by Kevin Spence

Emailing someone to ask for a link is like kicking them in the kneecaps and then asking  for money.

by Kevin Spence

The following is a guest post by Matt Mehlhope, an ethical SEO evangelist, lover of caffeine and owner of Forge Search Marketing. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Within the SEO industry there is little discussion about how companies actually go about interacting with their clients. It is surprising how one of the most seemingly obvious activities is overlooked when it comes to discussion, even though it is one of the most important facets that distinguishes the success of a company. In this article, we aim to show you several tools for interacting with your clients in a professional and effective manner, yielding a happier clientele and a more transparent line of communication.

Presentation

In some cases, a deciding factor for a client using your company versus another company is how information is presented to them and how professional those presentations are. Clients often associate your first impression with what it will be like to work with you for months or years to come making your initial presentation critical to your success.

Crystal Clear Conversation

Obviously you are going to be having conversations with your clients; it is surprising how many companies have these conversations using cell phones or in less than ideal environments where there are a lot of distractions and background noise. The client will not think that their time and money is being well invested if their conversations with you are plagued with distraction. Distractions are only useful if your intention is to give the client the impression that you would rather not wholly devote your efforts to their goals. So here are a few suggestions for general conversation:

Skype
With a reliable internet connection and a great microphone or webcam, Skype can be one of the easiest, clearest, and most cost efficient tools for frequent conversation with clients. Long distance and monthly high cell phone bills are being eliminated in favor of VOIP. A great HD webcam for around $60 can allow for clients to have a full screen,high quality, face to face conversation with you. Skype recently announced that it will be shipping 5 million web-enabled TVs in 2010, increasing the access to video conferencing and opening it up to a less techno-savvy audience.

VOIP Phone System
If your SEO agency is of a decent size and it has not converted to a VOIP phone system yet, you should consult your budget and see if it allows for such. The initial investment is worth the saved costs in long distance communication with the additional increase in quality in comparison to an analog line. Transferring calls, creating a company directory, saving contacts, conference calls and utilizing multiple phone numbers becomes amazingly simple and yields an exceptional increase in productivity.

Bluetooth Headset
If you’ve decided to forego the land line or VOIP routes and instead have chosen to use your cell phone for business, it is wise to invest in a good Bluetooth headset for a variety of reasons. The most important reason is the increase in clarity that quality Bluetooth headsets provide as a result of better speaker and microphone components, in addition to background noise cancellation technology. Things as small as shuffling paper or typing on a keyboard can be highly distracting to your client on the phone, so by having these reduced or even cancelled out completely allows for a better overall conversation.

Meetings and Visuals

Aside from having general conversation, you are going to be presenting a variety of materials to your clients such as proposals, strategies, and reports on a regular basis. If you’re an SEO specialist, chances are you aren’t an amazing graphic designer, but that doesn’t mean your presentations have to look amateur. Below are some tools and resources that will not only allow you to easily create great looking presentations, but will also allow you to give those presentations in the most effective manner possible.

PowerPoint and Keynote Templates
While PowerPoint and Keynote are industry standard tools for creating slideshow presentations, effective use of their design tools is not common. Sites such as GraphicRiver provide some attractive Powerpoint and Keynote templates that takes your presentation from “average” to “memorable.” Professional templates are an inexpensive way to give you the edge over the other companies if your prospective client is shopping the competition.

Webinar Software
Whether you’ve already adapted the versatility of Skype, have chosen to go with more enterprise routes such as GoTo Meeting, or even Cisco’s robust WebEx software, webinars are the premiere solution when it comes to long-distance meetings and presentations. With the ability to give a presentation bundled with videoconference capability, webinars are becoming the primary meeting medium for businesses of all sizes. In our article on working with our SEO company in Lexington, KY, we expressed how webinars are one of our favorite ways to interact with our clients.

Daily Tasks and Interaction

The vastness of information that the SEO industry is burdened with organizing and refining for the benefit of companies and consumers alike is undoubtedly one of your company’s greatest challenges. The hardest part about conveying information is keeping it all organized so that it can be properly utilized. By incorporating the following tools into your business, you can keep key information at hand and give your clients a favorable experience.

CRM System
Whether it is simple solution such as Highrise, or an enterprise level solution such as Salesforce and Microsoft CRM, a customer resource management system is a must for any business serious about keeping their clients’ information organized. If you need to know how much “ACME Corporation” wants to spend on their campaign, or what you last talked about with “Jane Smith” a few months ago, a CRM system is the most efficient and easily organized way of storing detailed client information.

Project Management
As dynamic as SEO campaigns are, new plans and changes are continually being implemented. To maintain a clear line of communication tools such as Project Bubble and Basecamp are great for helping you to stay on top of the tasks at hand while allowing for transparency in what you are working on. By keeping clients involved in their campaigns, you are able to clearly demonstrate where their money is going to use as well as reinforce their trust in you.

Invoicing
Invoicing can be an absolute hassle if you’re dealing with several clients with down payments, advertising fees, project fees, maintenance contracts, etc., so having a system to handle this work for you is essential. Several of the CRM and project management tools mentioned already have invoicing tools (e.g. ProjectBubble can invoice, Basecamp can be integrated with Freshbooks, and Salesforce has apps for invoicing), but if you’re looking for something standalone, you can use solutions such as Freshbooks, Blinksale or LessAccounting.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has not only given you some resources but also some insight into how you can streamline your interaction with clients and give them a more transparent experience. Remember, the work you do as an SEO company is only part of the job, the remaining part is to please your clients and make sure that you are at the top of their recommendation list. It’s not just about the work you do; it’s the experience you provide!

by Kevin Spence

If I were an SEO Jedi and had to pass along five words of wisdom to my SEO padawan, this is what they would be:

1. Think objectively and filter out 99% of what you read as complete nonsense. Maybe it’s SEO gold to someone out there to know that the blood pressure of their users while viewing Tentacle Porn dictates their bounce rate on your site, but as for me, I consider that type of knowledge about as useful as knowing the molecular makeup of a donkey’s fart.

2. Pay attention to what’s going on in the industry. Reading about how real time search works today vs. yesterday will be of much more use than reading yet another keyword density post that makes as much sense as a Charlotte Church cameo in a Lady Gaga video.

3. Intentionally do stuff the ‘wrong way.’ If there’s one thing that drives me mad about SEOs, it’s that they are so often afraid to break the rules. ‘ZOMG that title isn’t in an H1 tag the world will explode in a fiery ball of google wrath.’  How about you ask yourself this: where did all these rules come from? I’ll tell you where they came from.1997. Sure, there is such a thing as good form. But there’s also such a thing as blindly following without trying out alternatives for yourself. Break stuff. Learn from it. Make awesomeness.

4. Don’t confine yourself to the internet when link building. Want to know my most successful link building campaign ever? A 5 minute interview on ESPN radio (that I initiated with a simple email to one of the hosts). Within 24 hours I had links coming from The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Sun, BBC, and a juicy link in an AP article syndicated across thousands of news sites. Not bad for five minutes of time, eh? Now, how are those link exchange emails coming along?

5. Learn to program. The language doesn’t matter, and you don’t have be MIT good at it. You don’t even have to be local community college computer science 301 good at it. All you need to do is understand how a basic algorithm is constructed. One thing goes in and another thing comes out — what would have to happen in the middle for that to happen? If you don’t know how algorithms work, figuring out what happens in the middle would be just as baffling as determining a monkey’s diet based on the coloration of the poo it’s flinging at you.

by Kevin Spence

Maybe the content will come back. Maybe it won’t. Either way, life goes on.

by Kevin Spence

I’ve been experimenting with how Google’s real time search works, particularly as it pertains to Tweets.

To start off, I’m making one major assumption: That tweets are not just chosen at random (that would just encourage a barrage of twitter spam affiliate links — send enough out and some will get through). That leads me to my second assumption: there has to be an algorithm at work here to determine which tweets are chosen and which never see the light of day.

To test things out, I chose the search term ‘walmart.’ I chose this for three reasons. 1. People always have something to say about WalMart. 2. It’s a popular target term right now for people promoting affiliate coupons/discounts. 3. I thought it might be interesting to get a sample of real time results for a well-known store/brand.

Analysis

After parsing and saving thousands of real-time search results for ‘walmart,’ my preliminary analysis shows no correlation between profile elements (thematic tweets, bio link vs no bio link, etc) and the likelihood of having your tweet included in the real time results. It was worth exploring, but right off the bat, I’m going to go ahead and toss that hypothesis in the trash for the time being.

With the profile/thematic hypothesis out of the way, the next step I wanted to take was to compare Twitter search results to Google real time search results for the same term.

Comparing Twitter search with Google search

The first thing I noticed when comparing Twitter search with Google search is that Google’s real time results are updated with FAR less frequency than they are  on Twitter. Part of this is likely a usability decision. There is just far too much noise on a popular Twitter term to digest anything at all.

However, the decreased frequency is likely also a side effect of a more important process — namely, the inevitable filtering process that all tweets must go through before they are widely distributed on Google. Now, given Google’s overall strategy against fighting spam, it would make sense to me that the first step in the filtering process would be checking tweets for links.

In comparing Twitter results with Google results, I noticed that tweets with links in them are generally filtered out, unless the tweet links to a site that Google trusts (links to sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, twitpic, etc, seem to always get through).

However, tweets with affiliate links rarely get through, and when they do, the affilate landing pages are *almost* always on trusted domains like blogspot.com. In fact, out of a few dozen links that got through, none were to the actual product page on the site of purchase — they were all to 3rd party landing pages.

Manual Review Hypothesis

I have no proof of this, as I am not a Google employee and have no insider knowledge into their development of real time search. But knowing how they have operated in the past, I would be totally shocked if there was NOT some form of a human review process at play here. After all, Google has already resorted to manual reviews on their traditional SERPS, having seemingly resigned themselves to the reality that no algorithm can prevent spam from breaking through without human assistance.

The problem here of course is that Google can’t manually review every tweet that it spits out in real time, as it would be prohibitively costly. So what could they do to solve this? Why, use US as the manual reviewers, of course.

Here’s an idea of how it might work:

Step 1: Display a given tweet to 1000 users in real time search.

Step 2: If 0 of the first 1000 users click a tweet, then trash it. If >x of the first 1000 users click a tweet, then show it to 10,000 more users. If >y of those 10,000 click a tweet, show it to 1 million more. And so on.

Now, big question here is whether Google would start to trust the tweeter over time. For instance, if 99 out of 100 of my tweets became ‘popular,’ would my tweets start to carry more weight and require fewer clicks to get greater distribution? If so, they would be opening a whole can of worms Digg style — I’d be surprised if they do it, but you never know.

Next Steps

As I stated, having a link in your tweet seems to decrease the likelihood of your tweet getting widespread distrubtion. But you know what doesn’t? Responding to someone else. In its current implementation, if your tweet is in response to someone else, then their name is clickable in the real time SERPs.

So first off, I’m going to try creating linkless posts in response to a dummy account. The most recent tweet at the top of the dummy account will be a link to one of my sites (no affiliate stuff, just a straight link), so that there is a decent probability of someone clicking straight to my site from the real time SERPs.

It’s worth testing out — as SEOs, we have to find out how to make this new development work in our favor. The possibility of appearing on the front page for any term we want in real time is just too good to pass up.

by Kevin Spence

There’s a lot that you can do with an htaccess file, and of course, things can get pretty advanced in a hurry. Here, we’re going to keep things pretty simple. These are the 10 basic htaccess hacks that every webmaster should know.

1. Force Caching with htaccess

Use: The following htaccess code won’t help the initial pageload, but it will significantly help subsequent pageloads by sending 304 status when requested elements haven’t been modified.

FileETag MTime Size
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus x seconds”

I generally set the cache for one day (86400 seconds). You can also set different expirations for each file type by breaking each file type up into separate ExpiresByType lines such as:

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus x seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus x seconds”

Simple!

2. Set a Custom 404 Page with htaccess

Use: I think this one is self explantatory. Just change ‘/notfound.html’ to match the path to your custom 404 page.

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

3. Implement a 301 Redirect with htaccess

Use: If you have permanently changed the URL structure on your site (via either optimization change or CMS migration), you will want to implement 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL.

The syntax for a basic 301 redirect is:

Redirect 301 relative/path/to/oldurl/ http://www.domain.com/newurl/

Explanation:
The first URL should be a relative path to the old URL and the second one should be an absolute path to the new URL.

4. Only allow specific IP addresses in certain directories

This is especially useful for admin directories. I generally set my home IP and work IP as the only allowable IPs who can even attempt a login. Unlike other .htaccess hacks, this one doesn’t work from the root folder. You will need to create a new .htaccess file, put the following code in it, and upload it to your admin directory.

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

To allow a second IP, just add another ‘allow from’ line.

5. Prevent Image Hot Linking with htaccess

Removed. Here is a MUCH better way to go about this thanks to Maurizio Petrone

6. Enable gzip with htaccess

Gzip is a means of compressing the files on your server so they will load faster. To enable gzip, just

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

7. Remove ‘category’ from a URL with htaccess

Many content management sytems use the ‘category’ URL segment. For instance:

http://makeitrank.com/category/category-name

Well, that’s fine, and it’s necessary to make the CMS work the way it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t need to be visible to do its job. Just drop the following code into your htaccess file to get rid of it.

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

8. Define any page as the home page with htaccess

You can set any page as the homepage by adding the following to the htaccess file in your root directory.

DirectoryIndex myfile

9. Disable Directory Browsing

You want to keep people out of any directories that might reveal security weaknesses — for instance, plugin directories.

You can block vistors from browsing the directories by adding the following line to the htaccess file in the directory you’d like to block:

Options All -Indexes

10. Protect your htaccess file

Lastly, you want to protect your htaccess file. Hopefully your host has protected it for you, but you can’t be too safe with these things. The following hack will prevent anybody from accessing your htaccess:

<Files .htaccess>

order allow,deny
deny from all

</Files>

Are there any useful htaccess hacks I’ve left out? Let me know!

by Kevin Spence

A lot of people are concerned about how the Google Sidewiki feature might be abused, but personally I think it’s pretty cool and have chosen to embrace it.

I had a little back and forth with the always awesome Shannon Paul on Twitter today on the subject, and that ’conversation’ motivated me to create the maiden entry on my own sidewiki. For those of you who don’t have the feature enabled (or happen to use the incompatible Chrome…HAH!) this is what it says:

Rather than fill this space with marketing fluff that nobody wants to read, I just want to go on record and say that despite the controversy surrounding the sidewiki feature, I’ve chosen to embrace it and hope that you will too.

Now, if you’re really fired up about something I’ve written and want to ream me out in this public forum, please look at this picture of a funny cat first.

If you’re still angry after seeing a picture of a cat with a funny helmet on, well, there’s nothing more that I can do for you. Please have at it. I hope it is very therapeutic and saves you thousands in psychiatric costs.

Hopefully, you are a sane individual and will have calmed down by this point. If so, please send me an email or leave a comment on the site instead.

Cheers!

Kevin

What do you think?

by Kevin Spence

Google is less than forthcoming when it comes to checking backlinks with the link: command. Their data is generally incredibly outdated and incomplete, and probably with good reason (I assume they want you to use webmaster tools to check your own backlinks, and their web spam team probably doesn’t really want you to build links by checking the backlinks of your competitors). Thankfully, Yahoo gives us a great way to check backlinks for any site on the internet.

Basic Yahoo Backlink Checking Syntax

The best way to check backlinks in Yahoo is with the linkdomain: command, which will show backlinks for your entire domain.

You use the linkdomain command like this:

linkdomain:mysite.com

While that is pretty good on its own, if you spend much time looking through the results, you’ll notice that internal links are also listed, and that isn’t really helpful.

To remove internal links from the results, you just have to tell Yahoo to ignore them. You can do that with the -site:mysite.com command. So if you wanted to see all backlinks for a site without the internal links listed, the entire command would be:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com

Removing Specific Domains from Backlink Search

Just as you can remove your own site from the backlink search by using the -site: command, you can also remove any site of your choosing from the results. This is especially helpful if you have some sitewide links from certain sites that are clogging up your results and making them difficult to weed through.

The syntax here is exactly the same as above, but note that you can remove inbound links from more than one site at a time:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com -site:linkingdomain1.com -site:linkingdomain2.com

Removing Backlinks from Pages with a Particular Keyword Phrase

While it may not sound particularly useful to remove results based on keyword phrase, I have found many good uses for it. For instance, I have had some entries scraped, or syndicated around the internet that resulted in hundreds of backlinks, all with the same title. So if I wanted to see the backlinks without that title in the results, I would use:

linkdomain:mysite.com -intitle:the syndicated title

You can also choose to remove backlinks that have certain words in the URL with:

linkdomain:mysite.com -inurl:keyword

by Kevin Spence