Since the domain and subdomain are treated as two separate sites by Google, you would start with a subdomain your SEO basically at “Zero level”. With a subfolder, you don’t loose authority because its still considered the same domain. This is a huge point in favor of building upon existing scores.

Plus, this will provide you with some SEO/Management adavantages vs. a subdomain:

(1) Subfolders are great for organizing content into meaningful, descriptive URLs. If you’re looking to grow the site and categorize content in a logical way then the subfolders are a good way to make the URL paths even more search friendly.

(2) The more authority and trust the site builds with the search engines, the easier it becomes to rank new content for related keyword terms that would have taken you much longer had you started from scratch. New content can be organized by new subfolders.

(3) Using subfolders can be easier to manage than sub domains in terms of url structure. You could start redirecting areas of the site (disallowing the original content to avoid duplicates) until your move is completed. Then you can make that main 301 redirect and its done. The fact that you got all content under 1 level makes it a lot easier to keep organized.

So now you know why you wont find subdomains within HiRank’s structure.

To contact us for more information on site structure SEO, call 1.510.473.6949 or email us at consultants@hirank.com to speak with Jose who handles all of our relationships.

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One thing remains clear, SEO has value in aiding the search engines in doing what they are meant to: create an informational structure out of your site. So how can a SEO Consultant help your website increase relevancy and visibility for the terms your visitors should be finding it for?

The right approach to SEO is more scientific that most think. The well known steps of the Scientific Method are: Ask a Question, Do Background Research, Construct a Hypothesis, Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment, Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion, Communicate Your Results.

OK, lets see how a   Technical SEO Consultants like me would apply such a method to optimize a target site for a client:

Ask a Question

The first thing any consultant should do is to have the client fill up a SEO Questionnaire about the current status of the site. This helps me to create a reference of the conditions at the time of engagement. It is essential to understand the goals, cycles and issues that will become part of any SEO work.

Note:  I normally also send out a free Immediate SEO Issues report where elements that can be fixed within he first 30 days of engagement are pointed out.  The more clear the picture is for everybody involved in the process the better.

Do Background Research

Now that I have the information, I proceed to study their answers, their numbers, everything. I don’t count on the accuracy of the information, so I confirm as much as possible. By now I have identified the client’s industry metrics, and their immediate competitor’s against their own.

I can also get an idea of the ranking difficulty they will face as they move forward. My job is to know who and how anyone is ranking for their target phrases,and  to fully understand what needs to be done by both, my client and I to achieve he SEO goals we have set.

Note: We run a SEO testing network here at HiRank of 500+ sites across 50 industries, from where we obtain SEO data for implementations. We only engage with sites for which we have such data to implement.

Construct a Hypothesis

It becomes very clear during this stage what needs to be done. The important part is to properly prioritize short vs. long term goals, and execute the right implementations. This allows to establish an estimated timeline for when the first boots in ranking will occur based on experience.

Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment

This steps is the easiest in my case since the testing and data that are the foundation for the implementations is readily available. Once I know the average industry metrics of the top competing sites and I have confirmed them trough testing (a.k.a Experiment) then only I can recommend them.

Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion

Here is where Web Analytics comes into the picture. This is my catalyst. Everything I do needs to confirm here. Also everything I still need to. My conclusion needs to answer this essential question: What next?

Communicate Your Results

Finally, ones need to be able to create SEO reports that communicate well.  Its not only about what is transmitted to the client, but how we do it.  You can easily be too technical rather than clear. That is why we implement custom reporting for each client we consult, because there are many key performance indicators and they can differ broadly in interpretation.

Do all SEOs apply the Scientific Method? Sadly, a big number do not, since their research is incomplete, they skip steps, or they do not use any testing… Most previous SEO work I encounter as part of taking over a new project clearly reveals that very few are aware of the Indexing Process Steps that takes place in modern search engines algorithms.

To contact us for information on Technical SEO, call 1.510.473.6949 or email us at consultants@hirank.com to speak with Jose who handles all of our relationships.

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The following is a sample SEO Questionnaire we here at HiRank sent out to our clients to get the information on their Current SEO Status:

General Questions:

(1) What are the goals of the natural search campaigns (ex. drive sales, increase traffic)?

(2) How long have you been the registered owner of the domain?

(3) Other than the target site, list and describe all domains you own & identify if they are active sites or not.

(4) How does seasonality affect your business?

(5) What is your site publish schedule (when site changes are pushed live)?

(6) When was the most recent site redesign launched?

(7) How many pages do you estimate the site has?

(8) Who creates/controls the content of your site?

(9) Please list your top three (3) competitors.

(10) What platform is your site built on?

(11) What ecommerce/shopping cart technology are you using?

(12) Is your shopping cart 1st party or 3rd party?

(13) Does your CMS (if you have one) provide changes to page title and meta-keywords/descriptions?

(14) If applicable, are there any product feeds that are available?

(15) If yes, please describe the types of product feeds available?

(16) Are you able to provide us with list of searches occurring on site (i.e. through on-site search box?)

(17) Is URL rewriting an option with your system?

(18) Are there plans for any major architecture changes in the next 6 months?

Current SEO Implementation:

(1) Have there been any SEO techniques used on the site to day?  If so, please describe.

(2) Are you using search engine submission (ex. Google Site Maps) programs?  If so, list out which ones?

(3) Are you currently participating in any paid inclusion programs (ex. Yahoo Search Submit Pro)?

(4) Has the site been submitted to the major directories? (Yahoo, Open Directory/DMOZ) If so, when?

(5) Are you currently involved in an active link building campaign?

Current SEO Tracking:

(1) What, if any, analytics package(s) are you currently using?

(2) Are you able to distinguish visitors coming from paid vs. natural search traffic?

(4) What type of conversions (ex sales, leads, downloads) are you tracking?

(5) Are you currently tracking your site through a rank checking tool (ex. WebPosition)?

(6) If so, how are you determining what keywords to track?

(7) Do you measure search engine saturation (number of pages indexed) and/or link popularity on a regular basis?  If so, please provide us with this data.

(8) What is your typical conversion rate for your online marketing campaigns (percentage)?

(9) Do you have Google Analytics installed?

(10) If applicable, what is your average order size?

(11) If applicable, what is your target ROI?

(12) If applicable, what is your target cost per acquisition (CPL, CPA)

Current Paid Search:

(1) Are you currently running paid search campaigns?

(2) If yes, please indicate in which engines you have existing paid search campaigns.

(3) Are you tracking paid search campaigns through conversion?

If you have any questions about this questionnaire, or any other inquiries, call 1.510.473.6949 or email us at consultants@hirank.com to speak with Jose who handles all of our relationships.

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In essence, according to our testing, the link should go from the most relevant page of the site giving it, using the most relevant anchor text, to the most relevant page on the site receiving it. Here is what works best in order to achieve this goal, based on what we have found:

• Only One-Way (Unidirectional/Non-Reciprocal) links
• Topical links with relevant Key Phrase in Anchor Text
• Link Page is Cached in Google within 10 days (Cycle)
• Links spread over different domains (Different Host IPs)
• Only links from Industry-Relevant pages
• NO links through “redirect” scripts
• NO JavaScript links
• NO links from “framed” pages
• NO Flash embedded links
• NO robots.txt excluded link pages
• NO Robots Tag excluded link pages
• NO Paid or Time-Bound links
• No links from Link Farms
• No links from FFA (Free-For-All) Networks

We deliver a full report of links created at the end of each month including only links that meet this criteria, with information on how many pending/approved links have been secured for the month.

To contact us for more information on our link building services, call 1.510.473.6949 or email us at consultants@hirank.com to speak with Jose who handles all of our relationships.

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As I have explained before, the ideal link value would come from the most relevant page of Domain A (link source) to the most relevant page of Domain B (link recipient) using the best anchor text related to the target phrase you are optimizing for.

This will bring the best incoming link value, but now we improve it further, via interlinking. Internal links act as a “router” of relevancy. Connecting your internal most relevant page with its supporting pages (we have developed an internal SEO tool to determine this) is the best way to implement interlinking. This approach “routes” all confirming relevancy from incoming links (from external sites)  across your site’s pages and into your most relevant page for the target phrase, closing the equation of link value.

One example in action is already on this post. Wordpress has plugins to automate the interlinking process, but most we tested are keyphrase based. We prefer instead, to retrieve search engine data in determining the “connecting dots”. Therefore we do it manually. What works… takes work.

To contact us for more information on interlinking, call 1.510.473.6949 or email us at consultants@hirank.com to speak with Jose who handles all of our relationships.

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Now, you and I may think that this “letter T” hack is really a silly idea, but how can we know for sure? Search evaluation is charged with answering such questions.

This hack hasn’t really come up, but we are constantly evaluating everything, which can include:

* proposed improvements to segmentation of Chinese queries
* new approaches to fight spam
* techniques for improving how we handle compound Swedish word
* changes to how we handle links and anchortext
* and everything in between

Not surprisingly, we take search evaluation very seriously. Precise evaluation enables our teams to know “which way is up”. One of our tenets in search quality is to be very data-driven in our decision-making. We try hard not to rely on anecdotal examples, which are often misleading in search (where decisions can affect hundreds of millions of queries a day). Meticulous, statistically-meaningful evaluation gives us the data we need to make real search improvements.

Evaluating search is difficult for several reasons:

* First, understanding what a user really wants when they type a query — the query’s “intent” — can be very difficult. For highly navigational queries like [ebay] or [orbitz], we can guess that most users want to navigate to the respective sites. But how about [olympics]? Does the user want news, medal counts from the recent Beijing games, the IOC’s homepage, historical information about the games?  This same exact question, of course, is faced by our ranking and search UI teams. Evaluation is the other side of that coin.

* Second, comparing the quality of search engines (whether Google versus our competitors, Google versus Google a month ago, or Google versus Google plus the “letter T” hack) is never black and white. It’s essentially impossible to make a change that is 100% positive in all situations; with any algorithmic change you make to search, many searches will get better and some will get worse.

* Third, there are several dimensions to “good” results. Traditional search evaluation has focused on the relevance of the results, and of course that is our highest priority as well. But today’s search-engine users expect more than just relevance. Are the results fresh and timely? Are they from authoritative sources? Are they comprehensive? Are they free of spam? Are their titles and snippets descriptive enough? Do they include additional UI elements a user might find helpful for the query (maps, images, query suggestions, etc.)? Our evaluations attempt to cover each of these dimensions where appropriate.

* Fourth, evaluating Google search quality requires covering an enormous breadth. We cover over a hundred locales (country/language pairs) with in-depth evaluation. Beyond locales, we support search quality teams working on many different kinds of queries and features. For example, we explicitly measure the quality of Google’s spelling suggestions, universal search results, image and video searches, related query suggestions, stock oneboxes, and many, many more.

To get at these issues, we employ a variety of evaluation methods and data sources:

* Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.

* Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.

Clearly, we can never measure anything close to all the queries Google will get in the future. Every day, in fact, Google gets many millions of queries that we have never seen before, and will never see again. Therefore, we measure statistically, over representative samples of the query-stream. The “letter T” hack probably does improve a few queries, but over a representative sample of queries it affects, I’m confident it would be a big loser.

One of the key skills of our evaluation team is experimental design. For each proposed search improvement, we generate an experiment plan that will allow us to measure the key aspects of the change. Often, we use a combination of human and live traffic evaluation. For instance, consider a proposed improvement to Google’s “related searches” feature to increase its coverage across several locales. Our experiment plan might include live traffic evaluation in which we show the updated related search suggestions to users and measure click-through rates in each locale and break these down by position of each related search suggestion. We might also include human evaluation, in which for a representative sample of queries in each locale, we ask evaluators to rate the appropriateness, usefulness, and relevance of each individual related search suggestion. Including both types of evaluation allows us to understand the overall behavioral impact on users (via the live traffic experiment), and measure the detailed quality of the suggestions in each locale along multiple dimensions (via the human evaluation experiment).

Choosing an appropriate sample of queries to evaluate can be subtle:

When evaluating a proposed search improvement, we consider not only whether a given query’s results are changed by the proposal, but also how much impact the change is likely to have on users. For instance, a query whose first three results are changed is likely much higher impact than one for which results 9 and 10 are swapped. In Amit Singhal’s previous post on ranking, he discussed synonyms. Recently, we evaluated a proposed update to make synonyms more aggressive in some cases. On a flat (non-impact-weighted) sample of affected queries, the change appeared to be quite positive. However, using an evaluation of an impact-weighted sample, we found that the change went much too far. For example, in Chinese, it synonymized “small” & “big”… not a good idea!

We’re serious about search evaluation because we are serious about giving you the highest quality search experience possible. Rather than guess at what will be useful, we use a careful data-driven approach to make sure our “great ideas” really are great for you. In this environment, the “letter T” hack never had a chance.

It is a fact that, algorithms play a very vital role in influencing the search results. But we are also aware of the fact that Google has human evaluators — thousands, in fact…

- Scott Huffman, Engineering Director.

“Recession marketing for search optimization needs to sell the idea that SEO which pays for itself is essentially a zero-cost marketing effort - not exactly free SEO service, but just as good.”
-Michael Martinez

But currently most established SEO professionals seem to have just the opposite need, they have too much business. Many established SEO professionals are declining to take on new clients because they just cannot accept any additional work load right now.

Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BS” crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise - solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough.

“Just like anyone could get into real estate a few years ago and make a buck, SEO is now going to start attracting a large number of people who previously had jobs at start-ups, banks, real estate agencies, possibly auto makers, etc. Don’t be surprised if the guy who just turned you down for a loan offers to get you to page one of Google for your keyword.”
-Andrew Shotland

But for those of you looking to hire a professional to assist you with your SEO needs, remember not all professionals are made equal. It will be more important than ever to understand what a specific service provider can bring to the table in terms of skills, knowledge, and experience before making your final selection.

“Prospects are demanding more specific information related to their sites issues and detailed, actionable solutions are expected. Generic audits that look automated in any way are no longer welcome. Ex: Don’t just tell me I got a problem with my titles, but tell me exactly how are we going to fix them! That is the attitude of an average educated site owner looking for help. This will ultimately separate the amateurs from the experts.”
-Jose Nunez

Microsoft has embarked on what it describes as the biggest strategic shift since venturing online. The company plans to build about 20 state-of-the-art data centers in an effort to outpace Google in Cloud Computing.

The 20 supersize data centers are expected to cost as much as $1 billion apiece and house as many as 560,000 servers per data center or upto 11 million servers in total. That will eclipse the 1 million servers estimated to be deployed at Google’s data centers.

Although Google has the lead over Microsoft many analysts believe that Microsoft has an advantage over Google in doling out cloud services for corporations, given its long history of developing reliable, feature-rich software. 

Further information on Google data center inner workings have been shrouded in secrecy.  Microsoft has taken the opposite approach - sharing information with supplieres. “Microsoft is…collaborating with the industry to drive innovation forward, to get great minds engaged,” said Forrest Norrod, GM Data Center Solutions for Dell.

For semantic relationships, Latent Semantic Indexing can analyze degrees topical coherence with a body of text. These results correlate very well with readability and comprehension, and therefore LSI would be a good fit with readability metrics on a feedback system for writing instructions. On another end, Spam control. Yes, LSI is very powerful, and is also customizable for this purpose. It could be also much more efficient than traditional keyword-based tools. It could be progressively trained and adjusted on a user’s mailbox. And lets not forget bulletin boards, newsgroups, forums, and anything that shares a common and basic structure type.

Latent Semantic Indexing could be used for structuring data, including all human generated taxonomies. LSI can do a partial structuring out of unstructured data. This would allow archivists to use their time much more efficiently by just doing enhancing, labeling and then correcting LSI-generated categories rather than having to do the indexing of documents themselves. This, combined with data visualization tools currently available could be used with LSI to create more sophisticated and interactive applications for archivists usage.

Keyword Research.
The first step of any SEO campaign is to research your keywords, and even more important, is to get them right. You cannot skip this step. And why would you?
You may think you know what keywords to target, and you may be right about them, but what keywords are your potential visitors searching for? One example: You could have a travel site wanting to optimize for “discount tickets” when actually your visitors are searching for “cheap tickets”. Another thing is the timeline to achieve results, like in the short, mid, or long-term. No unrealistic expectations here. One way I like to approach this is to optimize by levels. For example, I will choose 3 levels of difficulty and select the according keywords.
As I achieve the easiest level, I move on to the next and so on. Results diferr
per competition volume and markets, but overall results prove it does work.

On-Page Factors.
The most important elements in the page are the Title, Headings within the copy and keyword focused content. Keeping your code compliant is also beneficial. On-page optimization a very important part of the process, but it is almost indirectly proportional with the competition levels for the given target keywords. So it is highly scored into rankings when present within low to medium levels, but less significant among high competitive terms. So keep this in mind, according to your market.

User Friendliness.
Site structure and overall navigation are being considered by search engines increasingly when ranking websites. So what are search engines looking for to determine and weight user friendliness? Coding errors, broken internal or when outbound links are bad. Fast loading pages, contextual links between pages, links
to authoritative sites or resources within related topics are good.

Article Writing.
Quality content still rules… Content that is topic centered, and highly focused on your target keywords is really what search engines are looking for. So when this is applied on multiple pages across your site, you get results. Because of this, context, not content, is king.

Link Popularity.
“Tell me who links to you and I will tell you who you are” is how search engine scoring works on link popularity. Just like content, the quality factor is very important. This is the most important element to consider when your site is on a highly competitive market. So make sure you have applied all the previous elements, in order to achieve link popularity from related sites, avoid links from bad neighborhoods, and make sure to never link to sites not indexed by Google.