Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Next week, I'm organizing the NPMMO meeting (Nebraska People Making People Online). We're going to talk about optimizing your site for search engines, but rather than a boring speech, I'm going to ask for sites to take a look at from members and we're going to go over them giving suggestions along the way. At SES, this is known as a Site Clinic, but we're not going to charge $1800 to attend this. :) If you're in the Omaha area and can make it, please RSVP here and plan on attending. Space is limited, so make sure to reserve your spot early.

Apparently, ToolBarn.com is 1 page out of 1 Billion plus on the internet discussing tools. I'm sure there are lots of types of tools (web tools, power tools , photo tools, hand tools, blogging tools, David , etc.), but today Google says we're the best when it comes to tools. Thanks, Google. I appreciate the compliment. Now, if I could just get those people to buy something. Yeah, head term conversion rates stink, but they're sure nice for branding. It's also causing yet more server load issues, so it's really good we went memcached heavy over the past few weeks so we can handle it without a terrible load on the database server. That leads to the question... now that I've hit the biggest target in our industry, where do I go from here? The joys of doing SEO well on a big site. :)

I was listening to a Nascar podcast on my way in to work today and realized something. They always talk about the balance of a racecar to get optimal performance, and SEO is no difference. If a racecar is too tight, it won't turn. If your SEO is too tight, you won't be able to change directions quickly either. If a racecar is too loose, the back end comes out. If your SEO is too loose, you get a lot of tail action but don't lock in on the main terms. If you get the best balance, your site takes first place and your racecar goes to the lead. Funny how much of life is about balance, and it's funny I hadn't noticed the similarities before. Oh, and both require lots of attention to the details and fine tuning once you get to the track... er... web.

The first of our Beginning SEO podcasts will be released at 10AM central (I scheduled it for 8, but David's server is set for Pacific time.) The first one will be some basic introductions and some information on cloaking - what it is, why it's been debated lately and if it's a good idea for you to use. We also have our Ask an SEO question page up and running. Any questions - leave them there.

David Brown and I did some looking at SEO podcasts online. What we found was lots of podcasts we could stick into two categories. Advanced SEO Podcasts. There are good, available on webmasterradio.fm , but very intimidating for newbies. Beginner Bad Advice Podcasts. Yeah, we found some beginner podcasts, but the advice was awful - ranging from "Create doorways" to "stuff your meta tags with keywords". So, as they said on the movie Robots, See a need - Fill a need . Starting next week, David and I will be doing an SEO Podcast focused on beginning techniques, explaining recent SEO news at a beginner level, and giving long-term strategies for people to keep in mind. I'm sure there will be some things that experienced SEO's will be laughing at as well as techniques they can learn from, but we want to make something that invites new people to start learning about our industry. Yes, Dad - this would even apply to you.

Jeremy Schoemaker put together a nice event for Nebraska, which I attended last night. Today I see he's already calling me out to speak at the next one. If that's the case, I'll have some demands. First, I want access to the presenters lounge. I think that's the restroom, but someone's gotta show me where that is anyway. Secondly, I'm gonna need another link, but this time with the words power tools pointed at ToolBarn.com. Third, I want a couple of questions to answer to get started. I've never actually been asked to speak on SEO, and I've got no idea what level the attendees are at, so it'll be much easier to speak if I have questions from the group. I'm sure a post on shoemoney.com would get a few responses that would help. Oh, and #2 is optional. The bottom line: I'd be delighted to speak to the group, Jeremy. And, not being like those MBL people , I'll even send you an email to let you know this.

For those that aren't really familiar with Hitwise , they're a data collection agency. Through relationships with ISP's, they track user behavior. Then, they turn around and sell the information back to us webmasters. I got an account approved for my 2007 budget (not an easy task, let me tell you) and started poking around in there today. My first impression is that this is really amazing data. For starters, I've taken most of our top competitors and found all of the phrases that are driving traffic to their sites. For those of you doing your own sites, how useful would that be? I'm able to see if there are phrases that would make sense to target ourselves that our competitors are using. Secondly, once I've found a cool phrase, I can see what websites get what percentage of the traffic for that phrase. This is really cool for benchmarking how well we're doing for a given term. While this data is cool, it's also incomplete. For example, Amazon hasn't ...

Todd has convinced me to start a new domain, so the contents of this post have been relocated on my new blog. How important is one-box?

Look out, Patrick Gavin and crew. Google is on to you. As you can see, my gmail has already alerted me that anyone buying links through text-link-ads will obviously be needing to file a re-inclusion request, so they included the link for convenience. That's awfully swell of them. I guess I'll quit marketing and start filing re-inclusion requests now. They're on to this little game of yours. Matt Cutts finally figured out your scheme. Yeah... right. And next you'll tell me MSN's results are totally SPAM-less. At least Google has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh today.

I got interviewed alongside Allan Dick at SES in Chicago last week by WebProNews.com, and they posted the video on their site. Go ahead and give it a watch. I'm sure I said something stupid somewhere, but I think it shows my long-term strategy a bit.

Every time I go to SES, I end up talking to Todd . Lately, I've also been talking with Rand , Ken (some guy), and Todd . What do the first two have in common that the second two don't seem to buy into as much? Linkbait. Todd and Rand are two very good writers, and the linkbait they produce is second to none. Ken and the other Todd seem to use more traditional SEO methods, although they're not totally ignoring linkbait. Nor are they ignoring rankings. I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you want to do linking strategies, or do you want to be creative and have links show up because of some (interesting / controversial / insightful) content? Either one takes work. So what type of linkbait could we come up with for power tools? Something viral, like doing stupid things on video with power tools, would obviously attract some attention. Buying guides and hands on stuff seems to get minimal attention, although they do bring a few links if done well. I've got a couple i...

After spending some time digging around online, I've noticed a few things. 1) Scraper pages rank well. 2) Our site ranks well. 3) Links to searches on our site tend to make that page rank well. By taking a look at our search logs, it appears that people search the same way on our site that they search on Google. That's good news to me, because we use Google hardware for our search. But what's even better news is that we can capture what product they go to when they search for an item and create a link back to the search results the item was found in for each and every product on our site. So let me back up one step here. Since our product pages are dynamically generated, we can take a look at referrer data (HTTP_REFERER environment variable) and get the search terms out of the URL (if any). We can log these to a table with the brand name and the SKU, then take a look when we display the product page for any queries in that table that we'd like to show. So now, on a prod...

I was reading an article in a magazine about another Nebraska resident that goes by Shoemoney (who I met in San Jose last month - nice guy) and he was talking about diversifying within your niche. This had me scratching my head a bit, then Allan Dick from Vitage Tub and Bath sent me an email. Clawfoot tubs are a niche, so when he gave me an email about diversifying, Jeremy's interview popped into my head and things started clicking for me. Kitchen Sinks What Allan and his guys are doing is expanding within their niche. They have supplies for all sorts of bathroom related products already. They have relationships with Kohler, Whitehaus, American Standard and the like already. These manufacturers also make kitchen products. So what they're doing is expanding into a new area without setting up new vendor relationships. They're selling Kitchen Sinks and faucets at a new website - appropriately named buykitchensinks.com . So now expanding within a niche starts to make sense t...

It comes up from time to time at the forums I hang around at that many sites use frames, but not too many people know if they can be crawled or not. Taking a look around our Google Mini this morning shed a little light on that topic. Appendix F: Crawling Framesets and Frames To crawl framesets and their nested frames, the framesets must be well-formed with the tags occurring within the tag. Anchors (links) must also occur within the frameset. Depending on the particular structure of your site, the search results may point to the frameset page itself or to the individual frame pages. There is currently no way to specify which behavior you prefer. Sort of says it all... don't rely on the engines to handle frames correctly. Frames = poor SEO due to the unpredictability involved and lack of content on the actual page - the content is in each frame, which makes each one of those more valuable than the overall page but also much less useful to someone landing the...

I've been following the v7ndotcom stupidity - I mean SEO contest - just a bit. Every now and then I see a link to the search results . I just came across one of the best ads yet based upon those keywords. Sergey Says Eat my V7ndotcom Elursrebmem ! www.isthisyourcat.com Obviously poking fun with the name of one of Google's founders, but it sure made me laugh. Very simple and to the point, which took someone with a warped sense of humor to start in the first place. Kudos.

So I've taken part in a debate over if CSS navigation systems cause an SEO penalty and all the internal pages to fall out of grace with Google. I personally don't think this is the case, so I've started working on one for ToolBarn.com. I can see how the usability for some will be great, for others it'll be used the same as always, and some people will keep on using search. However, it's neat looking and our competitors don't currently use it, so it'll differentiate us from them. So what's the reason people are saying it's a penalty? Simple. There are div's that are hidden. Well, the version I'm building doesn't use many divs. Most of it is just unordered lists with different classes applied depending on the depth. I'm interested to see how it ends up looking and working. My biggest obstacle right now is our webstats and our live help buttons. They both run JavaScripts that have to complete before the JavaScript for the nav system will...

I'm taking my time in sharing mini revelations (insights gleamed from reverse engineering our google mini's algorithm.) I've got so many tests planned and want to make sure that the data I'm extracting is accurate. Anyone with an interesting test, let me know. I've been playing around with link order. If I link to a series of pages as linkto1 linkto2 linkto3, does it change anything to reverse that like linkto3 linkto2 linkto1? I've tried playing with that a big, but it's tough to conclusively decide without making 100's of pages exactly the same and reversing the links. Then, I'm having to go back and forth to make sure the results are consistent. I'll be ready to share my observations on this one shortly. I'm all ears for new tests. Brian.

With our Mini, I have been toying with some ways to search for substrings. What I'm finding is that dashes, dots, etc. don't allow for a substring match. However, there is one interesting observation that I have to note here. The first special character is dropped. That's right, be it a dash or a dot, the first one is dropped and ignored. Even when searching, the same behaviour occurs. What does this mean? How can I use it to my advantage? Well, let's take a look at the UB181 example. If I were to make 2 variations of that in our "Additional Keywords" field (only shown to our Mini), simply making ub-181dz and ub181-dz (adding a dash where a letter meets a number, which is a simple regular expression) will not allow these to match a search for 181dz or ub181. Instead, I'd have to make ub-181-dz for a match of ub181 and u-b-181dz for a match of 181dz. That seems like an odd way to have to handle this, but again - simple regular expressions to make this happe...

So I have some major beefs with the Mini and how Google's algo handles stemming / substring matches. This just isn't working right. For example, one of our products is the "UB181DZ". People commonly search for the "UB181", since this is the base model. Well, the default results were 0 matches. That's not good, especially when we have the UB181DZ in stock, along with the DZK and the DZK-2 (we "invented" these kits by customer demand.) So, a simple fix is to pre-fetch substring matches of any skus. I'm doing a "SELECT sku FROM products WHERE sku like '%$searchstring%';" and sending the search as "ub181 OR ub181dz OR ub181dkz OR ub181dzk-2" for now, but that's just not a good long-term solution. It also doesn't work when they search for multiple words. I'd have to make some funky syntax to get that working, and I'm feeling lazy right now. As an experiment, I thought we could try dashes. The first att...

We bought Google. Ok, so it was just a mini , but it's cleared up my understanding of Google a bit. Upon setting it up, nothing really great came to mind. However, after doing some tweaking (it's powering the search on toolbarn.com right now), it has become clear that the more I learn about this box and it's capabilities the more I understand Google. For starters, I ended up having to cloak some pages to our mini to get our results to come out right. A search for makita drills gave me results of milwaukee drills as well because of our breadcrumb navigation and the cross-linking. Every page on our site was returned for power tools because it's in the main navigation. Some searches return poor results, such as makita 5000, which several people have searched for. I have a temp solution in place for that. So, after playing with it and then sitting back to think about how it works / serves results, I figured something out that may end up being priceless. Searches done on our...