Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

Here is a quick checklist to run down when you’re launching a new Web site.

• Identify the market you’re addressing.
• Document or classify the vertical you’re in.
• Assess your resources.
• Set specific goals to serve as key performance indicators.
• Outline the steps you will take to achieve each goal.

Who is the target audience? – Especially with ecommerce sites, I often find people don’t really know to whom they are selling something. Think about it. 200 million+ Americans surf the Internet. Maybe 100 million of them purchase goods and services online. But how many of those people are interested in whatever you’re offering? Just write a short description (1-3 sentences usually suffices) of the people for whom your site is intended.

Know your competition. – I’m not talking about doing competitive intelligence. You cannot do competitive intelligence until you have identified the players. Odds are you never look beyond the first 10 results for your most valued queries. Do you really know whom you’re competing against? You should be able to divide your online competitors into major players, minor players, and wannabes. If you’re just getting started, you’re a wannabe.

Assess your resources. – How many Web sites can you leverage in promoting your new site? How much advertising and product packaging can you leverage into promoting your new site? How about public appearances? Events where you can/will be a vendor? Who are your network partners? A real marketing plan takes into consideration where you can get your message out and how you intend to do that. Don’t think about links. Think about promoting your site.

Write a list of achievable goals. – Write down ten things you will work toward. Publishing a specific number of pages, ebooks, or other documents counts as only one goal. Building daily visits counts as one goal. Obtaining links counts as one goal. What about your advertisements? What about your promotional plans? Include specific goals for everything, but don’t go past ten. When you’ve crossed 7 items off your list you can start composing your next 10 goals but finish the last 3 items on the first list before you tackle the next 10.

Tell yourself how you intend to deliver the results. – The results are how you fulfill your goals, not how many conversions you get from your site. Beside each goal write a brief Plan A and Plan B. Never take on a goal without a backup plan. Your plans can be as simple as “buy an ad in the local newspaper the week of June 4, 2010″ or as complex as a detailed 20-step plan for delivering 10,000 copies of a book to a major conference.

The point is that if you don’t know what you’re doing halfway through doing it, you’re stuck. Write down what you intend to do and refer back to your notes each week. You may need to adjust your plan halfway through but that’s okay as long as you know what you’re giving up and what you’re gaining.

Every Web site is different but you can follow these simple steps to launch new sites over and over again.

Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday on Embedded Content and Linking video this week took me back a few years. I have used that distributed content concept for a long time to build out my personal backlink network.

In a nutshell, you publish content on your site that people can embed on their sites. By giving people permission to embed part of your content on their sites, you can expect a link back to your site (a 1-way link, usually). Some people have managed to turn this technique into a spectacular failure. Other people have used it to earn billions of dollars.

But Rand pointed out that it requires work to create these types of content. True. And it’s a maintenance hassle. I’m still fixing scripts for one widget I created about 8 years ago. Every now and then someone hacks it, I move servers and break it, or something changes somewhere in the universe and the gods and pseudo-gods go crazy.

Still, you get a lot of links from these types of widgets and they can be easy to produce with today’s technology. Here are a few suggestions, followed by a few suggested guidelines.

Search box – Do you have a lot of content on your site? Do you have a deep database? Even if you’re charging for access you can distribute a search box widget to other sites and let people see what you have. Search box widgets work best when backed by good indexing tools, so be careful how you set this up.

RSS Feed – It’s been done a thousand times and the SEO community seems to fall in and out of love with this idea. Nonetheless, it works when you do it right. First, you need to create frequent, high-quality content that people want to read (link lists rarely make the cut). Second, you need to make it easy for people to embed your headlines on their site. Third, your content needs to be relevant to other people’s visitors so that they feel adding your headlines to their content increases the value of their site.

Image Rotator – Do people steal your bandwidth by hotlinking to your images? You have two choices and I’ve tried both. First, you can block all hotlinking (which I currently do). Second, you can allow people to embed a widget on their sites that rotates thumbnail images from your archive. I got good traffic and referrals (and links) from such a widget but keeping it updated was a nightmare for me because I’m neither a photographer nor a graphic artist. Still, if your business has an endless supply of images, make them available to other Web sites in a diminished value format and you may find you solve two or more problems with one technique.

Mutual Advertising Widget – You don’t have to join a large network to get advertising. You can band together with like-minded (or unlike-minded) Webmasters to share advertising. There are plenty of free and low-cost banner network scripts out there. By serving targeted advertising to a niche community you’ll find that passionate visitors click on the ads. It only needs one person to step forward and take on the bandwidth and administration responsibility. Niche networks can handle 100-200 sites. The network administrator gets a free link on every site. And you don’t have to use just banner ads — you can create text ads, flash ads, video ads, etc.

Video Channel – I know YouTube allows you to do this. You set up a video channel and let other people embed the channel on their sites. You don’t get anchor text-passing links but you do build up a viewing audience. If your business model revolves around promoting videos, think outside the page-trap. Create visibility and brand value for yourself by letting other people embed your channel on their sites.

So now that you know how to create easy widgets for link building, here are a few suggested guidelines. The more you respect these suggested guidelines, the more benefit you will reap from widget-based link-building. The less you respect them, the less likely you’ll enjoy your experience.

1. Never bait-and-switch. The only time you should change the link on a widget is when you actually move the destination. Bait-and-switch linking is a totally black hat, unethical, spammy tactic and you will deserve any downside you get from it.
2. Exercise restraint. Link greed and anchor text greed have been the undoing of many a Webmaster. When you set up a widget, leave it alone. Don’t try to squeeze more value out of the links. Create other widgets to get other value.
3. Be considerate. Some widgetmasters demand specific placement or otherwise burden people with ridiculous rules. Screw them. You don’t need their content and if you’re a widgetmaster with rules I don’t need your content, either.
4. Watch your resources. Be careful not to overextend yourself. Your Webhosting service may not be as forgiving as Darth Vader’s emperor.

HighRankings Forum moderator Randy made a comment recently that bothered me a little. In a discussion about whether you should use the Hx headers for SEO value (bottom line: do what makes sense for your visitors), Randy wrote “…I can clearly see why the engines would want to reserve the right to see [both CSS and Javascript files]“.

Randy was speaking figuratively (I think) but whenever someone says that a search engine has a right, I stop the horses and get off the wagon.

Here’s the thing: if you extend rights to search engines within the scope of your Web site’s resources, you become obligated to respect those rights (or they can sue you or take other actions against you).

Search engines and Web sites do not have rights with respect to each other. They extend privileges to each other. It is a revocable privilege for any search engine to be able to crawl and index your site. In practice, I revoke that privilege every day for all search engines on some content and for some search engines on all content. That is my right and no search engine has the right to circumvent the blocks I put in place.

On the other hand, there is no law stating that search engines have to observe any particular guidelines on crawling and indexing. That is, we distinguish good search engines from bad search engines on the basis of which ones honor the robots exclusion standard, but no search engine is legally or ethically bound to honor that standard.

Even under common law we do not operate in a contractually defined environment with search engines. They can include whatever content they wish and we exclude whatever search engines we wish, but beyond those inherent rights neither party has any actual defenses that assure them of damages.

If you create a spammy site, Google won’t win any lawsuits against you if your site manages to get past their filters. You just created content and left it for them to find. They took the revocable step of indexing your spam.

And if someone creates a rogue search engine, you won’t win any lawsuits against them if they merely crawl your site. After all, you created a Web site for the purpose of publishing information on the Internet. Everyone is allowed to access that information.

There is a boundary that is seldom crossed. If either party’s behavior becomes abusive to the extent that it interferes with the normal operation of the other party’s services, that might constitute criminal activity. Simply creating Web spam that gets indexed, however, does not interfere with the normal operation of a search engine’s services — it only affects the results of those services.

We cannot inject spam into a search engine. Hence, we cannot be held responsible for what a search engine indexes.

On the other hand, we cannot reasonably argue that a technology which is designed to make information openly available should be considered breached if someone we don’t like merely stops by and grabs a file. If you have secured the data through password protection and someone still grabs it and indexes it, you might have a case. A few courts have issued specific restraining orders in such instances.

John Andrews brought up the issue of “SEO liability” (note: Barry Schwartz followed up on SE Roundtable) on Sphinn. Are we liable for what we do? At some level there are certain obligations you enter into when you take on an SEO contract.

At the heart of the matter is whether you include a clause to ensure that both parties agree to indemnify and hold harmless each other in the event that something doesn’t work right. Without that clause, can your clients sue you?

These two discussions led me to wonder how we might engage in a contractual relationship with search engines. I’m not sure it would be feasible (in fact, there would have to be a three-way contract). Unless a search engine sells you a listing (as some directories do), neither your nor the search engine are offering value or consideration to the other — and as I understand it without exchanging either value or consideration two parties cannot enter into a contractual relationship.

We do see value in being listed in search engines and search engines do see value in indexing content from Web sites, but we are not explicitly exchanging value with the search engines. Our robots.txt files don’t lay down the law, as it were, for either party. After all, no search engine is required by law to either fetch or honor the specifications provided in a robots.txt file.

Which leads me to conclude that if you’re trying to manage your SEO as if you are engaged in a contract with the search engines — that is, if you’re assuming or acting as if the search engines have any rights (or as if you have any rights) — you’re doing it wrong.

Without coercion, without exchange of value or consideration, there is no real legal relationship between search engines and Web sites. We have to operate under the rules of that situation — whatever those rules may be.

Keep in mind that if you’re performing SEO on someone else’s behalf you have to observe the rules of that relationship — which may very well be defined by a contract or statement of work.

I think there is an entire body of search law waiting to be invented.

So I watched Google’s 2009 Searchology event and noticed they did not announce any major algorithmic ranking changes.

Instead they simply announced major new features. I have to admit I think some of the stuff they showcased looked kind of cool.

I especially liked the demo with the mobile phone where the constellations were presented in a sort of 3-D context. Imagine using that technology to find your way around a new city. Or imagine creating a virtual museum or Web walking tour for your friends and family to help them learn about your community while you are at work. There is a lot of potential in that one application.

The Google Search Options feature is sort of cool, too. It adds a layer of contextual measurement to Web search that has been seriously lacking in Google’s results. Some people have pointed out to me that other search tools have offered similar contextual adjustment in the past.

True, but those search companies don’t market themselves as well as Google does. Why isn’t Microsoft having an annual “Microsoft Search Day”? Why doesn’t Yahoo! go all out in talking up the media about warm fuzzy Yahoo! stuff? Maybe they do and the media don’t care. I don’t know.

Ask could have done a lot more with its marketing budget last year by schmoozing with the media than by purchasing ads on television.

Google has taken multidimensional search mainstream. Like Universal Search Google was by no means the first engine to introduce the concept — but it’s because of Google that people expect Universal Search to work (or to stand in the way of their success).

It’s not that so many people actually use Google exclusively (most people who use Google use other search engines) — it’s just that Google does a better job of promoting itself than its competitors.

In search engine optimization we can take away the lesson that all the tricks and strategies in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans if, in the end, people are still talking about other Web sites. Search engine optimization fails when people don’t recognize the significance of the sites that have been optimized for search.

We get a lot of blog comments you never see because the SEOs who drop those links do not know what they are doing. Sure, you can add “great post!” comments to certain blogs and the bloggers won’t give you a second look — if they even exist. But when you want a comment link from an exceptionally picky blog, the average SEO trick won’t cut the mustard.

Here are a few tips that will work with any blogger (in my experience):

Limit your link to the submission form field – Blog software allows you to embed a link with your name as the anchor text. Use it. Limit yourself to that link.

Say something useful – I’ve often found myself approving comments from people I have not previously heard of because they have shared additional information or pointed out an error in something I wrote. Disagreeing with me doesn’t constitute pointing out an error in something I wrote.

Share a resource that you don’t control – Self-promotional links and promotions-for-clients stand out because they are disrespectful to the blogger and his audience. If you’re making a serious recommendation on someone else’s blog you tend to be more respectful in how you share it.

Participate in the discussion – I do occasionally comment on other people’s blogs, and those comments occasionally drive traffic to whatever sites I link to through my name. I’m not as interested in building traffic through comments on blogs as many SEOs but I do appreciate seeing the traffic. I generally refrain from commenting on blogs that I feel are faking it. If there is a legitimate discussion, even if I’m the first commenter, I’m more likely to comment.

Now, participating in the discussion isn’t a way of earning a link from a picky blogger — it’s a way of being a picky commenter. Just randomly dropping links on blogs because the articles contain my keywords isn’t my style. In fact, it’s a dumb idea (because people who do this are clearly and obviously seeking “relevant” links).

A truly relevant link is not connecting two sites through the keywords. Think about that.

It’s the concept that matters, not the anchor text and PageRank. A comment on someone else’s blog is an opportunity for you to prove to people you’re someone to be taken seriously and not just some link-dropping schmuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing.