SEO-Browser Updated!

We've updated the SEO-Browser!

You can now use it to visit sites from the US or Canada, which is very helpful for multi-country sites. More countries will be added later, as the demand grows.

Canada: ca.seo-browser.com
USA: us.seo-browser.com

In order to add this functionality, we had to put in a FREE one time signup. Don't worry, we don't share emails with anyone.

You can still use it in simple mode without a signup, but the advanced mode is starting to get too difficult to program without assigning users and sessions, hence the login.

Eventually, the advanced mode will add things like ranking reports, etc - all of which require user/password combinations for privacy and data storage purposes, so this is preparation for that.

Open Office VS Bing

It seems that MS Bing is either really bad at search, or is allowing it's results to be unduly influenced by either money or corporate policy. I'm leaning towards the censorship version of the story, myself.

Do a search for open office in Google. Now do the same one in Bing. You'll notice the complete absence of openoffice.org in Bing. They send you almost everywhere but to the right site.

Think that's odd? Or maybe just a coincidence? Try searching for "openoffice.org". Nuff said.

Here is the real kicker - Bing's automated recommendations and suggestions all clearly show people are searching for openoffice.org, but I guess that's just too bad.

For shame, Microsoft.

UPDATE:

Matt and Vanessa did some checking, and found it was a technical glitch, and not an evil conspiracy. Although I'm happy the net result is positive for searchers, I'm annoyed at myself for not checking deeper into other possible explanations.

Redirect Issue with IIS

I'm not sure if this is just an IIS 6.0 issue, but that's where I just ran into it.

A user of the SEO Browser contacted us today because the browser couldn't load his site. That wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for Google ALSO not apparently being able to load his site (it was unindexed). However, browsers loaded it just fine.

It took some investigating, but I finally found the issue. The site was set to redirect visitors to the domain root to an internal page. No problem. The redirect was the default 302 that IIS uses. Ok, a bit of a problem, but not enough to stop Google or the SEO Browser from loading it.

But buried in the HTTP headers ( I used SEO Consultants "Check Server Headers Tool") I found this directive:

FollowRedirects=False; Server requested redirection, but sent no new location.

Oops. If you set a redirect (301 or 302) but then say that you should not follow any redirects, strange things happen to your site as the two incompatible directives play out.

In this case, browsers (Firefox and IE) followed the redirect and ignored the server directive saying they should not.

Spiders (Googlebot and the SEO Browser) acknowledged that a redirect existed, but also acknowledged that the server was telling them not to follow it. Therefore they did what they were told and stopped.

Naturally, the fix is a very simple checkbox telling IIS to set the FollowRedirects=False to FollowRedirects=True.

I've never encountered this issue before, but I thought I'd share, since it might help someone out there in the future. I'll see if I can have this issue detected by the SEO Browser, as well.

Ian

PS I need to blog more often. I feel a New Years Resolution coming on...

What You (Probably) Don't Know About Redirects.

Most SEO's are taught the simple mantra that a 302 (temporary redirect) is bad, and a 301 (permanent redirect) is good.

This is wrong. Or at least, part of it is.

An SEO quoting the above to someone who is really knowledgeable in web servers will have just shot themselves in the virtual foot, and probably made their job harder, since now the server expert is more likely to dismiss other things they are saying as possibly oversimplified and misleading, too.

The Facts

The good news is that a 301 is usually what you want as an SEO, and you want to avoid 302's, so even though you may have been wrong in your ideas as to how things work, the net effect was probably correct, or at least, good enough.

As with many things that are "good enough, it works", most people never bother to look further. The rest of this article is for those who actually prefer to understand things, rather than those who just follow checklists blindly. The rest of you can stop here and be happy that 301's normally do the job you think they are doing.

A 302 actually isn't a Temporary Redirect

A 307 is. In reality, a 302 just means "Object Moved", or "Found", which, if accompanied by a target URL, browsers and servers interpret as a redirect. But with no target URL, they will happily stay there, and it's not an error.

In reality, a 303 is what most SEO's think a 302 is. A 303 means "See Other". A 307 is the actual Temporary Redirect. It really means temporary, as in the very next request should also be made to the old URL, and the new one should not even be cached. This is usually only used for emergency redirects (like when a primary server is down) and the like.

A302 doesn't dictate a redirect, it just says that what you were looking for moved, and it's been found there. You are usually redirected only as a courtesy and for usability purposes. Technically, you should use a 303, which really does the job properly.

The Problem With 301's

A pure 301 actually isn't always the best choice for a redirect, either. The problem is that a 301 is cachable, and therefore if you ever change that 301 to point to a second place, it may take quite a bit of time for the search engine to update it's files, which is why there is often a delay in you seeing results after changing 301's.

For example, let's say you 301 me.com to you.com. Then later you decide you want to change the me.com redirect to us.com. There can be a significant delay in this working, because the search engines will cache the original redirect for quite some time.

Want to fix this?

You can put a 301 on you.com as well as me.com, which will create a second hop in some cases, but will give you some time for the caches to be updated and speed up indexing, in some cases dramatically.

It's a simple fix, but it can save you a lot of time and headaches.

Want another fix? (Best Practice)

When you create 301 redirect, prevent it from being cached is there is a possibility that you will change it in the future.

If you don't think you'll be changing it, then just do what you usually do - it will cache automatically, which is normally a good thing.

If you might change it, or expect to change it, you can disable the cache in one of 2 ways in either the server response or the redirect page. Server response is better, IMO.

• (BEST) use HTTP headers in the server response to send "Cache-Control: no-cache"
• Or, if you can't do that on your server, you can use "Pragma: no-cache" option in your html redirect page header area. But real server headers are better than the pragma.

Redirect Codes

• 300 Multiple Choices – HTTP_MULTIPLE_CHOICES
• 301 Moved Permanently – HTTP_MOVED_PERMANENTLY
• 302 Found – HTTP_MOVED_TEMPORARILY
• 303 See Other – HTTP_SEE_OTHER
• 304 Not Modified – HTTP_NOT_MODIFIED
• 305 Use Proxy – HTTP_USE_PROXY
• 307 Temporary Redirect – HTTP_TEMPORARY_REDIRECT

Ian

Bing! Microsofts New Search Engine (Brand).

Microsoft has just announced that the new name for it's "Live" search engine (which everyone disliked) is called "Bing" which everyone will also probably dislike, but at least isn't as confusing.

The other candidate was "Kumo", which I admit I would have disliked more. Poor Microsoft, I'm pretty sure no matter what they chose it would have been wrong.

You can give it a test drive and find out more here: http://discoverbing.com/behindbing/

Ian

Office 2007 Annoyances

UPDATE:

By complete coincidence, MS announced SP2 for Office 2007 *today*. Which I found about 10 minutes after complaining in this post. I'm installing it and I'll let you know how things go.

-------------------------

If you have an embedded Excel 2007 file in a Word 2007 document, and happen to have Excel open as well, Office, (in it's brilliance) informs you that Excel is not installed and tries to run Office 2007 setup.

This screen shot is classic:

Note to self: Switching Keyboards

If your keyboard starts spitting out strange characters, it's because you've probably switched keyboard language layouts by accident.

It's easy to do: Press / and then Ctrl Shift

I do this sometimes if I'm just trying to type a "?", which has me pressing the / and shift already. If my finger slips a bit and I hit the ctrl under the shift at the same time, suddenly my typing is all nonsense.

Fix:

Either remove all keyboard layouts but the one you use all the time (If you tell Vista you are a Canadian, it automatically adds French keyboard layouts whether you want them or not) or press / and then ctrl shift again.

Ian

Robots.txt Syntax Checker

I was checking the robots.txt file of a client today, and it was far more complicated than normal, so I went looking for an automated syntax checker.

I found this one from Motoricerca, (an Italian SEO company) and can recommend it: Robots.txt Syntax Checker (it's in English).

I like it so much I'm adding a link to it from my robots.txt generator.

Ian

Interesting Antispam Tactic: Bot Bomb

My son Tas plays an online game called Mabinogi and today mentioned to me a new feature in the game, which had been overrun by something called bots.

Bots are basically programs that control player characters within the games, taking over for the person who is supposed to be doing it. There are many types of bots, including ones that do repetitive tasks so they player doesn't have to, and the worst, spam bots.

These basically stand in the middle of places where people congregate and shout out advertising (typically game money that in turn was gained by bots, sold for real world money). This is against the game rules and makes it no fun for players who are actually trying to play the game.

In order to combat this (which was ruining this and many other online games) the creators of the game did all they could from a game security perspective, but it was simply too difficult to keep up with and detect the spammers, which went to great lengths to simulate human behavior well enough to fool a computer.

But not a human. Experienced human players can detect bots (and spam) almost instinctively.

The game designers finally decided to try something different: using humans to detect bots. Within the game, they created something called a "bot bomb" which can be thrown at a suspected bot. The "bot bomb" then asks a very simple question, that any human player would be able to answer with no difficulty. Essentially a reverse Turing test, like a CAPTCHA.

If the bot fails, it's logged out and the account flagged. Time limits are in place to prevent humans from being "bot bombed" by being hit with so many that they can't respond properly.

Why is this on my blog? Because game theory is a very important aspect to how the modern web functions. There are more similarities to dealing with search and SEO as an online "game" than with offline human to human behavior, to the ongoing annoyance of search engines.

It occurs to me that a method that accurately and easily harnesses humans as spam detectors, while not overloading the system with unmanageable amounts of spam reports (and fake spam reports) is something that can be learned from by website owners and search engines alike.

Use humans to detect the spam, but use the system to verify it independently, in order to minimize false or malicious reports.

Interesting.

Ian

Keyword Research Schedule

I was doing some keyword research this morning and was reminded of a very important issue that I'd like to share.

It's February, and I just did some KW research related to Calgary (my home town,and a place I'm very familiar with, as far as KW research goes).

Services like KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker typically default to showing what's in their database for the last few months (usually around 3 months or so).

That means that right now, I'm seeing KW's like "calgary valentine sale" and almost no searches for what I *know* is one of the biggest KW's for the city - the Calgary Stampede.

If I didn't know better, and used this KW research, I might come to the conclusion that the Stampede wasn't that big of a deal. But it is, and KW research done in August will clearly show it.

This seasonality especially affects seasonal things like tourism, tax preparers and so on, but keep in mind that it will have an effect on almost all industries, either directly or indirectly. For example, the end of summer is when a lot of people move to go to school. This results in more searches for anything from pots and pans to computers to local nightclubs as the new residents start to settle in.

As a result, I recommend doing KW research at least once per quarter (ie every 3 months) and to aggregate the data at least once per year.

Aggregation should be the following reports (keep them in a binder or in a folder somewhere):

1. Quarterly KW Reports, saved by year.
2. Yearly aggregate reports of the quarterly reports for the year, also saved by year.
3. Quarterly Reports, aggregated and *trended by KW* from the same quarter for each successive year.
4. Yearly trended reports of KW popularity. This is so the temporary huge popularity of a topic isn't directly affecting your decision making. "Pam Anderson" was an extremely popular KW back in the early 2000's, but not so much today, for example.
   

This will typically give you enough good information to act on, yet not be terribly onerous to create, analyze and report on.

Ian

PPC Text Ad Formats for the Major Search Engines

I'm currently working on a very, very cool tool that I can't tell you about (yet). However, part of it (an extremely minor part) allows the creation and export of PPC text ads for all major search engines.

Although I can't share the full tool yet, it took me some work to collect this information in one spot, so I figured I'd share it with you.

Where bulk upload is allowed, the listings use the exact terms that the search engine in question uses (i.e. the heading you would use for the CSV).

"SB" is single byte (i.e. English) and "DB" is double byte (i.e. Chinese). Enjoy!

Google AdWords Character Limitations and Format

Headline: 25 SB, 12 DB
Description Line 1: 35 SB, 17 DB
Description Line 2: 35 SB, 17 DB
Display URL: 35 SB (SB Only)
Destination URL: 1024 SB (SB Only)

Yahoo YSM Character Limitations and Format

Ad Title: 40 SB, 20 DB
Ad Short Description: 70 SB, 35 DB
Ad Long Description: 190 SB, 95 DB
Display URL: 25 SB (SB only)
Destination URL: 1024 SB (SB Only)

MS AdCenter Character Limitations and Format

Headline: 25 SB, 12 DB
Description Line 1: 35 SB, 17 DB
Description Line 2: 35 SB, 17 DB
Display URL: 35 SB (SB Only)
Destination URL: 1022 SB (SB only)

ASK ASL Character Limitations and Format*

Ad Title: 25 SB
Ad Description: 70 SB
Display URL: 35 SB
Destination URL: 1000 SB

*Ask is English Language (SB) ads only.

Baidu Huobao Character Limitations and Format*

Ad Title: 13 DB
Ad Description: 32 DB
Display URL: 35 SB
Destination URL: 1000 SB

*Baidu is Chinese/Japanese (DB) only

Optimizing Powerpoint Presentations

I give a lot of presentations, and I optimize things for a living, so it was just a matter of time for nature to take it's course and for me to start wondering what the hell I was doing.

See, there are a lot of different types of presentations (I'm talking about ones that use slides or PowerPoint here). There are presentations intended to inspire, presentations intended to sell, presentations intended to convince, and presentations intended to teach. Each type of presentation will require it's own format and style.

I do mostly the teaching type, and I love doing them. Like anything else worth doing, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. For years I've been a frustrated victim of PowerPoint and so-called "advice" on how to make a great presentation. Enough is enough. It's simply not fair to the audience for someone in a technical field like SEO to try to teach them using the wrong presentation style.

Bad Advice

It's not so much bad advice, as it is the wrong advice. If you go looking, as I have, on how to make a great PowerPoint presentation, you'll find that most of the advice boils down to: "Make a presentation like Steve Jobs". All pictures, little or no text.

What was the point of this again?

Maybe that's great advice for Steve Jobs, who is trying to sell you overpriced, proprietary hardware and software by making it seem really, really cool, but for someone just trying to teach people how to get better rankings or convert visitors into customers, cute graphics and drop shadows simply don't cut it.

People at search marketing conferences don't want to be inspired (they already are, that's why they have a site they want to promote), they want to get their money's worth by learning tactics and strategies they can actually take back and use. It's about being practical and effective, not about getting excited over the latest color available for the iPod.

You simply can't use a Steve Jobs / Seth Godin type of presentation to do anything other than inspire. There is nothing wrong with inspiration (I love Seths work), but inspiration won't fix that 302 redirect issue you have, or give you a checklist for finding good links.

The worst part is when you need to take notes. As an audience member, you probably can't write fast enough, (or perhaps were at the session next door) and may want to download and review the presentation later instead. Fat lot of good that picture of the monkey with a banana with no text will do then!

Presenters at technical conference learn this very quickly (assuming they even get invited back) and change their presentations to include examples, data and text so that the presentation will be more useful - basically helping the audience take notes, so they can spend the time listening to you rather than scribbling madly.

That's the point, really - avoiding too much note-taking or boredom. Inspirational presentations do this with big picture statements and great graphics, technical/teaching presentations do this by providing the notes so you don't have to write them yourself. Both accomplish the same goals, just in different ways.

Over-Correction

This brings me to the next annoyance with technical/teaching presentations - information overload. These presentations are the opposite of inspirational ones - they are basically a speech or lecture in slide form. I've even seen people do the entire presentation simply by reading every line of every slide - horrors!

An old presentation of mine from 2006. Ouch.

I think these presentations are even worse than the inspirational ones, in that although it solves the problem of note-taking, there really isn't a reason to attend the conference anymore, is there? These presentations are boring - which is one of the worst insults you can give to a presentation, in my opinion.

The font size keeps getting smaller as more and more information is packed in, the number of slides increase dramatically, and many presenters find themselves fast forwarding or skipping slides due to time constraints. This is very, very annoying.

Showing me a smaller amount of information than you know is one thing, but skipping by slides of potentially juicy information because you ran out of time is unprofessional and frustrating.

Making the Ideal SEO/SEM Conference Presentation

So, what to do? How do you inspire people enough to make them interested in what you have to say, but at the same time, give them enough information that it's worth it for them to get inspired in the first place?

Well, let's break it down. What do you need to accomplish? You need to:

• Make the presentation interesting and even entertaining to a live audience.
  
  
• Free people from the necessity of writing a lot of notes. It's great for them to make "AhHa" notes to themselves as they listen, but they should not be trying to scribble down every word you say for fear of missing something. If your audience is doing this, you should have stuck with blogging.
  
  
• Provide answers and resources, which you can use during the Q&A, as well as helping people who download your presentation. Although some people don't like to allow their presentations to be downloaded, they are missing the point (among other things).
  
  If your presentation is about your branding, then you are giving a commercial rather than a presentation and you should do everyone a favor and get the hell off the stage (unless the audience knew they were going to see a commercial in the first place). If you are trying to teach people, put a copyright notice on it, ask for a link and attribution, and let them download your notes.
  
  
• Identify yourself. This is not only great from a branding and marketing standpoint, but it's also helpful to your audience, should they wish to contact you. How will they remember? You've let them download the presentation! It's now like a giveaway pen with your logo on it, except it's a lot more useful, more likely to be saved, and contains much better contact information. Virtual swag, and costs you nothing to reproduce!
  

The Perfect* Presentation

*A good presentation should be like a website - always being tested and improved. Perfection is a goal, not a state of being, especially for anything using computers.

Section 1 - Splash Page. This should introduce your presentation and yourself in a simple and easy to understand format - no marketing hype. Also the perfect place to point out where you can download the presentation, since the audience looks at this while you are being introduced, and it's really the only time they can/should take notes. They usually also look at this slide the longest, since it's a placeholder during the introduction. Never underestimate the value of a splash page. A splash page/slide has a job to do, and they are only useless if you forget that. Use it wisely and well, or don't use it at all.

Section 2 - TOC. As my old drill instructor said, "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, then tell em what you told 'em". Resist the urge to put in every slide - just the main topics and sections. This is the perfect opportunity to point out you have additional information at the end of the presentation that won't be shown (I'll get to this in a moment).

Section 3 - Visual Presentation. The main event! This is where you keep the graphics clean, the text light, large and punchy, and the entertainment value high. Don't go into excruciating detail. Provide an overview and enough information so that people will be introduced to what they don't know and what kind of questions they should be asking you and themselves.

Remember many members of your audience will only be interested in certain sections, and just want an overview on how it all fits together. But don't over correct and be too shallow. A good way to accomplish this is to do an overview on a topic or sub-topic and then give some specific, practical tips related to that topic or sub-topic.

Section 4 - FAQ. If you have one or two questions that always come up that are not easily addressed in section 3 - put them in here. This is an audience favorite, and establishes you as helpful and available, rather than just a lecturer. This section is optional, but recommended. It does 3 jobs - it answers questions, it signifies the end of the official presentation, and it provides a time cushion where you can easily skip this part or go into greater detail, depending on how much time you have, without making the audience feel they have been ripped off.

Section 5 - Resources. This is where you put all that juicy info that you can't put in the visual presentation because you'd need to use small fonts and crowded screens. Charts, data, links, a bibliography and so on can all be placed in here. This is a great incentive for the audience to download your presentation if they want, but if they only wanted an overview, they don't feel they are forced to. You can also put in the kind of information you may want handy during the Q&A part of the session, but didn't want to get into during the main presentation.

Section 6 - Contact information. This is more than just your name and email. You can include a company overview, services you offer and even things like special offers and discount codes. This is your reward and incentive for making the presentation useful and available for download. It's low-key and not pushy, but highly effective at getting your marketing message out without ruining the on-stage presentation.

Wrap Up

I hope this has been helpful to you (and your audience). If you decide to use this format, feel free to leave a link in my comments area to the presentation for others to see and be inspired by.

Ian

Naver added to Robots.txt Generator

As you may know, my company offers the most popular robots.txt generator in the world free to visitors, and we are continually adding functionality.

In response to a recent request, we've added Naver to the robots.txt tool. Naver is the most popular search engine/portal in Korea. I've been to Korea several times, and (because it's my job) I always ask everyone I meet what search engine they use. It's almost always Naver, and there is good reason for it.

There is one thing I've learned doing international SEO - the Koreans are really, really good at creating useful and engaging web content. Some of the best free online games, tools and services are Korean. Google is getting their proverbial butt kicked there, and it's because they simply are not good enough. I still honestly think that Google got the idea of universal search from Naver - Naver was doing it long before Google was, and is still doing it better.

As a result, I'm kind of surprised I hadn't added Naver to the robots.txt generator already, but I guess it's better late than naver.... ;)

Ian

Update: Google Releases Google Branded IE7

This is a followup on a previous post complaining about my beloved Google Toolbar being lost during the upgrade to IE7 and Googles own Chrome not even allowing me the option.

I guess Google gave up on getting their toolbar to install on IE7, so they appear to have used the Admin Kit provided by MS to create a version of IE7 that has the toolbar included.

http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie7/

Works for me.

New Browsers and Google Toolbar

I like the Google toolbar. There, I said it.

Today, I decided to take a chance and upgrade my IE 7 to IE 8 Beta. I use Firefox for SEO purposes and IE for normal browsing, so this was a big deal for me, since I use IE a lot.

Upon installation, IE 8 promptly informed me that the Google Toolbar isn't compatible with it. A quick check on the web showed that it can cause all sorts of freezing and problems. Darn. Otherwise, it's a really, really nice browser. I was very pleased. Except for my Google Toolbar. I use this for checking my spelling. I spel reel bad. Eye knead ah spel chequer...

However, in a coincidence, I heard several people talking about the new Google Chrome browser. HAH! If anything should work with the Google Toolbar, it should be the Google browser, right? So I installed it, and went to the Google Toolbar page.

In it's infinite wisdom, Googles toolbar page detected IT'S OWN BROWSER wrongly as Firefox, but then informed me that to use the Google Toolbar I needed to download Firefox!!




Huh? That's a marketing and branding nightmare if I ever saw one. I think there needs to be a leeeetle more communication over at the 'plex. And maybe some testing, too...

Just dumb, guys.

Ian

Ranking Reports - a Defence.

You know you are getting old when you have an uncontrollable urge to start a post starting with words like "in my day.." , "I remember when.." or "I've seen this before..."

But it's true - that's the problem. People who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, or to even live through something worse. I was reminded of this while reading a recent forum thread about ranking reports.

Someone started complaining that Google had prevented a certain piece of ranking software from getting information from them. This was almost universally followed not by useful advice, but by a bunch of people saying ranking reports were useless. You see this type of thing with regard to PageRank, as well.

I appreciate that the posters meant well, but I really wish people would think clearly, rather than spouting off the latest over-correction crap they've heard recently. Regardless of the topic, there seems to be a consistent flow to this:

1. Something is pushed too far. Could be a theory, or political view, or whatever.
   
2. Experts, concerned about this, issue reasons why those pushing too far are wrong
   
3. A new generation of people, in a fit of rebellion against the status quo, quickly grab the "new way of thinking" and then, you guessed it, go too far with it.
   
4. Eventually, there is a counter-rebellion and the thinking about the topic matures, now that both sides have been expressed fully and challenged.

The examples are legion. Think about any political, civil rights or scientific revolution and you will see this. So it should be no surprise that it affects SEO, as well.

That being the case, let this be the first shot fired in the counter-revolution against Ranking Reports.

See, in the old days, no one did ranking reports. Who cares how you rank if no one ever visits your site? Instead, server reports were used. In this case, it was often "hits". At the time, hits were not a bad measurement. Pages were very light on graphics, and e-commerce wasn't really a workable concept - people were after "branding" and "buzz". In this context, measuring hits was an easy and fairly accurate way to measure the popularity of a site.

Even today, a popular site will tend to have more hits than a similar unpopular site. You can complain about issues with hits all you want, but the broad brush stroke is usually still representative.

Of course, there are many problems with hits - they are a method of measuring server performance, not visitor performance. A page with a single graphic on it counts as 2 hits (one for the html page and one for the graphic) whereas a page with 50 images on it (even 1x1 pixel images) would count as 51 hits. In both cases, there is only one visitor, however. This was exploited by spammers and bad SEO's who, rather than increasing visitors to a site, would sometimes just slowly add more invisible pictures to the pages in the site, thereby increasing the hits without increasing the actual visitors.

Soon, the industry became more sophisticated, the experts began to call for ranking reports instead of "hits" reports, and we began to move from server-based measurement to search engine based measurement. Instead of measuring our performance using internal criteria (server logs), we switched to external criteria (ranking reports).

After all, it can clearly be shown that your rankings directly affect your traffic and sales. I can see this in both PPC and SEO everyday across many industries. Additionally, measuring based on rankings was more closely tied to the job an SEO does - optimizing for search engines, not for server performance. Life was good. For a while.

Then, the problems with ranking reports began to emerge - first, search rankings can fluctuate from day to day and even minute to minute. Second, some clients wanted daily and even twice daily ranking reports for their top terms. This placed a lot of pressure on both SEO's and search engines, in many cases for no good reason. There is a point when granularity exceeds the information. You can measure too much, and too deeply, getting lost looking at bark under a microscope when you should be looking at the forest, or at least groups of trees.

Other issues with ranking reports were just as serious - ranking well in a term that no one searches for is useless, and sending unqualified traffic was just as bad (and even worse) than sending no traffic at all. Finally, search engines started placing robots.txt files on them. Suddenly, ranking reports didn't look so good anymore. The experts changed course again and began to recommend analytics, instead.

Ironically, we've come full circle. We started doing server based measurement (hits and unique visitors), abandoned it in favor of search engine based measurement (ranking reports) and have now come back to server based measurement - except now we are a lot more sophisticated. We don't want hits anymore, we want unique visitors, time on site, fallout reports, and all sorts of other Key Performance Indicators (KPI). This is cool. It's scientific, it's visitor-focused, and it's got all sorts of pretty graphs and charts.

Ranking reports are now in disfavor, to the relief of bad SEO's who can now justify bad rankings (and their dislike of doing linking campaigns) by talking about how rankings don't matter - it's visitors and sales. How very convenient. It sounds great. Very forward-thinking and modern. Except it's wrong.

Why? Because there is no context. Your visitors and buyers have increased - big deal. Maybe your competition's has also increased, but at a rate ten times yours. But you won't know that, because guess what? You are only looking at your own server for information. If it's not on your server, it doesn't exist. Analytics ignores the outside world and just builds a better navel gazer.

It's all well and good to make yourself better, to optimize the user experience and to increase conversions, but I have news for you - a qualified visitor does not usually stumble randomly to your site - they arrive from somewhere, and that is very often from a search engine. To say rankings don't matter is to do your clients and yourself a great disservice. The best website in the world is no good if no one can find it.

So what now? Go back to ranking reports? No - their weaknesses are well known and legitimate. The next step is to blend your rankings and other external data with your analytics. The visitor experience of your website doesn't begin when they land on your page, it should start as soon as they start looking for what you have to offer. Branding, buzz, social media, PPC and SEO all play a part in this, and thus far analytics has not adequately addressed it, particularly in SEO and social media.

Oh, they can say that people coming to the site based on keyword "X" convert at such and such a rate, but they usually don't suggest new keywords, or tell the analyst where the site ranked for keyword "X" that day, or whether the site was on the front page of Digg that day, or whether there was a news article, blog post or twitter campaign going on. That's important, but since it's not on their server, it doesn't get reported. There is no context, and therefore the information is suspect.

SEO's who "don't believe in ranking reports" don't get it. That's part of their job. If you want to avoid the robots.txt issues, do it manually or use a human-operated script rather than a robot (yes, there is a difference). It will help stop you from over-doing it, anyway. But to say that you optimize sites for search engines and then say that you don't believe in checking a search engine to see if your site is optimized for it is ludicrous.

If you have done your keyword research, a ranking report is a legitimate and extremely important part of the puzzle. It's only a part of the puzzle, not the solution, but it's a very important part of it. Data without context is meaningless, and context is provided from external sources of information, not self-referencing (internal) sources.

I think, like analytics moving from "hits" to KPI, search reports need to become more sophisticated, as well. A simple ranking isn't enough. You need more information. In many cases this information can come from analytics, but it can also come from linking reports, SE saturation, social media buzz references, and many other places. I call not for the return of ranking reports 1.0, but for ranking reports 2.0 - newer, improved and more connected to the visitor.

Doing the job properly requires BOTH server-based and external information sources. I hereby issue a call for all search marketers to move past the current myopic focus on analytics and to look at the whole picture - that's where true understanding lies.

Ian

Cuil Added to Robots.txt Generator

As many of you know, I run one of the most popular robots.txt generators on the web. Some time ago, I sent an email to up and coming search engine "Cuil" for information so I could add their crawler to the tool.

Once they came out of stealth mode, I was sent an email with the information (which I've been procrastinating on) and just today discovered that Victor mentioned my tool in his blog.

Well, I could not procrastinate any more after that! So now, the robots.txt generator now fully supports Cuil and it's special features (ie crawl-delay).

If you haven't tried Cuil, you should. It's growing very rapidly and currently has the largest index of sites of all the search engines. It's pretty good at finding hard to locate information.

Ian

Muphry's Law

AS mny of you know, I kan't spel good sumtimes.

However, I've learned to use the Google Toolbar spellchecker (and the Word spellchecker, when I'm in there) and now most of the time my misspellings are more of the "properly spelled wrong word" variety. You know, typing "it it" instead of "it is" or my most infamous mistake, which, no matter how hard I try, I seem to consistently use wrongly: "its" vs "it's" vs "its'"

This is a bit of a Yak Shaving day for me, as I was reading a post by Rebecca over at SEOMoz and it led me to another post which led me to another with this wonderful term in it: "Muphry's Law" (no, not "Murphy's Law", that's something related but different).

Muphry's Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

In short, people wielding the sword of editorial righteousness tend to cut themselves with it. I've noticed this myself, and think it's really funny, especially since I'm almost always in the "spelling correctee" camp...

On a related note, there is another word I like: incorrection, or a correction that itself is incorrect. I used to get this all the time in legal discussions. I'd say something was X, then someone who'd obviously learned about the law watching the Jerry Springer show "corrects" me with a really stupid definition/usage. My favorite part is when they do this with that look on their face that says they pity me for being so stupid...

Anyway, this whole thing reminded me of misspellings and such, so I thought I'd through together some interesting references:

• It's vs. Its - OK, so now I know... The links on the side to other "English Difficulties" are pretty helpful too.
  
• 100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English

Of course, not all misspellings are bad - you can do very well for yourself as a marketer if you bid on, SEO for, and register domains with, misspellings. Here are some tools and resources for this:

• SEOBook Typo Generator
  
• Keyword Discovery has a Misspelling Function many people don't use, but should.

Other Hints

1. If you bid on typos in PPC, make sure you put them into their own Adgroup and then remove the DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) in your ads for that group - otherwise you look illiterate.
   
2. Testimonials, ALT attributes, the keyword metatag (for Yahoo and MSN, not Google), filenames (ie misspelling.htm), image names (misspelling.jpg), and incoming anchor text from a "misspelling glossary" on your site, or from other sites are all great ways to show up for misspellings in organic SEO.
   
3. For non-English languages, always include the spelling of words without special characters - if the word is "Montréal" or "piñata", then also optimize for "Montreal" or "pinata" - some people are using a US style keyboard, and find it easier to type without special characters, even if they know the language perfectly. They are used to Google helping them and giving them good results even though it's not perfectly spelled. You want to be one of those good results.
   
4. For English, don't forget "s" and "z" transpositions between the US and UK spellings - ie "optimize" vs "optimise".

Ian

PS: I'm well aware that since this is a post about spelling and I'm a lousy speller, I'm a prime candidate for Muphry's Law. So I've short-circuited the problem by deliberately leaving in some errors and announcing that I've done so. Let's see the damn Law deal with THAT... ;)

On Vacation Jun 28-July 5 + Seo-Browser

Hi all,

I'm going on a family vacation to see relatives in the Toronto and Ottawa area for the next little while, so unlike my normal travel ties I won't be as accessible as normal. As a matter of fact, unless you are currently on my "To Do" list, I probably won't respond unless it's clearly an emergency or I said I would.

The good news is that I *will* be working on my "To Do" list (which currently has 73 items on it) whenever I can, as well as hopefully getting some work done on my upcoming book on International SEO. That means that if I've been slow to get back to you, but have promised to do so - I finally will. Once I'm completely caught up, I'll be getting some admin staff to help me so I won't have another issue like this again.

So it's a bit of a working vacation, but it *will* be a vacation, and I'm not going to apologise for that. I'm really looking forward to seeing my family again, and introducing my kids for the first time to their cousins, who I'm sure they will get along with really well.

One industry note before I go: SEOMoz had a post this week regarding a site that was, as it turned out, being a little naughty. Stupidly, ineffectively naughty, but naughty nonetheless. Rand mentioned at one point that there are somethings that tools like seo-browser can't do, like check for this type of cloaking.

I definitely appreciate the shout out, (SEOMoz's SEO Tools are really good themselves, so I take the recommendation as informed and all the more valuable as a result), but I just consider that kind of statement, true as it may be, as a challenge.

Further down in the comments, the ever-quoted Matt Cutts mentioned his favorite tool for detecting this type of thing: telneting to port 80 for a totally raw dump.

Hmmm, a problem (seo-browser can't show raw dumps) and a solution (telnet can). As a result, very shortly you will be seeing expanded functionality in the seo-browser where the http header capture grabs raw data using telnet-like behaviour, and can even report itself as various user-agents, including Googlebot, in the process.

Additionally, we'll be rolling out non-English language support - I do international SEO, so being able to view a site in seo-browser properly in Chinese or Russian is important to me :)

Cheers,

Ian

SEO-Browser.com Update

One of the nice things about being the co-creator of an SEO tool like the SEO Browser is that when I have an idea for something I'd like fixed or added, it's a lot easier to make sure it happens ;)

Of course, I have to pay for it, but at least it happens...

For those of you who don't know what the SEO browser is, it's an online SEO tool that lets you see your site the way a search engine sees it. Although this sounds like something you can do in any text only browser like Lynx or Firefox with certain options turned off, there is a lot more to it than that.

Some of the features (some you have to go into "Advanced Mode" to see. It's at the top of the SEOBrowser page):

• Text only mode browsing of the site.
• Image and object alt attributes are shown, but Italicized to let you know it's alt text.
• Issues with robots, metatags, etc are highlighted
• The character count for titles, meta information, etc are listed.
• You can see pages in advanced modes, such as with "stop characters" removed or in compressed mode (how a search engine actually stores the page)
• You can see WHOIS info, DNS Info, Header response etc
• Toggles Highlights your keywords so you can visualize the page easier.
• Lists the KeyWord Density for every keyword on the page.

One of the only things it doesn't do is give advice. It's a tool for professionals to gather information with, not some sort of mechanical SEO tool. I don't believe in programs that try to replace the skill of a real SEO. Basically, I designed it to do what I needed. Then shared it.

Anyway, I'm pretty proud of the latest tweak. It's such a simple thing, but can be huge when you are dealing with complicated sites. When you go to each page, it lists the response code at the top in orange.

That's all. But in practice, it's actually really important. I'll give you a few examples. Non-SEO's may not appreciate these, but the rest of you should be able to figure out why I like this so much.

First, you can just go to my home page: mcanerin.com [SEO Browser Version]

You'll see it's just a 200OK. Big deal. Now, lets get more interesting. Check out these pages by loading them into the seobrowser:

• Apple.ca [SEO Browser Version]
• SureServer Error Page [SEO Browser Version]
• Yahoo.ca [SEO Browser Version]
• IBM.com [SEO Browser Version]

Cool huh? And very, very useful for people debugging sites. Try to spot the errors (some of them serious) in the example sites above. Then maybe take a look at your own.

Ian