SOPA is basically a legislation designed very simply to stop online piracy. Essentially it allows police, authorities, and copyright holders to be able to get court orders that will essentially force service providers (Comcast, AOL, etc.), hosting providers (GoDaddy, BlueGator, etc.), payment services (Paypal, 2Checkout, etc.) and search engines (really?) to literally shut off or stop doing business with websites that they allege are stealing or even enabling potential copyright infringement.

Just in case SOPA gets passed, we got this image from http://endoftheamericandream.com

While it seems good in theory in order to curb online pirating of music, movies, files, and the like, there’s something much more sinister in the background.  The biggest target would be torrent sites that facilitate illegal distribution of files such as PirateBay, ISOHunt, and similar sites.  But other sites that have user generated content like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook could be shut down if SOPA gets enacted.

A site could be removed from the search engines, have their advertising revenue yanked, payment processing blocked, website shut off and even up to 5 years of prison time if someone alleges that a site is in violation and gets a court order against them. It also gives the government a LOT of power over what can and can’t be posted online. An example that may hit closer to home would be if you posted a photo on your blog that you acquired somewhere online and that you believed to be “free to use”.  If the person that owns the rights to that photo (even indirectly) decides that you’ve violated their copyright, they can get a court order to put all of those aforementioned detrimental factors into play on your very own website.  If you’re in a competitive industry, one of your competitors could reasonably shut you down over a photo buried on your site thousands of pages deep.

While it may seem far fetched, SOPA makes that completely possible. SOPA has a laundry list of big name opponents including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Youtube, Mozilla and many others. Google is exceptionally concerned because of the fact that there are many anti-Google folks just itching to tie them to something potentially copyrighted that could cause a lot of problems for the search giant. Hosting and domain megamart GoDaddy initially supported the SOPA project, but customers pulled over 72,000 domains from the registrar and moved them elsewhere as a result. GoDaddy got the point quickly and immediately pulled support once it truly understood the ramifications of the SOPA bill.

So tomorrow, Google will officially weigh in on SOPA, Wikipedia will go black (among others as well) and we’ll potentially get more details on where they stand. Actually, we know where they stand. It’s where you should stand. Even if you think SOPA won’t affect you, you’d be shocked how much it would impact your online experience. It’s a bad, bad idea.

This conversation is a good example of how humans might process information.

A friend comes to you and says, “I saw a bear.”
“Wow.”, you say. “Where?”
“Across the street!”
“Across the street from here?”
“No. Up in the mountains.”
“What mountains?”
“In Helen, Georgia.”
“Was it a big bear?”
“Huge!”
“What kind of bear was it?”
“No idea.”
“Well, what color was it?”
“It was a black bear.”

While this conversation may seem silly, it could have been avoided if the person simply started the conversation by saying, “I saw a huge black bear across the street when I was up in the mountains of Helen, Georgia.”  At that point, you have all of the information that you need.  However, this is the exact same thing that happens when a person puts broad keywords into a search engine.  They may have a vision of the results they expect to see, but they simply put “bear” in the search window without giving the search engine the data it needs to know the whole story.  Depending on the broadness of the keyword will determine how much interpretation the search engine has to do.

This is why website siloing is so important is because it allows you to start broad, but still lead the visitor down certain paths depending on more specific data. It’s also why keyword research is so very important. You may think you want to rank for “bear”, but if your website focuses only on Georgia black bears, you’ll kill yourself trying to rank for “bear”.  Then you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why “Build a Bear”, the “Chicago Bears”, “Bear Bryant” and tons of other sites outrank you. And unless you expand your content to include all things “bear”, they always will. This also goes back to building out the respective areas for specific terms and then optimizing those areas for those longer tail keywords such as “Helen Georgia black bears”.

Customer Intent (But what did you really mean?)

This brings us to customer intent. What did the searcher really want to find? But more importantly, does your website capitalize on that intent? And if it does, can it capitalize on it even more than it already does?

For instance, if a person searches for “windows”, are they trying to find a glass window or are they looking for something to do with the Windows software? You would definitely know if the person used the keyword in “plate glass windows”, but now you don’t know what they want with plate glass windows. Do they want to find more info on types of plate glass windows? Do they want someone to install them? Are they looking for pricing? How can you know for sure? The answer is in your Analytics.

Your best bet is to look at the keyword area under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics (assuming that you’ve installed it). You’ll see that people arrived to your site using a variety of keywords and your telltale sign is in the column called “bounce rate”. When a person “bounces”, they are leaving your site within a pre-defined time frame (typically under 5 seconds).  The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant that page probably is to the term they searched for.

However, it doesn’t always mean that it’s not relevant. If the person has searched specifically for “toddler girl dresses” and your page is all about “toddler girl dresses”, then maybe there could be something else on that page is turning them off.   The page could be taking too long to load (check Google Webmaster Tools). Maybe your pricing is too high (try doing some A/B split testing using Google Website Optimizer). Maybe your designs or selection sucks (more A/B split testing). Either way, you should always pay attention to how the person arrived at your page in the first place and pay close attention to keywords that have high bounce rates.

Alternately, if you see a high bounce rate for “blue toddler girl dresses“, and you have 4 blue toddler girl dresses, it’s once again time to analyze why.  Are those blue dresses mixed in with dozens of dresses of another color? If there’s a substantial amount of traffic bouncing for blue toddler girl dresses, maybe it’s time to move your blue dresses onto their own page. That way you can optimize that specific page for various blue dresses keyword terms and start landing those sales.

“Well, I did that and now they’re not bouncing, but they’re still not buying.”  If that’s the case, then you should start looking at your sales funnel. You have that set up, right?  If not, you should head to the Goals area of Google Analytics and get cracking.  Once you have that set up, you can see where they’re leaving the sales process. If they leave before anything even goes in the cart, then maybe it’s your pricing. If they leave on the shipping page, then maybe your shipping cost is too high.  If you end up in that conundrum, than it’s time to fire up Google Website Optimizer and do some A/B split testing and start analyzing different shipping or pricing.

The beauty of all of this is that it’s readily available to you for free via Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.  So if your sales have slowed down, or you simply can’t even get found on the web, it’s time to research your site structure first, then your page structure, and then the content of those pages. In that order. If you don’t analyze and test, you’re leaving major money on the table.

The topic came up again over the weekend as covered by the lovely Vanessa Fox about how major retailer JCPenney broke those rules and had enjoyed top rankings on Google for pretty much everything they sold and in turn had a very prosperous holiday shopping season.  JCPenney is not a small company and were certainly not prospering “in the shadows”.   They were caught because of a New York Times article where the writer hired an SEO company to find out just how JCPenney performed its SEO magic. The writer found that JCPenney had been buying links, supposedly inadvertently through their SEO firm, on literally thousands of websites and most of which weren’t even relevant to JCPenney.  When the Times questioned Google’s Matt Cutts about the issue, he released a very short, “Google’s algorithms had started to work.  Manual action also taken.”   The result was JCPenney’s rankings taking a major plummet, but Twitter came alive with questions about why it took a New York Times investigation and a tap on Google’s shoulder for them to notice this had been going on.  Vanessa’s article covers it in more detail here and it’s a great read, but it raises important concerns to all legitimate SEO experts.

SEO professionals have had enough.  We all have had those clients that are in competitive fields and experience this first hand.  We see a clients’ competitor sit at the top of Google rankings that are only there from beating the system. We see them buy links, appear on hundreds of irrelevant sites (some even pornographic) and they win the battle.  Meanwhile, we have to tell our clients, “I can’t do that.  You need to consider the penalties. If you get caught, you could be removed from Google’s index.  They’ll eventually get caught. You’ll see….“  and then months later, even years later, they’re never caught.  They just continue to prosper and our clients go elsewhere. Most of the time to black hat SEO hobbyists that give them what they want.  Top rankings via whatever means necessary.  If clients are smart, they will steer clear away from this type of activity, but the question truly is, when will Google figure out how to spot this?

Someone explain why Google ignores legitimate SEO professionals pleas?  The graphic below is from the aforementioned post that showed how many links JCPenney had from month to month.  Why can’t Google see this activity and why don’t they act on it?  As mentioned before, JCPenney is not a small company, and they still don’t get caught unless something like this occurs.  Maybe Google can explain to us how they don’t see this activity below?  Google’s algorithm brags that it analyzes 10,000 ranking factors to determine positioning. Is this not one of them?  There’s not one SEO professional that hasn’t struggled getting a client to rank following the rules while we watched their competitors flourish by breaking them.  All we had to do is use SEO Elite to see the origin of their links. Does Google not have something similar?  Do we have to tattle-tale on sites for them to get caught?  It’s time for this hole to be patched and thankfully it takes an embarrassing slip like this to bring it back to light.

If you were to write a great book (your website) and put it into the library (the internet), you wouldn’t just simply walk in and put it onto the library shelves. Nobody would find it unless it’s in the computer system. The only way that people could find you is if the librarian (the search engine spider) looks at the book to find out what it’s about and then puts it into the system (the index) so that people could find it. Then people could come into the library, put in what they’re looking for, find your book and check it out. And if more people check it out, the librarian makes note of that and will steer people to that book more often since she’s seeing that more people like it. That’s also why it’s important that your book is clear on what it’s about so that it can be properly indexed. In short, you have to make sure that the librarian knows your book exists. Simply building a website that is out on the internet means nothing. Ok. Enough of that analogy.

The way you do that is to submit the website to the search engines either by hand, using a submission service, or letting them find you via a link posted on another site that is already indexed like someone’s blog, link page, etc.. It’s been debated as to which is best and in truth, it really doesn’t matter although having the spiders find it on their own is supposedly a better option. Hogwash. It doesn’t matter how it gets there.

Once a person goes to a search engine, they simply enter the keyword they’re interested in and the engine returns a list of results based on a variety of factors. These factors are things like the age of the website, how many people link to it, the content of the website, what the page actually says, whether the page is even relevant to what they searched for and so much more. In some cases, the search engine will completely ignore the site age, and inbound links (links on other websites that link to yours) and just let it rank well because it thinks it’s very relevant based on how you placed text on the page.

Essentially, you could outrank a site that’s WAY more relevant than yours simply based on how you set up the page, adjusted your title tags, etc. And that’s what I’m primarily going to focus on during this SEO guide. How to get ranked as quickly as possible even though you haven’t set up any link partners, barely have any inbound links, how to structure your site and text, information, body text, etc to get quick results. I’m not going to ignore the important things, but you want quick results and that’s what I plan to give you. This is not about cheating the system. It’s about structuring your website to rank well on the major search engines and giving them what they want. Well most of what they want.

I will preface this by saying that there have been some sites that just can’t be helped at all. Sometimes well established sites are the worst to pull out of the mire. Especially ones with dynamic databases where the content is built on the fly based on what the person wants to see because there’s so much information that you simply could not build physical pages for each possibility. For instance, if you have 50 states and 10 categories, then you would have to create 500 physical pages so that each state has a page for each category. That’s mostly why databases are created is to alleviate that problem and give the user what they want on the fly. If they search for Georgia Photographer, the site goes to the database and pulls the names of the photographers from Georgia and just creates a page dynamically. Those could typically have the worst SEO nightmares sometimes. If that’s you, don’t lose heart. Make sure all of this other stuff is in line first.