The Maine SEO Blog

You may have noticed this tiny green bar on your Google toolbar that changes with every site you visit.  In its simplest terms, PageRank is one of Google’s ways to assign weight and rank to websites.

Google bases this particular algorithm off of millions of variables; the major factor being the number of (quality) incoming links.  While no one knows their true PR, the toolbar will at least give you an idea of where you’re at: with a number from 1-10, 1 being low PR and 10 high PR.  (Similarly, you will never know exactly how many incoming links your site has, but Yahoo’s Site Explorer will give you a fairly close number).  Google updates toolbar PageRank approximately every 3 months.

Being somewhat inquisitive, I decided to investigate a little further.  I took a look at 10 sites - with toolbar PR of 1-10.

I also included age because I’ve seen PageRank increase over time, simply from gaining trust from traffic rather than backlinks.  I wanted to test whether or not it had much impact on PR.  However, from this small sample, it seems too difficult to infer that age has anything to do with PR.  Perhaps with a larger sample, I could decide differently.

However, it is easy to see the direct relation between PR and backlinks.  Due to the drastic change in the number of backlinks, I had to split the charts: PR 10-6, then PR 5-1 following in order to see the similarities.

What I learned and confirmed

1. Don’t rely on your toolbar PR; use it instead as a relative guide.
2. Get as many quality, incoming links as you can.
3. Since blogs generally acquire more backlinks than regular sites, a young blog can have a better PageRank than an older site.
4. The only other website with a PR 10 (as far as anyone can tell) than Google, USA.gov, has just over 11 million backlinks - millions less than any examples I provided above a PR 7  - proving the power of a .gov (.edu’s are powerful too!).

Nicki Hicks
Watch your back(links)

Search these days sometimes makes me feel like we’re all back in 3rd grade on the playground.  Managing our reps.  Hmm, maybe that was just my elementary school…

Nevertheless, all of these bailouts got me thinking about real life reputation management.  While all of these poor Fortune 500 car companies have to deal with reputation management on a large scale, it’s still just as important for small businesses.

Local Reputation

Local search obviously pertains more to businesses who differentiate geographically.  And as we all know, word of mouth can often make or break you - maybe even in search results.  Find an all-star within your staff to keep an eye on these:

• Local Search Reviews - Reviews in Google Maps or Yahoo! Local are relatively easy to manage.  Not only managing them, but also responding quickly and efficiently to customer reviews and ratings can make a difference - whether it’s just that one person, or your entire online customer base.
• Yelp - An example of a localized service provider customer review site.  (There are a bazillion - yes, that’s official jargon - of other industry-specific review sites out there other than Yelp.)  The same applies for these sites as far as managing your business reputation.

What are people saying about you?

• On your blog - If you have a blog, be sure to respond to comments (especially negative ones) - it can result in much more satisfied customers.
• Google Search + “sucks” - Something I like to do for fun.  Search for your company name and add “sucks” to the end.  “Microsoft sucks” is the ever popular example.  This should pull up any bad press or negative comments about your business.  Take steps to fix any problems from there.
• Twitter Search - If you use Twitter, the Search feature can be overwhelmingly helpful for businesses.
  Just recently, I was complaining that my Pandora radio station had played the same song four times in a matter of a few hours.  Within minutes of my tweet, a woman from Pandora direct messaged me kindly explaining that I could use the “Don’t play this song for a month” feature so this wouldn’t happen to me again.  It was a 15 second conversation, but I must say, I was incredibly impressed and have a whole new respect for Pandora (I would’ve highly recommended it even before this).
• Google Alerts - This feature allows you to choose which term to alert you on, what type of search (news, blogs, web, comprehensive, video, or groups), and how often (whether as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week); then sent to you via email.  You could be alerted every time someone searches for your business, or even that “your business + sucks” search.
• Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. - Like Yelp, there are a ton of more generalized (and mostly social) networks out there: tools to see what people are talking about in your industry.

Damage Control

So now what?  You’ve figured out what people are saying about you through the various channels I’ve outlined.  Hopefully it’s positive feedback, but let’s face it, there’s going to be some negative.  What do you do?

1. Respond appropriately to customer reviews and ratings.
   a.   Just listen.  It’s amazing the number of people who just need a listening ear to hear their complaint.  Empathize with and console them.
   b.  Offer something for their trouble.  A coupon for a percentage off, a free stay at your hotel.  Offer what you’re able to.
   c.  “It will not happen again.”  (Important: Only say this if you can actually follow through with that statement.  I am not liable for empty promises.)
2. Comment on blogs, whether your own or others.
3. Bad news stories or press releases about you?  (Think the Jet Blue fiasco almost two years ago.)  Write press releases of your own. Make sure they are properly optimized, so they rank higher than other (negative) releases.

Never underestimate a sincere apology and personal touch.  Truth be told, if a customer happened to have a bad experience with you, they may not ever buy your product or service again.  But, if you make the effort to “ease their pain”, they probably won’t storm off telling their friends you are the worst bakery or plumber or car dealership they’ve ever dealt with.  Instead, they might tell a different story, something that might go this way: “I had a bad experience with [so and so company], but you know what?  They emailed me [or better yet, called] and apologized and offered me [this] in return for my troubles.”

Think about how you would want a company to respond to your bad experience.  What would you want to happen?

Nicki Hicks
Manage A Good Rep

Flyte recently launched a website for Reduce My College Costs, which I’m happy to say has finally been fully crawled and indexed!  We worked with Marc Hill, a Certified College Planner, to both develop and optimize his site.

One of the most important things you can do, and I must pride Marc on this, is to do your SEO upfront.  It’s been my experience that optimizing a site during development will be much easier and more cost effective than “SEO’ing” it later.

For example, we are now converting many of our table-based sites onto CSS platforms (namely, WordPress).  While this particular problem is usually due to the age of a site; had SEO been performed at an earlier stage, it would have increased those sites’ search visibility earlier and saved them money (and who doesn’t want to save some dough these days?!).

Anyway - to get back on track, in this case, optimizing before launch should help Marc in the long run!  Admittedly, I wish I had known how quickly mistakes can make a difference to the price you pay for school.  If I’d only known people like Marc exist before I went to college!

So if you are in the midst of planning to send your child to college, start the process with RMCC’s free college savings tip sheet. Then, work with Marc in order to save on your son or daughter’s education expenses!

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Keywords/Trends

1. Keyword Discovery - for all the keyword research you could ever care to know. It does require a subscription - this or Word Tracker (which I’ve never tried) are considered the best.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool - supplement keyword research; also gives better stats as to what people are actually searching for.
3. Webconfs.com Keyword Density Tool - there are a million keyword density tools out there, but I’ve found this one to be the most user friendly.
4. Google Insights/Google Trends - both give good insights as to what’s hot and what’s not.  Insights will also give you upcoming popular search terms.

Link Building

1. Marketleap’s Link Popularity Checker - gives you both Google and Yahoo!’s index of backlinks, plus others.

Plug-ins and Apps

1. SEO for Firefox - see nofollow links; look up PR, backlinks, meta-tags; plus much much more!
2. SeoQuake - many of the same benefits as SEO for Firefox, but you don’t necessarily have to have Firefox.  Plus, when activated, SeoQuake will give you a handy little toolbar with at-a-glance SEO stats.

Analytics (the one and only)

1. Google Analytics - it’s free and gives you everything you need.  Why go for something else??

I use quite a few more, but these are my favorite, and the ones I use the most often.  Do you have any favorites?

Nicki Hicks
I think I need a bigger toolbelt…

That is the question…

First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures.  Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket.  Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites.  Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes.  So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them.  This visual should help:

(Picture credit: eVisibility)

To nofollow

So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site.  In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs.  By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages - and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.

Pages typically nofollowed are those like:

• Privacy Policy
• Contact
• Search
• Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
• Affiliates

Not to nofollow

Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags.  However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).

Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link?  I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.

In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not.  Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.

Nicki Hicks
Nofollow-er