Over the past year we have worked with a number of organizations that have chosen to relocate their sites from an existing domain to a new domain. One of the questions that always comes up early in the process is “how much traffic are we going to lose?” It is an excellent question and not an easy one to answer, but in today’s column I am going to explore that exact question.

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.

Today I will make a case that nearly every organization should offer SEO training to anyone who even remotely touches the company’s web site, and why every senior manager should also be encouraged to attend. Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and ultimately a failure to effectively capture search traffic. You may think I am fear-mongering here, but to head that off, let me provide some real world examples:

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.

For a long time, links have been the largest factor in search rankings. While (in my opinion) this is still true today, other signals are gradually growing in importance. One of the most interesting of these is “web references” or “citations”. A web reference refers to a mention of a brand, product or web site, which is not referenced in a link (or perhaps referenced as a no-followed link).

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.

One of the hardest things to deal with in SEO is when a setback occurs. I will outline how to deal with these today, with a focus on those that don’t result from a search engine penalty. Even when you do all the right things, you can still run into situations where it doesn’t work out. There could be many reasons why, such as:

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.

One of the most common recommendations people make about link building is to find out who links to your competitors (aka backlinking your competitors). This is a great idea, but many people who do this miss the most important point of why you do it. Let’s explore the good things you can do while backlinking, and then dig into where the most value lies.

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?

Local search is a huge opportunity for many businesses, particularly those with hundreds (or more) of locations. In this article, we are going to cover one of the most difficult aspects of that – getting your data to show correctly in the search engines. This turns out to be an extremely important thing to do. In David Mihm’s recent Local Search Ranking Factors report the top two items listed where:

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.

One of the most important SEO decisions you make is the selection of your content management system (CMS). Your CMS can make SEO easy, or, in some cases, make SEO virtually impossible. Here are 14 crucial elements you should verify in a CMS before you commit to using it.

1. Control over titles, H1 headings and meta descriptions. In this day and age it may shock you that there are CMS’ that don’t allow you control over these basic page elements, but sadly, they exist. Worse, the vendors of these systems often charge exorbitant fees to fix the job as part of a customization project. Simply insist on these capabilities, and if it costs anything extra (at all) pick a different vendor.

2. Control over image alt attributes. Make sure you have the ability to implement the alt attribute within your image tags. This is the best method you have to tell a search engine what an image is about, so the capability is a must.

3. Custom anchor text. Another must have. Make sure the CMS you choose allows you to do this. Don’t assume that it can, because many systems can’t.

4. Nofollow, noindex support. While you might be able to live without this one, remember that this capability can save you from duplicate content nightmares, and it is also useful to to do some basic PageRank sculpting.

5. Avoid hidden text issues. Not too long ago I wrote about how some CMS systems make legitimate use of display: none, but there are many other ways to create hidden text. Many of these uses are legitimate, and should not be a major worry. However, do some searching for comments about your potential CMS on the forums and see if anyone has had hidden text problems with it.

6. Canonical redirects. Verify that you can implement a proper canonical redirect (using 301s!). In addition, check out the way the CMS handles the default document. Are you going to end up with all your internal links pointing to www.youdomain.com/index.html (or something similar)? This is not desirable.

7. Default redirects. Hopefully, the default redirects are 301 redirects. If not, it must be simple to select a 301. Otherwise at some point in the future some well meaning developer will end up using a 302 by accident.

8. Clean URLs without session parameters.. It is critical that your CMS not rely on session IDs on your URLs, or clutter URLs with other parameters. The CMS should rely on cookies to pass data about the user, and just accept the fact that users without cookies get less optimized performance.

9. Customizable URL structure.. The CMS designer should not be the one deciding the URL structure of your site. Your SEO team should. Don’t accept a CMS that does not allow you to control this.

10. Breadcrumbs. These really help reinforce the structure of the site for the search engine crawlers. It also passes the “theme” of sections of your site in an optimal way.

11. Duplicate content control. This is one of the most common CMS problems. Many of them create reams and reams of duplicate content. The good ones either avoid this altogether, or they give you a way to address it.

12. Scalable optimization. On large sites you will not be able to hand-optimize pages. You will need a scalable way to address these, and flexibility from your CMS is required to help you with that.

13. A way to publish articles on an optional basis. On a large site you may have a catalog of similar pages you publish with content from a database. You may wish to supplement that with some handwritten content, but if you have thousands of these pages you may be able to only do it for some of them. If your CMS allows you to handcraft articles for only some of the pages and not others you can simply write the articles as your team has bandwidth to do so, and publish them as they get written.

14. Sitemap generation.. Since your CMS is helping in the generation of the site, it should be able to help you create an XML sitemap.

Good, search-friendly CMS systems do exist. Some of the good ones I have worked with are Drupal, Joomla and PixelSilk. Of course blogging platforms like Wordpress work well for the purposes too.

Invest the time upfront to address these issues. It can really save your bacon in the end.

Publishing many web sites can be a very challenging process. There are times when organizations have a larger main site and decide to operate one or more smaller sites (aka microsites) as well. Other organizations publish a number of microsites without having a larger site at all.

Whether publishing microsites are in violation of the search engine webmaster guidelines depends on the details of the implementation and the reasons for doing it. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why people do it, and map out the likely search engine viewpoint on them:

SERP domination.. As most of our readers know, the search engines do not like to show more than 2 pages in the SERPs for a given web site. The main reason for this is that the search engines want to show their users a diverse set of results. After all, if a particular web site is not what a user is looking for, showing it to them multiple times in search results is not likely to result in a satisfied user.

Some organizations want to obtain more than 2 results and use microsites as a way to dominate the SERPs. This is done by publishing sites that chase the same sets of keywords, and therefore have similar content. As you might guess, this is against the search engine guidelines. If you choose to pursue this path, you need to do so with great care, and be prepared for the consequences if your group of sites are discovered and linked to you.

Reputation management. Related to our first scenario is when an organization is looking to dominate the SERPs for their brand name. Organizations often start to think about reputation management after seeing a website that publishes disparaging comments about them show up in the SERPs for the organization name or brand. This causes management to become very focused on protecting their reputation and seeking out strategies for dominating the SERPs for their brand name.

One strategy for pursuing reputation management is to build up a series of social media profiles and rely on the trust and authority imbued in those sites to start occupying the SERPs (linking to these profiles from the main site to help drive their rankings up), hopefully above the offending site. This type of strategy is OK with the search engines, but some organizations choose to create microsites for this purpose. This is where the game gets dicier, particularly if the content on the microsites are substantially similar to the content on another site owned by the organization.

Bypass internal management restrictions. Some organizations maintain very tight controls over what can and cannot be done on their main site. These types of controls are often put in place for branding reasons. Novel new marketing programs can get squashed in such an environment. One way around these restrictions is to develop a microsite.

An example would be a large brand that decides to create and promote a new video game on the web, even though they are not in the video game business (i.e. the game is being used as a PR tactic). They may not want to promote such a product directly on the main site, but are perfectly OK with promoting it on a new site thematically focused just on the game. Since the content is different, this is a strategy that the search engines will not have any quibble with.

Microsites as “link friendly” representatives. Sometimes moving differentiated content onto its own domain can make it easier for that content to gain links. For example, a publisher of a highly commercial site may want to create a series of articles that they promote on social media sites such as Digg, Reddit and others.

Why? The users of these types of social media sites are not particularly fond of linking to highly commercial sites. Publishing such articles on a different, “less commercial” domain may raise the probability of the success of the campaign. Once again, this is a scenario that the search engines would not be concerned about because the content is likely to be substantially different.

Beware of diluting your link power

The other factor that publishers should consider when deciding whether or not to publish a microsite is the issue of dividing up their link power. Each site you launch represents a new marketing problem. Each site needs links to prosper, and if a set of sites all share the same links that’s a sure clue to the search engines that something is amiss. As a result, the best linking strategy for a group of microsites is to make sure that the number of links they have in common are limited.

On today’s web where trust and authority play a large role in the ranking of a web site, dividing up your content on multiple sites is often not a good idea. For example, if you get 1000 different web sites to link to a set of 4 web sites, each site probably gets links from 250 to 400 domains (allowing for a modest degree of overlap).

This means that the domains have only the trust and authority of the 250 to 400 domains that link to them. Contrast this with a single site with all 1000 domains linking to it (particularly if they are all largely relevant). This site has a much higher level of trust and authority. The result is that this site can rank higher for the related keywords, and this can be critical in highly competitive areas.

As we have outlined above, there are scenarios where one or more microsites does make sense for an organization. Be careful to make sure that the microsites have unique and differentiated content and you will be OK from the search engine point of view. The other factor you should consider is the dividing of your link juice. In scenarios 3 and 4 outlined above, you may be willing to accept this splitting of links because the other reasons for developing a microsite are compelling enough. Weigh these factors when considering a microsite so you can make a fully informed decision.

Back in the early days of search engines and search engine optimization it was an anything goes environment. Initially, SEOs stuffed reams of keywords into their page to get their pages to rank. Then when links became the driving force in rankings SEOs moved into link buying. The problem with all this is that it was all based on manipulation of one form or another.

While many will argue that SEO continues to be the practice of manipulating search rankings, it does not have to be that way. The SEO industry hurts itself by allowing itself to be associated with manipulation. That is my problem with the terms “linkbait” and “SEO copywriting”.

The problem with linkbait

Linkbait is the term that emerged for developing content for the purpose of getting large numbers of links. In many cases this was focused on getting articles to the front page of social media sites such as Digg. In principle, there is nothing wrong with developing content that is intended to garner a lot of links. In a non-search engine world it would be similar to many types of PR tactics, and something that you might do to promote your business.

What I don’t like is that the term has overtones of much deeper manipulation, largely because the word “bait,” of “bait and switch” fame is part of it. For example, in March of 2008, money.co.uk wrote an article titled 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers. According to Yahoo, this page has nearly 1400 external links, a nifty haul for a single article. The problem is that the story is not true.

Ultimately, it is not OK to publish a deliberately misleading story in order to gather links. It should be noted that Money.co.uk published an apology. Jonathan Crossfield wrote about the story in his article Linkbait at any Cost.

This is what the term linkbait can lead you to do. Clearly a deliberately misleading story does not serve the interests of your web site’s users. I favor a descriptive phrase like “linkworthy content” because it includes the word “worthy” in it. Whatever you do, make sure the content you develop is linkworthy and lose the term linkbait, as it just confuses people about the goals of your content.

The problem with SEO copywriting

We work with large numbers of writers, and nearly all of our SEO projects include a strong component of recommending content for our clients web sites. As a result, we are constantly faced with questions about SEO copywriting practices, such as:

• How long should the article be?
• What keywords should we use in it?
• How should content be allocated across various pages of the site?

As with linkbait, the term SEO copywriting creates a mental image of manipulation which can quickly become a slippery slope. The root of the problem is that your writers are not trained in SEO, and nor should they be. That bears repeating: I recommend that you do not train your writers in SEO. There are two major reasons for this:

1. Even if you do try to train your writers in SEO, you will inevitably train them at a surface level. This means that their decision making will be based on partial information, and this can lead to mistakes.
2. Content quality has to remain the primary goal of the writers at all times. Providing low quality content for any reason, including your desire to get search engine traffic as a result of creating it, is not a good idea. This will come back and haunt you in the end.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from one of our writers asking if they should repeat the keyphrase from the title over and over again in the article body. My response was what would the user think when they saw this same phrase hammered at them over and over again. It just does not read right, and the reader of the content will notice it.

I don’t fault the writer—he was just trying to be helpful. Ultimately, poorly written content is not what you want readers noticing about your articles. You want them noticing the high quality information you provide. For this reason, we don’t hire SEO copywriters to work with us and our clients. We hire writers. We do tell them what we want the article to be about, and may provide a template with some pre-defined headers in it, but that is as far as we go.

Hire good writers and let them write good stuff. To meet your SEO needs make sure they are writing about the topics you want, and provide them with an article template. Great content, on a site that is search engine friendly, and that is effectively promoted, will always do well. It is a formula far older than the web, but it still works, and you don’t have to worry about the backlash tomorrow.

The thumbprint of social media on search engine optimization is evolving. It used to be that the big rage was figuring out how to develop link bait that had a strong chance of making the front page of Digg, Reddit, or other similar social news sites. The results were good, mostly in terms of getting a volume of links to a page on your site.

This is still a great tactic, but social media can do so much more today. For example, with Twitter or Facebook it is possible to use networking and information sharing techniques to build high quality links. I have seen sites from a number of different spaces use Twitter effectively as a PR outreach mechanism.

This new type of PR has become a new technique for link building and promotion. However, fast forwarding from today, there is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future.

Future probabilities

There are certainly a lot of reasons why this would make sense. Today’s link based algorithms are well understood by the community at large, and this has led to a battle between spammers trying to game the algorithm and the spam fighting teams of the search engines.

One way to combat this would be to start introducing social media signals as a ranking factor. This would allow the engines to leverage the wisdom of the crowds. Mike Grehan provides some excellent thought on this topic in his whitepaper titled New Signals to Search Engines: Future Proofing Your Search Marketing Strategy. He summarizes the situation as follows:

“Signals from end users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don’t rely on the elitism of one web site owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot”.

Personally, I don’t think that social media signals will replace links as a ranking signal, but will instead complement them. Think of it this way: a link from a highly trusted web site will still be a highly valuable thing. Similarly, a host of mentions across a range of social media sites, particularly if they are primarily positive or negative, will also be a strong signal. The signals have some unique aspects to them too.

For example, one thing that could take place is the release of a new movie (”Movie A”). If it is really popular it could suddenly get discussed and referenced thousands or tens of thousands of times very quickly. This could be a flag that search engines could use to see what the best response to a query like “new movie” should be. Three months later the raging discussions about movies may well have moved onto another movie, and Movie A would no longer be a good response to this query.

User reviews already play a key role in local search, as does the broader concept of web references (which are references to a web site or a business that may not actually be a link). Or go to the web’s number two search engine, YouTube, where user views and ratings are a key factor in rankings. And well they should be, because the old fashioned crawler method of performing keyword analysis is difficult to do with video.

One of the nice components of social media based signals is that they are self policing. Launch a spam campaign and you will get outed (just ask John Mackey, the Whole Foods CEO). There will remain the problem of unpoliced forums and social sites where spammers can potentially have a field day, but the search engines should be able to filter these out using trust based algorithms as well.

What it means for SEO

The depth and breadth of tactics and skills required to succeed in an SEO project is increasing. A brilliant link building tactic that isn’t really based on quality content will likely receive some level of negative backlash, and that backlash will act as a counter-balancing force. Basically, there will be a lot more data for search engines to use, and this is good news for them—all the while increasing the challenge for SEOs.

In addition, companies that understand how to use social media services as part of a broader PR strategy will get an early first mover advantage over their competition. This can bring some immediate benefits in terms of market exposure now, and it will bring the significant advantage of improved search engine rankings in the future.