I’m taking a tangent break from SEO this afternoon to talk for a minute about the recent daily deals phenomenon. Destinations such as Groupon and Living Social pioneered a new era in online marketing that is doing more than just expanding, but also evolving into it’s own marketing channel.

Many people who have attended my workshops or Meetup.com groups in the past have had a glimpse at my Tactic Utilization table, an exhaustive spreadsheet of marketing tactics with score criteria. In 2011, my table expanded with 10 new columns that include popular daily deals websites.

With industry growth, comes people with opinions, and subsequently, daily deals review websites. Ross Cohen, picked up on the trend and built his own Daily Deals Website Reviews destination. I had a chance to speak with Ross briefly about the phenomenon. Ross made it clear that

“it is especially important in today’s economically difficult time, daily deal sites provide individuals a cheaper means of enjoyment: lavish vacations, delicious meals, and relaxing spa days (among much else) for highly discounted prices.”

But are daily deals websites helping or hurting businesses? And what type of people use daily deals websites?

The Pros of Daily Deals & Coupon Websites

Below is a list of reasons that daily deals destinations are thriving and can actually have value.

1. Consumers get crazy deals (50% – 70% off typically)
2. Businesses gets hundreds of new clients walking through the door
3. It’s easy to spread deals through social media and sharing online
4. Consumers are introduced to new brands, products and software

Let me know if I missed anything here.

The Cons of Daily Deals & Coupon Websites

What could possibly be bad about getting killer discounts and (for businesses) potentially thousands of new clients? Here are my thoughts, and hate me if you need to.

1. The coupon culture is not your “buy once at a discount, and then come back and pay full price” culture
2. Couponers can be moochers and live for the deal, it’s hard to build your client list on moochers
3. It can actually cost a business thousands of dollars to do a daily deal (after the destination’s cut and the overhead)
4. It’s difficult for a business to get into a daily deal program thanks to the demand
5. It can feel awkward using an 70% off coupon, particularly if you know the business is already struggling
6. The service you get as a deal redeemer is not often what you might expect

So, at least in my list, the cons outrank the pros. However, as I mentioned earlier, the industry is evolving. For example, destinations such as Dealster, a new daily deals website, offers businesses the opportunity to join a network of coupon and deal websites outside of just Dealster.com. They promote a Tweet in the region you are marketing to and allow for you to bulk upload deals you want syndicated across other deal websites.

The one-stop signup with Facebook is definitely a plus with Dealster and a few of the newer networks, but what I like the most is the new travel segment. Anyone can go to a site like Groupon and get 50% off a pizza or a $40 massage, but so far Dealster is the only website that actually offers insane travel deals and gadget deals at daily deal prices. I’m a tech geek, so you know I like the latter almost as much as saving a ton on travel.

Another evolution is the DIY daily deals software, such as that made by companies like Pageable.com, where business can host their own daily deals on their own website. The advantage is being able to participate everyday and to an audience of patrons (not prospects), so it’s more of a client appreciation campaign I suppose. The disadvantage is obviously limited reach. I recommend organizations doing both. Chucky Cheese’s for example offers members discounts and sends periodic offers via email, yet they use services such as Dealster and Groupon during slow periods to boost the number of people coming through the door (the hope is the upsell on alcohol and games I’m sure).

As these social-enhanced daily deals websites continue to evolve, I’m left wondering if the business can find a way to secure long term value from loss-leader type offers and still fully appreciate the customers (moochers or not) as though they were regulars. I guess only time will tell. In the meantime, I have my daily deals flowing to my personal account, which deserves a glance every morning for anything too juicy to pass up.

What daily deals do you subscribe to and why?

It’s easy to find someone who “does SEO”, but finding a rockstar SEO Manager requires a solid understanding of basic SEO principles, and possibly a degree of street smart to differentiate the big talkers from the top performers.

In this post, I’m not only going to provide you with a few tips on hiring a manager to oversee your paid and natural search marketing, but for those agencies out there who follow my blog, I’m also including a template job requisition you can use when you’re ready to hire that special someone.

SEO Manager Salary: What to Offer Your Rockstar

Back in 2006, starting pay for SEO Manager at a job I picked up was $60k per year and included full benefits and a few pretty awesome perks. In today’s market, the standard seems to be no perks and DIY benefits with a hybrid of salary and performance-based pay. In other words, it’s still starting at $60k/year.

Performance queues are often offered by agencies based on up-selling, meeting critical benchmarks, and just being all around awesome. So the $60k/yr SEO Manager has the potential to make upwards of $100k per year if they follow through with interview promises.

SEO Manager Job Description

Your rockstar is out there, but he’s 1/100 of the people you are going to interview. Fact is, a truly good SEO Manager is likely making enough money with his own projects and products that he doesn’t need a salary position. But not to fret, many of us SEO’s are over-confident in our abilities and have a tendency to make ignorant financial (or partnership) decisions that lead to, well, debt.

It’s easy to pick out the rockstar when he comes in, because his rapport and ingenuity will shine through, while your scam artists and black hat whiz kids will immediately start throwing around big words and complicated tactics that seem more like gaming results than earning natural placement.

So What’s in the Description?

Here are a few requirements I like to put in my SEO manager job description under Experience:

• Have a thorough knowledge of search ranking factors and critical updates
• Familiar with industry-standard bid management and SEO software
• Have personally built and optimized a $10k+ per month pay-per-click account that met or exceeded specific business rules (such as CPA goals)
• Have managed a team of content writers, link builders, and social media marketers
• Comfortable working with API’s, advanced and integrated reporting

You’re also going to want to add sales and customer relationship management items to your experience list. Your SEO Manager’s bedside manner is going to be critical to continuity and retention. Even if you have an off month, if your client trusts your SEO manager, they are more likely to stick around an extra month or two if they believe in his/her abilities.

Responsibilities of Your SEO Manager

Aside from not blatantly lying to you and your clients, the SEO manager you hire should also be accountable to results and to you for being ahead of the curve with real-time search engine signal changes.

Here are a few bullets to consider:

• Day-to-day management of paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns
• Oversight and management of onsite and offsite SEO resources
• Research and strategic planning for paid and natural search campaigns
• Staying abreast of (and sharing) changes in search engine signals and market share
• Improving and enhancing boilerplate project lifecycles based on signal changes

Interview Questions

Your interviewee can talk a good talk, but what does he really know about the SEO industry. Below are a list of questions you can ask (followed by their respective answers) to see you’ve got the real thing sitting in front of you or just another ego-maniacal tech guy who “thinks” he’s an SEO Expert. Oh, and as a bonus, I’ve thrown in what your scam artist might reply with as well.

1. What would you consider to be the 3 most important principles of SEO?
2. What types of software do you use before, during and after an SEO campaign?
3. What are the primary differences between the paid and natural search engine signals?
4. In mid-2009, Google updated their search results with a major enhancement. What was it called and what was the change?
5. In May of 2010, thousands of business suffered ranking loss because of another major update. What was it called and what was the change?
6. In 2011, another major update came with several “aftershocks”. What was the nickname and official name of the change and what did it impact?
7. Talk to me about Local SEO. What factors come in to play with ranking in Google Places & Universal Search?
8. It’s said that Google gives more weight to major brands. If this is so, was there a name given to the update and how does Google differentiate?
9. For a new domain in a competitive keyword space, what link building and social media strategies might you employ and how quickly?
10. How important is valid source code to SEO? Will a website get higher rankings if it is W3C XHTML and CSS valid?
11. Around what percent of Google’s ranking equation do you believe social media impacts?
12. Can you name a few websites that provide checklist-format ranking and optimization criteria?
13. What blogs and Twitter users should I be following to stay in the know with changes in SEO and SEM?
14. What happened with Overstock and J.C. Penny December of 2010?

Okay, if the person you were interviewing didn’t already run out the door screaming, then here is how you check their answers:

The Interview Answers

1. The 3 most important principles of SEO are 1) Relevancy/Content, 2) Popularity/Visibility & 3) User Behavior/”Click & Stay” post-search
2. Keyword research tools (WordTracker, Google AdWords, SEMRush, existing Google Analytics data), competitive research tools (OpenSiteExplorer, Compete, Hitwise, site scapers, etc), keyword-tracking tools (Webmaster Tools, SEOmoz.org Campaigns, Raven SEO, YieldSoftware)
3. The primary differences between PPC & SEO algo’s are bid and budget amounts, keyword-level Quality Score, and PageRank (paid search doesn’t account for external links)
4. In mid-2009, Google announced their Caffeine Update which significantly improve the crawl, indexing and display time of Google search results
5. In May of 2010, the Mayday Update impacted long-tail keyword traffic in an attempt to deliver better quality results.
6. In 2011, the Panda Update (nicknamed “Farmer” out the gate), impacted websites with heavy volumes of advertisements, and sites dynamically created by duplicate content
7. Local SEO involves location-based landing pages, microformats, links AND citations (name, address, phone or NAP), business reviews, mobile & suggestive search
8. The Vince Update, named after the guy at the Googleplex who was responsible for it, does give more weight to brands, mainly because brands have better “reputation”, “trust” and “authority”.
9. For a new domain in a competitive space, a well-paced link building plan should include PR, industry blogger outreach (not pay-per-post), and definitely an array of social media campaigns (contests, widgets, link bait, etc)
10. Matt Cutts debunked source code as a factor several years ago. User experience is important, but code does not need to validate to rank well
11. About 7% of the search engine results ranking signal comes from social media (approximately)
12. Websites that provide excellent audit lists include David Mihm’s Local Ranking Factors, seomoz.org’s Search Ranking Factors and (if I’m lucky) they will list Steve Wiideman’s SEO Audit List. Don’t ding them if they miss the latter.
13. If you’re really an SEO Expert, you should be following @randfish, @aaronwall, @dannysullivan, @lisabarone, @danzarrella, @chriswinfield and maybe even @graywolf and @WebsiteMagazine. Important RSS feeds to subscribe to include: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, SEO Roundtable, Google Webmasters Blog (Official), Yahoo! Search Blog, the Official Bing Search Blog, and of course, seomoz.org.
14. In late 2010 and early 2011, JC Penny and Overstock were penalized for buying links

You might have had some interesting answers to the above. If you heard anything like the answers below, run. No, I mean it, you’re going to hurt your company more than help. These are the warnings that you have a resource who has a total disregard for search engine optimization ethics.

Not the Right Answers

1. These are NOT SEO principles: keyword density, having more links than competitors, search engine submission, hiding text, cloaking, doorway pages, paying for +1′s
2. Potentially Harmful Tools & Services: Linkvana, SEO Link Vine, 3-Way Links, Pay-Per-Post/ReviewMe (any link scheme), blog comment blasters, any automated link building tool or paid link service.
3. Any answer that involves automating and emulating click behavior is wrong for PPC/SEO algo differences
4. Anything other than above
5. Anything other than above
6. Anything other than above
7. Local SEO is NOT review syndication, linking to Google Places, or stuffing keywords in Google Places profiles
8. Anything other than above
9. Ranking a new domain in a competitive space should not include buying thousands of links or gaming click-through rates
10. If they answer that W3C validation is an important SEO factor, they are incorrect
11. Anything other than above
12. Any answer containing the phrase “black hat” is wrong
13. Again, any answer containing the phrase “black hat” is wrong
14. Anything other than above

Find an SEO Manager

Below is a list of several places I would go to find an SEO Manager. I’m sure you have your own secret list, so take mine for what it’s worth.

• Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) Member Directory
• seomoz.org Member Directory
• CraigsList.org
• Google SERPS
• Recruiters

Well, I hope that helps. Below is the link to the Template I promised you. Please share this post if you found it useful. Happy searching!

I get asked quite frequently how long it might take to rank for certain keywords. Diamonds and jewelry come up every so often. A good friend of mine reached out to me on Friday with the “how do I rank number 1 in Google for the phrase diamond rings?” I assembled an extensive response that would have wasted away and died in my Sent folder, so I decided to share my answer.

Without a doubt, diamond rings are on the top Most Competitive keyword lists with regards to search engine optimization. Amit Jhalani, VP of Search for MySolitaire.com has teams of teams working around the clock to build what has become well over 20,000 backlinks to the website, some from Google’s own Matt Cutts (on his blog no less). At one point, Amit’s efforts resulted in the number 1 spot for the keyword diamond rings.

Over the last 12 months, MySolitaire.com has been moving down in the search results. As of today, they hold the 38th position on my machine. Who dominates? Top brands, that’s who:

What Happened to the Number 1 Rank?

Despite the army of linkers, Amit failed critically at competing against the brick and mortar giants in the brand marketing arena. Remember, PageRank (as much we pretend we don’t care anymore) is, as Google states, “a technology that determines the ‘importance’ of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data.” Nowhere in that statement do you see the word quantity. Our friend Vikram did an excellent job with his diagram describing importance and PageRank by the quality and difficulty of acquisition:

As you can see, all the linking in the world at a low level will have very little value, where just a small amount of linking, mentions, and discussions at a high level could make a significant difference to search ranking ranking.

Steve, How Do I Rank Number 1 for “Diamond Rings”?

First and foremost, you need to discover the traffic potential.

According to Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool for AdWords:

• Diamond ring (exact match) has 33k searches and might produce 21 visits day (630/mo)
• Diamond rings (exact match) has 110k searches and might produce 95 visits per day (2850/mo)

I took a look at {name removed} percentage of traffic from keywords in Google Search-only ads versus the percentage of keywords from organic search where they were ranking #1 or #2 in both. The traffic data included over 30,000 total visits for each test keyword. Based on several keywords, the average difference was right around 56% organic and 44% paid. From this, we can infer:

• Diamond ring = 800 organic visits/mo.
• Diamond rings = 3,627 organic visits/mo. – this would be the target keyword

The #1 search result for diamond ring and diamond rings is Zales.com. According to opensiteexplorer.org, Zales.com has:

• About 1,530 linking root domains
• Many of the top links were earned from mozzilla.com, lycos.com, reuters.com, nbc.com, bloglines.com, census.gov, visa.com, newsday.com, msn.com, monster.com, ups.com, examiner.com, dallasnews.com, about.com, theknot.com, cnblogs.com, stltoday.com, bostonherald.com, etc
• 708 Facebook shares
• 90% of the anchor text from inbound links contain the brand name Zales, less than 3% contain a variation of diamond ring or diamond rings

Based on the data, I would say one might need 1-2 full time Public Relations (PR) firms, working for upward of $10,000 per month each to build up that much publicity from news, magazines, and the like to catch up to Zales. The Vince Update, named after the Google engineer who worked on it, continues to play a major a role in ranking, as Matt Cutts describes below:

You’d also need to influence search behavior by changing offline and online ads to include language such as “Search Google for ‘company_name Diamond Rings’ to see the new X Diamond series.” Do you recall Pontiac doing this in 2007?

It would take nearly a year to see top 5 results with the strategy above if the domain was less than a year old. You might be able to do it in 5 months if the website is for a well-established brand for over 5-6 years.

The Secret to Ranking for Diamond Rings

1. Have an excellence product and user experience
2. Spend thousands on PR and offline advertising
3. Make a list of every news station with a website, call them all
4. Make a list of every major magazine that publishes links
5. Send the editors of the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and USA Today some bling
6. Throw an appreciation party in a Vegas penthouse for key people at Digg.com, Mashable, CNN, CNET (take lots of video and photos for them to link to later)
7. Avoid any type of excessive linking (MySolitaire.com was punished for reciprocal linking)
8. Pray to God and wait

That’s it folks. If you’re in the diamond business and want to get to the top, expect to spend $10,000 to $50,000 per month for the next 6-12 months. Don’t even bother wasting your time with traditional linking. Vince and Google made it super easy for those with big bucks and big brands to rank for whatever you like with very little effort. Lucky you.

Posted from Brea, California, United States.

Normally I don’t like to post anything with an expiration date on it, but this WordPress SEO workshop is going to be huge and I don’t want you to miss out on it. The folks over at the WordPress Seminars have invited me to speak right here in Orange County, California.

The event will be held in a classroom environment just off the 57 Freeway across from the Honda Center.

During 3 hours of intense SEO and WordPress training, you’ll learn The 3 Principles of SEO, watch me install and optimize WordPress right in front of your eyes, and several important link building (or off-page SEO) strategies. You’ll have the opportunity to meet with me personally for a few minutes and discuss issues you’re having with your (or a client’s) search strategy.

Event Info

SEO WordPress Seminar
Cost: $159
Date/Time: September 17th, 9:30am – 12:30pm
Location: Westwood College
Address: 1551 S Douglas Road, Anaheim, CA 92806
Phone: (714) 805-9331

Can you attend? If so, please register below:

Why are Links Important?

If you’ve seen the recent SEO Ranking Factors for 2011 article from Rand Fishkin, you already know that links makeup for approximately half of the total ranking criteria. So if you have earned high quality links, you’re halfway there.

How Do Pros Build Links?

Well, I can tell you how they don’t build links. They don’t hire some firm in Asia to add links to random WordPress blogs they created that also host links to their other unrelated clients. They don’t put links in sidebar “Sponsored Links” menus, footer link farms, buy “social bookmarking” services, or buy Mega Link Packages from link brokers. These types of techniques have resulted in banishment for to major brands recently: Overstock and J.C. Penny. Don’t let this happen to you.

What companies such as the underground boutique firm SEOperks do, is help websites build authority (23.87% of the algorithm according to the study above), and apply a hybrid of technical and marketing genius toward a 12-month visibility campaign. It’s sort of like standing in the corner in a room full of paparazzi and having someone point over at you and say “there’s one!”, or like having a huge marketing magnet attached to your website that draws visitors in from interest alone.

Techniques used by the pros also include the basic, most fundamental steps:

1. Using tools such as OpenSiteExplorer.org to index and prioritize links competitors have earned
2. Secure placement in the most trustworthy Internet directories, such as BBB.org
3. Make a few phone calls to vendors, partners, affiliated associations, and chamber of commerce offices
4. You get the idea

Advanced link building techniques can get rather technical and in some cases require brilliance and innovation. Examples of such that I’ve personally witnessed Nate Dame and his SEOperks team execute, have included:

• Writing authoritative articles and conduct internal surveys for colleges and universities
• Rotating sentence-based in-context links under embeddable widgets (simple sample)
• Get clients involved in local government events
• Build comprehensive microsites on extremely high PageRank domains, with quality content about very specific topics
• Participate and even facilitate a robust study on an important industry topic (link bait)
• Assist with blogger outreach campaigns and social media buzz
• Guest blog for writers who just haven’t had time
• A ton more

Free Link Building & Baiting Workshops

I don’t normally do this, but for the month of June, I’m giving my readers complimentary access to 2 of my best SEO Workshops. If you found either to be useful, I encourage you to ask Nate for a free link building consultation (3 of my clients called just to thank me for the introduction). SEOperks can be reached at 440-220-5626
or by using the form below. Enjoy the workshops and please give Nate a call. I’m not sure how many more clients he can handle at once (so grab him while you can!).

• Advanced Link Building Workshop (expires July 1st)
• Advanced Link Baiting Workshop (expires July 1st)

Just as I whining about Google Image Search again today and ironically saw the new Sort by Subject option, it occurred to me that I had forgotten about an important topic relating to a different type of search: local search. When optimizing for a specific geography, the question always comes up, “should I optimize for service then geography or geography then service?service then geography in most cases (if you had to choose just one).

Let’s Lay This to Rest

In taking several super competitive industries, specifically in the Los Angeles, CA area, we weighed the sequence of geography + service and service + geography using multiple exact match queries in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Services we chose included:

• Locksmiths
• Plumbers
• Florists
• Chiropractors
• Cash for Gold
• Pizza
• Title Loans

If you’re in the Local SEO industry, you know quite well that these are several of the most competitive service industries online. In fact, they are so competitive, when I decide to retire from SEO, I’m going to hire a locksmith that ranks well in the Google O-Pack to handle all my SEO (I am 100% serious).

Here’s a table of the results:

Inferences from the Data

Though I’m sure there are going to be anomalies, in our study every instance of service + geography had more search volume or tied with the geography + service, with 9 wins and 3 ties.

Since we’re obviously going to optimize our HTML titles for the service + geography sequence, we should focus link building efforts on both sequences, because 2,976 possible searches for geography + service is a lot of traffic to just throw away.

You Get Dyslexia, You Get 7-Pack

For those who still insist on searching backwards, against the grain, 7-Pack lovers, the search rebels among us, we’ve learned something fascinating about you. According to our research, you geography + service folks, may actually enjoy the 7-Pack much better than the new integrated search results. See below the age old universal search results:

What’s Your Experience?

As you start on your adventure of optimizing your titles for service + geography and your backlinks for both service + geography and geography + service, you may find other interesting data. Please let us know what your experience has been and is as you practice local search engine optimization. Please use the comments form below. Thanks for reading!

A long-standing, but rarely discussed, in internet marketing is choosing the best permalink structure for higher overall placement in search results. I myself have studied taxonomy and have had outstanding results with matching my website directory structure with my URL structure, a common practice as you’ll learn below. Over the last couple of years, use of mod_rewrite and other services to modify URL structure has become quite popular. However, does this help or hurt search engine optimization efforts?

We surveyed over 100 SEO experts and SEO-savvy Mechanical Turk workers to come to a consensus on top criteria, such as using a www prefix, a file extension, forcing a trailing slash, capitalization, and directory/folders use in URLs. The result leads us to believe that the best structure for permalinks may be as shown below. Read our commentary and do some testing of your own before you make a final decision.

www.yourwebsite.com/category/keyword

Why Mechanical Turk Workers?

We chose to use Mechanic Turk for 25% of our survey respondents. Despite the stereotype as sweatshop labor with little knowledge in technology, we found the demographic of Turk workers to actually be perfect, with most workers holding bachelor’s degrees and previously providing very insightful opinions on SEO-related topics.

Criteria Analyzed

1. Structure
2. File Extensions
3. Using a WWW Prefix
4. Trailing Slash
5. Capitalization

Permalink Structure (Directory, Folder, & Taxonomy)

Over the years, we have learned from the thought leaders in search engine optimization, such as Rand Fishkin, Bruce Clay, and Lee Odden to use an intuitive, human-readable, category-based directory systems that match the hierarchy of a website’s taxonomy, to silo content, and to keep URLs short and simple. However, some might argue that using directories may push keywords used in the page name beyond what search engines would display in search results, making a URL and its respective listing less relevant to the searcher.

Matt Cutts, from the Google Search Quality Team, hints of importance in keywords being closer to the root domain, but says we should not obsess over keyword placement.

We asked our experts what they believed the best practice is for using directories in URL structure, to ignore for a moment extensions, prefixes, and capitalization. Here are the results:

Another important argument for those of us who love WordPress like politicians love oil (oops) is the potential danger of capitalization with regards to individual rewrite rules for each page. A practice that has been know to result in decreased performance over time. But we’ll save that for another study.

File Extensions in URLs

Matt Cutts also discussed file extensions in permalinks, stating that search engines prefer file extensions to help differential document types. Well, those surveyed about file extensions don’t agree. In fact, from a technology perspective, not having a file extension apparently provides a technology team with more flexibility in changing platforms and programming languages (.asp, .php, .html, etc). It’s also said to have helped paid search campaigns that use the same landing page for natural SEO; reducing the Display URL by 4-5 characters so that space can be used more productively.

Check out the results below:

Despite the community feedback, Matt Cutts says it may actually be better to include a file extension to help web crawlers understand the document type:

Using a WWW-Prefix

Websites such as Bit.ly and About.me may be two of the few exceptions where it’s not advantageous to include a WWW-prefix within a permalink structure. Despite the fact that Google, now bearing a 64.42% market share in search, allows webmasters to set a preference of how they would prefer Google display website URLs, there are still 35.58% of the search industry that don’t yet offer such an option. It’s possible that our survey results were influenced in part from a general feeling that users still use WWW in direct address bar visits, searches, and in how they link and/or mention a website.

Who cares? When Larry Page and the founders of Google invented PageRank, along with it came the passing of votes (or “Link Juice” as we call it today) and resulting duplicate content issues. Having two versions of the same page may create ambiguity and confusion as to which version a search engine should return in the results, particularly when users link to both variations. To correct this, the best practice is to create a 301 redirect from the non-prefix version, as well as specify the preference in Google Webmaster Tools.

The overwhelming opinion still remains using the WWW prefix, as you can see from the survey results.

Trailing Slash in Permalink

Similar to the problematic duplicate content scenario of having a WWW prefix, using a trailing slash at the end of category or extension-less page is another common topic of conversation. Interestingly enough, the majority of respondents chose the best permalink structure of not having a trailing slash.

Two main explanations for this choice may include:

1. Not having to create 301 redirects when using the same URL for Paid Search (PPC) efforts
2. Transferability of content between platforms, such as all those folks that are still migrating off of complex Windows servers to possibly more flexible Linux environments. This typically means moving .aspx files to .php, or in this case, .whatever to no-dot. Sorry, blatant bias from a LAMP guy – it’s my article and it’s good to be the king.

Permalink Capitalization

Another somewhat controversial subject in the SEO community is the use of capitalization in permalinks. Those who have ran their own tests really know which is better for conversion and click-through rate on their individual websites. However, to create a rule of thumb for those of us having to choose a permalink structure out the gate, our survey participants tend to swear by one best practice: using lowercase in category and page names.

Those who voted for using capitalization, preferred the use of title case rather than all caps, capitalizing the first letter of each word; we won’t talk about these folks who haven’t heard the buzz about capitalization causing confusion with users.

The preferred method is indisputably all lowercase.

Additional Comments & Recognition

The Wizard of Moz, as it were, made a really good point on my Quora extension of this survey, stating:

More info/details here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls

Darren Shaw, a local SEO expert from White Spark, says “With regard to the prefix/no-prefix question, I really don’t think this is a ranking factor. No benefit to having it, or, not having it.”

Cayley Vos, owner of Netpaths, says “This is for SEO only. A www subdomain is better for PPC but does not affect natural rankings. The structure of the entire URL can have dramatic impact on clickthrough rates In SERPS – create URLs that people can click on.”

Duncan Johnson of Yodelay stated, “I have checked “no opinion” in a few of the questions above, not because I have no opinion, but because I genuinely don’t think it makes any difference. My opinion is that Google will bundle all the variant of urls structure pretty much into one small group of of minor variances. There are far more influential factors that Google gives more weighting to than URL structure, such as Twitter Tweets of your page or Facebook Likes, LinkedIn Shares, and of course the good old Inbound Links. Because of the multitude of factors and their variants, I would be very surprised if anyone has sufficient evidence or factual proof of the difference.”

Other comments by anonymous participants included:

Forced www or non-www has little impact on SEO from a rankings standpoint, but can change user perception, as can file extensions (such as lesser used .js and .cfm files; unfamiliarity may be confusing).

Capitalization helps with user readability.

Trailing slashes can disable some server-side includes. Also some servers do not recognize the difference between upper and lower case. You have probably heard the saying that 10% of the fishermen catch 90% of the fish. I am sure that the same is true in SEO. Based upon that, a smart SEO should do the opposite of what a survey finds.

About the Author

Steve Wiideman calls himself a Creative Search Strategist, specializing in technical SEO enhanced with creative content and link bait. Steve currently works as a consultant to well-known brands, trainer to webmasters, SEO agencies and strategist to social media firms.

Wiideman recently completed a study on Google Autocomplete and is currently working on an SEO strategy publication he hopes will be in stores by the end of summer 2011.

Additional References & Resources:

• 11 Best Practices for URLs
• Lee Odden, Bloggers Face-Off
• Google.com > URL Structure

I know you have better things to do with your time than read a study on URLs; thanks for taking time to read this study and please do share your comments and experience on best permalink structure for SEO below. To participate in the study (we’ll keep it going), use this URL: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/permalink-study. Thanks again for reading!

Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag on a few of the projects I’m working on to replace Client Services as a business model. One of the projects is a kick-butt pet travel website called Pet Hotels of America (did you catch the link there? Yah, well I earned it, you’ll see in a moment). The business models are subscription and affiliate marketing and things are starting to come together.

As my clients well know, I manage all of my projects through an awesome online project management tool by 37Signals called Basecamp. I’ve used many other systems and am a fan of various PM software, but there’s just something about Basecamp that really does it for me. Let me give you a virtual walk-through of the different tabs and features from the eyes of an internet marketer.

Overview Tab

Since I’m deep into most of the project work, I don’t really use the Overview tab much. However, if you are a project manager, director, production coordinator, or operations manager, you might use this tab to get a high level view of what’s been accomplished recently, what milestones are coming up (or are late – yikes), and how active your team is with a project. Here is a screenshot below:

Hierarchy of Basecamp PM Software

You’ll want to pay attention to this because it’s the backbone of what makes this project management system so great. There are only a few production tabs in Basecamp, but each has an important purpose and each should tie into one another easily. Here we go….

1. Create Milestones first; mine are typically “On-Page SEO Work Completed”, “SMM Benchmark Hit”, etc
2. Create a To-Do List (or several) associated with each milestone; I have “On-Page SEO To-Dos” and one might be “replace duplicate content”
3. Create a collaborate Writeboard to discuss core topics with version-tracking enable to see who changed or update the Writeboard
4. Create Messages from Basecamp or right from your mobile device that other can see, add attachments to and interact with from a mobile device; I used messages to share ideas before they become a Writeboard
5. The Files tab allow you to upload gigabytes of files; use “Upload a New Version” to archive a copy of the original
6. Time is the perfect way to capture billable hours on a project so you don’t become the victim of vendor abuse.

To-Dos – Paste SEO Task List Here

Under Settings in Basecamp, I typically select the To-Dos tab as my start page so I can quickly see a list of everything assigned to me. If you’re a manager or above, you may be fine with viewing the latest activity on the Overview tab.

If you were to look at my Best Boilerplate SEO Strategy post on Quora, you’d be fairly close to where I start with a new client. Each heading in that strategy would be a milestone and each bullet would be a task. Take a look at the screenshot of Pet Hotels of America’s To-Dos below:

There’s no affiliate program here guys and I don’t work for 37Signals. I do, however, use Basecamp for every single project I’m working on in addition to allowing many of clients into the system so that can upload files and such.

Do You Like Basecamp?

If you’re a fan of Basecamp or any other project management software, please share your experience below. Thanks for reading!

What is the Local Citation Finder?

Friends of mine at Whitespark, an Edmonton SEO services company, invented a tool to help local businesses identify, sort, compare and acquire online references (citations) competitors have earned. The Local Citation Finder is a tool many Local SEO’s have used since August 2010, with quite a bit of filtering. However, soon there will be a few new twists that will make competitors cringe as they start to see Google “local-integrated” and Google Maps Search rankings shift dramatically thanks to some awesome new features that make the tool much easier to use.

Imagine throwing a wide net out and pulling in every single citation earned by the competition, but having the sequence of those citations be sorted first by destinations you currently don’t have visibility in and last by those you do. Now imagine being able to sort that list by mozRank or Majestic SEO Rank, and now imagine being able to “checkoff” citations you have verified your placement in. Got your attention? It gets so much better.

Search by Keyword

Upon first login, the first tab you’ll see is the Search by Keyphrase tab. The Local Citation Finder prompts for some very basic information, including Country, State/Province, City/Town, and Key Phrase. Based on the info you put in, the Local Citation Finder suggests a Final Search Phrase, similar to Google Autocomplete, mixing your geography and keywords automatically for you.

TIP: Suggestions are just that, suggestions. I recommend performing additional keyword research before deciding on the Final Search Phrase. You may want to refer to Google Analytics data or (if available) data from Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Most of the time, the highest volume of local searches are performed with {service} {location}; however, it’s not an exact science, as searches will vary based on the Googler’s geography, language, and service type. For example, “computer stores in Calgary” may be searched more than “Calgary computer stores”.

You can then choose your project as you might have on the earlier version. The project will help associate your business to the search results report (this helps with filtering and sorting later on).

Search by Phone Number

The second tab in the Local Citation Finder allows for a Search by Phone Number, which has two benefits:

1. Discover where your business has already earned citations online
2. Discover where your competition has already earned citations online

I’d start by researching your business. Enter your business information as requested in the form fields, paying close attention to the spelling and accuracy of your town, city, and phone number.

TIP: [Corrected 4/22/11] Business Name is used only for labeling purposes and is not used in the actual query. Your Business phone should not have parenthesis and should be same number that appears online. If your business has multiple locations, you may want to create a report for each local phone number associated with each facility or location.

Discovering competitor data should start at Google Places playing close attention to the exact spelling of how a competitor spells their brand name and the verbatim phone number they are using in their Places Page.

I’d use at least 3 or 4 competitors to get a comprehensive list of citation opportunities.

TIP: Avoid using a phone number your competitor is using in an offline advertisement, such as a flyer, radio ad or TV commercial. Unique phone numbers are often used to segment marketing efforts. If a competitor has an experienced SEO Expert on the team, it’s likely the number in the local maps and directories is specific to online marketing efforts.

As each report completes, an email will be sent to your inbox notifying you that report is ready to be viewed.

Your Search Results

On the Your Search Results Tab, you’ll see all the past reports you have ran and have the option to move the report to a Project, delete it, and now you can even compare your business to several of your competitors in one report, viewing all the root domains you and your competition have sorted by frequency! I love this part, can you tell?

Start by choosing a Search by Key Phrase query report associated with your business (the report will not have a phone number next to it), by clicking the “View Sources” link to the right of the report.

[Correction 4/22/11] The first section of the report will be a table of the top listings that appear for your target keyword phrase, sorted by the order they appear in Google. It doesn’t matter if the search returned a 7-pack style, or, a local-integrated style, the tool just pulls the local results and ranks them in the order it finds them. If you’re seeing a difference in the order from what you get when you search directly in your browser, it could just be localization, or personalization of the search results..

Citation Sources refers to the number of citations found online from various sources, such as Google Places (under “More about this place), BBB.org, Yelp and other destinations.

The real value of citations comes from both the quantity of trusted citations earned and the visibility within all the destinations where competitors have earned them. Therefore, the goal is to acquire citations from the most common sources first, followed by those that are deemed the highest quality by several industry tools built into the Local Citation Finder.

You’ll Love This

A useful feature of the Local Citation Finder is the ability to export opportunities into a CSV file. An aggressive search engine marketer might create an aggregated report of 10-20 competitors using 3-5 core keyword themes and then import the spreadsheet to a Google Spreadsheet where it can be shared and worked on by your local and outsourced link building teams.

For everyone else, a simple habit of refreshing the search once per week, and dedicating an hour or two per week toward earning new citations, is more than enough to show Google and other search engines that your business is slowly growing in importance and popularity.

TIP: You may want to start by verifying and updating business data with the three largest data providers prior to creating or updating online citations and business profiles.

1. InfoGroup (http://www.expressupdateusa.com/home.aspx)
2. Acxiom (http://www.mybusinesslistingmanager.com/)
3. SuperMedia (http://www.supermedia.com/business-listings)

BONUS TIP: Pay attention to the categories and sequence of categories competitors choose in Google Places, Yahoo! Local and within business directories. With a little math, one can quickly identify ideal categories that could also boost local rankings.

The Search by Phone Number Report

The best use of the Search by Phone Number Report (for the target business listing) may be the ability to identify citations with incorrect data. Data validation is a crucial factor in local ranking, playing the role of a digital footprint. Even one suite number or abbreviation off skews the footprint and lessens the effect of the local search strategy.

Note, in this report, the “GOT IT!” column has the checkboxes preselected for you (thank God). You can clean up this list by simply marking irrelevant citations (such as paginated references and duplicate content pages from tags and other redundant URL parameters).

Using the Search by Phone Number Report to identify where competitors have earned citations is absolutely the cornerstone marketing tool of the Local Citation Finder. Provided a Project has been created with the target business name and phone number stored, the report will not only list opportunities where competitors have acquired citations, but those listings marked as “GOT IT!” in the system will automatically be listed at the bottom of the report. This is one of the new features I’m super excited about. I don’t have a lot of time to filter through what I have and have not already done.

Once again, the option to Export CSV can be found above the table for quick download.

Additional Comments

The folks at Whitespark are trying to include links to submission pages across all the popular directories and destinations (Yelp, MerchantCircle, Yellowpages, etc); this will save you a ton of time trying to find where to submit your business. When the direct link to a directory’s submission page is not available, they offer up a link to the homepage of the destination instead, which is the next best thing.

You should always make a best effort to submit valid business data and use categories chosen from competitor research.

Well, that’s my review of the Local Citation Finder and how to get the most from the tool. Please let me know in the comments below if you think I missed anything or you have any feedback. All comments welcome.

I’m a huge a fan of giving props when props are deserved. Today, PSD2HTML is getting featured on my blog because of the unparalleled work they performed on a recent project. PSD2HTML offers Photoshop to HTML services, including coding of WordPress themes, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, email templates and more.

For those of you who know me, you know I’ve been slowly transitioning from full-time SEO Consultant into being more integrated with my family and focusing on projects that produce pyramid-free passive income streams. One such project is a pet-friendly hotels and kennels directory called Pet Hotels of America. The original designers did a fantastic job on the comps we approved, but dropped the ball (miserably) on the coding of the WordPress theme. So bad in fact, that we paid two different developers to try to ‘cleanup’ the code, only to have the entire website revert back to TwentyTen when we upgraded the core WordPress version. I was livid to say the least.

At the point of throwing in the towel and calling this another “just can’t win” scenario, we stumbled upon a resource I had totally forgotten existed, PSD2HTML. Without hesitation, we quickly uploaded our PSD files and paid for a cut to WordPress. It took approximately 20 minutes to fill out all the details and specifications in their ticket system and about 4 hours before I received a confirmation email from the team at PSD2HTML.

Within a few days, we had our beautiful website available for viewing on the PSD2HTML development server. We approved the work and downloaded our theme. It took me about 30 minutes to activate the theme and copy over the code in the Widgets area from the development website (easy work). The theme had extremely clean coding, perfect aesthetics (great user experience), and unparalleled backend simplicity in the WordPress administrative area.

When you’re ready to migrate your website to WordPress or just looking for a re-skin of your existing website, start with brilliant designers or crowdsource using 99Designs.com or CrowdSpring.com, then send your files over to PSD2HTML. I know you’ll have a great experience, we did and so we’re giving props and a well-deserved PSD to WordPress theme coding link to our friends at PSD2HTML. Thanks guys!