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.

In my experience, the best search engine optimization (SEO) in the world comes from small shops and freelance consultants. That statement (and the following article) is only my opinion, of course, but it’s an opinion based on about 14 years working in this industry.

Let’s get real: any agency (large or small) is primarily in business for themselves, not their clients. Their success is (naturally) built upon the success of their clients, but their clients are not their first priority. They can’t be, because agencies care about their clients only to the extent they impact or influence the interests of their own business model. This can be fine, really, and is even expected. However, it’s important to acknowledge, because that’s exactly the perspective in-house teams have of most agency relationships.

And yes, I myself am the president of a small SEO shop. Okay fine, call it an agency! In that light, the following may appear to be self-serving. Fair enough. Just know that I feel it’s the truth.

Adaptability creates advantages in search

SEO is a competitive field with a lot of money at stake. SEO is also about results: revenue, conversions, pageviews—whatever metric you live and die by. SEO drives traffic, relevant traffic, and top rankings can send lots of it.

Therefore, SEO has always been about finding and leveraging competitive advantages. Giant, slow-moving companies that take over 12 months to implement simple changes to robots.txt files and title tags (true story!) put themselves at a disadvantage to the savvy independent SEOs launching sites every week. The same is true for agencies. If Google changes the rules tomorrow, it’s a lot easier to adapt if you’re a single person (or even a 15 person shop) than if you’re a 300 person agency.

Being small also creates advantages in specialization. A small agency can focus on a single aspect of search—such as local SEO, real-time search, comparative shopping engines (CSEs) or mobile—and learn that area more deeply than departments within large agencies created for a similar purpose. Why? Primarily because large agencies seek to be a single stop for their clients, by offering services across multiple categories, rather than focusing deeply in a few select areas. They think wide, not deep.

SEO gets corporatized

As search gets more corporate, and the fluff gets squeezed out of the market, the landscape is changing. It wasn’t long ago that SEO was a fringe topic reserved for a relatively small selection of insiders. Now, the popularity of search (primarily driven by Google) has given rise to a significant industry. This has helped create a typical bell-shaped distribution curve with the majority of innovation and creativity at the far end, the mass market in the middle, and the fraudsters at the other end. The SEO industry is beginning to resemble the patterns of many other industries in this way.

Big fish sharing food with little fish

With SEO already proliferating the web ecosystem (sites that haven’t been touched by SEO are becoming rare), many large digital agencies with experience on the creative side are using small shops and consultants for SEO needs. Their clients want search marketing services, but they can’t offer it themselves, so they outsource it (relatively) cheaply and mark it up. This can and does work quite well, so long as the client has budget.

This mimics the traditional advertising world, where large agencies often use small studios for creative ideas. Large agencies provide small shops opportunities to work with platinum clients on challenging projects, while the small studios offer creative and innovative work. Unfortunately for them, the studios are usually cheapened in their role and undervalued. They work within a “black box” undisclosed to the client, who believes the large agency is providing all the work.

In my experience working with many different agencies over the last decade (both creative digital companies and large search companies), a similar pattern is emerging in the SEO field. However, where I’ve felt in the past that the creative agency world was predatorial to small studios, in the SEO industry it can be a profitable arrangement for all parties involved. It makes sense to bring in SEO specialists that excel in their specific area—just be sure to fight for transparency in the process if you’re the small shop (or ask who’s doing the work if you’re the client). And don’t let anyone undervalue your work.

SEO and the agency business model

In my opinion, the best SEO talent in the world either owns their own shop, freelances, does independent affiliate or project work or (rarely) holds an in-house position. Most agency or in-house positions can’t shell out the salaries that veteran SEO experts command, but there are exceptions.

From what I’ve seen, small elite shops and consultants time and again have done work that moved the needle further and faster than work from big agencies. The small ones are more nimble, more flexible and more open-minded and motivated. They work with fewer clients and have more riding on each of their successes. These factors lead to a more adaptable and unstructured approach to SEO.

Large agencies tend to rely on formulaic approaches, processes and systems, sometimes resulting in staff and services that are hopelessly behind. Of course many large agencies also have tremendous talent and intelligence on staff, but usually reserve these leaders for business development and marketing. The majority of agency accounts are then managed by junior-level staff, or even interns.

Specialization in the marketplace

SEO has matured a great deal since the mid to late ’90s, and it will surely continue to evolve. It’s becoming clear that sub-sets of the field are emerging, each one requiring a great deal of specialization and knowledge. The audience development work a SEO team does for the New York Times, for example, is going to be much different from the ecommerce work a SEO team does for Amazon. One is going to be focused primarily on building pageviews and the other on building sales, each requiring its own unique strategy and approach.

As specialization occurs, companies and large agencies will continue to look for independent consultants and small shops that solve problems for them. It’s not unthinkable that in five years a small company that specializes only in technical SEO audits may exist. Certainly we’ll see local SEO agencies (we already do, some very big ones), and we already see SEO boutiques doing ecommerce or focusing on specific verticals. I predict a consolidation within the next five years as acquisitions begin to take place among the many small SEO shops and large agencies in the industry.

Whatever happens, one thing’s for sure: I’m going to work hard to keep my agency small and nimble!

Every search marketer shares one important goal: get more of the traffic you want and less of the traffic you don’t. One of the best ways to get manage your traffic quality is by focusing on keyword selection. By selecting the right keywords you can reduce the number of untargeted clicks you get, reducing your costs. But it doesn’t stop there. Eliminating unwanted clicks increases the click-through rates for your ad groups, leading to higher quality scores, lower CPCs, and increased conversions.

Better keyword management isn’t just a nice to have; it’s increasingly becoming critical to your bottom line. According to Jupiter Research’s US Paid Search Forecast, 2008 to 2013, average keyword prices are set to rise more than 25% over the next five years. With keyword costs rising quickly, it’s critical that every keyword in your portfolio deliver maximum value. You can save thousands of dollars per month, and re-allocate that budget to better uses by following a few best practices around keyword targeting. These inside tips, detailed below, include pruning underperforming keywords, using match type refinement and negative keywords and evaluating raw search queries. The goal is to ensure your ads show on every possible search that provides a good ROI, but don’t appear at all for keywords that don’t.

Prune your under-performing keywords. The first step in keyword management is to search for high-traffic keywords that get no conversions. See if you can eliminate some or all of these terms. By removing keywords that drive untargeted traffic you can free up dollars to spend on existing terms that perform well or buy traffic on completely new terms.

Add new terms using keyword research. Adding new terms that are not included in your campaigns today can be a great source of new, profitable traffic. One of the best sources for new keyword ideas is raw query logs and reports. These logs/reports show which terms users are actually searching and converting on, and in many cases will provide you with insight into terms you should be buying but are not today.

Refine broad match terms with phrase and exact match. Once you’ve done your basic pruning and expansion, the next step is to view your raw search query logs again. Focus on the high-traffic keywords on broad match that actually convert, and try to determine the user queries that are driving the conversions. Replace these broad match terms with the raw search terms using the phrase or exact match options provided by the publisher. This will help refine the traffic associated with your keywords, increasing conversion rates and quality scores.

Use negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant and non-converting terms. Once again, check your raw search queries, but this time look for queries that are irrelevant to your brand or not converting. Add these terms to your negative keyword list to remove your ads from irrelevant searches.

Let’s look at an example of how keyword management can deliver impressive results. PowPow Guitar Store bought the keyphrase “steel guitar” on broad match below. They bid $2.00 on the term, which provided a good return on average across the conversions that resulted from search clicks on their ad.

Looking at their raw search query logs, however, PowPow Guitar Store found that people were clicking on this ad and purchasing more than just steel guitars. In some cases they were buying low margin items such as steel guitar Strings, which didn’t justify a $2.00 bid. Even more concerning, they were paying for traffic on queries related to products and services they don’t even sell such as “guitar repair” and “guitar lessons.”

Based on this analysis PowPow Guitar Store decides to change how it manages keywords. By shifting “steel guitar” from the broad to the exact match type they are able to reduce the number of unwanted clicks coming through on this term. Based on the raw search query data, they also add new keywords related to steel guitars such as “used steel guitar” and “steel guitar strings” and bid these terms appropriately to reflect the margin of the products associated with each keyword. Finally, by using negative keywords they are able to eliminate clicks on keywords associated with products they don’t sell, such as “songs”, “repair” and “lessons.”

The net effect is more traffic on relevant terms, and less traffic from visitors looking for products PowPow doesn’t sell. More importantly, because PowPow’s keywords now match user queries more closely, the company will see a boost in quality score, which further reduces CPC and boosts traffic. Through simple changes like this, marketers can make a big impact on sales and ROI without having to increase spend.

On the heels of launching Yahoo campaigns in three countries in eight days on an incredibly tight timeline, it makes sense to take a small step back and jot down a few thoughts about what went right, what went wrong, and how to improve next time.

Going global with SEM

I think this phrase is misleading. It’s not like you can take an SEM (or any kind of) campaign and globalize it. Going global really means going local in a dozen (or more) different markets. Sure, there are some elements of the campaign that are universal, but the real work lies in duplicating the franchise across a large number of diverse markets without deviating from the core message.

To go in-house vs. outsource?

Outsource. Don’t be a hero. Don’t even think about running this in-house. Unless you are an SEM agency promoting your own brand, definitely look for outside help. Even then, you might want to contract with an agency that specializes in this kind of work, as the sheer volume of details can bog you down. Your existing SEM agency may have the skills and experience to pull this off, but I wouldn’t take it for granted. This is not your father’s SEM. If you are considering using your existing agency, make sure they have case studies ready to show you. If they don’t, then don’t force it. Move on. There are a number of agencies that have the chops to pull this off. Find them, interview them and pick one that you like, because you’ll be spending lots of time with these people, and it gets pretty intense.

Budgeting

You need to look at your budgets in two different ways to make sense of them. First, take a top-down approach. Find out what your total media budgets are for the campaign and look at how they are distributed by market. You’ll probably have a big chunk of the media being spent on the US, and smaller percentages in EU and emerging markets. Take another metric that’s representative of SEM budgets in relation to other online (or offline) media. These days, you can use 40-50% as a placeholder for SEM as a proportion of total online media.

Now you have some budgets by market. Next, you want to take a bottom-up approach. Once you’ve worked with your agency on basic keyword lists, find avails for the list in each of your target markets. Then run three scenarios based on share of voice (share of search) in each of those markets. Now compare your bottom-up estimates to your top-down approach and see how they line up. Hopefully they intersect somewhere. If not, no big deal, you will either bump up against the share of voice totals (if so, congratulations!) or will be limited by overall budgets and will have to trim your share of voice to fit the limited budget.

If you find yourself in the latter group, you’ll be managing trade-offs, so here is a tip. Break your reduced budgets down into components like brand, product, etc. so you can spell these trade-offs out clearly and explicitly to management.

Building it out

So here’s how brand campaigns normally work for SEM. You’ve got a brand message. In our case the brand message is “It’s Y!ou.” So we have gobs of media out there—broadcast, radio, out of home, online display, you name it. Like all good campaigns, we have microsites and landing pages in all major markets that speak to this message, that invite users in to interact with our brand and guide them through the brand experience and the products that support the brand promise. So how does SEM play into this? Simple.

First, write as many ads as your brand message (and associated web assets) will support. Take your brand keywords (and misspellings!), attach the new brand ads to them, and point them to your microsites, landing pages, or whatever web assets you have to support your brand message. Put your brand keywords in their own campaign, so you can manage the budgets carefully (this is especially important for big brands, as high search volume can eat through a ton of budget). Now, build another keyword list of all the terms associated with the message itself. There won’t be too much search volume there, but you’ll want coverage on these terms to ensure if anyone (inside your company or out) searched on these terms. Attach the same ads to these keywords. If your have product offerings that support the brand promise, you’ll need to tailor some ads to these products. Make one campaign for each product, again, so you can fine tune your budgets.

Asking permission vs. forgiveness

At some point you are going to need to get approvals for your campaign builds. Depending on your organization, this could include brand and product folks in a number of countries. That’s a lot of back-and-forth. So a couple notes here. First, have your agency build approval templates that are easy to read. Second, review all the campaigns first and weed out the obvious problems. Now comes the tricky part. Depending on how highly-compressed your campaign is (think leadtime), you may or may not be able to get everyone to approve your builds before they go live. Don’t panic. This is where you can once again be thankful you are a search marketer. Go ahead and launch if you have to. Once you’re live, set up meetings with all the stakeholders and bring them up to speed. Get their feedback, and impress them with the speed with which you can make the necessary changes to your ads and keywords.

That’s all for now. Tune in next month when I’ll write about launching multiple campaigns in multiple markets, as well as measuring success.

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.

Step right up fellow search marketers, and get your tasty tips for ecommerce right here! I have to admit, my favorite number is “9,” so this list is already my favorite.

The below tips are especially for search engine optimizers (SEOs) actively working in the ecommerce field. Hopefully you can make use of these, and maybe even provide some tips of your own in the comments (or on your blog).

I’ll be speaking at SMX East in New York City next week—click here to drop below and see which sessions I’m on. I hope to see you there!

With that out of the way, let’s focus on these 9 Tasty Tips for Ecommerce SEOs, shall we?

1. Implement a recommendation engine

The king of upselling has always been Amazon.com (they don’t need any more links, so I won’t bother), a site that pretty much invented the idea of displaying recommendations during the browse and purchase processes. Recommendation engines can be extremely powerful. If you aren’t using them yet, make sure you put this on your radar for 2010 planning.

There are a few key things to remember for SEO with functionality like this, especially how the feature will be coded on the site. If it’s built on javascript, that could pose problems with search engines. While googlebot can crawl through javascript, it’s not guaranteed and certainly won’t provide the benefit of plain text links; Bing’s bot (still msnbot as far as I’m aware) and Yahoo! Slurp are also important to cater to and don’t follow javascript yet.

You’ll also want to ensure the recommendation engine is making use of definitive product URLs and not creating its own “variety” as the recommendations are generated.

Depending on business requirements, you may want to build this in-house or look to a third-party solution. Either way, this is a large project requiring a lot of resources—but it’s worth it. Why? Just look at this:

A company we work with recently launched a recommendation engine and saw the following performance improvements after launch:

• Pages per visit (PPV): +20.1%
• Time on site: +2.8%
• Bounce rate: -5.9%
• Conversion rate: +4.8%

Pretty extraordinary results from adding recommendations to the site! This client is a large brand with an already healthy sales process, so your mileage may vary.

2. Add related links

With a lot of pages to work with, related linking can be huge for SEO. At the enterprise scale, SEO is really about leveraging large amounts of pages efficiently, and using that scale to advantage. Related linking accomplishes that very well, but can be an intensive feature to implement and manage (there are several third-party resources for this, including TextWise, SLI Systems, and others).

The king of related linking has always been Shopping.com, a site that was using this to advantage years before it caught on (thanks to their extremely sharp SEO at the time, Aaron Shear).

The idea behind related linking is to accomplish at least 3 major goals:

Flatten the site, thereby making it easier for crawlers to access URLs from many different points. Think of this as opening more doors for spiders to traverse a site.

Relate and categorize products and categories together, thereby making it easier for crawlers to understand how URLs can potentially be grouped together. Think of this as putting signs on the doors to other, possibly related, doors for spiders to follow.

Provide human visitors with links to related products and categories, thereby aiding the navigation process.

Using related linking well can offer a huge advantage in areas beyond SEO, because users love them too! Related linking can be used alongside or separately from recommendations, and is highly recommended for ecommerce sites—especially large ones.

3. Correlate entry page to bounce rate

Here’s a great tip for SEOs working in analytics, with a hat tip to Brian Kalma who pointed me in this direction: generate search traffic reports to show you the search term alongside the corresponding entry page. You can then analyze the bounce rate of that term and page combination, and find where relevance needs to be improved.

The idea here is to ask, What organic traffic terms are bringing visitors to the wrong page? Knowing that, you can either optimize the page for relevancy, or figure out if a conversion issue is causing problems.

This is literally a gold mine of opportunity for the hard-working SEO! But it’s not something that you can accomplish over night. After you’ve created the ability for your analytics reports to generate the right data points (easier said than done), you’ll then need to analyze that data and finally begin to chip away at the large number of projects this analysis will create as outcomes.

Long live analytics!

4. Be a speed demon

Dealing with hundreds of millions (or billions) of pageviews a day is nothing out of the ordinary for enterprise sites. Ecommerce sites can get pounded with traffic, and require advanced content delivery network (CDN) solutions such as Akamai and Limelight. While these are important (actually, essential), what’s also important is ensuring your pages are loading lightning fast!

While Google in particular doesn’t use page load time as a factor in its ranking algorithms, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact SEO or isn’t important. Site latency can have ramifications in SEO in at least the following areas:

Crawling efficiency. As a spider crawls the site and performs typical GET/RESPONSE requests, the content needs to be served without excessive delays and without any 5xx server errors. Slow-loading sites can hinder the crawl by serving pages too slowly, which can adversely influence indexing and ultimately even impact rankings.

User response. A slow-loading page is as dead as a non-existent page. On the web, we want it fast and we want it now, and if we can’t get it now we hit the back button. Google certainly, and Bing probably, look to user satisfaction as a prime concern. A user who searches, clicks a result, then quickly returns to the search engine result page (SERP) and clicks on another result sends a strong signal about a page that is surely recorded. Think of this occurring many thousands of times and you can predict the outcome: the page will be pushed lower in the SERPs, or if it’s a serious error such as a 5xx, removed from the index altogether.

Have your development team look into techniques to speed up the site, and continually audit site load time.

5. Find and kill duplicate product URLs

Here’s some low fruit to pick: ecommerce sites are especially bad at having multiple versions of product pages. Normally we can find these with site: and inurl: search operators. Pay careful attention to the product level URLs, as this is usually the area duplicate content creeps in (through faceting and sorting of URLs, or through tracking or cookie information appended in the query string). It’s also an area that can cause major negative impact on search rankings. Each product page should have one single, authoritative URL.

Duplicate product pages cause the following issues (at least):

Page dilution in the search indices. It’s not uncommon to find sites with dozens or even hundreds of product duplicates; with Google crawling and indexing a finite number of pages (domain dependent, of course), this is critical to resolve.

PageRank split in the link profile. Duplicate pages can attract links on their own, too, and these need to be consolidated to maximize a product URLs external links.

To find duplicate product URLs, do some quick searches in Google like the following:

site:mydomain.com inurl:productID
site:mydomain.com intitle:"my product name"

You’ll have to click on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link to see all the duplicates (this adds filter=0 to the query string in the URL).

After you find them, here are your options (in order of preference for SEO, and intensiveness to implement):

Best but highly intensive: Re-structure your URLs so they don’t create duplicate content. This may mean a complete overhaul of the URL format and is not recommended in 99% of cases. However, in very serious situations this is the long-term goal, even if you have to get there via other short-term fixes.

Second best and moderately intensive: 301 redirect duplicate versions to the authoritative version. This is always a good option, however it requires more resources and is sometimes not do-able on ecommerce sites sorting products by season, style or special promotion. Also, redirects cause latency on a site (a point often overlooked by SEOs).

Third best and lightly intensive: Use the link canonical meta tag to relate duplicates with a single, authoritative version. Next, use Google and Yahoo! parameter removal tools in their web consoles to pull out parameters that aren’t needed. This is the least desirable option because it doesn’t really fix the underlying issue, it only places a band-aid on it. Still, it’s better than nothing, and it requires very few resources in comparison to the above methods.

6. Run your own scheduled crawls and audits

If you’re an in-house SEO, set a crawler loose on your pages regularly. Xenu can be a good option, however it doesn’t scale for large sites and won’t stand up at the enterprise level. web Link Validator is better in this department. However, there are unique advantages to either having a custom crawler created or to use the services of an outside agency. The idea here, and the benefit, is to continually monitor the site for changes and new content pushes to ensure nothing creeps in that will stab you in the back (like the creation of 25,000 302 redirects from out of stock items).

Google’s webmaster console is fantastic (I also recommend using Bing and Yahoo!’s tools, which are good but not as comprehensive). Google’s tool acts very much like a crawler you would use on your own, but in my experience only shows “indications” of issues, and therefore acts best as a pointer for further investigation with other tools.

Whatever route you choose, stay on it!

7. Brag about your successes

This may sound odd, but you need to hear it: brag! That’s right, brag. If you don’t tell anyone about your successes, do you just expect them to discover them on their own? You can’t quietly do your work expecting for everyone to notice how amazing you are. You have to stand up and say, “hey! check this out, we made the front page of Digg! We got some new rankings! We’re building links like crazy!” or whatever you can brag about.

You provide reporting and benchmarking, I’m sure, but be sure to share what you’ve done outside of those formal procedures.

Brag to your managers and even the C-levels about link building successes, wins with rankings and social media, traffic increases, and even specific projects that you’ve recently undertaken or completed.

Make your successes known.

8. Leverage landing pages

Landing pages are like little hubs that tie entire categories (and even sections) of a site together. For large ecommerce sites, having custom and high-quality landing pages created enables web teams to:

• Create excellent user experiences
• Control the number and type of links on a page (not to mention their location)
• Control the ‘flow’ of a site from the category to product level
• Aggregate content such as custom-tailored copy, links, reviews, product shots, promotions, and navigation elements into a single page

And you want to know the best part of creating advanced landing pages? They convert extremely well, and can rank like crazy!

9. Stay creative

I’ve saved the best one for last, because I really like the number 9.

Top ecommerce sites do one thing very well: they cater to their customers. They innovate, they contribute value. Creative thinking is required in SEO, because SEO best practices can only get you so far.

Continually aim to keep new projects on your agenda. It’s not enough just to stay caught up with damage control. Keep an open mind. Stay away from “latest fad” type of SEO tips and other rubbish. Creative ideas can drive a lot of traffic and attention, regardless of SEO benefits. And always remember, as Bob Massa says, “Search engines follow users.”

I guess it all comes back to a truth stated in 1995: content is king. It’s just that wrapping that content in new and interesting ways is the prime differentiator now.

That’s all folks! See you at SMX East.

My SMX East speaking agenda:

• Revisiting PageRank Sculpting
• Ecommerce Search Marketing Tactics
• Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues

Ah, the holidays—the most wonderful time of the year for retailers. Even though the uncertain economy has retailers only cautiously projecting an uptick in sales this holiday season compared to last year’s dismal downturn, the truth still holds that most will make 25-40% of their yearly sales in November and December.

What is unique for holiday season 2009 are the specific strategies online retailers must take this year to reap the most sales possible. With lessons learned from last year’s bloated inventories and fire-sale prices, many retailers this year are restricting inventories and fine-tuning merchandising in an attempt to lure shoppers to purchase earlier and at higher prices. And, of course, the best way to get potential shoppers to your site is via search engine marketing. 82% of holiday shoppers polled by Google said they find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.

In the run-up to the holidays, there are several concrete SEM strategies you can implement right now to make maximize your revenue from Black Friday and beyond. The trick is to anticipate the way consumers will behave during the holidays, and leverage those predictions to improve the performance of your search marketing campaigns to increase sales and ROI.

Here are five common holiday-driven consumer behaviors to keep in mind, with concrete SEM tips to turn these behaviors into valuable revenues:

Consumers research early and purchase late

Studies show that over half of people begin researching Christmas gifts before Thanksgiving, but the majority of purchases occur in mid-December. Google’s holiday survey suggests that 57% of consumers begin researching holiday purchases before Thanksgiving, but 77% of purchases happen after Thanksgiving.

Tip: Make sure to set your tracking cookies to 30 days or more, so you can fully value all of your keywords and adjust bids accordingly. In November, you may see increasing costs for some of your keywords without an increase in conversion; don’t bid them down just yet, however, because a few weeks later those same keywords may turn out to be your top performers.

Research begins online, but many end up purchasing in the store

Shoppers frequently research online, but continue on to purchase offline either in the store or over the phone, especially for high-value products such as electronics. Google’s research shows that 54% of shoppers research online but complete their purchases in-store, and that number could be even higher, as it’s a tricky metric to track.

Tip: Find a proxy for measuring your offline conversions such as tracking when users click on the “store locator” or the “contact us” links on your website. By counting these actions as a conversion and assigning them a value, you can create a more accurate picture of how your keywords are performing. If you want to get really fancy, upload in-store conversion metrics from your data warehouse into your search management application, which gives a more precise measure of which keywords drive offline purchases. By fully valuing the impact of keywords across channels, you will be able to increase your bids and position in the auction to drive more sales.

Holiday consumers are more likely to be searching for gifts

What people buy for themselves during the year has little to do with what they buy during the holidays. Shoppers increasingly focus on gifts, and will be on the lookout for advertisements targeting holiday gifts, sales, and shipping promotions. This may seem like a no-brainer, but many online retailers don’t fully modify their SEM campaigns to take advantage of this shift.

Tip: Adjust your keyword mix to include more holiday terms, not just the keywords people associate with your products and brands during the rest of the year. Secondly, don’t forget gift cards. Some 69% of shoppers plan to purchase gift cards this year, according to Google, so if you aren’t managing a separate gift cards campaign you’re losing out on a lot of potential sales. Finally, consider testing holiday-specific creative with your campaigns to increase relevance and clickthrus. For example:

Consumers are more likely to purchase over the holidays

Consumers are much more likely to make purchases, and to make higher-value purchases during the holiday season. This results in an increase in conversion rates and average revenue per click for search marketers, making some keywords worth more during the holidays than they are during other times of the year.

Tip: To stay one step ahead of the competition, you should anticipate increased conversion rates, and boost your bidding strategy for competitive, high-traffic terms. View your data from last year to see how conversion rates changed week-over-week during the holidays and make adjustments accordingly throughout the holidays. By having a game plan set before the holidays, you can focus on measuring the results and adjusting the plan to meet actual changes in conversion rates as you go.

Consumers love post-holiday sales

Everyone knows they can find great deals starting December 26th, which is why research shows that 63% of shoppers will make purchases during post-holiday sales. Your job as a retailer is to maximize the number of purchases before December 25th, while at the same time planning ahead to optimize your campaigns for post-holiday sales.

Tip: Don’t assume the holiday season ends on December 25th. Create sale-specific campaigns, keywords and creative ahead of time and schedule the campaigns to launch automatically on December 26th at midnight. That way you won’t be in the office tinkering with keywords and can enjoy the holidays too! Once you’re back at work in the new year, make sure to watch for stock outages and changes in inventory so you can pause or delete ad groups accordingly. This will not only save you money, but will help avoid issues with customer satisfaction.

While no one’s sure how the 2009 holiday season will fare for retail sales, it’s clear that if you take a few simple steps, you can increase conversion and boost sales even during these challenging times.

After my last column on how big brands should organize around social media marketing, I thought it might be useful to get tactical and look at some specific ways that big brands can begin to move the needle on social media. Again, I’m crediting Bill Hunt with inspiring some of these thoughts in a great presentation he gave here at Yahoo! last month, as well as Laura Lippay for leading the charge internally at Yahoo!.

Get the basics right

Like most things I experience here at Yahoo! that hold true for large companies, I find that we need to focus on doing some very basic things across a vast scope and scale. The same holds true for social media marketing. Focusing on a very few, important efforts and doing them well across the company represents success for us and all big brands. So let’s isolate a couple topics and make sure we get them right.

Push all the right buttons

First, enable your site to support social media. Enable your users to join your network and promote your content. Your site needs links or buttons to follow the brand or product on Twitter and Facebook at the very least. Of course, if you have many products, like most big brands, you’ll need to point to different Twitter streams or Facebook pages that are appropriate to the respective product or service. As well, if you produce content on your site, at the end of your articles you’ll want buttons that promote your content to sites like Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. Getting these buttons on your site will take some time and effort, not because the work is difficult, but because the folks who do the work will have many other priorities in their queue. At this point, you will need to rely on your previous work in creating a center of excellence (CoE), working with an executive sponsor to get the work prioritized.

A cast of thousands

Once your site is enabled for social media, you will want to rely on your company’s biggest asset: your employees. One of the nice things about big brands is that we employ large numbers of people who are brand evangelists. That means that at Yahoo! and other companies, there are thousands of potential marketers for our products and services. If we all spend just a few minutes a day talking up our products and services to our respective social communities, the effect will be significant.

With social media, however, we need to be careful how we behave. Social media networks are fragile when it comes to commercial promotion. If your network thinks you are spamming them with commercial messages, they will likely ignore you and you will lose credibility within your network. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that it’s OK to talk about your products within your social network, but this should generally be done in the spirit of conversation. That is, when Yahoo! launches its new homepage, it’s acceptable to post a link to it on my Facebook page and say “Hey everybody, what do you think about the new Yahoo! homepage?” In contradistinction to this, it is generally frowned upon to promote your own products and services through some of the main social channels such as Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. For example, if Yahoo! sports just broke a story about Shawne Merriman and Tila Tequila, I shouldn’t Digg it through my own account. However, it’s OK to share the story with my social network and invite others to “buzz it up.” You can imagine that if all my fellow Yahoos worked in this way we could really start to move the needle on our social media efforts.

Get your social social on

Another great way to increase awareness and share best practices internally is to schedule small, informal meetings with the folks in your organization who are really interested in social media. We came up with some interesting ideas around this in our SEO and Social Media Conference in Santa Monica last month. Having lunch, brainstorming with other Yahoos, we developed a formula for putting this into practice. We’re calling it a “Social Social” and we’re scheduling our first one next month, thanks to Laura Lippay. The idea is that we can have a small, targeted gathering where we can swap war stories and share strategies around social media. The goal is to make sure we’re executing in effective ways around the organization. The recipe is simple: Invite a small number of social media types. Pick a topic. Open with a Pecha Kucha. Add beer. Rinse and repeat.

Now that you’ve got the tactics down, you’re well on your way. Remember, with big brands: do a few things, but do them well and do them everywhere.

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.

On this, my maiden voyage as a columnist here at Search Engine Land, I’m going to rant about the empty buzzphrase “best practice.” Nothing like a little rant to get things started, right?

This column is called Industrial Strength, with topics centered on search and social media marketing in the enterprise. While “best practice” talk is prevalent at every level of marketing, the consequences of this type of thinking hit especially hard at the enterprise level online, where the scope is large and the change continuous.

“Best practice” is a stale buzzphrase that offers zero competitive advantage. There, I said it. SEO best practice in the enterprise? To me, that is nothing but useless marketing-speak. It doesn’t say anything about creating a competitive advantage in search, and it barely scratches the surface of SEO—especially industrial strength SEO, the focus of this column!

Important disclaimer: in-house SEOs work hard to train content teams, developers, UX teams, PR folks, and many more key stakeholders on SEO best practices. You’ve got to do this, and I do it too. But it’s not the point here. The point is to call out run-of-the-mill thinking and stale SEO campaigns.

A little history of flawed thinking

The idea of best practice grew out of organizational techniques popular in the mid-to-late 1990s (Six Sigma, Total Quality Management). These theories, and others, helped create the idea that certain groups had achieved “best practices” within an organization, and that these practices could be taught to the company at large, proliferating their “bestness” company-wide.

That’s all fine and dandy, and from a practical point of view, probably has merit. But at the strategic level, there’s an inherent flaw here: the whole idea of “best practice” signifies that we have achieved what is best, that we can practice that and follow a procedure, that the best is based on a ruleset that can be taught, repeated and spread out across an entire organization. Does that sound like SEO to you? It sure doesn’t sound like SEO to me—at least not valuable SEO, the kind that delivers significant returns at the bottom line. It sounds like SEO 101.

Ramifications of SEO best practices

We are reaching a point in SEO where established ideas are no longer good enough (this is magnified at the enterprise level, where the stakes are high). It’s always been moving that way, of course, but today there is such an extreme level of competition that we will soon see the men separated from the boys, as it were, in the search engine result pages (SERPs). (Sorry ladies, you’re awesome too! It’s just a saying.) This is a natural evolution for search marketing: you can get away with being sub-par for awhile, but sooner or later, you’ll fall off the back.

Let me ask you this: Do you think you can separate your company from the competition in SERPs with SEO best practices?

As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh recently quipped:

Best practices are weak at best

By their very nature, best practices are rulesets that are standardized and formalized procedures. There is no competitive advantage in having best practices, at least in SEO. There is only a summation of basic webmastering (e.g., place relevant keywords in the title tag, make pages semantic and relevant, etc). That’s simply not cutting it anymore, because frankly, that stuff represents the basic price of admission. Best practices are neutered, stale and massively reproduced conventions that have been used (and sometimes abused) to the point of ubiquity. SEO and ubiquity don’t mix.

By definition, a best practice:

• is a static ruleset
• is a standard to be followed
• has worked in the past (read: is old)
• has been popularized (read: is average)
• limits judgement, evaluation, and strategy (cornerstones of quality search marketing)

Any time we feel satisfied with having achieved the ‘best’ (what a pipe dream!), we miss great opportunities that are always present. We miss the opportunity to fail quickly, find out what didn’t work, change it, and find something that does work. That type of thinking and risk taking is what contributes to cutting-edge SEO, and it also contributes to great companies.

In contrast, best practices are procedures that seek to be easily duplicated and reproduced. This offers no competitive advantage, a serious limitation that’s emphasized in competitive fields such as internet marketing.

There is a place for SEO best practices. For example, so-called textbook SEO, where title tags and basic on-page optimizations are followed, can be fairly easily standardized (and even automated). There will be some nuance, especially in regards to keyword selection, but optimizing title tags and basic on-page elements is a pretty straightforward affair.

I’m not saying that key company departments shouldn’t have training in SEO best practices. They should! Teach content teams to think about SEO. That should be a preliminary tactic, which opens the question: what’s next?

Think radical change and innovation

SEO for enterprise-level sites has become much more about brand and authority, about influence and partnerships, and about wider marketing principles than conventional SEO can ever touch. Instead of following best practices in this environment, I like to follow something akin to “radical discontinuous change“—now there’s a phrase that fits the SEO mindset! Instead of stale, common best practices, think of the key strengths of your corporation, of unique competitive advantages. This type of approach is:

• dynamic
• unique to each organization (and even each department)
• current and future-looking
• requiring of judgement, experience, evaluation and creativity

Theoretically, SEO at any level is about reinventing strategies continuously based on what works, removing what doesn’t, and always striving. Sure, we need some pragmatic processes developed and spread across key departments in the company. That’s a given. But at the macro level, we need to think in terms of creating big ideas, not in terms of SEO 101; and that means thinking in atypical ways, which is directly contrary to following best practices or procedures. This key concept will separate the average SEOs (who are a dime a dozen) from the truly great ones (who are pretty darn rare). And no, I don’t count myself as one of the rare ones (yet). But I’m working on it.

You don’t achieve dramatic results by following the herd. You achieve dramatic results by thinking in new, weird, and creative ways. It’s true in business, and it’s true in SEO.