“Hey everyone! We’re jacking up your rates. Now give us some love!”
-Netflix

Then they followed it up with this epic announcement:

“Hey guys, sorry about that rate thing. We really didn’t have a choice because the cost of content is skyrocketing. But check out this new Qwickster thing!”
-Netflix

If you’ve watched the stock price over the past several months and the disappearance of their profits you know they have certainly paid a price for their stupidity. As I watch Google’s recent decisions it’s as if I’m watching a slow moving freight-train headed for a cliff. It’s a Netflix moment, but in super-slow-mo.

I recently commented that Google was getting an little too big for their britches. Here is more proof: Google is now going after sites with too many ads above the folds of their web pages by penalizing their search rankings. You’d think before such an announcement they’d at least take a look in the mirror:

On your standard, run-of-the-mill SERP page, there are ads everywhere. Even in the non-ad area, half the links above the fold are to Place pages which are Google product. You can even see blue markers in the map at the top-right of the page that are ads. Don’t get me wrong, I hate ad-heavy sites as well. And increasingly, I’m disliking Google’s ad-too-heavy search engine result pages. Of the 73 things I counted that you can click on, only 17 were either not ads or not links to other Google products or pages. That’s less than 25% of non-Google content on a SERP. That, my friends, is the only reason Google’s stock price has increased over the past several years.

Google, it’s time you looked at yourself in the mirror. If you don’t you’re going to end up like Netflix. It was the techy, early-adopters that made you. When they move on to the next shiny new object, it’ll be the same group that unmakes you.

If you go, right now, to a group on LinkedIn that you are a member of you can see what I am talking about. Plenty of people making noise, plenty of people posting links to their blog posts and offering to trade “Likes” on Facebook. Go look at some of the small business pages you “Like” on Facebook. Is anyone posting to them besides the small business themselves? More likely, the page is filled with randomly posted promotions, links, and other noise.

I’m not writing this post, typing away on my Mac, with my hands entirely clean myself. If you checked out my page on Facebook you’ll see a lot of noise there as well. At least I don’t advertise myself as someone that does social marketing. I’m not very good at it and I don’t pretend to be. I don’t play a social media expert on T.V. and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night either. But social signals (not social noise) are playing a much more important part of SEO.

One of my goals in 2012 is to learn how to create more signals and much less noise. I hope you will join me.

If you have any questions about anything in the video, leave a comment below.

Transcription via SpeechPad.

Hello everyone, my name is Brandon Shoupe with Strategy6 and welcome to a Strategy6 SEO strategy session.

Today we’re going to be talking about what sort of SEO services typically are included as part of a website development project, not only projects done by Strategy6 but also projects done by many reputable website developers across the world.

Typically, the number one concern that people have when they approach me about me developing them a new website is, how much is it going to cost? Sometimes, though, and it’s getting to be more so recently, here lately, the number one concern, but most of the time, still, the number two concern is, “When someone does a search on Google, is my website going to come up?” That’s a great question.

Everybody knows about Google and everybody knows that if you’re going to look for a plumber or a new camera, the first thing you’re going to do is go to Google and start researching.

So, business owners know that it’s important to rank for important keywords. So, that’s usually a very big concern. Really, what the question is, and sometimes they come out directly and ask it, “Are SEO services part of your website development service?”

In other words, “Are you going to perform search engine optimization on my website, so that when I put it up, and someone does a search, is my website going to come up?” The answer to that question is “yes.” The longer answer is “yes but.” And today, we’re going to mainly be talking about the “but” part of that answer.

Let’s go back. Let’s say you’re the client and you come to me and you say, “Brandon, I want to do a great website and you do a great job. Is SEO part of what you do? Can you help me rank in Google?”

And I’m going to say “yes” like many web developers, but the services I’m going to be providing as part of the website development project is what’s called “on-site optimization.” On-site optimization is essentially, taking the key words, and most of the time, the key words are the key words that you supply me, and using them strategically in your website.

Let’s give an example of your home page. You’re a blue widget manufacturer. So we use those keywords strategically on your website, essentially, giving you a chance to come up for that keyword in Google. I could use, “blue widget.” I could use that key word in the title tag.

If you have an old version of Internet Explorer, it’s the blue bar at the top. I could use “blue widget” in the H1 tag, which is usually the big bold headline on any webpage.

I could use it strategically in the copy, just throw out a different variation of it, “big blue widgets.” I could have “big blue widgets” and bold that, making sure that Google knows that that’s really important. So I’m going to bold that text and, that way, it’s going to help me rank little bit better.

I could do something funny down here in the footer, “We love big blue widgets,” and I can use different variations of the key word, “small blue widgets,” “medium blue widgets” over here on the sidebar.

There’s a lot of things I could do to influence Google and essentially give Google a better idea of what this page is all about. Hopefully, it will rank for “blue widgets.”

But, sometimes, and this is mainly a bigger deal in more competitive verticals on the Internet, that’s not enough. In fact, it’s getting to be, these days, most of the time, that’s not enough. If you’re really going to be number one on Google and everybody wants to be number one, then you’ve got to put a little more into it.

Typically, these services that you really need are not included as part of a web development project. Keyword research is incredibly important, just spending a few hours getting to know what people are searching for on the Internet.

If you’re squeezing your web developer on costs or they really don’t know what they’re talking about, then keyword research never really enters into part of the project.

To give you a little more information about how important that can be, I can look at and tell you, blue widgets are extremely competitive. We’ve got a brand-new website, Big Blue Widget Manufacturing Company out of Boston has been manufacturing blue widgets since the 1800s.

They’ve had a website since before Al Gore even created the Internet. So, we’re really behind when it comes this keyword. It’s going to be really tough to rank. A lot of companies out there all across the world are making blue widgets. It’s going to be tough for us to rank.

So, I do a little research and I find that, yes, there is a market for blue widgets that are made in America and nobody is really going after that keyword. Maybe that is a tactic that we should do on our website. Maybe we should go after the “made in America,” patriotic crowd of blue widget buyers.

Maybe I could look for “Southern blue widgets,” or “blue widgets made in the Northeast” or “blue widgets made in Vermont.” I don’t know. Maybe there is enough search volume for those longer tail key words, and maybe there’s not enough people competing for those keywords, that we could put them on our webpage and we won’t be getting as much traffic as there aren’t as many people searching for blue widgets.

There’s not that many searches for “made in America blue widgets,” but there are still some search volume and maybe we can be number one in that. Maybe we can get some traffic coming to our website and maybe we can convince people to buy.

Competitive analysis, is almost never part of, especially, a very tight budget web developer project. What are your competitors doing and how are they promoting their website? How are they promoting blue widgets? Where are they getting links from?

Content creation. This is always an ongoing aspect of search engine optimization. Essentially, great content, at its very core, is SEO. That’s what it’s all about. Google has an incentive. They want to supply their customers, which are the people performing searches on Google with great content.

If you go to Google and you can’t find anything worth reading or worth looking at, eventually you’re going to start going to Bing, and that’s a last thing Google wants. So Google wants to send you to great content.

So is your content epic? Do you have epic content on your website? If not, then you really need to beef this up. This is something that, even if you do have epic content, you have to keep working at everyday. So, this is an ongoing marketing expense. That’s what it’s all about.

Social media. Do you have a social media marketing campaign? I could demonstrate for you if I have to but Google looks for social signals, how many links you’re getting from Twitter.

I had a pretty prominent person on Twitter tweet about a blog post I wrote, couple of months ago. I think it was number three for this keyword, for a couple of days. I’ve since fallen off the first page, but I still get a trickle of traffic.

But, just having that tweet from an important person on Twitter can really boost your search ranking. So, if you don’t have an ongoing social media campaign, you’re not doing everything you need to do when it comes to SEO.

Link building, this is huge. If you get one or two great links from a really quality, authoritative website, it can boost your search rankings incredibly. You could go from not even being ranked to being on the first page, overnight.

So, link building is something that takes time. You have to build relationships with people. You have to write a guest blog posts. It takes a lot of work. So, that’s not going to be included as part of your basic website package.

So, that really explains what you get. Typically, when you’re getting on-site optimization, you’re not getting all of this. So, that gives you something to think about when you’re talking to your web developer about what you are going to get.

It gives you something to think about, the right frame of mind to approach the website. It’s not a one and done. It’s something you’ve got to work at, day in and day out. The companies that do get the highest rankings and, thus, get the most traffic from search engines, and thus get the most sales. So that’s what it’s all about.

One of the things that draws Eric’s ire is the concept of Vanity Metrics. Loosely defined, they are metrics that make you or your business look good, but in reality don’t do anything to help you get closer to figuring out what your business really needs to be doing to grow.

One example of a vanity metric we have used a lot of in the past is Revenue per Website Visitor. While that metric may be interesting and it may make Strategy6 look intelligent, I’m not sure it brought any of my clients any closer to retirement, so to speak. A slightly better use would be to chart the revenue per customer over time, but even then the author states that unless we are using the metric to validate or refute a specific hypothesis, then it still isn’t doing any good.

One way that Strategy6 might use the Revenue per Website Visitor metric going forward will be as follows:

1. Begin by telling the client we hypothesize that if we show potential customers “add-on” options during the checkout process we can increase our revenue per website visitor.
2. Then split the web traffic into two equal groups and show half the add-ons and the other half no add-ons.
3. Finally, look at the Revenue per Website Visitor for the control group and the test group and see if the test group confirms the hypothesis by producing a higher Revenue per Visitor

Split tests are nothing new to SEO or to Strategy6 but after reading Eric’s book, we plan on doing them as much as possible in 2012. Going forward, we will only present metrics that either confirm or refute a previously stated hypothesis. The best part is that they will all be “actionable,” that is they will reveal to my client the correct action they should take going forward. Anything else, according to Eric Ries, is a waste of time to compile and present.

1. Nothing lasts forever

You might think this is cliche, but then you hear so many people on T.V. stating that, “we have entered a new era so this shall continue forever.” Remember the booming housing market a few years back? Or the “new economy” of the late ’90s? The only thing that will last forever is change. The great economy of the 90′s ended. So did the housing market. I guess we can take that as hope for our current economic condition. Even this shall pass.

2. Your family should be your greatest accomplishment

When the end is before you, you won’t wish you had spent more time working each day. You’ll never think about that deal you didn’t do or all the bad moves you’ve made in business and your career. While all that may seem important now, at the end of the line if you can’t say that your family is your greatest accomplishment you’ll be filled with regret in your final moments.

3. The word “data” is plural

Don’t say something like “the data is conclusive” because that’s like saying “the geese is flying” or “the players is playing.” Data is plural, thus “the data are conclusive” is how you’d use it in a sentence. Of course I’m one to be talking, I struggled in grammar as you’ll notice from this blog post

4. Having a sense of humor can be hugely beneficial.

Years ago when I was at Auburn I took a Calculus III test with an insanely difficult problem. I had no recollection of ever seeing the type of problem before. There was no hope of me solving it and I decided to not waste time and proceed with the remainder of the test. To be funny, I took my “best guess” as to the correct answer and jotted “= 5″ to the right of the equation. No work to back up my answer, just “= 5″. I guess my professor thought it was funny as well because I received +5 points for my answer when I got my test back.

5. Software & Electrical Engineers will conquer the earth.

Look around at all the jobs that have been rendered obsolete by software and technology. Even pharmacists will soon go the way of the switch-board operator. The more repetitive your job the sooner it will be replaced by electronic hardware and algorithms. Even in this crappy economy, there is a war out there for talented software developers. If you are skilled in math or have an interest in computers, the web, electronics, you will do well to consider a career in software because there will only be more job opportunities in the future.

As a side-note, re-read #1.

6. Not all beauty pageants are won by the contestant that is the most beautiful, sometimes they are won by the contestant that is the least ugly.

Sometimes there are no good choices, just three or four bad choices. But you still have to make a choice and live with it. Not making a choice is typically the worst choice available.

7. We don’t elect people that will make the best leaders, we elect the people that are best at getting elected.

This is one of the many reasons our country and many of the states are in such a mess. The best person for the job doesn’t always give the best speech nor are they the ones with the wealthiest friends.

8. 50% of success in business is just returning phone calls and doing what you said you would do.

You may or may not be surprised about how many times you’ll conduct business with a person or company and they drop the ball with communication, follow-through, or just flat-out show no interest doing business with you.

9. The Alabama football team has a roughly 9% chance of winning a national championship in any given year.

Alabama has played 118 seasons of football. They have won 13 national championships. That means they have won a national championship 9.07% of all seasons played. Of course historical performance does not guarantee future returns, but I’ll dismiss that fact for now.

10. People will like you much better if you aren’t a jack-ass.

There are a lot of people I like to hang around. None of them are jack-asses.

11. Change the oil in your automobile or the engine will eventually blow up. I’m looking at you, mom.

12. The Russians are evil. See here, here, and here.

13. The education system is designed to employ adults, not teach children.

What? You thought it was all about the children? In any other industry the owner or manager has plenty of authority to fire under-performing workers. In education, it can takes months to fire teachers who get caught doing drugs or even doing students.

14. Most people just don’t give a damn.

If you are still reading this blog post then you are a rare breed. Most people have clicked away by this point.

15. You’ll be much happier if you remember that your spouse is your partner and not your opponent.

16. Higher property taxes don’t make better schools.

Correlation does not equal causation. Better schools are the result of stronger community support. Communities that strongly support their schools are much more likely to give them additional resources through higher property taxes. Throwing dollars at a school-system whose students aren’t taught the value of a good education at home is roughly the equivalent of dousing money with kerosene and lighting it on fire.

It is similar to the fact that children who live in homes with numerous books are smarter. Some people argue that by giving books to families they can make the children smarter. Its as if they think the knowledge from the books will magically leak out and flow into the children. It just doesn’t work this way. Homes with numerous books are usually occupied by families who place a bigger value on knowledge and education. This familial environment is what produces smarter children, not the books themselves.

17. You don’t have to be very smart to be a member of congress. Exhibit A

18. The health insurance system isn’t as much of an insurance system as it is an all you can eat buffet.

Imagine if we purchased groceries the same way we purchased health care. Imagine if all you had to pay when you checked-out was a $20 co-pay for all the groceries you can take with you. If the system were set up that way you’d quickly stop paying any attention to the cost of lobster and steak because all you had to pay was $20.

And what would happen to the real cost of lobster or steak? With more people buying them the actual cost would go through the roof! I can image the cost of a 12 oz. steak would quickly surpass $100 or even $200. Unless lobster could somehow be “farmed” they would probably find their way onto the endangered species list!

And guess what…ever higher grocery costs would mean ever higher grocery insurance deductibles. Before long your grocery insurance deductible would climb from $100/mo to $1,000/mo which would probably be higher than you were originally spending on groceries before grocery insurance was implemented.

You might even be tempted to think, “Damn! Maybe we should just drop our grocery insurance coverage.” But by then you would be hooked because if you dropped it you’d have to pay out of pocket for that $200 steak and that $40 box of corn flakes.

Doesn’t make any sense does it? But that is exactly how we do health insurance.

19. Brushing your teeth before you go to bed is a good idea.

When I was growing up I thought I only needed to brush my teeth once: in the morning. Several cavities later I decided a good old morning and evening brushing would be a good idea.

20. There is no better hobby than reading.

I’ve always loved learning. It’s almost an addiction. The great thing about life is that there is always new books, magazines, and blogs. If you want to know how to get from Point A to Point B you there are maps for that. Books, magazines, blogs, news articles…they are the maps to life. You can do anything or be anyone if you read.

21. If you don’t like who you are or where you are at in life you can change. It isn’t impossible.

I used to be shy, extremely shy. I had my family, my friends, and my comfort zone. Outside of that was a world that I was too timid to step into. I finally just decided that I was going to make new friends, speak in front of large groups, lead people and projects, and biggest of all expect to be accepted by others. Sure, I fumbled around the first several times I had to speak in front of a large groups, but I didn’t stop doing it. I’m still not the most outgoing person at any networking event, but I don’t have to be. Now there are few things more exciting that meeting someone new and learning their story.

22. It’s a good idea to keep a stick of deodorant in your desk at work.

That B.O. smell? Yea that was probably me at some point. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to apply a little deodorant when I was groggily getting ready in the morning. It’s always a good idea to have a back-up plan.

23. The strength of America its economy.

We don’t win battles in the battlefield because we have the bravest soldiers; we don’t succeed at besting our enemies in the cloak and dagger world of espionage because we have the smartest people in the world. We do so because we have the largest economic engine in the world and that affords us the ability to train our soldiers better than any other nation and devote enough financial resources to solve just about any problem there is.

24. The economy is America’s Achilles heel.

We can’t be beaten on the battlefield or in the field of intelligence unless we begin to lose our economic prosperity. Unless things change, we will keep heading in that direction.

25. Pay yourself first, invest, and grow happy.

Don’t look at the amount of money in your checking account and imagine what all you can buy. Always remember to pay yourself first. Put the first X number of dollars in savings. When you have sufficient savings to live off of for a few months, invest in real estate and stocks. Don’t ever dip into your investments to pay for something that will one day be worth nil; cars, motorcycles, boats, and T.V. sets come to mind. The goal is to build up enough in stocks, bonds, and real estate that they generate enough cash for you to live off of. When they do, then you’ll be free to do what you want to for the rest of your life.

26. You can’t be friends with everyone.

I’m pretty easy to get along with and can only think of one person that I cannot stand to be around. But you can never be on friendly terms with everyone. If person X hates or mistrusts person Y, there isn’t any way you can build a strong trusting relationship with both person X and Y because both will distrust you if you get close to the other person.

27. Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.

28. Women, in an ideal world, wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the same dress twice.

29. If your child is just entering elementary school, there is a good chance that he or she will one day have a job that isn’t even invented yet.

I started school in 1984  and now work as a web developer and SEO consultant. There was no web in 1984 and search engines were still a decade away. But I learned math, fractions, how to read, and how to write (poorly). “But I won’t ever use this” is never an excuse for not doing studies. I wish I had known that then. Oh well.

30. Most households have more than one television.

I didn’t do a study, conduct a survey, or read an article or blog post about a study or a survey to figure this out. This fact dawned upon me after we’ve swapped cable companies twice within the past few months. Both times I was asked where the other T.V. was. Both times I received puzzled looks when I told the installer we only had one.

31. I had excellent parenting skills until I had children of my own.

“What that child needs is a good belt on his backside.” I’ve been guilty of saying that and similar statements in my past. Parenting was so easy. All children needed was discipline, I thought, usually in the form of corporal punishment. If raising children was as half as easy as I thought it was…

 32. Success and greatness didn’t rain down from the heavens on America, it came from much toil.

I remember hearing often in elementary school how America was favored and blessed by God and thus would always be prosperous. To my recollection so were the Israelites, but they have spent much of their existence as captives or in foreign lands. No, America isn’t great “just because.” America is great because our ancestors spent their time and blood willing this country into existence out of the bare earth with their bare hands.

This country may have its share of troubles, but it is still the greatest country on earth. Unless we realize that success, prosperity, and greatness don’t just come automatically and we get back to doing the hard work and making the hard decisions required to build a great country, we will begin to rot from the inside out.

If you have installed WordPress’s newish Twenty Eleven theme you may have noticed that it doesn’t support a widgetized menu by default. If you have a project that requires a widgetized menu you’ll have to customize it yourself. But don’t fret, because that is what this blog post will show you how to do.

The first step in doing this is to create a child theme of the Twenty Eleven theme. The reason is because if you customize the Twenty Eleven theme directly and then later update WordPress your customization will be completely blown away and your site will revert back to the default theme.

To create a child theme, navigate to your Themes folder on your WordPress install and create a new folder called “widgetized-twentyeleven.” Then create a style.css file with the following code:

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<pre>/*
Theme Name: Widgetized Twenty Eleven Theme
Theme URI: http://www.projectdomainname.com
Description: Child theme for the Twenty Eleven theme, customized to have a widgetized nav menu.
Author: Your Name
Author URI: http: //www.yourdomainname.com
Template: twentyeleven
Version: 1.0
*/

@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");</pre>

Once you have created this file, upload it to the folder you just created. Then log into WordPress and go to Appearance->Themes and activate the theme titled Widgetized Twenty Eleven Theme. Presto! Your child theme is activated, although it looks just like the default Twenty Eleven theme because we haven’t changed anything yet.

Now you’ll need to download a copy of the header.php file from the actual Twenty Eleven Theme and make one minor change to it. To make the change, find this line of code near the bottom of the file:

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<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary' ) ); ?>

then remove it and replace it with this:

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<pre><?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('MainMenu') ) : ?>
  <p> </p>
<?php endif; ?></pre>

This code is going to drop a widgetized menu into the theme. The name of the menu will be MainMenu, which will create in just a few seconds. For now, save this new header.php file.

Now you are going to create another file named functions.php and place the following code inside:

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<pre><?php
register_sidebar( array(
	'name' => __( 'MainMenu', 'twentyeleven' ),
	'id' => 'sidebar-nav',
	'before_widget' => '',
	'after_widget' => "",
	'before_title' => '',
	'after_title' => '',
) );
?></pre>

After you have created the functions.php file, upload both the functions.php and header.php file to your child theme directory.

If you view your website you’ll notice that now the theme has no navigational menu at all. The reason is because we have changed the theme to drop in a widgetized menu, but we haven’t actually created the menu yet.

To create the menu, in WordPress navigate to Appearance->Menus. On the following page, enter Main Menu on the Menu Name field and click the Create Menu button. Add a page or two to your main menu and press the Save Menu button. Now go to Appearance->Widgets and drag the Custom Menu widget to your newly created MainMenu widget area. Don’t give the Custom Menu a title, just leave it blank. But in the select box, select the Main Menu which you just created and press the Save button.

That’s it. You should now have an easily customizable menu widget for the Twenty Eleven theme.