feed hat blog

Next week members of the Bruce Clay, Inc. crew will be taking a trip to Northern California to attend SMX West. However, the booths and the bars around Santa Clara won’t be the only place BCI will be rep’d next week.

Every month in New York City, a group of entrepreneurs and SEOs come together to hear about the innovative and dynamic ways that Web sites can be improved. Similar events happen in Boston, Denver, Philly and London, too, under the stewardship of Graham Lawlor and his company Ultra Light Startups.

On March 4, Bruce Clay, Inc.’s director, Eastern region operations, Christopher Hart will be at ULS’s SEO for New Websites forum, happy to answer anyone’s questions on SEO for new sites, old sites and everything in between. Details on when and where and how much the event costs can be found on the event page linked to just above.

It’s a big name panel, including the likes of Conductor, Inc.’s Seth Dotterer and Didit founder Kevin Lee. They’ll aim to answer any entrepreneur’s entry level SEO questions. And if you’re at the point that you’ve heard of SEO but don’t know where to start, here are some questions that might help you on your way:

• How much will it cost me?
• Am I going to do a lot of the work?
• What kind of technology is involved?
• How much time should I expect to spend?
• When will I see results?
• What results can I expect to see?
• Where should I start if I want to teach myself the basics?
• How can I tell if I’ve reached the point where I should devote resources beyond myself?

Ultra Light Startups makes all their videos of past events available, in case you’re not able to attend or want to check out the tone and style of these events. By the way, if you were wondering, events like ULS’s and our SEOToolSet Training are excellent places to start, if that’s one of your questions.

BCI’s Christopher Hart Speaking at Ultra Light Startups Next Week was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Read the original here:
BCI’s Christopher Hart Speaking at Ultra Light Startups Next Week

You may have noticed a section called “Hiring!” in the latest edition of the SEOToolSet Newsletter. Yes, exciting times are afoot for Bruce Clay, Inc. in that the company is set for expansion. We have a number of openings for experienced, driven professionals to work from our office locations in Simi Valley, CA and Long Island, NY. If this sounds like you, read on. Oh, and send your resumes or letters of interest to employment-bc@bruceclay.com.

HR Hiring Manager: Are you an HR professional interested in a role at a rapidly expanding company? Bruce Clay, Inc. plans to triple the size of its staff this year, and we’re looking for a recruiter able to identify and bring in qualified candidates. Past experience hiring in the Internet marketing industry and an understanding of SOX compliance is a plus. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

SEO Analyst: Think you’ve got what it takes to be an SEO at Bruce Clay, Inc.? We’d love to add experienced SEO professionals familiar with all aspects of SEO, from keyword research to on-page edits to strategic recommendations, to the BCI family. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Client Liaison: Fancy yourself a diplomat? That, along with strong organization and communication skills, is just what we’re hoping for in a client liaison. This position oversees the schedules and progress of many search marketing projects. He or she works closely with all departments to keep projects rolling and the lines of communication open. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Senior IT Manager: Familiar with Microsoft products and office intranets? With expansion imminent, we’re hankering for a well-seasoned, career-minded IT manager that knows SOX compliance standards. He or she should also have experience with both Microsoft and Apache servers and be able to work in multiple server and e-mail server environments. Familiarity with communication systems is key. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Content Writer: Content writing your thing? Willing to travel around the country? We’re hunting for a writer comfortable working across boundaries, ideally fluent in writing technical specifications, marketing materials and client Web content. Plus, writers often travel to conferences to liveblog events. A working knowledge of social media and other Internet products will certainly come in handy. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Sales Executive: Living in the Big Apple or looking to relocate nearby? How about in the L.A. area? Care to commute to sunny Simi Valley? Bruce Clay, Inc. is looking for sales executives to work from either of our U.S. offices. Our sales executives offer our SEO services and products to prospects and clients. Ideally, candidates will have lots of sales experience and a wide and relevant social network. A solid understanding to search engine marketing, search engines, social media and branding campaigns will be needed for the job.

Senior SEM Analyst: Are you a PPC master? If so, we’re looking for you. Keyword research, ad submission, A/B testing, reporting and monitoring are all part of the daily duties of our PPC professionals. You’ll also require an understanding of marketing concepts, like increasing traffic and driving ROI. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Web Developer: Programming wizardry up your sleeve? We’re keeping our eye out for a developer with at least two years of experience developing commercial sites. Experience in C++, PHP, Python or .NET (C# or VB) is required. Also, experience developing dynamic sites utilizing a database platform is preferred. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Web Analytics Analyst: Are you all about the numbers? A Web analytics specialist at Bruce Clay, Inc. will require in-depth knowledge of Google Analytics and Omniture. He or she would handle client side installation across multiple domains, reporting, site tuning, A/B and multivariate testing and submitting recommendations to clients. This position works out of the Simi Valley office.

Looking for the Best of the Best — Now Hiring! was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Read the rest here: 
Looking for the Best of the Best — Now Hiring!

Interested in learning white hat SEO from the industry’s best?

Learn SEO the right way at Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO training course. Since 2004 we have trained more than 1,000 people in the most current SEO best practices and search engine guidelines.

SEOToolSet® Training is presented by search industry leader Bruce Clay, Inc., the premier SEO training provider for Internet marketing conferences Search Engine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo.

Along with the one-on-one expert training, attendees walk away with their own free copy of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One for Dummies and a one-year subscription to the SEOToolSet suite of diagnostic tools.

The next SEOToolSet Training course will be held February 15-19 in Simi Valley, CA, with both the standard course and advanced certification course being offered.

As Bruce says, everyday is a new day in the SEO industry. Don’t get left behind. Register for SEOToolSet Training today.

Learn SEO from the Expert was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

See original here: 
Learn SEO from the Expert

‘Twas the day before Christmas and white hat SEOs
Were excited for presents with ribbons and bows!
They had been nice, and Santa knew well
They were deserving of gifts and jingling bells!

To the Bruce Clay, Inc. holiday party they came,
Bringing good kin along for the games!
And who but ol’ Santa Clay did appear
With a bag full of fun and love for the New Year!

I just wanted to add one final dash of holiday cheer to the blog before leaving for the long holiday weekend. Here’s a quick handful of fun holiday finds:

• The Bruce Clay, Inc. holiday party was an atomic blast! Check out the picture gallery on Flickr. A special thanks to our in-house event photographer, Tom!
• On the Bruce Clay Australasia blog you’ll find an SEO’s Christmas wish list, and there’s a little something in there for everyone.
• Bloggers with a sense of humor will get a chuckle out of the three wise bloggers.
• If you missed it before, view the Bruce Clay, Inc. office all decked out with lights, garlands and snowflakes!
• Not holiday related but certainly end of the year related, next week the annual Bruce Clay, Inc. Best of Search Conferences will be posted on the blog. See last year’s agenda for an idea of what’s to come.

Happy Kwanzaa! Merry Christmas! To all our friends, happy holidays!

Happy Holidays 2009 was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

Go here to read the rest: 
Happy Holidays 2009

Happy (day before) Halloween! It’s the annual Bruce Clay, Inc. Halloween party today, and as you might know we take this holiday very seriously.

Bruce Clay, Inc. Halloween 2009

Bruce has been out of the country for the last week — out in Milan for SEO ToolSetTraining. We thought we’d give him a proper welcome back to the office. What do you think of our thoughtful decorations?

Turns out I blended right in with a look I like to call mummy turned TP monster.

All that’s to say our cauldron was overflowing with fun! Everybody looked amazing and got into the spirit. You can check out all the costumes as well as some of our luncheon fun on our Halloween 2009 Flickr album.

It’s time for me to go unravel some trouble like only the undead can do. So until we meet again…

Happy Friday, happy weekend and happy Halloween!

Mwahahaha!!

Original post: 
SEO Spooksters!

Danny’s assembled a grizzled group of veteran SEOs. They’re running through intros. Here’s yours:

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Stephan Spencer, President & CEO, Netconcepts
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book

Q: The Canadian portion of our site is under a different root folder but has the same content as the U.S. portion of the site. Is that duplication a problem?

Vanessa: Is it on a .ca site?

No.

Vanessa: Oh…

Stephan: Did you sent the geographic region in Webmaster Central?

No.

Vanessa: Do that first. But you may want to move it to a .ca domain.

Aaron: And redirect the Canada folder to the new domain.

Q: How do you deal with content when it’s been scraped from your site?

Stephan: In the bio of the article, link to the original URL of that article. When it’s ripped off it will be linking to the original version. Try to get all the duplicates to point to the canonical version of that article.

Greg: If you have your site ripped off from a site with more authority, then that site will probably rank for it. But typically that’s not the case.

Rae: If a scraper site is outranking you, you have bad SEO.

Vanessa: File a DCMA.

Aaron: You can use it to your advantage as a name and blame.

Vanessa: Yeah, like, look at this big brand that obviously likes my content.

Bruce: Copyright register your content so you have recourse.

Q: Will bounce rate or time on site ever become a factor in the ranking algorithm?

Vanessa: If you’re talking about analytics data, and Google using analytics data to rank your site, it would be hard for Google to rank things that way because not everyone has Google Analytics on their site. If you think about why you want to rank on search engines, it’s to get people engaged on your site. High bounce rate is a signal that you’re not doing that. That’s a bigger issue to me.

Todd: There are sites where a user clicks through and gets what they want in 10 seconds, then hits the back button. There’s too many cases like this that Google could roll bounce rate into the algorithm. If you have a ridiculously high bounce rate, don’t worry about your ranking. Worry about why you have a ridiculously high bounce rate.

Rae: I would just assume that they use everything. They say they don’t use the analytics data, and maybe they don’t, but the things they can tell about your site are beyond anything we can comprehend. So just assume they know everything.

Greg: There’s a time when your page is around the 12 to 17 position and it’ll jump onto the first page sometimes. We call that the audition period. It’s when Google’s testing your site out in place of something else on the front page position. We’ve found that during that time, if you concentrate on improving bounce rate, it’ll stick on the front page faster.

Bruce: It would be an easily spammed factor.

Danny: Google has lots of ways to cross check the data, though. So they can tell if there’s behavior out of the ordinary.

Q: My site recovered from a Google penalty six months ago for spammy backlinks. Is it safe to launch a sub-domain now?

Unanimous: Adding content won’t hurt you.

Q: What do you think the value of sub-domains in terms of ranking power? In the last few months I’ve noticed that Google has devalued keyword value on sub-domains.

Vanessa: I think that value is mostly in the anchor text of links.

Todd: Think of why you’d use a sub-domain. I don’t think using it just to add another keyword is that useful.

Vanessa: When monitoring someone else’s site, it can be hard to know what really caused the effect you’re noticing. You don’t know what else is happening on the site.

Greg: Any large scale project we do, we typically sub-domain. You don’t want to be overly granular with it — engines don’t like that. It’s seen as spam. But if you have a site with a very large topic base, you’ll find you can rank for head-related terms by breaking top-level categories into sub-domains. It’s also good for brand protection. For your brand name it will give you more listings.

Todd: For your brand, you should have at least two listings: your site and an indented listing. With a couple sub-domains you can have 40 percent of the page.

Q: Any insights on Google Caffeine?

Danny: Google hasn’t really said anything interesting about it yet. They’ve said they’re trying some new crawling, maybe some new ranking things.

Vanessa: I know that Google said it’s primarily an infrastructure change, not a ranking change. Though some people I’ve talked to have noticed a ranking change.

Todd: I’ve seen Universal Search results missing, like video results missing. But generally with ranking, we haven’t seen any big changes.

Greg: I’ve got a tool that collects data on both Google standard and Caffeine every day and have noticed a lot of changes. A trend toward home pages — trying to return the best site, not necessarily the best page.

Bruce: I’ve found pages in Caffeine that are older than the standard index. So it appears that the regular index is updating faster than the Caffeine index. If you see ranking changes, it may be that your competitor has been spidered more recently than yours. It’s hard to compare the two indices because they’re not in sync.

Todd: Keep in mind that the only people that know about Caffeine and are clicking on things are a bunch of search marketers.

Danny: I think Google’s also feeling a lot of pressure over Bing. No one thinks Google does search anymore. This is something they can point to and say, look, we’re still working on search.

Q: Any tips for Google Suggest?

Danny: In some cases you’ll get sites that come up. Typing “rhyme” into the search box suggests www.rhymezone.com.

Aaron: We actually were able to create phrases. If your domain name matches your keyword, you probably get a boost. A lot of Suggest looks to be navigational, as well.

Todd: I’d like to be able to clean up the suggestions from a brand management standpoint. Google Suggest is hurting you before the user even gets to the results page.

Vanessa: You can take advantage of the knowledge of the intent of the query. For instance, Bing breaks the query down into categories. You can drive interest by speaking to those categories.

Q: What’s the difference between Alexa ranking and Google PageRank?

Vanessa: Well, they’re the same by both being mythical numbers.

Danny: It’s like two independent critics reviewed a movie. There’s no relation.

Vanessa: Alexa is skewed because it only counts users that have a toolbar. A better way of gauging your site than PageRank is looking at your inbound links.

Rae: Don’t waste your time monitoring that number. Spend your time improving your site.

Todd: The two things to be concerned about in regards to toolbar PageRank is if it’s white or grey. If there’s even a pixel of green, you’re fine.

Q: What do you recommend for Sitemaps and making sure your site is crawled well.

Vanessa: I think you may as well submit an XML Sitemap because it doesn’t hurt you and it’s good to give them a better picture of your site. It doesn’t replace good information architecture. If it’s crawlable it can also help you with diagnostics if you submit it to Google and learn more accurate metrics than the search operator will give.

Aaron: If you block a page in robots.txt and someone links to it, it can still end up in the index. Instead you should include a noindex in the Head of the page. But if you include a noindex in the head and also exclude it through robots.txt, it won’t be crawled to see that it’s supposed to be noindexed.

Q: Should you pull old URLs from Sitemaps after you’ve redirected pages?

Wait for the redirects to get picked up. It’ll tell you in Webmaster Tools.

Q: For Flash, when should I use switch objects?

Vanessa: The biggest problem is that you need a separate URL for each interaction, otherwise it’s a mass of interactions.

Todd: You’ll come across sites that paid $2 million for an amazing Flash site. And they come to you and say we need SEO help. You can’t look at them and say, “You’re going to have to scratch that.” Copy the site in HTML.

Vanessa disagrees that you should just cloak your site as the solution.

Bruce: You can copy your top nav as links in the footer.

Q: How do you determine if a site is authoritative?

Rae: Does it rank well for main keywords?

Stephan: Does it have Sitelinks for non-brand keywords?

Vanessa: If you’re asking about sites that are linking to you, does the site have active stuff happening on it. Is it referring lots of visitors?

Greg: The time factor is one that you can’t fudge. Sometimes you may want to acquire a domain.

Vanessa: Acquiring a site and not changing the whois info is a little risky.

Q: Are the guidelines the same for optimizing dynamic sites?

Yes.

Vanessa: Google wrote a post on their blog this morning about dynamic parameters.

Q: What are the dumbest SEO mistakes you’ve each seen?

Todd: Pier One Imports launched a new site with breadcrumbs that followed the click path. It was totally unspiderable. They ended up just shutting off the ability to buy products on the site altogether because they didn’t want to fix it. You still can’t buy anything from their site.

Rae: At a site clinic several years ago. One site someone submitted was a scraper site.

Bruce: During a site review, one site had linked to all their other sites in the footer. One of the services phrases had a different site being linked to with each letter.

Todd: I bring this up at every conference hoping Bed Bath & Beyond will be at the conference. Every title is “Bed Bath & Beyond (Product)”. They also have 2400 lines of JavaScript at the top of the page.

Vanessa: One site had been around a year and wasn’t indexed but they didn’t know why. The host had actually blocked the site with robots.txt.

Greg: In the gaming industry there’s a lot of geo-targeting. More than once, a site will bounce Googlebot to the U.S. site because it comes from a U.S. IP, and so their UK site will never get indexed.

Excerpt from:
Ask the SEOs - SMX East 2009

Real-time search has been getting so much buzz lately. But is it really everything marketers hoped for? What does it even mean? Let’s find out.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Gerry Campbell, CEO, Collecta
Jeremy Hylton, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
Ken Moss, CEO & Co-founder, CrowdEye
Kimbal Musk, CEO, OneRiot
Vipul Ved Prakash, Co-founder, Topsy

Danny’s starting us off by answering the question “What is real-time search, really?”

Web search = search for Web pages
Image search = search for images
News search = search for news
Real time search = search for real times?

Real time content = content published within seconds of being found/created/thought.

Some examples are pics posted within seconds of being taken, or a tweet or status update.

Real time search = finding microblogged content

You can do real-time searches on Twitter. The disadvantage of it is time is the ranking mechanism, and they have a bad habit of losing tweets.

Facebook is another real-time search engine. But it only searches in Facebook and delivers results from people who opted in.

There are also a number of Meta real-time search engines. They tend to let you search for real-time sources among multiple sources. A lot of them are predominately designed to tell you what’s being shared in real-time, not necessarily the current thought process. Two real-time search engines can have radically different results. Until Twitter teams up with a major player, we’re not going to have a great real-time search experience for tweets.

Kimbal Musk steps up. He types “SMX” into OneRiot.com. Results are about the keynote this morning and some of the other session coverage. But in Google, it’s the SMX site and other results that aren’t about what’s happened at the show so far. So if you’re looking for what’s being talked about at SMX right now, you need to use real-time search.

Real-time search is starting to be leveraged at properties across the Web. The real-time search results are starting to appear in many places. It’s a real and growing market.

Jeremy Hylton is next and says that when users have an information need, freshness and real-time is a part of that. Freshness has been an interest for Google for a while. Over time Google has become faster at uncovering new content.

There’s lots of real-time content available, but it’s not necessarily of use to a searcher. If we can take timely content and deliver it to users in context when they need it, that’s going to be very useful for users.

But you still have to worry about spam and duplication. And you need good ranking — we have to be aware of international issues like language, and knowing where the user is if they’re looking for something they just saw. One worry is how open these platforms are and how accessible your content is. We need to be careful about letting the actual authors control how it’s indexed and discovered.

Ken Moss takes the mic and says that real-time search helps consumers and businesses keep their finger on the pulse of the real-time Web. Microblogs are a big deal. Social conversations are a new mode of human communication.

There are some weak aspects of real-time search that are being addressed with new services.

• Perspective: knowing the history of a search term or topic — hours ago, days ago
• Ranking: finding the most relevant results — not just about time
• Topics: a tag cloud can help the user understand what the conversation is about

They’re also experimenting with real-time searches as a dashboard or home page.

Gerry Campbell is up next. Real-time search means so many different things. Is real-time search overhyped? He says it absolutely is. Not because there’s not a ton of opportunity, but because no one’s certain of what the opportunity is yet. It’s here to stay but we’re just at the beginning.

How do we know it’s got value? Don’t measure it by the press; measure it by user intent. People must stay up on their brand and the conversations around them. Microblogging is just the beginning of real-time utterances — it’s a bellwether that people are looking to express themselves. They’ve found about 20 percent of microblogging is commercial. But the query stream is not stable. Though, trying to predict user intent over time is relatively stable.

Vipul Ved Prakash is our next presenter. At Topsy they are indexing all the links that people are posting in real-time formats. The search results page takes the signals shared on Twitter and culls it for the top results. As you go back in time, you start discovering more canonical documents — pages you’d find on a traditional search engine. As the data grows, we’ll have to find ways of condensing it and culling it to find the signal.

View original post here:
Real Time Search: Opportunity or Hype?

For Bruce’s birthday we decided to send SEOToolSet Training™ on an international tour!

Throughout October, our SEO training course is making stops on the East Coast of the U.S., three cities in Australia, and Milan, Italy. Racking up those frequent flier miles, are we SEOToolSet Training?

Training is the foundation of a successful SEO campaign, setting the stage for expectation, implementation and communication.

Attendees of Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO training leave with an improved understanding of the technical requirements of search engine marketing, appropriate site goals and metrics, and the cost of achieving these goals through the site.

During yesterday’s SEM Synergy podcast, we got to talking about how educational opportunities like training provide the face-to-face time and in-depth knowledge transfer to facilitate understanding and cooperation across an organization so vital for SEO. If you’re unsure on how SEO training and an understanding of best practices can affect your organization and your Web site, you may want to check that out.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for SEO training opportunities near you that are focused around a current and proven methodology, take a look at the international line-up for Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO training course.

SMX East

Just next week, Bruce will be presenting a one-day SEO training course in conjunction with Search Marketing Expo - SMX East. It’s not too late to register for the course which takes place October 8 at the Westin Times Square.

The course follows an action-packed curriculum that establishes an understanding of search marketing practices and the intent behind them. Attendees also receive a three-month subscription to the SEOToolSet.

Garden City, Long Island, New York

Along with learning about search engine optimization best practices, the most up-to-date recommendations from search engines, SEOs place among the organization’s business goals, and time-tested technical approaches to search engine optimization, the three-day course affords attendees the opportunity to get hands on with the suite of SEO tools with the guidance of the instructor and invaluable Q&A time.

Bruce Clay, Inc.’s director, Eastern region operations, Christopher Hart, leads this three-day standard SEOToolSet Training course at the Garden City Hotel. Completion of the three-day standard course qualifies attendees for the SEOToolSet advanced certification course.

Australia - Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney

Bruce Clay’s Australasia office is presenting one-day SEOToolSet Training courses across the continent throughout October.

• Brisbane: 14 October at the Novotel Brisbane Hotel
• Melbourne: 20 October at the Stamford Plaza Melbourne
• Sydney: 29 October at the Menzies Hotel

Director of Bruce Clay Australasia, Jeremy Bolt, will lead attendees in this overview course designed for managers and SEO team members. Attendees walk away with a foundation for cooperation in the technical requirements of SEO and an understanding of underlying goals. Because even the most experienced SEO can’t be effective without collaboration from other departments and support from the organization as a whole.

Milan, Italy

Rounding out the international tour dates, Bruce Clay Italia will host a three-day standard and advanced SEO training course taught by Bruce at the Doubletree Hilton Milan from October 26-28. Completion of the advanced course qualifies attendees to become a certified SEOToolSet analyst. SEOToolSet certification is an assurance of an SEO’s adherence to SEO ethics and guidelines set by search engines.

For SEO training that’s comprehensive, foundational, technical and business-minded, backed by more than a decade of experience and designed by Bruce Clay, we hope you check out our SEOToolSet Training courses, coming to your part of the world soon!

More: 
SEO Training Comes to East Coast, Australia & Italy This Month

Our fearless leader, Captain of Chaos, and father of our fabulous SEO company celebrates his birthday today! On behalf of the Bruce Clay, Inc. crew, happy birthday, Bruce!

Your guidance, wisdom and support made this company a family. Your foresight, pioneering spirit and pursuit of knowledge inspired an industry.

Because of this, we in the BCI team aren’t alone in our well wishes. Gotta love how the Internet provides the ability to bring communities together and spread the love! Thanks to our friends in the Twittersphere for their happy birthday greetings to Bruce. Ya’ll are the coolest!

Special thanks from Bruce to these tweeters for their kind birthday wishes!

Steve Plunkett, @steveplunkett
Anthony Verre, @milwaukeeseo
Robert Frost, @rperro
Janet Driscoll Miller, @janetdmiller
Monica Wright, @monicawright
Cathie McGinn, @acatinatree
K.S. Katz, @creditgoddess

Here’s to another great year filled with SEO, PPC, ROI, and L-O-V-E!

Read the rest here:
Happy Birthday, Bruce!