As the story goes, JCPenney  was dominating the top of Google’s search results. They were occupying the #1 position for keywords such as “dresses”, “furniture”, “area rugs”, “skinny jeans” and a myriad of others. The question came up about how they are accomplishing this amazing feat! Through some investigative reporting by Doug Pierce, it was determined that JCPenney’s SEO company was utilizing Black Hat SEO techniques described as “the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen”.

The results of this investigation yielded 2,015 pages that held links to the JCPenney website, with anchor text such as casual dresses, evening dresses, little black dress, cocktail dress. Clicking on any of these phrases would direct you to the main dress page on the JCPenney website. This gave Google a false impression that the JCPenney website was satisfying one of Google’s algorithms with flying colors, thus launching them to the top of the natural results. This type of linking is a known no-no, a form of exploitation, deceptive and clearly Black Hat SEO, punishable by either being black listed from Google or at the very best, watching your placements sink into oblivion.

The NY Times sent Google all the evidence that they had collected and Google took prompt action against the offender.

At 7pm On February 9, 2011, JCPenney was #1 for keyword “samsonite carry on luggage”. Two hours later it was #71. Also at 7pm, it was #1 for keyword “living room furniture”; Two hours later it was #68.

“In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country. The next it was essentially buried.”

Read the full article here

It’s not unusual for a prospective client to call all upset that they have lost all their positions with another company that promised the world. I’ll never forget “Tom” who had a top three position for a highly competitive home industry term. He was actually screaming and frantic on the phone. I assured him that what his last SEO Firm had done was called “Black Hat SEO” and though it worked for a while, they got caught and he was now reaping the wrath of Google. This was five years ago, and we weren’t sure how long it would take to fix the problem. But we “undid” the damage and within three months, “Tom” was back in the top five for the very keyword phrase that he desired. Although it’s tempting to take the short cut, it’s rarely worth it in the long run.

If you are suffering the consequences of Black Hat SEO, or are looking for a White Hat SEO Firm, call Mannix Marketing! We assure all our clients that the search engine optimization elements that we apply to your website will not harm your efforts to increase your online visibility.

That is what the two authors of Whoogles have encountered. They started compiling screenshots of Google search suggestions as of January 2010, and not even a year later they have a few thousand compiled in both blog and book. And this is not their main focus, either – they are not internet gurus or social media pros nor do they work in search engine optimization – most of these  Google searches were simply found by chance, while doing research for their day jobs. It started when Tess Hottenroth was searching for an article about why tax day was on April 15, and “why is t…” came up with the a Google suggestion as appalling as it was surprising and laughable.

Definitely a confused moment, to say the least.

But from that first exposure, Tess Hotttenroth and Kendall Almerico have been keeping track of these Google suggestions. They bring a smile to your face, these ridiculous ‘Whoogles’ as Tess and Kendall have dubbed them, as in, “Who would Google that?” Typing in a serious query, people are likely to get something out of the blue – one of the suggestions for “Can I get…” has been “Can I get herpes from my cat?”

It says something about how far the internet has come that people are asking Google questions they would not rightly ask their mother, that in some ways the internet is becoming a more intimate compatriot and partner in crime than even your best college buddy. ‘Google’ is a verb in the dictionary now.

People have searched in Google if Google can hear them. Yes, really. “Google is a great thing,” the authors say, “It has brought knowledge to the masses at their fingertips. But it has also brought stupidity to the forefront.” A double edged sword, indeed – but true enough, “you can’t make up things this funny.”

So keep an eye out yourself for these Whoogles for a good laugh, or head over to their blog or check out their book for even more. And in closing – Kendall and Tess have said that they “expect a Christmas gift from Google for driving more traffic to them.” Well, good luck, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa, whatever you may celebrate, bah humbug and keep everyone in stitches with these Whoogles – I know I will still be keeping tabs.

• Logo – Make sure your logo is professionally designed and utilized throughout your marketing materials. Typically on a website, the logo is located in the upper left hand corner of EVERY page. Additionally, make sure to link your logo back to the home page of your website. This is standard practice.

• Font – Make sure your font is consistent throughout the website. Utilizing a bold tag or an italic tag is acceptable, but spattering the website with different fonts or vastly different sizes is not recommended. Your page design actually begins with the font you choose. Choose a professional font that is simple, readable and browser safe. Serif fonts (ie: Times New Roman Book Antiqua) are the best for large quantities of text as they are the easiest to read. Sans Serif fonts (ie: Arial, Helvetica and Verdana) are good for headlines and commonly used for entire websites. A very common code to ensure that a searcher will see your text with the font you intend is: <font face=Georgia, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica>. This says that if you have Georgia, you will see Georgia. If you don’t, you will see Verdana. If you don’t have either, you will see Arial, etc.In regards to font size, we recommend not going any smaller than 10 points for your body text and using 12 point or bigger for your headlines.

• Design – Consistent site design goes a long way toward making your site pleasing and usable. Be sure to keep your design consistent throughout the pages of the site. If you vary your design throughout sections of the site, make sure to keep it logical. For example, I work with a Nanny Agency that services several states. The design of the site is completely the same except for the color. We designated different colors for different states. Other than that, the logo is the same, the style is the same, which makes it very clear that this is the same company.

• Bottom Text Navigation – Bottom text navigation is essential for every website. Make sure that your main pages are listed clearly, in text at the bottom of every page. Navigation is the tool that enables searchers and search engines to find the different pages within your site. Try to make the “path” that you want your searchers to follow as easy and clear as possible. We don’t want anybody getting frustrated because they can’t find what they are looking for.

• Contact Info – Contact information is expected at the bottom of each page, underneath your footer. Included should be your Company Name, Address, Phone Number, Fax, and Email. An optional addition could be Hours of Operation.

If these elements are not in place when you begin a SEO Campaign, it will be the first thing your Specialist will address. Once the website basics are in place, we can move onto basic SEO elements. First things first!

• The earlier you start the better prepared you will be if other things pop up (which they inevitably do)
• You may find that some of your ideas may take time to come together (Do you have some research to do? Do you need other people to make things happen? How much time will they need to get their part done?)
• If you are optimizing for new products or services, it will take some time for your efforts to show up in the search engines
• If there are changes to your website or marketing message you’ll probably want to test a thing or two to make sure you are getting the most out of your efforts (and test it before the holiday rush of visitors hits your site)

Let’s take a look at each one of these points in a bit more detail.

Things Pop Up
When was the last time your business ran as smooth as you planned for an entire month, let alone an entire year? Probably never. Unexpected things happen that take up your valuable time – the time you may be planning on working on the holiday season. If you are able to map out a plan of attack for your holiday season right now, you will be more likely to stick by it and be able to complete it on time.

Most Online Initiative Take Some Time To Come Together
Some initiatives require other resources like designers and copywriters. The earlier they are involved the more apt they are to meet your deadlines. A PPC campaign is often a powerful revenue driver around the holiday season. And sure, you can pull one together over coffee one afternoon in late November. But to really get the most out of your investment you should start early so you can test different keywords, different ads and different landing pages. That way once the holiday traffic is searching for your product or service you are ready to take advantage of it.

Jumping Up The Search Engines Doesn’t Happen Overnight
As we all know, it takes time for solid SEO efforts to show results in the search engines. So if you start now, you may just be #1 for the terms you want by the time we’re all holiday shopping. But if you start in November there is virtually no shot at that.

It’s Better To Test With A Smaller Sample Size
If you’re testing a new marketing message with an email campaign and / or your website, why wait until the bulk of your customers are coming to buy your product to test it? It make sense to test it out when the stakes are not as high. Test a few landing page designs on a small sample (maybe only part of an email list, maybe a month when traffic to your site isn’t that high). That way you have the kinks out when it’s time for the holiday rush.

Are you still under the impression that it’s too earlier to start thinking about Christmas 2010? Or are you all ready starting to plan for the 2011 season? Let us know your thoughts.

Online reviews can come from a host of sources – if you have a business and you aren’t checking for these reviews onine periodically, you should be!  The stats for online reviews are impressive: 86% of consumers read them before making purchasing decisions, making reputation management a must for businesses of all sizes. With the introduction of travel review sites such as TripAdvisor, regional dining reviews , potential customers and clients are savvy. Why risk going out for an expensive dinner, stay at a hotel or resort, or do some retail shopping without first seeing what others have to say? Not surprisingly, online reviews have become an integral part of any successful SEO and SMO campaign. 

Online reviews can boost your reputation and bring new customers to your business. But just like other promotional online environments, a review site can be viral, meaning (in the internet world) it can gain popularity and grow at an exponential rate, seemingly taking on a life of its own.  Don’t miss out on this opportunity for free exposure and word-of-mouth advertising, and do your best to ensure it’s all good!

How to Earn Positive Reviews

As in many other areas of sales, the best way is simply to ask for the business! Reputation management begins with developing a positive client base, so you can begin with your most trusted long-time customers or clients, people who know you and your business and have continued to patronize you. You can simply ask them to review you business and the quality of your services, providing them with a few possible locations where they can do so.  Tell them what you are trying to do and simply ask them to be honest in their assessment.  There are a host of locations where your customers can post their comments, including Yahoo Local, Insider Pages, City Search, and Ratingz.net.

A Word About Negative Reviews:

It happens. It may be out of the blue, or come from someone you’ve been expecting to hear from! Either way, negative reviews can be personally upsetting and damaging to your business. The best way to avoid these is, of course, to provide the very best in customer service that you can! If you have 30 or 75 or 150 great reviews and one bad one, most reasonable people will avoid giving it more credence than it may deserve. If there is a recurring theme in the complaints, then it’s probably something you need to look into and treat it as a learning experience. If it does happen to you, however, remember that most resasonable people understand that these things do happen, so don’t over-think it, and by all means avoid getting into a discussion or argument about it online!

Why is reputation management important?

Remember when you were a kid and you played that game where everyone sat in a circle and whispered something into the next person’s ear - by the time it went around the circle it was usually a totally different version. You can avoid that scenario by monitoring your reviews, maintaining positive communication and exemplary customer service, and making sure your business gets the positive attention it deserves.

The good news is that the online review environment is extensive, open to everyone, and FREE! Need help with your online reputation management? Call Mannix Marketing, Inc.!

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now:

PDFs can and should be optimized for search engines.

Search engines can read PDFs, assuming the text is not an image. So if they are optimized properly, the PDFs on your site can offer a new avenue to gain extra traffic from.

So what optimization tactics should you perform on your PDFs? Here are a few of the main ones:

• Whenever possible, optimize the text of the PDF just as you would any page of your site.
• Be sure to fill out the Document Properties: Title, Author, Subject and Keyword. Treat the Title field like the page title, the Subject field like the meta description and the Keyword field like the meta keyword field.
• Optimize the file name.
• Keep total file size down as low as possible. As with any page on your site, the larger the file size the slower it loads. This starts with any images you include with the original file, and continues through to when you convert the file to a PDF.
• When converting a file to a PDF, be sure to use a program that does not make it one image. For this, programs like Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF Professional and Bullzip work well. Photoshop and Illustrator do not.
• Link to the PDF. Make sure the search engines can find it. Use quality anchor text as link when possible.
• Link out from the PDF. Give the search engines a path out of the PDFs to continue to the rest of your site.
• Express the PDF file structure in tags.
• Optimize PDF for fast view web.

So the next time you’re looking for something that might give your website a boost in the search engines, take a look at your PDFs. It may be a hidden opportunity for you to increase traffic to your site.

Have you optimized PDFs and seen success? Still have questions about this topic? Comment and let us know.

13. Don’t worry too much about duplicate content.
(Luisella Mazza, Google)

This stopped me in my tracks because as an SEO Strategist, one of the top things we work with clients on is to not only develop content, but to develop unique, high quality content. In doing so we ensure the site of not being hit with the dreaded label of having duplicate content, therefore causing the pages or entire site being ranked low, or worse yet, not being indexed at all. (read some of our previous post on the topic of duplicate content)

So have things changed in Searchland? Maybe. Are we being paranoid? Possibly a tad. Google even says within its guidelines that duplicate content by itself is not grounds for action on a website. In fact, their guidelines read:

‘Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.’

I would say most websites out there are above board and not trying to manipulate any system. So should we really not be worried about duplicate content issues? I say we absolutely need to keep the issue of duplicate content in mind when developing site content. If we don’t, we may, even if the chance is ever so slightly, end up kicked out of search engines if they interpret the content as trying to be deceptive. How do we know how they are going to interpret content on a site? What I think is fresh and new copy may be interpreted by a search engine as duplicate content for reasons I might not even know about.

When it comes to duplicate content, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And remember that there is an added advantage of attacking duplicate content – when you develop or rewrite content to be unique, you are erasing the duplicate content possibility, as well as adding unique and hopefully high quality content to your site for visitors. A win – win.

Have you run into any duplicate content issues with your website? Let us know how you were able to remedy the situation.

What is LinkedIn?
Similar to other social media sites, like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, LinkedIn is an online community where you and other users can interact, post updates, add photos and display information about the most important product…YOU.

LinkedIn is different from most other popular social media sites because it is geared toward business professionals. Rather than making ‘friends’ with other users you make valuable ‘connections’ on LinkedIn. Think of it as a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, online networking mixer. With the economy and job openings seemingly going by the wayside, it’s time to start getting creative and being proactive about your most marketable asset: yourself. LinkedIn allows you to put your best foot forward and begin building your new image.

How Do I Build My LinkedIn Network?
You can build your online network by making connections with other business professionals you know or have worked with in the past. These can include college friends, professors, current coworkers, past coworkers, club/group/chamber associations, and the list goes on.

First, begin by connecting with your colleagues at your current place of employment. Next, input your email contacts and connect with your entire list within seconds! If you do attend local business mixers, whether through local Chambers of Commerce, or attend niche trade shows, make sure to collect those business cards and check to see if your peers have accounts. Again, if they don’t – send invites to these new friends asking them to create an account and link to you.

With over 35 million business professionals currently using LinkedIn, you can connect and network with like minded business people on both a local and national front or promote your business services shamelessly to your connections! Build your sphere of influence and open up your network tenfold through this ‘virtual handshake’.

What If I’m Currently Unemployed?
If you are one of the many who may be on the look out for a new opportunity, don’t fret – consider your former employers. LinkedIn allows you to find connections you may have from companies where you have worked in the past. Where did you go to school? Where did you learn your craft? Where did you study? You can find people from your past educational institutions or organizations and connect. Simply put in the name of your past businesses/education organizations, and LinkedIn will do the work for you. You might be surprised at who you find and connect with!

Once you have a connection bank, the next step would be to browse your connections’ connections…do you know these people? If so, send them an invite to connect with you. You will be on your merry networking way in no time!

How Can I Personally Benefit From LinkedIn?
Get seen, be heard and connect! There are many benefits of using LinkedIn, whether you want to promote a positive image of yourself online, network with others, stay in touch with business connections, monitor group updates and/or stay up to date on industry news through RSS feeds. In short, LinkedIn provides an open platform for self promotion and business networking, which often go hand in hand.

Looking for a job? In today’s world, submitting a resume may not be enough to land you that dream career that you’ve been striving for. Competition has ramped up, and employers are looking for those who enjoy interacting and engaging within their respective niche. Most interviewers will ‘Google’ your name to see what information comes up, trying to learn more about you. Try ‘Googling’ your name, and you will see that your LinkedIn profile may pop up above other listings for you. If you don’t have an account yet, ‘Google’ one of our names, either Sarah Lamansky or Destiny Malone (go ahead, try it), and scroll down. Google now offers direct links into social networking platforms (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn). Traditionally, Google only allowed 10 links on the results page…now the 11th is given to these privileged social networking platforms…showcasing YOU.

Your LinkedIn profile is almost like an online resume that people can view at any given time – an open showcase of everything you have to offer. So make the most of it! Beef up your profile with your professional skills, job experience, credentials, you name it. References are even available upon request; meaning, you can request recommendations from your connections. Anyone viewing your profile can then see and read all the recommendations you’ve received, and it adds to your credibility and positive image as a business professional.

How Can My Business Benefit?
You can use LinkedIn to monitor your competitors and keep an eye on other big players in your niche industry. You may find new business ventures, leads or skill sets, and your LinkedIn profile may be priceless for sealing the deal with a potential client or finding that new business opportunity. You can even use LinkedIn to find or pre-screen potential employees.

Google likes LinkedIn! Many search engines consider LinkedIn.com a reputable site and give more weight to those links. Try ‘Googling’ our company’s name, Mannix Marketing, and you’ll likely find our LinkedIn company profile among the first page results. Also, any links you post on LinkedIn to your website will aide in boosting your site’s search engine rankings as well.

Take note that a LinkedIn company profile differs from an individual LinkedIn account. Employees of your company who have individual accounts can actually help build out this company profile, where you can add a company description, links, photo, etc. This provides a sort of mini-website showcasing all your company has to offer and can be accessed from all of your employees’ individual accounts. In this Internet Age, the more information available online that is controlled by YOU, the better.

How Do I Get Noticed On LinkedIn?
Be active! Change your status daily. Make regular profile updates. Comment on your connections’ statuses. Become an expert in the ‘Answers’/’Questions’ section. Create a poll. Add applications to your profile. Start discussions with peers within your selected groups (you can search groups related to your profession, or browse through a list of groups that LinkedIn suggests for you based upon past/present professional expertise). Staying active on LinkedIn is the key to standing out among the other millions of professionals who utilize this networking super giant.

*This article will be featured in the Glens Falls Business Journal in the July issue

Here is the illustration they gave:
Old URL

New URL

No doubt, this will also help your public profile get found in the search engines because, as you know, SEO is all about targeting keywords!

But Wait… That’s Not All!

You can also reserve custom usernames for your Facebook PAGES. This is particularly useful for businesses on Facebook. You can then print this custom (easy-to-remember) url on your business cards, website, marketing materials, you name it. PLUS it will help your page get found more easily in the search engines by choosing relevant keywords for your Facebook username.

When Is This Happening?

Early bird gets the worm, so make sure you reserve your Facebook username as soon as you can! They are making this available at 12:01 am EDT on Saturday, June 13, 2009.

Things To Keep In Mind…

• Usernames are PERMANENT and cannot be changed (so double check your spelling)
• You can use letters, numbers and a period to create your custom Facebook username
• If you want to reserve a popular Facebook username (ie. John.Smith), reserve early!
• Trademarks and Copyrights can be protected or reported
• You must be an administrator and have over 1,000 fans of your Facebook page in order to reserve a username

Get More Info On Facebook Usernames

• Facebook Blog Announces Usernames Coming – http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130
• Facebook Blog Elaborates On Usernames For Pages – http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91106469821&ref=blog
• WHERE TO RESERVE YOUR FACEBOOK USERNAME! http://www.facebook.com/username

Don’t have a Facebook page? We can help set one up for you! Give Sarah Lamansky a call to discuss the details: Toll Free – (888) 395-9035