I became one of the hoards of shoppers who needed to do everything online. It’s almost cliché to point out that mobile shopping, or m-commerce, is becoming larger and larger. The research site eMarkerter has a great graph that shows exactly HOW large m-commerce is getting, projecting $11.6 billion in spend for 2012, up 73.1% over 2011.

So as I sat there eagerly ready to contribute my portion of those billions I ran into the same problem over and over again— subpar website experiences.

They were creative, they were good, but they were not optimal for viewing on a mobile device.

Since SEM is well, my job, I saw a great opportunity to dig in further to something that is already affecting search.

Google announced late last year that mobile site optimization would become a factor in quality scores for campaigns that were targeting mobile devices. It makes sense!  If a consumer is just going to get frustrated by your website anyway, why would Google reward you with a top spot in the paid search results?

Google put together the site www.howtogomo.com which has a lot of ways you can test your website for mobile usability, design tips, and even build your own. For now, I zeroed in on five of their ten mobile top practices!

1. 1.       Keep It Quick

This is for the impatient among us – which is all of us. Personally, if my little status bar takes more than three seconds I’m already hitting the back button and going to another site.

The Tip to Implement: compress images, use bullet points, and make it easy for your page to load

1. 2.       Simplify Navigation

Your mobile site is the place for your most succinct writing. Only put on the page what you really feel is important because here people will get lost in the details.

The Tip to Implement: Google’s recommendation is 7 links or fewer so make them count! Adding a search box for a complex site is ideal!

1. 3.       Be Thumb Friendly

Two words: Fat fingers. High on the list of annoying things about mobile sites is clicking a too small link and ending up somewhere I didn’t want to go because my fingers were too large!

Tip to Implement: Use large centered buttons and pad them!

1. 4.       Design for Visibility

SEER doesn’t give design tips. We won’t tell you what colors to use or which general images work best, but we can let you know that how you use your space is important for conversions. Do make use of size and color for the button that leads to your call to action. Don’t ask people to fill out long forms, mobile is not the place to get their entire consumer profile, and Do make sure that they are not having to surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it (Technologic!) in order to read your page. They may leave first!

Tip to Implement: Make it easy for your customers to read and eliminate the need to pinch and zoom to view content.

1. 5.       Make it Easy to Convert

This is important for all websites but where could it be more important than PPC? If someone comes to your site through a PPC ad tell them what you need them to do and allow them to complete this step in as few actions as possible. You can make it even easier on your customer by trying a function like click to call!

Tip to Implement: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to complete your desired call to action.

Now that you have some of our tips here is a great example from Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia that has all of these tips in action:

• In just three lines of text you know the benefits of FastCare.
• There is a clear call to action (Call now for Hours Directions or services!)
• There is only one large button to press, and you know exactly where it will take you!

This page was created in less than 30 minutes using Google’s Mobile Landing Page site templates (http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/mobile-landing-pages/mlpb.html) and has seen a 30% call rate since implementation.

With so many tips and tools it doesn’t have to be time intensive to revamp your mobile site for success. When you are all done fixing it up, learn about Creating a Mobile Profile in Google Analytics.

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Ed Fry  -  Two burning questions about SEO for online marketplaces where users are creating listings where users buy and sell products. So here goes:

1. When a listing expires (e.g. product runs out permanently) should you 301 or rel-canonical, and point the result to either the users profile or back to a category page (the one you want to rank) based on link juice, optimal user experience and appeasing Matt Cutts. :]

2. How do you try and rank for competitive terms if you’re a marketplace and you’d really like to rank in one country where you have lots of users (e.g. the UK) without ranking in another country where you don’t have as many users (for instance, you haven’t got critical mass of sellers in the USA, and the USA is really several different markets – East Coast vs. West Coast if the product is really local). And no, we don’t have the budget or resources for the multiple TLD’s and hustling across every country :( Any advice?!?

Wil Reynolds  -  +Ed Fry thanks for coming out and supporting us…You are asking the tough questions. So here is my take… I am a bigger fan of 301′s than anything just because they are tried and true. +Rand Fishkin has done more research than I have on how they pass juice. The one thing I wonder about is how does 301′ing vs canonicaling impact social signals for a product (I know that 301′s don’t pass vote value) but let’s say that as Google starts using Google +1′s to value pages, then I bet you a canonical is better because you keep the social voting juice and push the link juice as well. I think as long as the 301 is on topic our buddy Matt Cutts would be OK with it. That is a great question, cc: +Mike Essex +Dana Lookadoo

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Andrew Dunkle  -  Do you guys have any advice for developing an effective SEO culture in a small business? We have a team of 8 and I’m looking for ways to get everyone involved in the process so important SEO related decisions are understood by everyone. Thanks!

Adam Melson  -  +Andrew Dunkle Love this question. It’s totally important to get this across your developers, PR person, President, etc. Everyone has to get on the same page as to why SEO is important and what you’re working toward. This can be shown to the web devs by showing them the impact of a page that was optimized. It helps get more conversions & doesn’t have to take forever. The PR person can start linking in releases and they’ll also be tracking who picks up the release and might have a contact at that website to get links in there if they were taken out during distribution. Copywriters can be briefed on different keywords they will want to include in their copy so that their articles/blog posts/pages get more visibility. The ego stroke is always a great route and if their content gets more eyes, your company gets more eyes. If there are 2-3 big keywords that you know are your money makers, share these as a goal with the team. Share that it’s important to have them rank. Maybe show how these keywords convert in PPC and the actual value of a sale. If you can save the cost of paying per click, it makes the company stronger, job security stronger, but more importantly it shows people that what they’re doing for SEO contributes to the bottom line of a company. If people are having trouble understanding why SEO goals are important, everyone can relate to dollars. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because it could get us moved from #5 to #4″ isn’t motivating. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because if we move from #5 to #4, it could bring in another $10k over the course of the year. Do you have an hour to implement?” is much more motivating.

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Cleo Kirkland  -  Hi all, What’s your process for a technical site audit? What are the top 10 errors you look for, how do you find them, and what tools do you use? I come from a link building and copywriting background, so trouble shooting site indexation issues is a bit foreign to me. Thanks!

Rachael Gerson  -  +Cleo Kirkland We have some basic starting processes, but every site ends up being different, so part of the plan needs to be flexibility. We may start an audit only to find there’s an issue with this particular site that we haven’t seen in hundreds of sites previously.
Some basic things to look for:
* Is the site content spiderable to the search engines? Try spider simulators like http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php.
* Is the navigation spiderable? The Web Developer Toolbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/) is an absolute favorite. Get it for Firefox and Chrome, b/c Chrome is missing the ability to disable JavaScript. Do basic things like checking out Google’s text-only cache of a page. 
* Do you have redirect issues on the site? We had a client previously on a platform that 302 redirected every single link on the site to another URL. Since 302 redirects tell the search engines the redirects were temporary, the actual pages weren’t being picked up. The platform couldn’t be edited. If the site was/is redesigned, make sure there’s a redirect strategy in place. My favorite redirect checker is http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx.
* Using the same tool, check to make sure that either http://domain.com 301 redirects to http://www.domain.com, or vice versa.
* Make sure 404 pages actually return a 404 server status. 
* Go through Google Webmaster Tools. Find the errors, figure out how to resolve.
* Review the robots.txt. Are pages being blocked that shouldn’t be? This can be a huge issue!
* Are there duplicate pages/domains/subdomains? Would a multi-faceted navigation make more sense for the site? 
* Do they have basic things like HTML & XML sitemaps? 
* Check for pagination issues, mistakes with canonical tags, etc.

Pausing my response here b/c just got a note that you were already answered… :)

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Now what does this all mean?

Besides the 100+ comments we received and an admirable attempt at justifying having a Google+ page, what we noticed more was the increase in our overall social media following. Here at SEER, I help manage the many social media accounts we have and find myself always looking for innovative ways to increase our fans and followers. We know that as a company, we have extremely valuable insight in both the SEO and PPC worlds, and we want people to know our thoughts and opinions! Hosting this G+ Q&A gave us exactly the push that we were looking for! Using our lunch break on a Wednesday afternoon, we were able to boost our name virally for an all-time high of 63 mentions and gain over 1% more followers (and beat our competitor’s follower growth that day)! Using SEOmoz’s Social Dashboard (which I highly recommend), the below two graphs highlight my exact enthusiasm (SEER is represented as the green line in the Follower Growth graph and competitors are represented as the red, blue and purple lines, respectively).

In Conclusion

Now, looking back, I see that our first Q&A session was a huge success. We were able to inspire people with our knowledge and our creativity using Google+, all while enabling new benchmarks for our future social media efforts. My simple and quick words of advice for other small (or large) businesses that are trying to actively increase their presence online is to be provide knowledge or actionable items for your users, think of creative ways to invite and include your audience and have fun! I hope to continue learning more about social media and implementing new trends for SEER, but as for now, stay tuned for our next #SEERQandA session coming up in early February! We’ll be switching things up with SEO and PPC-themed discussions, so bring out your best questions and let’s rock and roll.

I’d love to hear about your social media successes and failures! Follow me @Melissa_Alam and fill me in!

It’s inevitable that clients will not be able to carry out every recommendation you may have. And let’s be honest, sometimes after looking back the idea isn’t always as earth shattering as we initially thought.

Part of being a great consultant is being able to pivot and take the project in a new direction when this happens. However, there are certain instances where a proposed strategy is critical to the success of the project and therefore to the client’s business (ALWAYS the ultimate goal).

When you get a “No” to a strategy idea that falls into this bucket, you shouldn’t just pivot in a new direction; you should sit back and analyze where the disconnect occurred and how you can get your client to understand the impact.

As I’ve been working in the Search space for over 6 years now, I’ve been challenged with this type of situation hundreds of times. Each time I’ve gotten a “we can’t do that” response, I’ve taken it as a learning opportunity to step back, evaluate and analyze my approach, and revise my next attempt to better connect with the client, often times re-proposing the same strategy idea!

By using the “No’s” as a learning opportunity and understanding how to better connect with clients to get them to approve my strategy idea it’s not by my mistake that I’ve been able to create account growth across PPC accounts for multiple years with increases of 1000+%, 800+%, 300+%, etc. And years ago, to get my SEO recommendations implemented, from linking strategies to content generation.

Growing the PPC accounts I am proud of, but what I am even more proud of is that by growing the accounts, I’ve helped my clients businesses grow as well – This is what the ultimate goal of getting your clients to being ‘Yes Men’ (& women) should always be!

So while this list is exhaustive, here are 10 tips that I’ve found to help connect with clients and get them to be Yes Men (& women).

Tip #1 – Honesty is the best policy

The age old idiom rings true in any partnership.

Start off a client relationship hiding the truth and you’ll find yourself covering your tracks instead of working on what matters to the clients business.

I’ve always found that by being an open book, from having clients own accounts (& therefore having the ability to login and see how things are going at any time) to being completely open about what exactly I am working on and all the details of the strategy, clients value the transparency.

Transparency builds a relationship.

A relationship builds trust.

Trust builds Yes men.

Tip #2 – Be Proactive

No one bats 100% all of the time.

As such, not every single strategy idea will result in success.

The key is to always be proactive in setting expectations, reporting on results and calling out failures FIRST.

If you notice your Adwords conversions take a dreadful downward trend for a few days after you implemented a change or the linking strategy you executed is not leading to the expected outcome – Be the FIRST to call this out.

It’s always better to be the one to call out a failed test and have a game plan ready for how to turn things around!

Tip #3 – Say “I’ll look into it”

Don’t answer questions on the fly if you don’t know the answer with 100% confidence.

When I first started at SEER 5 years ago, I knew little to nothing about SEO, my focus had always been Media & PPC. I used the phrase “Let me check with the team” more times than not and I never once had a client demand an answer on the spot.

Do your homework, tap your resources, get the accurate answer for your clients.

They will always appreciate the correct answer versus the fast answer (Check out Rand Fishkin’s take on this).

Tip #4 – Always do what is best for the client

Agencies overall have an unfortunately nasty reputation for doing what is best for THEM, not what is best for the client.

Our focus at SEER has been the complete opposite – ALWAYS do what is best for the client, even if that means it may decrease budgets for you or cause a pause in a project.

Check out Wil’s post where we outlined strategies for slowing down payments, or pausing projects when it benefits the client.

Tip #5 – Know what resources are available, or aren’t

Resources to carry out recommendations when it comes to things like developing content for example, can be a hindrance for driving clients toward success.

Without understanding resource situations for your clients, your strategy recommendation may have been shot down for a simple reason that you can offer help on or better yet build directly into your recommendation!

Tip #6 – Track your results

Nothing is worse than hearing a really great idea, hear it was implemented, and then hear crickets.

Before you propose any great strategy, be sure you have a plan to track and report on results throughout the execution phase. This is key to how SEER has developed our processes.

Tip #7 – Prove it

Nothing helps a client see the benefit to their business quite like showing them real results.

Do you want your client to buck up for a linking strategy? Show them what success you’ve had with a similar strategy for another client!

Share blogs (like this and this ), case studies, share real examples, create scenarios that show them the potential success.

Tip #8 – Understand the BUSINESS

Even if you are the PPC consultant, or SEO consultant, you need to understand your clients’ business, not just the small slice of the pie you focus on.

What are the overall goals for the company? What future initiatives are they focusing on?

By understanding the business, you can tie how your PPC strategy recommendation or SEO strategy recommendation ties back to the overall business goals, which ultimately is why they are investing in PPC or SEO. Check our Ryan’s Post on Talking Revenue With Your Clients.

Tip #9 – Be a student

You should always be pushing yourself to learn more – about the clients business, industry, about your own industry, about competitors, etc.

The more knowledge you bring to the table, the better strategy recommendations you can propose that tie back to the clients business.

Tip #10 – Be persistent

Hearing “No” to a strategy idea that you really believe will drive success for the client can make you feel defeated and feel intimated to bring up future “great” ideas.

However, it’s important that each time you hear a “No” you don’t give up or get frustrated that you have a “No” client.

Instead, evaluate the situation – it’s likely that there was a miscommunication in how you presented your idea, how it ties into the clients overall business goals or even who you presented the strategy to.

Analyze what you can do differently the next time to help get your strategies approved that will drive success for the clients business!

Overall Takeaway

You can only understand the overall business and goals by becoming a true partner and become engrained in the clients business and industry. To get your ideas and strategies approved by clients consistently, you need to earn the trust & clearly tie everything back to driving success, not just for PPC or SEO (for example), but for the overall business!

Hi, my name is Chrissy and I am an SEO neophyte!

Since you haven’t seen me in this space before I’ll go ahead and give you a rundown of how I got here. I worked in PR, Marketing and Social Media.  Anyways, I thought the next natural progression would be SEO. Well, nothing about this progression was natural or even remotely fluid. Everything I had learned up to this point (three and a half years) equated to nothing more than a big pile of crap! Yep, that’s right, it was crap!

So, what is it that I now deem to be crap and what have I learned in the last month? Here’s a small sampling of what I have learned to be true:

• Formal outreach to bloggers for links does not have to be so formal. The more casual you are the more likely you will be to have them actually respond to you. (Dear nuns, thanks but no thanks for your MLA training!)
• Those ‘crappy sites’ I used to bounce from only seconds after clicking on them – apparently they aren’t so bad after all. Just because it is aesthetically displeasing doesn’t mean that site isn’t valuable in the eyes of an SEO professional.
• Mommy bloggers are racking in the dough! Seriously though, these women have cashed in and understand the value of working with SEO professionals. Not to mention they are usually very accommodating of our requests.
• Forums, who knew! These sometimes-overwhelming website destinations can hold a lot of value, through profile links and other fun stuff.
• People are actually talking about hedgehogs, that hangy ball thing in your throat, dreams and even dreams about hedgehogs, hens and floating. Who knew?!
• If you’re being shady with links and websites, Google will find out! Then you’ll be in deep-dark, un-rankable trouble.
• If a client’s rankings drop – keep calm and carry on (unless they have been trending down for more than 2 weeks, then it’s time to rethink your strategy).
• It’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. If you have an idea – run with it. Satisfy your curiousity.
• The biggest lesson I have learned so far – social media cannot be quantified…yet. (I still hold hope that one day I will be able to quantify it as something that helps rankings but until then I wait in anticipation like a five year old on Christmas eve.)

My hope is that some of these initial lessons help other SEO neophytes who are transitioning from PR, Marketing or similar industries.

Making the leap from traditional media to PPC is little like moving from your hometown to a new city. All your life you’ve been in one place, and you know it well. You never had to think twice about where to go and how to operate. Now in this new city, you have to get used to a new norm. You know the basic things, but the little nuances are something you will have to figure out.
So if you are making that switch (or you need to explain it to someone else) here are three quick concepts to grasp when translating your traditional knowledge into PPC expertise.

1. Say Goodbye Rating Points. The basic goal for most traditional media buys is to get your advertising on the highest rated Arbitron/Neilson channel or station in the highest possible ranked DMA for the lowest CPM. Part of this is for branding, you want as many people as possible exposed to your product (hence CPM’s instead of CPA.) These rankings/numbers don’t mean quite the same thing in their PPC counterpoints however. Impressions and Clicks measurements matter, but generally only to the extent that they mean there is volume around your term. To break it down further there may be a term that gets tons of volume, let’s say “insurance.” Chances are however you aren’t going to bid on that super high volume term because your CPA will likely be extremely high. In the PPC world you aren’t purchasing based on eyeballs you are focusing on conversions.
2. Targeting Occurs, (but not the way you are used to it.) Media agencies spend tons on various services; Claritas, TNS, Strata’s etc. to find out who they plan to target. “What is the demo?” is a phrase engrained in pretty much any type of traditional media buy. When you move to PPC however you have to let go of that concept. While you should have an idea of who to target, you definitely shouldn’t (and in some ways can’t completely) segment people into who should or shouldn’t be searching your term. I would argue that more so than any other media PPC consumers find you. It doesn’t really matter if they are 18 or 45 in New York or Quad Cities if they give you a qualified conversion, then you are on the right track when it comes to PPC.
3. Think of creative differently. I don’t want to make the point that creative isn’t tricky no matter how you are advertising. It is a very nuanced part of marketing and it always will be. Most non-brand advertising is tracked, using unique phone numbers in a newspaper FSI, or promo codes in a radio ad is nothing new. But in both those examples there is a cost involved with those creative, effectively shortening either the amount of time it takes to find out statistical significance  of one or another ads, and limiting the number of creative variations you can try. The branding creative process tends to be long and drawn out and discovering ROI usually comes when ratings posts are done or sales revenues have come in. What makes PPC so interesting is the speed at which you get your quantitative information and how quickly (compared to most media) you can implement changes. Depending on the volume around your term, you could gain insights about your creative, you could make a change while the campaign is live, instead of waiting until it is done for results.

Making that mental switch from traditional advertising to PPC understanding as complicated as it may seem, with a little patience you’ll understand the nuances and be ready to roll.

So how many of our parents actually know what we do at work? Not just our titles, but the day-to-day stuff. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been surveying the proud parents of SEER associates with a simple question:

“In 3-4 sentences, how would you describe what your son/daughter does at work?”

In an ever-complicated internet ecosystem, even our techier peers have difficulty in explaining SEO and Paid Search. As the business brain amidst a sea of wonky Search junkies, I spend my days translating the nuanced, thoughtful and down-right complicated work of my team to business owners who understand that the internet has an effect on their business in a big way. I’m fluent in Business, now conversational in Search, but how would our parents fare?

While some of our parents cheated by either checking our LinkedIn pages or just searching our titles (I’m looking at you, Dad), others took the opportunity to put in a good word:

“I am short on technical details, but he is creative, a quick study, a hard worker, responsible, reliable, engaged and enthusiastic. And I’m not just saying that because I’m his mother!” – Mark’s mom

“I just have to say how proud I am of the dedication and work ethic she has demonstrated, as well as how appreciated she seems to be at SEER” – Rachael’s mom

“He does a damn good job of it!” – Brett’s mom

Others still, were endearingly confident in their sons/daughters’ ability to help clients “advertise electronically” (Chris’ mom) using “web based information” (Megan’s mom) to see “where web surfers are spending their time” (Rachael’s mom, again)

Teasing aside, I need to give our parents a whole lot of credit. While I set out seeking blackmail material, the responses I received, on the whole, were right on par. They spoke to the highly technical process of helping clients get the traffic and visibility needed to help the profitability of their business. They told me about how their children were out to build a quality web experience by connecting with users and taking care of clients. Our parents (sigh) were right.

I’ve concluded from this experiment that there is a growing recognition of the importance of how users find information/services/products, or that SEER parents are wonderful listeners.

Either way, we’re grateful (and because we’re all older now, we’re okay admitting it)

Hi, my name is Chris le and I’m SEER Interactive’s full-time internal developer.   I have a unique position that most developers don’t:  I work side-by-side everyday next to 30 SEO/SEM people.  I sit in both worlds every day. Yes, I’m crazy.

1. Developers:  Nobody cares about the technology!

Andrew Norcross: “I can whip up all the chewy schema-dusted meta fields and rel tags you’d ever want, but I haven’t the first clue as to WHY these matter.”  (News Flash to SEOs: Your developer hates you)

Answer: Um.  MONEY.

Developers, let’s be honest: even if you build it, they will not come. Nobody really cares that your site loads in less than 60ms, your JavaScript is minified, and every icon is made from CSS.  If your client isn’t making money, there is no cloud-based-high-availability-technology in the world that will help you.  In fact you’re out of a job chump!

The fact of the matter is this: The client whose website you’re building is probably doing it because they need to make a dollar, just like you.  They have their own expertise.  They’re not developers.  That’s why they hired you!  If you want job security, then help them make or save money.  Unless they’re nuts, clients won’t fire you for increasing their bottom line.

For example, show the client how a technology will save them money or tell them how the technology will get them to market faster.  That’s the stuff that makes them keep you.

2. SEOs: Don’t tell me how to do my job!

Ben Cook: “I asked a developer to perform a task in a very specific fashion only to have them do it differently.  Why?” (Why SEOs Hate Developers)

Answer: Because you didn’t EDUCATE your developer.

SEO is a (somewhat) new field for us and we both know it already changed by the time you read this.  You asked for a redirect.  We think: “Ok, the SEO dude wants this this page to show up.  Not that one.  No problem.” So, we made it redirect to another page.

When I started with SEER, I didn’t know there was a difference between 301 and 302 because I still got the result I was looking for:  it redirected to get to the right page.  I didn’t know what “link juice” was so how was I supposed to that 301 and 302 were treated differently? We also don’t call them “301 redirects.”  To us, they’re called “status codes.”

If you want to impress your developers, tell them “Section 10.3.2 of RFC2616 Status code standards states: 301 is moved permanently while 302 is moved temporarily.  I want to make sure the search engine knows this is a permanent move.”  Then proceed to educate them about what “link juice” is and how it works. Teach us what “status codes” means to Google.

But, don’t TELL us how what we need to do.  Nobody likes being told how to do their jobs.  EDUCATE us!   We love knowing how things work.  That’s why we’re developers!

3. Developers:  I propose we make unit tests for SEO!

Ben Cook: “I don’t have any idea what the problem was, why the developers didn’t spot it during development, or why it took so long to fix.”

Sorry.  That sentence made me cringe.

Developers!  I know.  We’ve got a million moving parts.  Multiple cloud servers, databases, version control conflicts, 50k+ lines of code, database integrity issues, callback hell, and incompatible dependencies.  Trust me, I get it!  (Oh, and can you fix the printer?  It says “PC Load letter”)

The last thing you need is to make sure that every single individual page either redirects correctly, has the right meta tags, have unique title tags, or has custom tracking tags.  There’s bigger fish to fry, right?  But, wait.  Listen.  The client doesn’t they want the whole site to fall down.  If it does, we’re out of a job.  But if the site’s rankings go down because we broke something, the SEO is out of a job.  We need to recognize that too.  In the end, the client doesn’t care who’s fault it really is.  They want a site that work and doesn’t make them loose visibility.

I have an idea.  Let’s solve the problem!  I propose we write automated unit testing to make sure pages 301 redirect where they’re supposed to.  Title tags are what they should be.  No JavaScript errors are making Google Analytics fail.  Maybe something like RSpec for SEO.  What do you say?  We can cover both our butts at the same time.

 4. SEOs:  SEO best practice is development worst practice.

(And vice versa!)

I’ve found a common thread in SEOs is uniqueness.  Business will want to differentiate themselves from the competition.  That’s good!  Clients need unique compelling content that drives people to take action.  Marketers, you need track everything on the page individually so you can calculate what’s driving the most conversions. Every signup form gets a unique campaign tag.  Cool, man.

My business classes taught me that the best practice is to differentiate yourself form the completion.  Being uniqueness is what sets you apart.  But computer science classes teach you that best practice is to make everything the SAME. I’m not saying the analogy is perfect.  What I’m illustrating here is that each discipline has different driving philosophies to get to the same the same thing: efficiency and stability.

For example, we might code the title of the post as the title of the page so we can make efficient use of one piece of code.  You may want it differently so you can make efficient use of a keyword.  If we’re working on a new or existing project, work with us.  We just don’t know the field.  Most of us want to make your ideas work too.  Show us the ropes like you’re training a new guy.  A little education goes a long way.

5. To both:  It’s all about the customer, stupid!

In the end, whether you’re a designer, a programmer, an SEO guy, a finance guy, whatever.  We all have different ways and different philosophies in our disciplines.  We should be learning from each other.  But in the end, none of it matters if the client isn’t reaching their goals.

Now, that requires that clients (should) know who their customers are and what it takes to make a sale.  If they don’t know that, then the client has a problem.  It’s the client who has “no clear goals or expected outcomes.”  Clients with no goals are the blind leading the blind.

The least we can do as consultants is to help the clients open their eyes, help them figure out what they’re goals should be.  SEO is important.  More than ever!  As much as I hate to admit it, I think Google can almost make or break a business these days.

All of us need to be focused on making sure that the client stays in business.  Everyone should love what they do for a living.  That’s why they’re all in business.

Bonus tip:

Bonus tip:  Did you know that every server in every language’s default redirect is a 302?  You have to explicitly specify, in the code itself, every single time you want a 301.

This code will 302 redirect:

<?php header(‘Location: http://www.domain.com/new_page.php”); ?>

<?php header("Location: http://www.domain.com/new_page.php"); ?>

This code will 301 redirect:

<?php header(‘Location: http://www.domain.com/new_page.php”, TRUE, 301); ?>

<?php header("Location: http://www.domain.com/new_page.php", TRUE, 301); ?>

Notice you have to code it in or else the server will default to a 302!

(ps: To my all my Seer peeps:  Thanks for being patient with me as I learn SEO along the way.)

• Update 1: Single quote, double quote bug in bonus tip. Missed that! Thanks @halfbrown!
• Update 2: Thanks to @5ubliminal. A technically more correct version of the tip:
  $code = 301; $status = “Moved”;header(“Status: {$code} {$status}”);
  header(“{$_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL']} {$code} {$status}”);
  header(“Location: /somewhere/over/the/rainbow”);
• Update 3: Corrected typo.  Extra word from nowhere.
• Update 4: Added links for “link juice” and  RFC2616.

I came to SEER from an In-house SEO position which is a completely different world than the Agency environment. There are pros and cons to working with each and I wanted to share the un-candy coated truth today, based on my experiences.

Expertise

I have to start off by saying, when you’re exclusively working with one industry you get to know the industry pretty well.

The In-house SEO is entrenched in their industry all day, every day. Let’s say you have an internal SEO Specialist for your online store that sells toys. If you’re doing the SEO for this store, you will see the trends for toy sales and search volume for toy related keywords every day, all year. You’ll know what market trends make traffic spike and which make traffic plummet. You’ll know what works and what strategies are wastes of time in your niche.

The agency SEO Specialist may not be immersed in the same field all day, however they get to see market trends and algorithm shifts for a variety of industries and websites. They can see how the most recent Google algorithm change affected different types of websites with different functions and goals. They can see how a change in the economy, a different time of the year, or even what SEO strategies affect businesses in the financial sector and at the same time see how it is influencing the health industry. Agencies get a more comprehensive view of the SEO industry as a whole and see more of what affects search engine rankings.

Workflow

At an In-house position exclusively meant for SEO, you get good at creating work for yourself. At the start of an SEO project there is an industry analysis, keyword research, page targeting, content development, link building strategies…however, after the initial kick off tasks the project is running on all of the initial research and strategy. When your job is to do SEO for one website, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, you need to make sure that you’re continuously working on something new, looking for finding new opportunities for your website to be optimized, and making sure you still have a job. I have to say, you definitely get good at finding every possible optimization opportunity!

In the agency, after doing all of the initial kickoff work you can follow your strategy. You have other clients to work on, so you don’t continuously search for alternative strategies. If something works, it works; if it doesn’t work, you do your research, find out what does work, and refine your strategy. Why look for alternatives if something is already working? You make changes only once it stops working, not just because you feel the need to be continuously working on something. Besides, there are other clients that need work done for them, so there is never a loss of SEO tasks to do at any time.

Exposure

Again, let’s go back to the toy store. You are exposed to this industry every day as an In-house SEO Specialist. You see what works and what doesn’t. However, when you find out something doesn’t work that’s it; you don’t touch it anymore. Why bother wasting time on a strategy that doesn’t work?

Let’s again bring this back to an agency. They’re working on the Toy Store and a certain strategy doesn’t help their important keywords rank. You’d move on like the In-house SEO Specialist, however this same strategy may work for a University that is also a client. Since I started at SEER, I’ve explored realms of SEO that I never even set foot in because it was already determined by another Senior SEO Specialist that they didn’t work for the website I was involved in. Getting your feet wet with all of the different areas of SEO is a definite with an agency.

Pace

One of the biggest changes from switching to an agency setting was the speed at which day to day operations took place.

Going back to the online toy store example again, you’re in the process of getting a great link on the blog of a daycare with a great online presence. They’re inviting your toy industry specialists to talk about what toys are most popular for each age bracket, geographic location, and income class. The best part is you can link back to your site as many times as you want with whatever anchor text you desire! What is the problem here? You’re waiting on your content writers to deliver the content. What do you do while you wait for this?

Let’s say this toy store was using an agency and the same lack of content situation is presented; the SEO Specialist at the agency would take this break to work on another client project. Just because you’re waiting on someone for one SEO Project doesn’t mean that you need to be a sitting duck. Like I said earlier, there are always other clients with SEO tasks to be completed!

The Final Word

My take on the In-house vs. Agency debate has two conclusions:

1. As an SEO Professional, I have appreciated my time in an agency more than an In-house position. The experience with various industries, the opportunity to be exposed to various SEO strategies and see what kinds of sites/industries they fail/succeed in, and the fast pace are why I prefer my current set up. I can see why someone would prefer to be exclusive to one website that they can master, but I prefer the versatility.
2. From the perspective of a company looking to have SEO done, I think the optimal solution is to have an SEO Agency work with an In-house SEO specialist. Usually the In-house SEO Specialist has other non-SEO tasks that come their way, so having the agency behind them to work with will yield the best results in my opinion. This isn’t always possible however, mostly because of budgets, so honestly I’d have to say an SEO Agency would be my preferred choice. The agency is engrossed in SEO all day, so it’s their job to only focus on that. Plus, if it comes time where the company doesn’t need full time SEO anymore, they won’t have to worry about reallocating someone’s job functions in the company.

I’ll finish with saying I’m glad to be part of a team like SEER. Working with a great team of intelligent Search Professionals with different strengths and weaknesses makes me learn something every day. It’s also the reason it’s taken me 6 months to write a blog post…when you’re surrounded by great minds, it’s tough to determine which bits of SEO wisdom are wise or just old news.

Does anyone else have experience working with/in an In-house and/or agency setting? I’d love to hear other perspectives about it!

I came to SEER from an In-house SEO position which is a completely different world than the Agency environment. There are pros and cons to working with each and I wanted to share the un-candy coated truth today, based on my experiences.

Expertise

I have to start off by saying, when you’re exclusively working with one industry you get to know the industry pretty well.

The In-house SEO is entrenched in their industry all day, every day. Let’s say you have an internal SEO Specialist for your online store that sells toys. If you’re doing the SEO for this store, you will see the trends for toy sales and search volume for toy related keywords every day, all year. You’ll know what market trends make traffic spike and which make traffic plummet. You’ll know what works and what strategies are wastes of time in your niche.

The agency SEO Specialist may not be immersed in the same field all day, however they get to see market trends and algorithm shifts for a variety of industries and websites. They can see how the most recent Google algorithm change affected different types of websites with different functions and goals. They can see how a change in the economy, a different time of the year, or even what SEO strategies affect businesses in the financial sector and at the same time see how it is influencing the health industry. Agencies get a more comprehensive view of the SEO industry as a whole and see more of what affects search engine rankings.

Workflow

At an In-house position exclusively meant for SEO, you get good at creating work for yourself. At the start of an SEO project there is an industry analysis, keyword research, page targeting, content development, link building strategies…however, after the initial kick off tasks the project is running on all of the initial research and strategy. When your job is to do SEO for one website, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, you need to make sure that you’re continuously working on something new, looking for finding new opportunities for your website to be optimized, and making sure you still have a job. I have to say, you definitely get good at finding every possible optimization opportunity!

In the agency, after doing all of the initial kickoff work you can follow your strategy. You have other clients to work on, so you don’t continuously search for alternative strategies. If something works, it works; if it doesn’t work, you do your research, find out what does work, and refine your strategy. Why look for alternatives if something is already working? You make changes only once it stops working, not just because you feel the need to be continuously working on something. Besides, there are other clients that need work done for them, so there is never a loss of SEO tasks to do at any time.

Exposure

Again, let’s go back to the toy store. You are exposed to this industry every day as an In-house SEO Specialist. You see what works and what doesn’t. However, when you find out something doesn’t work that’s it; you don’t touch it anymore. Why bother wasting time on a strategy that doesn’t work?

Let’s again bring this back to an agency. They’re working on the Toy Store and a certain strategy doesn’t help their important keywords rank. You’d move on like the In-house SEO Specialist, however this same strategy may work for a University that is also a client. Since I started at SEER, I’ve explored realms of SEO that I never even set foot in because it was already determined by another Senior SEO Specialist that they didn’t work for the website I was involved in. Getting your feet wet with all of the different areas of SEO is a definite with an agency.

Pace

One of the biggest changes from switching to an agency setting was the speed at which day to day operations took place.

Going back to the online toy store example again, you’re in the process of getting a great link on the blog of a daycare with a great online presence. They’re inviting your toy industry specialists to talk about what toys are most popular for each age bracket, geographic location, and income class. The best part is you can link back to your site as many times as you want with whatever anchor text you desire! What is the problem here? You’re waiting on your content writers to deliver the content. What do you do while you wait for this?

Let’s say this toy store was using an agency and the same lack of content situation is presented; the SEO Specialist at the agency would take this break to work on another client project. Just because you’re waiting on someone for one SEO Project doesn’t mean that you need to be a sitting duck. Like I said earlier, there are always other clients with SEO tasks to be completed!

The Final Word

My take on the In-house vs. Agency debate has two conclusions:

1. As an SEO Professional, I have appreciated my time in an agency more than an In-house position. The experience with various industries, the opportunity to be exposed to various SEO strategies and see what kinds of sites/industries they fail/succeed in, and the fast pace are why I prefer my current set up. I can see why someone would prefer to be exclusive to one website that they can master, but I prefer the versatility.
2. From the perspective of a company looking to have SEO done, I think the optimal solution is to have an SEO Agency work with an In-house SEO specialist. Usually the In-house SEO Specialist has other non-SEO tasks that come their way, so having the agency behind them to work with will yield the best results in my opinion. This isn’t always possible however, mostly because of budgets, so honestly I’d have to say an SEO Agency would be my preferred choice. The agency is engrossed in SEO all day, so it’s their job to only focus on that. Plus, if it comes time where the company doesn’t need full time SEO anymore, they won’t have to worry about reallocating someone’s job functions in the company.

I’ll finish with saying I’m glad to be part of a team like SEER. Working with a great team of intelligent Search Professionals with different strengths and weaknesses makes me learn something every day. It’s also the reason it’s taken me 6 months to write a blog post…when you’re surrounded by great minds, it’s tough to determine which bits of SEO wisdom are wise or just old news.

Does anyone else have experience working with/in an In-house and/or agency setting? I’d love to hear other perspectives about it!

While Google may want all links to be organic, I believe that they know that is not even close to within the realm of possibility. They know that non-organic link building will always be a part of the search landscape and have begrudgingly come to terms with the issue. Understandably however, Google has to draw a line somewhere. It’s up to us as SEOs to understand where that line is and for the sake of our clients, not to cross it.

So where does Google draw the line?

Normally I would say “intent.” This is the ad hoc metric Google uses to determine whether something is evil or not. If the intent is obviously to manipulate their results, then more often than not it gets a busted. However, since almost all link building is done with the intention of improving a pages/sites position in search results, “intent” cannot be that line.

Par for the course with Google, the line is a little fuzzy. They can tell us something is not acceptable on one hand then on the other, SEOs show us that it clearly has impact. Google does not think it is fuzzy at all by the way. They tell us what they expect and lead us to believe they have the technology to enforce it. SEOs have shown over and over again that their enforcement tends to have holes.

Examples on both sides of the line.

The recent J.C. Penney paid linking issue uncovered by the New York Times was an instance where the intent was obviously to influence rankings. It’s a great example of either not understanding where the line was or not caring if it was crossed. The search firm who handled the Penney’s site either allowed the creation of or actively created thousands of links using paid link networks. With what I personally consider a gross disregard for the basic principles of link building, these links were place on totally non-relevant sites which was the cause of the overall “JC Penalty” debate started in the New York Times. Google has told us that paid link networks were stepping across the line over and over again.

When was the last time you saw traffic from the Yahoo! Directory in your sites referrals? That’s a $299 a year link and the only reason most people even bother anymore is because of the strength of the site and the potential link juice it can pass. I just checked, those links are still without the no-follow tag. How far would the sales drop if Yahoo! decided to add no-follows; pretty far I am guessing. Quality directories are a rather safe bet from a paid linking standpoint. When a directory is hand edited and is full of useful links across its categories, Google will normally see value in a link on that site and give it a pass.

How to deal with the line.

Let’s face it, many clients and unfortunately many SEOs don’t have a clear understanding of how much work goes into building quality links. It’s a time consuming and expensive process. Remember, I said “quality” links, sure you can get links cheap, and paying for links is an easy way to get the job done efficiently, hence its popularity. But in this case, cheap and easy usually equal dangerous and risky; just ask J.C. Penney. The tactic of quantity over quality is not viable anymore.

Dealing with the far side of the line is easy. Just stay away from link networks and brokerage houses. If a company has a “List of Publishers” you can choose from then it’s most likely not a list you want anything to do with. If a company has an exclusive network of sites, they are probably not sites you want anything to do with. Use common sense, any service that “automates” a link is probably not a service you want anything to do with. Quality link building is neither cheap nor easy. If a company or service disagrees with this, assume they are on the wrong side of the line.

Draw your own line.

A few weeks ago, Michael Martinez of SEO Theory wrote an article similar to this one. It was somewhat tongue and cheek, but focused on the point that since all linking is paid, it’s hypocritical to allow some and not others. And it may be, but there is a point at which Google decides that SEOs have gone too far and it’s at that point that the site or page gets slapped. As SEOs it’s up to us to decide for ourselves how close to the line we are willing to venture and since it’s a fuzzy line it’s a subjective decision. Some SEOs don’t mind pushing the limits while others stay as far from the line as possible. In the long run it’s up to us as SEOs to draw our own line remembering that in most cases it is not our sites which will be in the Google crosshairs if the line is crossed.

Personally, my line was pushed to far beyond my comfort zone where I was before, I am glad to be at a place like SEER where the line is mine to control once again and all the people around me have the same regard for the clients and their sites as I do.

This was my inaugural post here on the SEER blog. I am glad to have both the time and a place to write about the industry I love once again. If you are coming over because I mentioned this post on the SEO101 Radio show, thanks for dropping by.