In many large enterprises, when SEO is first introduced, it happens because some internal person is championing its cause. If you are that person, chances are really good that you are facing some very interesting challenges related to the ignorance of others in the company. They probably think you are speaking Swahili to them.

You can recreate this phenomenon very easily. Try explaining what SEO is to a group of your neighbors. Undoubtedly, you will get a lot of blank stares, and quite possibly some “what are you talking about?” type comments. Based on their frame of reference they can’t relate. This can—and does—also happen in the senior management team of a company.

One of the problems is that SEO is simply not something that is taught at any level (except at SEO conferences, and by SEO firms). There are no college courses on SEO that I know of, and SEO is not generally discussed in marketing or web development degree programs. As a result, SEO is something just about everyone learns on the job. People in an organization who don’t have to do SEO generally have no understanding of why SEO is important or what it means. Overcoming this ignorance is critical to the success of your organization’s web site.

Start with the business case

You have to tackle the challenge of persuading decision makers first. Here is how you do it:

Develop an estimate of the quantity of related search queries done every day. Start by writing down what search queries you think people might use when they are looking for products and services like yours. If you sell computers, you may end up writing down terms like “computers,” “notebooks,” “laptops,” “Dell,” “HP,” etc. Make sure your list of the terms you come up with is relatively thorough, but do not include your own brand terms in the list.

Once you have the list, use your favorite keyword research tool, such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Google Trends, or whatever tool you prefer, to get the volumes of the individual search terms. Add them up, and multiply that result by 10. For more information on why we do that, check out my recent article onThe Decisive Advantage Of Optimizing For The Long Tail.

The rest is easy. Calculate the “total available market” by multiplying your calculated search volume times your site’s historical conversion rates times the average order size on your site. The calculation might look like this:

Of course you will not get 100% of the search traffic, but at this point we are just sizing the total available market.

Do a competitive analysis of the total available market

So who is actually getting that traffic, and all those orders? You may be getting some, which is great, but your competition is getting the rest of them. This is a critical point to emphasize. Someone is getting those orders. You can actually break this down a bit by doing another calculation. Start by taking the list of search terms and getting yourself a list of rankings of your competitors on each of them.

Then use the data released by AOL a few years back to see what each position in the SERPs will get in traffic (on average):

Run a set of calculations across all of the rankings for your competitors, times the click through rate, times 10. This will give you a crude estimate of the search traffic they are getting. Then apply your conversion rate and average order size data and you have an estimate of how much money your competitors are making from search. Here is what the calculation might look like:

This should start to get the juices flowing. Business that you don’t get is business that your competitors get, and this helps them become stronger. Make sure that everyone understands this crucial point before trying to explain the role of SEO and what it means, because there is no point in going further until they do.

While the importance of search is obvious to the readers of this column, it is not obvious to most people. Don’t assume that your management team buys in to this concept, because you will face roadblock after roadblock until they do. Sell the business case up front.

Notice in the left menu the neat categorization of the shoes category of products on the left. First we see a breakdown into women’s and men’s shoes, and from there it breaks down further into various type of shoes. In addition, across the top you see an alphabetic menu for drilling down by manufacturer name. This provides the site visitor with multiple ways to navigate to the product they want to buy.

Now if we click on sneakers under men’s shoes we can see what this looks like a layer deeper:

In this shot we see that Zappos offers many levels of refined navigation. You can pick your shoes based on theme, size, width, color and brand. You also start to see individual products listed on the page. Overall, this provides a great experience because shoppers can use the approach that works best for them. However, if you step back and think about it you can begin to see the basic complexity involved. There must be tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of shoe products on this web site.

On many ecommerce sites of similar complexity (whether the product is shoes or not) you will see one of two things:

Hundreds of thousands of pages with an image of the product, drop downs for selecting specific product features and a few bullets about product features (which were supplied by the manufacturer) and little else. The problem is that these pages will likely be seen as low quality pages because they have so little search engine parsable content. As a result, these pages may not even be indexed.

The same scenario as above, except with the addition of a manufacturer supplied product description. The problem with this scenario is that the manufacturer is providing that same text description to everyone else selling their product, resulting in duplicate content. Whenever the search engine sees duplicate content they will choose only one of those pages to show in the search results, and the page they choose may not be yours.

Unfortunately, this is not the only set of problems. Let’s now consider all the navigation pages. What would be the material difference between a page offering blue men’s sneakers and a page offering brown men’s sneakers? Not much at all, so those pages are likely to be seen as duplicates of one another as well.

Solutions

Create a killer link profile. If you have a strong enough link profile, Google will resolve many of the duplicate content choices it needs to make by picking your site instead of another. In addition, it will much more likely be forgiving to include what would otherwise be seen as low quality pages in the index. What kind of link profile is good enough? The best way to think about this is that the objective is to have a better profile than the competition.

One of the reasons for Zappos’ success is the strength of its link profile. Zappos was an early entrant in the market, offered a superior shopping experience, and built a strong brand that consumers trust. All of these things have helped them build a strong link profile and continue to enhance it over time.

Build out unique content. One obvious solution is to put unique content on every page. If you have hundreds of thousands of pages this sounds like a big mountain to climb. In addition, how would you write a different description for a blue, size 6, nike air, men’s running sneaker and a blue, size 6.5, nike air, men’s running sneaker. Definitely challenging.

Amazon has addressed this problem using user contributed content in the form of customer reviews, as you can see in this example:

This gives them great unique content for each page. However, this will not work for sites that do not have a critical mass of traffic. For sites without an authoritative link profile, or without enough traffic to generate a lot of customer commentary, it is probably a good idea for them to generate their own unique content.

The way to do this is in layers. Probably 20% of the pages of any site are the most important ones, at least from a search engine perspective. Of course, on larger sites even 20% may represent tens of thousands of pages. In that case, the best thing to do is to go yet another layer further up in the hierarchy and perhaps address the top 2%. Once you have identified the targets figure out how to write 100 to 250 words of unique content for each page (more for the top 100 pages or so). It does not take a lot to increase the perceived quality of the pages for users and search engines, so this effort will be well worth it.

You can make this more affordable by contracting with overseas-based content writers. We do this in our efforts, and the writing quality is not bad. The information is usually quite accurate, though the English is sometimes not so good. But, then we use local (US based) resources to do a quick edit of the content to fix the language errors and to verify accuracy. Using this process we can get these short articles for under $10 each.

How do you prioritize the pages that should get this new content? Focus on pages close to the home page of your site, as well as pages that appear to be drawing the most traffic. You can get this latter metric from the “most requested pages” or “top landing pages” report in your analytics package.

Engage in PageRank sculpting. No, this concept is not dead, just changing. For example, I consider use of the canonical tag to tell the search engines that one page is essentially the same as another one as an exercise in sculpting. So if you have a page for size 6 men’s blue Nike xx27gh running sneakers (not a real product), and one for size 6.5 men’s blue Nike xx27gh running sneakers, you can use the canonical tag to tell the search engines that these pages are both really the same content as the men’s Nike xx27gh running sneakers (the base page prior to picking a size or a color).

This has the effect of telling the search engine how to deal with pages that it will likely perceive to be low quality or duplicates. The link equity will be consolidated on the most important version of the page, and over time, the search engine is likely to crawl much less frequently pages that have a canonical tag on them.

There are other ways to do sculpting as well. A variety of techniques exist for implementing links to pages that make the page invisible to the search engines. For example, a link to a page can be implemented in an encrypted form of Javascript, or within an iFrame to make it invisible. If you use one of these methods you prevent the search engines from spending any time crawling pages you want them to ignore, but you have to worry that this may change as algorithms get tweaked over time, causing one of these types of techniques to stop working. I would avoid this route unless you are very savvy and able to respond quickly when such algorithm changes occur.

All of these techniques work together to provide an ecommerce site a strong growth path. Sculpting helps the search engine focus its attention on the most differentiated pages of your site. Creating great unique content directly on product pages provides a better user experience and gives the search engine spider something to chew on. It also makes the site more attractive to link to, which along with the sculpting will help drive increases in search engine traffic. This will provide cash flow that enables funding the development of more content. It is a great virtuous circle to build your business steadily over time!

The problem with all this is duplicate content. If you write an article, place it on your site, and someone comes along and wants to put a copy of the article on their site, how can you safely do it? If a search engine crawler finds the same article in two different locations, the search engines are going to realize that they have a duplicate content situation.

The search engine will then choose which one to show in the search results for particular search queries. Unfortunately, it is not clear which one they will pick. They will try to show the original author, but it does not always work out that way, and there is a real risk that the original author will not show in the search results for their own article.

Four solutions for pain-free syndication

Syndicate a synopsis. Major news sources, such as Business Week, do a nice job of syndicating content. For example, their December 27th headline was “Retailers Shift Focus to Post-Holiday Bargains.” You can see that this story was picked up by many sources, including Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal in this screen shot of search results from Bing:

This shows the search engine returning the many different results for this one article. To see why Bing would do this (the other search engines do it as well), we need to look at one of the results. Here is a screen shot of the Wall Street Journal page covering the article:

As you can see, only the first sentence of the article is shown here. The Wall Street Journal does not want to replicate the entire article, and instead shows only a snippet with a link back to the original article. The added value from the Journal comes from links to related news stories that it includes. It is because of this deeper context provided by the Journal that this synopsis of the article is allowed in the search results. This type of syndication is a huge win for Business Week because they get scads of high quality links by allowing other sites to publish these synopses.

Use the NoIndex meta tag. If you want to syndicate a full copy of the article, The NoIndex meta tag might be the ticket for you. By requiring the publisher who is republishing your content to place a NoIndex meta tag on each of the pages they take from you, you also avoid the duplicate content problem. The search engines see the NoIndex and interpret that as an instruction to not return that page in their search results. Note that NoIndex pages can still accumulate and pass PageRank.

Why would a site want to publish web pages and then NoIndex them? If the content is valuable enough it may be compelling to their site visitors, so the publisher may feel that they need to have the content and developing it themselves might be too costly. I have seen some very powerful sites (such as ESPN.com) do this in the past.

Divide your content development efforts. This is also an interesting option. Simply allocate part of your content development efforts toward creating content for your site, and part toward developing content for other web sites (for syndication). The idea is to create new original articles that you don’t publish on your own site. The articles are designed and created solely for publication elsewhere .

The key here is to create new original content that has unique value. For example, the article you are reading right now is an example where I am authoring an article that I won’t publish on my own web site, but instead am publishing in the Industrial Strength column at Search Engine Land. Be sure not to just do warmed over rewrites of existing articles with little change in actual content, as these types of rewrites won’t really get you that far.

Use the cross domain canonical tag. Just two weeks ago, Google announced support for the cross domain canonical tag. Basically, this allows you to have the exact same content in two different places and tell Google which one you consider the master copy. So if you have two different pages with the same article, one on http://www.yourdomain.com/original-article.html, and one on http://www.theirdomain.com/copy-of-article.html, you would take the latter article and add this statement in the head section of the page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/original-article.html” />

Note that Google has not stated whether pages using this tag can accumulate and pass PageRank, but I suspect that they will, as a web site that is republishing your article is in fact endorsing it quite strongly. If my assumption is correct, the impact of this approach would be similar to the NoIndex tag, but the information provided is a bit more precise and useful to Google.

Each of these methods can be used for syndicating content. Do make sure to obtain links back to the most relevant page on your web site, and if you are syndicating exact copies of an article you have already published on your site, make sure you get a link back to the page containing the original article. Also, since this type of link building requires a fair amount of effort, focus the effort on higher value links to make sure you get a good return.

• The site owner most likely wants the fastest possible revenue growth from the web site.
• Competition is also investing in SEO, so the market is competitive.
• The long tail for the site is typical. In other words, 10% of the traffic goes to the head terms, 20% to the “chunky middle,” and 70% resides in the long tail.

Of course, the above assumptions are probably true for very nearly any business operating a web site. This means that the long tail of search offers seven times as much opportunity as head terms, and more than double the opportunity of the rest. But now let’s take the discussion a bit further, by looking at the keyword competitiveness in one market. To do this we will look at three different stats for a set of keywords: search volumes, the number of results returned for an “inanchor:” query (e.g. words appearing in anchor text of links) and the number of results returned for an “intitle:” query (e.g. words appearing in title tags). Here is some data for some keywords in the health insurance market:

Daily keyword volume in the above table is courtesy of Wordtracker, and the inanchor and intitle results are from Google.

In our table we see that the combined inanchor and intitle results for “health care” is a touch greater than 167M, whereas the corresponding total for “health care reforms pros and cons” is 50. If we divide 50 into 167M, you might conclude that the phrase “health care” is 3.34M times more competitive than the phrase “health care reforms pros and cons.” This is probably a bit of an extreme conclusion, but a page with “health care reforms pros and cons” in its title, and/or links pointing to it with that anchor text, will clearly have an excellent chance of ranking highly for that search term. For purposes of this article, we are going to guess that the average competitiveness of a long tail is one quarter that of the head (a figure which is probably low).

This is already pretty compelling, but now let’s take it one step further, by considering keywords in relation to where a user is in the purchase cycle. Many head tail terms are used by searchers who are at the beginning of the purchase process. They are still in research mode, and are not quite ready to buy. With (relevant) long tail terms the conversion rate tends to be much higher.

To illustrate, take the example of someone who searches on “digital camera” to start a search session. A bit later they search on “canon digital camera,” and after that they search on “Canon PowerShot SX20 IS”. This is a process that has been documented many times, where the user starts with a general term because they are still in research mode. As they learn more and more about what they want, their searches get more specific. By the time they get to “Canon PowerShot SX20 IS” they are much closer to making a purchase decision.

I have seen articles that suggest that the conversion rate of relevant long tail terms is 2x that of head terms, but unfortunately, could not find hard data to support that. Yet this does make intuitive sense.

Now for some math. We have seen that the long tail has 7x the traffic of the head. We have estimated that it is 4 times easier to rank in the long tail (a figure which I believe is low), and that the conversion rate is 2x higher. This would suggest that extracting cash from search is 56 times easier with a focus on the long tail. That’s pretty compelling.

There is no doubt that there is brand value in ranking highly on head terms. Users in research mode will see your site if you rank for head terms. That serves as a brand impression, and that’s a good thing. But, the reality is that branding is expensive. It has always been expensive, and this is unchanged in the world of search. You can pursue branding as a first priority, but you will need to make sure you budget for it.

I realize I have not provided empirical proof for my estimates in this article. But our experiences with clients confirm that businesses that proactively implement a long tail strategy on the web have a significant advantage over their competitors. Cash is strategic. Few businesses are in a position to ignore an approach to revenue that is 50+ times easier than the alternatives. Money in your pocket puts you in a position to increase your investment from cash flow, even as you are able to show results from your SEO activities. Better still, you can implement your SEO strategies to chase all the relevant search terms (head, chunky middle, and long tail), as these strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive. But, whatever you do, don’t ignore the long tail.

Here are some of the types of changes that can have an impact on traffic or rankings.

Domain change. Any change in the domain, such as a move from http://www.old-domain.com to http://www.new-domain.com. The most common reason for doing this is a branding change of some sort. An existing business may be changing its branding, or one business entity may have been acquired by another one and the two sites are being merged.

Structural changes or URL changes. These are changes where the content that lives on a given URL on old-domain.com (such as about-us.html) gets moved to a different URL (such as about-us.php). URL changes can be “wholesale” (change nearly all or all of them), “heavy” (change a lot of them), “moderate” (change some of them), “light” (change only a few), or not done as all if you simply copy the exact site structure from one domain to another.

Structural changes often happen as a result of a change in the technology used to implement a site. For example, a business may have been using Cold Fusion as a content management system, and then switches to using ASP. The other major reason for structural changes is when wholesale content changes are made.

Content changes. Changes to the content on pages can happen without changing the URL structure of the site, by simply rewriting content on the pages, or something that causes structural changes to the site. As with URL changes, these can also be heavy, moderate, light, or not done at all.

Content changes may be made for many reasons. Perhaps the target audience has changed. Perhaps the basic positioning of the organization has changed. Another possible reason is to revamp the content as part of a wholesale expansion of the site.

Each of these things can happen independently. You can make content changes without changing the domain or the URLs. You can change the URLs without changing the domain or the content.

What are the true consequences?

You are going to lose traffic. That is a fact. Even if you only perform a domain change and preserve the exact same site structure and content, you will lose some traffic. In this simplest of scenarios you can minimize the amount of traffic loss by using 301 redirects from each URL on the old domain to point to the same URLs on the new domain, alerting the search engines that the new URLs are the important ones.

In principle, this simple domain change scenario sounds like one where there should be very little lost traffic. One factor to consider though is that of “trust.” Any time there is a domain change it may be reflective of an ownership change, even if the WhoIs info is not updated. For the search engines this raises the possibility that the new owner isn’t as trustworthy as the original owner.

Another factor concerns the 301 redirects themselves. In tests we have done at Stone Temple Consulting, we have seen evidence that they pass through the majority, but not all, of the link juice to the destination page. Sometimes there is a delay between the implementation of the redirect and when the search engines pass through the link juice, which can result in a significant drop in search engine traffic. In the medium to long term a simple domain change is usually not that costly (though there are exceptions). You may lose 20% to 40% of your traffic in the short term, and 10% to 20% in the medium to long term.

As you might imagine, the more complex the changes, the greater the potential negative consequences. For example, combining a domain change with URL changes will definitely be more costly. You have given the search engine more reasons to trust the site less, and your 301 redirect map just got more complicated. Assuming you completely restructure the site so all the URLs change, you can expect to see traffic loss of about 30% to 50% traffic loss in the near term, with gradual improvement on that over the longer term.

In our final scenario, if you change your domain, URL structure, and your content, you are asking for trouble. The big reason for the cost here is that the new content you create is not the content that people saw when they linked to your site in the past, even if it basically about the same subject matter. This probably results in the search engine significantly discounting the value of those links. Traffic loss in this scenario is likely to be 50% or more in both the short and long term.

To summarize:

Disclaimer! These numbers aren’t exact, and your mileage will vary. The actual impact of changes to your site will depend on many factors that are not possible to cover here. In addition, the chart assumes that you don’t do a lot of incremental link building to bolster rankings. However, savvy site owners rarely stand completely still.

How to mitigate the damage

Once you have made your changes, and assuming you have followed Google’s recommended best practices for doing so, the main damage control you can do is get new links to the site. In particular, if you can continue to get links at a pace similar to, or better than, what was happening before the move, this is a strong positive signal to the search engines that all is well.

Also make sure that you ask people who have linked to you in the past to update their links to go direct to the new site, bypass those pages where you’ve put 301 redirects in place. If a significant percentage of your past linkers do this it is also a very strong signal to the search engines that your site is still trustworthy in its new location.

The best remedy? Stop and think about the consequences of a move before committing. There will be a cost, and your business plan probably does not call for a dip in traffic to, and orders from, the web site.

The bottom line: Don’t make major changes to your site unless you really have to, and are willing to pay the price.

One company had an existing site that they wanted to migrate to a new domain. A key goal was to preserve the legacy search traffic as much as possible. They selected a CMS for the project and built the site. Then they brought in the SEO firm to begin working on the site. The trouble was that the CMS was an SEO disaster, and did not allow unique title tags on each page. The cost of fixing this problem: a six month launch delay at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another company was rebranding their site. They were going for a major upgrade in look and feel, and they had made a corporate level decision to target all their messaging at the “C-Suite” (CEOs, CFOs, CIOS, etc.). Based on this they made a decision to implement an all-Flash site (see this article by Vanessa Fox on why that is a bad idea). They created a site with a beautiful user experience, but that was virtually impenetrable to search engines. The in-house SEO that was trying to work on the site did not have the pull to get people to understand the consequences of this decision, and search traffic plummeted.

The source of the problem

In large enterprises one of the big challenges is that there are many different groups that are involved in decisions. You have marketing, sales, development and the executive staff. Anyone of these groups can make decisions that are basically fatal to SEO. Successful SEO efforts require that all these groups are working in unison. Yet coordinating all these groups of people can be very difficult to do.

There are two ways that the problem gets worse, both of which are examples of bad decisions being made about SEO. These are:

• In some organizations SEO is thought of as something you do after the site is built. This is just too late. At this point the damage has already been done.
• The organization hires someone to do SEO work for them, and they are knowledgeable about SEO, but they are relatively junior and do not have the confidence or presence to sway the C-Suite or other decision makers.

To summarize, either bringing in an SEO resource too late, or making use of one that is too junior to have sufficient influence in the organization is a mistake you do not want to make.

How do you solve this problem? You put key people in all constituent groups in your organization (including the C-Suite) through basic SEO training. Knowledge can be a very powerful thing. Once people “get it” they are in a position to make much better decisions. Sometimes there is a tension between corporate objectives and the requirements of SEO, but these can nearly always be handled elegantly if the issues are confronted up front.

In one training session I did, I had the senior management team of a good sized company for 4 hours. The group was comprised of really smart people, but with no background in SEO. During the course of that meeting we kept everything at a high level, and we covered a lot of ground. There were tons of questions and dialogue, and by the end of it all the team had gotten the basics down.

The outcome of the meeting was amazing. Historically, they had a great focus on on-site SEO (or technical SEO) but the focus on link building and web site promotion was not high enough. After the meeting decisions started to get made a bit differently. The focus on link building went way up, and the improved results on new business obtained from search engine referrals has been impressive.

The key to success

Large organizations are complex beasts, and a lot of different people have the opportunity to provide input (or directives) about the web site. Everyone is usually well-intentioned, but what you don’t know can hurt you. Training people is the key. It’s not necessary for most people to spend years learning all the ins-and-outs of SEO, but they do need to know the basics.

The best time to do this is as soon as possible. Decisions about the web site are made on a regular basis. Of course, there are other priorities in the organization, and those need to be taken into account. Sometimes a good time to fit this training in is in conjunction with planning meetings for site redesigns or updates. These meetings usually bring the various constituent groups together to make decisions anyway, so it’s an ideal time to provide them with the knowledge they need to make better decisions.

Training can help prevent disastrous decisions, and can also enable great decisions. Knowledge is indeed power, so make sure that those with power over your web site have the knowledge they need to be successful.

An analogy will help illustrate the potential of this concept. Many have referred to links as a voting process, where each link is a vote for the site receiving the link. Consider a medieval country where the nobles vote for the next king when the current one dies. There is an election process, but only the upper class gets a vote. This is an elitist process, as the great majority of people have no vote.

This is what the current link-centric ranking algorithms are. You need to have a web site to participate. No web site, no vote. What would happen if everyone who uses the web had a vote? This can happen as a result of the growing use of social media web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar sites. Mentions of brands, products, or web sites on these social media sites can be considered as votes as well. For example, if Coca Cola gets mentioned more often than Pepsi (or vice versa), that could be used as a signal to elevate the rankings of the Coca Cola web site.

You can take this a bit further too. Let’s say that over time that Coca Cola has received 1.2 times as many mentions as Pepsi. Then say Pepsi starts growing its presence, and for three consecutive months Pepsi gets more mentions than Coke. This type of change might represent a short term marketing campaign by Pepsi, but if it sustains itself it could represent a shift in the importance of one company over the other. This may cause the search engines to start ranking Pepsi over Coke—even before the total mentions over all time of Pepsi exceed those for Coke.

Some current examples

The biggest issue in these signals is signal quality. To help deal with this, expect the search engines to start using the signals in select ways where the quality of the data is quite high. Here are some examples.

Web references are already known to be a ranking factor in local search. In David Mihm’s study of Local Search Ranking Factors the panel of experts surveyed put citations (or web references) as the second most important ranking signal, only behind that of location. These citations can as simple as a phone number, a street address, business name, product name or some combination of these.

These may show up on the web in yellow page sites (which often don’t link to the listed businesses), and in raw data provided by data aggregators such as InfoUSA and Acxiom. One of the experts, Ed Reese commented of the importance of “citation sources related to your industry (like associations and social networking groups).”

Another way that web references can provide a stable signal is when surges in activity occur. Consider a brand that is getting a dozen or so mentions a day across the web that suddenly gets thousands of mentions across a few days. This is a strong indicator of a hot news item. This type of signal could be used to discover news and rank it by comparing the signal strength of one item to another.

For my final example, I will speculate a bit. Early in 2009 Google pushed out an algorithm change that eventually got the label of the “Vince change” (named after the Googler who did the work). In February people started reporting that some Google update had taken place, as Aaron Wall did in this post on Google Branding. A common belief was that Google began to heavily favor brands over non-brands. Matt Cutts later came out and said that this was not so much about brands, as it was about an increase in weight on trust and authority.

While it is premature to state that brand mentions in social media sites were a significant factor in the Vince change, you can see how a long history of regular mentions across the web would factor into a trust algorithm. For example, if a brand gets mentioned hundreds or thousands of times per day over a long period of time, that could be treated as a positive trust ranking signal. You may be able to do a similar analysis with just links, but this is an example where the social media signals show ongoing stability, and this provides the search engines with more data—which is a good thing.

There are two big problems with search engines using social media signals today.

The first is that social media sites are a bit elitist too at the moment. While they are available to everybody, not everybody is using them. More ways to use their data will emerge as use expands, simply because the data is getting better.

Second, the “wisdom of the mob” is inherently quirky. Consider the surge in mentions for Stephen Colbert during the campaign to get him to rank number one for the query “greatest living American”. This was a fad that ultimately had little to do with Stephen Colbert. It faded over time, of course, but the search engines would prefer not to be fooled by similar surges in the future.

Expect ongoing efforts by the search engines to find good ways to use these types of signals. As a publisher of a web site, it means you should begin to get active in social media environments. While this will unfold over a long period of time, major new brands are being created within social media environments today. It is OK to begin with some experiments to determine how you want to engage, but the time to start those experiments is now.

1. Unexpected changes by Google can put you in a situation where you need to scramble (such as the recent change to how Google crawls JavaScript).
2. The web development team may make a change that is not supposed to have SEO impact, but for reasons unkown to them, it does.
3. The web development team can make a mistake, for example, copying the NoIndex tags from a staging server over to the production site.
4. Of course, it can happen that you make a mistake too.

Bottom line: setbacks do happen.

Protect yourself

The first step takes place before a setback occurs. Make sure you keep a detailed log of all the changes made to the web site, not just changes made specifically for SEO reasons. This includes all obvious major changes, such as changing domains, changing navigation, or implementing a new CMS, but you should also log any other non-trivial changes made, including:

• Changes in how menus are implemented
• Placing new analytics code on the site
• Using a new method to implement ads

I chose these three items to list here because most of us probably think that these changes could not possibly affect SEO, but they are examples of things that can, if they are done improperly. For that reason, your SEO log must be thorough.

One last step in building your log is to monitor the major search blogs (such as Search Engine Land) for significant search engine announcements. Did Google announce an algorithm change rolling out? Did they change a policy as they did recently with NoFollow? Are lots of people claiming that they are seeing dramatic changes in their search results? All of these things belong in your log too.

Diagnosis

The first diagnostic step is to see when the downturn in your web site traffic began. If you have experienced a sudden catastrophic drop off, this is pretty easy to identify in your web analytics solution. If the change is a steady decline over a sustained period of time, this may be hard to nail down exactly, because some day to day and week to week moving around of traffic levels is normal. Nonetheless, you should be able to get a rough timeframe on when the problem started.

Next, see if the downturn is affecting your site in a broad based manner, or if it is isolated to a section of the site. You can also check to see if it is specific to one search engine or seems to be happening in all of them. Then, you should also determine if the problem is a manual penalty (you can see a great flow chart on how to do that in this SEOmoz article which shows how to determine if you have a penalty). Lastly, check the SEO blogs and forums out there and see if it is possible that an algorithm change by the search engines is in play.

Once you have learned what you can from this research, the next step is to look at your change log and start figuring out possible causes. First of all, changes made after the dropoff started, or six months before, are not likely to be the cause. The sweet spot timeframe for your culprit is in the 5 day to 3 month range, but changes outside this range can’t be completely ruled out.

Next, you need to start trying to determine the actual cause of the problem. The basic process is to try and match up the symptoms with the possible causes (from your change list). In addition, conduct a step by step SEO review of the changes made in that zero to three month time range from when the dropoff began. Change to a menu structure? Check to see if the links are still crawlable by the search engines. New analytics code? Make sure that the analytics code is properly implemented.

Once you have found something worth addressing, implement fixes and wait to see if it solves your problem. The time delay for the fix to take hold is likely to be about the same as the time delay between the change in your change log and the time you saw the dropoff begin to happen.

Summary

Problems do come up in the world of SEO. Unfortunately, cause and effect are not simple to determine. The site change log will be invaluable to you when the time comes, as it will allow you to zero in on the key suspects very quickly. Then, a manual review of the code for the changes you made will often get you the rest of the way there.

Contacting people who link to your competitors

A common strategy is to develop a list of sites who link to your competitor, and then contact those sites and ask them to link to you. There are many programs that will help you develop such a list. Some of the most interesting ones are Linkscape, Majestic SEO, and Link Diagnosis.

Link Diagnosis is free, and the other two cost a modest amount of money. Link Diagnosis extracts link data using the Yahoo! API, and Linkscape and Majestic SEO assemble their data based on independent crawls of the web. As a result, in return for the fees they charge, Linkscape and Majestic SEO can offer more functionality and depth of data.

Once this data is assembled, the next step is to prioritize the sites. Using metrics such as PageRank (SEOmoz also offers mozRank and mozTrust), you can get an approximation of which sites are providing the most important links to the competitor. However, you do want to get a bit deeper into the analysis, because relevance is an important factor as well. In fact, even if a linking page has relatively low PageRank, but it is relevant to your site, you really don’t want to overlook it.

Once you have settled on a prioritization you now need to figure out who to contact to request the link. Do not use scraper software to do this for you. Scraping contact information off the web is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, and the punishment is not a fine (it is time in jail). Equally bad is the fact that scrapers will frequently come up with the wrong contacts.

Use inexpensive human resources to do this work for you. They can be trained to recognize the right contact information, and they can also assess the relevance of the link for you as well. This relevance data is a key to the refining your prioritization of your link targets, because relevance is a big factor in a link’s value.

Once you have this data you can begin mailing people and asking for links. An important part of this is crafting a message that will be well received by the recipient. The key is to remember that they probably did not wake up this morning thinking about what links they were going to add to the page you are interested in, and they certainly were not expecting to hear from you. In essence, you are interrupting them. Be respectful, and you will be far better off.

The problem

Contacting sites that link to your competitor, as we noted above, is a great idea. You should do it. However, it is an expensive manual process that takes a long time to produce benefits. And what is your success rate likely to be? If you run a really successful campaign: about ten percent. So the real problem with making this your link building strategy is that it is not enough to help you achieve your goal (unless your goal is to have a site that is worth 10% of your competitor’s site).

This is a common link building mistake: not putting in a place a plan that will have enough impact to achieve the goals of the business. For example, if your competitor has 20,000 links, and you have 10,000 links of similar quality, putting in place a plan to obtain 500 new links of similar quality is not enough. Of course, if 100 of those links are of much higher quality, that is a different matter altogether.

The biggest value of backlinking

When you analyze your competitor’s backlinks there is a tremendous amount of information made available to you. Dig into the nature of the sites linking to them. In the process we outlined above, understanding the relevance of the sites that link to your competitors is really valuable. But you should look to expand upon that. Have your researcher take the time to define the relevance in detail. Have them answer the question: why did this site link to your competitor?

Is it because of a particular piece of content on the competitor’s site? A special promotional program? Are a lot of links coming from one market sector? Are there related market sectors linking to them that you would not have suspected? What areas of the market do you think might be a good target that are not strongly featured in your competitors’ backlink profiles?

Like any other form of marketing, successful link building requires an ongoing process of brainstorming ideas for improving existing campaigns and coming up with new ones. Your (successful) competitors’ backlinks can be a treasure trove of ideas for link building strategies. I have done this many times and am continually surprised at the novel ideas that leading competitors come up with. But, they are smart. That is how they became a leading competitor. So why not put their brains to work for you?

1. Local address in City of search (e.g. a user search on “boston rental cars” will favor rental car companies located in Boston)
2. Citations from major data providers, IYPs, and other local information sites

Since you cannot control what the user types in for a search query the only way to impact the #1 ranking factor is by changing your location. The #2 factor listed is also incredibly important, and something that businesses should strive to address. This is actually much more difficult then you initially might think. Let’s explore why.

The search engine’s challenge

Let’s take a look at the problem from the perspective of the search engines. Here are some of the basic challenges they face:

• There are 15 million or more small businesses in the US. Tracking them all down is an extremely difficult task.
• While there are mechanisms for the businesses to provide data to the search engines directly, very few businesses realize that they could (and should) do this.
• Even if you track down all these businesses, the data the search engine obtains for them could be wrong. Here are are few ways that this can happen:
  1. The data obtained could have been entered in incorrectly in the first place (e.g. typos)
  2. Businesses close their doors, leaving the search engine with a listing with a place that no longer exists.
  3. The business changes location. This is also a frequent occurrence)
  4. New businesses open their doors. Search engines need to track these down and add them to their data.
  5. Businesses acquire other business, or get acquire by other businesses.
  6. Businesses change their name.

To underscore how difficult this is, consider the fact that data provider InfoUSA conducts 30 million phone interviews every year (source: my recent interview with infoUSA’s Pankaj Mathur. The search engines are not likely to want to replicate this expense given the structure of their businesses where they use algorithms to build their indexes instead of people.

One thing that the search engines do is draw data from as many sources as possible. This includes obtaining data from data providers such as infoUSA, Localeze, and Acxiom. They also crawl the web to see what listings for businesses are listed on various web sites, with special attention to Internet Yellow page (IYPs) sites, such as YellowPages.com, or SuperPages, just to name a couple, and other local information sites such as CitySearch and MapQuest.

This is helpful, but there are still many problems that they face. For example, the data between these disparate sources do not always reconcile. They all have different methods for verifying data accuracy and updating their data, and the differences can be quite significant in number. So the search engine must decide what to do when the data from Localeze differs from the data from CitySearch, and so forth.

Worse still, these disagreements in data reduce the confidence that the search engine has in the data. As a result, it can and does impact your ability to rank in the search results — the search engine would rather show something where all the data agrees because their confidence in the data accuracy is higher. The bottom line is that you want to help them out, by getting as many data sources as possible in alignment.

What you can do

Imagine a world in which all data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites provide the search engines consistent data. It would certainly make their job easier to do. But since these data sources are competing businesses, they will not solve that problem for you. You have to do that, and getting all the data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites to agree can be a sizable chore.

The best thing to do is prioritize. You definitely should take advantage of opportunities to provide your data directly to the search engines. Using the Gooogle Local Business Center is a must. In addition, Google makes active use of location data provided to it in KML files (Martin Beijk covers how to this in this guide to KML and SEO). In short, these are files that you place on your server with information on all of your locations. You then point to it in your site map file. The fact that it is referenced in your site map files helps Google identify it as being from you. You can read more about this in an interview I did last year with Carter Maslan.

Once you have taken care of these basics, go as deeply as you can through the various data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites. Here are some of the top ones to target:

Data providers

1. Acxiom
2. infoUSA
3. Localeze

Note that currently Acxiom does not have an operating program for businesses to update their data with them directly, so it may be hard to accomplish that update. But make sure you work with infoUSA and Localeze, both of which have such programs. If Acxiom does offer such a program in the future, make sure you jump on board!

Internet Yellow Pages and other sites with local information

1. Yellowpages.com
2. Local.com
3. Superpages
4. CitySearch
5. MapQuest
6. MerchantCircle
7. Yelp
8. CityVoter
9. YellowBot
10. Best of the Web Local

The IYP and local information sites generally pull data from the major data sources, much as the search engines themselves do. However, it is still best if you can take control directly with the major ones. If you have to choose between spending time on the IYPs and the data providers, the focus should be on the data providers.

The goal is to get as much data consistency as possible! It is not all there is to the art of local SEO, but it is the foundation of local search optimization. It is hard for the search engines to know where you really are, so do everything you can to make it easy for them. There are many other subtleties to this such as what type of data you provide. For example, local phone numbers for each location works better than one 800 number for all your locations. You can learn more about these other types of factors relating to your data from the David Mihm report referenced at the beginning of the article.

Special thanks to Stone Temple Consulting’s local search guru, John Biundo, for his help with the article.