SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

I have been inundated with communities over the last couple years and recently it has been almost the only thing I am working on lately. I have learned so much about managing volunteer groups, creating an offline community of web geeks called “San Francisco Geek Dinners,” and in consulting roles.

There are many methodologies that I have learned over the past couple years and I am even learning all different forms daily by being thrown into it. What I find extremely intriguing is how there is no two communities or groups that function in the exact same way. This can take form in the shape of an online community that deals with technology or even travel, a group of people to manage within an organization, or a community of individuals in the offline sense, like a meetup.

So, the question remains, how do you deal with this? I truly don’t have the smoking gun nor will this article answer this all for you. Rather, I think this will get you on the path of thinking about how your unique community needs to be managed and/or gain traction. All communities have a set of common practices that are apparent within them.

Define a purpose and show you care about the community

Define the reason that the community exists and show that you really care about the community. Put some effort into this by putting a lot of grass roots effort into the planning and growth of the community. This gives the members and users of the community the sense that you are vested in the welfare of the community, which you truly are. Moving forward, the next steps are to engage community members and start having conversations with them, once again, both online and offline. Make members or volunteers feel like they have an opportunity to be involved in the overall success of an online community or organization. An example of this is as simple as providing a feedback link on your website that allows members/users to provide feedback on features, updates, or bugs that they run into. Other things that you can do is send out polls or surveys on user experience or features.

Things that I have done in the past is create user polls about new interfaces or more recent internal teams for naming conventions. Within the SEO community I have seen a number of people sending out polls/surveys about details for events as well.

Building momentum and keeping it going

Momentum is also a huge factor and keeping that momentum going is very hard to do, but once you have it, do not lose it! If you get some steam behind the community or group members, there is a great chance they will ride that momentum and want to get more involved. This is easier said than done though, as I am sure you can attest to if you have run or built a community.

Creating events and meetups for your online community is a great way to get the members or users together and even invite others to the event, thus creating Customer Evangelists for your community. Something else that you can do to create momentum is to create participation and conversations, which I will get to in a second.

On the offline community side, I have to admit, I had some great momentum with the first two dinners for San Francisco Geek Dinners. But, because I have not been able to stick with it but hope I can re-energize the momentum with the group. Granted, this is not an online community that I am working on, but, it shows that if you miss a beat with a community, you can instantly lose momentum and traction.

Creating Participation and Conversations

Just like I mentioned above throwing events is a great way to build momentum, but also a great way to start getting people involved in becoming an Evangelist for you. Members, will typically bring others along and hopefully get them involved in the community as well.

Also, give people the opportunity to volunteer and get their hands on something that they will make them feel like they are contributing. This can be as small as making recommendations or bring community involvement into the overall decision making process. Create a location for users to get together and discuss issues they are facing, let them talk it out, moderate it a bit, and you have create a think tank of your own for your community.

While building an online community, you want to ensure that the participation is staying put on your domain. Polls, survey’s, events, etc. are a great way of getting the community together. Ensure that your online community has a lot of sticky features that make it easy for people to be a Customer Evangelist of your online community. Do this by giving users all the “social/viral” features that they can use to pass things on to friends, collegues and family. Many community members want to be the first in on the news, to report it, get in touch with people, etc. From an Online Reputation Management standpoint, if you give users the opportunity to talk to you or provide feedback, it will prevent them from creating flame posts or sites about your community or brand.

Bottom line, Encourage the online community to be just that, an online community that allows people to participate and have conversations with each other.

Incentivise the community

Finally, you can create participation channels, but sometimes we all need or want an incentive to make things happen. They also give people the feeling of being rewarded, and we all enjoy knowing that we are appreciated for the hard work that we do.

In an offline community, ask the members if someone wants to run the event/meetup and I can guarantee you that there will be someone that is interested in stepping up. Empowering someone to step up and leave his/her mark on the group can be priceless. Create contests that give users/members a chance to win prizes. An example of this can be creating a twitter account for your community and asking everyone to follow you and that the 100th, 200th, etc. will win a free iPod Touch, or something along those lines.

Where do we go from here?

I think it is very apparent and we all know that we have already moved into an era of the online culture. But, that does not mean that we cannot build or leverage an offline community to help the online community or vice versa. Yes, that sounds a bit confusing, but there are commonalities between the two that can be important in building your online community like creating conversation, participation, etc. Overall, you want the community to be sticky and get members and users to become Customer Evangelists for your community.

Keyword research is the base for any good SEO campaign and a large amount of your success will be truly dependent on how well you did your keyword research. Of course, this will be built into your overall SEO Strategy, but it should be the very *FIRST* item on your SEO to-do list.

When you start you really want to think about your industry and use a top down approach to the seo keyword research and development. What I mean by that is, start by understanding the audience that you are marketing to. This is a very basic marketing principal and quite frankly the most important thing to understand within Internet Marketing. Once you understand the audience that you a speaking to, you will have established what types of keywords and key-phrases they are searching for on a daily basis.

Now that you have established the audience that you will be marketing to, it is time to starting laying this out and putting it into your overall SEO Strategy. Since this is the base for your entire SEO Strategy and/or campaign, having these keywords and phrases handy will help you later with items like Link Architecture. Something I like to do is get the keywords layed out on either a whiteboard or something of that nature.

Moving forward, you want to do some competitve analysis with the competitors and other industry leaders for the industry, community, etc. This will help you when you start getting into the real detailed data mining and using Excel or an application to maintain this data. On a side note, you not only want to make sure you note down the keywords, but, keep score of what company it is for later use, it can help you in your Link Building efforts. Finally, doing this analysis can also lead you to new and creative discoveries for keyword research.

Figure 1.1 - Keyword Research Lifecycle:

If you are keeping score at home, we have now plowed through the start of gathering the main 10-15 keywords to target for your site. We’ve done this by understanding our audience, the main industry terms and a doing a bit of competitive analysis. The next step is finding a keyword research tool that you like and enjoy working with.

Keyword research tools all have different features and benefits. Some are free, some are expensive and some are bundled. I personally love doing some data mining and using different sources. Everyone has their own needs and wants though, so I would suggest finding methods that make your life easier or that you enjoy. That being said, here is what I have been using lately:

Free Wordtracker Tool: I sometimes visit this page just to do some quick sanity tests on keywords that I am interested in. When reviewing pages, i sometimes pull this up to look at the product/services that are on the page.

SEO Book Keyword Tool: So far, this has been the best tool that I have used lately. Aaron Wall has done an excellent job with this. Gathers a daily estimate for keywords and/or phrases based on a search term. I love that it has an aggregated listing of all the data I need. Finally, I love that I can export to CSV and import into excel! (P.S. Great job Aaron! As always!)

Y! Search Marketing and Google Adwords: I always feel that PPC tied into your SEO campaigns. It gives you the opportunity to test/measure/adjust and so on. With that, I can get a little bit of data to use in the keyword research process.

To be honest, lately, I have been solely reliant on SEO Book’s tool. Just perfect for all of my needs at the moment.

Next thing you need to do is do is run a query on your top 5-10 keywords that you have identified. Prior to doing all these searches though, you need somewhere to store all this information, as mentioned earlier, using Excel is a great way to do this. Truthfully, you need to find what works for you (and possibly, your organization).

Based on your main keyword search you should be able to gather a pretty healthy (read as: LONG) list of your main and long tail keywords, seperated out somehow. If you are using a keyword research tool that exports this data for you, it should be a piece of cake! At this point, you will just need to “massage the data” to your liking.

Now that you have this nice healthy long list of keywords, you have an insight into some importance of each keyword or phrase. You can organize this to your liking and will definitely assist you moving forward while doing things like Copywriting and Link Building.

You can use this data as a basis for your overall SEO Strategy and campaign and build in overall statistics as well. (which could make for a very LARGE Excel sheet!) You can then use these stats to build charts, graphs, etc. of which can be used in presentations for upper management, executives, and/or consulting clients.

SEO Keyword Research is a necessity! Contact me about my SEO Consulting Services and get started with your SEO Strategy today!

Being an SEO Evangelist within an organization requires lot of energy, a lot of knowledge, thick skin, and a lot of relationships. Success is hard to come by and will require a lot of hard work, but it is definitely attainable. I would almost say that this does not apply to just SEO, but to all programs launched within an organization. Along with all that being an evangelist for the entire industry requires the same amount of tenacity.

I have spent a lot of time doing this through consulting efforts by convincing SMB’s to embrace the web and most importantly (at least to me of course!) adopting SEO. Each and every time was a struggle and required hard work, but was *always* worth the time spent.

As I mentioned, getting organizations to adopt SEO when they (a) have never heard of it, (b) don’t believe it is “really that important right now” (typically I’ve heard this from startups), or (c) still believe SEO is spamming. That all being said, here is my “guide” to the art of SEO Evangelism.

Knowledge of SEO

I start with knowledge, because it is extremely important to bring that into your conversations. Your knowledge and experience is crucial to your successes. Companies want proven success and someone that has the ability to deliver. This is especially true in the consulting world, as organizations want that track record of successful projects. In-house organizations are looking for a track record of successful performance.

Be sure that you have done your research on an industry, a skill and/or an organization. Have an understanding for what the company is doing for SEO. Put together questions that you feel people should be asking. Make sure that you have the skill set to do the research, put together the strategy, and execute the plan.

You also bring that knowledge to the table through the experiences that you have been through. Bringing only theories and ideas to the table will leave you in a weak position. So, that means that you want to speak in a strong tone and voice about your experiences. Using terms like “I think” or “i guess” or definite no-no’s. In previous consulting roles I have started conversations by saying, “My experience…” or “Previously…”, so that you are talking in terms of experiences. Now remember, you still need to be able to deliver, but I am assuming you already have that ability.

Knowledge is an important piece of the salesmanship of your SEO Evangelism. Use your knowledge and experiences to your advantage and make sure that people know of your skills.

Energy & Thick Skin

Energy and thick skin go hand-in-hand because I compare traits of the evangelist role similar to a telemarketer. Have an understanding that people are going to do and say a number of things that will upset you. They will mock you, assume they have more knowledge, challenge you, etc. Don’t let this get you down at all, keep your energy level high and keep going at it. NEVER get into a pissing match with someone about how important SEO is.

That all being said, keep that intense energy level and constantly talk about SEO in meetings, in passing, at lunches, and anywhere else you can think of. SEO should be mentioned in almost every conversation you have. Start asking product teams if they are building SEO into their product lifecycle? How is marketing integrating SEO into campaigns? Show everyone that you are talking to that you care about their job more than your own and that you are truly vested in their success.

Now, remember those people that did not want anything to do with SEO? Drop hints here and there, provide statistics and results, show case studies, etc. The more data that you bring to the table and the more fact finding you do will start to sell them, just based on performance and metrics. Keep going at it and let the data win them over!

Relationships within the organization

The most important piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, is the relationships you build. I feel this way about any new program that you launch. As always I feel it is especially important with SEO, because it is so hard to sell within an organization, to startups and getting buy in from individuals.

Start developing casual relationships with everyone you meet. Keep in touch with the people you meet and continue to have conversations. Sometimes conversations will drift towards the interest (or sometimes lack there of) of SEO. Ensure that you are developing contacts that are spread out throughout the entire organization, in product, marketing and technology. You are looking to create evangelists within each organizational unit in the company that will then begin take SEO under their wings as well

Creating relationships and empowering peers within these cross-functional areas will spread the word of SEO to their teams. This is very important because the knowledge you gain is not something that you can get by digging through analytics data. They can provide insight into their organizations key strategies, thoughts and challenges. The relationships that you build are crucial for that alone!

Putting it all together!

All of this is to your advantage because you can now start to build your SEO Strategy for the business needs and get buy in from executives about incorporating SEO into the product and marketing lifecycle and strategy. You can also find yourself with UX teams that are excited to fit keywords and phrases into content and create link architecture while building out a sites information architecture. Finally, technology will have no problem helping to ensure the meta data and tags on the page fit into the SEO strategy.

The cycle continues…

You will be consistently selling, re-selling, evangelizing, re-evangelizing, and so on and so forth. It will be a constant that you will always see within organizations as they change, adapt and bring in new people. The key is to maintain that same level of energy and continue to build those relationships!

Related Articles:

Web Standards based design and SEO - Win technology teams over by showing them you care about Web Standards
Website Link Architecture - Empower UX to tie this into Information Architecture
Dominate Search Engine Results Pages - Show executives how to protect your Brand’s online reputation

Tonight I updated Wordpress from Wordpress 2.0.2 to WordPress 2.5 and ran into some issues with permanlinks. Turns out that Yahoo! Web Hosting does not allow you to do Permalinks the standard way with WordPress and you have to use the Yahoo! Plugin for this.

Essentially what happened was that standard permalinks in WordPress go 404 and Yahoo! Permalinks Plugin continuously re-directs with the following error “The page isn’t redirecting properly.”

So, here is what I did to get Permalinks working:

1. Active the Yahoo! Permalink Plugin

2. Download the Disable Canonical Redirects Plugin. (which i probably should have had installed a while ago)

3. Upload the file to your wp-content/plugins folder

4. Activate the Plugin from your Plugins Menu

5. Customize your Permalinks!

Done, done and done! All my permalinks issues were resolved! Just a reminder, this is a Yahoo! Web Hosting issue and not a WordPress 2.5 issue.

Part of any link building campaign should always include the internal Link Architecture that you have within your domain and off the domain for link building activities. I tend to use the term Link Architecture because it is similar to the Information Architecture (I.A.) that is used within your site. The Link Architecture will give you a naming convention for text links and image alt text used for links on your domain or for any other link building.

To preface, I would say that it is important to have some sort of I.A. for your site prior to building out your pages. This can be done quickly by writing the information down on notecard(s). That being said, I would always recommend to create a formal I.A. and Link Architecture documentation. The benefit of creating formalized documentation is that you can pass it around within your organization to creative and development teams or an agency that could quite possibly be working with your organization.

Documenting your Link Architecture and link text and/or image ALT text will provide a frame of reference.

When a search engine crawls a web page it associates the link text to the page it is linking to, which then associates link value to your page. An example of this is using the link text “web design” that points to “web-design-services.php.” Doing so will tell a search engine that the page you are going to is specifically about “Web Design.” These are the types of associations that should be created, documented and implemented for any and all link building in order to get the most link value possible for the associated keywords or key terms.

The naming convention used also applies to the image ALT text that are linked as well. All images that are linked should contain the contextual text within the ALT tag. For example, if you have an image that has a link pointing to a developer referral program page, the image ALT text should be example that, “Developer Referral Program.”

Something to look out for is using the terms “click here” and “this” for link text, which is a bad naming convention. Using this type of link text will not provide any context to the user and also to search engines, and along with that, it does not offer any link value to your domain.

The crucial thing to remember is that associating keywords to the link text when performing any link building or submitting to directories will pass the link popularity and PageRank value to the keyword you have associated to a web page. This in turn, makes your pages more relevant to search engines and will most definitely increase your rankings.

Related Article(s):
Sculpting PageRank using rel=”nofollow” for your internal Link Architecture

Over the past week I have seen two of the most horrific examples of why research is so important. It is what we base our decision making on in our work lives, it is how we evangelize our expertise on to others, etc. Doing the right amount of research sets you up for success.

Here are some examples of how little to no research and/or bad research can leave you in a very sticky situation.

Speaking at a conference:
At the SXSW “Social Media Metrics” panel, there were 5 so called industry experts attempting to speak to this. The problem was 30 minutes into the panel, all that was talked about was CXO level buy in without providing any concrete examples or case studies about how to do so. Social Media properties like Twitter, Digg, etc. were brought up, and the panel had nothing to talk about. Also, questions were brought up in regards to “customer sentiment” and one panelist mentioned that there was no way to do any measurement on this, when there are a multitude.

The Panel really had no industry expertise. One panelist barely signed up for any social media properties, and other panelists, didn’t even have a web presence for their own name. Finally, when they were asked questions, they had no answers.
This was a horrific example of why not doing any research, providing any research or even being prepared for your audience can leave you in a very awkward situation. It makes you look like a completely unprepared, unprofessional and also devalues your professional expertise.

Writing Articles and Blog Posts:
On Search Engine Land, Shari Thurow wrote You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice (which I have nofollow’ed). She talks about how SEO’s are using this as a tool to build one thing for users and another for engines, similar to that of cloaking/IP Delivery.

Where did Shari make the mistake? Well, she failed to do the proper research on whether rel=”nofollow” was a form of cloaking or if it was just used to sculpt page rank. Also, she talks about the usage of “nofollow” as fake information architecture too, which since that seemed to be her focus, would have been a better title for the post.

There was a lot of backlash within the SEO world via twitter posts, comments, blog posts, etc. Shari derived a conclusion without proper research and therefore was made to not only look bad, but if writing for a major brand cause a lot of harm to the brand as well.

Research within the Community:

This is a very important part of being engaged in a community and not having your research can really hurt you personal/professional and even corporate brand. Things like Q&A Sessions, informal meetups, blog comments, and interviews can reflect you negatively, if you are not prepared.

An example of this was on Sunday at SXSW, there was a barrage on my twitter feed of people criticizing Mark Zuckerberg about his interview. You can also see this in multiple blog comments, informal meetups, conferences, etc.

Final Thoughts:
Being prepared and knowing your industry is very important when committing to any of the above items and will reflect on you, remember that! Be prepared and do your research, this will extremely benefit you and your brand.

Over the years I’ve been practicing a lot of different techniques with my internal link architecture. One of the things that I have been doing more and more of is evaluating when to use the rel=”nofollow” tag on the internal links.

Why is this important?
Well, in order to make the content within your site more relevant, you need to tell the search engine what is and is not relevant. Using rel=”nofollow” within your internal link architecture is a great way identify links that you do not want ranked well within the SERPs.

For example, contact us pages, FAQ pages, help pages, etc. are really not pages that most people want to be ranking well. By using rel=”nofollow” on those links, you are telling the search algorithm not to pass any link juice or PageRank (google specific) to the linked page.

How do you do this?
Start by establishing a listing of the types of pages that I talk about above. Next, you are going to want to do a site wide update of your links. For example, its as simple as updating your markup to the following:

Now that you have all the major ones out of the way, I recommend taking a few minutes to analyze your links on a page by page basis to see where you want to distribute the link value within your web site.

That’s all!

It is a fairly simple process, but one that I find especially crucial when I start looking at the Information Architecture and Link Architecture of any website.

Related Articles:
Website Link Architecture for link text and Image ALT text

During my daily web research I tend to try to come across some interesting sources to get some good social media links to control my name searches in the SERPs.
That being said, we all know about the main players in the game like Digg, Flickr, MySpace, etc. But, sometimes, you can come across a good personalized wiki or social media site that would create a profile for yourself. Well, that is exactly what I found the other day.

Elitizmr is a wiki for Web 2.0 and Internet Entrepreneurs, powered by MediaWiki. Now, you wouldn’t really be able to do anything with this for a company (unless its your name, e.g. Bruce Clay), but it works great for a personal brand. Actually, I was quite surprised at how quickly this showed up for my personal search term (”tony adam”).

Within almost 2-3 days the Tony Adam Elitizmr entry was already ranking for my personalized search query. I was so excited about this because I’ve been trying to push down all the other entries (e.g. links to Tony Adam the soccer player on you tube, etc.).

This last week has had some interesting events occur over the big revolt against Digg. Now, big news sites like Wired, NY Times, etc. have posted stories, many people are talking about it on twitter, etc. The question is whether or not these constant issues being brought to the forefront are going to effect the Digg site and brand in a negative way, especially in a time when it seems Digg is entertaining a buyout opportunity.
Over the past month I have seen this topic thrown around in person, via twitter and now a live stream on Ustream - The Drill Down (brought to you by Andrew Sorcini, Muhammad Saleem and Reg Saddler). The Ustream podcast is now available for download, RevoltNation, Part 2: Jay and Kevin Respond, this was basically the tempers of top Digg users flaring and demanding some answers. Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson graciously appeared on the show to talk about all of hte issues at hand, including rumors of an “auto-bury”, the banning of digg users, the un-responsiveness and finally, the ever-infamous algorithm change. (For more on the algorithm change, see Kevin Rose’s post: Digg: New Algorithm Changes)
Now, I am not a top Digg user or a power user even for that matter but I still find this debate very interesting, because I have always loved using Digg. But, I have been finding certain things really pestering me lately. I’ve noticed that the user base is becoming almost like that of Slashdot, very quick to judge and with only one mindset. Secondly, the algo changes seemed a bit unnecessary, even with those using Digg as a marketing and SEO tool. Jay did mention that the algorithm usually takes a few days to finally work itself out, but, making that large a change is just too much too soon. I could understand something like 50-60 diggs to make the home page, and then pushing it to 80 over time and then finding the right balance. The overall experience to me now seems like it is only a select few posts that go hot and the rest stay in upcoming, which is not really the main place people look for stories. Is it just me or does that mean relevance is lost?

What I found interested in this whole situation is that Jay Adelson said to Wired Magazine:

“Let’s be realistic about what happened yesterday,” Adelson says. “It wasn’t a revolt. To me, a revolt is when a statistically significant group of people cause a disruption. These guys are significant to me personally, but this wasn’t a revolt. I hope that the next time a small group of users voice their concerns, it’s not represented as a ‘mass movement’ or a ‘revolt.’”

When a large group of your top users stand up and say, “We are unhappy”…that is a revolt. Jay should have understood that from the vibe of the room. Granted, I think that everyone was happy that Jay and Kevin went on the show to talk about the situation, which was the stand up thing to do. I think they recognized how severe the situation could have gotten and they decided to attempt to mitigate that risk. (See Full Wired Post: Digg CEO Jay Adelson’s Take on the So-Called “Revolt”)

Digg has seen its Alexa ranking drop to the mid-hundreds (Digg ranks 144 currently according to Alexa) from being in the top 100 previously.

Here are some great reads about the recent Digg News:
Digg Causes ED Among Social Marketers; Will it Now Go Limp Itself? - Andy Beal
Near-Revolt on Digg Underscores Site’s Dependence on Its Users - Wired
Top Digg Users Revolt Against Algorithm Change on Site - NY Times

What do you think this will do to the Digg community? Will this effect buyout opportunities negatively? Or, does the old Hollywood saying of “Any buzz is good buzz” apply?

According to the Nielsen online reports it seems like Microsoft has increased its search market share from 12% to 13.8% in December from the previous month. (See MarketWatch Article) All things considered it seem that Microsoft has picked up close to 2% of the search market, a big gain for the company. So, if we can trust the Nielsen online ratings, what has attributed to the gain?

Now, a lot of people are talking about Google losing “search share”…but I really want to focus on Microsoft. More specifically, I want to examine the current promotional aspect of Microsoft’s search space. They have been trying to push the Live Search Club to searchers to give away prizes like t-shirts, etc. Something that I found interesting about this, was trying to create a “search community” more than giving away prizes.

In a world of increasingly popular social media sites like Digg, Reddit, etc., does creating a social or “prize give away” aspect to search give users a reason to use a search engine more then the next one? Is it possible to push people away from the mammoth lead that Google has gained and sustained? At the very least, could Microsoft make a push into second place, pushing Yahoo! to third?

Granted, really making a play at taking over second place in the search engine wars is a REAL possibility since Yahoo! is in flux at the moment. The question really is, can Microsoft take a good amount more of the search share away from Google? Or, is this promotional aspect to Microsoft Live Search an attempt at gaining fickle traffic that will begin to fizzle away as it looses its gusto?