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It’s another day on the Internet and yet another form of ad monetization has reared its ugly head.

You Tube recently launched its InVideo advertising solution to a resounding dull clang of dissatisfaction from the exuberant masses who consume hours of content on the beloved Web site.

It’s not hard to see why. And in the interests of full disclosure, I do work in online advertising, yet I think it’s really kind of hard to love this solution.

Don’t get me wrong. For some, loving advertising is like loving tax preparation. YouTube’s solution isn’t easy to understand in the context of how it’s used with content. The relative context of application, if you will.

Specifically, hearing a lo-fi video defense of a pop star is bad enough, but when it’s shrouded with a slick transition to the ad message, it all seems a brash and out-of-place marriage of elements.

This blight-on-blight online advertising solution is only the most recent. There have been many others before, and rest assured there will be more in the future.

It makes me wonder why we keep coming up with the same solutions to monetize this relatively new medium. Can’t we get a little more creative? Or are we destined to a downward spiral of repeating the same advertising model on everything we do?

Make the logo bigger. Stick a special offer in at the end. Repeat. Yes, these forms of advertising are familiar, like a comfy old chair, but old and comfy can get stinky after a while.

In their book, “New World, New Mind” Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich point out, “Human judgment and humanity’s ability to deal with the consequences of its creations lags behind its ability to create.”

Bad times at any company’s online solutions division lie ahead.

We constantly trying to innovate, yet we don’t slow down our minds (or our development cycles) to really contemplate the impact of our work. It’s a truly vicious circle.

We develop measurement criteria in the same way. Often, these two crimes combine to provide poor ad solutions and mishandled performance valuations.

In a competitive industry, yes, time is money. But ignorance wastes time, money, and a user’s interest in your brand. I’d say the last is much more costly.

Damning as that may sound, it’s been true for quite a while. Did anybody ever think the floating rich media ad would dominate the online advertising industry forever?

For that matter, the lovely and controversial You-Tubian solution for integrating advertising into its spectacle of video content shares the same future.

Lest we forget, the practice of inserting :15 spots before and after video content that floods the news became the new hair extension for a thinning and expensive media market. Truly, to think an online spot can be included in overall television rating points (TRPs), regardless of screen size and format, is unfathomable.

But as bad as it sounds, there’s hope for an industry known for interrupting viewers’ valuable time (and being the spawn of Satan).

There are ways in which we can rethink this whole ad thing. First, we must ask ourselves a few questions: Why must an ad follow a traditional story arc? Why do we need to assume users must understand everything they see? Why do we need comedy to make a viewer remember an ad? Why can’t the user have several available options and interactions?

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By  Dorian Sweet

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In this article we gave you a step-by-step plan for selecting the keywords and key phrases most likely to drive targeted traffic to your site. Here are some tips on avoiding keywords that are too common, using branded keywords, and knowing what to do when your keywords are likely to be misspelled. Finally, there’s a summary checklist to verify that you are on the right path to leading prequalified visitors to your web site.Do not use keywords or key phrases that are too broad. Use modifiers to make generic keywords and key phrases more specific. For example, if your site offers insurance-related services, you might want to use health insurance quotes or auto insurance quotes. To prequalify your visitors, your keywords and key phrases should identify your niche.

Let’s say you’re in the entertainment business. By choosing entertainment news, entertainment jobs, or entertainment center, you identify your niche and attract the kind of traffic you want. This is important no matter what you sell, be it apparel, books, health services, furniture, business services, or jewelry. A smaller, targeted audience is almost certain to result in more conversions than a large volume of traffic that got to your site thinking you were selling something you don’t!

Words such as software, Internet, cars, and radios are too general and will yield nothing but looky loos. But key phrases such as encrypted security software, Internet writing services, Ford Mustang two-door, and Bose wave AM/FM radio will attract visitors who are looking for exactly what you’re selling.

Not only that, single words and search engines don’t mix. Do you use single words in everyday situations when you need something? When you walk into a restaurant and the waiter asks what you’d like to eat, you dont just say, “Food.” Search engines can’t read your mind either and have a very tough time returning relevant search results on single-word searches. A searcher will get fed up with wading through hundreds of result pages to find an e-commerce software solution for his or her auction site. He or she won’t type in a search for software; it will be something like e-commerce auction software solution.

Do not use trademark names other than your own in your key phrases. If you are a start-up shooting for the top and decide to use a competitor’s name, watch out! Stay away from using other parties’ trademarks or product names in your key phrases. On the other hand, if you really do want the term Kelley Blue Book, contact Kelley and request permission. Whether you’ll be granted permission depends on potential affiliation. If you’re a vendor for a product, it’s quite possible the manufacturer will give you permission to use its name to promote and sell more product. However, trying to benefit from the use of another party’s trademark is disingenuous and will likely be met with significant resistance and legal exposure. Using another company’s trademark or product name to profit from its brand is totally unacceptable and breaches several federal trademark-protection laws.

If you are branded, include your company name in your key phrases. RadioShack, for example, should use key phrases such as RadioShack computers, RadioShack electronic components, RadioShack telephones, and so on. On the other hand, if RadioShack were interested in recruiting new employees, it should use key phrases such as work for RadioShack, RadioShack jobs nationwide, and executive RadioShack positions to recruit at specific levels of human resources. This way, RadioShack would be using its brand to find the very best people, people interested in working for RadioShack.

Remember that people misspell search words. A commonly used strategy that can be very effective is to select keywords and key phrases that incorporate likely misspellings. If you offer bookkeeping services, be sure to select bookeeping as one of your keywords and use this misspelling in some of your key phrases.

Following all the strategies covered this week and last should help point prequalified visitors to your web site. In summary, here’s your short list for developing your best key phrases:

• Try to think the way your potential customer thinks.
• Develop your keywords into a list of key phrases.
• Use concept key qualifiers to qualify visitors.
• Consider using special tools and services to help you discover your best key-phrase possibilities.
• Do not use keywords or key phrases that are too broad.
• Do not use trademark names other than your own in your key phrases.
• If you are branded, include your company name in your key phrases.
• Remember that people misspell search words, so select keywords and key phrases that include likely misspellings.

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By Paul J. Bruemmer

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In Part 1, we said that the SEO industry is at a crossroads. I suggested that the path we in the SEO industry are taking is precarious. I harped on the lack of uniformity with regard to doorway pages as a case in point. This lack of uniformity is not only confusing prospective SEO clients but also turning them off. Finally, I suggested that a way to address this problem is for the SEO industry to adopt industry standards.

Standards provide both stability and continuity. Doorway pages, for example, would be essentially the same at company A as they would be at company B, and that uniformity would make things work both for consumers and for SEO firms.

Here’s why.

Not only do standards foster clarity, they also impart credibility. To illustrate the clarity that standards could bring, let’s juxtapose an industry with standards against the current situation. Imagine that you’re a dot-com looking for an online advertising vehicle that works. You investigate SEO firms. Here’s some of what you’d have to deal with.

SEO firm A has a positioning guarantee; SEO firm B says guarantees aren’t feasible because search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and it furthermore cautions about the legitimacy of SEO firms that offer guarantees.

Let’s look at pricing. SEO firm C charges for its services by the month. Firm D charges $300 for every Top 10 ranking. Firm E charges only for “competitive” terms that get a Top 20. Daunting, isn’t it?

Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

We’re not making it easy for consumers to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Not only that, I’d suggest that there’s so much conflicting information, we’re inadvertently engendering cynicism in the very group we’re trying to solicit.

Standards will bring the kind of uniformity you’d expect from any other industry.

Look at it this way. If you’re in the market for a car, you know that the major manufacturers mean essentially the same thing when they say they offer cruise control. But what if every manufacturer’s concept of cruise control were totally different? Imagine that they all had different pricing structures, and some offered cruise-control guarantees, while those that didn’t scoffed at those that did.

This kind of disparity may cause you to forsake cruise control entirely.

Unlike the automobile industry, SEO is relatively new and is fighting for mainstream acceptance. It’s crucial that we engender confidence and credibility now.

The Standards Dilemma

Setting standards isn’t a new idea. Nor is it without controversy.

Eons ago in Internet time (1998), Danny Sullivan, perhaps the web’s most authoritative voice on SEO, wrote a piece in which he discussed problems in the industry that precipitated a call for standards.

In “Promoters Call for Certification,” Sullivan reported how some key players called for the “establishment of a certification program for optimization professionals.” Proponents of the program felt that standards would help distinguish between relevant, ethical doorway pages and doorways that abused the system.

While Sullivan allows that “there are still some types of standards and common ground that can be formed,” he has some concerns about the idea of industry standards — in this case, as they pertain to doorways.

“Standards don’t solve the underlying problem — as soon as you have 11 people vying for 10 top spots, they’ll fight among themselves and constantly rejigger their pages within whatever ’standards’ someone sets up… So they’ll go back and rework their pages, albeit within the ‘rules,’ to secure a better placement. Thus, they’ll go back and rework their own pages, putting the cycle into a constant loop.”

Rules Worth Playing By

Not surprisingly, Danny’s right when he points out that this system isn’t perfect. It may appear a bit stifling if everyone plays within the rules.

But let me propose this: The SEO firms that succeed are the ones that find ways to make playing by the rules work. Can you show me an industry whose players don’t bend the rules (without breaking them) in an attempt to get the best results for their clients? Danny’s “constant loop” may be a way for us to encourage innovation.

Adopting standards may well ruffle a few feathers — just ask Al Gore’s attorneys. In effect, Gore lost the keys to the White House because 5 of the 9 Supreme Court justices couldn’t reconcile with the idea of a recount without uniform standards. How do you discern voter intent without uniform criteria?

Standards could also help us tackle an insidious situation.

The truth is, the SEO industry is quietly suffering from an image problem. Am I suggesting that SEO isn’t effective and, therefore, has a bad reputation? Absolutely not.

Consider this. Someone goes to AltaVista. He enters “buy CD changer” in the search field. If he lands on your site because you have a high ranking, you have a visitor who knows exactly what he wants — and he wants to convert. Also note: This prospect wasn’t solicited by a banner or email that implored him to click through. He deliberately went looking for your goods or services.

I’m convinced there’s no better way to drive qualified traffic.

Changing Minds, Opening Doors

People’s perceptions of the SEO industry are being shaped not because of the product itself but because of the issues surrounding the product. I also think that our image problem is exacerbated by the industry’s organic growth, which has resulted in a lack of industry-wide uniformity.

So, how do we change the perception that the SEO industry is esoteric?

Standards could provide the infrastructure for assisting prospects to make informed decisions. Armed with standardized information, prospective SEO consumers would be able to sift through various SEO firms, make apples-to-apples comparisons, and choose the firms that best suit their needs.

The stability that standards foster implicitly validates SEO strategy. The perception is that if all the SEO firms are all playing by the same basic rules, they must be doing it right.

Making clear and consistent information about SEO more accessible to our target empowers our prospects. Standards can help facilitate this empowerment process.

We don’t have to change the product, we have to reposition the brand. If that happens, doors will open.

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Sid Herberman is the President of Optimize-This.com, a search engine optimization (SEO) firm that believes online businesses really can achieve ROI. Prior to specializing in SEO, Sid was the Online Marketing Manager of LOUDtunes.com/MyMusicFactory.com, a B2C turned B2B e-commerce solutions provider. Sid is a former ad agency copywriter and sometimes enjoys writing articles that challenge the status quo. 

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As the number of sites proliferates — currently about 300,000 home pages are added to the web each week — and more and more people go online to shop for services or goods, the importance of search engine optimization increases. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work anymore; “launch it and promote it” is the name of the game.

Knowing what words and phrases people use to search the web is the first step in conducting a search engine optimization campaign. The benefit of a well-executed search engine optimization campaign is that it will increase the chances that members of your target audience will find your site. Choose the right keywords and phrases, and you’ll receive prequalified visitors. Choose the wrong ones, and people who want what you’re offering won’t find you.

Here’s a step-by-step plan to determine the keywords and phrases most likely to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Try to think the way your potential customer thinks. What words will pop into your potential customer’s mind when he or she is conducting a search for your offering? Here’s a tip: Take a step back from your product, service, or home page, and think like the average Jack or Jill who wants to find what you’re offering but doesn’t know about your site. Relax, concentrate, and quickly generate as many keywords as you can without worrying about whether they’re right. Approach it like a free-association exercise, and get your brand managers, marketing vice presidents, CEOs, and frontline salespeople to do the same.

Once you’ve listed everything that remotely comes to mind, prioritize and edit this list. Drop any words that don’t fit, and add those that pop up. Then shave this list down to the top 150 keywords your target audience will use to find what you do best.

Develop your keywords into a list of key phrases. If the keyword broadband is appropriate for your site, select key phrases, such as digital broadband, wireless broadband, accelerated for broadband, broadband news, broadband wireless communication, and so on.

Combine your keywords and key phrases with additional qualifiers to create more specific terms. Create two-, three-, and four-word phrases. For instance, from the key phrase software solutions, you might create traffic analysis software solutions, B2B software solutions, e-commerce software solutions, and so on. You get the picture.

Use concept key qualifiers to qualify visitors. Specify the concept in your key phrases, such as e-commerce software, but also be specific enough so that the key phrase is not too broad. You might want to use e-commerce software solutions, e-commerce security solutions, business-to-business e-commerce software, or B2B e-commerce software.

Beyond Engineering’s WordSpot is a tool for helping you discover your best key phrase possibilities. It can help you monitor and prioritize key phrases that people search for on the Internet.

The tool lets you analyze which key phrases people are looking for on the web. This research can provide you with knowledge about which words relevant to your situation are the best to promote or optimize.

Next week, we’ll talk about using branded keywords, avoiding common keywords, knowing what to do when your keywords are frequently misspelled, and more.

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 By Paul J. Bruemmer

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Each search engine and directory has specific requirements when accepting a “request to be listed,” and those requirements are all a little different from each other. It’s not one size fits all. Some things are best done by hand, and you’ll probably find that this is one of them.

When you hand submit your site, it’s a little like leaving your calling card with a client. You’ve met, and you know she has your card because you just handed it to her. It’s an important part of the business ritual. The same thing happens when you resubmit a URL to a search engine or directory. You’re making sure that it knows who you are. Being polite and using the right techniques are important. And repetition is reputation when it comes to search engine database listings.

Here’s why you want to verify and confirm your submissions:

• You want to know if the “request to be listed” was accepted by the engine.
• If it was accepted, did it get placed into the database?
• If it was entered into the database, did it stay in or fall out?
• If it did stay in the database, is it number 41 or 45,041?

You can do this yourself if you have the time and can keep current on search engine practices. Or you can farm it out to a listing agency. Professional registration services performed by trained technicians will provide you the following:

• Verification and documentation that the “request to be listed” was accepted by the engine
• Verification and documentation weekly or monthly to ensure the listing is found in the database
• If the listing is not found, identification, documentation, and resubmission
• Verification and documentation to submit additional doorway pages, monitored monthly
• Position analysis for your home page, sub-pages, and doorway pages

Hand submission can have a definite advantage over random or computer-generated and automated services. When submissions are performed by hand, the procedure is documented and verified during the registration process, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Manual registration is effective and worthwhile.

There are many companies offering to “submit your site,” but legitimate search engine traffic agencies that actually build traffic to your web site through analysis, optimization, linking, and monitoring are hard to find.

Search engine and directory submission is a huge business and a whole new industry on the web. There is no standardization, and the industry is unregulated. Some of these businesses are legitimate, and some aren’t. How can you separate the wheat from the chaff? By asking some very pointed questions:

1. Does a search engine analyst with at least three years’ experience optimize my home page before submitting it to the engines?
2. Does a trained technician manually submit my URL individually to each search engine and directory?
3. Does a trained technician return each month to verify that my submission is registered in the engines?
4. Do you send me specific documentation verifying that the stated tasks were performed?
5. Can I receive an individual screen-shot confirmation of each individual submission?
6. Can I personally visit each individual search engine and directory you submit my site to?
7. Will you identify the exact category for my submission into each directory?
8. Can you verify that I am listed (registered) in the search engines and directories specified?

If the answer to all eight questions is yes, then you’re on the right track.

Don’t accept any less of a professional service. You are entrusting a third party to represent your company by submitting your web site for multiple listings on search engines and directories. Your prospective new visitors and potential clients will find you through these listings, so it is critical that the company you select to perform this very important activity is reputable.

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By Paul J. Bruemmer 

• 0 Comments

There are a lot of people involved and there is lots of action taking place in the search engine optimization (SEO) field, which often leads to confusion and a number of questions.

Most marketers today realize the importance of achieving top search engine placement for their Web sites as it’s well established that the majority of Web site visitors come from search engines. But when it comes to the mechanics of fees and pricing methods, most people are in the dark. Even fewer know what to expect regarding customary fees and how they are determined.

In fact, I get many questions on the topic of SEO pricing and have avoided writing about it sooner because I didn’t want to sound like I was promoting my own SEO services. But since this is now becoming such a frequently asked question, I decided to share a request and provide a philosophical response.

Keith Clark of CC Group asked: “I have enjoyed reading your column at ClickZ, and it seems you are on to something. However, I am curious about your past articles where you mentioned the ‘real professional fee’ SEO agencies charge should average $2K to $5K and that charging by the impressions or click-through is not a good way to go. Could you tell me more about how you come up with a price for a client?”

What follows is a philosophical answer and in no way has anything to do with pricing used by my company, Web-Ignite. I’ve made a strong commitment to write for ClickZ honestly and objectively without self-promotion. Here are my candid feelings, based on years of industry experience, about methods of payment for SEO services.

Paul’s Honest Answer

SEO is abstract and dynamic. In other words, it’s unpredictable and ever-changing. I prefer a price point developed around the resources required to sustain and maintain the best positions possible.

A price point would have to be regularly maintained and modified daily, weekly, and monthly. It would include the cost of dedicating the proper resources to a specific client and its objectives. This is normally provided as a monthly ongoing SEO plan, payable month to month as a fixed fee.

The fee in question is best tied to the number of key phrases a client has, which obviously vary from industry to industry or site to site. In some cases, a site or industry may have the capacity for several hundred key phrases; however, its marketing budget may be limited to a few dozen key phrases. Pricing should be based on the long-term resources required per key phrase and the extent of the SEO plan.

Charging SEO services by impressions or click-throughs presents several areas of concern for the success of the client’s campaign. A major concern is fraud or irrelevancy.

Traffic auditing is a very complex technology when combined with search engine referrers and IP addresses, not to mention that the relevancy of a click-through is always under scrutiny by the client. I recall a discovery I made in the early days while auditing search traffic for the term “fat burner.” It was delivered and derived from searches for “Pamela Anderson.” This was both fraudulent and irrelevant. Additionally, only the cloaking server-side log files would know.

When I can see a position report that: a) identifies the engine or directory, b) tells me exactly where my keyword search result is located, c) tells me whether it’s located on page one, two, or three, d) gives me a live link from the engine to my destination page… I am a happy camper. When I pay a monthly fixed fee to maintain and modify these links, I am even happier.

Like I said, these are my own feelings based on years of experience. There are many other opinions, and I continue to welcome your comments.

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By Paul J. Bruemmer 

• 1 Comment

Stop me if you’ve been in this situation before…

You want to get your new web site listed on the most popular search engines. So you check out a few “how-to” sites on search engine placement and get right to work.

First, you comb through your page and make sure that you follow all the unwritten rules of search engine spiders meta tags, alt tags, relevant text, etc. Basically, your web page needs to look like a generic typewritten book review from high school. No pictures, no interactivity, no pizzazz.

Then, you must go to EACH search engine and post your URL. At this point, the waiting game begins. Some spiders will actually index your site within the week. Some, however, take four, six, even eight weeks to get to your URL. Ridiculous!

Even then, does that mean your job is complete? Hardly! Finally, after waiting up to two months from your initial submissions, you find your site is listed as number 1,026 on LYCOS. Who has the top listings? It looks like some kid with a sex site tricked the search engine into getting his URL on the first page for just about any search term.

What happened? What did you do wrong? Actually, probably nothing. But since most search engines don’t seem to give a hoot about your situation, or provide useful and helpful hints at what their particular spider prefers, you haven’t got a clue about what to do differently. But you try. You start the process all over again: re-tweaking, re-formatting, re-submitting, crossing your fingers, voodoo dolls, tarot cards, magic eight-balls, rock-paper-scissors, ANYTHING!

Even still, suppose you DO (through some sort of magic karma) get a respectable listing on a search engine. Every other site that is trying for the same listing now takes a lesson or two from your web page. Now, when the spider makes it’s next trip around, you get bumped out of your cherished top spot. Now you’re back to ground zero starting all over again.

To make matters worse, recent months have seen search engines increasingly turn to “indexed” formats, where an actual, real live person reviews the site to determine its relevancy. In this case, the “spider” is taken out of the equation completely.

AOL (and many others) uses the Netscape Open Directory. Excite even uses an “index” to list sites (which preempts its spidered listings). Now, at the click of a button, a human can make the final decision on whether your site is relevant or not. This is basically another crapshoot for that brand-new web site you are trying to give exposure to.

What’s a web site to do?

We at E-Troop.com have found a very successful alternative to this time-squandering, ill-conceived, ridiculous guessing game of search engine promotions.

Pay for Position Search Engines

When search engines like FindWhat.com and GoTo.com started showing up, people at first thought “Why would I want to PAY for listings when I can get my site listed for free on every other search engine? Besides, the Internet is supposed to be about FREEDOM, right? Paying for the top listings is exactly what we were trying to get away from with the World Wide Web!”

That sentiment seemed valid at the time, but quickly gave way to simple economics and business logic. We have found it much more cost effective to simply pay for our search listings. How?

Think about it.

Why pay somebody a nice hourly or salaried wage to sit there and “optimize” a site in Notepad? So you pay somebody several hundred dollars a week to do promotions, and wait months for results that may actually never come. This is certainly not efficient or cost effective. Why?

Because now you have gone for a month or more without good search engine listings. That costs you money. In addition, you are paying somebody to sit there and submit to search engines (that may not even list you anyway) like some sort of latent, ineffectual little drone. That also costs you money. All that time wasted, all that money spent, and what do you have? Nothing certainly not listings!

FindWhat.com, GoTo.com and other pay-for-position sites have easy-to-use web interfaces that allow you to bid on keywords and monitor the activity 24 hours a day. You only pay for people who “click through” to your web site from a paid listing. This means that you actually get “qualified traffic” the best kind you can get!

This means that if you have a shoe store on the web, every visitor from a pay-for-position search engine listing is brace yourself looking for shoes! You can even cap the amount you wish to spend on keywords, thus ensuring that you stay within your allotted advertising budget for a given month or year.

Speaking of traffic, what kind of traffic do these search engines get, anyway?

A lot. According to its latest press release, FindWhat.com gets almost three million searches per day! In addition to the main FindWhat.com site, its search engine listings are featured on such sites as Go2Net, Dogpile, Mamma.com and others.

Traditional search engines will probably remain an important part of Internet promotions for a few more years and simply cannot be ignored. Admittedly, we still tweak our pages and jump through the hoops to appease the whims of most major search engine spiders out there but we don’t get bent out of shape anymore when our listings defy logic. It will take a mass exodus from these ridiculous, marginally-useful spiders for them to change their tune and provide truly useful search results.

In the meantime, our success continues to be with the pay-for-performance model, and we expect it will continue this way for quite some time.

Besides, who doesn’t want qualified traffic?

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Don Makoviney is the Technology Director for E-Troop.com, Inc., a privately held company in Fort Myers, Florida that specializes in streaming media solutions for businesses. In addition, he also created and maintains an Internet news site called Makovision.com, which sorts through all the PR hype and bloated news stories to provide truly useful news to Internet professionals. 

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You know the drill. Two doors confront you. Behind door No. 1 is online marketing nirvana. Behind door No. 2 is a salivating lion that hasn’t eaten in days.

The search engine optimization (SEO) community confronts a similar dilemma. It’s at a crossroads and must choose which of two distinct paths it will follow.

So where is the SEO industry headed?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that the SEO community has not only opened the wrong door, it’s already going down the wrong path.

There is good news, though: It’s not too late to turn back.

Doorway Pages

In life, metaphoric doors open if you do the right thing. Here are a few things the SEO industry should consider to ensure it’s on the path to prosperity in the new year. Let’s start with doorway pages, or doorways.

A lot of confusion and many myths surround doorway pages. In truth, doorway pages are not the root of the problem in the industry, but they’re a symptom of a larger problem.

I believe that the merits of the SEO industry are being overshadowed by industry-wide inconsistencies. Doorway pages are a case in point.

The SEO industry is divided not only on whether to use doorways but also over the actual definition of what a doorway page is. If the folks in the SEO community can’t agree on something as fundamental as doorways, how can they ever convince prospective clients of the legitimacy of search engine optimization?

Put yourself in the client’s shoes. An online business decides it’s time to hire an SEO specialist. It confers with a number of seemingly credible SEO consultants. These prospects are going to be confronted with a choice that splits the optimization community right down the middle: to use or not to use doorway pages.

It’d be simple if credible SEO companies said one thing and dubious companies said another. But that’s not the case. Respected SEO companies are polarized regarding doorway pages. Some say they’re important; others advise against using them. Still others bristle at how their peers define a doorway page.

The result? Prospective clients are turned off. Doors are closing.

One thing SEO specialists agree on is that doorways are created to increase the odds of a site turning up at the top of search results. Beyond that, views become distressingly divergent.

Differing Views

On the essence of what a doorway page is, one of the industry’s most visible and respected voices, Shari Thurow, says the following: “Most doorway pages need to be cloaked because they often contain only a few lines of HTML text. Many doorway page companies create thousands of pages with only a few lines of text and submit those thousands of pages to the engines. Doorway pages definitely pollute the search engines’ databases. The main goal of doorway pages is to get a ranking without any other consideration. Doorway page people and cloakers are in it for the money…”

On the other hand, there’s FirstPlace Software, makers of the award-winning and much-heralded WebPosition Gold software. It defines a doorway as “a page on your web site that you have optimized or fine-tuned to rank well on a certain keyword. Since people end up finding your site through these pages, they act as ‘doorways’ to your site… Search engines do not have a problem with doorway pages as long as you follow their various rules.”

Jill Whalen, who comoderates the Rank Write Roundtable, lambastes the use of doorway pages altogether. In her article “The Myth of Gateway Pages,” Jill argues that pages rank highly “because they are filled with great content.” Not because of doorways. Jill goes on to critique doorways by adding, “The main thing typical gateway pages do is create clutter in the engines. If you already have a web site, and it’s more than one page, then you have your own built-in, natural gateway pages. Each and every page of your current site is a doorway to the rest of your site.”

Let’s try Paul J. Bruemmer, the CEO of Web-Ignite Corporation and a ClickZ columnist. He says the following about doorway pages: “When designed and used properly for content-relevant linking, doorway pages are no different than any other web page or subpage of a web site. A ‘doorway’ or ’subpage’ can be linked to a specific web page or location, either IP cloaked, Java redirected, meta-refreshed, or with a visible ‘click here’ link. Neither the ‘doorway’ nor the technology nor the delivery method are the problem. It’s the design and linking of irrelevant or disingenuous key phrases to any web page with the intent to mislead (bait and switch) a viewer that is the core problem.”

All very interesting. But all very different.

A Problem, and a Solution

Who do we believe? What does this disparity mean?

For one thing, it means there’s a problem. And the problem’s not only restricted to doorway pages. There are other inconsistencies. Unless these inconsistencies get resolved, that hungry lion behind door No. 1 is going to have the SEO industry for dinner.

Fortunately, there’s a way out.

In fact, if we adopt one simple principle, we’ll be able to reposition the SEO industry in a much more positive light.

It boils down to one word. And that word is “standards.” Setting standards isn’t a new idea. Nor is it without controversy. But I’ll continue this discussion next week, when I’ll tell you what Danny Sullivan, the Internet consultant and journalist who created Search Engine Watch, wrote in 1998 about standards.

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Sid Herberman is the President of Optimize-This.com, a search engine optimization (SEO) firm that believes online businesses really can achieve ROI. Prior to specializing in SEO, Sid was the Online Marketing Manager of LOUDtunes.com/MyMusicFactory.com, a B2C turned B2B e-commerce solutions provider. Sid is a former ad agency copywriter and sometimes enjoys writing articles that challenge the status quo.

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A friend of mine is just beginning his professional programming career and he asked me recently f I had any specific programming advice for him.
I found that I couldn’t really think of anything interesting to say. There are lots and lots of programming advice on the web. Some of it good, some of it less so. But most of it is simply plain obvious or just too general to be interesting.
Then I thought well, since I feel that I do have something to say in that area, why not try and address some of the most common things people are being told with which I disagree?
So here goes,
The top ten list of programming advice not to follow:

10) “Use error codes instead of exceptions”

Okay, I just had to throw in this particular one because it keeps showing up over at Joel’s.  Joel feels strongly about this and since he is read by many, I think he is considered somewhat of an authority in the area. However, exceptions are in my opinion superior to error return codes for many reasons.
This discussion relates to programming language discussions which tend to be dead ends, so I’ll step carefully. I think the number one reason why I like exceptions is that they help me convince myself that my invariants are enforced. Joel says: “Every time you call a function that can raise an exception and don’t catch it on the spot, you create opportunities for surprise bugs caused by functions that terminated abruptly, leaving data in an inconsistent state, or other code paths that you didn’t think about.” I would argue the exact opposite: everytime you call a function that merely returns an error code, you risk such surprises, simply because you may not react to this error code. Throwing exceptions is a way to ensure that code is not executed with a broken precondition. Error codes rely on the programmer’s discipline. In C++, Java and C#, constructors are the most obvious example. If something goes wrong during the construction of an object, throwing an exception is the only way to back out, unless you want to leave behind a zombie object. Granted, throwing an exception will cause your entire program to explode if you don’t catch it but at least, you will have valuable information about where things went wrong. Zombie objects on the other hand, are like bombs with a timer set to go off in maybe a second or so, when code that relies on that particular object fails. Now, a second may not be a lot to you and me but to the computer, this is millions of instructions away from the erroneous code. Tracking that is a lot harder.

9) “Use unsigned integers for values that can only be positive”

I’m a bit nervous about this one because it is used in the STL and if there is one thing that I have learned it is that those guys thought things through. STL is an example of strikingly good design. However, in STL, size types - *::size_type are unsigned integers just like the old C size_t was. Why that is I simply don’t understand. Unsigned integer types seem nice at first because they feel safer. They have a constraint that says “this variable will never become negative” which makes perfect sense for a number of variables, such as sizes. Problem is, this constraint is enforced by wrapping rather than bounds checking (at least in C and C++ - in C# you can turn on overflow checking and as far as I know, Java doesn’t have unsigned integer types). Hence, you simply end up having no way to tell whether it has been violated or not - the bit which could be used for error indication is now used to gain size. But we’re talking one bit here, people. If you’re stretching your code so far as to require the size gained by that one bit, you are probably in the danger zone of introducing errors of more serious kinds.
Update: As it has been pointed out to me, the reason for STL to use the unsigned type is obvious: being standard, an STL container must be able to address the entire space. However, I think this makes the point even stronger. Unless you are writing something as general purpose as the STL, chances are that you won’t have to rely on this last bit.

8) “Design classes parallel to their physical counterparts”

I believe that one of the reasons why OO is so popular is that it is so easy to grasp. Inheritance and specialization really does seem to occur in real life and the concept of classes fits nicely into real life phenomena. A Ford is a car is a vehicle. Only this does not map very well to software. You’re not implementing a car. You’re probably implementing a record of a car which can carry a number of stock items from one city to another, with a certain mileage and speed. This is not a car, it is a virtual reference to a certain car. Thinking of it as a car will lead your design in the wrong direction. Even if you’re designing a model of a new prototype of car for Ford, which will be rendered in 3D with physical modelling and all, you’re still not implementing a car. People who think in such parallels are likely to find themselves confused if they run into the “a square is a rectangle” problem. In math, squares may well be subclasses of rectangles but making square inherit from rectangle is plainly wrong.
But while I’m on the topic, I want to bring in a favourite nit of mine, namely that inheritance is overrated. It used to be the case with C++, though it seems most of the deep hierarchy people have moved to Java and C#, leaving the C++ community to evolve in a direction that I think is more promising. Danny Kalev puts this rather precisely.
Update: The square/rectangle problem is commonly described using circles and ellipses. Check out these links for elaboration: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/proper-inheritance.html#faq-21.6 and http://ootips.org/ellipse-circle.html.

7) “Make sure your team shares a common coding standard”

Not quite going to tell you not to do this, simply that I think it is much less important than people make it. Programmers can see through indentation and naming conventions, really. But alas, some don’t want to (I didn’t for a long time - I would actually spend a lot of time reformatting source code to fit my liking if I had to use it. Sigh).
Consider these two versions of the same function:

public string FormatAsHeadline(string sourceText)
{
string resultCode = “<h1>” + sourceText + “</h1>”;
HeaderCount++;
return resultCode;
}public string format_as_headline (string source_text) {
string result_code=“<h1>”+source_text+“</h1>”;
headerCount++;
return result_code;
}

Now tell me, is there one of the versions of the code above you could not immediately decipher? Of course not. The two pieces are semantically identical but they look different. But not so different that they would fool a programmer. Now, if you’re going to tell me that style is important, at least have the guts to admit that they only really are because of your aesthetical nit picking desires.

6) “Write lots of comments”

Make sure you comment your code. Otherwise, it will be impossible for anyone to understand - including yourself in a year or so. I have heard that many many times and thought that it was probably right. It makes sense after all, and I have often found use of comments when trying to find meaning in somebody elses code. Particularly, I have struggled with comment-less code and sworn that I would never make that mistake. However, this is mostly the case when the code is not self explanatory. Which it should be. If you feel the need to write comments in your code, I suggest you try to refactor instead, so comments won’t be needed. Renaming some variables or introducing a function call will probably do the trick. Context is better documented using assertions. In fact, a context that cannot be described using assertions is probably a bad sign!
There are times when comments serve a pupose though. Algorithmics can be hard to grasp and yet impossible to simplify through further abstractions. In such cases, you can explain yourself with comments. I think my colleague Lars Thorup pointed out a very good test for comments: they should contain the word “because”. This way, you know that you are answering a why rather than a what.
Oh, and my favourite specialization of the comments advice: keep a history of changes and author info etc. in the top of each file.
I’ve never actually heard anyone say that you should do this but I have seen it so many times that there must be people out there recommending it. Why on earth you would clutter the code with information that so obviously belongs in the version control system is just beyond me.

5) “Use accessors or properties rather than public fields”

We’ve all learned this. Public fields are no good. Which is true, they’re not, because they break encapsulation. However, supplying accessors gives you but a tiny bit more encapsulation. What you need to do is determine why somebody from the outside needs to manipulate the inner workings of your class. Often, you will find that there should really be a method or set of methods that do the manipulation. Otherwise, your class might be the victim of what Martin Fowler calls “feature envy”, which means that other classes seem to wish they had the fields that your class does. Maybe they should, then?
Update: Read Why getter and setter methods are evil by Allen Holub for an in-depth discussion.

4) “Use the singleton pattern for variables that you KNOW you should have only one instance of”

Global variables are evil. And just because you put a such into a class which in turn is put into a design pattern from nothing less than the GoF book, it is no less so. Variables should live in the innermost scope possible, since this makes every scope more deterministic. A method that relies only on local variables is easier to analyze than one that also relies on members of the class. Because instead of having to look around the method for places where manipulation takes place, you now have to look around the entire class. And guess what happens if you pull the variable even further out? That’s right - if global variables are used, you have to look around the entire program for manipulation.
On a more philosophical level, what is “global”? The date could be said to be a global variable, if one doesn’t consider timezones and such, but that is hardly what you mean. Neither is it what you get. “Global” in programming terms means per process. Which is sometimes fine but it is actually a rather arbitrary resolution given the distribution of many software systems. A software system can consist of many processes running on many machines - and each process may internally run many threads. In this perspective, process-level variables are really somewhat of an odd size.
I should note that this goes for mutable variables only. I think. Global, immutable variables - constants - are okay. For the simple reason that since they do not vary, determinism is maintained and, they can safely be accessed by all threads as well as multiple processes.

3) “Be tolerant with input and strict with output”

Yet another piece of advice that seems intuitive. My program or function should be able to accept almost anything but produce a very deterministic and streamlined set of results. This seems like really diplomatic behaviour, however, it easily conflicts with a principle that is of greater importance: fail fast. A function that accepts a vast variety of input formats is harder to test and harder to validate. Also, it allows for problems to propagate down the system - if a calling function supplied invalid data, this is less likely detected. This brings us back to the exceptions point. You will want to fail as soon as you realize something is wrong - and fail as effectively as possible. Not pleasant to the user, perhaps, but much easier to find and debug.
If you want to allow for various formats, for instance if you input is entered by the user, you should split your function into two: a normalization function and a processing function.

2) “Code all the corner cases immediately, cause otherwise you’ll never go back and fix things”

Why do we programmers feel guilty when not finishing a function? We’re simply keeping focus! First of all, the “you’ll never go back and fix it” argument is just silly. If you don’t then it’s obviously because it’s not necessary! But this point is part of an entirely different discussion about whether you focus on aesthetics or economics, which I will not bring up here.
Known hacks and incomplete code can be documented, preferably with a failing test. But you can write a todo-item in your taks list for all I care. Getting the broader picture together first is important because it shows you whether your solution is on the right track or not. When you are certain, focus on the details, but not before that. Which brings us to my number one piece of advice not to follow:

1) “Design first, then code”

Okay, things are going political now, but even though you will find many many people who disagree, I still feel that this is the single most valuable lesson that I have learned. Designing first and then coding simply doesn’t work. The problem is that this is so counter intuitive that you more or less have to find it out for yourself.
I think every programmer has experienced a project with no planning turning into a mess. Changing such code can only be done with hacks and patches to everyones great frustration. It is at that time that you realize that the only decent way to code is by designing things right from the start. Only now the frustration is even greater when you realize that your beautiful design isn’t prepared for exactly this new feature that you are to implement now. What to do then?
You should think before you code. Go ahead, but think for hours, not days. Don’t kid yourself into believing you can sketch an entire design document with UML diagrams and everything without making mistakes. At least, don’t think you can do so any faster than you could have simply written the code.
Now, if you’re not familiar with agile methodologies such as eXtreme Programming, the whole concept of evolving design sounds like the very problem programmers are trying to solve with all their clever ways of abstracting things out. And indeed, evolving design only works well if you follow a number of practices. Short iterations, automated testing and frequent refactoring being the most important.
I suggest you read Martin Fowler’s excellent article Is Design Dead? which explains it all a lot better that I am capable of.

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