John Wiehe's Start-up SEO

I have traveled the World Wide Web sitting in front of my MacBook Pro with SEO on the top of my mind the past 364 days since my last post. Fun fact: The Egyptian calendar year had 360 “real” days with the last five days as one huge New Year’s Eve party to make up the difference of the orbit. SEO and myself have been through many changes and improvements this year. My first part explains our journey of the past. My second part explains how SEO should stay true to its roots of human communication without getting caught up in the attraction of newness I witnessed.

What I have done between posts

• Worked at Walmart while working on SEO.
• Left Walmart to take up my own SEO last December.
• Earned three marvelous clients.
• Applied for great SEO jobs. I am still applying for them if you’re still wondering.
• Learned an abundance of SEO knowledge from awesome resources and my own trials and errors. I have learned more than just SEO. I have learned the coolness of the history of computers, Internet, search engines and oh so much more.
• Learned SEO is only one cog in Internet marketing. I just can not get enough of the likes of e-mail marketing, PPC, social media, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization, Web development just to name a few. I like having friends.
• Applied much of this information to my SEO efforts and enjoyments.

What SEO & the search industry has done between posts

• Became better friends with Google Panda and Penguin.
• Became friends with Google Authorship.
• Became friends with Facebook Graph Search.
• Learned of Bing Snapshot.
• Greeted Marissa Mayer as Yahoo!’s CEO.
• Feared for its life from Chinese hackers and saboteurs cutting undersea Internet cables.

What my thoughts on the future of SEO are

The Internet and World Wide Web are tweenagers. The Internet is around 65 years old. The World Wide Web is around 24 years old. Browsers and search engines are around 20 years old. I love learning more people are gaining and using Internet access, especially from previously impervious countries. This amount of growing data is great but still too young to really understand and what to make of all of it.

SEO has had a lot of change and improvements to communicate best between our clients to our customers this past year. I thought SEOs were using new outlets more while forgetting the foundation of interaction this past year. Means of human communication may change but the soul of communication will not. Hieroglyphs to smoke signals to emoticons: all share the human desire of expression. 

Updates, fancy Internet gadgets, platforms and tools mean well but all are subject to improvement. Newness is fleeting. You’re only new the first time. SEO has to be more than just a band-aid for technology. What is our identity? What are our roots? Times change but the core of strategically sound and creatively brilliant SEO will stay the same. Always promoting the new “new” is a feeble business model. Humans can see right through new if it is the same or worse than the old on our screens.

SEO is a unique form of advertising because it brings in all of the Internet marketing forms. SEO involves the cooperation of other healthy Internet channels to best communicate with our customers about our companies. There are a lot of ways to do this but we must remember all of them need to have the equal amount of strategy and creativity to satisfy our customers.

Author Rank could impact SEO, like dinosaur-ending impact.

Author Rank, Google’s project to help create and maintain identities on the Internet, fascinates my young brain full of SEO. This post is my attempt to sort it out.

Author Rank is a method of discerning an author as an expert in their respective field who creates good contextual content that will influence the ranking of search results through Google Authorship. It wants to rank search results through bringing searchers and Web sites together to create trust and authority. Google applied for its patent five years ago and they’re in the works of rolling it out. It’s not a last-ditch effort to save Google+.

Google Authorship is a method to connect an author’s identity through their Google+ profile to their content on the Internet. It shows the Web page with its author’s face next in the results, which look like this on a search engine results page. Google+ is an identity platform, not so much a social network. Searchers will see your face attached to your content in a context they were looking for. Each time they see your face next to your material is a first impression, the first time extending your hand for warm handshake with a stranger.

I thought Authorship was a cool idea and a method SEOs would likely use in the future when I first became aware of it last summer. It’s right up Google’s alley as it centers on interests people search for, not just friend activity, which other platforms use. I knew it would help create a rapport between searchers and authors, which would directly affect SEO.

Why do I think Author Rank is important?

AJ Kohn writes of its importance best below:

AuthorRank means that your reputation as a content creator will influence the ranking of search results. Not only that but AuthorRank can be used to make the link graph more accurate.

I know this is the way of search but I have some questions about how it will influence SEO and what we’ll do to support our clients.

How will Author Rank affect authorities without Google Authorship?

Authorities like Warren Buffett, Tim Cook and Emeril Lagasse don’t use Google+; they may in the future but how will this affect their Web sites’ rankings? Could Google place authorities like them below authorities with lesser clout who use Authorship in their respective careers? I truly don’t think Google would do this but the possibility is out there now.

I reaffirmed my love for SEO after watching the horrendous Super Bowl commercials last night. Without a doubt the worst Super Bowl commercials I’ve ever seen. I hope SEO for the companies advertising was much better.

I noticed the last few seconds of almost every commercial last night contained a Web address – the company’s or their Facebook profile – or a Twitter hash tag. This tactic generates Web traffic but I wish they would devote more time to their presence on the Internet if they feel the need to include it in their $3 million TV commercial.

I love SEO because it allows me to write but more importantly, it allows me to dive in to the nitty-gritty of advertising.  I don’t care about killing vampires, Jerry Seinfeld or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Correction – I care about them when they aren’t selling cars and are kept in their respective heydays. This era of advertising has the most options making your brand known – newspapers, magazines, TV, laptops, mobile devices, guerilla marketing, etc. All of these possibilities lower the time to create impact for your company. They also create a need and opportunity for relevancy due to the increased amount of channels to connect your company. SEOs must make searching snappy and relevant at the peril of losing brand awareness and value.

2012 isn’t the first year Super Bowl advertising and commercials have vexed me*; it’s just the first year where I know SEO and the conduit it brings in to this generation of advertising.

*Please read my past rants on advertising in Super Bowls in these two posts:

• Nifty Tips for Watching Commercials
• Super Bowl Adness

Hello again, remember me? Providing SEO to my clients’ Web sites is where I’ve been for nearly three months.

I still like my definition of SEO but the video underneath better explains the definition, function and value of SEO.

What Is Search Engine Optimization / SEO
From this video I’d reckon SEOs as the stenographers and real estate agents of e-commerce. Bear with me: We write down and refine our clients’ – cooks’ – recipes in cookbooks and send it to search engines – libraries – so they’ll have it ready when our clients’ customers come looking for their products and services prepared just for them. I think the service of SEO is very unique, made with the future of advertising in mind and one I’m proud to have found early in this stage of my career.

I’ll try to post more of my cogitations centering on SEO but you can see more of my SEO work on my clients’ Web sites in between this post and future ones.

Video via Search Engine Land and Common Craft. Thank you!

I’m bummed.

I know the importance of meta descriptions within SEO but I’d look like a hypocrite if I said I know SEO without a good meta description for my very own site. If you searched for me and this site came up, you likely saw:

I want you to see:

Meta descriptions are those few sentences underneath a URL in a page you’ve just searched for. They’re like breadcrumbs leading up to the site you want to go to yet I can’t even make my own work!!! (Exaggerated exclamation points made in anger.)

Matt Cutts to the rescue.

Maybe I haven’t made a big enough pothole in the information superhighway for Google or Bing to put in what I want my meta description to be. It’s frustrating but I’m relieved to see it here:

I hope search engines put it in their result pages one of these days as well.

Thanks for reading,
John

PS. If you read this post and know how to fix my problem involving meta descriptions, don’t be a stranger and please let me know.