So I’m glad to be back to work. Back to a regular schedule of long work hours, few sleeping hours and a few minutes on the pool table a day. While they are not quite as awesome as my “real” family, if you have to be stuck with any group of people for nine to twelve hours a day, you could do worse than the Pole Position Marketing team. They’re good peeps.

Lucky for you we have another installment of Q&A. For those of you new to this game here’s how it works. You post your questions in the comments below and then in the next installment I’ll answer them. Simple really. But there is one catch… you actually have to post your questions. I’ll make no attempt whatsoever to read your mind. I’m a bit of a clean freak and I know how dirty it can get in there!

So on to today’s question…

Hi,

Question about 404’s.
A site has been moved, twice really and is now a WordPress blog.
30% of the HTTP status codes are 404’s, about 2,500 hits in November.

Some are for pages that existed on the old site that do not exist on the new blog, in any way. Some are for “old” directory structures that have since changed on the new blog and were never on the original site. We simplified the directory structure. domain.com/blog/resources/page.html is now domain.com/resources/page.html, for example.

The old structure only existed for a few weeks as the site was being built in WP. Others are page coding mistakes that are being fixed. Others are related to feeds, archives and so on. Google web master tools shows that they have indexed all but a handful of the new correct URL’s, a couple of old ones are still in their index. The mast majority of 404’s are bots, robots, search engines and so on. Very few are people. I am using the WP plugin that emails me for every 404.

Should I care about and try to fix every single 404? Will the search engines eventually stop looking for old file/path names? Since they see my current content, does not finding old content effect me in the search engines in any way that I should care about? What would you recommend be done about the 404’s?

Many thanks for the opportunity to ask the questions.

First, you win the award for longest question in history. I feel like I’m running for president and this is the part where I say that if I was president there would never be any 404 errors and all bad links would be healed. Forever. And nothing like this would happen again, just so long as we all hold hands and “care”.

But I digress.

Can you tell me the name of the plugin you’re using? That sounds like something I might want here.

Ok, on to business. The occasional 404 error happens, but if 30% of your requests are coming up with errors I’d say you got a problem. Even if these are not humans and only search spiders, to continue to serve links that are broken will end up effecting your performance with the search engines. Too many broken links and the search engines won’t spider or re-spider as many pages as they might otherwise. You’ll also likely take a hit with trust and quality scores as well which will effect search engine rankings.

So yes, you should care and try to fix 404s within reason. I say “within reason” because over time blogs do tend to accumulate broken links. Old blog posts link out to pages that have moved or been removed and I believe search engines take this into account. But again, we are concerned here with the amount of broken links being found which is quite high. You should try to get that down to at least under 3%. But if it’s just as easy to fix them all the I would do that, especially considering you’ve changed your URL structure recently. And even more especially if these are internal rather than external links.

Will the search engines eventually stop looking for old file names? Yes and no. If the search engine visits a page enough times and finds that it’s not there then theoretically yes, it will stop trying to access that page. But by relying on the engine to stop looking on it’s own you’ll be effecting how the search engine spiders your site. You’re forcing it to make decisions about which links to follow and which pages have links worth following. Putting the search engine in this position leaves it prone to mistakes and not following links you do want them to follow.

The other issue here is if those broken pages are linked from external sites. If someone is linking to a page that’s not there then there is no link value being passed. That might be fine but depending on what site the link is on this may cause the engine to continue to try to access this page. I’m just speaking theoretically here, but still, I think it makes the case for fixing any and all links possible.

The easiest solution is to implement 301 redirects for every broken page or image that is being accessed. You don’t have to worry about uploading a file, just implement a permanent redirect for the broken URL passing the visitor and spider through to another URL. Not only does this tell the search engines that this page is no longer here, but it passes on any link value that this page is getting. That and it’s pretty seamless for the visitor and the spider.

A long question deserves a longer answer! I hope this helps and feel free to ask any followup questions. I’ll try to answer those in the comment thread below.

Which begs the question… where are all you question askers? I mean really, I know you’re out there, I can feel you lurking. Are you shy? Do you feel silly asking a question to someone that you’re just not sure is “real”. Hey, how do you think I feel? I have to deal with that every morning. Being in doubt of your own existence is quite frightening. But luckily I have myself to convince me that I am, in fact, real. I blog, therefore I am.

So fire away with the questions folks. And if you don’t know what to ask, go tell your friends that I’m here for them. I feel their pain. And here are this weeks answers to prove it:

Looking at the “big picture” is something I strive to do but my biggest obstacle right now is getting people on board with changes. I was wondering if you’ve ever had a client who refused to make the changes you recommended. Were you able to persuade them? How?

Thanks for rubbing salt in my wounds with that one! We have clients do this all the time, so don’t think you’re alone. For the most part, since we usually have access to our client’s websites we go in and make any optimization edits that we feel are necessary. Major changes go through the client for approval, but small stuff can just be done on the fly. No waiting for approval. We just let them know what we have done.

But many times we need to have some significant design and development changes made which we can’t do ourselves and therefore must pass to the client. These are the most likely to be shot down, put on hold or sent to the DMV to grab a number. Usually it’s because for budget reasons, other times changes can’t be made due to limitations with the CMS. But still, occasionally we get the client just not wanting to do what we ask for whatever reason. And we can do nothing but grin and bear it!

Just recently we had a client in the medical community create a page for a new keyword they wanted to target. They asked us to jump on this new page right away so they can start getting some rankings. We went through the process of optimizing the content for search engines and visitors, carefully integrating keywords, but being sure to tweak the content to speak to the website visitors. All said and done the end result was leaps and bounds better than the original.

We submitted it to the client for approval and they rejected the changes. My contact had told me that the doctor who wrote it wanted his version. Now there was really nothing wrong with his version, other than it wasn’t optimized and it wasn’t put into the language that would speak to their patients. So all that work flushed away for reasons unknown.

Yeah, it happens and in those cases you just have to let the client know that short of our work being implemented, that will effect overall performance of that page and the keywords it was targeting. At that point, since you really can’t do anything else, you move on to the next task for the client.

How many keywords can you target per page?

That’s a good question and one where there really is no right or wrong answer. Many in the SEO community will tell you not to target more than three to five keywords per page, but I think that’s shortsighted. I say optimized for as many as the single page can bear.

Think of it this way, if the page can support only a small bit of content, then you won’t be able to target more than one or two keywords while keeping the content focused on selling to the visitors. On the other hand, if you have a page that’ll support several hundred words of text, then your keyword targeting options for that page grows considerably.

In actuality, it all depends on the keywords you are trying to target. Our method is to target a single core term per page and then fit as many relevant search phrases onto the page as possible while still keeping rich, dynamic text for the visitor. Here is an example:

If a core term is ‘motorcycle battery‘ then we’ll target the main motorcycle battery page for this term. But we can also throw in additional terms such as:

* gel motorcycle battery
* discount motorcycle battery
* agm motorcycle battery
* gel cell motorcycle battery
* 12v motorcycle battery
* best motorcycle battery
* sealed motorcycle battery
* honda motorcycle battery
* suzuki motorcycle battery
* yamaha motorcycle battery
etc.

I’m simplifying a great deal here, but you can see how easy it would be two write a few hundred words of text that covers all of these ‘motorcycle battery’ keywords without looking dopey. But if the page couldn’t bear a few hundred words of text, then some of those keywords might be moved off to informational pages and allows to gain traction on their own.

If you’re headed to PubCon then you should catch Stoney’s presentation in the Keyword research session. He’ll be explaining the patent-pending secret formula (shhhhh!) for keyword research success.

That’s enough words for one day. But be sure to email your questions to bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com or just comment on this post. You do that and I swear I’ll try and make these things funnier.

Has anyone been able to find any internet marketing or sales techniques/strategies that have worked for them?

There are a lot of viable options for internet marketing, but you have to remember that not every method works for every type of business, product or service. You have to figure out what’s going to work for you and, sad to say, sometimes that means you have to do a bit of trial and error.

If you’re limited on budget then start small. But be careful, small budgets often don’t lend themselves to quality tests. Make sure you invest enough for a solid run that will give you an accurate picture if that method will return a positive ROI.

Oh, you want an example? OK, let’s talk about radio or TV advertising. It’s been pretty well established that a single commercial doesn’t provide much benefit. In fact, listeners/viewers need to hear/see the commercial three to seven times before it actually starts sinking in. So if a single commercial blows your budget, you’ll never be able to know if TV or radio is right for you because you didn’t give it a fair enough of a run

Being in the SEO industry, I can say pretty definitively that SEO is generally a safe bet, though not always for brand new sites. If your site is new then there are other things you can do that will be more lucrative in the short term, such as PPC campaigns. This can be very effective at driving traffic, plus with solid testing and tracking you are able to really control costs, profits, etc.

I’m trying to come up with a cool logo for my company. It’s a healthcare company and they are starting a new program providing healthcare awareness to their employees. I wanted to tie in that they don’t stop there concern for healthcare on just their patients, but their employees as well! Any ideas on how to say that and make it sound cool or creative?

Tag lines are always fun to try and come up with but it can often be difficult to nail it head on. Over the years many companies have changed their tag line. Heck, Pepsi seems to change theirs every year since they dropped the successful “choice for the next generation” tag line. Here’s my take:

“Better health care starts with personal health. We help you, so you can help them.”

I’m real keen on the “them” part but “others” seemed too impersonal and “our patients” a bit too much of a mouthful. Your mileage may vary.

Does anyone know of a good keyword research course to take up?

I don’t know of any specific “course” but there are a lot of good resources out there. We have developed our own guide to keyword research which many have found quite valuable. Stoney will also be using this as the basis for his presentation at PubCon in December. Don’t worry, I’ve gotten a peek at the Power Point and it’s much prettier than the document (and the presentation he gave last spring at SEMpdx).

Aside from that, you can get a lot of good information from SEO conferences. But for your money, the keyword research guide linked above can’t be beat.

That’s it for the questions this week. Just for full disclosure I didn’t have to make these questions up this time around. In fact I did the only sensible thing. Speaking of sensible, I’d like to thank coughYahooAnswerscough for their helpful input.

Email your questions to bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com or just comment on them here. I’ll hold the good questions until next week–and try not to be a conversation killer in the process.

Today I step out on my own and prove that I’m not just the side-kick that gets to say a few pithy lines for comedy relief. I’ve got a voice that wants to be heard… that needs to be heard… that you, my friend, want to hear! Am I overstating? Perhaps. But by the time you figure it all out I’ll have you wrapped around my little finger like a pig in a blanket.

I’m sure you want to know more about me so feel free to check out my Reno SEO bio and peruse our search engine marketing company site to read more of my cleverousness. Yeah, that’s me in those orange boxes in the middle of each page. That’s all the space I’m allotted. Weak I know.

So enough about me, let’s talk about what I’m going to do here on the blog. I thought I’d start off with some Q and A. You ask me questions on search marketing and I’ll fling the straight poop right back atcha. I’m not gonna cram any marketing mumbo jumbo down your throat and I’m certainly not drinking any SEO or Google Kool-Aid.

So let’s get to the Qss so you can see my Ass!

First question comes from Stoney, from Reno, Nevada:

Hi Bob, I have two questions for you. 1) how do you say your name? I’m having trouble pronouncing it in my head. 2) Didn’t you steal your name from Tony Danza’s character that first appeared on the third season of Arrested Development?

Great to have you on the show, Stoney. To your first question, I suggest you stop trying. There ain’t much in that head of yours so you’re better of just pronouncing it out loud. Go ahead, give it a try, I’ll wait. Ok, moving on to your second question. What’s your point? Next.

Bob, what’s with all these social networking sites? How in the world does anybody have time to participate in any more than a few? Does anybody work anymore?
– Stoney deGeyter, Reno, NV

Stoney, have we met? Hey, I’m with you. I honestly can’t keep up with all the social sites and certainly don’t have time to attempt to leverage any more than a couple. If you feel leveraging social media is important I suggest you start small. Build one profile on one site and work it from there. Once you have that down, then move on to the next. As you go along, figure out what you need to do with each in order to participate with the community, but be sure to save some time for your real job. With the writer’s strike in full swing you’ll have plenty of unused TV time to work on this. The bottom line, only use social sites that help you progress your long-term business goals, or just keep it as an after-work hobby.

I’m interested in hearing Stoney speak. Can you give me a heads up on his speaking schedule?
– Stoney deGeyter, Reno, NV

Uh, yeah. Anything for you, pal. Stoney will be speaking in the Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization session (Tuesday Nov 4, 1:30-2:45p, Salon D) at WebmasterWorld’s PubCon. You’ll also see the rest of the Pole Position Marketing crew (except me, I can’t get past the metal detectors on the plane) hanging around, meeting and greeting. They will, of course, be wearing our nifty Pole Position Marketing pit crew shirts.

Stoney has also pitched a session for SMX West, so if you have any pull with Danny or Chris, be sure to let them know you’d like to see him there.

Next up is SEMpdx’s SearchFest, March 10, 2008, which Stoney has been invited back to. Ask anybody, he was fanfreakintastic!

And April 21-22 Stoney will be presenting at an undisclosed location to be made known in the near future. Be sure to mark your calendars for that as well.

That’s it for the Q and A for now folks. Start sending me your questions so I can get them answered each week. I’m hoping for at least a couple of questions from someone other than my boss! E-mail me your questions at bobloblaw@polepositionmarketing.com and while I probably won’t respond to your emails, I’ll try to get them answered here.