Well, here we have another perfect example of what I love most about WordPress. It seems there’s a plugin available for basically every imaginable task!

One of my consulting club members pinged me the other day to talk about an SEO trick he’s been using for a while.  Nothing blackhat or anything, just something simple & smart, but tedious and annoying to do by hand (so therefore, who’s really going to do it consistently?)

The basic idea is something you’re undoubtedly already familiar with if you’ve ever done any on-page SEO:  using <h> tags in order to indicate the important keywords, to a search engine or other bot.

The problem of course is that just assigning h1, h2, h3, etc. to various words throughout your page, tends to result in a totally messed up and broken page, from a human-readability perspective.

The solution is really quite simple… just use some CSS to format the h tags so that they still look normal to the visitor, but the bot sees the tags in the code and treats those keywords appropriately.

It’s not rocket science by any means, but it is tedious to have to set up in your theme, and requires you knowing how to hack the CSS in the first place.

Enter – Stealth Header Tags!  A nifty little plugin that does one thing very well.  It makes it incredibly easy to format your header tags so they visually have no difference from the rest of your content, but the tags stay in your code for SEO purposes.

And it’s super cheap.  I love plugins like this, that do something genuinely useful, save me some time and hassle, and are incredibly affordable.  Sure, super-sophisticated plugins that cost a fair amount have their place too, but I’m a sucker for little “utility plugins” like this one.

Anyway it’s releasing in a WSO for a whopping 7 bucks for a Personal License, or 12 if you want the “developer Version” which allows you to include it on sites for clients, or that you resell, etc.

A nice, simple little plugin that solves a common problem at little cost.  What more could I ask for?! 

Jonathan

I was just Googling for information on SOPA/PIPA since I heard that it was immediately thrown out.  The results I got surprised me, despite the fact that I had said this was going to be happening not long ago:

http://screencast.com/t/y9BcX82Rcb

Yep – personalized search results are here!

I’m not quite clear how they work or which ones are personal and which are not.  It’s also only for some keywords so far.  Searches for “SOPA”, “PIPA”, “dogs”, and “cats” all returned personalized results, but a search for “dog food” was not.

I imagine Google will be rolling this out more and more throughout 2012 until ALL searches get “personalized”.  Care to share your thoughts on how this is going to impact the SEO industry?  Comments below!

Jonathan

OK all you closet Dungeons and Dragons players! Now is your time to shine!

Wait… what??

Sorry… let me explain.  Based on looking over the recent Google Quality Rater Guide that was leaked out, I believe that for marketers, this is the “Age of the Persona”.

Now it’s not exactly a new concept to use a pseudonym, or even an entire other persona, when marketing online.  But Google has very clearly stated that they want to see “experts” delivering useful information and opinions on web pages.  And that their raters have been instructed to see through the “thin affiliates” and all the other games & tricks, to determine who is REALLY an expert, and who isn’t.

So, does this mean you have to go become a leading expert on everything you want to market?

No I don’t believe so.  But you better LOOK LIKE ONE!

This is where the RPG reference in my title comes in.  If you’re going to market something and don’t want to put your personal name on it (which often makes total sense to do), then you better make sure that whatever name you DO use, appears to be a genuine expert in the field.

So if you’re a man marketing fitness products for women, you’d better create a female “character” and really flesh her out.  Figure out her stats… give her a backstory.  Create profiles for her on social networking sites, business sites, etc.  Make it so that if someone looks her up, she’s real and “out there” and has the appearance of credibility.

I think that now more than ever might be the time to really dive deep into your “alter egos” and let them shine.  Give them a Flickr album of personal photos, an active twitter feed, friends who actually write to her on her Facebook wall… etc.

This should go a long way towards pleasing the quality raters if they come to her product site and decide to look her up to help determine if she’s truly an expert on women’s fitness.

So no matter who you really are, learn to create believable characters and portray them as fully as you can.  Doing so shouldn’t really take more than a few hours to set up a few accounts and post some content… and could provide you some long term benefits!

Jonathan

I’ve had a feeling for the last year at least, that the “SEO game” is due for a radical change.  I didn’t know exactly what it would be (still don’t exactly) but I’ve felt all along that it would be related to “personalized search results”.  In other words, each individual searcher getting their OWN set of results that is unique to them, and influenced by their past activities rather than just by some algorithm in a black box.

Based on some of the recent things I’ve seen change when I use Google (my search engine of choice), and by some information I’m not at liberty to discuss, I’m more convinced than ever that the “end of SEO” is coming.  Here’s why I think the way I do (based on things I can legally discuss):

1.  As Google goes, so does the rest of the (SE) world.  Every time Google implements something, everyone else follows suit – eventually.  So I’m using Google in all this discussion but it will apply equally to other SEs, just delayed.

2.  Google has been making search results more personalized for some time already, just by things like Geo-IP location detection.  In the last year, I was on the phone with a friend and we were trying to look something up together.  It was maddening because we COULD NOT get his results to match mine, because our IP addresses were returning different data.  This was true both of the actual search results, as well as Google Suggest.  Everything was localized to our individual areas.

3.  Google is constantly fighting the “black hat SEOs” who are trying to game their algorithm, so it’s in their best interests to stop them from ever being able to game any single algorithm.  Personalized searches would stop (nearly) all current BHSEO tactics cold.

4.  Google makes money from advertising.  The better the response to the ads for their advertisers, the more Google can charge for them.  Advertising is a quality vs. quantity game for Google.  I saw some recent metrics on how much money they make from their “big budget” advertisers vs. everyone else… it was staggering.  A tiny minority of their advertisers are responsible for the VAST majority of their revenue.  The more they can do to push the “little guys” out of Adwords, the better it is for them as a company.  Personalized searches should give even better results for the big players, and make it that much harder for the little players to work their way into the organic OR paid results.

5.  With the introduction of Google+, Google has a huge wealth of data they can mine.  Once people adopt this platform (assuming of course that they do), then Google will begin knowing things about you that they can use to tailor your search experience way further.  They’ll know things about your friends, about which of your friends you are most similar to, who’s taste you most likely share, etc.  Add to this the new “+1″ concept, and Google has an incredible amount of information about things you like, and therefore are most likely to want to see related items come back in your search results.  Eventually over time they’ll be able to build some sort of relational map between different search results and the people who liked them, and more precisely target individuals both for organic search results, as well as paid advertisements.

I could probably come up with more, but I think that’s enough to get the point across.  All of these things together, mean that the days of being able to SEO for a specific term and get that term to rank universally for everyone – are soon to be gone.  How do you SEO a term when there is absolutely no guarantee that the same search term will return the same results for any two people?  And how do you check your rankings when they’re now meaningless?

I think SEOs had better start changing their ways – and FAST – or they’re going to find themselves overnight, the victims of a complete and total loss of traffic to their sites, with absolutely no way of recovering it.

Jonathan

You may have noticed a change to the way Google returns search results recently.  The results are now returned live as you type – probably using AJAX I’m guessing.

I think this is actually pretty cool, though it’s still taking me some time to get used to.  What I wonder about though is what affect this will have on adwords advertisers.

I was actually part of a usability study involving this new technology about a month ago, and I went to Google’s headquarters and got to play around with it for about 90 minutes while they asked me a bunch of questions about it, and had me do certain tasks.

My biggest concern at that time, was speed.  I told them in no uncertain terms, that if this slows down my search experience at all, I’m going to throw a fit and look elsewhere for my search engine.  They assured me speed would not be an issue and for now I’d have to say that is true.  It seems quite fast and responsive.

But the grey area I’m not sure about, is for Adwords advertisers.  Since a single search query, typed by someone who is on the slower end of the spectrum (not everyone types 75+ words per minute like myself!), could actually contain multiple totally different queries within it, while it’s being typed out.

Here’s an example query:

honda dealer in chicago

I went and typed this query out slowly in google, as if I were figuring out what I was searching for as I went, or as if I were just a normal hunt-n-peck slow typist.  I saw no fewer than 8 different sets of Adwords results returned, and many of them were not relevant to my search query because they appeared before it had been fully formed.  Had I done this search “the old fashioned way” there would have been only a single set of Adwords ads returned – those for the final query.

So what this means is, a whole bunch of Adwords advertisers just received impressions from me, when I wasn’t looking for them at all and was highly unlikely to pay any attention to their ad.  As most of us probably know, your CTR is a big part in determining your bid price, and the number of impressions you’ve received is a huge component in calculating CTR!

This suggests to me that this new feature could actually hurt advertisers, by reducing their CTRs and increasing bid prices.  Which is of course good for Google, but bad for advertisers.

Will there be any long term fallout from this?  I have no idea.  But it was actually a point I brought up while I was at Google and they said that usability wasn’t involved in those kinds of decisions, and they didn’t know what the ramifications of it were or how it was going to be handled.

I do really like this new approach to search, but it remains to be seen what it’s going to do to the Adwords or SEO landscapes.  Some more food for thought about it:

Since the results are going to change constantly as you type, people may be exposed to search rankings they would not otherwise have been.  Will this mean that SEO for partial keyphrases might begin to gain more importance?  What if for example in the above example query, I had ranked #1 for the term:

honda dealer in chi

Would my result have been displayed along the way, and possibly caught the searcher’s eye as they typed?  Will this open the doors to an entire new world of partial domain names being registered?  Or partial keyphrases being SEOd for?

I guess time will tell all!

Jonathan

I’m not really an SEO expert, though I have my share of knowledge.  It’s not an area I dabble in heavily because I just don’t care for the uncertainty of it, when compared to paid traffic sources.

Still, an awful lot of people do spend a huge amount of time & energy on SEO and so I thought I’d share these 4 resources I just dug up for one of my consulting club members.  There’s some good stuff here, so enjoy!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/the-best-damn-o.php

http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/on-page-seo/

Jonathan