As you explore the various opportunities to market your company, products, to blog, to post videos, and more, you probably want to do so with a recognizable name. There is a great tool over at namechk.com which allows you to pop in potential user names and check a variety of social media sites for your desired name, in one go. While this might seem like a site that you would use only once or twice, like when you are registering yourself or a client, this can also be a great tool for researching a bit about what your competitors are doing across these networks.

If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or if you've seen the movie, you know that Marvin The Paranoid Android is funny in it's own depressing way. What if your web server had the same dejected outlook? Check out this 404 error page. This is a great example of something that can go "viral" and add new visitors, links, and attention to a site.

Every time some one hits the wrong URL or mistypes when visiting the Wikimaniacs site, they come across this great 404 page. While it is probably a rare occurrence to hit this page, if the site lasts a few years, it wouldn't surprise me to see their 404 page submitted to the various social bookmark sites over and over again as visitors re-"discover" this 404 page. This is one of the ways in which viral marketing works best... The reason why I found this page? It hit the front page of a social bookmark site called "Reddit".

It could be that some one associated with Wikimaniacs submitted the page to Reddit, or that with their recent brush with popularity via social bookmark site Digg, a new visitor came across this error page, loved it, and subsequently decided to submit an error URL to Reddit (and perhaps other places as well). Either way, it helps them to gain more visibility and potentially improve their rankings. As I mentioned a few months ago, a 360 degree take on visitor experience and attention to little details like 404 pages can be quite positive toward marketing a site.

(Photo by Prince Heathen)

I've mentioned before that there are various ways that you can make your site's flash content more search engine friendly. However by and large, it is pretty hit and miss as to what an engine actually indexes from a site's flash content. If your site is big on flash, you might want to check out Adobe's new Search Engine Optimization Technology Center.

Interesting post over at SEO ROI Services called "Does Google Care If A Link Is Underlined? - SEO FAQ". Gabriel Goldenberg relates a conversation that he had with Google's Matt Cutts over the use of underlines in links. I know a lot of people wonder about whether tricks like keeping links underlined or not is kosher with Google and generally...

Reading Cutts' reply, it looks like you are probably OK using or not using an underlined link at your own discretion. It comes down to how the links are interpreted by Google. If you are doing something on your site that seems sketchy and a competitor turns your page or site in for a spam review, a manual review may occur. While it has been around since at least 2005 and the authenticity is not 100% guaranteed, there is a Google Spam Grader PDF over at Search Bistro that may be of interest. A newer version was mentioned more recently over at Search Engine Land and at SEOBook. I would imagine that some of the points in those documents, whether the docs are real or not, would indeed cause some concern (i.e. a seemingly benign URL in the search result forwards you to an adult URL, hidden text on a page, etc.)

I know some will want to "hide" a few extra links on a page for marketing reasons (i.e. link trades and exchanges). I know that others may have their own design aesthetic that may warrant not using visible links at all. For example, I've seen some ARGs and interesting graphic designer portfolios, rock band websites, etc. that choose not to underline all links in their pages so as to force visitors to hunt and peck through their site. Visitors who scour such a site are often rewarded with "easter eggs" - materials such as free ring tones, free wall papers, and the like which are not available from the normal navigation of the site but may be hinted at.

From Goldenberg's conversation with Cutts, it seems that intent is the key. If there is any doubt that Google may misinterpret your intent, just use normal linking.

I got a tip today about a site that helps non-profits out, a site called TechSoup. It appears that if you are a non-profit company, you may be able to qualify to pick up free or discounted software. While I don't work at a non-profit myself and have not used this site before, this seems like a great opportunity for non-profits and for enterprising companies to donate or provide discounts for non-profits. Have you used TechSoup before? Do you have any similar resources to share?

Talking to a WebPosition customer this morning, they were wondering why a Google link: search would show that they had 4,000+ links pointing to their site when WebPosition was showing only 26 links from the "same" search. A space, as well as other things, can make all the difference in how you search and what Google returns from your search.

In the customer's case, and using Apple.com as a generic example, they had been searching in their web browser like this:
link: www.apple.com

When this search is performed, Google looks both for the word "link" and the second word, the domain name. This turns the search into a normal keywords search rather than invoking some of Google's advanced search and filtering functions. You'll notice that Google even highlights the "words" in the search results:

This is the proper way to do a link search at Google:
link:www.apple.com

Notice that while there may be fewer pages listed as linking back, this is also using Google's link command rather than a normal search.

Reading through social bookmarking site Reddit, I found this great graphic that describes the "browser wars". The graphic represents a great piece of viral marketing as well. There are a lot of tech, SEO, and others that will likely bookmark, blog about, or otherwise promote the site or graphic. However there is nothing else really on the site, it has no place to go...

Put your graphic on a specific web page and strategically link to other pages on your site. Submit the web page to social bookmarking sites, not the graphic. You do want to leverage any "Page Rank" gains on your viral page gains so that it can help uplift other pages on your site. When you submit only a graphic, your page rank starts and ends with that graphic. There is not "site rank".

I was listening to NPR this morning. They were talking about some experimental photography project that was on the web. I didn't quite catch the name of the group, so I did a Google search on a few of the keywords that I thought they were mentioning.

But... while I listened to their show and read the NPR post, I tried clicking on the link to the http://www.sametime715.com/ site. The site was down. I got a Yahoo 999 error.

Trying again about 20 minutes later, I was able to get to the site, but it did not include any pictures, only the text from the site.

Obviously the site was still having some problems. A few hours later, now, I can get to the site and actually view it normally.

Interesting site/idea but not quite my cup of tea. It looks mainly like something that you would see as a photogallery on FLICKR or someone's blog. Yet this has to be of interest to someone out there and were it running normally, it would probably gain a considerable amount of links almost immediately just from the NPR broadcast.

3 things that I learned from this NPR experience:

• Plan Ahead! Know how the engines tend to index your site.

  NPR may or may not keep track of how often Google visits. But if you were to check Google's WebMaster Tools and your website's analytics software, like WebTrends, you can compare and contrast the two in order to get a good picture of how often your site is indexed. You may even learn that there are certain pages or areas of your site that are better indexed, or getting more frequent indexing than other portions of your site. You can then plan and publish quite strategically.



• If possible, understand your hosting company and technology.

  If you know that your site is going to be highlighted on a major TV or radio show, or other publication, you certainly want to make sure that your site can handle a spike in traffic if it occurs. The superbowl flush may be a myth, but the Digg/Slashdot/whatever effect is real.

  You can read about how real it can be: via Inc magazine's story on gift card reseller Plastic Jungle, a relatively unknown but awesome graphic designer's post about getting "dug" a few times, or the story of the ever growing and popular social bloglet service Twitter and their experience with technology hampering their ability to provide scalable services.



• Are there other limitations to your account? What stories do error messages tell about your site/company?

  I would be willing to bet that the 715 site has no control over the error pages that their host, Yahoo, serves up for their site or at least doesn't know that it is configurable.

  If you can, you may want to create a custom error pages to encourage users to perhaps book mark your site and return later. Give them a hint as to what they are missing. If I didn't think that this would make a good post, I would have listened to the NPR broadcast, tried the site, got the generic error page, and never came back or tried the 715 site again. In one ear and out the other, eh? Worse yet, what if NPR had linked to the 715 site incorrectly?

  If you were on a social bookmarking site, a blog, a forum, etc. and some page from a site was mentioned, from a site you've never heard of, you tried the link but got to a generic error page, would you be more or less likely to return and re-try a site the link? Attention spans are short. Would you give a site a second chance if you saw one of these 404 error pages? Or something a bit better? I would bet that the odds would be better.

  I know that some are thinking, "but that is stupid, it's just an error page"...

  When was the last time that people were blogging about your error message? Freely creating viral videos about it? Creating error page art, T-Shirts, fan clubs, and more about your site, let alone your error page? Sure this is an extreme, but it shows the underlying fact that a error page can be more than a dead end.

Now, not everyone will care about their site getting extra traffic, visitors, links, and so on. But many of us do. Not everything can be covered or planned for. But you never know planning and understanding a few things like this might help. Good luck in your online marketing efforts!

Back in April of this year, I wrote an article called "Name Squatting 2.0". Essentially, some will buy a domain name and hold it until it becomes popular. Once popular, they may try to sell the domain as if for ransom. In the social media world, I pondered the probability that the same thing could happen with name registrations and services like Twitter, MySpace, and others. Anne Zieger of What Matters Online, had a similar thought. Connecting the dots to how you run a marketing business, she proposes that her clients contact her in order to run a social media naming audit.

If you can explain the value of social media to a client, and they get it, perhaps you may also want to reserve some of the obvious names for your clients. While not everyone will be ready to take up the reins of social media, a client may be pretty appreciative if you have the foresight to reserve a few obvious names for them.

It probably goes with out saying, but be sure that expectations are set and that there is a clear explanation of who holds the registrations, when the logins will transfer to the client, etc. You probably don't want to be labeled as a scamer or name squatter yourself and you want a client to sing your praises, not complain about you online. Thus, give the registration to the client when they are ready to take the reins or if you cease business relations with the client.

It's no secret that we find Wordtracker a really useful tool. We even include a basic version in WebPosition in order to encourage more people to discover this great keyword research site. Whether you are a current user of Wordtracker or not, you may also find their new Keywords Questions experiment pretty interesting.

When you look at the number of links pointing back to your site, it is usually good to see the total number increasing. This often means that you are doing something right. When dealing with client expectations, you may need to explain to a client that just because the number of links go up, this does not necessarily mean that all of their rankings will go up in turn. It may, in some ways, be helpful to explain to your client that links can often be radioactive in nature. They can provide a benefit today that energizes your rankings, helps it to gain traffic and conversions, to start a conversation about a product or service, and so on, but many links lose their strength to provide these actions over time.

As one example, lets say that Google just so happened to visit Best Week Ever this morning. And it looks like they have...

One of the posts on their front page today, leads to a page that talks about a cat toilet. Not too exciting, I know. While the post on their main page talks about and links to the manufacturer, Google and other engines will see that link back to the manufacturer and they can associate a bit of the page's popularity to that link. In this case, Cat Genie, has a PR7 page pointing back to it from BWE.

As the BWE home page adds newer posts, the Cat Genie post will be buried further (PR7), and further (PR 5), and further (PR 0) into BWE's site structure. As the link moves deeper into the site, most of the benefit that Cat Genie's rankings had gained from this link will decay or disappear.

While this is just one example, there are many hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, news aggregators, and other sites that have this same process at work. I know that PR is a lousy measure by most accounts, as it is not updated for updated for months at a time, and there are indeed many factors aside from PR that engines like Google use to rank a page. Understanding this concept of link radioactivity, depreciation or whatever you want to call it, may help you to explain to clients and others why link building is not a one time action. This understanding can also help when trying to explain why even with a huge number of links behind them, a site may still no do so well in the rankings. Even with a good volume of links behind them, sites can - seemingly out of nowhere - find that their rankings tank through no fault of their own.

In my last post I spoke a bit about Absolute Vs Relative URLs. In this post I will talk about the Windows Hosts file. If you have a site mock up that you want to put online and test out but the files are not yet ready to be deployed on the live site, you can test your site by using the Windows Hosts file.

How To Edit The Hosts File

- Search on your computer for the "hosts" file.
On my computer this is located at:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
this can vary depending on your system.

- Open this file up in notepad.

- Here you can add the IP address where the mock up site is hosted. And the actual URL where the site may eventually be hosted. Or you can put just about anything in. In my own case, I've added a few shortcuts in my hosts file so I can type in phrases like "edit", "blog", "payroll", etc. and have my browser always take me to my preferred sites rather than having to type a long URL or click through a mess of nested bookmarks - geeky, I know.

More Info On The Hosts File...

This same sort of trick is often employed by libraries and schools to block access to certain sites or redirect traffic back to an internal page. If YouTube is any indication, this is not an entirely fool proof methodology. I've found a lot of kids posting videos on how to get around this...

Businesses use this not only to test sites that aren't live yet, but also so that employees can type phrases into their browsers like "HR" and get to internal HR pages and so on.

Unfortunately, this is also a way that some viruses and spy ware can get on your system and try to phish for your information. So it's not a bad idea to be aware of this file and check it once in a while for odd entries.

Introducing The Hosts File To A Colleague

If you want to have some fun with an SEO colleague in your agency... wait until they leave their desk then head over to their computer. Pull up a news page like this one and leave it up in their browser.

Click through "start-->run" then type in CMD and hit enter. Type in: ping www.google.com

Copy down the IP address that shows up. Open their hosts file and put something similar to this in:
209.85.173.99 www.yahoo.com

Save the file and perform a www.yahoo.com search.

Bring the news page back up and when they get back:

"Oh wow Bob, looks like Yahoo actually sold out to Google, it's not just advertising... Just...wow."

Have them perform a www.yahoo.com search.

Once they are past the "No way!" stage of your hijinx, you can get back to business and show them how to edit the hosts file so they can test a client's site with the actual URL being used.

Working on a new site? Testing code before it goes on a live server? Reading through Google Groups, John Mu talks about the pluses and minuses related to absolute vs. relative URLs. He says that as a negative absolute URLs "cannot be tested on a staging / testing server (e.g. locally) (unless you insert the links dynamically)". I disagree with his suggestion as I'm a fan of absolute URLs and believe that there is a way around this, by using the Windows Hosts file on your PC. This first post discusses absolute vs. relative URLs in case you are not familiar with the difference.

In case you are unfamiliar with absolute vs. relative URLs, a quick recap no what they are...

In the fake blog page mock up below, I have a few absolute links to sites that currently exist. When you click through the link, they work because the link exists.

What if I wanted to add navigation to the page such as this:

Since the domain does not exist right now, lets pretend that the site is down as I'm moving to a new hosting company, an absolute link like this one will not work to test the navigation:
<a href="http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/absolute_vs_rel.html#relative">previous
post</a>
However I could use a relative link like this:
<a href="absolute_vs_rel.html#relative">previous post</a>

Thus if I'm testing the html page on my local hard drive I can still click through the link and see if the navigation works because my browser will add the first half of the link based on where the web page currently exists.

On the plus side, if I move this page to live web server, it will retain all of the relative URLs and I have very little if any edits to make in order to make sure that he page works as long as it works on my local hard drive. There are some caveats, but I won't cover all of those, only one that John hints at...

"...Relative URLs:
+ make it easy to move content around
+ make it easy to test locally and on a staging server
- are easy to break if linking to content that isn't moved as well
(stylesheet, graphics, etc)..."

Lets say you store your graphics under the main folder of your site like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/somegraphic.gif

and you usually save your HTML to the same location like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/chewbacca.htm

Then you move the HTML to a new location like this:
http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/archive/chewbacca.htm

If your coding on chewbacca.htm used a lot of relative linking, you really need to plan ahead or you'll probably break items in the code. For example maybe that relatively linked graphic on chewbacca.htm now looks for the graphic at: http://www.scotts-starwars-memories.com/archive/somegraphic.gif ... but you forgot too move all of your graphic files to the new folder structure... oops now you have broken images.

As John Mu says, there probably isn't an "absolute" answer as to when you should or should not use absolute or relative URLs. It is mainly a matter of choice. In my next post, I'll talk a bit about how the Windows Hosts file can be used to test a web site on your staging server regardless of if you use absolute or relative URLs.

A bit more on the duplicate content vs. syndication idea...

I found a recent post on the popular Wolf Howl SEO blog where he gives his own take on how Google may be getting their duplicate content filters wrong. Wrong or right, he has a point. Not all original content creators will rank highly for their own content.

A local SEO shop called Anvil Media allows us to repost their articles from time to time. Perform a search on the phrase: Building Trust Online to Build Sales. As of today, you'll find a page from Market Position ranking in first place for that phrase. With Kent's permission we re-posted the Building Trust Online to Build Sales article in August 2006.

In the same search results you will find a link to a post at SEMpdx where Kent re-published this article in April 2007. (SEMpdx is Kent Lewis' Portland Oregon SEO community site.)

Looking back through the Internet Archive, this article was originally on Anvil Media's site around April 2006. It is possible that Kent may have even published this piece elsewhere or previous to this, on a different Anvil Media URL.

Putting this a different way... Google does not necessarily rank the original publisher in the top spot:

While I've read a few theories including those that Google -can- use the original date of publication as one factor in determining whether a page is actually duplicate or not, and then filter out the duplicates (this way the dupes may not rank as highly as the original publication...) obviously this doesn't always happen. But these are good ideas and theories on how Google works in relation to duplicate pages, and may generally apply as one of several overall factors that they balance when making an algorithmic decision in how to rank original and duplicate pages.

Syndication can be a good thing if you are able to get your content
onto a site that is popular, that has some trust, age, etc. On the other hand, this also means that for an indeterminate amount of time those other sites may out rank your pages for your content. It is a mixed blessing to be sure.

Should you syndicate your site's web content? If you were to start a new business you might not have a brand name that consumers and web searchers recognize. Even if you've been out in the market for years, maybe your local search market recognizes you, but a larger audience would not. In this post, I want to show you a quick example of duplicated content, how it's not necessarily penalized, and why it can be a smart move to syndicate your content.

One page that is listed in the first page of a Google search, is this one:
searchengineland.com/080422-132417.php (Number 9 as of 5/22/08, number 6 in ranking as of 5/27/08).
If you strip away all of the Search Engine Land navigation, advertising, and social media widgets, what is left? What is 90% of the page's actual information comprised of? An image and a text blurb about the image. This image actually. Or is it this image?

This SEL post is a guest spot by the SEO firm Elliance.com. Let me say up front that I love Elliance's Infographics series! I really like how they have things boiled down to an understandable chunk of information. Even so... Go back to Google and click several pages deep and look for Elliance related listings. If you are using WebPosition 3 or 4 Pro, try this mission. You'll find that elliance.com is listed in Google but as of today they have rankings in 62 and 78 respectively for International SEO on these two pages:
http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-services/international-search.aspx
http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-resources/seo-infographics.aspx?title=International-SEO-Tips

Something to learn here... Not all online marketing is about optimizing your site or getting your site to the top ranking. Some times there are others sites that -can- and will rank for highly competitive phrases, and it might be better to have those sites rank with your info while you work on your own rankings. By doing this, you may be able to get a new audience to learn about your site or services.

Where it not for Search Engine Land and that fact that Elliance's content is regularly syndicated there, I may never have heard of Elliance. Additionally, Elliance may not have gotten exposure and links from this blog but also from many other blogs and SEO news sites that enjoy the infographics series at SEL and Elliance's site.

If archive.org is any indicator, Elliance has been around for quite some time... but in a world full of marketing firms online and offline, you can't really know them all. Even interesting and helpful sites like Elliance some times get lost in the shuffle of amazing to mediocre sites but syndication with the right sites can be helpful.