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Remember Ms Dewey, Microsoft’s experimental pseudo-interactive search engine interface? The Ms. Dewey actress Janina Gavankar is still entertaining thousands of fans but the old search site ain’t what it used to be. It now redirects to EVB.com, the Web site of the creative agency that helped create Ms. Dewey in the first place.

The lesson to be learned here has nothing to do with search engine optimization — it just has to do with capturing traffic. When you set up a site on behalf of a client, and the client walks away from that site, what do you do with the property? Some people obviously feel it’s okay to 301-redirect the property to their own corporate setting.

Maybe there was an agreement in writing permitting the repurposing of the MsDewey.com domain (one would like to think so). Maybe Microsoft felt it would eventually grab more real estate elsewhere. Hard to say.

Or, we can put it another way, in the form of a question and answer.

Question: When should your SEO plan favor links over content?

Answer: When it will take less time and money to build the links than to rebuild the content.

You don’t have to build the best SEO blog on the Web if you can drive traffic to it by redirecting a once-popular site. People will see your site and decide whether to come back.

What would happen if we 301-redirected SEO Theory to Best SEO Blog or some other Visible Technologies site one day? Would all the thousands of people who visit SEO Theory every month keep coming back, even though the content they were looking for wasn’t there any more?

In search engine optimization you should always focus on the content first, but if a windfall drops in your lap or if you cannot do much with the content, then you need to be creative with your linking. Think of links as the frame that you build around the picture that is your Web site.

A really great frame can make even the worst picture look better — that is the Art of SEO. The difference between a good SEO and an SEO who is just stumbling through the process is that the good SEO recognizes where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. Sometimes that falls under fixing the picture and sometimes that falls under framing the picture.

And when the contract runs out, you may be able to put a new picture inside the frame you built. Some people might point out that replacing the picture in the frame is not the most ethical approach, but it seems to happen more often than most of us realize, and for many different reasons.

Be sure you make informed choices and don’t just choose to do what you think other people would do.

This article has nothing to do with the so-called “Vince Update” at Google, which many people speculate caused a shift in ranking algorithms to favor “brand” Web sites. Google may very well have drawn up a list of signals they can use to identify a “brand-value Web site” but I’m not ready to attempt reverse-engineering such a list. In fact, given the significant decline in quality of Google’s search results this year, I would say that if they really are favoring “brand” sites in their algorithm now, they have given searchers a powerful incentive to look at other search engines.

What I want to focus on is what you can do with any search engine to build brand value (or brand equity as some people put it) in your site.

A brand is an intangible asset but it is generally assumed to have powerful, distinctive qualities. Here is a litmus test to show you whether you’re working with a brand or something less valuable. You can apply it to a Web site, a product, or a service.

1. The brand is distinct from the field. You have Nike and Bass and you have shoes. You have Roto Rooter and you have plumbers.
2. The right segment of consumers recognize the brand. Most men probably have no idea of what the difference is between a Coach purse and a Louis Vitton purse. Women who buy expensive purses know the difference.
3. The brand is mentioned by third-parties in a variety of contexts. A powerful brand creates many new anecdotes and metaphors and is the butt of many jokes. No one cares about what happens to the guy in no name sneakers.
4. A brand can introduce or validate change. We inherit brand trust from Grandma and Grandpa. We know a trend has arrived when the brands adopt it or a new brand is born.

There are many book selling Web sites but how many book selling brand sites can you think of? Everyone will mention Amazon first. Behind them you may get general consensus on Barnes and Noble, but I think people would start diverging on who comes third in the U.S. book selling market. There are more than two brands (BooksAMillion, Alibris, eCampus, and maybe a few others round out the top of the field) but most Americans would probably only be able to name those first two companies consistently.

Hence, we can say there are Strong Brands and Weak Brands. Of course, given a choice between having a weak brand and no brand, I think most of us would take the weak brand over the no brand.

If you want your site to build brand value then you have to treat it like it has brand value. That means you have to give your site everything a brand site has. That includes a distinctive name (and I ain’t talking about your mama’s domain name), a consumer vision, and a tagline or catch phrase. But it doesn’t end there.

If you’re selling shoes, what distinguishes your shoes from the rest of the field? If you’re selling SEO, what distinguishes your SEO from the field? If you run a Web directory, what distinguishes your Web directory from the rest of the field? You need a message that is sincere, memorable, and attractive. You have to show people that when they hear BAJING! they think of you.

It’s a Pavlovian principle: you want to be the bell that makes your potential customers salivate.

But you don’t have to achieve world-wide recognition. For example, to the best of my knowledge no newspaper or magazine has ever cited SEO Theory but a lot of people in the SEO industry know about the blog. Some movers and shakers insist on not mentioning SEO Theory by name but you can tell by the articles they write that they would not be addressing certain topics if I had not shaken those topics’ trees on SEO Theory. The average person on the street has never heard of and doesn’t care about SEO Theory, but it has reached a LOT of people in the SEO industry.

In fact, whereas three years ago hardly anyone was talking about “seo theory”, today a growing number of SEO bloggers are working to position themselves in the “seo theory” name space. You can find blogs that use “seo theory” in their titles, blogs that include “seo theory” categories, and blogs that sprinkle the term “seo theory” throughout their copy. I’ve even found people linking to their blogs with the anchor text “seo theory”. I wasn’t the first person to use the expression “seo theory” — I was only the guy who focused on it and showed there was value in the topic.

Hybrid cars have been around for years but hardly anyone was buying them in the United States up until the price of gasoline hit $4 per gallon. All of a sudden, the demand of hybrid cars caught the attention of the Big Three automakers in Detroit. I think it’s safe to say they will eventually convert their automobile technologies to use hybrid or other gasoline technologies over the next ten years — they see the wave of change and they are determined to ride it. The Big Three brands did not introduce the change, but they are going to validate it. They’ve already gone through this once before, in the early 1980s, when fuel-efficient engines replaced gas guzzlers in nearly all low-end models.

Your Web site has to create a value that is relevant to what some segment of consumers want but which is different from what they are already getting.

Your Web site has to target a specific customer base. It’s great if more people know about you, but when you’re just starting out to build a brand you cannot go after a large market unless you have a lot of resources.

Your Web site has to be mentioned by other people on other sites: in forums, in blog posts, in link lists, in bookmarks and favorites lists, in contests — everything and everywhere. I don’t hang with the people who give out SEO awards but even SEO Theory has received a few nominations for awards (and I think I won “Most Likely To Win An Argument Even If He Is Wrong” somewhere in my own name). Web Site awards and nominations don’t establish brand value, but they do help validate it. The best nominations are the ones you don’t make or ask your friends to make.

Your Web site does not have to introduce or validate change, but you’ll know you have a brand site if/when you do use it to introduce or validate change. You don’t have to be the only brand validating a change but it’s good when you’re one of the brands people look to as bellwethers when they want to know if the change is for real. And it’s fantastic if you’re the brand that introduces change.

So in terms of creating a great Web site, the formula is pretty simple: Build content people like enough to talk about; build content that provides value to a group of regular “consumers”; and build content that challenges other people to follow your example.

Whether a search engine ranking algorithm cares about all that doesn’t matter. With enough brand value you don’t need search engines to get your traffic.

What makes a good SEO report? Have you ever thought about that? Most people rely on automated rank checking reports, which I feel provide some value (if you track the rankings as trend lines on a graph) but they don’t really get into the meat of what I would want reported to me, were I to farm out my SEO reporting to someone else.

There are a number of things that I look at when doing traditional SEO, particularly for my own sites where I am developing content and seeking new traffic that appeals to me. The SEO community is beginning to focus more on conversions than on rankings and referrals but informational conversions (what I usually seek for myself) are not always appealing.

For that matter, transactional conversions (sales) may not always be appealing, either. You may get a lot of customers who abuse your return policy, for example. Some companies have actually been targeted for what I would deem return policy abuse by a few blogs and Web sites.

Transformational conversions (signups or registrations) may also be unappealing if they are made for bogus reasons. In my science fiction and fantasy forums, for example, we constantly have to delete accounts that were created by spambots and low-life “link building” SEOs who create forum profiles in volume. I would prefer not to have to deal with those kinds of people.

So here are a few items I would want included on a good SEO report. Your mileage may vary.

Search Results Rankings – I do monitor some keywords, but what I would really like is a report that monitors query spaces. A query space consists of all the keywords and relevant content that would be served for those keywords that pertain to a particular topic. So I don’t just want to rank well for “itemized blue widget topicality”, I also want to rank well for “topicality relating to itemized blue widgets”, “blue widget topical itemization”, and “topic-specific itemized blue widgets”.

Furthermore, as I noted above I would want to see these rankings graphed into trend lines. Ideally I would want to see a 2-year rolling window. Since a query space could theoretically entail thousands of keywords and since many of those variations would produce virtually identical results, I would want to arbitrarily limit my query space analysis to about 5 keywords per query space.

So show me a graph by limited query space that includes up to 5 keywords with rankings for the past 2 years — by search engine (Ask, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! would be sufficient). I would also want to track a few meta search engines (including Ixquick, Dogpile, and 1 or 2 others). And then I would want to include a 3-month or 6-month window for new or smaller search engines.

A typical site with 100 pages of content should be tracking about 500 query spaces (approximately 2500 keywords across 10-15 search engines and meta search engines).

Furthermore, I would want to see aggregate rankings broken out by category: major search engines, meta search engines, and new search engines. Even though the query spaces are unrelated to each other, such aggregate rankings reports would give you a snapshot or birds’ eye view of your ranking depth.

Referral String Data – I would want to see which queries people are using to find my content. I would want to know month-by-month for about 2 years which strings are the most popular (the top 100 would be okay). However, I would want to see this data broken out by referer — don’t bother figuring out which one is a search engine, just tell me who the referers are that include a query string.

I would want to see queries flagged as seasonal if they occur in a cyclic pattern. I would want to see queries flagged as “never seen before”. I would want to see queries flagged as “stable”. And I would want to see queries flagged as “declining”.

You need trend graphs to do this kind of analysis and it can all be automated but no one does it to this level of detail.

Search Referral Demographics – So take that referral data report you just put together and find out what you can about who the referrers are — are they indeed search engines, or are they just sites with search boxes powered by search engines, or are they search engine partners? Are there any new names in the mix?

The sooner I identify new resources, the sooner I can get another advantage over my competitors. The same is true for query string analysis. If you’re suddenly getting traffic for a query you haven’t targeted, maybe you should optimize for that query space and see where that strategy takes you.

Competitors’ Analysis Report – Who my competitors are is not determined so much by who ranks for what keyword as how many query spaces the same sites appear in. You can divide competitors into “sites like mine that pursue all these query spaces” and “sites unlike mine that appear in these few query spaces”.

Some of your Class A competitors will be larger than you. Some will be newer than you.

Some of your Class B competitors will be so huge you are not even a blip on their radars. They don’t care about your query spaces — they just happen to show up here and there.

If your site sells shoes to American customers, your competitors will be other sites that sell shoes to American customers. The occasional CNN article about shoes will appear in your query spaces but CNN is not your competitor even if it outranks you.

Most competitive analysis reports lack sense and coherence. They look at nonsense like backlink profiles, comparative rankings, and on-page keywords. You’ll learn more about a competitor by comparing how many query spaces you both appear in without really looking at comparative rankings.

What makes a site a Class A competitor? You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the site that, if you were running it, you would try to push into all the query spaces you care about. Size and age really have nothing to do with it.

Backlink Profile Stability – I should think that if someone were doing SEO for me then they should know enough about link theory to be able to report to me which linking resources are performing well for my needs.

No, I’m not going to provide you with any criteria, but rest assured there are no link analysis tools out there that tell you want I would want to see in a report.

Every month I receive numerous offers from “SEO firms” wanting to help me with my rankings and link building. Friends, before I would give my money to you, I would want to know you could deliver the reporting by which I would hold you accountable. This ain’t your daddy’s ranking report — not by a mile.

When it comes to talking about SEO for blogs, everyone who has ever blogged about SEO has an opinion. They have opinions, strategies, favorite blogs, top ten lists of best SEO blogs, and all the gimmicks you could possibly ever imagine.

If I had to paint a metaphor for the SEO community in its “best blogging advice” mode, I would think of a mime convention where a couple hundred silent people would be falling off imaginary balance beams, breaking out of invisible boxes, performing bizarre, magic tricks, and otherwise branding themselves with every mime cliche you have ever seen on television or in the movies.

People have said so much about blog SEO strategies they really don’t have much to say — they are constantly rehashing, meming, rememing, and otherwise republishing the ideas that have been thoroughly impacted into the SEO mindset. There is really no signal coming out of the SEO blogging community when it comes to blogging about SEO blog strategies.

Here are a few ideas that have taken hold and become cliches — dumb cliches in most cases.

Link Bait – Here is the problem with link bait. It does absolutely nothing for search engine optimization. You write a great article and hundreds, maybe thousands of people link to it. So what? You don’t have control over the anchor text and you probably don’t have a follow-through strategy for what to do with all that PageRank anyway.

Link bait (when it succeeds) gets a site out of the Sandbox Effect Zone — but other tactics work just as well. Once you’re out of the zone, then what? Why are you link baiting? Your strategy needs to go beyond “let’s get a lot of links”.

Meme Bait – Meme bait is where you start a meme and other bloggers pick it up. The problem with meming is that most memers are obsessed with links, and their link memes more often than not get sites penalized or banned. What’s worse is that by the time the guy who started the meme realizes he screwed the pooch, it’s too late to stop the meme — once a meme gets going it takes on a life of its own.

Of course, in most memes no one ever links back to the guy who started the meme, except maybe the first circle of sites that participate in the meme. Hence, if you’re hoping for a lot of PageRank, you don’t get that much — and you get even less anchor text.

Meming is one of the few actual viral techniques the SEO community employs.

Top X Lists – Not a day goes by where at least a few dozen SEO bloggers don’t publish a top X list. Top X listing is the easiest, laziest way to blog. The people who originally made it a popular technique in the SEO community have all but stopped doing it.

Top X lists do double duty if done right: they act as link bait and they give you an excuse for repeating your keywords over and over again in your body copy. On rare occasions top X lists may take on new life as memes.

Lame Tutorials – 99% of the SEO bloggers who post tutorials are writing crap. 100% of SEO bloggers who have written tutorials have written crap tutorials on at least one occasion. What makes a crap tutorial?

1. You rehash stuff that gets rehashed every day, especially by new SEO bloggers.
2. You make specious claims (they look credible but are in fact false).
3. You present your opinions as if they are proven facts.
4. You fail to provide a unique insight into the topic.

You can usually identify new or inexperienced SEO bloggers without much effort. They either write very brief posts that just recap well-known concepts (with about a 50% accuracy rate) OR they write very long-winded introductions to the basic SEO concepts they just learned. Someone who is just getting into SEO deserves an apprenticeship period — they should be writing those long-winded intros to basic concepts so they can at least demonstrate some knowledge of the topic. If they keep blogging long enough, they’ll mature into self-motivated writers who find their own voices and topics.

It’s the so-called professionals who keep trying to improve their tutorial skills that drive me crazy. I ain’t linking to them. You’re welcome to do so if you wish, but you’re just making the problem worse by doing so.

So if we should avoid the cliches, then what are better SEO strategies for blogging? Here are a few suggestions:

Meme yourself – Yes, repeat what you say. If you write a post today about how to carve out a niche in some obscure social media stratum, don’t let that be your final word on the topic. Come back to it several times over the course of a year, link back to your previous posts, and remind your readers that you are someone who has a real opinion about the topic. More importantly, complement your blogging with off-post resources that help reinforce the points you’re making.

But remember that meming yourself doesn’t equate to trying to improve upon lame tutorials. No tutorial should be repeated. Ever. Get the crap out of your system so you can start writing good content sooner and just meme the good content.

Link Out Meaningfully – You should never go back to any SEO blog that “shouts out” to the blogger’s best friend. Shout outs are a waste of the reader’s time. If you blog about someone else, give people a reason to care about whomever you mention. And for that matter, every link you place in a blog article should provide value to your readers first.

Let’s take the Top X List concept. Some people go on day after day assembling Top 10 This and Top 5 That because they read on some lame SEO blog somewhere that Top X listing brings in readers and links. And then some people dress up their lists of things with graphics, opinions, pros, cons, explanations, rationalizations — in short, they go well beyond just tossing together 5 or 10 points (or links) and they write articles that explain concepts (even fairly simple concepts) in depth.

You don’t have to be right in what you say. You don’t have to be all-inclusive. You just have to be … passionate. It shows when you give a damn about the content you create.

Write early and write often – There are so many excuses people have for not blogging. Frankly, if you can squeeze out 10 Tweets a day you can write 1 blog post a day (and it will probably be more interesting and more informative than “Oh! I left my paycheck at the office! Wife is home!”). 1 blog post a day will make you a better writer. 1 blog post a day will make you a better SEO. Teaching other people to write 1 blog post a day will make you a better SEO consultant. Actually getting other people to write 1 blog post a day will make you a power to be reckoned with in the search results.

If you’re going to create a blog, you need to post something to that blog 5 days a week, Monday through Friday. I currently write for 3 personal blogs and 2 business blogs. I am NOT writing 5 days a week for all of those blogs but I am writing something 5 days a week (7 days some weeks).

If you don’t write hundreds of blog posts every year, you’re the last person on Earth I would ever want to pay for advice on how to leverage blogs in SEO.

If you don’t write hundreds of blog posts every year, you’re not anyone I would want to discuss keyword research with.

If you don’t write hundreds of blog posts every year, you have no business blogging about SEO or Web marketing in general.

If you’re any type of online consultant, you need to be more productive than blogging once per month. If you’re an AnswerPerson, a Web Guru, an Expert In The Field you need to be blogging regularly, substantially, and often. There are high school kids who blog more than you do and in 5-10 years your customers will be paying them more than you ever got paid.

In Short: BE PRODUCTIVE – The Best Blog SEO Strategy is to use the blog daily, work it, treat it like it’s the meaning of your life. You need to make your blog a resource that people come back to. You need to make your blog something that stands out from the crowd. It needs to be unique, distinctive, and valuable to other people.

The one mistake most people in the SEO blogging community make is they allow laziness to guide their blogging. They let sloth set the pace. They don’t care enough about their topics to get their facts right. They don’t care enough about their readers to properly disclaim their opinions. They don’t take the task seriously and treat it with the respect it deserves.

The best SEO strategy for blogs is to love your blogs like they are your children: nourish them, discipline them, cherish them, help them grow into the best possible resources they can be.

Back in July I wrote on SEO Theory that you can use your SEO resources to help worthy non-profits. Here on Best SEO Blog that same week I asked readers to help your local charity during hard times.

Truth be told, I sometimes do absolutely nothing to help charities and people in need. Most of us are like that and we don’t condemn each other for living out our lives, keeping the needs of others on a back burner somewhere.

But there are people who live the challenge day-by-day of dealing with need or injustice. We admire them for their dedication, their hard work, and the changes they help bring about in the lives of many. And we feel some of the pain they experienced through the losses they suffered, losses which inevitably drove them to take some action.

While I cannot support every cause, every now and then I pick one and just use my sites to say something about them. There is no search engine optimization benefit in supporting a family that has lost a loved one or an organization that cares for wounded veterans, but I know I can help make a difference by using my SEO powers to help other people who are in turn helping others.

Just putting a link on your site or sites to one organization a year is better than doing nothing. And this year I suppose I’ve found myself thinking of ways to help other people more than once. This article is not just about charitable organizations, however. I want to talk about how families are making use of social media resources to share their experiences and ask people for help.

I am sure there must be many sites like this one, but this is the site I found not so long ago. It’s called Peace 4 The Missing. This is a social network someone started on Ning, which many of you are aware of. I’m not trying to shame people who use social media sites for link building, but I want to point out that someone is making a legitimate effort to use social media for a higher purpose.

I stumbled across a page about a missing girl who has now been returned home. I don’t know the whole story but I chose her to be the poster child on my network for the Peace4TheMissing network. I started running banners there a few weeks ago.

I also blogged about Celeste on two of my personal blogs, and I have shared the link to Peace4 The Missing freely. I’m glad this young lady has been restored to her family but Peace4 The Missing is still helping other families look for lost loved ones. You may know of other sites that don’t receive national media attention which could use your help. Please give it some thought. Spread the word.

You may help save a life.

Another site I have been supporting since 2006 is The Wounded Warrior Project. I actually began linking to a different Web site but the two projects had very similar goals and they merged. Although many people in the United States have opposed our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I feel we should never forget the sacrifices our soldiers make on our behalf. Many of them come home in need of medical treatment, special prosthetics, and an understanding from friends and strangers alike.

When I first learned about the Wounded Warriors initiative I vowed I would link to the site from my personal network until our work in Iraq was done. I have continued to promote the initiative through the past three years and will not forget the service these brave men and women provide us.

It really doesn’t take much effort to remember those sites that could use your support a few times a year. Nor does it take much effort to write a post about their services and what they do. If nothing else, you’ll get a quick and easy blog post out of the effort.

Someday you may be asked to help set up a social media site for one of these causes. When that day comes, you may want to call upon your colleagues in the SEO community to help you promote the site. Or they may call upon you. Don’t hold back when that day comes. It’s worth the effort. It really is.