JCPenny.com SEO Damage Control: Hire a Whitehat!
The news is abuzz with articles about JCPenny.com and how they used black-hat SEO techniques to scam Google and innocent online consumers. This is a sensational story because JC Penny is a large company and they were utilizing a massive amount of irrelevant back-links to push their placement for a plethora of lucrative keywords. So, to start: ‘Bad JC Penny’ for hiring a black-hat SEO company and not knowing what you were getting into.
However, JC Penny can still make do by hiring a white hat SEO firm and getting ranked the right way (and showing the public they are doing so). First of all, JC Penny: your SEO 101 sucks. That means you aren’t doing the basic SEO techniques to get your site ranked. A quick overview of the big categories in your site shows that you’ve done almost nothing to optimize your site for organic results. Let’s take the example of ‘men’s t-shirts.’
The #1 Google Result for men’s t-shirts is Gap.com, who does a fantastic clean SEO job with their website. Let’s compare the men’s t-shirts page on Gap.com to the same page on JCPenny.com:
Gap.com: provides keyword-strong, front-loaded title tags: “Men’s T-Shirts’ | Gap – Free Shipping for $50
JCPenny.com: title tags seem to be built ‘breadcrumb’ style and aren’t always clear: JCPenney: men: t shirts
Gap.com: provides great H1, H2 and H3 tags that are all loaded with relevant keywords: H1 = Men’s T-Shirts
JCPenny.com: has no H-tags whatsoever.
These are just a few examples of how JCPenny.com has done no basic SEO work to get their site ranked, which kind of makes sense as far as why they were looking for a shortcut to search engine glory. Title tag optimization and H-tags are just the start: there are quite a few other basic SEO modifications that could get a page rank 6 site like JCPenny.com on the fast track to page one again.
So, JC Penny: get on the path to SEO righteousness again by hiring a white hat seo company to start over from square one.
Posted in SEO, SEO Basics, white hat seo company
Tagged blackhat seo, gap.com, JC Penny SEO, jcpenny.com, white hat seo, whitehat SEO, whitehat seo company
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Google Algorithm Evolves to Target Spam Content
For years, spam and duplicate content has been in a battle with Google’s search algorithm. The obvious point of Google search is to find the most relevant and most original content related to your search query. For example, if you search for “San Francisco bars” you want all the web page results to be the original websites for bars in San Francisco, not some spam page that is trying to make money off advertising alongside relevant keywords that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for.
Luckily, Google has continually developed safeguards to distinguish original, relevant content, from spamy duplicate content. Google is able to determine with some certainty an ‘original’ source and place less weight on anything other than the original. Google’s entire page rank equation takes a number of factors such as incoming links to determine a pages’ relevance.
Google has also recently taken steps that allows publishers to mark their content as original through page meta data. A partner organization that then reuses the content (like anyone using an AP story) can mark their duplicate version as ‘syndicated’ to place less importance on it. This strategy, of course, only works for those publishers that decide to play by the rules. The original content tag could easily be manipulated by spammers.
One of Google’s principle engineers and head of the web spam team, Matt Cutts, recently shed some light on new changes to the algorithm that will further prevent webspam: “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”
Hopefully, these new changes to Google’s search algorithm will continue to place more importance on original content. In the end, if Google can more accurately locate original content, the technology as a whole will be far more useful to the billion or so people performing s
earches every day.
Is Keyword Related Search Going Away?
“Contextual Discovery” is a new Google search term coined by Google VP of Local Places Marissa Meyer. Essentially, contextual discovery refers to utilizing a individual’s location across a number of Google products, including Places, Latitude, Google Maps and Google Earth to provide relevant results.
In a recent interview, Meyer stressed the future importance that local will have on all of Google search: “The idea is to push information to people. It’s location in context. Inside the browser and a toolbar, can we look at where people have been going on the web — then we deliver it. But it’s a big UI challenge. In the browser it might be a panel on the right or bottom that complements your browsing. On the mobile phone, it’s where you are in the physical world. We can figure out where the next most useful information is. In a restaurant maybe it’s a menu. Or maybe it’s a social menu. It’s about explicit and implicit location.”
The recent integration of Google Place results into the mainframe of organic results already underscores the fact that the way results are served is evolving, and it’s happening at a rapid rate. As contextual discovery becomes more important, keyword related searches could start to lose importance (as would standardized keyword-based SEO tactics).
For example, if you are looking for bars in Union Square of San Francisco, instead of typing ‘Union Square San Francisco Bars’ into a Google search box, you might already be served results based on the fact that you are standing in Union Square. Much like how Adsense serves contextual ads based on what sites you are on, Google’s contextual discovery algorithm will serve ads based on your location and other relevant queues.
In the case of San Francisco Union Square bars, the SEO tactics to optimize a website for contextual discovery might be quite different than keyword related title tags, content, etc. Geographic and social queues might start to be weighed more heavily and would become all the more important for local and small business search engine optimization.
In a recent interview, Meyer stressed the future importance that local will have on all of Google search: “The idea is to push information to people. It’s location in context. Inside the browser and a toolbar, can we look at where people have been going on the web — then we deliver it. But it’s a big UI challenge. In the browser it might be a panel on the right or bottom that complements your browsing. On the mobile phone, it’s where you are in the physical world. We can figure out where the next most useful information is. In a restaurant maybe it’s a menu. Or maybe it’s a social menu. It’s about explicit and implicit location.”
The recent integration of Google Place results into the mainframe of organic results already underscores the fact that the way results are served is evolving, and it’s happening at a rapid rate. As contextual discovery becomes more important, keyword related searches could start to lose importance (as would standardized keyword-based SEO tactics).
For example, if you are looking for bars in Union Square of San Francisco, instead of typing ‘Union Square San Francisco Bars’ into a Google search box, you might already be served results based on the fact that you are standing in Union Square. Much like how Adsense serves contextual ads based on what sites you are on, Google’s contextual discovery algorithm will serve ads based on your location and other relevant queues.
In the case of San Francisco Union Square bars, the SEO tactics to optimize a website for contextual discovery might be quite different than keyword related title tags, content, etc. Geographic and social queues might start to be weighed more heavily and would become all the more important for local and small business search engine optimization.
Celebrity Age vs. Search Traffic – America’s Keyword Report
This edition of America’s Keyword Report checks out the US monthly Google search volume on all those celebrities you hear so often about. While creating the report, I found a really interesting trend that correlates younger celebrity age to more Google traffic. While this seems fairly logical because of the news and media coverage of young celebrities, it also speaks to how much the younger fan-base must be searching and using the internet in general.
The graph image below expands if you click it:
Celebrity Age vs. Search Volume Chart
How Big of a Role Does SEO Play in Politics?
I recently was Googling some information on California’s recent proposition 23, which if passed would have banned a ground-breaking clean energy bill. The ‘No on 23′ site pops first in the results, above two ‘Yes on 23′ sites. For anyone looking for information on whether to vote ‘yes or no’ on this proposition, the search results could have made a difference in their decision.
As more money goes into political campaigns it makes you wonder how much is going towards search engine optimization efforts. Meg Whitman put a record $141 million into her governor’s campaign, and it shows on the SEO side of things. Googling ‘California Governor Race’ you find megwhitman.com on the 1st page of results but jerrybrown.com is no where to be found. Although Meg Whitman ending up losing, she may have made gains through SEO.
Large corporations and political organizations both have recently made use of Google Adwords. BP had the infamous case of trying to clean up their mess by sending users searching for ‘oil spill’ to their clean-and-tidy PR web portal. This past midterm election also was inundated with Google ads for search terms on various candidates and bills. As more and more people go online to retrieve their information, the battle for political search engine supremacy is sure to become more competitive.
There are quite a few SEO standards that come naturally with a popular candidate’s web presence. If the race is getting news coverage, getting link-backs to a website should already be there. The same goes for their Twitter and Facebook presence – if a politician has a following it will already be reflected there. However, there are some items that may not be accounted for normally, such as the use of anchor tags in links, getting a political page up as early as possible, and determining which search terms are most likely to garner traffic when election time comes around.
It will be interesting to see how SEO evolves next time around for the 2012 presidential election. The jobs issue is clearly at the forefront – will new sites pop up targeting keywords like ‘obama jobs’ or do old bastions like Change.org already serve that purpose?
Posted in Adwords, SEO, political SEO
Tagged meg whitman, midterm elections, political keywords, political SEO, politics, proposition 23, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
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Sport’s Traffic – America’s Keyword Report
In America, sports make the world go round. Sports fans are likely to drop social, moral, or professional obligations just to make sure they are home in time to watch the game.
So how does this obsession reflect in our Google search trends? Do more people search for Tom Brady or Peyton Manning? Do people really hate hockey as much as we think? Check out this month’s sports edition of America’s Keyword Report:
Football – 16,600,000
Golf – 16,600,000
Baseball – 9,140,000
Basketball – 9,140,000
Soccer – 7,480,000
Tennis – 4,090,000
Hockey – 4,090,000
MMA – 1,000,000
NFL – 7,480,000
NBA – 4,090,000
MLB – 2,740,000
UFC – 2,240,000
Nascar – 1,830,000
NHL – 1,220,000
Yankees – 1,220,000
Lakers – 1,000,000
Celtics – 673,000
Red Sox – 673,000
Patriots – 673,000
Dallas Cowboys – 673,000
Redskins – 550,000
Packers – 550,000
Miami Heat – 246,000
Bruins – 246,000
New York Jets – 165,000
San Jose Sharks – 74,000
Los Angeles Galaxy – 6,600
Tiger Woods – 2,240,000
Lebron James – 823,000
Kobe Bryant – 450,000
Brett Favre – 301,000
Manny Pacquiao – 246,000
Peyton Manning – 201,000
Brock Lesnar – 201,000
Derek Jeter – 201,0000
Tom Brady – 165,000
Floyd Mayweather – 165,000
David Beckham – 165,000
Ochocinco – 165,000
Ben Roethlisberger – 135,000
Dwayne Wade – 135,000
Dwight Howard – 135,000
Anderson Silva – 135,000
Alex Rodrigeuz – 110,00
GSP (Georges St-Pierre) – 110,000
Adrian Peterson – 90,500
BJ Penn – 90,500
Roger Federer – 90,500
Landon Donovan – 74,000
Sidney Crosby – 74,000
Kevin Garnett – 60,500
Chris Bost – 60,500
Fedor Emelianenko – 60,500
Tim Lincecum – 40,500
Buster Posey – 14,800
Joe Thornton – 4,400
Cody Ross – 2,900
Steven Stamkos – 1,900
So how does this obsession reflect in our Google search trends? Do more people search for Tom Brady or Peyton Manning? Do people really hate hockey as much as we think? Check out this month’s sports edition of America’s Keyword Report:
Football – 16,600,000
Golf – 16,600,000
Baseball – 9,140,000
Basketball – 9,140,000
Soccer – 7,480,000
Tennis – 4,090,000
Hockey – 4,090,000
MMA – 1,000,000
NFL – 7,480,000
NBA – 4,090,000
MLB – 2,740,000
UFC – 2,240,000
Nascar – 1,830,000
NHL – 1,220,000
Yankees – 1,220,000
Lakers – 1,000,000
Celtics – 673,000
Red Sox – 673,000
Patriots – 673,000
Dallas Cowboys – 673,000
Redskins – 550,000
Packers – 550,000
Miami Heat – 246,000
Bruins – 246,000
New York Jets – 165,000
San Jose Sharks – 74,000
Los Angeles Galaxy – 6,600
Tiger Woods – 2,240,000
Lebron James – 823,000
Kobe Bryant – 450,000
Brett Favre – 301,000
Manny Pacquiao – 246,000
Peyton Manning – 201,000
Brock Lesnar – 201,000
Derek Jeter – 201,0000
Tom Brady – 165,000
Floyd Mayweather – 165,000
David Beckham – 165,000
Ochocinco – 165,000
Ben Roethlisberger – 135,000
Dwayne Wade – 135,000
Dwight Howard – 135,000
Anderson Silva – 135,000
Alex Rodrigeuz – 110,00
GSP (Georges St-Pierre) – 110,000
Adrian Peterson – 90,500
BJ Penn – 90,500
Roger Federer – 90,500
Landon Donovan – 74,000
Sidney Crosby – 74,000
Kevin Garnett – 60,500
Chris Bost – 60,500
Fedor Emelianenko – 60,500
Tim Lincecum – 40,500
Buster Posey – 14,800
Joe Thornton – 4,400
Cody Ross – 2,900
Steven Stamkos – 1,900
Posted in America's Keyword Report, Google, keywords
Tagged America's Keyword Report, Lebron James, MLB, NFL, NHL, Patiots, Soccer, Sports, sports fans, Sports Keyword Traffic, sports traffic
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Updated Google Places Search and SEO
Google recently started rolling out their new and improved Google Places search results. Essentially, the changes make Google Places listings for local businesses more visible by occupying more real estate (See below for the side by side comparison.) So, the question is: how do these new Google Places listings change the SEO for local businesses?
Let’s say you are a San Francisco Pizza Delivery shop. Now, instead of simply having a seperate ‘local results’ section for all the pizza delivery locations in San Francisco, the results are seamlessly integrated into the standard organic results. For example, the organic results between the national chain dominos.com listing and the local northbeachpizza.com listing are nearly identical.
One of the primary changes is that the new listings allow for more information to be displayed on the results page prior to clicking through. This makes being meticulous on your Google Places page all the more important – filling out a profile picture, details, hours, service area and more will differentiate your local business and drive more customers.
In addition the map now follows you as you scroll down the page of organic listings. This makes the map more prominent, and could influence the use of Google’s pay-for placement tags that highlight specific businesses. However, the map’s placing on the right side of the page also pushes down Adwords placements that are below the top 3 positions. If you scroll down the page, the map follows you and pretty much covers up the right side ad column. This could potentially further diminish the click-through-rates of ads in the 4-10 positions (thus also lowering the corresponding quality scores). Position bidding for the top 3 positions could become a more valuable tool with this change. What does Google have up it’s sleeve with the large change of search layout?
Let’s say you are a San Francisco Pizza Delivery shop. Now, instead of simply having a seperate ‘local results’ section for all the pizza delivery locations in San Francisco, the results are seamlessly integrated into the standard organic results. For example, the organic results between the national chain dominos.com listing and the local northbeachpizza.com listing are nearly identical.
One of the primary changes is that the new listings allow for more information to be displayed on the results page prior to clicking through. This makes being meticulous on your Google Places page all the more important – filling out a profile picture, details, hours, service area and more will differentiate your local business and drive more customers.
In addition the map now follows you as you scroll down the page of organic listings. This makes the map more prominent, and could influence the use of Google’s pay-for placement tags that highlight specific businesses. However, the map’s placing on the right side of the page also pushes down Adwords placements that are below the top 3 positions. If you scroll down the page, the map follows you and pretty much covers up the right side ad column. This could potentially further diminish the click-through-rates of ads in the 4-10 positions (thus also lowering the corresponding quality scores). Position bidding for the top 3 positions could become a more valuable tool with this change. What does Google have up it’s sleeve with the large change of search layout?
A Guide to Writing for Both Humans and Robots
It’s simply strange to think about. There are writers out there, in the present day, who are composing content for two audiences simultaneously: humans and robots.
These individuals are search engine optimization (SEO) writers. Writing for SEO means creating content for two specific audiences simultaneously. The first audience is the human reader – those people who will find your content on blogs, news directories and social media sites. The second audience is the search engine ‘web crawler’ – those robots employed by Google and Co. that meticulously crawl web pages and determine the relevance between sites and search queries.
There are quite a few guides available on how to properly write content with search engine optimization in mind. While many of these guides give great tips on the use of keyword conventions and titles – many forget the cold hard truth that writing for SEO is a constant balancing act.
The very nature of these two audiences is in opposition. What a human finds entertaining, humorous or interesting might be completely irrelevant to a web crawler. And what a crawler bestows with high importance through its appraisal of title tags and H1 headers may turn out to be an utterly banal article (which probably could have been written by a robot). Catering too far to either audience can result in failure. Too much human ‘pizzazz’ (such as the use of metaphors) and the crawlers may not attribute the article to the target keyword. Too much keyword jargon and the humans will never pick the article up and link back to it.
This makes the job of a good SEO writer particularly difficult (though not impossible). Achieving a balance between the two audiences can be done – it simply means working within constraints. Let’s say the end goal is to attain incoming traffic for a local business web site through the keyword “old shoe repair.“ Here are a few various article types that can help cater to both our human and robotic audiences:
The Top Ten List: Create a top 10 (or 5) list of famous shoes that have gone out of style.
- For The Humans: Reminiscing about our old pairs of Converse All-Stars and Nike Air Jordans.
– For the Robots: The perfect segway to talk about getting those old shoes repaired.
The Recent News: Write an article that involves recent, breaking news that involves shoes. For example “Do Obama and Biden share their pairs of old shoes?”
- For the Humans: A piece of news that is as digestible as anything you might find on CNN nowadays.
- For the Robots: Fresh, relevant, keyword specific content.
The Controversial Subject: Write a piece of content on a subject that is sure to have both lovers & haters. For example “Will Vibram Five Fingers Replace Old School Shoes All Together?”
- For the Humans: a good read that is sure to push them in one way or the other and possibly involve them in an ongoing conversation because of that.
- For the Robots: Fodder not only for on-topic keyword insertion, but also a long term conversation with commentor’s keyword use.
Posted in Google, SEO, SEO Writing, keywords
Tagged blogging, Google, Humans, keywords, Robots, SEO Writing
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Food for Thought – America’s Keyword Report
For this edition of “America’s Keyword Report” we ask the question: what kind of foods are Americans Googling? This report is not only indicative of what we like to eat, but also the types of crazy diet fads that are currently sweeping the nation. Also, what’s on the menu this month? My personal favorite: the 390 people who searched “how to cook squirrel” (any guesses where the majority of these queries originated from?)
Pizza – 7,480,000 (1 out of 37 Americans Googled Pizza last month…) Sushi – 1,500,000 Burgers – 1,500,000 Chinese Food – 450,000 Jerky – 246,000 (this one’s been on the rise lately) Pho – 201,000 Indian Food – 135,000 Rocky Mountain Oysters – 5,400 Alligator Meat – 3,600 Puppy Meat – 260 (a bit scary the first hit for this goes to ‘puppybeef.com’)
How to cook turkey – 60,500
How to cook steak – 40,500
How to cook lobster – 18,100
How to cook salmon – 14,800
How to cook pasta – 4,400
How to cook squirrel – 390
How to cook frogs – 320
How to cook moose – 140
How to cook snake – 140
How to cook pigeon – 91
Low Carb Diet – 135,000
Protien Diet – 110,000
Mediterranean Diet – 74,000
Vegetarian Diet – 60,500
Raw food Diet – 60,500
Cabbage Soup Diet – 49,500
Acai Berry Diet – 49,500
Grapefruit Diet – 33,100
Fruit Diet – 27,100
Ketosis Diet – 22,200
Caveman Diet – 12,100
Tapeworm Diet – 3,600
Breatharianism Diet – 140 (This is a diet that consists of no food OR water, aka ‘starving yourself’)
Ear Stapling Diet – 110 (Don’t even ask)
Pizza – 7,480,000 (1 out of 37 Americans Googled Pizza last month…) Sushi – 1,500,000 Burgers – 1,500,000 Chinese Food – 450,000 Jerky – 246,000 (this one’s been on the rise lately) Pho – 201,000 Indian Food – 135,000 Rocky Mountain Oysters – 5,400 Alligator Meat – 3,600 Puppy Meat – 260 (a bit scary the first hit for this goes to ‘puppybeef.com’)
How to cook turkey – 60,500
How to cook steak – 40,500
How to cook lobster – 18,100
How to cook salmon – 14,800
How to cook pasta – 4,400
How to cook squirrel – 390
How to cook frogs – 320
How to cook moose – 140
How to cook snake – 140
How to cook pigeon – 91
Low Carb Diet – 135,000
Protien Diet – 110,000
Mediterranean Diet – 74,000
Vegetarian Diet – 60,500
Raw food Diet – 60,500
Cabbage Soup Diet – 49,500
Acai Berry Diet – 49,500
Grapefruit Diet – 33,100
Fruit Diet – 27,100
Ketosis Diet – 22,200
Caveman Diet – 12,100
Tapeworm Diet – 3,600
Breatharianism Diet – 140 (This is a diet that consists of no food OR water, aka ‘starving yourself’)
Ear Stapling Diet – 110 (Don’t even ask)
Posted in America's Keyword Report, keywords
Tagged America's Keyword Report, caveman diet, Diets, food for thought, Food Keywords, Google, keywords, Pizza, SEO keywords, Sushi
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SEO vs PPC: Who would win in a fight?
SEO: A long -term organic strategy for a business to drive online traffic.
PPC: An immediate implementation to enable a business to get the right eyes on their product or service.
SEO: Takes a creative, qualitative, content driven and socially-aware approach. (Writing quality content, creating social media conversations, requesting link-backs, etc.)
PPC: Takes an analytical, quantitative and ‘by-the-numbers’ approach. (Analyzing data, trends, and traffic estimates to ascertain the best formula for success).
In a sense, the SEO vs PPC debate is similar to the dichotomy of pre-internet advertising models. Take coupons vs. brand awareness. Coupons are a great way to drive immediate traffic to a business – simply advertise them in the local newspaper and acquire customers through your great deals and offers. However, when you stop offering the coupons, you’ll likely cut off the flow of new customers. Brand Awareness is a long term strategy – utilizing print, television and various other mediums to get in your customer’s head and make them suddenly remember your brand when they are walking through the grocery store aisle. Brand awareness is a long term strategy that often takes the creativity you see in shows like Mad Men.
It’s never so cut-and-dry though. Coupons need a degree of creativity, and can have a long term effect, just as a branding campaign needs to crunch the numbers and make sense in the short term. The same goes for PPC and SEO. Although in general PPC is a qualitative effort, it takes creativity to fit an eye-catching ad tagline in 25 characters. And SEO may be a long term organic strategy, but it should also take the short term into account by targeting long-tail keywords that will be easier to rank for while the ‘big fish’ are catching up.
So…who would win in a fight? It would probably go something like this:
Posted in Adwords, SEO, ppc
Tagged Adwords, brand awareness optimization, coupons, PPC Marketing, search engine, SEO vs PPC, social media
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