As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company – Covario!

As part of Covario, I’m very excited for our people and our clients to be part of what is the leading search marketing software and services organization. Together, we have nearly 100 combined clients in key industries, including high-tech, ecommerce, consumer electronics, financial services, media and consumer packages goods, with many Fortune 500 brands.

Our combined SEO technologies, which include Organic Search Insight and GravityStream, promise advertisers the first end-to-end industry solution that spans the entire search optimization process: keyword research, recommendations, execution, and ongoing reporting. GravityStream is a pioneering technology for automating the execution piece. And now even more is possible.

Analysts expect marketers to increase their SEO spend by 100% over the next 5 years, to $5.0 billion by 2014. By leveraging our leading technologies and world-class SEO expertise, we will continue to improve performance and ROI for leading brands across organic and paid search, on a global scale.

(And on balmy, single-digit temperature days like today in Madison, I’m also excited to spend a bit more time out at the new San Diego headquarters)

As the world of search continues to evolve, these are exciting times indeed!

Brian Klais
Chief Operating Officer
Netconcepts

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

• Variation in anchor text of incoming links
• Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
• Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Like any skill though, it takes continual honing and refining, along with the education. This is part of the concept behind the 60-Second Website Audit and training the eye to quickly identify key SEO issues and potential issues.

I’ve joked that, after so many audits, SEO consultants could probably do them blindfolded. So, whip out the blindfold and let’s put that to a test.

Okay, so maybe not really blindfolded, but how about auditing a site without actually seeing the site? Hmm, that might be interesting. This is more than gimmick. In fact, though I might normally take a quick look around a site, ala 60-Second Audit, I generally start the deep dive of an audit exactly as I’m going to show you.

So how do I start auditing a site without looking at the actual site? Just like a search engine, I start at the crawl, which is what we are going to do today. SEO is about so much more than just keywords, and while the title tag is one of the most important signals a site can send to a search engine, a title tag that can’t be found is of little value.

Let’s Audit, Blindfolded

I needed a website I haven’t seen before for this experiment. To pick a site randomly that I haven’t seen, I started by picking a word and searching in Google for it. Being mid-October and feeling the quick approach of winter, the word “sweater” seemed aptly appropriate. I then jumped to the 5th page of results and selected the 2nd result, which was ColdWaterCreek.com. While I know of Cold Water Creek, I don’t recall ever seeing their site, so this is perfect.

Let me introduce you to Xenu. Xenu Link Sleuth™ is a free crawler program that you can download and use to crawl your own site (highly recommend) or other sites. Xenu is one of the most powerful (and perhaps underrated) tools an SEO can have. The amount of information from this tool is priceless, and in this case, will be how we’ll start to audit ColdWaterCreek.com “blindfolded.” That said, if you want to try this at home, I’d recommend doing so on your own site, rather than everyone running out and crawling Cold Water Creek’s site!

Since I prefer to work with the data within Excel, the first thing I do after running it is to export it out to a tab separated format that can be imported into Excel. The details of using Xenu are beyond the scope of this post, so if you are new to Xenu, I highly recommend spending a little time reading first.

After moving the external URLs/links, which in this case also includes the images to another tab, I’m left with 5,161 rows of data, or in other words, 5,161 URLs. When I do a site:www.coldwatercreek.com search in Google (appending &filter=0&start=990 to the URL), I see Google returns 820 results. Quite a difference … what’s the true number?

No idea, but most clients feel that the Google number is often far less than the number of URLs (pages) they have and Xenu seems like a lot more than they expect. I certainly don’t expect Google (or any other search engine) to index 100% of a site’s URLs, but seeing less than 16% indexed based on the Xenu number tells me there may be some issues. Remember though, I haven’t even looked at the site so I don’t really have any idea what those issues are yet.

More importantly, and I see this time after time, we don’t know whether the “true” number should be closer to the Google number or the Xenu number. Too often, people view indexation numbers as something that needs to be increased, that more is better. But more could just as well be indicative of problems.

Next, I note that the server is running Windows IIS as the server platform. I see this in part by the .aspx file extension, but confirmed by the “Server” column of the Xenu report, which lists the URLs as Microsoft-IIS/6.0. In a normal audit, this would clue me in on two things, the first being that I want to be aware of possible case issues. Since IIS doesn’t distinguish case differences, this means that we might see somewhat “sloppy” or inconsistent linking references, such as default.aspx vs. Default.aspx, or blue-jeans.aspx, Blue-Jeans.aspx, Blue-jeans.aspx or even blue-Jeans.aspx. While the server may gladly serve up the appropriate content for these variations, search engine spiders recognize that these could be different pages on other serves, such as Linux, which means that each of these URLs are unique.

Second, this also alerts us to proper redirection challenges. Setting up 301 permanent redirects vs. 302 redirects in IIS seems to trip up many IT departments. So now, we know that this may be a roadblock to any recommendations we make, or that we really need to double check that they have been done in the past and that they are done correctly going forward.

A quick scan is all that is needed to find examples of the case issue:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146

See the differences above? One version uses an upper case “L” while the other version uses a lower case “l” within StoreLocator. This means that there are likely duplicates of all of the stores for the details and events pages. Fortunately, the rest of the URLs are pretty clean and consistent, which isn’t always the case (no pun intended).

After sorting by URL, we quickly see some other common issues. Ironically, this issue is less about the content that is there and more about what isn’t there. Toward the top of the list, we find these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/%2f404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/MyAccount/MyAccount/MyAcctLogin.aspx

First, the %2f is the encoding for the “/” which tells me that there is probably a malformed URL here. The real issue though is that all of these represent a 404 file not found page, yet all return a 200 ok header status. This means that these, and likely any malformed URLs or URLs that no longer exist, will continue to live on and bloat the index rather than drop out. It also means that the site isn’t sending the highest quality signal to search engines by appearing to return ok statuses for URLs that don’t exist. However, we can also see by the following example that some URLs are returning a proper 404 header status:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fEGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d01GC006%26ensembleid%3d10756

Along with additional examples of possible encoding issues, this is a good reminder that we need to check for issues in different areas of the site and in different ways. This is especially true with complex sites that might appear seamless visually, but may be powered by a number of different scripts, such as a content management system, ecommerce cart, blog, forum and FAQ … all of which might be powered separately.

While we are on that note, my guess is that the following URL probably isn’t of much value either:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Blank.htm

Other examples of possible duplication or diluted content may be seen in the following:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/default.aspx (because I still haven’t viewed the site, I don’t know for certain, but experience and my gut tells me that this may be a duplication of the homepage URL, http://www.coldwatercreek.com/).

Another challenging area for duplication is in presentation, and my guess is that:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx

is probably being duplicated by:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=false

Which is prevalent for all products that have pagination, and to some extent, duplicated further by the counter URL variation:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=true

At this point, we don’t know if these are being dealt with in other ways, such as robots handling, nofollow link attributes or the canonical link element. Nor can we determine how these should be handled, but at least we have a better understanding of what is going on and what we need to dig into.

Related to that, we also have a quick view into the pagination URL construct:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=1

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=2

In addition, some other URLs that are probably low value for search (as well as possible encoding issues again) that we’ll want to check to see whether they are being excluded from the bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d44130%26ensembleid%3d50183

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/EGiftCard.aspx?productid=01GC001&ensembleid=10756

While we are looking at URLs, we can quickly scan our Excel file and identify key URL constructs being used.

Such as parameter-based product detail pages, including perhaps low-value duplication:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281&Skn=outlet

Some lengthy, a little parameter heavy and generally ugly URLs that may be challenging to bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/prodList.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czcategory&cat=All+Products////Apparel////Dresses////UserSearch=Dept.Channel+ID=1&ShowAllProducts=false

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Sale/default.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czNewPage&path=All+Products////UserSearch=RedTag////UserSearch=Misses&page=18

Especially in comparison to the cleaner, keyword friendly category pages (though I’d still want to review these around the pagination construct mentioned earlier):

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/knit-dresses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/misses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-jackets.aspx

Seem like a lot of focus on URLs? You bet. URLs are at the foundation of a site’s SEO. Get these wrong and little else matters. Xenu is excellent at seeing the URLs that exist that may not ever make it into a search engine index … which may be quite telling. So remember that a “site:domain.com” advanced query only reveals what is “above water.”

The Cold Water Creek site is actually quite small with only a few variations of URLs. The real power and beauty of Xenu is when you find yourself reviewing 300,000+ URLs from highly complex sites with several URL constructs and variants.

In part 2 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we’ll start out by seeing what Xenu can show us about the most important search signal a site has.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Berman states that while the market in 2006 may’ve allowed Verizon to take billions in the deal divesting itself of its directories corporation, Idearc, he further states:

“It took too much.”

Will there be any consequences for Verizon’s throwing off these companies with unserviceably high debt loads? Burman reports:

“These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon.”

In a brief video piece, David Berman debates the issue with Evan Newmark, who takes the opposite viewpoint that Verizon should not be held responsible for the performance of its divested companies.

I find part of Newmark’s argument in the vid segment to be facile. He initially argues that Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, did a clever/good thing because “…he unloaded these companies before they could go under within Verizon!” This is just plain dumb, because they wouldn’t have failed within Verizon. In the case of Idearc, the business unit was too small to cause the great corporate mother ship to founder, and it’s the Verizon spin-off debt load it was saddled with that caused it to be unable to function in the first place. He misses the point that Verizon took too much money out of the spinoff deals. Those weren’t existing debts associated with those business units prior to their divestment.

These companies wouldn’t have “gone under” within Verizon. It’s possible that if a business unit starts to lose money for a quarter or two, the board would naturally require it to correct itself in some way. But, arguably these companies experienced a much higher degree of financial problems due to the extremely high debt they were required to service subsequent to spinoff. These spinoffs funded Verizon’s FiOS expansion — a gigantic project that was paid for by Verizon offloading the investment costs to the companies it spunoff.

So, this was not at all a normal case of companies failing to survive in the competitive marketplace: they were sandbagged at the outset.

In the video, Berman cogently states that “…it raises the question of what responsibility does a seller have to the health of a buyer’s target afterwards…”.

To this, Newmark responds, “Caveat emptor” (well-known Latin phrase meaning “Let the buyer beware.”). One wonders if Mr. Newmark would be quite so glib if he were on the receiving end of a lemon the next time he purchases an automobile. I think not. This is essentially what I’m stating has happened to stockholders of these Verizon spinoff companies.

Newmark finally, grudgingly, states that because it’s a heavily-regulated company, “…Verizon cannot be doing deals which appear to rip people off…”.

I’d go a bit further and say that if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, it’s a rat.

It will be interesting to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission gives Verizon a pass on their spinoffs of bankrupt companies as Newmark seems to think reasonable, or if they don’t respond in some way to consumer and state government complaints.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is - Which results do users trust more on search engines - the organic or paid results?

Evgenii Prussakov is a renowned affiliate marketing specialist and he delves into the minds of the average Joe/Jane online consumers by asking 107 questions in his book titled “Online Shopping Through Consumers Eyes: A Study Of Online Users’ Responses To 107 QUestions” (found on Amazon).

The topics are wide ranging covering areas of general online advertising, B2C marketing, website usability and modern day online consumer behavior. This research provides a wealth of information to online marketers doing affiliate marketing, web analytics, SEO and web design.

The graphic below summarises the query which this post endeavors to answer.

I will discuss a few of the questions and their responses which make really interesting reading. The questions and their answers are as follows:

The main question is about users trusting either natural results or sponsored results more on search engines. This question is preceded by another basic questions which reads:

Q: Do people know the difference between natural results and sponsored ads in search engines?

A: 18% say No and 82% say Yes

Now to the main question again:

Q: Do users have more trust in natural results than sponsored results?

A: Definitely not - 1.75%
Probably not - 6.55%
Maybe - 19.65%
Probably so - 36.68%
Definitely - 35.37%

Clearly, the results show that over 71% of the shoppers trust organic results over sponsored results. A majority state that they know the difference between natural and paid results and they trust the natural results more.

The results prove that organic SEO efforts lead to more traffic which in turn is more likely to trust your site and buy from your site. A result for your site (especially in the top 3) on page 1 of the SERPs delivers results big time. It would be well worth your time and effort to work hard and get your site ranked in the top pages of the SERPs.

Evgenii does not study factors related to the user’s intention to shop online. He questions people who have shopped online and gleans their experience while going through the different stages of pre-purchase research, making the purchase and post-purchase interaction with the online business.

Some of the other unrelated questions deal with the situation of the customer clearing her web cookies, the amount of emails she has to process on a daily basis etc. These are of considerable interest to online marketers though. A good video on which this post is based can be informative.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland SEO firm specialising in organic search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable - it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start - clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon - they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Okay, you aren’t going to fully understand the intricate details and you’d obviously spend far, far more time (closer to hours than seconds) on a true site audit, but I’d venture that 60 seconds is enough for a good gut check and for identifying areas that need deep exploration.  What may make this most interesting is to compare results that your “team” gets from this exercise since we all have our own approaches, hot buttons, etc.

Ultimately, I’d recommend all SEO practitioners go through this exercise, even randomly on any old site, at least once or twice a week. I say this because like most skills, true mastery comes when it transcends thought…it becomes instinctive and our minds take in and process more naturally without conscious thought.

Of course, every one of these 60-second site audits will also be different based on initial perceptions and where the path leads us. Some elements we identify will be revealing in and of themselves, while others will merely be stepping-stones to other elements or footnotes toward criteria for our eventual recommendations.

Here is just a quick list of the things that I might look for in undertaking a 60-second SEO audit:

• Canonicalization (www vs. non-www)
• Title tag formatting pattern
• Title tag duplication (quicker via search engine with a “site:domain.com” search at 100 results per page)
• Indexation (via the “site:” search in Google and appending &filter=0&num=990 to the URL string from the initial results page)
• URL insight: construction parameters, keyword usage, length, tracking parameter usage, etc. (via site navigation as well as site: search)
• Meta description usage and duplication (via site: search)
• Heading usage (navigating site with Outline Headings and Show Element Names When Outlining via the Web Developer Toolbar)
• Nofollow usage (via SearchStatus plugin with highlighting while navigating site)
• JavaScript/Flash usage in navigation or links (combination of hovering over links in the simplest, but more accurate via disabling JavaScript with and disabling CSS, and view source)
• Hidden text or links (combination of ctrl-A to select everything on the page, disabling JavaScript and CSS, viewing text-only cache pages, review list of links on a page)
• Pagination, guided / faceted navigation constructs, sorting constructs
• Site structure (via sitemap)
• Robots.txt file and XML sitemap usage
• Server platform (Apache, IIS, WebSphere, etc.)
• 404 Handling

That’s just a sampling, but a very powerful sampling that can provide a considerable amount of insight into a site. What you might have found surprising is the amount of information learned about a site without even looking at the site, but through the search engine results pages. For the daring souls, try this exercise without even looking at the site itself — how much can you learn just through analyzing SERPs?

And this isn’t just for work. Feel free to amaze your friends and family at your next party — then again, perhaps reserve that for parties with other SEOs.

So, what cues would you look for in your 60-second audits?

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Google has stated its support for rich microformats. Yahoo’s Search Monkey has already implemented them. But is still not clear if the search engines read them. Local search results have been rumoured to use microformats but there is no evidence to back this either.

Google has introduced Rich Snippets whereby existing open standards microformats like  hCard , hCalendar and  RDF (Resource Description Framework) assume significance.

Google’s adoption of these standards now gives webmasters an incentive to include microformats on their websites. They can enhance their existing data through use of these open standards without registering with Google. The rich snippets enhance the search results on the SERPs and show more information. To start with reviews from Yelp and user profiles from LinkedIn will be part of this process.

If your company address on your website is enclosed in a hCard microformat, this will appear as part of the enhanced listing on the SERPs for your site result.

If your site has a product launch coming up in say two months from now, you can use a hCalendar format to enable the search engines to display it as a rich snippet. Being an open standard, your calendar can be shared with other users who can import it into their Outlook and Google Calendar apps. This can build backlinks to the calendar on your site.

Sentiment analysis is a unique feature that Google uses to emphasise opinions from user reviews. It can be used as a description enclosed in quotes in the absence of rich snippets. This can be used in conjuction with the newly released Google search options that allows you to slice and dice search results by various options, one of which is Reviews.

Google’s rich snippets is much easier to implement than Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. As a site owner, you have to make the metadata available to Googlebot by placing the microformats on your web pages. To use SearchMonkey, you need to develop an application that will use the microformat data on your site to make it compatible for Yahoo to use on their SERPs.

Another option is the new Google search options is People search. This can be used in sync with Google Profiles to highlight a user’s job title, name and the geographical location of the company. Searchers can distinguish between people having the same name or sharing names with a celebrity.

A site owner cannot control the enhancement of his site listings. He has to make this metadata available in the first place for Google. Also, placement of data in microformats will not ensure enhanced listings for a site in the SERPs.

A site owner can request Google to be considered for the inclusion of rich snippets using this form. This helps the bots to find your content quicker than finding it in a regular crawl.

Both Google and Yahoo have clearly stated that they will not be using microformats for indexing and ranking purposes at this point. It could be considered in future based on its usefulness and popularity.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts and based out of Auckland, New Zealand. He also posts regularly to Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus

However, the generous folx at Netconcepts have encouraged me to continue as one of the group blog writers herein, so you can continue to expect to see articles from me coming through this pipe!

Hope everyone had great holidays and here’s hopes for a Happy New Year (with increasing commerce, too)!

Related posts:

1. Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
2. Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
3. Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
4. WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
5. Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
6. Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
7. 60-Second Website Audit
8. Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
9. Key to Relevance: Title Tags
10. Brief Posting Hiatus