(I have been a practicing SEO for over a decade. We, as a company, have white hat optimized hundreds of websites with great success. We also design and develop websites and offer value-add internet markeeting services. So, in writing this blog, I put forth my own empirical data but do so using the guidelines put forth by Modesto Siotos, Rand Fishkin and SEOMoz.)

The Penguin update is aimed directly at “unnatural” linking strategies employed by SEO’s: outbound links, inbound links, and anchor text which, in the common parlance, is a term used by SEO’s to indicate that text on a web page has been linked to another web page on the same site. Anchor text is supposed to give Google an idea of the theme/thesis of the linked-to page. For example, if I link the term “women’s leather wallets” from the home page – as we’ve done on walletbe.com, Google expects that the linked-to page is about Women’s leather wallets, which of course, it is. I will oly link to that page once as a rule, but I will link more than once if I feel it will enahce the visitor experience. I expect Google to understand that.

We are reading that sites with unnatural links in place receive notices in their Webmaster Tools console, sometimes before the penalty hits and sometimes after the penalty hits. After researching the Penguin update for quite a while and absorbing its meaning, it would not be that far from the truth to say that it is primarily aimed at link farms and agencies that buy and sell links in bulk. As Google has stated: "Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.". Slowly, but surely, Google catches up with their guidelines; unfortunately, at times, a bit too much after the fact. Because what we no doubt have seen is that white hat SEO has been penalized for a long while and it’s about time Google stepped up. The only issue here is that I’m reading that some good sites are falling through the cracks because of the Penguin update and there’s a petition to cancel it. I’d prefer to see a better constructed algorithm.

Google has identified 5 basic categories of unnatural links that website publishers should be aware of:

1. Paid Link Programs – if you subscribe to a link building program, you can basically be assured that Google knows about it and that those linking websites have been targeted for de-indexing or a lower ranking.
2. Agency Link Networks – What is an agency link network? An agency link network is comprised of a group of websites published by companies for the clear intention of using those sites to provide links to their own client websites. I think this is a bit over-reaching and can be dangerous. I agree with the idea that link-farming is improper in theory but it is folly to believe that all links should be altruistically attained in the climate that Google itself has spawned and encouraged – yes, encouraged because doing nothing, as Google has done for years, is still an action. For years, Google has rewarded sites that receive the benefit of link farming, or excessive quantities of links in short periods of time. And here we are, 10 or so years after the fact, and Google is just now beginning to act on it. Links should be thematically relevant and beneficial to the visitor – in the end, as Google has asked for many years, think of the visitor first and its search engine will reward you. Yes, sites with unethical linking strategies should be penalized (what took you so long, Google?). But, companies that publish websites with exceptionally useful content whereby moderate amounts of anchor text on those sites links to client sites is not black hat – not at all. Nor is it webspam. If a useful site links to another useful site, does that not accomplish what Google has set out to achieve? Relevant and useful results listings? This is a gray line, of course. The key, as I still believe, is to publish authoritative and useful content that enhances the user experience. Being overzealous on the attainment of links is a no-no. I agree with that. But, well-positioned and thematically relevant links, if coming from another authoritative, thematically relevant site, are useful.
3. Sidebar Links – this mainly deals with blog owners. Blogs allow sidebar links and many times, publishers will link out to any site to prove content authority and to help boost rankings of friends or agency websites paying them. Big no-no. Don’t do it. If you do, take down the links that don’t belong. Link to sites that enhance the visitor experience.
4. Anchor Text – I explained anchor text above. Just be sure to include anchor text links when useful and when necessary. Anchor text links provide useful navigation for visitors and give them an idea of what the page they’re linking to is about. Wikipedia does a nice job of this.
5. Toxic Sites – a site that has linked to yours and initially appeared to be a legitimate enriched content website may have, for monetary reasons, strayed form the course and may now be full of webspam. Google is saying: be careful. Stay away from accepting links from sites that promote an array of websites irrelevant to their businmess model – in a spammy way. Where Google may be overstepping its bounds is by penalizing sites that are on the receiving end of those links. Some links are attained altruistically. How can a publisher research each site that links to its site and then find the time to contact those “toxic” sites requesting that the link be removed? Don’t penalize site owners. Just don’t count the link! Now, if this is only connected to link building agencies, then webspammers have only one phone number to call. Hopefully, this is Google’s intention.

If you outsource your SEO to a SEO company, make sure they are following Google’s guidelines for proper SEO. If not, it’s time to find another SEO company:

1. Develop Proper Title Tags – A proper title tag 1) thematically represents the them of the page content, 2) is enriched, not spammed, with keywords representing the content of the page, and 3) is written to entice the visitor to click through to your site, much like the description metatag should be written. An example of a spammed titel tag would be: Los Angeles SEO Company – LA SEO Company – Los Angeles. Notice the repetitive nature of the words and phrases. A good title tag is: LA SEO Company – Los Angeles Internet Marketing which indicates the primary purpose of the company (us) which is SEO but it’s also important for visitors to know that we offer a wide range of internet marketing services (social media marketing, web design, reputation management, etc.). Rand Fishkin uses a different set of terms to signify spam. Here’s what he says: "So think: “used cars Seattle”, “used autos Seattle”, “pre-owned cars Seattle”. Why are those three different pages? It sort of feels like keywordy, SEO-y, spam, right, and then there are pointing exact match anchors at all of these. This is the same page. You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that’s called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle."
2. Smart and Useful Anchor Text Links – if you’re optimizing a page for “Utah ski vacation homes”, good SEO companies will pass a text link to that page from another web page on the same site. That text link should read “Utah ski vacation homes”. At that point, it is not typically useful to ranking to pass along another text link to the same page especially if the keyword-rich text is turned around and stated another way. At times, we will pass along two or more links to the same page only if it enhances the visitor experience, but as a general rule, we avoid duplicating anchor text links.
3. Link Spammed Footers – I’ve been wondering how long it would take Google to address spamming footers. As a practicing SEO evangelist for 12 years, it’s dismaying to find websites atop the search engine results with footers a mile long containing NOT a helpful page index or helpful navigation tool but anchor text links repeated over and over in different iterations. The most egregious spammy footers in my experience have been the ones that link to geo-centric “pages” – in other words, companies that want to rank for “Boston widget”, “Detroit widget”, “Dallas widget” will place these terms in the footer with links to pages with the same content with only the geo-centric term changed. No added value in the content. Obvious attempt at ranking for keywords for which it has no business ranking. Rand Fishkin mentions he still sees light gray terms on a slightly darker gray footer backgrounds – a black hat SEO trick thagt should have been outlawed in th Google algorithm a decade ago. I’m as astonished as he is when stumbling across footers like these.
4. Agency Link Networks – mentioned above. Google knows about these agencies adn their linking strategies. Best to avoid them. Think about this example: your site has been up for some time now, has 25-100 inboundd links. You sign with an agency to get you more links. theo nly problem is that their packages begin at 100 links per month but the links are authentic, meaning that the agency has a host of bloggers waiting by willing to add your link to one of their blog posts. Two issues here: How many times will this blog publisher be issuing text links? Can you imagine what it looks like to Google and to visitors to see a blog promoting a ton of weirdly irrelevant topics and websites? And, what does it look like to Google when your site suddenly begins “attracting” 100 links per month when it couldn’t get 100 links in 2 years!
5. Work with a Respected, Seasoned, and Proven SEO Company – We are a Los Angeles SEO Company. We do, however, partner with and work for clients across the globe – our furthest being in Athens, Greece. However, I would never think about trying to spam Google into thinking I should rank for “Boston SEO”, “Detroit SEO”, “Dallas SEO”, etc. I cannot possibly write different value-add content for each of these cities – well, not that I can’t but I shouldn’t and therefore, don’t. Good SEO is good SEO. If my offices were in Boston, Detroit, and Dallas, then ok. By living there, I’m bound to find some geo-centric distinctions in the companies to whom I would provide SEO services. Maybe. But I don’t have my offices there, so I don’t. My offices are in Los Angeles and I intend to rank for the geo-centric terms containing “Los Angeles” or “LA”. In fact, we rank onf the first page for “LA SEO Company”, our primary targeted keyword. The point is to work with SEO companies that care about you, your business and your website. Good SEO companies do not charge by keyword. Good SEO companies do not charge monthly subscription fees because “the Google algorithm keeps changing and therefore we need to optimize your site each month”. They are stealaing your money and do not know what they’re doing. Like most anything else in life, apply the 80/20 rule: 20% of all SEO’s are worth the investment. So, you read this and say to yourself: I don’t have the time to make 9 calls in order to find that one good SEO company. Seriously? This is your business, your life we’re talking about.

Well, the value of Pinterest was just enhanced. According to TechCrunch, Pinterest, with a 1.05% visit share in February, was responsible for more visitor referrals than Twitter (.82%). Currently, Pinterest ranks behind Facebook (6.38%) and StumbleUpon (1.29%). Pictures really are worth a thousand words!

A view into Referral Traffic Results from One of our Clients

What is Referral Traffic?

Website traffic is categorized into three segments:

• search engine traffic – visitors to your website whose path to your website began on a search engine when they queried with a search term.
• direct traffic – visitors to your website who typed your domain name directly into their browser thus bypassing the search engines.
• referral traffic – visitors to your website whose last path to your website was from another website.

The value in referral traffic is that other websites help to build your brand and improve your conversion rate by linking to your website pages with text, images or banners. Referral conversion rates should be competitive with the conversion rate of a long-tail keyword term entered in a search engine query. Visitors will not click unless they are interested in your product or service.

• Our client websites receive 10% – 15% of all traffic from mobile devices, including tablets such as the iPad. The number of visitors viewing your site from a mobile device will increase markedly for the foreseeable future.
• Full website content is intended to be viewed on a larger monitor with larger screen resolutions. Mobile devices like smartphones typically offer screen resolutions ranking from 320px x 480px to 640px × 960px, much smaller screen sizes (many of the Android phones will have larger screens but they’re still all smaller than your desktop monitor).
• Videos and images have a greater effect on mobile websites because they really can convey your message in a much shorter time than text.

Lancer Media’s 6 Principles of Mobile Website Design

1. A lot of content is not always good. If there’s any platform that should leverage the aesthetic value of images and videos, it’s a mobile website.
2. Content is still king, though. Think value and a positive visitor experience.
3. Graphics play a significant role in mobile conversions. Photos are a great aesthetic in mobile website design but too many will slow mobile web page load times and also charge more bandwidth against the mobile device owners data plan. That said, graphics play a big role in conversions, especially on a mobile site.
4. Videos are exceptional, entertaining, visually stimulating (content, not really) and can sell your product or service in a shorter period of time. This is a good time to video SEO each of your videos (and images) with proper keyword-rich titles, title tags, metatags, and descriptive text.
5. Content should be succinct and to the point. Mobile visitors have even shorter attention spans so deliver the call-to-action quickly whether it’s a listing of real estate properties, women’s wallets, life coaching services, or charter fishing rates.
6. Your full site does not equal your mobile site. Do not replicate all web pages from your full site onto your mobile site. Yes, describe your company, include a contact page, your product/service pages of course, and supporting web pages essential to the product or service being sold.

Where most website owners fail is understanding what happens when a visitor lands on a web page on their site. In other words, what is it that you want visitors to do once they land on any page of your site? What I am getting at is that to optimize your website means more than performing SEO on it. To fully optimize your website means to find the optimal ways to influence visitor behavior on your site. And this leads us to a quick discussion on website ergonomics which we also refer to as human factors optimization.

Lancer Media, a Los Angeles SEO and internet marketing company, defines website ergonomics as such: In relation to web design, website ergonomics is basically the study of the functional influences on visitors. In proper website design, we always make sure the following questions can be answered:

• Can the visitor know what your site is about in 3 seconds or less
• Can the visitor navigate to a web page in one click or less
• Can the visitor efficiently perform a desired action on each web page?

Website Ergonomics

Website ergonomics is aimed at answering the 2nd and 3rd bullets. When engaged in the preliminary stages of website design, make sure the website design allows the visitor to navigate to any page on the website in one click or less. Make sure there is clear navigation horizontally or vertically and make sure the visitor knows where he/she is on your site at all times. Website breadcrumbs can help you out here in case horizontal or vertical navigation falls short. Also ask yourself before you being designing what it is that you’d like your visitors to do once they land on any page of your website:

• Email you
• Call you
• Complete a contact form
• Purchase products
• Review content
• etc.

Whatever it is that you deem most necessary for a visitor to do or perform on your website, make sure he/she is able to do it without having to click to another page. Email addresses and phone numbers can be placed in the header of each web page, and contact forms can be “included” in the right margin (column) of each web page. If you’re selling products in a shopping cart, ensure that the products are easily accessible visually and categorized appropriately. Also prioritize those actions. The high priority things that you want your visitor to do should be above the fold and should be apparent so that they can be located in seconds.

As we have stated many times to website owners and clients when describing our Los Angeles website design services:

“We approach your custom website design project as a mall store-owner approaches window merchandising: attract them to the website through SEO and social media marketing, keep them on the website with smart and advanced design aesthetics and a navigation and call-to-action schema. Increasing the time spent by visitors on your site will increase the conversion rate. In other words, you can’t just build it and expect them to come. Deploy advanced SEO techniques and social marketing strategies to attract visitors then capture and convert them to customers with a creatively merchandised website that is optimized for human factors, just like Mall stores do.”

But, as mentioned, SEO is still vitally important and by this, I mean that ranking high in Google organic SERPs (search engine result pages) is vitally important. We are asked the question many times a week by clients and prospective clients: What are SEO best practices? That is, what are the most important SEO strategies/techniques to incorporate into my site? How important is the title tag? How important are the description and keyword metatags? Heck, what is a metatag? And, how does content factor into the equation – or should I say algorithm? Do I need links? How do I get links?

SEO Consulting 101: Let’s begin with the title tag as a SEO Best Practice.

Think of Your Website as a Monet Impressionist Painting

Lancer Media began as a research company years ago, not accepting payment from clients until we were able to prove we understood the Google algorithm and all SEO techniques. Empirically, we have proven over the years that title tags define the theme of the page and on the home page, the title tag can define the theme of the site, in general. We describe it this way: Imagine that your website is a Monet impressionist painting. Looking at the painting up close yields a different view than when standing 10 feet away. Up close, you see the intricate strokes and sections of the painting. It’s difficult, really, to visually grasp the theme of the painting up close because it’s those sections/strokes, when merged, that define the painting. So, step back from the painting and it all comes into focus – it all makes sense now. The different sections and varied strokes merge, mesh and become one. Think of your website as an impressionist painting. Each page is a section or a separate set of strokes on the site (canvas). However, taken together, the website should offer a cohesive understanding of its theme. Thus, we sometimes will use the home page title tag as the definitive explanation (in keyword form of course) of the site as a whole. When optimizing a site for a client, we will typically optimize all sub-pages first then save the home page title tag for last. Optimizing all of the Services pages or Product pages leaves us with a clearer understanding of keyword mix as well as true content theme.

SEO Best Practice: How To Write a Title Tag

So, how do you write a title tag? How long should it be? How many keywords should you use? And how do you separate the keywords – can you use dashes, greater-than signs, commas, pipes, underscores? All great questions.

Through research and empirical evidence derived from SEO techniques applied to our own websites and those websites of our clients, here are our SEO best practice techniques for writing title tags:

Title Tag Length

Researching other SEO best practice blogs and sites suggests that a title tag should contain no more than 70-72 characters (including spaces). However, our empirical evidence suggests that you shorten your title tags to a length of 52-62 characters (including spaces) – any longer and Google will truncate the title tag with an ellipses (…). Prove it for yourself. Copy/paste a title tag – with ellipses) from a SERP into an HTML editor or Word and perform a character count.

The title tag is the first search engine result line that a searcher sees/reads. It is highlighted in blue because it hyperlinks to one of your website pages. So, not only does the title tag appear at the top of your web page near the top of your browser window, it is also utilized by SERPs as the intro marketing line. So, be descriptive and enticing even if you are emphasizing keywords.

Example:

Google result for Nextag for keyword “cell phone wallets” shows a title tag length of 62 characters which includes the ellipses (…)

Google result for WalletBe, designers of Men’s, Women’s and Travel Wallets for keyword “cell phone wallets” shows a title tag length of 29 characters. We lead with the term “Cell Phone Wallets” because that is the focus of the wallet category to which we are directing visitors. We then follow the keyword with “WalletBe”, the name of the company, because we want to brand the company and, in many circles, the WalletBe brand is recognizable. So, by incorporating this term into the title tag, we are not seeking to rank for “WalletBe”; we are seeking to improve the click-through rate.

How Many Keywords To Use in The Title Tag

Technically, there is no limit to the number of keywords to use in a title tag. The law of diminshing returns does apply, however. Google has always said that we should think of a website’s content and all of its design components from the point of view of those reading it. Thus, if we lead the title tag with “cell phone wallets” then follow that with “leather cell phone wallets”, the assumption by Google and your visitor is that the former is more important than the latter. In addition, you’re only effective up to 52-62 characters so while you could develop a title tag that contains 200 characters (which we’ve seen unassuming website publishers and even SEO companies do), anything longer than 62 characters will not be viewable in SERPs (yes, longer portions of it will be viewable in some browsers) and the longer it is keywords further along the string will NOT be assigned the weight you’d like.

Research Your Keywords

Keyword research is probably the first step in SEO Best Practices. It is the foundation upon which the entire SEO strategy is built. You might think that you know your primary keywords but the market will confirm or deny it. Why think you know what your keywords are? Take a few minutes to verify. With good keyword suggestion tools, you might find (we often do) other short- or long-tail keywords that are more directly related to the pages’ theme. At the least, you will find complementary keywords to employ as secondary content keywords or as primary keywords on other pages.

Which Separators Are Allowed In A Title Tag?

Matt Cutts has stated that the types of title tag separators to use should be ones that basically would be enjoyed and approved by searchers viewing the title tag (which is, as we’ve mentioned, the lead marketing line in each website’s SERP listing).

However, the types of title tag separators to use has spawned debate. Is a comma better than a dash? Can you use a greater-than-sign (>)? So, we put it to the test.
Our empirical evidence suggests that dashes (-) work as well as commas (,) and greater-than signs (>).

Example:

WalletBe ranks on the first page of Google for “front pocket wallets”. We’ve crafted the title tag with greater-than-signs, not just for ranking purposes but for click-through tests. We found that WalletBe not only ranks on Google page 1 but click-through rates remained the same when compared to CTRs with title tags with dashes (-). Also, remain aware that Google bolds keywords that match the search term. In case you’re skeptical, we provided yet another example of WalletBe ranking on Google Page 1 for “Accordion Wallets” with greater-than-signs in its title tag.

The only separator of note to not use: the underscore. The underscore, when used in a title tag, is used as a concatenator, meaning it connects the terms and makes them one word, not two.

Why Pinterest interests website owners:

• Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites EVER – 4000% growth in the past 6 months and it currently has about 11m unique visitors
• Pinterest converts more browsers into buyers – pictures are worth a 1,000 words
• Pinterest drives traffic
• Pins get you more inbound links – every pin is a one-way link building exercise  that leads back to the source of the image, i.e., YourSite.com. Despite each link being a “nofollow” link (there’s debate whether they are actually “do follow links”, some link juice still gets through. Nevertheless, visitors get to your site and that’s what your goal is.
• User Engagement Is High

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.

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.

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?