here giving you the opportunity to see the traditional results, and if you clicked on a link on this page you could remove the new and improved customized results and see a traditional search query results. Low and behold today, Google has done us a huge favor by removing the ability for us to not see the new customized results or the second set of search engine rankings.

Here is the lingo Google is providing us with to help us understand the second layer of search results:

When you perform a search, a message appears in the upper right corner of the search results page if the results have been customized based on one or more of the following factors:

Location: If you’re signed into your Google Account, your search results may be customized for a default location that you’ve previously specified (for example, in Google Maps). If you’re not signed in, then results may be customized for an approximate location based on your IP address.

If you’d like Google to use a different location, you can sign into or create a Google Account and provide a city or street address. Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.

Recent searches: We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you’re signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser.

*Web History: If you’re signed in and have Web History enabled, we customize your search results based on what you’ve searched for in the past on Google, and what sites you’ve visited. If there’s a particular search that you’d rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account. Learn more about Web History.

You can click the more details link in the message to see the specific information used to customize your search results. For privacy reasons, this information becomes unavailable after a brief period of time. Visit the Privacy Center.

Now I have polled about 20 internet savvy users, and none of them even noticed this little phrase in the upper right hand corner of the search results. Therefore one would assume that the vast majority of people whom use Google traditionally or the average internet user never even noticed these changes.

I believe that these changes do not impact the user experience, but they add an entirely new level to search engine optimization. Think about it, now you open a new browser and search for cheap laptops:

We see the number two result is laptopbroker.com with a site link (or basically number 2 and number 3).

Now we search for laptops:

You see laptopbroker.com is search result number 7.

Now let’s search for cheap laptops again:

Now laptopbroker.com is in position number 4. Why?

How is it that Google has determined that a person who searched for cheap laptops when opening up a new browser should see laptopbroker.com as the number two result, but when you search for laptops first and then cheap laptops laptopbroker should show as search engine result number 4?

I tend to believe that this new experience is not really 100% to improve the user experience, I believe this is to make search engine optimization or in reality search engine manipulation much more difficult.

If you consider that it is impossible to determine what a user searched for prior to the current search resulting in your website (or in my case my clients’ websites), you can never truly determine what your ranking really is. Now one is to assume that if you rank number 2 in a new browser for the search term cheap laptops and number 4 for cheap laptops after the search for laptop that you will never be far from the top few search results no matter what other searches you have done.

One other interesting spin on this is that if you searched for marriage counseling, and then search for cheap laptops, it does not display the second tier of search results, it goes back to the default search results, showing laptopbroker.com as number 2 for cheap laptops. It also does the same if you search for health insurance prior to a query for cheap laptops.

Now it appears that Google is not quite as smart as we fear at this point yet, as the only time it customizes these results, is when the searches are done in a related query.  If one searches for laptop batteries and then cheap laptops, we get customized results; if you search for notebooks and then cheap laptops you get customized results. This does leave the SEO some opportunity to manage its clients results, but imagine if Google starts to “know” or “guess” what the user who searches for health insurance and then searches for cheap laptops should see based upon what everyone else in the users part of the world has done after searching for health insurance and then cheap laptops. This would be earth shattering.

Now needless to say I am not sure in my lifetime a search engine will ever be able to anticipate every possible combination of queries for every possibility search term as fortunately the amount of possible queries are infinite.

This is going to make the SEO world, start to work very hard to understand why Google would make these query based determinations, and what is keying off the varied search results. For now many people have begun to guess, but needless to say links and content do not have anything to do with this second layer of results, it is based upon something that is being done by the user and some tidbit of information Google has gathered from its users.

This type of monitoring of user behavior is something that has been done in the world of PPC and ad sense delivery for some time now, but this is really some of the first instances of search engines monitoring the user’s actions and supplying results based upon this information.

Recently Google has shown up on the US Federal government’s radar with concerns over consumer’s privacy and I do not believe Google will ever be able to gather enough information without coming under serious pressure from the federal government over consumer’s privacy rights.

It is also to be noted that Microsoft’s latest release of Internet Explorer 8 offers an In Private feature which caused Google multiple problems.  The data that Google uses to determine what ad sense ads were to be displayed was no longer available in the traditional sense and Google has to react rather quickly to change its information gathering to accommodate the latest version of IE. Needless to say the next release of IE will make this new layer of search customization even more difficult.

Do you think it is just a coincidence that a month after the release of IE8 that Google released Chrome? I think not.

Some companies have people on staff that are so prolific with the writing and ideas for content on their site, they are channeling Stephen King without the creepy horror. But so often the content tapers off, even for us.  I have been jotting down ideas that I come up with or collect from reading all over the next and looking at other sites, this is a list we pull from when clients, or even our own writers, get stuck.

• Announce any new product or special offer.
• The reasons your clients do business with you: this should provide a very long list of blog entries. Every single selling point about your company will make at least one article. Why small business is better, a price comparison (even why it is not worth it to go cheap), describe a new higher quality source you found for your product/service, or the reasons your products/service are higher quality (imported or made in USA, you buy in bulk and pass the savings on), all your work is done in house and not outsourced, and on and on.
• Employee profiles.
• In depth product reviews, one at a time.
• Buying guides for your products, or how to choose a provider guides for service industries.
• Share humorous office stories, or customer stories; get personal.
• Share customer testimonials with a guest writer, or repeat what you heard.
• answer a client question that has come up more than once (re-write your FAQ in your blog, one question at a time)
• News news news: any single news item that in any way relates to your industry: summarize it and share how it affects you, or your opinion.
• Company news: this covers more than you think on the surface. Anniversary, added a staffer, moved offices, got a new copier (ok I’m exaggerating there), but trivial is fine.  Other ideas: Any charitable contributions or activities you or your staff are involved in, received an aware, new strategy, new behind the scenes software or improved efficiency, speaking at ANY event, conduct a survey and announce results, attending a seminar or further education of staff, new significant clients.
• Things to avoid, products to avoid, the negative spin on What Not to Do.
• Recommendations of companies you do business with: your web designer, your cellphone service.
• Look at your competitors. It is allowed and will spark your mind for ideas. also look at related sites that are not competitors but complementary.
• Make lists.  Make Top Fives.  Top Five mistakes you see. Top Five Sellers and why. Top Five trends.

Ideally your content is useful to your users, and increases their confidence in you.  But sometimes it is also OK to just yammer about things when you get stuck, it will often keep you going and at least keep your content fresh.  Then with the next article you’ll be back to adding significant value to your site again.

It is a fact that Google and other search engines value content.  Old news.  Any SEO company is going to tell you that for a dollar.  And apparently not going anywhere.  This concept can be frustrating, as filling up some sites with content is not really natural, necessary, or valuable to the end user.  Of course, in many cases it is very valuable, but there are only so many leather buying guides I want to see when i’m shopping for a wallet; it gets overdone really quickly.

However I digress. The fact is that content needs to be continually added to any site that needs to rank. So here are some basic ideas for how to incorporate continuous content into your site.

1. Blog.  Every site does not HAVE to have a blog, but just about any site CAN incorporate a company blog into it’s format. Link to it from the homepage. Featuring the most recent articles on your homepage is good too.  If you think you have nothing to blog about, think again: Here are some content ideas that will keep you busy.

2. A collection of articles:  these can be organized as resources on your site, categorized using your keywords, and continually updated.

3. Industry News: if your site lends itself to current events in your industry, an entire section can be built and kept updated at least weekly with articles.

4. Buying Guides and Advice: the ideas and “How To Choose” articles here can be organized along with your categories. Or can incorporate into your collection of articles. Every feature that a client has to choose can be broken down within the categories. Sizing guides, features guides, what to look for in a service, anything to help your customer make their decision without leaving your site to do their research.

5. User generated content: customer reviews of products (offer a coupon if they fill one out), customer testimonials, customer suggestions, customer top 5 lists

6. Glossary: this may not continually update, but can be updated occasionally and is a great way to get more content on a site.

7. Case studies. Huge selling factor in addition to the content factor.

8. Related companies, with a blurb about them, using affiliate links potentially to generate some other revenue.

9. Frequently Asked Questions: again make this useful as well as keyword rich for SEO, and it can cut down on your customer support resources.

10. Specials/promos: every time you have a new special, create a page highlighting the details, and link to your buying guides when appropriate.