I have spent the last year working with an image powerhouse. The power of images is great, an untapped source of traffic for sure. I am a search marketer that is all about the conversion, but if all you want it traffic, images are just awesome and long tail. What’s just so sharable? Images. Why do you think we take data and make it pretty (ala infographics)? People love images. The most recent, not sure if it’s really the brain child of Paula Holmes Crimm, but maybe.

Shared almost 2k times as of 5:12pm CDT

Really. How freaking cute. He/She let the dogs out. Took claim for the apparent mess it caused. You just want to kiss that puppy and the share it with all of your friends. I saw it this morning, reshared it, and 5 of my friends have done the same and not all from me.

Now the image search for this image. I figured “I let the dogs out” would do it.

Alas no. I may be wrong in the search or it might just not have been shared outside of FB yet. Therefore, Google hasn’t seen it. So I’m posting it. With good alt text and image name. Let’s see what happens and if I can get some traffic from it. </SEO>

Take Away for Search Marketers and Businesses

This small picture is being shared. There is no commerce behind it, no linking scheme, just an image. So I want to impart something I have seen as I’ve developed client infographics and link bait, don’t make it about you. Make it about users, your target market, the everyday user, the facebook user, whoever you want to see and share your content. Make it about them and they will share it. This does not have a 100% success rate (meaning making “viral linkbait” is still not possible to just create) but it does help get to the heart of the user and that might transfer down to the tip of their “share” finger.

Letting the Dogs Out: Image Search is a post from: Kate Morris

I’ll outline a plan below but you can edit it as you please. The goal here is to change things up and get a more holistic approach to SEO. The more you change up your tactics, the more natural things can appear. So, without further adieu:

Round 1: Outreach and Guest Posting

Use the guest post search tips from my coworker Geoff Kenyon, and find bloggers in your space that allow guest posts. It’s fairly easy to do and a fantastic way to get links. This is the first step to building relationships as well, and those will come in handy later. Start by drafting a few posts and then working on contacting bloggers at the same time. By the end of your 17 days you should have a few posts live and maybe a few more ready to go live.

Round 2: Title Tag Research

After the outreach, head back to the foundation of SEO. Look at your site’s title tags. Depending on the size of your site, you can determine how in depth to go. First, address any duplicate titles you have. All of them. If you are running a site with millions of pages and 100,000 duplicate page titles, find an automated way of differentiating them. Trust me, it’s doable.

If you are good on duplicate title tags, move to identifying your top pages. Are there any missing? Why isn’t one of your top categories on there? Find the pages that should have top traffic and look at the title tag. If you only have a few static pages on your site, investigate them all. Do standard keyword research and make sure you are targeting the right key phrase to get the best traffic.

Round 3: Be the Resource

Remember those relationships you built with guest posting? Time to recontact those people. Hopefully their sites got all kinds of traffic from your content (you helped pushed those posts socially of course) and now they are emailing you for more! This time, get them to share their knowledge. Since they are in your space, their minds should be ripe with information your customers want to hear as well. Turn your blog into a resource by having top minds guest post for you and post some great information yourself. Be the resource and you will be.

Round 4: Think Social

So many of these rounds are social in that they are building relationships, but this last one, I want you to focus on being social on the big networks like Twitter and Facebook. If you have to choose one, go for Facebook. Reach out to your friends, get your 25 fans for your business page and claim your URL. If you can’t find friends to like you, buy an ad. I did that for a friend, took me 2 weeks with ads and $100. Done. But really do focus less on the friends and more on the conversation (it is a chicken/egg thing – you need fans first). Get out there and get people talking about you. SEO is marketing … the more people are talking about you, the more mentions and links you get.

And add Facebook comments to that awesome new blog.

Rinse and Repeat

So not like the diet, keep changing it up. There is no end to SEO. A #1 is not guaranteed in any market, so you should always be pushing to get more traffic and selling more. The only way to do that is to continually grow and reach out to more people. Hope you like the new 17 Day Diet.

17 Day Diet for SEOs is a post from: Kate Morris

Guest Post from Lingo24

The growth of the internet means it’s never been easier to reach a truly global market. Your products or services are now accessible to anyone with internet access from Birmingham to Beijing but just because the potential for reaching a new audience exists, that doesn’t mean the connection will be made without properly localizing your approach for your multilingual market.

Geographical barriers might not mean as much these days, but linguistic and cultural barriers remain. English is still the single most widely used language online, according to Internet World Stats, but it’s the native language of only 22% of web surfers. Consider also research showing that the majority of multilingual internet users place more trust in websites written in their own native language, and it’s apparent that a multilingual approach to online marketing is essential.

Targeting your market

The first thing you have to decide is whether to target markets by geography or by language. It may well be cheaper and easier to target several territories that share a common language – for instance, Spanish will provide accessibility to users in Spain (naturally) as well as vast swathes of South America, while French will provide inroads within France, Switzerland, Belgium, parts of Canada and former French or Belgian colonies such as Senegal and Gabon.

You should bear in mind, however, that linguistic usage can vary tremendously from one area to the next. Just as the English spoken in England, India and Australia varies in vocabulary and especially colloquialisms, so does the Spanish spoken in Spain and Latin America, and the French spoken in France and Quebec.

If targeting by language, you should ensure that all content is understandable across the board and avoid any culture-specific references and jokes that might not translate. Targeting individual markets by country will help you avoid losing your message in translation – and it also opens up a number of marketing and SEO options.

Country code domains

The algorithms used by Google and other search engines take location into account, so investing in a separate country code top level domain (such as .de for Germany or .fr for France) hosted in the target country for each localized version of your website will considerably boost your rankings on Google other local competitors.

If you decide to have a single top level domain (such as www.example.com) you should at least set up separate subdomains or subdirectories for each localized version of your site. An example of a subdomain would be de.example.com and a subdirectory would be example.com/de/.

Google’s Webmaster Central blog advises that you keep your multilingual content separate – don’t mix languages on one page – to avoid confusing Googlebot. [Editors note: This is not true in all cases. You could technically have a Canadian site and have French and English user generated content on the same page.]

Handily, the same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content for listing and ranking purposes – and Google also has a Geographic Targeting tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to specify particular geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains – so your Indian subdomain, for instance, can have its location set as ‘India’, and it will be turn up in the results when web surfers in India search for your keywords.

Keyword research

There are several ways to translate your content. The most effective is to employ the services of a native speaking translator, but if your budget does not stretch that far, then you could also use machine translation for content which is not business critical.

Regardless of whether you opt for machine translation or a professional to translate your website content, though, you should never rely on a straight machine or dictionary translation of your keywords.

This is because synonyms, colloquialisms, abbreviations or alternative terms may be the more popular keywords in any language. By all means use the direct translations of your English keywords as a starting point, but be sure to thoroughly research the alternatives in each target market. This may involve a brainstorming session with a native speaker from that country, and should definitely involve using Google’s keyword tools to check what results each keyword yields in that market.

Either way, multilingual SEO is an ongoing process of researching and refining, just the same as English language SEO, but if you’re willing to invest the time and money in expanding your market with localized multilingual websites, then the rewards can be beyond your wildest dreams!

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translation and localization agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 4000 specialist translators worldwide, operations spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries.

Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning www.katemorris.com before 30 October 2010 and you’ll receive a 10% discount on your first order.

SEO for the world – thinking beyond English is a post from: Kate Morris

There are many people talking about the death of SEO. Yeah, I know, you are contemplating closing this post. Stay with me. Well, if you are a seasoned search marketing veteran, you are free to go. There is nothing here that is going to be earth shattering. But I have seen too much recently to not say something.

SEO is not going anywhere but it has changed. Long gone are the days of “tricks” and “secrets.” SEO is moving towards (and about time IMHO) being a staple of every company’s IT and Marketing schedule. But we are not there yet. I can’t research a local company or do a competitive analysis without coming across a handful of sites that are missing the basics. The larger companies are getting there, but again, not there yet. This is what should happen though, SEO is a part of marketing and web development and should take its rightful place.

But there are no secrets. Can you still pick up some good ideas from the minds at conferences and get togethers? Yes! But know that you might be one of those minds. How? It’s the experiences that make good ideas. Conference organizers constantly try to blend new speakers/new perspectives with seasoned veterans. But what is said there is not hard and fast truth. Any of them will tell you that your site is unique. It’s about the idea they are presenting that spurs the idea for your site.

The questions I’ve seen arise recently have been just like those from 2005. Site developers and first time website owners want to know how to get their site to #1 right now. They want to know why other “less desirable” or “less worthy” sites are outranking their beautiful creation. The answer is always the same.

1. Build your site well. It needs to be clean, understandable, and navigable. Page load times and text based content are things to notice.
2. Content needs to be focused to the user. Don’t stuff. Don’t over optimize. Build pages for different users and make it something they want to read. Users via email are different than those from PPC ads. And the users from organic SERPs are different too. All users are not created equal.
3. Content needs to engage and entice. Not only to convert (which is the first focus) but also to share. In this world of linking, the best way to go about links isn’t easy. The best links are from real people. You will get them by marketing and customer service. PR is a good road too, remember that one? Journalists are your friend.
4. If you are building links by paying someone in India, stop.
5. Be patient. Yes, the engines will pick up content almost instantaneously in some cases but not all. If you spotted a problem recently and changed it, give the bots time to find, fix and propagate.

Build your foundation (good clean code), set your framework (navigation and structure), insulate (link build), pick the right colors (content), and then market. The most beautiful well built house will never be found if no one talks about it.

Building a Proper SEO House is a post from: Kate Morris

Issue: In optimizing a client’s website, I came across some images that might seem unsuitable for children. Not vulgar or crude, and were there in a health care sense, but were still not suitable for children.

I wanted to find a tag that I could place in the image or on the page that would let the search engines, especially the adult filters of the images side, that the images were not suitable from the get go. The client had noted it on their site as well, but on the entry page, not on every page that the images appeared.

Short version: There were no tags that I could find, and no one knew the answer. So I emailed a friend of mine … Matt Cutts (no, I am NOT giving anyone his email address). See Matt, for those of you that don’t know, is one of the minds behind SafeSearch and is now the Head of the Web Spam team at Google. Who better to ask right?

Turns out there are meta tags that can be affixed to the page with ratings that are much like movie ratings. These ratings work with browser filters to ensure that kids do not see specific content on the web. Reading between the lines, I am thinking that this might also be a way to signal to the SEs that there are things on that page that should be behind the SafeSearch wall.

How to Tag Adult Content

The best resource for adult rating that Matt pointed me to had examples of how to use all the rating systems. Major downside: this means 4 additional meta tags on my page. This area of the world has not been condensed, so there are many way to rate pages. For my client, I added them all. Better safe than sorry in my opinion.

I won’t go over every one, but basically for most of them you place specific codes within the meta tag that let bots and browsers know exactly what type of content is on that page that might not be suitable. In my client’s instance, it was partial nudity on a woman that was health care based.

It might have taken some time and a little more work, but I know that parents and search engines will like that my client is trying to help protect children on the web. I just hope that the various organizations can come together on ONE rating system someday, but that might be as possible as all of the browsers rendering the same way (stupid IE …).

UPDATE: I had a question (PRO Membership Required) the other day in the SEOmoz Q&A that gave me another thought about how to use the adult content tagging. If your images have ever been placed behind the SafeSearch filter, and you think it isn’t warranted, you might TRY (read: hasn’t been tested) placing these meta tags on the page where the image is hosted, and use the tags for safe for children. Don’t use this to get around the filters, I don’t think that will work. If hand checked, and the images are in fact NOT kosher, you might get removed/banned. No bueno here people. Karma, remember karma. If you don’t want your kids, your nieces/nephews, or godchildren looking at those images, then other kids shouldn’t either.

Tagging Adult-ish Pictures is a post from: Kate Morris

Feb 23 – I have moved the client to HostGator.

Every once in a while an SEM consultant will come across a gem of a client. One that understands enough about our business to trust and respect the recommendations we make. It is these clients that we get the most involved with and spend extra time ensuring their success. And it hurts me when someone else decreases those businesses’ chances for that success. All because a service provider is cutting costs in tech support.

I got one such client recently from a referral. They did the unthinkable and brought me in as the SEO consultant while the site was being redesigned. We had some issues with the developers, so I have been fixing some things since the site was completed this weekend.

The fixing includes adding tracking codes, unique title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. This also means removing archaic table based code and inline styling. This is while I await the flash files so that I can change some links on their homepage and in navigation. Why navigation? They used relative URLs. Yay.

What more you ask? How else can a project that started so well go wrong? It’s not the developers I have issues with, it is their host, XO Communications. You see, the client’s site is on a Linux-based server running Apache. Yes, I was thrilled to see that making small changes like 301 redirects should in fact remain small.

No. Apparently, XO Communications does not allow their clients to use mod_rewrite. XO does not make it clear how to use an htaccess file and what issues might arise when it is uploaded incorrectly. You can place an .htaccess file, but it won’t work but if it isn’t coded and loaded as a UNIX file, there are line break issues that cause issues. There is no way to point their /index.html to their www and non-www (which XO nicely redirects for everyone without asking which is preferred). On top of that, any old links are wasted at this moment until they can be changed. Why? I cannot redirect them using anything more than a meta refresh, which is what I might have to resort to in the end.  They might as well be on a Windows server, they might have more control that way.

Update: Please see the comments from XO below for more instruction on how to use htaccess in their server environment.

Contacting tech support was as helpful as their help section of the website. Their first response:

Unfortunately, we cannot change any settings on our Apache server to allow for whatever directives you are using in your .htaccess file. You can find a lot of information on what .htaccess file directives you can use on our server by using our knowledge base.

To find all of the .htaccess information we have, simple click on “Help” in the upper right hand corner of your Gateway. Once you get to the knowledge base, simply search for keyword “htaccess” and you will find all the information you need. I sincerely hope this assists you as our support is very limited on actually helping you with the actual directives.

The second response from XO after asking what I can do to redirect files on the site was worse.

I am sorry to report that we do not provide any assistance with setting up redirects.  You can, however, find these instructions in the Help Center.

[I took them out, sorry, but worthless, I had seen them hours before.]

Our Professional Services team can set up your redirects for a fee.  They can also optimize your web site so it is ranked higher on search engines.

Professional Services is currently offering 20% off their fees for the work they do.  Would you like a free quote from them?  Please let me know and I will forward your request.

Did you catch that? They can set up redirects for a FEE and on top of that, they can optimize my web site so it ranks higher! Really?!?!?!

XO Communications is resorting to holding the server functions hostage from their paying customers so that they will pay more. They are taking something that we work hard to convince people is not snake oil, and hide it from their clients under lock and key.

You’d think they would be a cheaper host then right? If my client prepays for a year, they are paying $162 to XO Communications for the year. I pay $120 for the year to HostGator and get more control to my server than my client could ever dream of! And I am not talking high level server control here people. I am a marketer by trade, I only know enough server side to make myself dangerous.

I have scoured the internet for this entire day to figure out how to deal with this short of telling the client to cut and run. That call is tomorrow.

XO Communications you should be ashamed.

Oh and I was on twitter all day alerting you to this issue using your @XOCares account. If you guys want any help with social media and customer relations, let me know. I know some awesome people who could help you out. Until then, please know that I will take as many people away from you as I can and push them over to any number of hosts that are open to assisting small business owners succeed in business.

Please Share This Story!

Yes, I hate XO Communications is a post from: Kate Morris

Taylor Pratt asked if cereal was allowed as a mid-afternoon snack today. A resounding yes was heard from what I saw, and that sparked my interest. What do search marketers (and any of my other followers) eat? Specifically, what is an SEO’s favorite cereal?

Winner: Lucky Charms

Voted on By:
Christa Watson, Joshua Sciarrino, Lyndsay Walker, Dan Perry

Seems like everyone loves the marshmallows. Forget the sugar covered oats, we want the marshmallows!

Runner Ups

Voted on By: Matt Siltala, Dan Perry	Voted on By: Casey Yandle, Andrew Woods	Voted on By: Taylor Pratt, Casey Yandle
Voted on By: Alan Bleweiss, Chiropractic	Voted on By: William Attwood	Voted on By: Ruth Burr
Voted on By: Matt Pellerin	Voted on By: Robert Brady	Voted on By: Jason Harrison
Voted on By: Clint Zink

Snack Time Cereal – SEM Edition is a post from: Kate Morris

Thanks to Kristy Bolsinger for her help!

You are an SEO’s Parent If … is a post from: Kate Morris

But now there seems to be a trend (and it could be because I live in my little hole called SEO) recently where good SEOs are being suspended on Social Media sites.

Case #1: Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen) was suspended on Twitter on September 22 at about 1pm CDT and reinstated a few hours later. No reason, nothing. Community support and twitter contacts helped.

Case #2: Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) has been suspended as of September 22 at 3:34pm London time and not yet reinstated was reinstated later that day. A twitter search for rishil shows the large amount of support for his reinstatement. Update: We got the story of why, written up by SEOptimise.

Case #3: My own Yahoo! Answers account has been suspended for “spammy” activity. None of which has ever happened. I have appealed three times, and gotten nothing. Yahoo seems to just not want to hear it. So my efforts to remove spam on Answers, and my support of that site are all for nothing. I am still not sure if I will ever return.

So what is the deal here? Are we being identified and purged no matter what? Yes, this is taking three small cases and making a HUGE assumption. But why are these accounts being marked and taken down? All have been in good standing and done nothing wrong.

Anyone else seen this happen? I’ll update as I learn more.

Fake Spamming by SEOs? is a post from: Kate Morris

I am a liberal for the most part. I vote fairly regularly. But I really don’t get into the depths of politics.

That is until it meets the SEO world. And today it did. I got a call from the Austin American Statesman wanting to know my opinion on a site supposedly put up by the Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson campaign called http://www.standbykay.com

My first reaction? No redirect from non-www to www (Kay, if you need any help with SEO let me know). Pretty site though.

Then I looked at what I was called about: the source code. The next words out of my mouth were “Woah. Oh my lord. Wow.” (Yes, that was the quote.)

What did I see, but a normal header, some javascript, and then a list of 2241 random keywords centered around Texas and politics. Just a huge list. Dumped in the top of the page. And hidden. The CSS is:

#Layer1 {
	position:absolute;
	left:0px;
	top:0px;
	width:100%;
	z-index:1;
	visibility: hidden;}

Then again on the line:

<div id="Layer1" style="display:none;">

Yeah. I say again. Wow.

I figured it was a) Spam Attack b) stupid SEO. When discussed with a friend (@whoisgregg), he noted it might be a demo site by the hosting company. But …

The campaign is now saying it’ll be removed. It is their site. Needless to say someone is getting fired. Not sure who did this, but really? How stupid can you be?

For anyone launching a site … never make it live until it’s passed through the company(or organization) and your friendly neighborhood SEO. Sorry, I love web design companies, hosting companies, they all make the interwebz a prettier place. But trust SEO to the professionals. Especially when you are deal with something as hot as politics, you have to be clean.

Update

From the article:

Sadosky and other campaign aides said this afternoon that only the two phrases using “rick perry gay” will be removed because they won’t play into the campaign’s future messages.Broadly, the campaign said a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms “Rick Perry,” “Kay Bailey Hutchison” and “Texas.”

Punch line: The generated phrases aren’t intended to drive up traffic to the standbykay site; they are intended to help Hutchison’s campaign decide most efficiently where to purchase banner ads or other Web-related advertisign that would drive people to the site, where visitors can volunteer, chase information or make donations.

My response to the Statesman (and hopefully the campaign reads it):

There is no reason for them to hide keywords such as “name xls” and “debachary definition,” much less any other keyword in that site. The company that is recommending hidden text to determine “efficiently where to purchase banner ads or other Web-related advertisign that would drive people to the site, where visitors can volunteer, chase information or make donations” is one that does not understand websites or how the search engines work.

A reputable company would have recommended a paid campaign to test keywords or content around the keywords to test it’s relevancy. Hidden text holds no value to their campaign or website and can potentially hurt the site in the future.

Senator Hutchinson’s Site Keyword Dump is a post from: Kate Morris