The Golden Hat

There are two things in my life that I am particularly passionate about right now.

Endurance Running and Search Engine Optimization

Along the way I’ve come to realize that the two interests, though at first unrelated, have similarities so striking that I now see them as inseparable. I doubt that I can become exceptional at one if I don’t also have the other. I can explain it best with a thought provoking example. It’s the classic scenario of an engineer turning to nature for inspiration and innovation.

I remember once reading about a mechanical engineer who took a vacation to the Far East. During his trip he was hiking up a mountain side and nearly took a thump to the head as a passing owl blazed by his head in a defensive gesture suggesting that the hiker was stomping through his territory. What interested and inspired the engineer though wasn’t that fact that he evaded certain injury, but that he didn’t hear the owl coming. He wondered how the owl was able to swoop down on him undetected and without a sound yet at such speed.

The engineer’s curiosity eventually led him to read and learn about the design of the owl’s feathers and their delicately frayed tips. It was through his experience and observation that he came to understand Nature’s awesome design. The engineer then went on to develop cooler and quieter running fans for PC’s by integrating design elements that mimicked those of the owl’s feathers; solving a computer hardware issue that had long gone unresolved.

I’m not saying that I’ve made such a profound observation. However, I’ve seen how life’s dealing of unrelated events can come full circle and result in brilliant harmony to the observant.

So how are my two passions similar? What does endurance running have to do with SEO? It turns out a lot!!! Here is a quick list with some examples:

1. Running marathons requires commitment to training and gradual improvement in overall endurance to realize a long term goal. Anyone that knows SEO also knows that overnight results just don’t happen. To realize long-term, sustainable organic growth an SEO campaign must consistently optimize and improve several components both on-site and off-site over several weeks and months (or years!). The life cycle to optimize a site is a long one. To endure a 26.2 mile running race requires the same commitment.
2. Marathon training requires the testing and calibration of different techniques, especially if you want to make substantial improvements over time. Sure, anyone can “optimize” their website by improving the meta title and meta description, building a few external links, and adding fresh content on a regular basis. Although you’ll likely see results they probably won’t be enough to consistently place you among the top 3 pages of the SERPs. If you want to break into the top positions then you MUST do more. You must turn to technical issues effecting site crawlability and rankings. Look at duplicate content issues, utilize the proper robots.txt protocol for your site, clean up broken pages and pass link value with 301 redirects, etc.. The same applies with marathon running. If you want to break into the top percentile of runners you MUST incorporate speed training on a weekly basis, do hill work (uggghhh it’s terrible, but worth it!), rehab injuries immediately, and stretch and ice on a regular basis. You can’t just add content and call it a day, much like I can run the same route at the same speed each day and expect to win.
3. Marathoner’s are a bit messed up in the head. Yeah, that’s right. There’s something weird going on in my noggin. What do I mean? Well, just think about waking up at 5am on a Sunday morning to go run 26.2 miles. Get it? It’s a strange addiction to personal challenges and the willingness to die for a $5 medal at the finish line. That’s not an exaggeration. At every race I’ve been in the ambulance crew has always been busy. All of the passionate SEO’ers that I’ve met have a similar mentality. At odd hours of the night and on weekends they work through a challenging environment to obtain a goal. They know that they must take several steps to get there. They also know they could screw up along the way and not reach their goal. But they take that risk and accept the consequences and go for it. I don’t win any money for finishing a race. I do however get extreme satisfaction. The same goes for my SEO work. I usually don’t have anything tangible to walk away with. Just a self-congratulating “job well done!”

I’ll be writing plenty more about this topic and I hope that SEO’ers and marathon runners alike decide to follow. For the time being though I want you to think about what you’re passionate about and consideration the interrelated nature of them. How does one inspire the other?

My blogging is done for the day. Time to go lace up the shoes

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I thought it would be a fun exercise to perform a Google search for “SEO” and see what kind of Sponsored results appear. One might figure that the quality of the results would be a notch above the average PPC advertiser. The top Sponsored search results though ran the spectrum from sketchy to moronic. Below are some screen shots of the results. The following images carry graphic material and may not be suitable for all adults…..

Position #1

I find it interesting that the first call to action is about the basics. And that white paper better be free! If someone wanted the basics they can hop online and check out any of the several, credible SEO blogs to learn the basics. This is probably just a gimmick about how meta data runs the SEO world and will get you page 1 rankings overnight…. blah blah blah

Position #2

What makes this companies SEO services high-end? Is their website wall paper Louis Vuitton? I’m not too sure about the URL either. I think this falls into the sketchy category.

Position #3

You can call an SEO operator now??? Imagine that conversation! “Hi. My name is Jim. I’m not ranking very well for www.himynameisjim.com. Can you help me?” Operator says, “Sure Jim! We can definitely help you rank! First, may I have your credit card number?” Need I say more?

Position #4

At first I thought this was a Spanish language ad that somehow ended up in the English results. I figured “Comapre” was some kind of conjugated Spanish verb. Then I realized that the fool who uploaded this just can’t spell and the company obviously doesn’t have a QA process in place either. My advice: work with these guys and you’ll “comapre” your results to the sites found on page 52 of the Google SERP.

Position #5

Well, I think they tend to over simplify the process a bit, but at least it’s better than the rest. The URL is pretty bad though. It again simplifies the process. SEO is a lengthy and patient process. A snap of the fingers won’t render your SEO efforts complete. I definitely wouldn’t recommend these guys unless your SEO budget is $299 as a one-time fee.

Sadly it turns out that the top 5 PPC results for the SEO industry in Google search house some of the worst examples of relevant, credible PPC results. I wouldn’t use either of these companies to discuss SEO efforts for my organization. Then again I work in the SEO industry and have a better idea about what to look for and what to avoid. If you’re a company shopping around for SEO services then I hope you read this blog post because I wouldn’t want you burning up precious phone minutes speaking to an SEO operator ;D

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I like to personify search engine spiders as a casual Sunday grocery shopper. When you go shopping for groceries you expect a few simple things when you enter the store. Firstly, you want to be greeted by the friendly elderly person at the door welcoming you in….. wait, that’s Wal-Mart…. I digress. FIRSTLY, you want to see neatly organized product aisles. Fruits and vegetables in aisle 1, canned veggies and condiments in aisles 2, and so on and so forth. Secondly, when you walk down the aisle you expect to find the product that was listed on the aisles product sign. Thirdly, you want to move quickly through the line and exit the store with everything you expected to purchase.

Much is the same with the site sub-domains, taxonomy, and URL naming conventions. If a user were to cover the screen up with their hand and read the URL they should be able to identify what products/information will be found on the page before they even look at it. Too often you encounter a site with dynamically generated URLs with several dozen, or even hundreds of random characters (e.g /%#$35561135633?464….. blah blah blah). As a user I certainly don’t want to see that. As a search engine bot I DEFINITELY don’t want to see that. Much like the casual Sunday shopper who wishes to easily find the desired product in a well-labeled aisle and move on with their day, a search engine spider wants to find well labeled site architecture (in this case we’re focusing on URLs) to easily identify what product/information will be found on the page, then crawl the page, and associate a clean, descriptive, static URL with the content found on the page (and hopefully it’s all relevant!)

For example I did a Google search for “home furniture” and clicked on a link for Ashley Furniture. I then clicked on the “chairs and ottomans” section. This is the URL I got…..

http://www.ashleyfurniture.com/Showroom/Showroom.aspx?PageId=
Showroom&CategoryID=8&SetDomTab=1&PageNumber=1&IsClicked=1

Ok….. imagine you didn’t know that you were visiting a site for home furniture, or that you wanted to check out their chairs and ottomans. Would you be able to predict what was on the page just by reading the URL? Probably not.

Next I visited www.OfficeFurniture.com and again clicked on “chairs”. This is the URL for the chairs section.

http://www.officefurniture.com/Browse/Office-Chairs.aspx

Could you describe what products exist on this page without seeing the page itself…. most definitely!

I also want to point out that if you click on the dynamic URL for Ashley Furniture, it lands you on the root directory page for their “show room” and does not place you on the “chairs and ottomans” page that I had initially clicked on, and from where I captured that dynamic URL. When clicking on the OfficeFurniture URL however it lands you on the exact page for “office chairs”. From an external linking perspective then, if you wished to link to that dynamic backlink and land users on the page specific to “chairs and ottomans” that unfortunately probably wouldn’t happen and they would end up on the showroom sub-directory. To wrap it up then, make the URLs static, clean, and descriptive. Avoid dynamically generated character strings whenever possible. Draft them so that they are indicative of the products/information on the page. Pat yourself on the back for making the URLs both user and spider friendly and you’re on your way to long-lasting, quality SEO results!

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