Datadial, UK: A London Based Digital Web Agency

iCrossing UK

Voltier Creative, USA

Sebcreation, France

Union Room, UK

RICG, USA

alt design, UK

fluidcreativity, UK

Three and a half years ago I’ve published a very popular list post called the 15 best SEO Company Website Designs. I had to remove some of them over the years for a variety of reasons. It took me over 18 months to find even the 15 originally.

Luckily the days of bad SEO website designs are gone for good.

No more keyword stuffed, text only sites created by SEO practicioners who have never learned the design basics. These days SEO companies and other SEO service providers sport excellent web design that both appeals to users and converts them to buyers.

By now I have collected ten times as many that is 150+ outstanding websites from the SEO industry and beyond.

In order not to overwhelm you with a huge list of 150+ random designs I sorted them accordingly to similar attributes, Today I focus on Search Engine Optimization firms using a dark background.

How did I select the sites? You need to offer at least one or more organic SEO services to be added to my list but your agency can focus on marketing or we design by and large. So SEO company does not mean SEO only. Also you don’t need to be a company as long as you offer some SEO services, you can be a freelancer as well. I focused on the actual web design. It doesn’t mean that these are best for SEO purposes or rank best in Google.

Being on this list means that you have an great looking usable website.

Are you searching for a SEO company I approve of both web design and SEO wise? The first two: SEO.com and Datadial have been evaluated by myself. SEO.com is a partner of mine while Datadial has an entry in my SEO directory where I collect the SEO firms I trust most.

Related posts:

1. Some of the Best SEO Company Website Designs
2. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality
3. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!

1. Some of the Best SEO Company Website Designs
2. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality
3. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!

Piwik is is better than Google Analytics in many ways, at least 10 of them. It’s:

Free, really free, you don’t pay with your data. Once you use Google Analytics you’ll get Adwords ads via mail both electronic and in real life.

Open Source – Do I need to say more? No big Google like corporation behind it or small business that could go bankrupt out of the blue.

Respects privacy while Google Analytics does send your data to the US where at least 40 different secret government agencies can access it.

Easy to use once it’s installed. GA is way to complex by now. You have to click several times to find some crucial reports.

Simple goal tracking. I have explained that in a recent how to post on SEOptimise. The way Piwik organizes goal tracking is easy to grasp and implement.

Customizable. While GA is also customizable you can make your Piwik dashboard show anything and everything you want.

Self hosted, so that you control your data and they stay i the same country you’re in and nobody else can view them, not even Google employees.

Tracks Google Image Search. While GA, sham on them, doesn’t properly track Google Image search traffic Piwik does with ease.​

Full referers: you have to perform bizarre workarounds to see the actual referers people come from to your site in GA. Once you have them you have to click several times just to see them. Piwik simply shows them after one click.

Almost real time – While Google Analytics data appears with sometimes a substantial delay​ Piwik shows your visitors right away.​

Did I overlook something? I bet Piwik has even more advantages. I’ve been playing around with it for roughly two weeks now. Add them in the comments. I also have to ​admit that Google Analytics has some advantages over Piwik. I’d miss advanced segments for instance.

So I won’t quit GA just yet but may in the future. Piwik gets developed fast. Last time I tested it they were Beta 0.4 or something, right now the current version is 1.1.1

Also

• Woopra
  
• Clicky
• Mint
• Reinvigorate
• Chartbeat

and other entry level paid web analytics tools have to look out.​ I use all of them except Chartbeat but I almost stopped after I started using Piwik.

Related posts:

1. Software for SEO: Tools, Why & How to Track Rankings in a Personalized Search World
2. Keyword Research: SEO 2.0 on the Rise – Says Google “Insights”
3. 7 Reasons Why Google Chrome, the New Google Browser is a Bad Idea

1. Software for SEO: Tools, Why & How to Track Rankings in a Personalized Search World
2. Keyword Research: SEO 2.0 on the Rise – Says Google “Insights”
3. 7 Reasons Why Google Chrome, the New Google Browser is a Bad Idea

Basically anybody can add anything as an parameter to your URL and make it appear as if it’s part of your blog or site.

Just try adding

• “?gay-porn”
• “?obama=muslim”
• “?you-suck”

to any of your URLs or other sites’ URLs. Most sites accept that without even showing an error “not found”.

In case you link such an URL Google would even index it. So you can make Google show up fake URLs on other people’s websites this way.

Also unwanted parameters break a lot of things SEO-wise. You get unlimited duplicate content this way. People bookmark the wrong (polluted) URLs on Delicious and elsewhere and thus you lose juice on social media.

Who adds utm_source to your URLs and why?

utm_source is added by multiple services in order to get tracked in Google Analytics. You get inflated numbers on Google Analytics though. That’s why I do not recommend adding such parameters to your URLs in the first place. For instance when I click an URL on Delicious which is tagged utm_source=feedburner it gets wrongly counted as stemming from Feedburner and not Delicious as the Delicious bookmark is still tagged as Feedburner and not Delicious.

Also as I said before the bookmarks on Delicious do not add up. It means that maybe 30 people bookmark the Feedburner tagged URL. 30 others bookmark a Twitter tagged URL for the same post and a few dozens others bookmark the original URL. Thus your post doesn’t show up in popular lists.

You can prevent Feedburner from adding the utm_source crap but that’s not enough to remove all other unwanted parameters from your URL. Thus I wrote this tiny script in JavaScript you can add to your WordPress blog anywhere in the header:


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
var url = self.location.href;
var p = url.indexOf("?");
var str = url;
var parameter = str.slice(p);
if (p >= 1 && parameter.indexOf("p") != 1 && parameter.indexOf("s") != 1)
{
url = str.slice(0,p);
self.location.replace(url);
}
//-->
</script>


I know it’s quite redundant and not very elegant but my JavaScript skills haven’t been used much in the last decade so you are welcome to customize it.

The script basically checks where the parameter starts and removes everything from the URL including the question mark “?”

which signifies the start of the parameters. It then redirects visitors on the client-side to the accurate URL without parameter crap in the address.

So in the end your visitor ends up on the actual URL s/he should end up from the beginning but someone else prevented them due polluting the URL with parameter spam.

The only acceptable parameters are the “p” so that you can still use the post preview function in your WordPress and “s” for the search function.

I’ve added the script to SEO 2.0 already so a link like this one should get redirected: http://seo2.0.onreact.com/?you-suck

Related posts:

1. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps
2. How to Create a Dynamic Blogroll in 5 Minutes
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

1. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps
2. How to Create a Dynamic Blogroll in 5 Minutes
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

I’m preparing a SEO 2.0 web directory right here on my blog as you might have noticed already. What? A web directory? In SEO 2.0? It sounds like a contradiction indeed. Aren’t directories either dead, spammy or low quality?

Well, not all directories are wacky. Some of them thrive and are indeed expanding.

Some of the most renowned web directories aren’t even considered as such probably because they are part of larger projects.

So today I will outline the anatomy of an SEO 2.0 web directory of the highest quality, one that I hope to be able to provide here in the future as part of this blog or rather the upcoming SEO 2.0 empire. The SEO 2.0 directory will focus on SEO services and companies.

So this is the actual anatomy of such a directory I deem high quality:

Not standalone but part of a larger website

A web directory without context is often useless. A directory embedded into a larger concept provides additional information your users seek in contrast. Users rarely seek a directory out of the blue. They need a directory to find and compare sites once they know what they are after or interested in.

Covering a very narrow niche

A high quality directory is not about technology, news or health but in a way a long tail directory targeting just one category of a topic. Nobody wants to enter a directory homepage like in 1999 and click several times until they find the sub-directory they actually need. People want to arrive already knowing that they are in the right niche and industry.

Very exclusive

A very high quality directory is the opposite of “free for all links” as Matt Cutts has put it in the past repeatedly. When everybody can get a link in a directory or the directory is just part of a linking scheme it’s low quality or downright spam. A directory must be trustworthy thus only really trusted sites should be able to enter it.

User friendly deep links

Old school web directories only list homepages so basically you have to do the same work twice, once you find what you seek on Gogle you just get sent to the main page of the directory and have to search for the actual resource you are after again. Thus a modern directory has to deep link to be useful. It must provide the information you need directly. It even has to link out to third party sites like Twitter or LinkedIn if that’s where the most current information is at. Also links to contact forms make more sense to users than just a generic homepage link.

User friendly anchor texts

A directory that links with the words homepage, click here or the actual address are useless. It’s a decade old usability lesson that you need to use an anchor text reflecting the actual content on the page you link to. Thus the deep links have to use some meaningful anchor texts to be user friendly.

Contact information

Some people do not want to click a link, they need the actual contact information, most notable the phone number or email address immediately. Thus a directory entry has to include contact data.

An honest third party review

Most directories to this day just let the people who submit their websites to determine the description of their own site. So you actually get what the webmaster or website owner thinks about the website not necessarily what the site is really about as the description. A high quality SEO 2.0 directory provides an honest third party review of a website and its purpose instead of self promotional fluff.

An accountable editor

Directories rarely disclose who actually is responsible for writing the entries. Some anonymous, low paid poor soul or a volunteer who hasn’t really a clue what the sites are about. The editor of a high quality directory has to be known personally and be held accountable for his choices and opinions.

All of these requirements demand of course some level of work to be done. I will do it myself of course, not an underpaid drone in India so it will be an exclusive paid directory. I’m quite optimistic though that most SEO companies will be able to afford it. You pay for Yahoo directory entry as well, don’t you?

E​xamples

Check out paid directory entry examples for Redfly and Datadial. Also take a look at a free entry for Search Engine People.

Now let me show you some very good directories in the SEO niche and beyond I respect and consider “high quality”. I will aim to become like them or even surpass them. I don’t want to be bigger than them, I want to be better!

• CrunchBase, The Free Tech Company Database
• Supplier Directory | Econsultancy
• SEOmoz | SEO Marketplace – Internet Marketing & SEO Company Directory
• Directory of SEO, Internet Marketing and Web Design Services

W​ant to be one of the first companies and other SEO service providers to be featured on SEO 2.0? W​rite a comment here below (it won’t get displayed if you don’t want it just say so in the comment itself) and I will consider your SEO services for inclusion. In case your company is already on my list to get included firms your entry might get fast tracked.

Who is already on my list to be included sooner or later? Any company or consultant I have saved on Delicious under the seo-services tag or added to my Blekko seo-services slashtag.

Everybody whom I follow on social media like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, has been linked to from SEO 2.0 already or saved in my other Delicious tags or Blekko slashtags can apply as well. All the others: Say hello first and let me notice you.

* Image by Patrick J. Lynch

Related posts:

1. How to Get Links on SEO 2.0 and Other Blogs
2. Best SEO Website Design: SEO Companies Using Dark Backgrounds
3. SEO Company, SEO and Search Engine Optimization Google Results Are a Disgrace

1. How to Get Links on SEO 2.0 and Other Blogs
2. Best SEO Website Design: SEO Companies Using Dark Backgrounds
3. SEO Company, SEO and Search Engine Optimization Google Results Are a Disgrace

*

Two years ago I celebrated my first world usability day by pointing out usability mistakes usability experts commit. Fast forward to 2010 and what do I see?

World Usability Day is here again and usability experts still can’t even get their own website right.

Yes, the World Usability Day website sucks big time and I’m really ashamed for them. How can they make people believe that they want to support usability when their own site is not usable by any standards?

Here are the most obvious mistakes the organizers make on their own site:

Excessive Clutter

Both the worldusabilityday.org website and the UPA site are excessively cluttered. The site looks so bad I don’t even want to add a screenshot here not to scare away my readers. Find it at the bottom of the post.

Repetitiveness

Why say it just once when you can repeat it several times throughout your frontpage? “World Usability Day – Making Life Easy!” says the logo on top. Right behind the logo we read “World Usability Day has started!”. Looking down from the quite big logo we see another even bigger logo saying “World Usability Day 2010 – 11. November 2010 . Making Life Easy!”. In order not to forget where we are we can read right below it: “World Usability Day announces Honorary Chair for 2010″ and scrolling a bit further: World Usability Day is Today!
I won’t cite all the other mention or even the headlines containing that phrase or Google will penalize me for keyword stuffing!

Bizarre Typography Mix

While I myself use two different fonts on this blog: Arial/Helvetica and Verdana, worldusabilityday.org manages to use not only Arial/Helvetica in all kinds of different shapes, colors and sizes but Georgia as well although every novice web designer will tell you that you shouldn’t mix both serif and sans-serif fonts.

Blinking

I couldn’t believe my own eyes! Did worldusabilityday.org just blink on me? Yes, they did. They have a large blinking section in the middle of the site. What can I say? Why not use the <blink>-tag then?

Call to Action Overkill

While visiting worldusabilityday.org I was really overwhelmed! Not only by the clutter though! Several calls to action in a row shouted at me: I had to “get involved”, “sign our charter”, “visit partner events”, “register an event”, “donate to world usability day”, “follow us on Twitter”, “become a sponsor”. All of the even before I had the chance to scroll. I didn’t even count the “contact us” call to action and those below the fold.

Making the Logo Bigger

Did I mention that designers love to “make the logo bigger” on websites? worldusabilityday.org really gave them that opportunity. Lie I said above, the big logo on top appears as an even bigger aka huge version below. Great work!

No or Several Points of Focus

It wasn’t just clutter and the myriad of calls to action that made me dizzy on worldusabilityday.org – the site has no single point of focus. There are some many similar sized objects on that site vying for attention that I simply had to give up. My eyes were jumping like ping pong balls on a table on his site.

I’m just an

• SEO
• blogger
• former web developer.

I’m not a designer or usability expert myself. Still I see so many utterly obvious usability mistakes even without professional training.

Therefore I ask you: What is the purpose of the World Usability Day? Is this some kind of cruel irony? Give me a break from World Usability Day! I’m already fed up with all that “usability” and bouncing.

Usability experts still fail themselves so they aren’t in the position to teach the rest of us. Do you want to see the screenshot [600kb] yourself? It’s awful but at least it doesn’t blink.

* Image by clpo13

Related posts:

1. 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
2. 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
3. For Design, Usability and SEO Simplicity Is Key

1. 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
2. 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
3. For Design, Usability and SEO Simplicity Is Key

A tagline is meant to explain the purpose of a blog or site in a few words or short sentence.

I have a few ideas already but you may add yours as well:

1. Self Empowerment Online
2. The convergence of search, social media and business blogging
3. The future of SEO
4. SEO is dead, long live SEO 2.0
5. SEO by humans for humans
6. Findability, usability and profitability
7. Search & Social Media survival guide
8. Cleaning the Intertubes since 2004.

Please choose your three favorites and add them in the comments below. Something like: 1, 4, 7 is enough. You may explain your choice as well of course! The best additional ideas will be added to the post and you get a link back to your site.

Help me finding a tagline for SEO 2.0!

Related posts:

1. Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources
2. 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
3. Keyword Research: SEO 2.0 on the Rise – Says Google “Insights”

1. Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources
2. 7 Usability Mistakes Usability Experts Commit
3. Keyword Research: SEO 2.0 on the Rise – Says Google “Insights”

Executed by mistake is a Creative Commons image by the moog.

Sometimes it takes years of blogging to notice your most obvious mistakes. I’ve been blogging for several years privately, then a few professionally and still do on several business blogs. By now I have made most mistakes you can make as a blogger I guess. I’m not the only one though.

Most bloggers make the same mistakes either by neglect or due to the limitations of the medium and software itself.

In many cases you have to make the decision to change your ways to stop making the most common mistakes. Here are 10 blogging mistakes most bloggers make and you probably do as well.

Embedding videos from YouTube etc.
Most bloggers embed YouTube videos on their blogs. Vimeo is also popular. There are plenty of other services as well. Some even embed Hulu videos. YouTube videos often get removed aka deleted or censored. Even a teenager managed once to take down several videos on fake copyright charges. Vimeo is  less restrictive but people also remove videos on their own sometimes. Hulu videos can’t be watched outside of the US. So for all of these reasons you have an empty screen on your blog. Many posts don’t contain anything beside a video so such a post is dead, even more dead than a dead link. I know because I learned the hard way.

Tweeting instead of blogging
Some people obsess about Twitter. In a way I do as well and sometimes I tweet away my ideas or the sheer time I’d spend on blogging otherwise. Consider each idea you have for blogging before you tweet it. Everything tweeted is lost after a few minutes. Whatever you blog is yours and lives on for ages unless you use a third party service like Blogger or WordPress.com perhaps.

Submitting your own blog post on social media other than Twitter
Many bloggers still tend to submit their own postings to social sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. It doesn’t work that way. Most of these sites either limit that or downright ban self submission in many cases, especially for business blogs. Don’t do that. Make other people discover your content. Socialize on social media but don’t self promote to get some traffic.

Using 125*125 display ads
Banner ads are dead but everybody uses them on blogs these days. Some WordPress themes even come with predefined banner ads areas. They look ugly, nobody clicks them and your bog appears spammy when it’s plastered with blinking ads. Use text ads instead (I’d recommend Yahoo) and affiliate ads but only very good ones matching your content.

Blogging too often or not often enough
In recent months SEO 2.0 has turned too silent for a good blog. Over the years I’ve noticed that 3 to 5 posts per week are best for a blog. 2 weekly posts are the minimum and more than 5 in a week lead to overload. Many blogs these days blog less often and look more like static websites this way. You lose attention, people start to forget about you when you blog rarely. Several posts a day in contrast lead to an information overload nobody can digest. This way you get more and more casual traffic from search and social media but you overburden your loyal readers. Your loyal readers are the backbone of your blog though. Don’t annoy them.

Automating content creation
Many services offer ways of syndicating content. You can post content to your blog automatically this way you posted on Twitter, Delicious or elsewhere. This scares away your loyal readers as well. I did just recently when testing the Twitter tools integration on SEO 2.0 I disabled now the weekly twitter digest as it’s low quality cross posting. You can add Twitter or Delicious in the sidebar instead so that it doesn’t pollute your RSS feed.

Creating “blog spam” postings
The “blog spam” kind of blog post seemingly will never die. They contain only a link to the source and short description of it . Basically it’s just wasted time. Your blog turns to an obstacle between the reader and the real source. If you don’t have any value to add don’t blog it at all. at least add your opinion beyond “this is great” or collect a few links.

Not socializing enough
Blogs aren’t islands. They only strive as part of the blogosphere. Bloggers who don’t socialize enough with other bloggers and social media users can’t get popular in the first place or they turn to one way communication in case they already are well known. In both cases the overall quality of the blog deteriorates. Never forget your blogging and social media peers. Link out, vote and contact them on a regular basis.

Not updating old content
Most blogs have a huge archive of blog posts which get plenty of visitors from search who bounce after noticing that the post is outdated and the links broken. Make sure to revisit your old postings, update and fix them. You may even republish them once the update is substantial enough. Also write for longevity in the first place. Nobody cares for yesterdays news tomorrow.

Not focusing on best postings
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about it years ago. One of the most common issues with blogs is that they don’t show the most popular postings on top. Plus like mentioned above many popular postings are outdated. I’ve been testing many “popular posts” plugins for WordPress. I haven’t found the perfect one yet. I’ll tell you once I do. Some people recommend the Socialrank widget, formerly known as AideRSS. I might add it in future.

Do you make these blogging mistakes as well? Do you miss some common mistakes by bloggers in this list? Tell me about it. I made all those mistakes above myself and noticed afterwards so it’s easy to recognize them on other blogs.

Related posts:

1. Does Blogging for Money Work or Not? 6 Noob Mistakes
2. The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need
3. Guest Blogging Guidelines

1. Does Blogging for Money Work or Not? 6 Noob Mistakes
2. The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need
3. Guest Blogging Guidelines

For years the Delicious front page has been the better Digg. No political bias, no teenage geek crap with b00bs, FAILs and pwns. Just die hard tech and web dev resources.

Today Delicious changed its front page though.

Now you get to see “fresh” bookmarks by default. That means getting popular on Delicious doesn’t mean getting on the front page anymore. Popular posts are hidden behind a “Popular Bookmarks” tab most people won’t click.

Now Delicious became a somewhat misguided Twitter/Delicious mashup.

Until yesterday you needed approx. 120 Delicious bookmarks in a short period of time (one to a few days) to get popular on Delicious. Then you ended up on the default front page. There you got a decent influx of traffic but most notably you got another few hundred bookmarks while being displayed there for at least several hours. Those bookmarks often automatically end up on blogs so delicious was always great for link building.

Just yesterday a post of mine on the SEOptimise blog, the 30 SEO tools you must know list got popular. Sadly Delicious does not honor excellent resources like this one anymore. I’ve watched the Delicious fp for a few hours today and saw mostly short-lived news sometimes propelled to the fp by just 4 or 5 tweets in the course of an hour or two. Yes, it really means just 4 or 5 people (or bots) tweeting about a link during an hour.

I doubt that it will stay this way.

This way the Delicious fp is useless.

It neither works like the old one nor can compete with the many successful Twitter link aggregators like Twitturly.

Also currently it’s ridiculously easy to game Delicious that is to get to the front page without truly deserving it. You don’t even have to use Delicious for that purpose. Everybody can manage to get 4 or 5 tweets about a link in an hour.

That’s not enough of bad news. Delicious not only counts links to one source it simply groups similar sounding tweets containing links as one and pushes one of the URLs mentioned in it as the source. For instance today a crappy pic about Japan got a few tweets and several other tweets dealt with Japan as well but they linked other non related pages. Nonetheless all of them got counted with the crappy pic as one just because they mentioned Japan in the respective tweets.

Now to be honest this is not what Delicious was intended for I think. I’d expect crappy pics on Digg, sometimes StumbleUpon and even Twitter but Delicious was the last refuge of true quality.

Now they try to jump on the Twitter bandwagon but lose their original purpose and character. Also the buggy implementation and easy to game system make the fp completely useless. Delicious calls this “The freshest bookmarks that are flying like hotcakes on Delicious and beyond.” but in fact they’re the most popular Twitter topics at a given moment. Two bookmarks are enough to appear on the front page.

So is the new good or bad for SEO?

The new Delicious front page is good for spam but bad for SEO.

You can push any crap with just a few tweets to the Delicious fp and most sites will end up on Delicious as a byproduct without even participating. Current Delicious users are clearly the losers with after this change. Great resources or link baits by bloggers or SEO practicioners who devise valuable list of resources won’t get the publicity they deserve anymore. Whether you hit the front page as “fresh” or you get “popular”, in both cases you don’t get significant exposure anymore.

Is the new Delicious fp good for it’s users? No, I don’t want random news like Bill Clinton arrived in North Korea on top of Delicious. I don’t care. Do you? OK, I can hit the popular tab but many people won’t even notice there is one while skimming the site.

Related posts:

1. How to Get on the Sphinn Front Page
2. 7 Autopilot Link Building Methods for the Lazy Bastard
3. Broken Social Media: Anti-Social Sites vs Alternatives

1. How to Get on the Sphinn Front Page
2. 7 Autopilot Link Building Methods for the Lazy Bastard
3. Broken Social Media: Anti-Social Sites vs Alternatives

This post is not meant to whine about SEO 2.0 being censored on Wikipedia. Every Web-savvy individual by now knows how unreliable Wikipedia is. I want to focus on new articles on SEO 2.0, especially on the spelled out or inherent SEO 2.0 definitions in these articles.

The longer I write about SEO 2.0, soon for 2 years, the better I understand it and the closer I get to a definition that makes sense beyond saying “SEO for Web 2.0″ or something. While I’m not yet perfectly sure about the definition itself I’m quite certain what it is not though!

So let me link the 6 new SEO 2.0 articles that have been published in the recent weeks:

1. The new Search Engine Optimization – SEO 2.0 | PC Pro blog
2. SEO: What’s Hot and What’s Not
3. SEO 2.0 – SEOs are Marketers Too! | SEO.com
4. Pharma, Biotech & Devices Can Ignore SEO 2.0 « The Buzzword Status Report « Group 8020
5. What is SEO? It depends on the version… | Propel Marketing, LLC
6. MLM – Network Marketing Blog : MLM Traffic Formula 2 Course Outline: Serious Details!

Before I comment on each definition let me summarize for the quick readers who just skim this:

SEO 2.0 is not Google SEO, a Buzzword, a PPC Scheme or part of an MLM Formula, it’s the People’s SEO, about Relevancy & ORM

In the broadest sense SEO 2.0 as a term just describes a paradigm shift in SEO that took place when Web 2.0, social media and Universal Search appeared among others. Other major developments that led to this shift were localized and personalized search results.

So apparently a lot has changed and the SEO industry had to adapt to the new situation. You can call it what you like but it did happen, it still happens and thus we have to name it too. The easiest way to name it is SEO 2.0

OK, so let’s see what the recent articles say about SEO 2.0 in detail.

#1 The new Search Engine Optimization – SEO 2.0 | PC Pro blog
Tom Arah readily admits to revisit SEO after a few years of absence. While he gets the first paragraph right summarizing that “a whole lot changed” his conclusion is 2/3 wrong. He rightly acknowledges that SEO 2.0 is not about tricking search engines anymore.

Then he goes on to state that SEO 2.0 is basically about Google telling webmasters how to do basic SEO. He errs as well in saying that SEO 2.0 is actually “new”. It wasn’t new in 2007 when I started this blog. Also, in a bizarre twist Matt Cutts becomes the ambassador of SEO 2.0 while the Google SEO Starter Kit is the bible of SEO 2.0. Sorry to disappoint you but you haven’t done your homework.

SEO 2.0 is not about Google SEO. SEO 1.0 was. SEO 2.0 overtakes Google by ignoring it basically. I prefer to call that “SEO as a side effect”. When you get popular on Twitter, Delicious or YouTube Google basically can’t ignore that and you get links that push you at Google as well. At the same time you haven’t done much if any old school SEO.

#2 SEO: What’s Hot and What’s Not
Mihaela Lica attempts to address the fuzzy SEO 2.0 topic on Sitepoint. While the commentators mostly fail to grasp the concept she quite aptly describes and elaborates on it. In her article she argues correctly that social networking sites are major SEO tools nowadays which is true both for SEO and SEO 2.0 practicioners. She also mentions link baiting, one the first SEO 2.0 tactics around. It has surfaced somewhere around 2004/5 already and its more recent extension, the so called viral marketing. That’s right.

While in 2005 you did a link bait to get links in large numbers form Digg e.g. you nowadays tend to create “magnetic web content” that spreads on social media like Twitter by itself. Lica also goes on to cover the so called long tail concept which one of the earliest SEO 2.0 definitions also included, the Hittail definition from June 2006.
So all in all Mihaela Lica gets all her points right. She doesn’t cover the whole scope of SEO 2.0 but who can in such a short blog post?

#3 SEO 2.0 – SEOs are Marketers Too! | SEO.com
David Malmborg of SEO.com very carefully explains why the SEO industry had to adapt. The changes of the Internet landscape that led to the paradigm shift of SEO 2.0 have rarely been so well formulated in such a short post. He goes on to declare that the most crucial aspect of SEO 2.0 is the reputation management part of it.

This may be overstated but reputation building is indeed the prerequisite of a successful SEO 2.0 strategy. You can’t succeed with people when they assume that you are a jerk. I agree with Mrt. Malmborg but I admonish you not to forget all other aspects of SEO 2.0 and concentrate solely on your reputation.

#4 What is SEO 2.0?
An anonymous poster at the “Group 8020 Blog” asks “What is SEO 2.0?” and we quickly realize why: He doesn’t have a clue himself, s/he even “confused” according to her(his won words. Also we soon realize why he won’t get SEO 2.0 in the future either: The agency s/he writes for is based on the assumption that you should reach 80% results with solely 20% of effort.

The 80/20 thing might work in SEO when you change a few title tags and headlines as SEO tactics but here the author fails completely to grasp the concept of SEO 2.0. Next time s/he probably should spend more than the proclaimed 20% effort n research. He likens SEO 2.0 to basic SEO 1.0 practices and thus declares the term SEO 2.0 to be not needed. He also states that SEO 2.0 is only a buzzword. Is it?

Well, show me the buzz then? I collected 6 articles from the recent 2 months on SEO 2.0 so it’s not much of a buzz cowboy, isn’t it? It was a wise decision not to use your name for this article. In this sense you got SEO 2.0 right. It would be bad for your reputation.

#5 What is SEO? It depends on the version… | Propel Marketing, LLC
Tanya from Propel Marketing, LLC gets it right in her article, there are two kinds of SEO, an outdated one, sometimes even sneaky and a new one, SEO 2.0. SEO 2.0 is different though.

While SEO 1.0 best practices are fine you won’t get far nowadays without focusing on relevancy and user experience. This is a short but excellent post. Sometimes other people who deal with SEO 2.0 less often then me see it more clearly. Tanya is one of them. Thank you! SEO 2.0 is designed for the people!

#6 MLM – Network Marketing Blog : MLM Traffic Formula 2 Course Outline: Serious Details!
While searching for more info on the so called “LocalAdLink” scheme I came across above mentioned article. I won’t cover the LocalAdLink PPC scheme as some warn that it’s actual a scam. I can’t say whether it is, I haven’t tried it. I can tell you one thing though: PPC is not part of SEO and it’s not part of SEO 2.0 either.

The same blogs that cover this PPC scheme also deal with the “MLM Traffic Formula” which also refers to part of it as SEO 2.0.

While both methods get the definition of SEO 2.0 quite right, as in “SEO as a side effect” above, both of them are not SEO 2.0 because they don’t rely on authority like SEO 2.0 does. You can’t buy love and you can’t buy friendship and real loyalty on social media or networks either. Investing in PPC is OK, it’s traditional search marketing but it’s not SEO 2.0 even if you create geo-location specific pages.
The MLM formula contains a small SEO 2.0 part as if SEO 2.0 could fit in such a tiny aspect. SEO 2.0 is a great effort by itself, you can’t do it in 15 minutes while performing several other steps. So neither of these two methods are really about SEO 2.0!

What do you think? Is SEO 2.0 still something new, an actual buzzword or doesn’t it exist at all like some uninitiated assume? Add your own private SEO 2.0 definition now!

Last updated: November 14th, 2011: Fixed broken link.

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1. 3 Search Marketing Magazines in Print
2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
3. Does Link Building Still Exist as an SEO Practice in 2011?

1. 3 Search Marketing Magazines in Print
2. New Search Marketing Standard Issue Out: International Search Markets
3. Does Link Building Still Exist as an SEO Practice in 2011?

One of the basic best practices of SEO are user and search friendly URLs. URLs are simply Internet addresses like something.com/more/details

Step 1: Make URLs user and search friendly
My example is already both user and search friendly. It’s readable and understandable (you sometimes even call them speaking URLs). So you already know that we talk about “something”, “more” of it and some “details”. A better example would be

ford.com/cars/ford-focus

Here we quickly notice that the page deals with a Ford car by the name of Focus.
The actual Ford site is almost as good, but that would be the ideal URL structure. It’s also perfect for Google and other search engines as it already includes both keywords and a site structure with cars being a folder or rather directory and ford-focus a specific page out of similar ones in this directory.

Now consider an international site. Ford is a good example here as the Ford Focus gets sold in Europe too. In Europe people speak a few dozens of different languages. Just covering the more important ones like

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Polish
• Russian

is not an easy task. It starts with the URLs. Let’s assume Ford.com would be a multi-language site, that is a site that covers all those languages. In contrast there are plenty of companies who prefer separate domains for each country like

• ford.es
• ford.fr
• ford.de

etc. Maintaining so many sites is quite an effort though. So many companies of smaller scale won’t operate an extra site for each country. You should reserve a domain for each at least even if you plan just to use one.

Let’s assume though that Ford.com would develop a multi-language website including all those languages. We would encounter several problems as each of these languages has special characters other’s don’t and Google has some difficulties with. I don’t want to focus (what a pun! ;-) on those.

Let’s also assume that we don’t deal (yet) with the special characters. Let’s talk about the standard procedure for user and SEO friendly URL design for multi-language websites.

Step 2: Separate URLs
What’s most important: You need separate URLs for each language! No joke. There are sites that have several languages on the same page (using the same URL).
Depending on you browser language, IP or according to your choice the content language changes but the URL stays the same. This way you would view ford.com/cars/ford-focus from Spain and see the page in Spanish, from France in French ans so on while in the US it still would be displayed in English. This is the worst case scenario from a SEO perspective. Google will only index the English version. Your site won’t get found on local Google search at all. Plus the automatic setting of languages doesn’t work as desired in many cases. American expats in Spain get the Spanish version in spite of not speaking Spanish for instance.

A simple and SEO wise good solution would be adding a directory (or virtual one) for each specific language.
Thus we would end up having:

ford.com/es/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/fr/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/de/cars/ford-focus

Step 3: Translate URLs
That’s almost fine but there is one problem: You use the English word or keyword “cars” for the Spanish and French version. In France people even can get angry at you for doing that.
As I’m doing SEO in Germany I’ll use the German examples from now on. The next step is translating the URLs as well:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus

You see that the product name remains the same but the keyword describing it “cars” changes to the German “autos”. We would be happy here as users and website optimizers but in most cases the programmers behind the content management system will cry out and telly you that it does not work that way.

Step 4: Add URL numbers
You can’t create different pages with varying for each language without risking chaos.

So we need a small change in the URL structure and we will tell them that so called URL rewriting (in most cases using the so called mod_Rewrite module for Apache) will suffice.

The simplest way to deal with this issue is adding a unique number to each page. This number stays the same across the languages to allow handling the same pages across multiple pages with much hassle.

So we end having something like this:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234

take note that “1234″ is a random number here, it could apply to the data set number or page number or whatever you choose to count. It has to be assign just once for a single URL and stay permanent. It’s not a session ID or something like that. Also take note that I added the number at the end. This is to prevent Google from assigning too much authority to the number as directory “name”.

Make sure that an URL like this can always get identified just by the number. So ford.com/1234 should still lead to the same page at ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234
This also works with WordPress blogs. Having numbers in the URL allows you to change the keywords in it or mistype it without breaking it.

We’re done. Now we can optimize a littel if we like to.

Step 5: Optimize URLs
This step is already optional. Some of you might argue that an URL like the above ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234 still has some issues. For instance it mentions ford twice which is a little too much if you ask me. It looks like SEO out of 1999.

So you could cut the second “ford” in “ford-focus”. This results in:

ford.com/de/autos/focus/1234

Also if you change cars to autos earlier on you don’t need the “de”. You could use

ford.com/autos/focus/1234

instead as “autos” applies to the German part of the site only. The English site says ford.com/cars/focus/1234

Now we’re really done. At this point we’ll probably face the special characters issues with so called umlauts (äöü) for instance but that’s another post. So you see the basic user and search friendly URL design for multi-language websites is no voodoo at all. 4 easy steps are enough.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
2. Digg-Like International Social News Communities
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

1. Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
2. Digg-Like International Social News Communities
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes