As an SEO in Pittsburgh, one of the most common things I hear from clients who are disappointed with their website performance is “I thought I was getting SEO with the design.”

Sometimes, the claim in somewhat substantiated. There are some Pittsburgh web designers that actually do know how to set up a site in order so that it can be easily optimized. Most of them, however, only offer SEO as a sideline to their packages, and this is simply not enough to get the rankings and traffic most business owners expect.

Minimum SEO Requirements

There are many design elements that are usually ignored by designers who are, by their nature, more concerned with aesthetics than function. The following are 5 things to make sure you are getting if your web designer claims to be providing SEO services as well.

1. Unique title tags on every page.  It’s not good enough to just have a title on every page. Each one should be different and reflect the keywords you’re optimizing for.
2. Unique meta information.  This info shows up in the search results and should be relevant to the content on each individual page.  It too should be unique on every page.
3. Header Tags. Headers should be used on every page instead of simply bolding text.  The search engines use headers to determine relevance and including keywords in the headings is incredibly important.
4. Use CSS formatting instead of frames.  Frames hinder the search engines’ efficiency and are an archaic organizational method in any case.
5. Include a sitemap.  Sitemaps help the search engines quickly crawl through and index the website.  An XML sitemap should include every page on the site.

SEO is More than Just Good Web Design

The elements listed above are just examples of the on-page elements of optimization that are the absolute bare minimum requirements for a successful SEO campaign.  Off-page optimization is also vital to ranking highly, especially if you are in a highly competitive industry.  It is extremely rare to find a web designer, in Pittsburgh or out of it, who can afford to spend the time necessary to build quality links that will boost your site in the search engine response pages.

Online Marketing is a Full Time Job

You wouldn’t go to Jiffy Lube and expect them to be able to detail your car or rebuild your engine.  Web design is an exacting and time-intensive job all by itself. If SEO is done right, a good web designer would never have time to be able to handle it.  Good, organic SEO is an investment that eventually pays for itself in rankings and the resulting traffic.  Leave it up to the professionals who specialize in it and you won’t be disappointed.

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There is a wealth of information out there about search engine optimization and internet marketing, but most of it is rather general.  Dealing with clients every day has taught me one thing: everyone wants to know how the general information relates to their industry specifically.  After all, there is only so much theory you can learn before you want to put it into practice.

To answer the question “what about me” I’m going to start writing a series of blog posts concerning specific industries. For the first installment of the “what about me”  series, I’ll focus on the education industry.

I Am in Charge of a College. How can SEO benefit me?

The education industry is one of the most competitive both on and offline.  One of the biggest problems that schools face online is that lead generation companies spend tons of money in order to outrank the school’s websites so that they can intercept online traffic and resell the resulting leads.

SEO can help schools beat out not only their industry competition (other schools,) but also their online competition (other schools + lead generation sites.)  The result is that all of that online traffic will be funneled directly into the school’s website, removing the need to pay a middle man for leads.

How Much Interest is There for Schools Online?

Search volume for education (the number of people searching for education-related keywords) is astronomical.  The graph below is from Google Insights. It judges search volume not in terms of real numbers, but in terms of comparative popularity.  Using a scale of 1-100 Google judges how popular a search term is compared to all the other searches online. I used the word “College” the most general term I could come up with to benchmark industry interest and the graph below was the result.

As you can see, the percentage of searches online for the word “college” is huge.  People ARE using the internet to find potential schools.  This means that any school not actively competing for the firs page of Google is missing out on giant lead generation potential.

We Already Get Leads Through Affiliate Sites

This is one of the most common arguments we hear from people in the education industry.  What makes all the difference is that leads acquired through lead gen sites come at a premium, and as soon as you stop paying per lead, they dry up.  SEO is more of an investment than an expense.  Directing some of that marketing budget towards SEO efforts will leave you with long lasting, profitable results with minimal upkeep.

We Already Tried PPC and It Didn’t Work

Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising is not the same thing as Organic search engine optimization.  With PPC, you pay more money to get ranked higher for specific search terms.  And, you’re paying per click—this means that even if the traffic isn’t interested in what you have to offer, you’re still paying for it every single time.  Organic SEO raises online visibility in the natural Google results.  Because you don’t pay per click, achieving top five rankings in the natural results has a much higher ROI.  Additionally, schools run into much the same problem with PPC as they do with buying leads from lead gen companies:  once you quit paying, traffic dries up.  That means that all the money you spent on that traffic is gone, with no continued return on investment.  As mentioned before, Organic SEO provides much higher return on investment.

Added to all this, PPC campaigns don’t provide nearly as high a click through rate as achieving top five results in Google.  The following is a heat map constructed by a third party web analytics company. It shows the levels of interest and clicks on a typical Google Search Results Page:

Click activity on the PPC ads on the right don’t even remotely compare to the activity on the top left hand corner.

The last reason why PPC is an impractical alternative to organic SEO is that in order to have a truly successful campaign and get all the bang for your PPC buck, you need to create special landing pages for the Pay Per Click adds.  These landing pages have to be optimized the same way you would optimize for a search engine in order to be as relevant as possible to the ad in question.  In other words, you’re performing SEO for the PPC campaign.  Why not just do SEO?

Organic SEO and Colleges

It’s highly unlikely that a college website will rank without a significant amount of outside help.  SEO is a full time job for sites in competitive industries, and all the tricks of the trade are necessary to achieve the desired results.  These results often have a much higher ROI than most other marketing media (such as radio and tv spots etc.) and are long lasting.

Advertising agencies often offer “SEO services” but beware: many times, they consider SEO a sideline project and won’t devote the time necessary to get the same results as a company that specializes exclusively in SEO.

SEO is an actual investment in your web presence, and should be treated as such.  The results will keep you competitive in the education industry for years to come.

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A few days ago, my co-worker Chris pointed out a really well written blog post by SEOMoz.  It wasn’t just well written, it was perfectly formatted, and had all the earmarks of a webpage that both search engines and users would love.

All of the elements are perfect in this page.  Relevant keywords appear in the title, the meta info (sans keywords tag because they don’t believe in using outdated methods,) the header tags and the body copy.  There are pictures all of which have alt tags which include the appropriate keywords. All of Rand’s ducks are in a row here.

Well placed headers and paragraph breaks draw the eye effortlessly down the page and sparse, informative copy tells us all exactly what we need to know.  Somewhat ironically, the page itself was about composing the perfect, search engine optimized page. If only everyone could write web content that gracefully appeals to the user as well as the search engines.

Not So Stellar Examples Of SEO Writing

I was browsing SEOchat.com when I realized that the page was making me dizzy.  This article on blogging for beginners was full of good information, but it was extremely hard to read on a computer screen.

The copy was written in small, closely spaced text.  There were no Header tags or bullet point lists to break up the blocks of copy and worst of all, you had to keep clicking on “next page” to read the whole thing. What’s wrong with scrolling I ask you?  I ended up printing out the page so that i could make some sense of it, but if I hadn’t been so intent on getting that information I would have bounced immediately.

On the other side of the coin, this post on web design breaks up the copy far too much. The images that they use are far too large for the page width and force you to scroll down excessively before you can continue reading. They used bullet points but the list contained way too much information pre section and were still somewhat overwhelming to try to read through.

Finding the Perfect Balance

Web Copy writing is all about finding the perfect balance between supplying what the search engines need in order to establish relevancy to your site and supplying what your users need in order to have an enjoyable experience.  Pleasing the users is notoriously harder to manage than pleasing the search engines, but it can be done with a little practice.

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting in on Stephan Mack and Dave Moser’s presentation about the value of LinkedIn links at a Pittsburgh SEO meeting.  He and his colleagues at EDMC did a study on the value of adding keyword rich anchor text links to your public  LinkedIn account.

7 EDMC employees, randomly chosen, added a link with the anchor text Design School and pointed the links at the Pittsburgh Art Institute.  According to the results of the study, the Art Institute’s rankings for this keyword jumped pretty significantly as a result of their efforts. Further proof the efficacy were the resulting slump in rankings at the termination of their test when the employees remove d the links from their profiles.

It was a really interesting presentation. I was also presenting, so I couldn’t come up with any insightful questions or comments at the time, but the ideas and conclusions have had some time to marinate in my head for a while and I have some comments about linking from social media sites to share.

The Value of Links from Social Media Sites

There are many social media sites out there that, like LinkedIn, will transfer link juice out of their site such as Propeller, Digg, and Stumble Upon.  However, the only place they offer the do-follow links are in your personal profile pages.  These links are valuable in the sense that all do-follow inbound links are valuable, but don’t expect a link from a LinkedIn profile page or a Digg profile page to take care of all of your linking needs.

The domains as a whole are incredibly powerful, but the actual profile pages hardly have any demonstrable page rank. That means the link juice they pass on to you will be more like a dribble.  That is to say that link from your profile page on Digg will not carry nearly as much weight as a link from Digg’s home page (which, incidentally, are no follow.)

In other words, the homepage of Digg is like the Hawaii beachfront property of the internet.  It has huge value, but doesn’t pass that value along through do-follow links…which is how the page remains so powerful. The profile page is like the servant’s quarters that overlook the dumpsters.  They’re still technically on beachfront property, but it’s not as valuable as the big house… Now I’ll continue on before I trip over my own metaphors and kill myself.

Common Myths About Social Media

One of the most common myths about links from social media profile pages is that the number of people who connect to your profile page will raise the amount of link juice that is passed through your link.  This is simply untrue.  The amount of value passed through a link on a profile page is just like the amount of value passed through any other link on the web: only the strength of the profile page is the only measure of the worth of the link. That means that unless the amount of connections you have somehow raises the page rank and strength of your page, there is no difference between a profile page with one connection and a profile page with 1000 connections.

That’s not to say that the link won’t provide more TRAFFIC if you have more connections.  However, traffic and link juice should not be confused.

Another common misconception is that the strength of the whole domain will be passed through your profile link.  As we discussed before, only the page rank of the profile page dictates the amount of actual link juice value the link will pass on.

Twitter

What about Twitter you might ask.  The number of followers that you have on twitter does directly affect the page rank of your profile page.  Unfortunately, Twitter has all that PR to pass around because it does not allow link juice to flow out of ANY link on it’s domain. No matter where you link to from Twitter, you’re not getting any PR value to the site that you pointed the link to.  Sad, but true.

The Networking Benefit of Links on Social Networks

All talk of PR passing aside, social media links are incredibly beneficial whether they’re do-follow or not.  There are many aspects such as branding, popularity, and raw traffic that you have to take into consideration.  LinkedIn might pass minimum PR, and it might not matter how many connections you have from a link juice-passing perspective, but the number of connections you have does directly affect how much referral traffic you get from the site.  Same with Digg and any other social media site.  They can be veritable goldmines of free traffic if you play your cards right.

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• how do you increase your rankings in search engines? Here's the answer: http://bit.ly/Y4HAx #
• Amazing hilarious fantastic Google Opt Out video. http://tinyurl.com/kkn3k7 . #
• Interview on Web Pro News with Matt Cutts from SES. I wish They had asked better questions! http://tinyurl.com/qpkgoe #
• What makes a qualified SEO? Are you one? Are you hiring one? http://bit.ly/19wAPL #
• Just wrote a post about qualifications for SEO professionals. http://bit.ly/19wAPL
  Are you a "qualified" SEO? #
• Check out @PittsburghMag when you get a chance – Eyeflow was featured in this month's issue (see page 28) – Thanks! #

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The success of social media campaigns is notoriously hard to quantify. With pure organic SEO, there are quantifiable metrics upon which to judge the success of one’s tactics. Keyword rankings go up or down. Traffic goes up or down. There are numbers and graphs and statistics which prove the efficacy of any given technique.

Social Media campaigns are not as easy to judge in those terms. The effects are more qualitative than quantitative, and the return on investment is almost never as clear as with traditional SEO services. This does not in any way imply that the social media campaign is less valuable, only harder to track. A great post on Mashable about how to judge the effectiveness and ROI of social media for businesses explains the importance of deciding what the desired outcome of the campaign is.

Social Media Misunderstood

This is where the biggest disconnect between clients and internet marketing professionals usually happens. The client expects quantitative data to back up the effectiveness of a social media campaign when the overall effects are not easily quantified. Instead of looking at typical metrics like traffic increase, other benchmarks must be set at the beginning of the campaign.

For instance, if the campaign is meant to help fix a bad online reputation, then an increased number of conversations is a good benchmark upon which to gauge success. Increased traffic to the website was not the intention, but is often used as a metric for success.

The Intent of a Social Media Campaign Should Match The Results

Figuring out what your goals are specifically is the first step to figuring out the value of your Social Media Campaign, and how it is helping your business (or not!)

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I’m well aware that anyone outside of the SEO industry will be utterly incapable of making any kind of sense out of that title. That’s ok. I’ll explain.

Big Daddy was a software update that happened back in 2005/2006. It changed the way that Google indexed pages and ranked them. The biggest practical (for the every-day webmaster) upshot from the Big Daddy update was the increased importance of inbound links in determining rankings.

Enough about Big Daddy. Lets get to more recent news. Google’s just released another update called Caffeine. Caffeine is being billed as a mostly back-end, architecture and infrastructure change that will increase the speed at which sites are indexed:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”–Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Reading between the lines, however, I would like to focus on the term “accuracy.” To me, it implies that the results served up to the user will more accurately reflect the search terms used which means that Caffeine is actually changing the way that Google ranks websites. Although the changes won’t apparently be too obvious (at first) they are likely to affect fundamental aspects of SEO. Which aspects specifically will not, of course, be revealed to us, but with adequate testing it will soon be possible to get a general feeling for how Google’s ranking practices have shifted.

One completely undisputed fact is that Caffeine is definitely the biggest update Google has done since the Big Daddy update that took complete effect in early 2006. The changes may be more subtle, but they are there, and with further study, we’ll be able to re-evaluate our SEO techniques and refine them to adhere to the new ranking practices. Big Daddy rocked the boat immediately.

I get the impression that the Caffeine update will not be as visible as Big Daddy but will go a long way to keeping Google competitive as the world of search continues to change. In the mean time, SEO companies and practitioners will have their work cut out for them!

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Industry Standards

Most industries have several tiers of formal qualification that are necessary to attain before one can claim that they are professionals in those industries. Doctors have to pass all manner of tests before they are legally qualified to practice medicine. Lawyers have to pass bar exams in every state in which they wish to practice law.

In other industries, the qualifications are not of a legal nature, but are industry-standard. It’s unlikely that anyone lacking a PhD in their specialty will be hired by a university to teach a post-graduate course in that specialty.

In many cases, qualification rests on the nature of one’s education. For instance, a bio-engineering lab is unlikely to hire a liberal arts major because that individual would lack the necessary skills and knowledge to do lab work.

New and Young Industries

There are, however, some industries where anyone can claim to have adequate training, experience and expertise to successfully practice their trade on behalf of others for payment.

These industries, one example of which is SEO, have no formal training. There is no legal SEO qualification one must attain and industry standards are still being decided because of the relative newness of the field.

Formal education is completely lacking–after all, by the time ink dried on the text books, the changing nature of SEO will have already rendered them obsolete.

So how does one claim to be a professional with no possible external qualification? How are business searching for qualified SEOs to decide who is actually qualified and who is selling snake oil? The answer is simple.

The All Important Portfolio

SEO’s only concrete claim to the value of their service is their history of success. There are a few in the industry that have achieved such renown that their expertise is deferred to by most other SEOs, but for the majority of small SEO companies or private practitioners, their portfolio of success is the best way to judge their overall ability to achieve the desired results.

For practical reasons, this makes things much easier for those purchasing SEO services. Clients can judge the SEO firm based on their actual, concrete experience in the industry instead of trusting a third party accredidation party to tell you that they are qualified.

The Formalization of the SEO Industry

The SEO industry is slowly becoming more formalized and structured and there are several organizations such as SEMPO and even Google that offer different SEO certifications. However, none of these are benchmarks of quality the same way a MCAT test is for medicine or the LSAT for law. The true test of quality is still the portfolio and professional history of the SEO firm or individual in question.

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• Whiteboard Friday – How to Get Re-Tweeted http://bit.ly/t2Y3u – good video tutorial from @seomoz #
• Mashable’s Twitter Guide Book Now Available for Download http://bit.ly/TfKvX – this is going to be good. #
• Google Acquires Video Compression Company http://bit.ly/FcIbo – could this mean better youtube and possible TV streaming? #
• Twitter Search In Plain English http://bit.ly/lgtHX – great resource for those just getting involved in the twitter scene. #
• Ben Stiller Discovers Social Media [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/1933pL – haha #
• 16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited http://bit.ly/kuzZc – I like rule 8 the most: Participate! #

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Sure, every day people tweet about their day and what they’re doing and all that fun stuff. Businesses write blog posts about sales, new products and what have you. Schools create Facebook pages so they can react with their students.

But it seems to me that the biggest user group for most social media outlets are Techies. Those who operate in technical industries such as web design, SEO, and other internet fields seem to be the ones who pick up new communication technologies like Twitter and use them the most extensively. Even companies who realize the value of a social media campaign don’t always utilize it correctly.

This should come as no surprise. It stands to reason that anyone who spends upwards of 12 hours a day in front of a computer is the first one to know about and utilize things like twitter. Tech blogs are some of the largest and most followed on the internet. I’d love to see statistics on the type of websites that have the highest rate of RSS feed subscription. I bet they’re sites like Mashable, Reddit and Techcrunch.

Maybe I’m drawing conclusions based on my myopic view of the webverse. I am one of those glasses-wearing, coffee-sucking, monitor-addicted information fiends myself so maybe I’m trying to generalize from a specific and personal point of view. What do you all think?

Is the social media realm populated primarily by Techies? Or can’t I see the forrest for the trees.

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