Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

Method – Method may be defined as “a manner or mode of procedure, esp. an orderly, logical, or systematic way of instruction, inquiry, investigation, experiment, presentation, etc.: the empirical method of inquiry.”

Methodology – Methodology may be defined as “a set or system of methods, principles, and rules for regulating a given discipline, as in the arts or sciences.”

Stratagem – Stratagem may be defined as “any artifice, ruse, or trick devised or used to attain a goal or to gain an advantage over an adversary or competitor: business stratagems.”

Strategy – Strategy may be defined as “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result: a strategy for getting ahead in the world.”

Tactic – Tactic may be defined as “a plan, procedure, or expedient for promoting a desired end or result.”

Technique – Technique may be defined as “the manner and ability with which an artist, writer, dancer, athlete, or the like employs the technical skills of a particular art or field of endeavor.”

Method, Methodology, Stratagem, Strategy, Tactic, Technique — we use them all, both in our professional lexicons and in our daily work as SEOs. If you’re like me, you’ve probably used these expressions loosely in conversations and formal writing. Frankly, I rarely stop to look up the proper meaning and use of a word in a credible dictionary.

But I think that when people want to talk about “best SEO practices” they need to be consistent in what they are saying. You have to work with a single vocabulary, an authoritative lexicon, consistent jargon, one body of language, a standard idiom — honestly, is there any other way to say it? In English, there is always another way to say something, anything, just about everything. If you get my meaning (but I drift off onto a tangent, here).

What is the difference between an SEO tactic and an SEO Strategy? Does anyone have an SEO Stratagem? Does anyone actually use the expression “SEO stratagem” when searching for the Best SEO advice they can get?

I’ve always thought of a stratagem as a piece of strategy, a tactic, a technique that you use as part of a larger plan to achieve a specific goal. I was wrong, apparently. Stratagems are ruses — deception.

Truth be told, I use deception in search optimization every day — I just try to make sure I don’t violate search engine guidelines with it. And, yes, I do believe deception can stay within the guidelines established by search engines. After all, search engines are only concerned about whether you’re deceiving them or their users. They care nothing about whether you pull the wool over your competitors’ eyes.

However, deceptive SEO tactics make up only a small part of my repertoire of SEO techniques — the inventory of ideas, methods, schemes, and processes or procedures I work with, use, and utilize is not only quite large, it grows on an almost daily basis.

Maybe this post would be more appropriate for SEO Theory but I put it on Best SEO Blog because there isn’t much theory to share. I mean, here at Best SEO Blog I try to be concise and direct, to the point. I suppose you could say I strive to be pithy on Best SEO Blog and I indulge in word-wallowing on SEO Theory.

It’s easy to be pithy — just say something concise that is rich with meaning.

You could therefore say that I strive to develop the technique of pithy SEO here on Best SEO Blog so that I can be sure I have an SEO tactic that is both ethical and easy to implement.

The pithiness of a Best SEO Blog article might be measured by something we could call PithyRank, in which the most pithy article is concisely linked to with meaningful anchor text by the remaining most pithy articles. It’s a pithy we cannot have a Toolbar to measure pithy.

I take pithy on you by not wasting words. Words are a beautiful thing to waste, but not on the Best SEO Blog, because being the Best SEO Blog means that one’s words are too important to be wasted. The human word, what a terrible wasteline.

This article really had nothing to do with strategy, tactics, methods, and stratagems — or did it? Did I just use the Best SEO Blog to deceive you, or was I being honest (and somewhat pithy)? That’s almost like saying “this sentence is a lie”, is it not? Is this question correct?

Frankly, I think you can say that the Best SEO Blog is honestly trying to show how deception is ethically acceptable so long as the deception harms only a competitor and not the consumer. But what if your consumer IS your competitor? Then can the most harm accomplish the most good, or is the least harm better than the least good?

How one must wonder what conundrums we contrive when we seek to help those who most seek to harm our own best interests.

As William Shakespeare might have said, “Pithy is the virtue of search engine optimization, and none but spammers use it cruelly.”

As I am sure everyone in our industry is now aware, there is some very bad advice circulating in the SEO community about “Sculpting PageRank”. Even though it might look like Google finally slapped down the concept, it appears to me there are still some hardcore advocates who continue to preach the philosophy in secret. They may even be working on a new euphemism to disguise their intent.

Let’s face it: there will always be high profile advocates of dumb ideas in every industrial and political spectrum. Still, Google makes it clear they require some PageRank for sites that want to appear in the Main Web Index.

The Isolation of PageRank
PageRank is an entirely Googlian element. You won’t find it in other search engines like Ask, Bing, and Yahoo!. Oh, you’ll find something at each search engine that measures link value — but it’s not Google’s PageRank. PageRank is unique to Google and here is why: Google calculates its PageRank based on the data it collects (data that Google does not share with other search engines) and on the filters it employs (filters that other search engines do not use).

Since you don’t have access to that data or those filters, you have no way of knowing which links Google allows to pass value in its search index — hence, you cannot track and measure PageRank. Nor can you track and measure the other PageRank-like values used by Ask, Bing, and Yahoo!. You can collect your own data, implement your own filters, but you can only create your own PageRank-like value — you cannot track and measure PageRank that way.

How Well Can You Manage PageRank?
Imagine being given the task of altering the course of the mighty Nile and Mississippi rivers. You have immense resources at your command. You have the ability to create dikes, dams, canals, etc. Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to look at the rivers or to use scientific instruments to measure their capacities, rates of flow, etc. You have to blindly tell people what to do and those people are not permitted to tell you what happens when they follow your orders.

You do get some feedback. You can read news reports about where the rivers flood and which communities have access to water — but the reports are only published 4 to 6 times a year.

That’s a poor system for managing two huge natural resources but in this scenario you do manage them. You’re just not in a position to manage them well. That’s what happens when people go to extreme efforts to manage PageRank.

How People Can Manage PageRank
After all this time we’ve found only two ways to manage PageRank on our Web sites: add more links to increase PageRank distribution and remove internal links to restrict PageRank distribution. We have embellished both approaches with some variations. We can:

• Get more external links to point toward deep content
• Get more external links to point toward our root URLs
• Use “rel=’nofollow’” to prevent PageRank from flowing through our links
• Use “nofollow” in page meta tags to prevent PageRank from flowing through our links

Google of course recently shut down all attempts to restrict PageRank flow through Javascript, since Google now follows Javascript links. Some ideas never really worked, although people have proposed using them to manage PageRank flow. For example, using “noindex,noarchive” in your page meta tags won’t prevent those pages from accruing PageRank. If you don’t link out from the pages the PageRank will “evaporate” — more or less be distributed to the rest of the PageRank-receiving documents in Google’s index.

Some people have suggested using robots.txt files to disallow pages — but that doesn’t prevent them from accruing PageRank either. The fact is, if a value-passing link points at a document, that document will receive value. All you can do at that point is decide where to send the value next.

How You CANNOT Manage PageRank
Some people point to Google’s classic PageRank algorithm and say, “Well, they included this dampening factor that reduces PageRank as it flows through the system”. Therefore, they conclude, each page only passes on part of the PageRank it receives. Hence, one of the latest hypotheses in PageRank Manipulation Theory is that you should reduce the number of steps through which you flow your PageRank. Cut out all those intermediate directories and such.

But it doesn’t matter if you keep all your pages at the root level directory or if you spread them throughout your site. Your PageRank is still going to step gently or roughly from page to page and the dampening factor (for all we know) will be applied to every page’s accrued PageRank. Screwing up your server’s file system is not going to change the flow of PageRank. (Note: How does that screw up a server’s file system? Ask your local Unix guru how well a server handles 1,000,000 documents in one directory. The look of horror on his face should clue you in.)

PageRank flow is tied to logical structure, not physical structure. Oh, sure, a few years ago people noticed that Toolbar PR would be automatically adjusted to “estimate” what PageRank might look like if it had been calculated for a page. If your root URL had a Toolbar PR of 5 then pages in the root directory might get a 4 — as would pages in a secondary directory. Pages 2 directories deep would get a Toolbar PR of 3, and so on.

Of course, once you started getting natural links for your deep content, the Toolbar PR values would go up or down because they were being based on real PageRank. On my own sites I have had many deep content pages that achieved as much Toolbar PR as the root URL — and that was happening back in the day when people thought you automatically got “stepped down” based on folder distance from the root directory.

What You Should Not Be Doing To Manage PageRank
You should not be using non-Google resources to track and measure your PageRank. They cannot tell you anything about what Google knows or allows to happen. Anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn’t know what they are talking about. That doesn’t mean you can’t use non-Google tools for link research. If you enjoy spending your days counting backlinks, there are plenty of tools out there to feed your obsession.

You should not be attempting to block the flow of PageRank on your sites. Since you cannot track and measure it, you don’t know how much blockage is effective and how much is self-destructive. Internal PageRank is such a tiny little value, why do you think you can build it up to something useful anyway?

You should not be attempting to hide pages from search indexes. For example, if you have a privacy policy on your Web site, you should allow search engines to show it in their indexes. Why? Because people search for privacy policies. If you put “noindex,noarchive” in your privacy policy’s robots meta tag, you’re only hurting your site’s search visibility. And some people might be tempted to say, “Hey, I can put ANYTHING on this page because it’s not indexed”. Yeah, well, that doesn’t guarantee that a search engine will respect your “follow” directive.

You should not be counting the number of internal links each page contains. Link counting means you’re doing it wrong. Link counting means you don’t understand search engine optimization. Link counting means you’re thinking in terms of not passing PageRank.

What You Should Do To Manage PageRank
Start by getting more value-passing links to your Web site. Saying that is so easy it sounds trite, but that is where you should begin if you seriously want to manage PageRank for your site.

Use an open navigational system. Instead of hiding things and pretending you’re being efficient, just embed more internal links on your site. That advice, of course, leads people to ask, “But what if I put too many links on my pages?” The answer is, put as many links on your pages as will help your visitors. No more than that. How many is that? It varies by Web site. Artificial link count limits are useless pieces of fluff advice.

An open navigational system doesn’t have to be embedded in a single element. You can use multiple navigation tools. Just make sure your visitors don’t have to rely on the BACK button to get around your site.

For More Information, Read These Articles

• Large Web Site Design Theory and Crawl Management
• Optimizing Web Site Structrue Through Architecture
• Architectural SEO – Website Navigation Principles
• Site Search Optimization
• Using Multiple Domains To Build PageRank
• Duplicate Content For SEO and SEO For Duplicate Content
• Search Engine Love: Now They Crawl Me, Now They Don’t
• Prioritizing Content For Search, People, and You
• Site Search Optimization 2.0
• How To Rehabilitate SEO Advice That Has Lost Focus
• Architecting Web Sites – Design From The SEO Perspective

A hotsheet is a simple list of items that are currently “hot”, high value, or available only for a short period of time. In some contexts a hotsheet might be a list of stolen items, a list of forbidden items, or a list of items to find.

If you want to be serious about link building then you need to work with link hotsheets. These are not the spreadsheets your grandma uses every Sunday. Here are a few scenarios that illustrate how to use link hotsheets.

Scenario 1: Top Linking Resources – Everyone is looking for places to get more links from. You should have a hotsheet that includes 10-20 places where you can place credible links to your content. You won’t be able to use every resource on the list at any one time. Still, when you roll out a new section for your site or launch a new site entirely you should check this hotsheet first to see which sites can help you.

Criteria for Top Linking Resources:

1. Frequent cache updates in major search indexes
2. Verifiable anchor text passing
3. Easy to update
4. Not used by many other people

Scenario 2: New Linking Resources – Everyone in the SEO blogosphere wants to get the next hot thing on Sphinn, and some people stupidly publish lists of linking resources. You should keep track of the newer ones AND AVOID THEM LIKE THE PLAGUE. Don’t waste your time using linking resources that every SEO idiot in the world will exploit and burn to Link Spam Hell.

Criteria For New Linking Resources:

1. Blogged about by 2 or more people in the past six months
2. Google Toolbar Penalty Applied
3. Recommended by any popular SEO tutorial, book, or webinar in the last year
4. Mentioned in any SEO-related video that gets more than 2 views

Scenario 3: This Week’s (month’s) Hot Content – There is no point in building links if you have nothing to link to. You should be building deep links, fresh links, and refresh links. Cycle through your URLs (especially if you have a lot). Don’t just point every link at the “important” pages on your site — point links at ALL the pages on your site.

Criteria For Hot Content Resources:

1. You just created the page
2. You haven’t built a link to the page in at least six months
3. The page will become relevant to seasonal queries in 2-3 months
4. You just updated the page

Scenario 4: Safe, Non-Competitive, Relevant Resources – These are sites you link to freely to help create value in your own content. They are relevant to your content but not competing with you. That should be self-explanatory enough I don’t need to list specific criteria for inclusion on the list.

Here are some basic rules for using link hotsheets:

• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS
• Update these lists at least once a month
• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS
• Keep more than one set of hotsheets if you promote multiple sites
• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS

There is no greater harm you can do to your own SEO power than to share with people which resources you use. It doesn’t matter how many other people know about them. Do not contribute to their popularity because they WILL become useless if they become popular enough.

Ubiquity signals the death of any SEO linking resource. There are no exceptions to the rules, just a lot of useless links being built by fools.

Many people today implement SEO tactics without thinking through their strategies. Here is a quick guide to help you set a strategy and match good tactics for it.

The SEO strategy defines your objectives and the tactics you’ll use to achieve them. In other words, you use an SEO strategy to state your goals and how you will work toward accomplishing those goals.

Example of an SEO Strategy: Our Web site will leverage its content to gain 1st active keyword matrix relevant to the topic of “strange banana glues that glow in the dark”.

Some Example SEO Strategies:

• Brand launch campaign
• Rebranding campaign
• Invasive Campaign
• Competitive Displacement Campaign
• Query Building Campaign

Brand Launching SEO Strategies are the most complex because you have to create value in the new brand, build active queries around it, and position content to prevent other people from seizing your glory. If you’re doing the SEO separately from the marketing, chances are good there will be mis-steps along the way. Your strategy should encompass a recovery and adjustment phase.

Rebranding SEO Strategies may be tediously detailed but they are not nearly as complex as branding SEO strategies because when you relaunch a brand you can (and should) use the old brand to create a transition for your clients and prospects (or suspects) to the new brand space. Again, if you’re doing the SEO separately from the marketing, the chances for miscues rise significantly so you should allow for recovery and adjustment.

Invasive SEO Strategies are the most competitive and aggressive strategies. You’re moving a new site into an established space. It doesn’t have to be highly competitive — your showing up may be sufficient to trigger an SEO war. SEO wars wear you down because you have to stay on top of so much detail. These are high-stress campaigns and you should design your strategies around cycles.

Competitive Displacement Campaign SEO Strategies may sound ugly but these are very common. eCommerce sites implement them all the time when they roll out new products and drop old products. Many affiliate sites also implement competitive displacement campaign strategies. People probably describe the process by a hundred names and expressions. The goal is to position new content in the search results without losing significant traffic while removing old content from your site. Many SEO technicians are brought in after the change in content has occurred, when people start to realize it’s not as simple as taking down old pages and putting up new pages.

Query Building SEO Strategies dovetail nicely with other strategies but you can implement these strategies without doing anything else. Think of a site or document that is relevant to two expressions. Your initial keyword research suggests one query is far more active than another. You try an invasive strategy and it fails. So what do you do? You can try building interest in the less active query, where your chances of dominating will be better.

Some Example SEO Tactics:

• Targeted copywriting (articles, press releases, blog posts, etc.)
• SERP listing modifications
• Supporting content placement
• Strategic Link Placement
• Supporting Link Placement

The Targeted Copywriting SEO Tactic is simple. You write an article and place it on a site. The article should contain one or more links. People most often use blogs, article directories, and press release services for this type of tactic. A powerful strategy would utilize a variety of targeted copy formats on many sites.

SERP Listing Modifications SEO Tactic should be self-evident. You change page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.

Supporting Content Placement SEO Tactics differ from Targeted Copywriting SEO Tactics because supporting content is not intended to rank well in the dominant query. Let’s say you are promoting a site that sells dog supplies. Your supporting content might consist of blog posts about dogs on a site that advertises your dog supplies site (through banners, embedded image ads, videos, text links, etc.). The content has to have value. It has to serve a purpose other than being there simply for a link.

Strategic Link Placement SEO Tactics are very common. You cherry pick the Web sites where you place your links and optimize the anchor text. Some people optimize the surrounding text, too. Strategic Link Placement SEO Tactics may include creating microsites but I would regard that to be a drastic effort.

Supporting Link Placement SEO Tactics include creating spammy linking resource sites, swapping links, submitting links to directories, buying links, dropping links in blog comments and forum signatures, etc. Not all supporting link placement SEO tactics are naughty. They’re just low-key, minimal effort, low-value ROI methods. On any average day, no matter how sick you feel, you should be able to get at least 10 of these kinds of links without having to get dressed for work (well, if you’re an experienced SEO, that is).

Matching SEO Strategies With SEO Tactics
Frankly, you could use all these tactics with all these strategies. It really comes down to time and resources. You should choose the best possible set of tactics to achieve the highest reasonable return on your investment. That does not necessarily mean do everything possible until you get a Web site to rank first for keyword X.

A good strategy will pull up short of the mark if it’s not the most efficient means of achieving the ultimate objective (which, technically, should be to increase converting search referrals regardless of keywords and rankings). You can use a launcher strategy and an adjustment strategy, followed up by a maintenance strategy.

Sometimes you have to throw a Hail Mary SEO Strategy into play. This is the strategy you pull out of your back pocket when the reasonable, low-cost, high return-on-investment strategies don’t achieve what you need to achieve. Hail Mary strategies are almost tactics. A Hail Mary Strategy has to be structured around risks as well as payoffs (which is why it’s not a tactic).

An example of a Hail Mary Strategy might be where you pull down an entire site and replace every page with new content that is meant to rank for an entirely different set of keywords, a sort of “B” matrix of related keywords. Hail Mary strategies are radical and risky. You don’t want to build a business on this kind of work because the payoff is not usually high enough to justify the effort.

I was going to write about the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, as I have a good deal left to say about it (I think). I suppose for now, however, I should leave my thoughts over at SEO Theory, where I wrote Microsoft and Yahoo! antitrust concerns.

I also gave some thought to how to increase your Bing search traffic but obviously I wrote about that last year. So I was coming up a bit dry for ideas and then thought, “Well, let’s take a look at local search”.

Hm. That’s been written to death, hasn’t it?

Still, I took a look at a random query on one of the major search engines and noticed something odd: the same address and business appeared in multiple listings for different Web sites. Oh, surely it could not be THAT simple, could it?

Alas! It CAN be that simple. Someone has created a lot of Web sites for the same business and submitted them to all three major search engines’ local search directories. How spammy.

I scanned Google’s guidelines and could not find anything forbidding the practice. Apparently, it’s okay to submit as many legitimate Web sites to the local directories as you can create. Hm.

Does that mean the search engines don’t catch on to the trick? I don’t know. I found mixed results. Perhaps there are some filters in place.

So if you want to place the microsite network game with Local Search, I would suggest the following guidelines may help you stay out of trouble:

Things To Do For Multiple Listings In Local Search

1. Create sites that have unique functions and content
2. Use a distinctive address and telephone number for each site (see note below)
3. Use a distinctive title/business name for each site (legal DBA usage only)
4. Assign each site to unique categories

Things Not To Do For Multiple Listings In Local Search

1. Do not use identical copy on every site
2. Do not redirect any sites
3. Do not use false or misleading language in your listing

Distinctive address and telephone number – Okay, if you only have one business location, how do you do this? The multiple telephone numbers should be easy. I leave that to you. Creating a distinctive address is more of a challenge. You could, I suppose, designate different offices if you own or lease the entire property. That is, include “Suite 100, Suite 200″ but I’m not sure what the U.S. Postal Service would make of that. Maybe incorporate a department name.

Distinctive Business Name – Many companies do business as one or more entities that are distinct from their legal or incorporated name. If you can reasonably do this, it might be worth the effort. But keep in mind you may cause consumer confusion — and you cannot sue yourself if you screw up your own brand value.

Why create a microsite network in the first place?

Clearly, someone is doing this for the sake of obtaining multiple listings in local search. However, there are more useful/legitimate reasons to create multiple sites. Here are a few. The more of these reasons your business matches, the more likely you’ll be okay in the long run.

• Your business offers multiple products or services distinctive enough to warrant their own brand flagship sites
• Your business offers multiple products or services through as multiple DBAs (such as after mergers and buyouts)
• Your business offers products and services to very specific markets with distinctive terms
• Your business manages pay-per-click tracking through the use of multiple sites

I’m not suggesting that you dilute your PPC tracking by mingling Local Search traffic with PPC traffic, but you can create PPC landing pages on secondary, non-indexable URLs and still use the root URLs for your microsite domains in local and organic search.

Many people in the SEO industry oppose the use of microsites for small businesses. I’m not arguing that microsites work in every situation. I’m just saying that if you already have a microsite strategy in place, you may be able to leverage it to help increase your local search visibility.

It’s something to think about, but don’t be surprised if the search engines are thinking about it, too. Just because someone else seems to be getting away with an apparently spammy tactic doesn’t mean you will. Think about the return on your investment and get the most bang for your site development buck. Create value, not confusion.