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Ever get that? When you really want to do something which you feel you would be great at but when the opportunity comes around the timing just ain’t right? What am I waffling on about you may ask? Well during the week I turned down pretty much my dream job which was offered to me on a plate. The chap that offered me the job (over the phone) was the managing director of a small company specialising in SEO and Internet marketing services with an Irish (obviously) and a UK presense. I had meet him before and we had talked over the phone about various issues on a couple of different occasions. I had mentioned to him that I noticed his company was advertising for a vacant position (which he told me had actually been filled), it was definitely more ‘banter’ than a formal application but anyhow he obviously had remembered what I had said when the position became free again.

The job itself was essentially a combined web development and SEO/Internet marketing role, which is basically the perfect job for me as I have a strong passion for both (SEO/Internet marketing more so though). My understanding of the role was that it would have involved developing APIs, tools and applications for use inhouse and on client websites as well as performing organic search engine optimisation, PPC based search engine marketing, conversion improvement etc. for the company itself and for their clients too of course. The direct salary that was on offer was a bit better than what I’m on now I must admit but the overall package wasn’t close. For example my current employer pays an amount equivalent to 8% of my wages into my pension fund every week, I also have a semi defined (I roughly know what I’ll be getting each year) bonus written into my contract, additionally I get approximately 50% of my electricity bill paid all as part of the overall package included by my current employer, none of this (or similar) was on offer for this new job.

I would of course want to be rewarded well to change jobs, but in saying that the ‘package’ wasn’t the main reason I didn’t accept the offer. I probabely would have taken a ‘hit’ (compared to my current job) on any overall package due to the increased job satisfaction I most likely would have gotten from the actual role itself. Additionally I liked the idea of being able to play a big part in helping a small company grow, rather than just being another face in a large company as is the case with my current job setup.

Infact the main reason I turned the offer down was due to bad timing, perhaps if the offer had come 3/4 months later I would have at least furthered my interest and possibly tried to bargin for more benefits (not necessarily monetary) before finally accepting or rejecting, but due to the fact that my yearly XMAS bonus (which you don’t get if your leaving) was on the way, I was due a raise in January and also the fact that I have just rejoined the gym (paying for a year upfront) close to my current job meant that the timing was just not right for such a big change. Some people of course will say that the timing is always right for your dream job. Oh well I’ve made my bed and now I’m lying in it.

Seems to me that doing a simple query on Google and then having a glance at the amount of results returned isn’t really the best way to gauge how competitive a keyword or keyphrase is. This figure represents all the pages in Google’s index which are even only a small bit relevant for the query, it does not give a fair indication of the amount of naturally relevant pages or the pages which have been specifically optimised to appear for the searched upon query.

A better way is to use a combination of Google’s advanced queries to run a much stricter search to filter out all the pages which are ‘accidently relevant’. Examples of these advanced queries include ‘allintitle:’, ‘allinurl:’ and ‘allinanchor:’

A search with ‘allintitle:’ before it on Google will only return pages that have all the words following ‘allintitle:’ in their HTML title tags. An example is ‘allintitle:football tickets’ which returns 376,000 results, all of which have the words ‘football’ and ‘tickets’ anywhere (regardless of position) in their titles. A further restriction on this would be ‘allintitle:”football tickets”‘ which only returns 226,000 results. Notice the double quotes around the search phrase, this basically means that football and tickets have to be A) in the correct order and B) one after another. I think you’ll agree that these figures are a lot more useful than the figure returned for a basic search for ‘football tickets’ which currently returns over 55 million results, a figure which is dominated by pages which are accidently relevant and thus don’t provide real competition. 

Allinurl: is basically the same kind of idea except it looks in the URL of pages and not the title. Using the football tickets phrase in conjunction with allinurl to run ‘allinurl:football tickets’ and ‘allinurl:”football tickets”‘ against Google.com returns 116,000 and 65,000 results respectively. Again these figures are both massively less than the 55 million results returned for the basic search. Pages with keywords in their URLs are very likely to be your real competiton and tough enough competition too.

A final advanced query and perhaps the most useful one is allinanchor. I know some people have been experiencing ‘issues’ with this type of search but it appears to be working for me at the moment and thus deserves inclusion. Using allinanchor: before keywords/phrases in a search forces Google to return only those pages that have all those keywords and phrases present in at least one of their backlinks, these backlinks can be internal or external. Search Engine Optimisation consultants know the power of keyword rich backlinks thus it is likely that many of the top results for an allinanchor search have had their sites/pages optimized and thus are going to be hard enough to outrank. For instance AKAMarketing.com is currently #1 for a ‘allinanchor:search engine optimisation ireland’ search, this basically means that I have loads (well more than the competition) of valuable links to my site which use the words the four words ’search’, ‘engine’, ‘optimisation’ and ‘ireland’ scattered about the text which links to me. Due to this #1 ranking you can bet your bottom dollar that my site is going to be a ‘tough competitor’ on the normal ’search engine optimisation ireland’ results, and hey what do you know I’m #1 on those normal results too. If the figure returned by an allinanchor search is in the millions get prepared for a long 15 rounder slugfest because there are lots of real competitors.  

Of course the figure Google returns for any search basic or advanced is not 100% accurate but is only indicative, a good way to find a more exact number of competitors is to run one of the advanced queries and keep on skipping by 10 results pages until Google shows you the following:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XXX already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

XXX will / should be a fair indication of the task you have ahead of you in terms of competing sites and pages. Please share you thoughts and comments on these issues.

I’ve seen many discussion threads on this topic over the years but it seems this question remains unanswered for a lot of freelance SEO consultants and indeed many SEO companies who are new into the market. Basically it all boils down to the personal choice of the person or company supplying the service, one hopes though that they will try and accomodate the clients cashflow and budget as much as possible. A couple of different payment structures which I’m aware of are outlined below.

50-70% lump sum upfront and monthly maintence fee
This is the payment structure I use for 90% of my work. The lump sum upfront allows me to carry out (within say the first two months of the campaign) time intensive work such as keyword analysis, onpage optimisation of an entire site, content creation for the site itself and content creation for submission to other sites without having to worry about being paid. It also allows me to submit the clients site to fee charging directories like Yahoo & the Microsoft Business Directory straight away. A monthly maintence fee helps with the SEO consultants cashflow (as it’s always good to have at least a little bit coming in every month) and allocates a couple of hours a month for the aquiring of links to the clients site. The benefit to the client is that the overall payment is offset over the course of the entire campaign which may be 12, 18 or even 24 months and thus it becomes much more affordable to them.

100% lump sum when results are achieved
Avoid this payment structure at all costs, it does not protect you at all and you could end up doing months of work on a site without receiving a single cent. All ethical optimization consultants know they cannot guarantee any particular position in the natural results of any of the major search engines and so to agree to something like this is in my opinion downright stupidity. Besides that there is something quite worrying about having a supposedly legitimate potential client asking me to do perhaps a years work for them for free. Can you imagine a soccer club saying to someone like Ronaldinho ‘come play for us and IF we are successful we will pay you‘? It also means you can’t have content created for the clients site nor can you submit the clients site to places like Yahoo directory which require a fee, unless of course your going to dip into your own pocket.

100% lump sum upfront
Depending on the type and size of project this option can be best. I mean if were talking about something like keyword analysis or once off onpage optimisation which can be done and then pretty much forgotten about for the next 6 months or so I would charge this way. Of course most campaigns require a couple of months of ongoing link acquisition so charging like this may not be the best idea in a lot of cases. Depending on how large the lump sum actually is this could put your services out of reach of many smaller clients.

There are a couple of others in between such as 50% upfront and then say 50% after 4/5 months, but I think it’s best to get a good chunk up front for your protection (and to allocate time for the first month or two when most of the work is done) and then allow the client to pay the other 30%, 40%, 50% or whatever as a month by month maintenence payment for things like keyword rich links or new content. The important thing is to find a solution which a) protects you and b) suits the client as much as possible.

Recently I’ve been having a small bit of luck on MSN by working my pages towards average keyword densitys for elements such as title tag, meta description, h1 tags and general body content. I ‘computed’ the averages by using the densitys of the top ten sites for my chosen keywords on MSN.com. For example for the term ’search engine optimisation’ on MSN.com I am currently ranked 5th. This is outstanding considering before I conducted this latest round of onpage optimisation I was not even in the top 50. Interesting to know that MSN still pays a lot of attention to onpage elements, much more than Google and Yahoo anyhow.

Matt Cutts is a Google employee who works on their anti-spam team. Recently he has started to publish a number of videos on Google Video (where else?) in which he attempts to answer questions on a number of different Google SEO and sometimes general Google questions. Earlier yesterday morning (August 3rd) he added his 9th and 10th videos. 

I’ve seen blog posts all over the place about these videos but the source posts are of course from Matts own blog which is located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ so to see what he has to say about them go there, well actually you’d be better going to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/movies/ as his posts pertaining to the videos are conveniently one after another on his movies category page whereas his blogs homepage has others posts scattered in between. Anyhow in this post I will provide an overhead look at the first five of these videos. These are just rough summaries and are not transcripts as such.  Although these summaries do cover all the important points from each video, I still recommend you see the videos for yourself and for this reason I have included direct links to them.

Video #1 - Qualities of a good site
Matt talks about some general guidelines and recommendations to increase visibility on Google…
He says that the #1 mistake people make with their sites is that they are not crawlable, Matt says try to go through your site using something like the Lynx text browser, if you can get through your site with Lynx your going to be in pretty good shape as far as crawlability is concerned. Also consider using Google Sitemaps.

The main thing which Matt advises is to make sure people relevant to your niche know about you, (ie. get links from them). Think also about a ‘hook’ for your site, something viral. For example really good content like newsletters, tutorials, videos etc. which have links back to your site. Matt gives the example of some tutorials he read about making his videos professional and then at the end of these tutorials the tutorial providers said something like ‘oh and by the way you can use our equipment to make these professional videos, visit www.alink.com’. Matt says content can be a great way to get links and mentions things like syndicating tutorials, digg and slashdot. Matt says fundamentally you need something different which sets you apart from the pack.

A question is asked about the dmoz snippet. Matt talks about why Google would use the dmoz snippet for your listing as opposed to your meta description tag. He says Google will pick whichever snippet is better for the query, so it is query dependent. He also mentions using the noodp tag which will disallow Google using the ODP tag for your listing snippet.

Does Google favour bold over strong tags? Matt says they favour bold, however it’s so slight that you need not worry about it.

Video #2 - SEO myths
Too many sites on same server? Too many sites with IPs too similiar? Too many sites which all use same Javascript?
99% webmasters are OK, but if you have something like 2000 sites, Matt poses the question do they/can they all have unique relevant content?

Launching millions of pages at same time? Matt says things have changed in Google, now he says it’s better to launch a few thousand pages now and then a few thousand pages later. Try a softer launch as otherwise your pages could be attracting unwanted scrutiny.

Video #3 - Optimize for Search Engines or Users?
Which is more important SEO or end user optimization. Matts says both - for initial attraction of visitors and then conversion of visitors to customers. The trick is to try and make sure your users interests and the search engines interests are aligned as possible (ie. good content is liked by both users and engines as too is good navigation)

Matt recommends sitemaps for checking your site is ‘clean’ as it should flag you about crawl and other errors which were found.

W3C - Matt says W3C validation does not help in the search engines as some figures estimate 40% of all HTML pages have syntax errors and there’s no way Google would remove or penilize all these. He mentions that in general it’s a good idea but for SEO purposes making compelling content is to go at the top of your priority list.

Video #4 - Static vs. Dynamic URLs
Does Google treat static and dynamic URLs differently? Matt says generally they are treated the same way in terms of ranking. He says pagerank flows to dynamic URLs in the same way as to static URLs. He refers specifically though to an example URL from the website of the person asking the question which has 5 parameters and in response to this he says you can use too many parameters. Matt says it’s best to stick with 2 or 3 parameters at most and to avoid long numbers as Google can think they are session IDs. He also mentions using mod_rewrite if you think you may have problem URLs.

Can Google inform webmasters if they were hacked from within sitemaps? Matts says good question but Google does not have the resources available yet.

Is it safe to use GEO targeting software without Google thinking we are cloaking to provide different discount and marketing messages to people from different countries? Matt talks about the way Google defines cloaking which is showing different content to users than you do to search engines. He says geo targeting software is not cloaking under Googles guidelines. Matt mentions that the thing which will get you in trouble is if you start treating Google differently. He says not to make a special country just for Google… such as Googlebotistan (his example, not mine). Treat Googlebot just like a regular user, so for example Googlebot comes from a United States IP so show it the page you would show normal human visitors from the United States and you will not have any problems.

Video #5 - How to structure a site?
Will acquiring related domain names and using a 301 redirect to the final website after the aquisition get a site banned or penilized? Matts says in this occasion no because the domain name was related, but if you run a music site for instance and then all of a sudden get a tonne of links from sites about debt consolidation, cheap online etc… that might raise a few eyebrows.

What’s the best way to theme a site using directories? Matt says to concentrate on a tree like architecture and to break things down by topic, so for example if your selling clothes you would have shoes as one directory and sweaters as another directory.

Is it OK to serve static pages to Googlebot instead if dynamic URLs are unindexable? Matts cautions the person who asked the question about getting into the realms of cloaking and tells them to see if there’s a way to unify what search engines and users see in terms of URLs. If you do decide to serve static pages to search engines, you have to be sure that if regular users do visit these pages that they are not redirected (ie. if Google can see it, users should see it too)

Will A/B split testing raise suspicions of cloaking? Matt says it’s best to split test in an area where search engines are not allowed to index. He mentions using robots.txt or .htaccess files to make sure Googlebot doesn’t index your split tests. He again cautions about doing anything special for Googlebot, treat it like a regular user and you should be fine.

Well folks as you can see from above Matt has already been quite helpful to the webmaster community with the these videos… and that was only the first five. The most interesting thing for me from the first five videos was the fact that he said using 301 redirects with aquired but related domains was OK, I was also too afraid to try this in the past but now it seems to me that it could be an excellent way to get a tonne of related backlinks for discount prices. Anyhow I hope this post helped, this wasn’t exactly a transcript but it wasn’t far off. I’ll go through videos 6-10 in a couple of days. Please let me know your comments on Matts first five videos, remember I did put together this post for you so let me know what you think.

Yahoo UK & Ireland have launched another service which again has overlooked the Irish market. No matter who denies it the United Kingdom & the Republic of Ireland are extricably linked in culture, business, language, history etc. and therefore to ignore the Irish market is just plain idiocy. What makes it worse is that the site although on a co.uk is referred to as Yahoo UK & Ireland.

The service in particular is Yahoo local, have a look at the following sample search I performed on Yahoo local… says it all really. This information becomes particularly annoying when one combines it with the fact that Yahoo pay per click advertising is available for GEO targeting in 14 european countries but not Ireland, this dispite the fact that Yahoo have its european headquarters in Dublin. Is Ireland not a center of IT excellence? Do we not host major companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Dell, Intel and Oracle to name but a few? Have we not got Internet businesses to promote and market too? OK enough ranting from me.