Now that Christmas 2009 is behind us, it’s time to start thinking about your SEO program and the Christmas and holiday season of 2010. OK, go ahead and groan. But you know it’s time. Well, if you own an ecommerce or retail website and if you depend on Christmas and holiday visitors to make or break your annual sales numbers, now is the time to plan your search engine optimization efforts for the Christmas and holiday season of 2010. Years ago, people didn’t start thinking about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. The day after Turkey Day was the largest shopping day of the year (and still is). But in recent years I’ve noticed that marketers have started marketing for Christmas earlier and earlier. It now begins a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. No sooner than you’ve gobbled up your yam and they’re hitting you with green and red. Festive, festive, festive!

Traditional offline marketers and businesses have always planned in advance for the Christmas and holiday season, but for SEO it is a different ball game. Search engine optimization takes a good 9+ months to really take hold. I’m not talking about indexing your website in the major search engines. I’m talking about performing a real targeted search engine optimziation campaign. The competition is so stiff in most industries now that you need at least a full year of solid SEO just to compete for the best keywords. So when I say it’s time to start thinking about Christmas 2010, I don’t mean selling. I mean planning and forming your SEO Christmas list!

If you have NOT optimized your website yet here is a SEO Christmas list for 2010:
1. Decide if you will wage the war on your own or hire a search engine optimziation firm for the new year.
2. Understand your online competition in the search engines.
3. Take the time to understand the types of keywords you want to target…do your research!
4. Make sure you have solid SEO plan in place, this includes getting accurate analytics working on your website.

If you HAVE a well performing SEO program, here is your SEO Christmas list for 2010:
1. Make sure you re-access all keywords that generated conversions throughout the year.
2. Look at any new competitors that might have arrived within your marketplace.
3. Continue to build highly relevant links to your website and continue to build your authority online.
4. Make sure your social media marketing program is up and running.

I hope my little SEO Christmas lists help you a bit for 2010. Are you ready to make 2010 a great year? I know I am!

Danny Dover at SEOmoz posted a “scientific” study on whether or not PageRank Sculpting works and his conclusion was – surprise! – it works. Michael Martinez at SEO Theory wrote a scathing refutation of the report. Who is right?

I have to say that my concern is the same as Michael’s and a few other prominent SEOs. Why doesn’t Dover provide the list of websites he used for his study? He’s asking us all to take his results as gospel without providing the necessary proof. That said, I’m willing to accept that maybe, possibly, PageRank Sculpting works under a few isolated cases. If the conditions are right you can influence your PageRank using internal links. But I’m not willing to buy that spending the time on pursuing it is worth it in the long run.

For every search engine optimization decision you make there is a cost and a (potential) benefit. The problem with SEO cost-benefit analyses is that what works today may not work tomorrow. So you spend hundreds or thousands of hours sculpting your PageRank only to find out a year or two later that everything you accomplished went up in smoke. Maybe that’s why Danny and SEOmoz chose not to publish the websites – they’re afraid Google may reverse engineer the study and change their algorithms to shut it down. Or maybe the test just doesn’t prove the conclusion? Or maybe it does and Danny is protecting his future tests?

Or maybe it doesn’t really matter! If PageRank Sculpting ever really worked at all, it only worked on sites large enough that you’d have to spend hundreds or thousands of man hours carving your link juice just to improve the PageRank on a few pages of your site when you could have done the same thing by performing honest link building, which we’re fairly confident will always be approved by Google and a part of their ranking algorithms.

Personally, while I think this is an interesting discussion, I think PageRank Sculpting is a waste of time. What do you think?

I get many potential clients on the phone that have one goal in mind and that is to be on the first page of Google right next to their biggest competitor, wouldn’t’ we all? It is important to realize that to get ahead in life most websites need to first put their dues in. The same thing goes for websites as well. Websites need to show the search engines that they have earned their right to be in that high position or ranking in search results before they are actually allowed in. Each website needs to work their way up to that point, by marketing their businesses over time. Key point is that search engine optimization is about building your online authority and developing trust.

If you have a website and Wall Mart appears on the first page with Target and a few other major department stores what makes you think that after making a few changes to your website you will all of a sudden appear right next to them in the search results? Organic search takes a great deal of time and your website needs to prove to the search engines that you belong on that first page with some of the biggest brands in your space. For some competitive keywords this could take years and sometimes even longer than that. If you have a new website you can guarantee yourself that it will take a quite a while for your website to rank for certain competitive keywords. Do some research on the websites that might be parked in the first few pages of search results for your targeted keywords. You might notice that they have websites that been in the search engines for over ten years. This means that they have had a decade to allow their website to grow and build. It doesn’t matter if you think your website looks better or even if your company has a better standing in the industry. Search engines are readers and recorders of data. The major search engines rank individual pages of websites according to data and not emotion…it is important to acknowledge that!

Search engines don’t pick websites they like more and put them in the first few pages of the search results. Many people and business owners feel that sometimes Google (or other major search engines…yes, there are several others treats certain websites unfairly and this really couldn’t be further from the truth. Google tries to organize the world’s information and catalog it correctly and this is no easy task by any means. There are hundreds of search engine ranking factors that contribute to positioning in the search engines.

Remember that new websites are being published each and every day adding to the online chaos so it is important to leave your mark and spend the time to properly optimize your website and build relevant inbound links and develop your authority over time.

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might want to purchase domain names that cross over into multiple TLDs and then there are times when you shouldn’t bother.

Let’s say that you are starting a new business in the UK and you purchase the domain name newbusiness.com. Should you also purchase newbusiness.co.uk?

There are plenty of reasons why you should. If you know that your business will operate primarily in the UK then having the regional TLD will benefit you. You could redirect one of the domains to the other or build two websites and increase your chances of ranking in the search engines for your search terms – just don’t use duplicate content!

The dot com TLD has a lot of potential to rank worldwide for your search terms, but it may be easier to go for the regional rankings instead. In fact, one strategy is to build two sites – one that targets your region and the other that is focused globally. When you start to rank in your local region for your important keywords then you can take advantage of those rankings by capitalizing on them. When your business grows to an extent that the business you get from outside your region matches that from within your region then you can redirect your regional TLD to the dot com site and keep on trucking.

That’s just one strategy. Here’s another:

You are starting a business in the U.S. that will have a global outreach, but you know your business will remain a small business forever. Should you snag up every newbusiness dot TLD on the planet? Probably not. That could get costly. But a multinational corporation with a presence on every continent might want to do just that.

What’s the moral? Analyze your business goals. If you are a regional business that you see may expand into a global outreach some day, buy up the dot com and the regional TLD for your site’s name and focus on regional sales until you deem it is prudent to go global. If you are starting out globally but staying small then don’t bother with regional TLDs unless you think you may run into copyright or trademark issues.

This is the time of the year when every blogger in the world looks back at the year and creates a top 10 posts of the year blog post. Marketing Pilgrim published its top 10 list of 2009 and I was just as surprised as Andy Beal to discover that one of the items on the list was a post from 2007. How did that happen?

The post in question is this post on Google offering cheap online file storage. Let’s perform a little forensic SEO analysis:

• First, the post is No. 1 in Google for the key phrase “cheap online file storage”
• It’s also No. 1 in Bing and No. 7 in Yahoo!
• OK, let’s include Ask too. It’s No. 1.

That accounts for over 95% of all searches for that key phrase. How many searches is that, exactly? According to Google’s external keyword research tool, there are 46 searches per month for that exact key phrase. That’s not much, but consider that most searchers are going to clickon that top listing, 46 times 12 equals 552 additional visitors from a Google SERP. But that’s not a lot in comparison to Marketing Pilgrim’s overall traffic.

There are related keywords that could account for additional traffic. But let’s move on. Why does this post have such great search rank in the first place?

• The title of the post includes the key phrase
• There is one outgoing link that includes the phrase “online file storage”
• There is another outgoing link with the phrase “buy online file storage”
• Yahoo! reports 93 inbound links to that blog post (and a lot of them are from Techmeme, each one counting as a highly relevant and authoritative aged link

I don’t think you can point to any one factor as the reason for high rankings for this blog, but a combination of factors – the Techmeme links being big influences. And speaking of those, do you think that Techmeme could account for a high volume of traffic to this blog post for Marketing Pilgrim?

When it comes to ranking for keywords long term, it’s important to consider the important factors – relevance, authority, age, and long tail keywords.

This Marketing Pilgrim post ranks well for one keyword that is a long tail keyword, which means less competition. And that can sometimes make all the difference.

Over the past year or so, I have started to see more businesses and marketers and search engine optimization professionals suggest that blogging is the best kept SEO secret online. I’d have to agree. But I’ve been saying that for several years now. Why is blogging such a great SEO tool?

For starters, every time you update your blog with excellent user focused content you invite the search engines back to crawl it. The major search engines really do love fresh content and every blog post is great search bot food. But, and this is even more important, each blog post is a separate web page, which means every time you publish a new blog post you are giving yourself one more opportunity to be found in the search engines.

But like all aspects of your internet marketing starting and running a blog is NOT the end all make or break, but should be another excellent outlet to attract targeted visitors for your company.


Here are several frequently questions related to blogging that I am frequently asked:

1. Should I launch a stand alone blog or should I incorporate as part of my website?
My Short Answer: If you want to only have 1 website for your visitors, then having a blog incorporated in your site is a good bet. If you decide to launch a separate site as your blog, be advised, that like any type of website you need to market it to build it.

2. Should I use a free blogging software platform (such as Blogger) or use a hosted solution (such as Wordpress)?
My Short Answer: If you are launching a blog as a hobby or to earn passive income, then a free blogging service is fine. If you are launching a blog for your business, then I ALWAYS recommend a hosted solution.

3. I have no idea what to write about, what do I do?
My Short Answer: Yes, you do! Use your knowledge about your business and write about your customers, industry trends, etc. I always recommend start by reading other blogs in your industry as a starting point or set up Google alerts that about industry topics and take it from there.

To make the most of blogging as SEO, here are a few best practices to make sure you put to work:

• Write unique, user focused blog posts.
• Write blog posts as much as you can.
• Naturally optimize the title of your blog.
• Naturally optimize every single blog post title.
• Make sure you custom design or use a search friendly template for your blog.
• Give your blog time to develop – Rome was not built in a day!

We can talk about the future of the Web all day, but today is today. The search engines still feed on good quality content. Use your blog to create an effective SEO campaign and take it one post at a time!

Web Pro News shared some information from Compete.com that lists the top 50 websites in the United States by volume of visitors.

Here is the actual Top 50 Website List:

Here are a few observations on the list:

• The No. 1 site on the list is no surprise: Google
• 4 of the top 10 sites are search engines (5 if you count You Tube)
• 3 of the top 10 sites are Microsoft properties
• 2 of the top 4 sites are Google properties
• The top 5 sites are all search engines or social media websites
• The No. 1 e-commerce site on the list is Amazon.com (No. 6)
• The top 3 e-commerce sites are Amazon.com, eBay and Walmart

Let’s stop right there. Of the top 13 sites, only 4 are not a search engine, social media site or Wikipedia – and one of those is Microsoft.com. This begs the question, what does it take to be a top website (or a highly trafficked one)?

Judging by the list I’d say you need to own the real estate, rent it (all of the top 10 sites are sites that provide a service for others in some manner that allows the owner to benefit from the usability of the masses). Secondly, you’ve got to offer a service with broad appeal. This is an appeal that is much broader than having a niche website. We all know that having a niche website is key to build your business online and is also a must to do very well with you search engine optimziation and search engine marketing efforts.

I believe it will be more and more difficult to break into the top 50 sites, but companies that manage to do so will do if they do all the right things and have a substantial marketing and advertising budgets. Even companies that focus on the best marketing practices, will stand a better chance of being considered a high traffic website, whether they make the top 50 or not, at the end of they day they too can be very successful online.