Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

An old and consistent internet meme with internet intelligentsia is the Harry Potterish sci-fi Library. Like something out of a MC Escher painting, these pics of remarkable University libraries or those built by web millionaire tycoons are rampant on hip tech blogs. They have a seemingly comfortable and empowering feeling despite their awesome and mysterious labyrinthine landscape. These fantastical landscapes capture the breadth and scope of the human mind’s potential in a photograph. The images also capture what the Internet is or could be.

The Internet to most is the screen in front of us be it a desktop, iPad, Nexus, or any other mobile device. When getting started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a career or, as a business leader trying to understand, keep these pictures in mind. Strive to be the archetypal librarian. If you are old enough to remember the card catalogues keep this in mind as well. Books (websites) were marked with all sorts of meta information with names, titles, descriptions, and Dewy Decimal numbers(URLs) to quickly identify a book’s location and context. The actual card was the compass.

In a sense this is what a Search Engine is trying to do. It will show you where to go. There is a spirit of the internet and a part of the spirit is acting and participating like a librarian. Librarians understand structure and context. They appreciate order. Logic. If they have a fault they may over-categorize. Images need to be cataloged and identified. They feel the library needs to be available for the disabled and those who are blind and those who are deaf. Access for all is the policy.

The information under the broad surface data is as important if not more than the patron-facing information. If we were to get literary an SEO is building the iceberg under the water like Hemingway’s literature. There’s more to it than what the reader sees on the surface.

Banksy — Disclaimer – No discredit or judgement on Bansky, he’s awesome, and one could argue he IS the Spirit of Internet but when we talk about categorizing information… not so much.

This known iceberg is what also hinders our profession. Not everyone understands what goes on underneath the surface or even wants to understand. It is far to easy to hide under the surface and really be fake, a mirage. As the algorithms (card catalogs) get smarter Black Hat SEO is becoming increasingly harder and will likely not be the gold rush it once was. If you are a business owner a word advice is to really grill and interview your SEO agency. Do everything to understand their mentality and make sure they are a librarian and not a Bansky.

An SEO’s job is to the BE the librarian to help catalog and stay as close as they can to the Search Engines. Know and understand how the information is cataloged. SEOs think like a Search Engine and therefore do not despise them nor do they try to game them. Instead, they try to help them and order information as it should be.

So where does Paid Search and Display Advertising come in?

Think of a college campus library. You know all those flyers in the elevator vestibules or on the kiosk out front – that’s display advertising. It could be about anything- an emo night at a bar, a room for rent, a private tutor, or the Young Republican meeting on Tuesday night. Smart display advertising will be placed at strategic places in the library even out front. Display retargeting will know what library you are at and even what row or section you will be traveling to.

Think of Paid Search as flyers at the end of the library bookshelf. Smart and cost-effective paid search promotes a topic for what’s in the row you are about to go down. The book section on basket weaving would have smart placed ads on the bookshelf for buying whicker in bulk. You could place an ad for Viag*r-a (deliberately misspelled) at the end of that bookshelf but you are going to pay an insane premium.

A shady SEO could try and get that Viag*r-a company’s website INSIDE the basket weaving section. Three or four years ago it would have been relatively easy. Not to so much anymore. If you were able to accomplish this now you would be on the 20th or 30th Search Result Page into obscurity. If you did get Viag*r-a on page 1 of a basket weaving result you are talking some serious black hat technology and you would not last.

Putting Viag*r-a on the Basket Weaving bookshelf would make an SEO twitch because the librarian in them would know it’s not right. They’d know it goes in the library down the street which has its own language and structure and they’d know… exactly where it goes. ;- )

I needed my gutters cleaned and there was no way I was doing it with a ridiculous fear of heights, at least on ladders. (Disclaimer – I didn’t have plants growing like the photo.) A few years ago I had my garage roof done with a respectable local company so I called them up and they referred me to a company a few towns over that did siding and gutter cleaning. It was probably a company that employed 6-7 people with 2 or 3 secretaries in the office. The woman on the phone kind of sighed and said “Yeah, we do gutter cleaning but only when it’s convenient for us when we’re in the area. Same goes for the estimate, we’ll do an estimate when we’re in the area”. I think that was like two months ago, they’ve never come out or returned my phone call.

After a week of them not calling I took to the Google and searched “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning”. Screenshot below and this is where the story begins.

You see, going back even 10 years ago Google AdWords was in my opinion left to the aggressive and shady marketer selling V*agara (deliberately misspelled), people finders, car insurance, or large advertisers with large budgets with money to burn. Sure, there were clever and smart ways to use it, but to me it was largely noise and I consciously and ultimately unconsciously tuned it out. When searching for something I would immediately go to the top organic results. I remember when I was treading into the web design world one of the first questions we received after a site launch was “How come we’re not #1 on Google?” This seemingly innocent question we would laugh at as pretentious web designers set me on the path of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I had to explain to our clients why they weren’t there and what they would need to do in order to get to #1. We also began to look at Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to compensate and appease them as they could now see their company on a Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

After being in this business for some time now, people do click on these ads and with Google and Bing’s constantly evolving dashboards to run these campaigns they can be laser focused, efficient, and targeted. The industry is currently paying a lot of attention to Google+ and whether it can take on Facebook, if it’s even worthwhile, if people are using it, or if it’s necessary to have a page if you are a business. Bottom line is this – if you are a small business it’s imperative you use Google+ merely for the integration with Google Local. Obviously you need to be on Facebook and maybe Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other Social networks.

In my search for “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning” this company came up for gutter cleaning and window cleaning, Prestissimo. Being “IN” the business of Search Engine Marketing I took note of their #1 position in the Paid Results (#2 in screenshot) and then their address listing in the ad with an address very close to my house. I kind of smiled to myself and thought “this guy knows what he is doing”, sure I’ll give him a call.

A Shift in Paid Search Thought

Right then and there I noticed in the ten-year span my reaction to paid search campaigns had monumentally shifted. Before it was a signal for shady and sloppy dark sides of the internet and now it had become a signifier of a smart small business optimizing their ad dollars and who knew how to play the game. In a way it almost established a subtle form of trust in his business because I knew if he was #1 for such a long tail search he was serious about his business. How I went on to do business with Carl Scott of Prestissimo continued to impress me.

Pay attention business owners – what went on was textbook.

I went onto his website, he had a contact form, I filled it out explaining my problem. He called me in 15 minutes. Obviously his online contact form was feeding an email or text to his mobile device. He called me from the field.

Carl was professional and kind and we discussed how he had grown up in my neighborhood. He could come out and look at the gutters that day and nobody needed to be home. After he looked he called me back and gave me a fair price and gave some good advice/concerns about the status of my roof. I could tell he had done this a lot and was very careful to make sure I understood all the ramifications.

I think he came out two days later to clean the gutters. When he got there he was surprised to find that the gutter guards were drilled on and had to be taken off, he didn’t charge me extra, and he wrapped up all the gutter trash in garbage bags to the side of my house.

An Adwords click and two days later my gutters were cleaned and I have yet to meet Carl in person.

Also, when he left the invoice he left three business cards and on the back was a QR code. Carl is well on his way.

SEO Sidenote

The point of this post is to show and recognize how small business can effectively use digital marketing but it’s also my way of giving thanks and promoting Prestissimo Window Cleaning Company. I’ll share this article in my social circles but by linking to him here I give what they call “Link Love”. What Carl will get really excited about from an SEO standpoint is the following sentence-

In my search for “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning” this company came up for gutter cleaning and window cleaning, Prestissimo.

Some SEO Points about this sentence –

He won’t get “double SEO weight” because I gave him three links, two text and one for the image. Google will only index the first text link in this case.
I debated linking out to Prestissimo with the actual hyperlink under “Window Cleaning” because window cleaning seems to be the core of his business and currently ranks #5 in my results. The logic here is window cleaning would be affiliated with the name Prestissimo and could boost his ranking for this keyword phrase. Obviously he’s going to do fine for just the word “Prestissimo”. However, due to the Google Penguin Updates which is a link spam filter I erred on the side of caution. I could have linked out this way but with all things Google I always recommend to be as white hat and transparent as possible. Technology will always catch up to you.
Having not hyperlinked window cleaning, Google’s spider is smart enough to pick up the context of this sentence and see that Prestissimo is affiliated with window cleaning, gutter cleaning, and even Ferndale gutter cleaning which is in apostrophes. The proximity of words to the link plays a part.
Links, title file names, and alt tags are key signals for the search engine crawlers.
Also all links have the alt text “Window Cleaning and Gutter Cleaning” which helps further explain what the business is.
I also named the image for Prestissimo “Gutter-Cleaning.png” and also used the Alt Text “Prestissimo Gutter Cleaning”.

Many thanks for Prestissimo for the fine job on the gutter cleaning.