Buying Links for SEO is a Really, Really Bad Idea

Just had a client call this morning about someone who was trying to sell her links. She was really confused by the creative salesman, and it took a while to talk her down from her link buying high. I walked her through, in a nutshell, what Matt Cutts has said about buying links (1, 2, among many other things). Mostly, I just kept re-iterating that buying links is a really, really bad idea.

9 Reasons Not To Buy Links

If only I had read Brian Chappell’s post on buying links first, I would have simply sent her there, and told her to call back when she finished reading it. Great list of 9 reasons you should be very worried if you’re buying links. Go, read it! Now

Austin Pizza: Where are the major chains in Google SERPs?

“Austin Pizza“. It seems fairly logical that at some time in the last few years, someone, anyone, working for Pizza Hut, Dominos or Mr. Gatti’s would have said, “hey, what happens when someone searches for pizza in their city?” Because, frankly, nothing happens, and that amazes me.

I could understand, I guess, that pizza executives might not see the value of the interwebs. For that matter, they might not even use the internet to look for things like pizza. After all, isn’t the internet just something the “kids” play around on. You know, college kids killing time between classes or late at night instead of studying … and what is the target demographic of these pizza companies? Oh, wait …

Where are Pizza Company Ad Agencies?

What I don’t understand - what I can’t grasp - is where are their ad agencies? The main goal of an ad agency, if I’m not mistaken, is to sell more product. I realize they are working on brand awareness, etc. (I happily await your flames :), but if I own a pizza company, I want my agency to sell more pizza. Speaking as someone who searches for everything from his BlackBerry, the first pizza company to show up in my SERPs is the one that gets my call.

It just boils down to, once again, advertising agencies not understanding search. (Just one more example of how little understanding they have of search: I can’t even Google up the current agency representing Pizza Hut. If one were representing Pizza Hut, seems one would want the whole world to know about it.)

Google Loves Pizza

Google loves pizza. In fact, Google loves anything that is relevant to keyphrases its users are looking for. Google wants these companies to show up in the SERPs. Dominos, Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti’s are all really, really relevant results for someone looking for pizza in Austin. So, since Google loves pizza and relevant results, why is it so hard to Google up some pizza at 3 am?

Pizza Chains and Google Organic Ranking

Well, Dominos achieves the amazing feat of hiding all its pizza stores from Google by having a store locator that requires you to type your address, city and state into a form and click “find”. They provide no crawlable means of discovering any of their zillion stores. Pizza Hut uses the same strategy to keep Google at bay. Papa John’s, ditto. (Did someone have a fire sale on this interface?)

Mr. Gatti’s, smallest entity in our sample, has, believe it or not, a crawlable store locator, yet they still manage to thwart ol’ Googlebot. How? Well, they have bad URL’s, code, text, H tag selections, meta tags (for a unique location, meta name=”description” content=”Gatti’s Pizza” / and meta name=”keywords” content=”pizza, restaurant”), page content… etc.

In fact, the only thing these pizza chains aren’t doing to keep Google out is forbidding access in their robots.txt file. They aren’t, are they?

Submit Business Locations to Google Local

I’ll play my own devil’s advocate here for a minute. Maybe the user experience, design or GUI is more important that organic search. Maybe they don’t want to build a crawlable directory of store locations for fear that a user might actually find it on Google.

Maybe these things are important. Maybe arguments such as “that person would never have become a customer if they hadn’t been able to Google your less than ideal locator page” should just be put aside. What then?

Well, there’s an extremely simple solution to these arguments. Google Local.

It’s incredibly easy to submit your business to Google Local. I submitted ours in 10 minutes. I submitted an excel spreadsheet with a listing of a client’s 500 locations in less than an hour. In fact, I’m guessing an agency could have an intern submit every Pizza Hut location in the world in less than a day. So, in less than a day (and the month it takes for the submitted locations to show up in Google Local), Pizza Hut could begin showing up for every variation of “city”+pizza. This would tap into a HUGE long tail keyphrase list and translate directly into increased sales of pizza … for the cost of an intern’s day. There is no excuse.

What’s that? You’re not interested in long tail, only high-volume keyphrases? Don’t get me started on the lack of SEO for pizza coupons.

When you blog about something for SEO purposes, link to it immediately, with relevant text, from social media websites that do not utilize nofollow links.

Don’t wait for someone else to do it. First indexed by Google is often first ON Google

Well, crud. Digg is down as well. Now what the heck am I going to do today? Better yet, what are YOU going to do today?

Twitter is Down. I’m getting a 500 internal server on Twitter, and my twitter finger is starting to twitch. I’m not really sure what to do now … just sort of sitting here staring at the screen … Do I call the police? The National Guard? Barack Obama?

Twitter Having a Ruby on Rails Scalability Problem?

Theories abound around here of why Twitter is down, though the prevailing one is that it’s Ruby, and that from our Ruby on Rails programmer. There is an inherent Ruby on Rails scalability problem, and it’s causing me, and millions more jittery twitters some unease.

“Twitter is Down” Timekiller

Ok, since Twitter is down, and you might have some time to kill, why not comment here on one of these questions:

1. Why is Twitter down?
2. What do you do when you can’t Tweet?
3. What horrible worldwide implications will the Twitter outage have?
4. What will we do if Twitter never comes back up?

… what’s that? Twitter’s back up now? um … ok, gotta’ go now, you can catch me on my Twitter about SEO, but you feel free to hang around here and answer the poll

Austin Advertising Agency GSD&M “won” the renewal of the Air Force advertising contract. The agency was chosen over Chicago ad agency DraftFCB for a ten year, $372 million dollar contract.

I say won in quotes because the contract is actually $12.8 million per year less than the previous contract. To be fair though, $37 million a year is nothing to sneeze at. I buy lotto tickets anytime it goes over $20M!

Since others seem to be harping on all the contracts the Austin agency has lost recently (The Statesman, Austin Biz Journal and mediabistro have all piled on), I think to be fair I would point out that the agency has also recently landed some pretty decent work.

New Clients for the Austin Agency

Two new clients include World Market (ack! the url’s, make them stop!) and John Deere (If you call me, we could fix these URLs for like, 100 bucks;). The Austin Business Journal also points out the agency is bidding on several other accounts, including LL Bean. That’s good news for Austin advertising folk, many who have been laid off because of the lost accounts.

I think with each of these clients the opportunity is there, just waiting to be realized. I know from 3 seconds looking at LL Bean (those url’s are gonna’ give me nightmares for a week) that absolutely nothing could hurt their SERPs. I’m pretty sure my yellow lab could create a more search engine friendly architecture.

Let’s hope the agency uses these new and renewed accounts as an opportunity to stretch into less traditional areas such as search engine optimization and social media marketing (no, not some avatar thing) but a true grass roots social media campaign.

We think it’s possible to be cool and have a positive ROI!

Yahoo Voice Search for Mobile: oneSearch

Watch out Google mobile, Yahoo is gunning for the mobile search space with it’s second release of Yahoo voice search for mobile, dubbed “oneSearch“, and bloggers are all a-twitter, so to speak. The idea of voice search for mobile is definitely a good one. All mobile devices are hard to type on (yes, I know yours isn’t, whatever and voice recognition technology could eliminate the need, or at least diminish the need, to type on Lilliputian keyboards.

Yahoo oneSearch for Mobile Powered by vlingo Voice Recognition

Like any good internet company, Yahoo didn’t develop the voice search technology, they’re just “renting” it from vlingo. vlingo specializes in voice recognition for mobile phones. From the vlingo about us, “With vlingo access to your mobile internet applications is no longer held hostage by twelve tiny keys.” That sounds pretty cool, though my BlackBerry Curve has WAY more than twelve keys.

Yahoo Voice Search for BlackBerry

Yahoo voice search for mobile is really now just Yahoo voice search for BlackBerry. It’s avaliable for download directly to your BlackBerry from m.yahoo.com/voice. It took me three trys with timeouts, then a long, slow wait while the download bar crept s l o w l y across my screen. Then the download failed and I had to start over. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

Voice Search on My BlackBerry: First Impression

Well, as I just mentioned, installation left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Especially since I’ve downloaded every Google mobile application for the BlackBerry and never had a single problem.

Ok…gotta’ be honest here. I’m still trying to download Yahoo oneSearch. BBIAB.

Back 10 minutes later. Whew. Once it downloaded, installation was seamless, and I found the Yahoo oneSearch program icon in my applications folder just where it belongs. A click launched the program and we’re off.

Performing a Voice Search on My BlackBerry

Actually performing a Yahoo voice search is really easy. You simply hold down the “green phone” button, the same button you’d use to dial, and say your search term. Be sure not to let up the button until you’re through saying the search term. It takes longer to process the voice search than I would think…not to perform the search, just to figure out what you’re saying. It did a decent job of deciphering what I said when I searched for yellow lab, but it just couldn’t figure out search engine optimization, Austin, TX. It kept putting in Boston instead of Austin. To be fair, I am from Texas, maybe they don’t have southern drawl filters yet.

After oneSearch (hopefully) figures out what you said, it then performs the search and serves you Yahoo search results as fast as my poor little Edge BlackBerry can serve them up.

Yahoo Voice Search Review Summary

To sum up the review, Yahoo voice search is hard to download, but easy to use. Hopefully they’ll fix that download issue. There are a couple lingering questions I haven’t resolved yet, the biggest being the Yahoo oneSearch download page says to disable WiFi in your phone if it’s supported. Why wouldn’t Yahoo voice search work over WiFi? That seems downright strange. All in all it seems to be a pretty tight application. If Yahoo and Google can keep providing apps that make search on a mobile easier, we’ll be doing SEO for mobile websites soon! I know, some people probably already are, but I brought up the topic of SEO for mobile at OMMA Hollywood to a bunch of mobile industry leaders. The room got really quiet

I guess, all things considered, the worse thing about Yahoo voice search is that the queries go to Yahoo.

Advertising Agencies Don’t Get SEO, Part 1 of a 2,000,000 Part Series

Let’s start this off by pointing out that it’s now April 2008.

In a recent 7 month study involving over three hundred brands, including the likes of Procter & Gamble’s Folgers and Pampers, it was learned that:

Google, Yahoo and MSN react differently to changes in content and inbound links.

Wow. Really?

It’s a good thing all that money was spent on a 7 month study of 300 brands in multiple languages to figure out something the SEO community has known since, oh, I don’t know, 1998.

SEO is something most little guys, even this little store in Austin selling cowboy boots (sorry, couldn’t pass up the link opportunity) understands well. SEO is not brain surgery. For that matter, SEO is not really even all that hard. It just requires effort beyond sending the work down the line to your AdWords buyer and making a few power points for the client.

Ad Agencies, please call your local SEO (just pick one, really) I don’t care if you hire them (or me) or not. Seriously. Just call them, ask a few questions. You might be amazed at what you learn.

It won’t even take 7 months.

Google Maps adds “Send to Garmin” - Garmin Adds Google Local Search

It sounds like a big game of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, but the end result is a great boost in functionality for end users of both Google Maps and Garmin GPS devices, including Garmin Mobile subscription service for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

Google “Send to Garmin”

The Google “Send to Garmin” feature works pretty much just like it sounds. You map out your route using Google maps, including any points of interest you might want to see along the way, such as this cool store for high end cowboy boots in Austin, and then simply click the “send to Garmin” button. Easy Peasy.

Google Local Search on Garmin Mobile

Alternatively, if you use the Garmin Mobile subscription service, you can now use it to directly search Google local to find those cool points of interest such as the cheapest gas or even the best Barbecue in the world (it’s so good, I’m giving them that link and they’re not even a client

Google Maps on BlackBerry

Or, as an alternative to the above, if you have a BlackBerry with a GPS (also supported on many other phones, but I can’t vouch for them), you can save yourself some money and simply download the excellent Google Maps for Mobile application. I got a new BlackBerry (OMG, would someone please write them a letter explaining search engine friendly urls?) with Tele-Nav and tried that once. I then tried Google Maps for mobile and never even launched Tele-Nav again. My one caveat, if you need turn by turn talking navigation, Google Maps can’t help you…yet, though I can’t imagine they aren’t working on that.

Overall, “send to Garmin” is a good idea. I just think it’s a better idea to simply install Google Maps on your phone in the first place.