I’m going to outline current beliefs on how brands affect SEO, and how to improve your brand in a way that will effect your rankings. Keep in mind this is a new and emerging aspect of SEO. Most of this is theoretical and based of off general statements from Google and SEO experts. But before we get too deep, a bit of history is needed.

History

Since 2008, Google has been developing search results that delivers better information on brands. In a now, over-quoted statement, CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Brands are the solution, not the problem … Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Around March 2009, Google’s update, called the “Vince” update, seemed to favor the big brands. We saw brands that were well known suddenly jump out of obscurity and into search engine lime light. At the end of 2009, personalized results became universal, whether you were signed in or not (I’ll explain how this effects brands later). Around April of 2010, we saw Google experimenting with displaying brands in search results. In December of 2010, it was announced that Social Media is also now being used as a ranking factor in search results (again, I’ll explain this in a bit).

Some of these changes are still noticeable today, some are less prominent or gone altogether. Regardless, you can see that Google has been trying to perfect their rankings of brands over the past several years, and there are no signs of stopping.

Impact of Changes

Clearly, no one is going to argue with branding being a critical part of any marketing campaign. Nevertheless, it does seem to get forgotten sometimes when I discuss SEO as part of that marketing plan with clients. If you want a lot of success in SEO, brands will eventually play a part. For example, let’s talk for a minute about personalized results. A part of the intent of this change was to help display brands that you recognized and clicked on more often at the top of the search results. In other words, if your visitors recognize your site, and click on it more often then other sites, you will be displayed higher in search results for those visitors. Sounds like a branding push to me.

Brands and Ranking Factors

OK, here is the meat that some of you were probably looking for. Again, I have to put my disclaimer here. These are not concrete measurements that are definitely used by search engines, but best guesses based on expert opinions:

• Domain Age
• Anchor text used in links (i.e. “click here” or “keyword” vs. “brand name”)
• Anchor text links using the domain name
• References to brand on other shopping portals, such as Amazon, or even Google Shopping
• Social Media Mentions
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Possibly others (Digg, Reddit, etc.)
• Presence on Social Media Platforms (with followers/subscribers):
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Linked-In
• Part of related government and private institutions (e.g. BBB)
• Members of the Industry Trade Organization or equivalent
• Non-link mentions and Brand Repetition (e.g. news articles, information sites, authoritative pages etc.)
  • News
  • Blogs
• Brand searches (i.e. someone searching for “Dell” or “Apple” as opposed to “laptops”)
• Online Ads (NOT paid links)
• Traditional media outlets – no really. Is there evidence that you advertise in the “real world”?
• Patents, Licenses and Government Documents
• Verified address

For more ideas and current changes in the search engines, subscribe to our blog.

The How-to

Here are some ideas on how to implement some of the above principles, or to just advance your brand in general.

• Tweet. And update Facebook. Often. However, remember to not only tweet, but also tweet something worth tweeting about. There are numerous studies and examples of how one bad tweet can ruin a brand.
• Make your articles, videos or viral content easier to tweet and share. There are now a myriad of buttons and options that will make tweeting something incredibly easy and painless (e.g. AddThis).
• Link build to your site using more than just keywords. A good brand will be linked to using the brand name. Don’t get so caught up in link building with good anchor text that you forget your own brand.
• Integrate your traditional media marketing with SEO. For example, suggest in a media print ad to have someone search on your brand. This could create more searches for your brand, making a stronger suggestion to Google that you are, in fact, a brand.
• If you sell products, consider putting these into Google shopping. Also consider other portals and resources, including Amazon.
• Write press releases when possible. The better the news you have to report, the more successful your releases (and brand awareness) will be.
• Leverage existing visitors or customers. For example, in your newsletter, encourage (or provide a link) advocates of your brand to do searches on particular keywords. With the personalized searches, you’re helping to cement your place in the top spots (this also increases Click-through rates which is believed to be a ranking factor).
• Do PPC. It’s not going to directly effect rankings (as promised multiple times by Google), but it will increase your visibility and make your more trusted. In fact having PPC and SEO on the first page has shown to increase click-through rates and conversions.

Here is the final word: Brands have been on the radar at Google for a long time. Experts are starting to see more of a push towards this metric and expect for it to become a more prominent ranking factor in the near future. It’s best to pay attention and, even better, make branding an integral part of your online strategy.

Have other ideas? I’d love to hear them! Post them in the comments below.

Why Big Brands Influence SEO and How Small Brands Can Benefit is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

It happens all the time, and causes me to scratch my head in complete confusion every time: Someone I’m working with on SEO will own multiple domains for the same business. I don’t mean that they have a couple related domains, I mean the same business and same offerings or services on more than one domain.

I usually find out about these domains in one of two ways: I find them through poking around and investigating the site (and the client usually acts like it’s some sort of dirty secret), or, they come to me about the domains and want more than one site to show up at the top of the search results.

I’ll be honest, I’m not usually a happy camper when I get this news; mostly because the secondary domains tend to have duplicate content (if you’re not aware, duplicate content is a bad thing). That being said, however, there is such thing as effectively using multiple domains (although I don’t recommend it). There are two main tactics commonly employed with owning multiple domains. Keep in mind that I’m going to keep an SEO perspective on these and only lightly touch on other marketing sectors.

The Defensive Domain Buyer

Some businesses are worried that competitors will buy keyword oriented domains thereby pushing their own site into obscurity. This can lead to a panic shopping spree of domains. The idea is that as long as they own the available domains, there is less chance of a competitor beating them in the rankings. While there is some merit to this tactic, it will have no effect on your SEO at all. Nor do I believe that it will really have much effect in blocking out your competitors. You can’t think of all the domain variations and buy them all, and if you buy too many, it can get expensive just to maintain them. Any competitor can rank better by offering better content and getting more links regardless of domain name.

As a side note, if you do this tactic, you had better make sure that all of your domains are redirected toward your main domain using a 301 redirect.

The First Page Domination Strategy

In buying multiple domains, some companies want to simply dominate the search results. Buy having multiple sites on the first page, you can get that much more traffic, right? In theory, yes, and it has on occasion happened. However, there are some fairly serious drawbacks to this:

• Doesn’t work on brick-and-mortar stores — If you have  a single physical location, it’s not a good idea to have multiple websites. You’ll confuse your visitors and customers, and I personally avoid having two websites with the same address. Google doesn’t want to have multiple sites from the same business (as it doesn’t provide good results) and I consider this to be one short step away from spam.
• Duplicate content woes — Because you can’t use the content from another site, you will have to write all new content. Considering how hard it is to write content for sites as it is, not to mention the allocation of resources to get it written, I wish luck to anyone writing content for a whole new site.
• Double branding all the way! — You have branding issues with two sites. Does one site become higher-end and the lower-end? Do you keep the prices the same? For that matter, what names are you even going to use on the site? If you have a phone number, how do you answer the phone? While there are certainly going to be exceptions (such as targeting different demographics), such a chaotic and divisive branding effort comes with a lot of risks and extra work.

Country Specific Domains

This is less of a tactic, and more of a “must do,” and is therefore my exception to multiple domains. It’s an exception because all of the problems above do not apply when you get into other countries. In fact, in order to have the best results in international SEO, you’ll need to have a country specific TLD (or top level domain). For example, if you’re doing business in England, you will have a hard time ranking without a .co.uk domain. You can still rank without a country level TLD, but it’s an uphill battle. And by uphill, I mean Rocky Mountains-type uphill.

SEO Resources and Indented Listings

One final (and big) point to that I would like to reiterate. If you really intend to own and run multiple domains and get these sites to show up in the search results, you will have to double your SEO work. There are no shortcuts, freebies, or quick rankings that you can get, even if you are already ranking well for your main domain. In fact, a new domain and site will be significantly harder to rank than a site that has history and some authority already built. I highly recommend that indented listings (or secondary pages for the same site showing up underneath the first main listing) be the primary goal before attempting to achieve multiple domains in the same search.

Why Multiple Domains are Mostly Bad for SEO is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This tactic is not really new. In fact, it’s quite old by Internet and SEO standards (being a couple years now). Nevertheless, I see the problem of bad data flowing into Google analytics with enough regularity that I think this deserves some review.

Don’t Blindly Trust your Data

Too often, webmasters and even Internet marketers put too much trust into the data that their Google Analytics accounts are reporting; especially if they see traffic increasing.

For example, I recently ran across an account that looked like it just exploded with additional visits and revenue from organic sources.

From every angle I was looking at, it simply looked like everything was working the way it should. Organic traffic was up, PPC was up, even direct traffic and referral traffic was looking great.

However, it was just too good to let it go without investigation. It wasn’t until I looked at the PPC accounts that I noticed anything was wrong. The PPC account was turned on the very same day that the traffic started to spike. In fact, the traffic graphs were pretty much identical, showing a strong correlation between the PPC being turned on and the traffic we saw coming in.

It was clear that something was off. WAY off. But was it Google’s fault? Not really. Turns out their PPC wasn’t being associated with their account, effectively skewing the organic results.

Now we get to the fun part, where I fixed the problem. In order to make sure that the traffic was pure coming into Google analytics, I changed all of the URLs in their PPC account to tracking URLs, using Google’s URL builder. Let’s look at how we build these URL’s.

Google Analytics and Tracking URLs

The good news is that this is a really automatic process, and only requires a few bits of information (once you get the hang of it, you may not even need to use the builder). You’ll need to input the following information:

• Website URL – Input your desired landing page URL
• Campaign Source – Type in where your visits will be coming from. If it’s going to be Yahoo’s PPC, then type in Yahoo.
• Campaign Medium – Here you want to the medium that is sending the traffic to your site. If it’s a banner ad, then type in “banner”. If it’s cost per click advertising with Bing or Yahoo (or even Google), then type in “cpc”.
• Campaign Name – Type a name that will help you distinguish the traffic from other campaigns and stay organized.

The other two options, Campaign Term and Campaign Content will allow you to distinguish a keyword you want associated with the particular landing page and the content of the ad used.

Results

Once I fixed the URLs and inputted them into the PPC campaign, the Analytics data seemed to return to normal. Note how the traffic drastically changed once the change was made:

Other Applications

Sometimes, when I share this awesome URL builder with others, they think it’s just for PPC purposes. It’s actaully robust enough to handle just about any marketing effort. Here are some common uses:

• Banner Ads
• Newsletters
• Email Marketing
• PDF Files and Brochures
• Sponsored listings (not paid links!)
• Social Media campaigns (such as twitter tweets)

If you have any other ideas on how to use this nifty, sometimes underrated tool, leave a comment.

Building Tracking URLs for Google Analytics is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I recently ran across a video of athletes literally running on water. I saw the video, passed it on (with a fair degree of skepticism), pondered on its implications. Running! On water!

Then, once I got over how cool it looked (and stopped trying to figure out if I could do this myself), I did some Googling. Sure enough it’s not only fake, but an advertising campaign. Now my Internet marketing (and Video SEO) brain kicks in and this video becomes amazing again, but for different reasons. In just one month, it had nearly 4 million views. Here it is, if you haven’t seen it yet:

Where does the marketing come in? For just a second, there’s a close-up shot of the shoes they use to perform the impossible feat. Just a couple seconds, barely noticeable by most standards. Certainly short enough to make marketing directors cringe.

Nevertheless, you can’t argue with four million views. While the impact on sales is yet to be seen, let’s take a look at some other highly successful videos and see why they worked so well in gaining so many views.

Honda Rube Goldberg Machine

Let’s face it, who doesn’t love watching these machines? There’s something about the ridiculous absurdity of having so many parts to accomplish one simple task that simply fascinates us. The genius in this particular video, however, is in how well they effectively demonstrate the car’s functionality. The machine is made up completely of parts from a Honda vehicle, and they keep the machine going by using features found on the car. For example, the windshield wipers turn on automatically from a water stream.

Guitar Hero on a Bike

Guitar Hero and related music based games have seen huge popularity and success in the past decade (hey, I’m a big fan myself). This video takes the concept into a real life situation where a full music track is ridden over on a bike in nearly perfect sync to the song. The beauty of this video is how realistic it looks. You watch the video wondering how long it must have taken to get perfect. Its only downfall is when it was revealed that the dots were added in afterward using special effects. Even with this minor shortcoming, you still hear a song featured in Guitar Hero and see what the game play would look like.

OK Go Music Video

First of all, yes, I consider this a viral Marketing Video. Why? Because this video helped put the band ‘OK Go’ on the map. With 51 million views to date, it can only be estimated how many singles were sold. I never knew they existed before this video found its way into my inbox. It works because of its simplistic and comedic effect of grown men dancing on treadmills. It’s creative, simple, and it looks like it was done in the basement of one of their homes. It also lets viewers hear their song giving them more exposure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI&feature=channel (Imbed not available – Sorry!)

Stolen Nascar Video

This video is a little bit under the radar in terms of total views, but I liked this marketing campaign because of who did it. It was from Taxbrain.com, which takes on the boring topic of taxes (obviously). It’s hard to come up with a good viral video for some topics, but this company proves that it’s possible even for the not-so-obvious industries. They took the resources that were available to them, created a video that would cause some buzz, and got a great amount of exposure. Notice in particular the amount of times the domain Taxbrain.com is mentioned.

LED Sheep

Samsung also jumped onto the bandwagon recently by creating a video of sheep covered in LEDs. The shear absurdity of plastering sheep in LED’s and then herding the sheep to create moving images is enough to arouse the interest in any bored Internet surfer. Plus, the recreation of the Mona Lisa from the LEDs is also an impressive demonstration of the technology behind LED’s televisions. With a URL for Samsung at the end of the video, this video becomes a complete marketing viral video, and then sits back to enjoy its 12 million views over the next year.

Laptop Catching

While a little crude, this is still a great viral video at more than 3 million views. The concept is a couple of guys catching an MSI laptop in their butt cheeks. Even though it’s obviously fake (but real looking enough to be entertaining), the real value in this video, and why I mention it, is because it is a successfull takoff of another video that was also viral (which was a video of a guy impossibly catching sunglasses on his face). Creating parodies of other videos is a great way to piggyback the success of already existing videos.

Will it Blend

It seems hardly appropriate to mention viral videos without mentioning the now famous Blendtec “Will it Blend” videos. It’s probably gotten to the point where any internet marketer groans when they hear mention of these videos, but they persist in providing a near perfect example of viral marketing. It’s so good because:

1. They are entertaining while effectively giving viewers a literal demonstration of their product.

2. They show off their seriously powerful blenders.

3. They are not isolated to one video, but there are now hundreds of these videos. Usually, “sequels” to viral videos fail horribly, but the “Will it Blend” concept will stay fresh as long as there are items to blend.

4. They are very easily created to match current trends. For example the video below takes advantage of the release of the iPad and subsequently getting 6.5 million views in one month. From an SEO perspective, this is brilliant as these videos will show up for searches for the iPad.

A few take aways from the videos above:

• Create videos that demonstrate your product or service if possible
• Be creative with your resources.
• Create parodies of already existing videos, incorporating your business or service
• Videos should be entertaining by either being comical, or impressive (such as running on water)

I’m on a Horse

Finally, I leave you with another viral video that I found to be a personal favorite (It doesn’t quite make the list because it’s an outright commercial, but it still had a viral great presence on the Web).

Walk on Water with Viral Video is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Hopefully, we should all know that websites need good, relevant content in order to be successful at SEO. The better your content is, the more likely it will be to show up in search engines and naturally attract links to your site. Additionally, fresh content is a major factor that plays a role in search engine rankings (which was recently confirmed by Google’s patent application).

Perhaps it would be best to explain using an example. In one of the websites that I own, I noticed a huge drop in my traffic from organic search (note the graph from my Google Analytics account). It wasn’t a slow progressive drop, nor did I see it coming. It was just a simple, out-of-the-blue loss of traffic. I researched a bit, and it only took a couple minutes to find out why. My #1 keyword for generating traffic was no longer ranking on the first page.

Naturally, that’s a huge concern as a website owner. Fortunately for me, I don’t really use this site beyond the occasional SEO experiment, but for a site owner that relies on organic traffic to generate income, it could be nothing short of catastrophic.

Nevertheless, it provided a powerful example of the need for fresh content. This particular website was a blog, and I hadn’t updated for almost 4 months. I have no doubt that other sites competing for my keywords were updating more regularly. I went into my site and submitted a blog post a few days after the sudden drop. It wasn’t much – just a “sorry I haven’t posted anything lately” post. It was a simple effort to put in something new.

The result was a complete return of the rankings and traffic (and then some):

Of course, not every site is a blog that will need to be updated weekly. Some sites could possibly go for years without actually needing an update. Nevertheless, don’t neglect your site. Here are some final points and bits of advice for making sure your content is fresh:

• If necessary, regularly perform a site review of all the content on your site. Does it still make sense? Is it up to date with any changes in the industry?
• Make sure that you have a blog and that you update it regularly.
• Don’t make small changes just to keep the search engines pacified. They look for sites that are more “fresh”, and small changes might not be enough.
• Making changes does not mean building a new website. Just add a page, or update a couple pages.
• Make sure to watch your competition. You want to get a sense for how often the industry updates so that you can make sure to stay with the trend. If you update less than other websites, you run the risk of losing rankings.

The Value of Fresh Content is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Hold your horses. Slow and steady wins the race. Some things just shouldn’t be rushed. Rushing into SEO, for example, just causes confusion, poor or temporary results, and probably a loss of mental health.

This message is easily lost in a world where information is sought after aggressively and life moves at a breakneck pace. Speed is expected, and new ways to increase speed are appearing every day. Even search engines have adopted the goal of delivering instant news and information with real time indexing.

As an SEO specialist, the realistic time frame for doing SEO can be frustrating. No matter how hard I work on certain priorities right now on a site, I may not see the results until as much as three months down the road. Because of this time frame, there are a couple important items to note for both SEO companies and SEO clients.

SEO Companies: As an SEO specialist, it is important for me to slow down enough to make sure I look at where I’m going. If you keep your head down while running at a full sprint, you may look up one day to realize that you are lost. In other words:

• Mistakes now, mean little or no progress later.
• Spend enough time to select the right keywords, because adjustments could take months.
• Build links to the right keywords right away to get results as soon as possible.

SEO Clients: Sometimes I’ll research prices online for a particular item, find a lower price, but then buy it in a store anyway, because I don’t want to wait for the shipping. SEO doesn’t work this way. Most SEO firms will have you pay now, then pay again, and you probably won’t see the results until the SEO starts gaining traction about three to six months into the campaign. Because of this, when you are paying for SEO, you have to be patient and wait for delivery. You have to slow down and consider your long-term goals.

By slowing down, I don’t mean that you can be lazy or stop working hard. There is still plenty to do and certainly a need to be urgent and diligently involved. Just make sure to stop along the way to look up, get your bearings, and smell the virtual roses along the way.

Stop! Smell Some Roses Already! is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Google just launched a new feature that works in conjunction with its toolbar. Called the “SideWiki”, it allows ANY visitor to make a comment on ANY site. At first glance, I thought this was a really innovative feature that would expand the experience of internet searchers and would allow for an interactive experience on any website or page.

For some searchers, there is a real benefit added. Imagine, for example, going to a company’s website that you’ve never heard of before. You’re not sure if you can trust it, but you are able to read comments by other site visitors who comment on the service or products offered. Just as we trust our friend’s recommendations, comments on a website could sway visitor’s decisions to purchase. For the website owner, these comments could help to improve the site and also provide valuable unsolicited feedback. Bugs and errors could be reported, questions could be asked and answered by visitors and all of this information could possibly be posted on the site, increasing the overall value to visitors.

However, just after a few hours, there are already some serious concerns. First, there isn’t any way for the site owner to control the comments on the page (other than being able to create a permanent post that appears above other entries or blocking visitors who use sidewiki altogether). That presents a potential PR nightmare. Going back to our imaginary example, you are now the site owner. Knowing that people can make any comment on your site, without moderation, suddenly seems as if you’ve got an angry mob in front of your house. What can you do when a dissatisfied client (of which most companies have at least a couple) decides to go on a tirade on your very own site?

In a real life example, a well-know Marketing expert, Seth Godin recently posted on his blog promoting a new service. It was rather controversial post and it was a perfect opportunity for most savvy internet marketers to express their opinion with this new medium. Even though comments were turned off on the post, those in disagreement with the post were still able to voice their arguments. Here are a few examples:

“Back away from this idea, quickly, please

It’s not a “neat” idea to do something for a brand without asking and then effectively try to exploit $400 per month out of them. To me, what you’re pitching seems right in there with domain squatting.”

“This is strange

And I’m not even sure it’s legal. I reeks of arrogance, desperation and ignorance of basic reputation management principles. Why swim with sharks for the low, low price of $400/month when there are plenty of other avenues for brands to maintain messages and dialogue with customers?

Smart brands will ignore this effort.”

I personally am scared about the direct effects of having customers post any comment they want on my site, but I also see the benefits. Ultimately, a good site will have good comments. I think every site will have at least a few bad apples, but these comments will allow me to know immediate responses to posts and changes to a site, allowing me to react faster to potentially damaging situations. For example, Seth posted the following blog post in reaction to many of these comments.

Regardless of how you may feel about the feature, I strongly recommend installing SideWiki to monitor your sites. If you don’t listen to what is being said about your business, there could be some serious damage to your brand and your business.

For a full list of features, you can visit the Google support page, or Search Engine Land’s article

Google SideWiki – Benefits, Concerns & Dangers is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The dust has all but settled on the now somewhat recent news of Matt Cutt’s announcement that the rel=”nofollow” no longer works for Pagerank sculpting. (If you haven’t heard, check out Matt’s post here.) At first, there was an awful lot of confusion and I can only feel sorry for Matt for having to answer the same questions repeatedly. Nevertheless, it’s now pretty clear the implications of the announcement.

First, to understand the basic concept of Pagerank sculpting as it effects the rel=”nofollow” attribute, many SEOs and webmasters wanted to force Pagerank to “flow” to certain pages and not others. For example, a page about widgets would be much more important to a website owner than the privacy policy page. The rel=”nofollow” attribute was a simple tag that one could place on a link that stopped it from passing Pagerank. The site owner would instead pass it to more important pages.

PageRank sculpting was thought of as a useful tactic until Google changed its algorithm. Now a page that is tagged with a rel=”nofollow” tag no longer gives its Pagerank to other pages. Instead that Pagerank simply doesn’t get passed at all. You can no longer force Pagerank into your more important pages.

Of course that has some real implications on how we should handle our SEO. In a recent video interview, Matt Cutts made a couple of recommendations:

• First, use the rel=”nofollow” tag on links going away from your site that cannot be vouched for. For example blog comments, or forum posts where users might post links. Other user-generated content may be considered for outgoing links.
• Secondly, he strongly recommended not using the tag on any pages of your site, but to let the Pagerank flow through even your less important pages. He was asked the question if these tags should be removed. While not stated specifically, it was implied that the tags should be removed from sites.

The mentality behind this change, in my belief, is another step in making the rankings of websites more natural, preventing use of artificial means. Some might see this as a negative change, but Matt mentioned that this was implemented over a year before it was announced. The fact that no one noticed indicates to me that there really won’t be much of an effect on actual rankings.

Another Look at rel="nofollow" is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I don’t know everything. I’m really, really close though. In fact, I pretty much have everything down except for the finer points of string theory. That, and how Roland Emmerich (Director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) was able to make more movies after the Godzilla catastrophe.

In all honesty, there are actually a lot of things that I don’t know, and more importantly, a lot of things that I can never know. Like Women. It’s just the nature of the universe.

Here are three items that SEO’s just don’t know, and CAN’T know. It’s not that we don’t want to know them; it’s just that they are either kept secret from us by the search engines, or it is a physical impossibility (meaning we can’t look into the future).

1. Google’s Algorithm. We don’t really “know” Google’s, or any search engine’s algorithm. When it comes to actual calculations, or how a search engine brings up a specific listing, we don’t know anything specific. Search engines keep it an extremely closely guarded secret. Some SEOs suspect that even if we did obtain access to the algorithm and code, it wouldn’t change our practices anyway, so there’s no point in trying.
2. When a site will rank. This should be obvious, but it is still a big issue for many site owners. When it comes down to it, we have no certain knowledge of any timeline for SEO to work. Any estimates that SEOs provide are based off of past experience and successes. Even then, the ranges can vary greatly, especially from industry to industry. Some sites see (some) progress in a month or two, others take as long as 6 months to a year.
3. Where a site will rank. Anyone who claims to get you to a specific position in Google is lying. For that reason, be extremely cautious of guarantees and promises incorporated with SEO contracts (look at my earlier post about shady SEO deals). Just like the timeline for when you will rank, we can create estimates (never guarantees) for where your site will finally place.

Any rational person may think, “You don’t ‘know’ anything!” In response, I reply, “That is true.” Except that these are the things that SEO experts DO know:

1. We know what Google and other search engines are looking for. Google wants relevant results that motivate surfers to return to the search engine. We understand Google’s guidelines, from information provided from the search engine, as well as from years of testing and experimentation.
2. We know that good SEO Practices WILL make a site rank. Although the timeline might be hard to pin-point, if work is put into the site, and the right SEO practices followed, ranking is the natural by-product
3. No one can claim that a site will be #1 in Google, as there are numerous factors that play into that, many of which are unknown or misunderstood. Be careful thinking that you should be #1, because sometimes it’s just not possible.
4. Your rank will be better with SEO than without. You absolutely will see results from SEO.

What SEOs DON’T Know is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

My Dad is a doctor. Not just any doctor, but a surgeon. A good surgeon. Nevertheless, my siblings and I sometimes had the gall to advise our dad on health related matters. For example, trampolines were of the devil in my family, but we jumped on one every chance we got. Even when I badly twisted my ankle, proving their evil nature, I wouldn’t be convinced that I could hurt myself.

I remember once when my sister got scraped and my Dad attempted to clean the wound and cut off dead skin. My sister gave a hissy fit and wouldn’t let him touch her, in fear that it would hurt. I recall the look of frustration on my father’s face (which almost comes as a sense of accomplishment for a kid).

Every now and then (call it karma), I get the same treatment. I am specially trained and keep up-to-date on internet marketing and SEO. Still, people (the very same who come to me for advice) have a natural tendency to either disregard, or supersede my advice with their own knowledge. Or lack thereof. It would be comical if it didn’t get on my nerves.

Here are the top reasons we don’t do the SEO that we should (and why we should get over it):

1. The perfectionist. Websites become an art-form. That’s fine; nothing is wrong with your website being pretty. Just don’t get so involved in the esthetics of your site, that it gets in the way of making practical business changes. A good-looking site means absolutely nothing if it won’t be seen by anyone, or convert to leads or sales. Make sure that you have a clear, noticeable call-to-action. And no whining if it messes up the “fung shui” of the website.

2. But this guy said… Most of the time, two opinions will agree with each other and be based off of good principals. Sometimes not so much. Some SEOs have outdated information, as the industry changes rapidly and constantly. Someone who read a book five years ago isn’t going to be as capable as one who stays abreast of industry changes. Also to consider, the advice from an SEO expert may not make sense when taken out of context.

3. It’s not that important. A lot of SEO tactics may appear small or insignificant. After all, how much difference will it make to change a single word on just one page of a site? Honestly, it won’t make a big difference. However, once you start adding up all the small things, they speak louder.

4. It’s too hard! First of all, it’s probably not that hard. There have been situations where I thought something would take hours, and a coworker shows me how to perform the work in a mere five minutes. Some web changes will be unavoidably inconvenient though. It’s not fun having to rearrange the whole site structure. Especially when it only helps a little bit. Now think long term. The benefits will last for as long as you keep the site. It might hurt now, but the advantages will be  noticeable.

5. It’s too expensive! On occasion, I begin working on a brand-new, fresh, out-of-the-box website, and have to tell the proud owners that their site is practically unusable for SEO. Having spent considerable money on design, they have a difficult time spending additional funds to resolve blaring SEO problems. In these cases, remember that the money already spent is a sunk cost. Consider the benefit of fixing the problems, and receive a return on the costs, rather than cry over the spilled milk.

No Rankings for You! is a post by SEO expert Scott Smoot. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.