We Do Search Engine Optimization.

If you haven’t checked out your Google webmaster tools lately, you may be surprised to see some new additions next time you log in. Google recently updated their webmaster tools and added a new “Settings” area with several new features for SEO’s including geographic targeting, preferred domain, an option for inclusion in Google Image Labeler, and custom crawl rate.

The new geographical targeting feature is pretty straightforward – it allows you to tell Google what geographical areas your website is targeting. It works similar to the way a .us or .co.uk domain works. This may be a very helpful feature for those who have a regular top level domain and only target specific regions.

The preferred domain option allows you to tell Google whether you want to set a preference for a “www.” or no “www.” in your URL. Don’t ignore this, as it is the root of canonical indexing problems. An example of canonical duplicate content is: www.site.com/page.html and site.com/page.html . My preference is to use ‘www’. This feature probably isn’t relevant in most cases, but it is better to make a decision, rather than leave it up to chance. The more specific you are with your site configuration, the easier time Googlebot will have indexing and ranking your site.

Another feature is the ability to opt into the Google Image Labeler program. This will allow other people to label your images and help Google index them better. This feature is useful for a wide variety of sites to help propagate images across the web and increase overall ranking in Google image search results. I am amazed at how much traffic our clients receive from Google Image search – it is 50% of all traffic on one site! Never underestimate the search engine optimization power of having relevant images on your site.

The last feature is the custom crawl rate. Google will let you have a little input over how fast and how long the Googlebot stays on your site. If you’re having problems getting “hard to reach” areas of your site indexed, this could be the answer you’ve been looking for. Another great thing about this feature is it will automatically reset after 90 days. While it may be beneficial to crank up the juice for the Googlebot to get him spidering your entire site, you probably don’t want to be giving up a huge amount of bandwidth over a long period of time.

This post will examine different kinds of search engine optimization spam and the shady SEO’s who create them. The easiest way to spot a beginner search engine optimizer is to examine pages for keyword stuffing, text in odd places, an over abundance of links, long gratuitous keyword stuffed filenames,

Hidden text at the top or bottom of the page
In the past, a company would try to use questionable search engine optimization to stuff pages with more keywords, inserting barely readable text in odd places and coloring this keyword stuffed text nearly the same color as the background. Apparently even churches need to falsely manipulate their search engine placement.

Extraneous links

After looking at thousands of web pages, these tricks and techniques stand out extremely well. It is very easy for an experienced SEO or spam engineer such as Matt Cutts to find unethical search engine optimization.

My advice is to create pages with information that will help another user and provide real value. Creating 5 pages that repeat the same text dozens of times will never garner any links. However a page that shows a person the 5 key steps to get social media traffic will gather lots of links.

Advanced SEO’s are master linkers. They know that the key to long term top 10 search engine placement is by getting lots of quality links. Acquiring links is hard, boring, and tedious. But after getting dozens of links from authority sites the Google Gods will smile upon your site.

Extra Long Footer Links
Beware of sites with 20+ links in the footer. This is very easy for search engine algorithms to detect, and it looks unprofessional for your users. The footer is a good location to place secondary links and additional resources. Listing all 100 cities in the state you serve is a bad idea.

Selling & Buying Links for PageRank
Link brokering is the oldest profession on the internet. Some websites have the goods, and people are always willing to get a piece of high net work link action. Resist the urge to succumb to your carnal desires and take a shortcut to backlink heaven. Buying links is expressly forbidden by all the search engines and the penalties can be severe.

Penalties for uncontrolled link buying range from mild (link is given no value) to strong (your links loose the ability to pass pagerank). Many professional sites such as Findlaw have tried to sell links while claiming they don’t.

If you sell links, setup a quality directory. I have compiled a list of directories that should be on every search engine optimization checklist.

There are many ways to do bad SEO.

To ascertain whether you should do a particular change ask yourself this question and you will never make bad decisions: Will my users be better off for this change, will it make my message clearer, will users be better able to find what they are looking for and will it make my site easier for search engines to index?

In a great piece of research from the Search Insider Summit in Park City, UT showing the disparity of spending between pay per click and natural search engine optimization campaigns.

Even though SEO is more cost effective, drives more traffic and is sustainable for the long term, it receives less of the marketing budget than paid search.

• For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)
• Based on action/conversion tracking, paid search clicks convert, on average, at 1.5X the rate of organic clicks (no surprise, since that ad text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser)
• From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search

Across the board ad spending (via SEMPO):

• 2004 was 85% PPC vs. 12% Organic
• 2005 was 87% PPC vs. 11% Organic
• 2006 was 87% PPC vs. 12% Organic
• 2007 was 88% PPC vs. 10% Organic

Pay per click marketing budgets are increasing while natural search budgets are slowly declining.

• Spend on SEO is 1/8th of PPC
• Paid Search Agencies earn, on average 10% of their clients’ PPC spend (this number may actually be low)
• By this logic, SEO Agencies earn 1/45th {1 / 5.66 x 8} as much as paid search agencies (from a direct keyword-to-conversion path perspective)

PPC is easier for clients to value and agencies to measure. As a result, online marketing agencies are devoting the lions share of their budget to Adwords, Adcenter and YSM and businesses are spending more dollars to get that traffic.

This should help convince SEO firms that they bring true value to the internet marketing world and easily prove it is a good long term investment.
other studies with traffic studies

• Hitwise
• Enquiro
• Comscore

See the full report from SEOmoz here.