…must we all keep hanging on his every word? He is, for sure, a very helpful, and very friendly guy. But just look at what he does for a living will you?

Now before I go on, let me stress that this is not a personal attack against Matt: He’s a nice guy with an exquisitely difficult job. But the facts remain.

I got thinking about this subject after a reader commented on my recent post on duplicate content issues over at Search Engine Journal, It seems that Matt said something to the effect that we don’t need to worry about duplicate content issues at SMX Advanced. I personally didn’t see footage of that, but I can tell you that I, and many of my SEO colleagues see evidence that we do need to worry about duplicate content every day.

Simply put, Matt Cutts is Google’s front man.

Many times, Matt has given us hints that he can’t tell us all we want to know, in this statement he made on AimClear Blog:

It’s sort of like the credit card companies, you can’t really tell all the penalties you really have without giving it away for the spammers

Now why would anyone think that Matt would be prepared to give away all Google’s secrets? He’d be fired straight away if he did.

Take an objective look at this excellent You&A with Matt Cutts. See? It’s more-or-less common knowledge that Matt Cutts can’t just come right out with it. We know it and he knows it.

Now if you’re rather follow what Matt says to the letter, that fine. But we have years of collective experience and we think we’re entitled to differ with what Matt says when it’s necessary for the sake of our commitment to great SEO.

Track Your Business to the Top

An important aspect of getting your website optimization right is tracking results and monitoring visitors and how they move about on your site, to make sure you’re getting targeted traffic (relevant for your product) and that your visitors ‘convert’ when they get there: that’s tech-speak for they do whatever it is you want them to do!

To make sure you get the mix right, a vital component of your website equipment is efficient tracking tools. The more accurately you can monitor who visits your website, why, and how satisfied they were, the more successful you’ll be online. Simple equation. You will be able to spot trends, and identify problems or areas where your system is coming up short with ease if you get your tracking right. This will make it so much easier to make changes that bring real results.

It’s sometimes difficult to gauge which tools you should be using though. There are so many web tracking applications out there and they all differ wildly, terms of complexity and price.

It occurred to me (OK, I was having a flash of inspiration! Are you done laughing? Then I’ll continue….) that the best way to pick the best tracking applications would be to monitor what other successful websites are using in the way of tracking devices.

So that’s what I did.

Google Analytics–Leader of the Pack

No surprises that Google Analytics came out on top: it’s free, it’s accurate, easy to install and what’s more, it tells you most of what you need to know. The trouble is, as far as I’m concerned, is that when you have Google Analytics installed, the largest search engine on the planet also has access to all your traffic information. Think about that. Obviously the same drawbacks exist for newly-launched Yahoo Analytics.

In the table below you’ll see tracking companies used by several top SEO firms as well as a number of the most successful websites. This is relevant, although the websites are nowhere near as big as CNN, for example, the keyword ‘SEO’ has to be one of the most competitive keywords ever, so I make no apology for including those first. After all, we should watch what the professionals use no? I’ve also included the most successful blogs ever, headed up by the Huffington Post because, let’s face it they’re doing something right with millions of visitors every day.

Like me, you’ll probably notice an interesting two or three applications that come up again and again. And, not all these applications are strictly tracking applications: it’s interesting to see how many different companies/techniques successful websites are using to improve their traffic and bottom line.

Here’s the list in no particular order, and I’ll just mention that I threw in a couple of web analysis companies that I know are used a great deal by online businesses, and therefore shouldn’t be discounted. I daresay I’ve missed a few, but this should be great food-for-thought for anyone considering how best to monitor what goes on with their online business. I’m kicking off with Google Analytics because of it’s overwhelming popularity:

• Google Analytics
• Index Tools (recently acquired by Yahoo Analytics)
• Mint
• Enquisite
• Quantcast
• Doubleclick
• Omniture
• Web Trends
• Awstats
• Technorati
• Lotame
• Tribal Fusion
• SiteMeter
• Google Custom Search
• YahooBuzz
• Revenue Science
• GoingUp
• Crazy Egg

Tracking is important, but only insofar as it can help you to increase conversions. Don’t get obsessed with it: just observe and do what you can to get your website running as smoothly and effectively as possible.

SEOs for Self Regulation

I’ve been trying to get things going on the self regulation front for several years now. After approaching a number of big-name SEOs hoping they’d help by taking up the cause, I finally reached the point where I felt if I didn’t do it no-one will. So I decided that I’d start some kind of grass-roots movement myself.

Why high-profile SEOs don’t want to be involved…

The high-profile SEOs I’m talking about (no I’m not going to name them), asserted quite firmly that they didn’t want to be associated with any kind of regulations for the SEO community. Here’s why (my deduction):

They are obviously making a lot of money from SEO: fabulous sums, some of them. And for sure they have their secrets about getting a site onto page 1 of Google faster than the rest of us. Maybe they’re using Black Hat, maybe not, but because they’re so successful all eyes are on them. They know that.

They also know that if they’re a member of some self regulation community then people will be watching them all the more closely to see if they’re breaking the code.

So it’s not difficult to see why they feel the way they do. If I ever want the conversation to dry up, all I need to do is bring up the subject of self regulation with a major SEO.

The Plight of SEOs With a Conscience

But for the rest of us things are a little different. Our plight was brought firmly home to me last week when I heard that Matt Cutts of Google had, once again, referred to the entire SEO community in a denigrating way (he has called us all criminals in the past), I felt indignant. It’s a fact that there are some very bad people lurking in the dark recesses of the SEO community: some Black Hats definitely verge on the criminal. But that doesn’t mean to say we’d all sell our souls for a link. Or that we’d break the law for a large check from a grateful client. I object strongly to being tarred with the same brush.

SEOs in general have a difficult time of it: they would like to join some sort of community that will reassure clients of their abilities and their purity of intention, but none exists. And this is where I come in.

I’ve done the deed and created the SEO Self Regulation Community. I even bought the domain name, but give me a few days to find the time to slot it into the Ning account.

I know a lot of people disagree with what I’m doing, but hey, if you can’t be true to yourself then you’re a big waste of space right?

My vision is that as a self regulating community we’ll gain traction in the business world by proving that our members provide solid, reliable SEO services. In return for complying with the regulations we agree upon, and a small fee, full members of the community will be accorded the right to display the community logo on their site, and their name will be listed on the roll of honor on our website (all in the works).

If you agree that this is a good idea, then please go over to the website, join, and help us draw up the regulations for our community.

As Seth Godin says in his book Tribes, we don’t need to seek permission to change our world!

I
f you’ve been hesitant about launching a full-scale online marketing campaign up till now you may be ready to make the move given the present economic climate. Online advertising and marketing can be both more effective and a lot cheaper than the real-world equivalents.

As far as I’m concerned it no longer makes sense, either, to have all your eggs in one basket. At the very least, an online marketing campaign could open up your market to segments you’ve never considered before.

Moving Your Marketing Online

You can save a lot of money by drumming up more business online. Ian Lurie helps you avoid some pitfalls if this is your aim.

Below is a graph showing the comparative costs for getting your message in front of 1000 people. There’s no doubt that marketing online can be next-to-negligible when you compare it with magazines and TV.

It costs nothing but time to network on sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, FaceBook and Bebo (just to give you a few examples) but the rewards can be tremendous. Successful networking can mean your posts are read by hundreds, if not thousands of people. Intelligent networking is sincere networking that comes easily to you as you engage with people of your choice, yet it will do more than perhaps anything else online to project the image you want for yourself and your company. Yes, you really can use Facebook, Bebo and Twitter to grow your business at very little cost.

Proactive Reputation Management

People don’t realize, often to their cost, that what you say on Twitter or just about anywhere else online can get indexed by search engines and therefore may show up in a search for specific keywords. It’s important to bear this in mind when you engage: don’t lose your temper and don’t say anything anywhere online that you wouldn’t want the whole world ot see–the whole world may very well see it! you can read more about proactive reputation management here.

Placing Ads

To begin with–or until you get some serious networking going–you might want to consider placing ads on these huge social media sites: YouTube and FaceBook are great for this. You can purchase ads that target your main keywords and only pay for click-thrus, which is where someone actually sees your web page and not the ad itself, as with offline advertising.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click marketing can be highly effective when used in conjunction with expert on-site SEO. However, Google Adsense and other forms of PPC marketing are easy to understand but not quite so easy to get right from the beginning, so until you’re confident, I’d recommend hiring a PPC marketing company to help you get the mix right to start with. Otherwise you could end up spending a great deal for badly targeted clicks which is easy to do if you get your search terms wrong. Don’t discount PPC because you fear that margin for error though: the rewards can be astounding when conducted professionally.

To back that up, here’s a quote from Aaron Wall of SEObook:

It is scary to think how reliant many businesses have become on search, but search is big business. Google pulled in $5.19 billion in revenues in the 1st quarter of 2008, with $3.40 billion from Google’s websites. Advertisers would not spend that much unless they profit from it.

Learning about SEO can be tedious and time consuming. If you’re determined to equip yourself for building a successful online business without much outside help, you need a shortcut to the right information.

A few days ago I was privileged to download a new ebook on SEO. Called SEO Secrets, the book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of SEO. It is perfect for complete Internet newbies, but it is also a useful guide for those with a bit more experience. Online business owners in particular should definitely consider adding it to their business resource collection.

SEO Secrets author, Glenn Murray, has been writing successfully for years, and has consistently held the #1 spot on Google for his major keywords, as well as helping numerous clients with their Internet presence, so it’s plain he knows what he’s talking about.

SEO Secrets can be downloaded here.

We are perched on the precipice, ready to hurtle into a new year and a new era!

Isn’t it exhilerating that the first few days of 2009 will bring with them the most exciting new US president in living history? I’m feeling a little anxious, I suppose because we are all so desperately hoping for positive change and there is always a possibility that Obama somehow won’t live up to the great things that are expected of him.

As we enter into this new world phase (God forbid we have  to hear the words ‘new world order’ ever again), it seems like a good time to take stock.

Yesterday my son was trying to talk me into buying a new iPod Touch. He’s got one on order and wants the same for me. He’s sweet that way. I’m tempted, really I am, but wonder if this tiny piece of fabulous technology might just turn out to be a further drain on my time. Whaddya think? Am I right?

Considering technology like the iPod set me to thinking about how much things have changed on the technology front in the past few decades–and change shows no sign of slowing. Just as I was pondering, I cam across this amazing video which just about sums it all up:

What does it all mean? It means that I, for one, will sit down and weep that Mankind has achieved all this but still cannot find a way to love and be peaceful on this beautiful planet. And that we haven’t found a way to save children from cholera epidemics, or ourselves from the ravages of 21st century disease. I ask God that in 2009 we will all make strides in the right direction and that, for once, we will get our priorities right.

PS. My marketing predictions for 2009 will be along in a matter of hours.

For the second time in as many weeks I’m breaking my own rule about no politics. Along with millions of other people around the world, I am thrilled that Barak Obama won the US elections. For posterity I’m embedding this video of some of his promises. Let’s review after a year and see how he gets on.

All I can say is, whatever floats your boat.

This post is loosely in response to Jamie Harrop’s comment on my guest post over at his blog. Jamie disagrees with me, so no offense at what follows Jamie.

There’s always more than one way to do anything. When you get advice, the person giving it can only tell you what they think is best from their perspective.

The <title></title> tags for your web pages are of supreme importance to your ranking and which searches you come up for. You need well-thought-out tags that are different for every page in order to get the best results–which is more traffic to your website. If you get it wrong you might even be penalized (like having the same title tag for every page of your website).

From an SEO point of view it makes a lot more sense to put the phrase or search term that your potential visitors are going to type into a search box when they’re looking for whatever it is that you’re selling. Quite simply, names, or your ‘brand,’ while they are important, will not figure into the equation at the search stage. Of course, once a visitor lands on your website you want to do everything you can to get them to remember your name or your brand. But that’s once they’ve arrived. Would you lure a fish onto your line by tying a frying pan onto your rod? Using your name to get new visitors is about as effective.

So, if you’re still determined to put your name in your title tags, without a search term before it, go ahead, Your competitor who listens to their SEO will most likely get more visitors than you do.

We’re still seeing a great deal of heated discussion online about what makes for good web content so I thought the subject is worth revisiting.

It’s all very simple really. Websites need words, whatever their reason for existing, they need words.

Each and every website is created to attract visitors–that goes without saying. But in order for people to see it, that website has to first impress the search engines because if it doesn’t, the search engines will never throw it up in a search. So unless you’re doing an obscene amount of Pay Per Click or you have other concrete sources of traffic, the search engines need to love you, and most important of all the search engines is Google because they have the lion’s share of the search industry. Period.

So let’s look at what the search engines look for first:

1. The title of your page needs to clearly define what the page is about. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, take a quick look at the top left-hand corner of this page. See what I mean? Lay out for your visitor exactly what the page is about in a way that will make them want to know more.
2. The main heading of your page also needs to contain your major search terms. This is different from the title as it’s seen actually on the page. To pick the right search terms, or keywords, make sure you do adequate keyword research using a reliable keyword tool.
3. The first paragraph should talk about your main focus (major search terms). Your most important content is what comes above the fold (what’s seen on your page without someone having to scroll down). It’s rather like writing for newspapers: you have to grab your audience in the first paragraph (in this case digital and human visitors) and then add the less-important facts lower down.
4. Sprinkle well-chosen sub headings throughout your text and link out to relevant content using your keywords in the anchor text (the words you click on in a link). Simple but effective.
5. Arrange for links from other pages of your website using those relevant keywords as anchor text.
6. Arrange for links from other websites, again using your chosen keywords as anchor text.
7. Don’t make the huge mistake of trying to target too many keywords. Just pick four-six really good ones and leave the rest for another page. There’s no limit to the number of pages you can create and doing it this way is a powerful way of making your website into a valuable resource for your target market.

Even if you don’t want the search engines to love you for some strange reason, you still need to get your human visitors to love you. Quality web content is the only way to do it.

Some kind of content management or content development strategy should therefore be high up on any webmaster’s list of priorities. If you can’t do it yourself, good content is well worth paying for even if it’s not on a regular basis. A decent SEO copywriter can put your website on the map.

“Search engine optimizers’ Backhat social media optimization tricks can hurt you without you doing it yourself? Yes, it’s true, and here’s why.”

Today’s search engine optimization or SEO is rapidly changing to meet the New World Wide Web order of things. SMM (social media marketing) SMO (social media optimizing) SSM (social search marketing) and ‘personalized search’ are not only the catch-all SEO phrases or marketing fads of the moment: Search and social marketing now go hand in hand. Both social media and search optimization can work beautifully in tandem when used properly as a combined marketing strategy. Social media is here to stay, but Web 2.0 is old. Personalized Active Semantic Grid 3.0 is going to be the next Big Thing.

All in all, while technically things are different, nothing has really changed for SEO. What’s different to the Web as it was a short while ago is that Blackhats, marketers and Whitehats alike now use social media as part of their daily routine. The core principles of optimization have maintained identical faces in both worlds. Good gets good results and bad gets bad results. So most likely SEO professionals will continue to develop their talents and meet a demand through to the next phase of the Internet.

Why ramble on about what we already know? For some reason no SEO has yet broached the subject of the real issues with Blackhat optimizers. Once, link farms and mass directory submissions were just about standard practice, and when a Blackhat got started on your site, all that would be left was a disreputable, hollow husk. Even then, using these shady methods would hurt your ranking far more than they would help, and the same is true today. But what so many online business owners don’t realize is that when you have a Blackhat inside your social circle operating in stealth mode, you will unknowingly be ruining you own social search rankings just by associating with them.

“HOW in the WORLD could that possibly EVER happen?”

If you’re a quietly-observant person who is active on the internet, you may have already asked yourself this question. It may also be that you have already noticed the very thing I am about to unveil.

To make my point I can give some simple examples any social media user would have seen recently.

Blogs: Have you ever heard of Akismet? How about these spine-chilling terms: comment spam, feed scrapers, hacked blogs, hidden links, pingback spam, trackback spam, XSS injection? These are Blackhat tools and blog-abusing tricks. Every single one of these can destroy a site’s authority, ranking and traffic.

Take Delicious: Once a quality indicator for websites across the internet, now the most overcrowded, insanely dense sea of innumerable tags, more an exercise in pointlessness than anything at this point. What does that mean for you? Your bookmarks may or may not get credited, listed or scanned. Why? Because of the flood of spam, Delicious is now filtered to protect the site itself. Poisoned links can seep into your pool, fed by mass shares, bot armies and forced homepage listings that only seem interesting at first glance.

Digg: Wow this one is Easy. Digg.com has virtually ground to a halt in the last few weeks. Reports of hundreds, if not over a thousand diggers banned for unwittingly aiding technical social Blackhats. It’s a story that has played out many times, but perhaps not on so large a scale.

As the redirected sites and obviously ad-fueled ADVERTISEMENT INCORPORATED sites flooded the Digg gates, scores of unwittingly complicit users then vanished. A new community of new and old faces replaced them. Now those users are mingling in a social site permeated with fear. Yes, it could and probably will happen again.

StumbleUpon: This is by far the most dangerous target for users. Blackhats can send you direct pages, often in a friendly way that will leave you unsuspecting. Yet according to the terms of StumbleUpon, no click should be asked for or suggested. Users guilty of asking for Stumbles can be banned, no questions asked. So next time you get a Stumble request, ” blah blah … stumble and review plz” read “make me money … get banned dummy”.

Twitter: Twitter oh our cruel mistress of dread. It’s addictive once you get started, yet staring you in the face is the Blackhat core from the dark depths of the Internet. Everything from adult and hijack redirects to mass-Google blacklisting has befallen Twitter users. Again as a Twitter user you may not be doing anything you would think could harm you, but you can get tagged as a spammer by association, and this can be visible to everyone and totally out of your control on ratings sites all over the Web. Talk about a reputation management nightmare.

As you now may see, the Internet as we know it has changed, in many ways for the better, but in some ways for the worse. Facets and faces of marketing will always be part of any product or consumer driven society, therefore greed or need will always drive some to choose the darker path.The bright side for all of us is that as technology changes, new and better is always just ahead. Test it, try it, explore the possibility of the Web. Go search and be thoughtful, be vigilant while you’re being social. Consider your actions and your associates carefully, and all will be well.

Another ridiculous yet interesting searchable socialized rant-ramble by: Mich D … yeah the very same dude [ @MichDdot 4D twest U pleepz N tweepz ]