Our Thoughts On “How to Land a Top Spot on Google is a Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma”

Posted on March 28, 2011 by admin

Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe just wrote a piece on the battle that company websites have in maintaining their Google rankings. In the story, Kirsner reports that even TripAdvisor’s own properties, namely TravelPod, saw its positions fall. TripAdvisor runs the most frequently visited network of travel sites so they took a big rankings hit after the Farmer’s Update.

Kirsner then went on to talk about the guiding factors that influence search engine rank:

  • GOOD: how many times a search term shows up on a page
  • GOOD: how many other websites link to your site
  • BAD: copying content from other sites
  • BAD: paying for links from low-quality sites
  • BAD: including dozens of hidden keywords that visitors can’t see on the page
  • GOOD: Create relevant and useful content with original analysis that people will want to link to and share

Our Analysis of How to Rank on Page 1 of Google

Good story. The shuffle he’s talking about is called the Farmer’s Update. Google went on a rampage a couple of weeks ago and began lowering the ranking of websites that did not contain valuable content.

What I mean is this: Google has always rewarded sites with valuable content – content that is helpful, informative and educational. Some sites like eHow.com took advantage of this “content is more” thinking by publishing content that was half-conclusive, half-baked, frustrating to read and altogether not really informative and educational. Why would eHow.com do this? Because they want visitors to visit their site so those visitors will click on Ads (eHow makes money each time a visitor clicks on an Ad) and Google, seeing a lot of content and a lot of visitors, thought that they were providing a valuable experience. Obviously, eHow didn’t and Google, finally, after all these years, dropped them in their ranking. The lesson is this: content is good, fresh and unique content is better and really informative, educational, pertinent and helpful content is the best. If you always try to give website owners a reason to link to your content, there should always be inherent value in it.

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eBay Stores Adds Shopping Cart Feature

Posted on March 28, 2011 by admin

In our last blog, we talked about the cost of doing business in an eBay Store. You’ve got to run the figures for each pricing level to ensure that your cost-of-sale is manageable.

When there is cost associated with selling a product (except for Google Shopping, when isn’t there?), we do everything in our power to reduce our cost exposure. eBay Stores has been a bit clunky in that regard. eBay Stores is a store but not really a shopping cart. In a typical shopping cart, you get to shop – meaning that you can add an item to your cart, continue shopping, add another product to your cart, and when you’ve completed your shopping, you check out and pay your bill – just like you’d do at any brick and mortar store. eBay Stores has not, in the past, allowed a true shopping experience. eBay Stores did not allow buyers to add a product to a shopping cart with the intent to continue shopping. Their model was always built on the one-product auction model. If you selected a product, you had to purchase it then. If you wanted to purchase 4 products from the same vendor, you had to endure 4 separate purchase transactions. Worse, you could not take advantage of lower shipping rates tied to the purchase of more than one product from that vendor. My belief is that this pricing model deterred online consumers from purchasing more products from the same vendor.

A couple of weeks ago, eBay announced plans to “add a shopping-cart feature that will allow customers to keep track of multiple purchases on the site.” This is a big boost to sellers on eBay Stores because it entices and encourages consumers to purchase more than one product per shopping session and also allows consumers (we hope, haven’t heard anything on this yet) to take advantage of lower shipping rates tied to multiple product purchases. The buyer ends up not making as much money on a product sale but should end up making more on sales volume.

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Selling on eBay – Ensuring a Manageable Cost-of-Sale

Posted on March 15, 2011 by admin

As an Internet Marketer, Lancer Media’s responsibility is to expose our customer’s brands wherever their audience or demographic is. Sometimes, that’s in search engines like Google; other times it’s through RSS (blogs), social media, forums, discussion groups, foreign language translated websites, online shopping sites, etc.

For our retail customers, we’ve found that certain online shopping sites have established brand awareness and enough monthly visitors to warrant participation, i.e., Shopzilla/BizRate, Shopping.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber. We’re careful, though. The cost to online retailers of marketing products through online shopping sites can be significant because their fee structure is typically based on a CPC model. We constantly monitor and adjust category and product CPC bids to ensure a manageable Cost-of-Sale.

Other online shopping sites maintain other fee structures. For example, eBay charges a flat $15.95 per month, a product insertion (listing) fee and a 12% commission on each product sold (of the initial $50). PayPal then charges 2.9% plus a $0.30 fee to process the transaction. Costs add up and if you’re not careful, product expenses could exceed revenue. This type of CPA model prevents us from listing lower priced products.

Let’s use two product pricing examples to illustrate the cost of doing business with eBay/Paypal, a $20 widget and a $6 widget:

$20 Widget P&L
Revenue $20
eBay Listing Fee $0.20
eBay 12% CPA $2.40
Paypal 2.9% fee $0.58
Paypal $0.30 fee $0.30
eBay Store Flat Fee* $1.00
Total Transaction Costs $4.48
Profit (Loss) $15.52
Cost of Sale 22%

* eBay charges a monthly flat eBay Store fee of $15.95 which has to be figured into product costs somehow. We’ve opted to amortize those costs at $1 per sale. If you sell more than 16 products per month, your amortization costs will be less per product.

$6 Widget P&L
Revenue $6
eBay Listing Fee $0.20
eBay 12% CPA $0.72
Paypal 2.9% fee $0.17
Paypal $0.30 fee $0.30
eBay Store Flat Fee* $1.00
Total Transaction Costs $2.39
Profit (Loss) $3.61
Cost of Sale 40%

* eBay charges a monthly flat eBay Store fee of $15.95 which has to be figured into product costs somehow. We’ve opted to amortize those costs at $1 per sale. If you sell more than 16 products per month, your amortization costs will be less per product.

Conclusions

We determined that the cost-of-sale for the $6 widget was simply too large and not an acceptable cost model for us to follow. We didn’t list that $6 widget. However, we were comfortable with the cost-of-sale associated with the $20 widget. From there, it’s not as imperative that you run a cost-of-sale calculation for product prices above $20 because the cost-of-sale will only decrease. It’s the products priced below $20 that you must be concerned with. At which product pricing level are you willing to list your products in an eBay Store?

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What Is Google’s Farmer Update?

Posted on March 1, 2011 by admin

The reason Google partnered with Twitter in 2009 is because Google’s website value measurement was failing. It was far too easy for website publishers to co-opt links from link farms, friends or a network. As a result, not-so-relevant websites were getting prominent SERP ranking. Twitter content and followers allows Google a better way to value a website.

The latest Google Farmer Update is another attempt to parse the relevant from the irrelevant. Nice but a bit late, don’t you think? Anyway, Farmer is aimed at site relevance by basically reducing the SERP rank for low quality websites that contain low quality content (think repurposed content aimed at voluminously filling up website coffers) and mimicked content (something I have to remind our clients about almost each day). Low quality or mimicked (copied) content originated from Google’s original mandate that website valued is measured in content. Remember the mantra: “content, content, content!”?

What Google meant to say was that website value was measured in original content. They meant it but their algorithm couldn’t support the mandate. Publishers and SEO companies realized this years ago and decided to venture off into dubious territory. But, they shold have known. You might not get caught once but if you keep repeating your sins, you’re bound to be caught. The focus for Google’s Farmer Update now, as it was supposed to have been, is original content and where best to get original content than from social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook? Twitter content is valued but how long will it take for even Twitter users to find a way to co-opt the Google algorithm into not being able to discern between valued tweets, retweets and follower bases?

What Can You Do to Increase Visitors to Your Website Today?

  • Develop original content – frequently – that is educational, informative, entertaining. Content can be in the form of text, images and video. Make sure you know how to tag properly or contact us for help.

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  • Blog about your industry, your company, its achievements, products, services, how it benefits people and the world’s populace as a whole
    Reformulate high quality thoughts (from your blog) into useful Tweets and Facebook entries. We practice safe SEO and Social Media Marketing Blogging. What will you write about?

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  • Seek (ask but gently) high quality links to your content. Again, a touchy subject for us. We despise link farms and the many requests we receive each morning form afar asking us to use link building schemes. We find that, over time, the content that we develop and optimize ranks very well on the front pages of SERPs. We find that links find their way to our content. It is not difficult to attract links. Ask your customers if they would link to your content. They wouldn’t be customers if they didn’t “recommend” your products and services.
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Twitter Can Improve Your Website Ranking

Posted on February 26, 2011 by admin

For many months now, Lancer Media has been extolling the virtues of Twitter to our clients as a major component of their social media marketing plan. We’ve noticed subtle positive differences in search engine ranking and increases in visitor traffic on client websites that maintain a Twitter profile with a significant amount of followers and content that those followers find useful.

To support our results, we’d like to talk about SEOMoz and what tweets and retweets did for their website’s rankings. We follow SEOMoz quite regularly through RSS. SEOMoz is headquartered in Seattle and develops SEO software.

A couple of weeks ago, SEOMoz blogged that Smashing Magazine had tweeted about their Beginner’s Guide to SEO and that a large amount of retweets were following right behind it. A couple of days later, SEOMoz.org found that they ranked in the 4th position on Page #1 of Google organic’s listings for the term “beginners guide”. Over a period of days, the ranking did fluctuate from Page #1 to Page #2 and back again but never before had they ranked anywhere near the top for such a term.

As SEOMoz rightfully points out, the search engine ranking ranking effect was more about the power of a tweet than it was about an increase in visitors because the term “beginners’ guide” is so general the intent of the searcher could have really been anything related to beginners: swimming, HTML, etc. Such a non-descript term that lacks intent will get your site lots of impressions but not much of a traffic boost.

It’s the Link Weight that Ranks Your Website
The point really is not about the how frequently a keyword is used in search; rather, it’s about the power of keyword-specific, interesting and useful tweets by Twitter users with a significant follower base referencing your website. This link weight algorithm is something that Google and Bing have been working on – separately – since late 2009. A tweet or retweet is not forced, purchased and, at times, is mostly altruistic. Links over the years have been difficult for Google to use in assigning website value. Users of Twitter, specifically, and social networking, in general, establish relationships and follow other people because they find value in the relationship. Google leverages the power of those relationships as well as the keywords, @references and links in the content (tweets) to determine website value.

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Social Networking As Prime Search Engine Ranking Variable

Posted on February 22, 2011 by admin

Last week, Google announced a Social Search update to its web search algorithm. Social search, according to Google, includes normal search results for a given keyword along with pertinent results from those in your social network (set up in Google Profile). Google’s reasoning for including social search in web search results is that search relevance – Lancer Media defines it as being delivered the most relevant results for your keyword query – isn’t just based in web page content but also in relationships. This new way of doing things does alter strategy and service offerings for SEO companies but a good SEO company would have already been aware of the influence social media marketing can and does have on websites.

We’re well aware of Google’s “relationship” algorithm. The thinking began when they (and Bing) partnered with Twitter in 2009 as a means to better measure website weight/relevance using tweets, links and followers. It would have been logical to have included Facebook in the social search results but Google and Facebook don’t seem to be too fond of one another at the moment. In late 2010, Google stopped allowing Facebook to export its user contact data unless Facebook allowed Google the same right.

The catch with Google’s Social Search algorithm, though, is that you have to be logged into your Google Profile for this to work – much like you need to be logged into Alexa (by downloading the Alexa toolbar) for Alexa to measure website traffic. We’ll see but regardless, the point is that Google is expanding the way they assign website value – content, optimization and links still matter – greatly. We don’t see content and optimization changing but we can see the way Google assigns link value changing. The new player in the game is the relationship link, the social network.

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The Unethical Practice of Keyword Spamming

Posted on February 4, 2011 by admin

Yesterday, Lancer Media was contacted by journalist Jessica Vander Velde of the St. Petersburg Times to comment on a keyword spamming story she was investigating.

Last week, a 50-year old mother shot her two teenage daughters to death in Tampa. The two girls were involved in sports and it is being reported that some people are trying to take advantage of the publicity by unethically tagging videos and website content with their names to enrich themselves financially.

What Lancer Media Reported to The St. Petersburg Times
This unethical practice is called “keyword spamming,” said search engine optimization expert Fred Palmerino, President of Los Angeles-based Lancer Media.

These spammers use programs that gather hot keywords or phrases — things that thousands of people are searching for online. Then they link the words to their content.

“They believe, ‘So what if 90 percent who come in are disgusted,’ ” Palmerino said. “There might be that 10 percent that forgets what they were looking for.”

Spamming is often filtered out by search engines’ algorithms, but YouTube’s images provide a loophole because text readers can’t read videos, he said.

What Does It Mean to Unethically Tag or Keyword Spam?
The search engines cannot “read” images or video.  Therefore, in HTML, it is possible to describe images and video. Describing images and video is important in search because searchers employ keywords to find what they are looking for.

For example, if we were to photograph an unknown woman and let’s say she was seeking publicity, more visitors to the site on which we published her photograph, we could – unethically, I might add -  write an image description that contains the keywords “Angelina Jolie photos” or “Lindsay Lohan photos”.  Why? Because each has been in the news in the past few months and are popular celebrities. Keywords that contain their names “enjoy” heavy search volume. I am sure that no one knows the woman I am photographing and therefore, there will not be any searches performed on her name. However,  describing that image of her with another name would populate a search for “Angelina Jolie photos” or “Lindsay Lohan photos” with the image of this unknown woman.

The same keyword spamming practice employed for images can also be used for videos hosted on YouTube, MetaCafe et al.  As for keyword spamming on a general website or blog post, keyword research is normally performed to determine the in-demand keywords relating to the product, service or idea you’re promoting. After determining the proper use of keywords, they are then employed in the development of title tags, description metatags and optimized content.

And, the same keyword spamming practices are being employed on keyword terms relevant to the Schenecker family tragedy. There were YouTube videos that were tagged with “Julie Schenecker” (the mother) that were not about Julie Schenecker but about celebrities and scantily clad women with referring links to other unrelated websites. Worse, websites with a PayPal shopping cart appeared quickly stating that they were a fund collecting money for the two childrens’ sports teams.

How to Combat Keyword Spamming
Here are just a few ways to combat keyword spamming:

  • Blog about it. Use the same keyword terms that the keyword spammers are using to inform readers about the scams or unethical practices. Be sensitive to the injured 3rd parties.
  • Do the same on Twitter – use your Twitter profile to alert your followers using the same keywords, i.e., “Julie Schenecker”. Many of your followers will most likely retweet your tweet and before you know it, your message will be heard by many.
  • Inform YouTube and the search engines directly.
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