Google recently rolled out Google+ which is the clever little +1 Button in the search results. Basically, it is a way that people can vote on a site. This, in addition to inbound links, will be theoretically the main part of the ranking algorithm in the next several updates. The evidence is in Google Webmaster tools showing “Search Impact” as outlined here:

This hurts small business because a big business, with a lot of traffic, can promote that +1 button on their site, therefore, they have a huge advantage in getting more “Likes” than a small business. Hopefully Google is able to give some type of ration credit. Just because a big business gets a lot of likes doesn’t necessarily mean that it is more relevant than the smaller guy who has simply less traffic.

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Google is in control of over 60% of online e-commerce transactions. If you are not ranked on the first page of Google for your primary keywords, and you are a small business, you have little chance of being successful online. Without organic rankings, it will be near impossible to be profitable. The problem is, according to Google’s webmaster guidelines, you cannot really do anything that will give you a competitive edge over anyone. You are supposed to only do what is natural. “Build your site and your marketing campaign to the user, the rankings will come”. That is completely false, if you are a small business.

The highlighted tactic that Google “forbids” you to do is aggressive link tactics. You see, getting inbound links from other relevant sites still account for 60-70% of Google’s algorithm (Pagerank) weight, and if you want to rank for anything, you need a robust linking profile. Simply put, without links, you don’t rank. And as I stated before, if you don’t rank, you probably are not making any money.

They claim that website owners simply need to build good content which users will like. This will be enough for people to want to link to you, which Google will pick up on. This is great in Google fantasy land but to compete with the ever growing link profiles of large companies, spending millions a year on a good PR campaign, it wouldn’t matter if you wrote a Nobel piece prize winning novel, you still wouldn’t be able to compete.

So the only way to combat this is to either come up with $250k+ yearly PR campaigns for your business or to violate Google’s ever changing, strict SEO policies. Most businesses have no choice, and they have to do the latter.

So the small business is screwed no matter what:
1. They abide by the rules and don’t get ranked
2. They violate the rules and risk being out of business any day Google decides to drop them from their index for being smart entrepreneurs and trying to compete in their marketplace.

Google having laws that prevent small businesses from competing is crazy. These laws are ridiculous and to think that you need to abide by them is even more ridiculous. Who the hell is Google to decide who is going to be successful and who is going to go out of business? Guerrilla marketing has been around for years. Google shouldn’t be able to decide who can and who cannot be aggressive in the marketing of their business.

To sum this all up into one neat, concise sentence. Google is favoring big companies by not allowing little companies to get aggressive enough to match their natural link profiles. This is flat our wrong. I am normally not in favor of government regulations, but because Google does control online commerce, they should not be able to decide whether a small business wants to market their business, and succeed online.

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The reason why exact match domains rank so well is because in Google’s view, they look like a branded search. Meaning, whether the domain name is HomeDepot.com versus GardenTools.com, Google does not know the difference between which one is considered a brand and which one is a generic keyword.

Lets go back in time and remember why Google decided to give exact match domains their weight. In the early days of Google, when relevancy was not quite as good as it is now, one of the biggest challenges they had was that people were not finding brands, stores, products when doing a search. When someone typed in “Home Depot” they would probably be presented with websites that were optimized for the brand, SEO sites, competitors, etc., but hardly ever would they come up with the brands actual website. This was a huge relevancy issue that had to be solved.

The solution to this problem was in perfect alignment with cyber-squatting laws. Brand names were winning the good fight in court, and they were getting their domains back. What I believe happened is that Google piggy-backed on this and decided to change their algorithm to include a very simple criteria; when a keyword or phrase was searched, they would add heavy weight to the .com version of the exact match key phrase as it was very likely that the main company that owned the rights to that name owned the website.

Brand relevancy solved! But with every solution there is another problem that comes out of it. In this case, there was no clear separator between a branded search and an exact match search.

So what is the real solution? It is going to be tricky, but I bet they could use a mashup of my ideas below as a starting platform to solve the issue.

1. Create a brand database (a meager of Google Places / Local Business Names / US Business Name search / fictitious name) and dump those into some type of database where they could identify all brand names in the US. Anything in this list will get some type of boost in the .com, .net, .org version) for their keyword search.

2. Create a non-brand list of generic dictionary terms. Sort of risky because a lot of brands are pretty generic on their name and new businesses would not have a chance of ranking, which causes relevancy issues once again.

Google fixing the exact match domain ranking problem is not going away anytime soon, unless they want to critically hurt relevancy for branded search, which would create a bigger problem than they are solving. Domainers – you are good to go now, but knowing Google, problem could be solved in the next few years. Which leads me to the solution for domain owners that have invested thousands or millions in exact-match domains. Make a brand out of them. Register the name, register it in Google places. Don’t give Google a reason to think your domain is a generic keyword trying to get free rankings.

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The Google Farmer update, which took place in late February 2011, is an algorithm specifically targeting scraper sites and sites with little or no real unique value.

95% of legitimate online businesses need not concern themselves. If anything, it will help you drive further up the rankings as other sites will get removed above you. The website owners that are worrying right now have probably worried for sometime, they knew that Google would catch up with their crappy content one day.

Basically, the filter is weeding out sites that scrape content from other sites which is giving the public no real value. A Google searcher does not need to see the same content regurgitated on multiple websites. Google is looking for more uniqueness, plain and simple.

If you have a good website, with good content that you created, you need not worry. If you don’t, I suggest you get writing. Google might not have gotten you this time, but they will get you.

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Hiring an SEO is a very difficult thing to do. I have been hiring them for years as employees, I couldn’t imagine knowing how to weed through the garbage if I did not have the knowledge that I do of SEO. Now a days, SEO is in many times the make it or break it for an online company and going with the wrong company/employee can have a severe impact on the future and success of your company.

I am going to break this post up into two sections, hiring the SEO company or the SEO employee:

I. Hiring an SEO company:
There is nothing consistent about SEO companies. You can put five good SEO companies up against one another and they will deliver you 5 distinctly different contracts; 5 different prices, 5 different payment terms and a host of different guarantee’s and promises. How on earth do you judge one company vs. the other when you are dealing with apples-to-oranges-bananas-grapefruit contract comparisons?

-Tip 1: Don’t compare on price. This is one of the biggest problems I have consistently seen. Sure, if the contract is outside what you can afford, get rid of it. But just because one contract is $5000 and the other is $1000, doesn’t mean that the $5000 is better. On the flip side, don’t go with a company because they appear to offer the same service at a more expensive price. You don’t want to go on the cheap when it comes to SEO. You are not buying paper towels. You are buying a service that could be the deciding factor in how successful you will be online.

-Tip 2: Know what they are doing. A reputable SEO firm will break down, with absolute transparency, what they will be doing for your company. If they are unwilling to show you specifically what they are going to do on a monthly basis, and specifically what it will cost, that is a red flag in my book.

-Tip 3: Verify Results. Many companies claim to have gotten crazy results for a client, but often times they are not verified. There are many ways for a company to verify their results. Speaking to the owner of their said placements is a great start! Also, how good of a job have they done for themselves?

-Tip 4: Check References. Don’t just go off glowing references. Anybody can make this up. One time, a client wanted to hear from 3 companies that we lost because we did a bad job for them. Shocked me at first but it was genius. Especially in the SEO world, none of us nail it 100% of the time. The best of us (I am willing to admit it) only have success with clients 70-80% of the time, so if they come back to you stating they have no companies they have done a bad job on, stay clear of them to.

II. Hiring an SEO employee
This can be dicey. Still not easy for me as I run an SEO company, but hiring (and managing) one in house to run SEO is a different aspect all together. I typically ‘ recommend in-house, unless you understand the SEO process well, but if you are hell-bent on doing this, here are a few tips:

-Tip 1: Finding an SEO. When you get a stack of resumes in, how do you filter through them? How can you verify what they are saying to be true? Unless you know SEO, it is hard to tell. I would look for a person that has verifiable references, can show 10 websites across a spectrum of verticals that are ranked well. If you are an e-commerce company, I would not hire an SEO that only has experience in the hotel industry as those are two entirely different campaigns. Also, have them write down 10 things he would do to your site out of the gate, see what he comes up with. Then, take those responses and hire an outside 3rd party to critique them. It might cost you $500, but much less the cost of a bad hire.

-Tip 2: Entrepreneurial SEO’s. Watch out for the entrepreneur-SEO: I am an entrepreneurial SEO and no matter what you paid me, I would be a horrible employee. If an SEO consultant comes to you looking for full time work, and his entire experience is him working on his own, don’t hire him. He will be gone the second one of his sites are doing well enough to pay his bills. Almost any SEO you hire will have side projects, that is something you will need to deal with. Just make sure they have experience with working with someone.

-Tip 3: Plan on management. How will this SEO report to you? Aside from monitoring placements, which can take a long time to achieve, make sure to plan out how you are going to measure him/her for the first six months. This first 3-6 months might be an opportune time to hire an outside consultant to monitor for you.

Good luck on your new hire! And just remember, how ever you move forward, make sure to be patient at first. No SEO company has control of search engines. It takes time. But if you hire the right company, and give them room to work, SEO will be one of the highest ROI marketing initiatives you will do.

### This was a post from Danny DeMichele‘s Newsweek page###

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I would assume, sites that were below the 7-pack will now get double the traffic.

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Step 1: I type in: Santa Barbara Luxury Hotels. I think this has to be an expensive travel keyword, so there is a high probability that people paying for the ranking probably have some good results to feed me.

Step 2: I am presented with a really good ad from Hotels.com that compels me to click:

Step 3: I am presented with my landing page. I expect some really nice hotels (4 seasons, san ysidro ranch perhaps) but this is what I get: (clicking the image will take you to the landing page)

IF you cannot see the results, basically is is littered with best westerns and other mid-level hotels. Now, I am not trying to be snobby here. I don’t mind a best western for travel, and trust me, I appreciate the $100/night rate. But the second I added the word “Luxury” to my search query, and Hotels.com added “5 star” to their ad copy, the results that I should have been given should have been drastically different.

Hotels.com PPC department, you just lost yourself a really good conversion from me.

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Google Instant Issue 1: Long Tail – I go back and forth on the impact it will have on long tail. On one hand, it will get less-sophisticated searchers to start using long tail more…which I think is important. I watched a less-technical colleague of mine perform a search one day and it was a painful process starting at single, at most, double search strings. On the other hand, I am concerned it will make people lazy who were once long-tail gold mines and they will conform to what Google thinks is the long-tail.

It also feels like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Google force-feeds longtails, they surely wont get as much search history to better search suggestions…which will then make their suggestions less relevant.

Google Instant Issue 2: Sponsored Search – the problem here is a simple one, and I have to think they will fix this but I have not heard it be addressed yet. If you start searching the word “Mortal Combat”, when you get to “Mort..” mortgage ads start to display. These will not doubt hurt the quality score of the mortgage industries campaigns, which would raise their click costs by lowering their CTR. This needs to be addressed by Google.

Google Instant Issue 3: this is more of a preference thing – I sort of feel like my fingers cant keep up with the Google screen moving, this is very distracting and if I was not that good at typing, it would really be an issue.

Google Instant Issue 4: Changing too much too fast – Google is changing things too much in the last year. They need to slow down. My belief is there are too many people making too much money and they might be over-innovating. I believe they should slow down or people are going to start to experiment with other search engines. People like what they know, if Google changes too much, they will lose people who stayed with them simply for comfort reasons.

Google Instant Issue 5: Performance – The site has timed out several times. The milliseconds they save on my searches are swallowed up by the 4 times I have had to refresh my browser. I think it is possible they under estimated the amount of bandwidth they would need.

Aside from that, I actually think it is pretty cool. I like it, I am not sure how a less savvy user will like it…I will be interested in the community feed back as a couple of weeks roll out

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A properly executed SEO campaign will target keywords based off of the content of your website. Doing it any other way is risky and will likely get you penalized now or in the future.

SEO is based off of two primary factors:

1. Content on your website
2. Links to your website

Step 1: Focus on the content
What keyword do you want to rank for? For each keyword you want to rank for, you need a page for it. Write a really good article on each keyword. Don’t have time to write an article for every keyword you have? Hire an SEO copywriting firm like iCopywriter or the like.

Step 2: Link to that article
The next step is easy (at least from a description standpoint). Go out and link to the article you wish to rank for the keyword you are after.

I know I put this in simplistic terms, there is a little more to it than the above detail, however, the moral of the story is 2 fold:

1. Don’t ask “how many keywords will I rank for” you are setting yourself up for failure with your SEO. Instead, make sure you have the content and your SEO knows what your priorities are.
2. If your SEO states how many keywords they are going to rank you for, hang up the call, change your number and never talk with that company again.

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Myth 1 – White Space in Code Will Hurt You - This is a great sales tool to scare you into believing an SEO knows what he is talking about. The white space in your code will not prevent a search engine from indexing your page. Come on now, Google can index and categorize billions and billions of pages…you don’t think they figured out how to ignore the white space on your page?

Myth 2. Google Changes Every month – Google does roll out small updates all of the time, but 99% of them never effect your business. I hear over and over again from other SEO Consultants / firms that you have to “stay on top of it” as every month the Google algorithm changes dramatically. Major changes occur 1-2 times a year tops, and most people are never effected in these either as long as they are doing SEO correctly.

Myth 3. Meta Keywords Help ranking - if some pitches to you that a meta keyword tag increases your likelihood of ranking, run for the hills. They are worthless.

Myth 4. Content is the most important - maybe for Usability, but for SEO rankings, Links outweigh content 10/1. I believe this is changing in the near future, but for now, as of the date of this post, Links are about the only thing that matters.

Myth 5. Unique Keyword Research Tools - most SEO’s will say they have some unique and crazy, custom built tool to identify keywords for your campaign. It’s B.S. They use the same tools you do. The Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and maybe Keyword Spy will give you all the information you need.

Myth 6. Google indexes Flash - I have been hearing this lately. Maybe they CAN index flash, but they are not ranking it worth a crap. Be like Steve Jobs and stay away from flash at all cost.

Myth 7. No follow links are worthless – This is crap and I have proven it over and over again.  Google will decide a links relevance, and they do ignore no-follows. Google only cares about relevance and if a link from the home page of The New York Times has a no follow, I assure you it will provide a lot of SEO value. Sure, you might not see it in a back link report, but I assure you it is going to help.

Myth 8. Google Penalizes Duplicate Content - in most cases, you will not lose rankings because you have the same content as someone else. You may not get credit/rankings for content on your site if it is duplicate, but you are not going to get hurt or penalized for it. Think about how many people sell the same products online and all use the manufacturers description. You think they are going to get hurt for that?

Myth 9. Reverse Algorithms - I hear this a lot when I shop competitors. The pitch usually goes something like “We have reversed engineered Google” This is total crap. Google is a hell of a lot smarter than an SEO, and they are always one step ahead of manipulative tactics. Sure, there are things that can help your SEO campaign and linking campaigns that will give you a push, but there is no secret sauce that some consultant came up with that has beaten Google’s robust platform of determining the rank of a page. If they did, Yahoo would have hired them for a billion dollars.

Myth 10. Keyword Density Matters – I cannot believe this one is coming up again, it is likely some sales guy trying to close something. Keyword density is how many times a keyword shows up on your page versus all of the other words on it. If I had 100 words in a post, and I put in the word ‘SEO consultant” 4 times, it would be a 4% keyword density. This USED to count a lot, in fact, it was Alta Vista’s primary algo 12 years ago. It is not relevant anymore. Just make sure your content is relevant to the keyword topic you are trying to optimize for and you will be fine.

Let me know in the comment below or email me if you think I am incorrect. I am pretty sure I am nails on all of these, but am happy to keep an open mind.

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