Nobody cares about “kind of cool… “. Your content has to be really great or fail epicly to get the attention of the Internet. Most of the time failing is not a good thing, but it can be, as I will show you.

Enter the Arngren method

Graph by Brad Colbow

The Arngren method is showing your product in a remarkable way online. It has to be bat shit crazy, make your eyes bleed or make you laugh out loud. This method is named after the epic web site Arngren.net. Lets look at some examples. I have selected both cool and boring niches to show you that there are no product pages The Arngren method can’t handle! Enjoy.

Arngren – gadgets

http://www.arngren.net

Arngren.net is a fairly unremarkable Norwegian store selling RC toys and gadget, but also awesome products like flying cars. They have the ugliest and most entertaining 90s web site on the net. Some stuff might be NSFW.

The data

Takeaways

This is one of the best examples of how horrible stuff on the Internet gets popular (like MySpace). I am pretty sure they would not have gotten any high authority links if they had an “okay” looking e-commerce template. I bet the creators of this site didn’t plan this, but now you can!

Blendtec – blenders

http://www.blendtec.com/products/tom_dckson_extreme

Blenders are boring right? Wrong. Blenders are awesome! What if I were to tell you that you could get 189.594.782 Youtube views and 400.000 subscribers? Would that be something you would be interested in?

Will it blend?

The data

Takeaways

Look at that sweet domain authority. It doesn’t matter how boring your product is or how small your marketing budget is. If you can do something crazy like “Will it blend” with your products, just do it.

DollarShaveClub – razors

http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/

This is another boring niche made interesting. Dollar Shave club has really pulled it off with an insane product launch that broke their site. Dollar Shave Club is so wildly awesome I’m not sure it’s even real.

The data

The video

Takeaways

This is what I’m talking about. This is the Arngren method in action. Make your product page stand out like a boss. Use what you got. Show your unique selling points.

Vat19.com – gifts

http://www.vat19.com/dvds/worlds-largest-gummy-bear.cfm

The World’s Largest Gummy Bear. Five-pound gummy bear is equal to 1400 regular-sized bears. This is one of my favorite product pages of all time.

The data

Takeaways

Make your product information interesting and unique. Use video and pictures.

Bonus: Think Geek – the ultimate Arngren method e-commerce site

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/e762/

Do you know what the most linked to sub page on Think Geek is? It’s the iPad Arcade Cabinet of course.

The data

Takeaways

Anything Apple is linkworthy. The tech bloggerati and Apple fanboys loves this stuff. What not to love, right?

Summary

“Remarkable is what we call something we remark on – Seth Godin”

Being good doesn’t cut it online. You need to be remarkable in a really great or really bad way. Like a purple cow. Some might say this is stupid, it’s not. This is what it takes to stand out online and gain organic links. The genius part is that you don’t even need to have the product in stock if you are worried it won’t sell.

Use your product pages as link building and marketing, it’s edgy and it works f**king great! And if you have to suck, remember to fail epicly.

What is the best Arngren method product pages you have seen? I would love to see more.

Photo: Google

To master the technical aspects of SEO you need to know the SEO basics. In this blog post you will get the 2012 version of SEO 101 for Google.

Disclaimer: This is a blog posts for beginners, if you are a professional, please feel free to skip to the share buttons  

The essential Google SEO concepts:

• Crawling – Can Google find you website?
• Indexing – Can Google process your content?
• Serving search results – Is your content useful and relevant for x keyword?

Crawling

Crawling is when Google sends out its GoogleBots (robots, spiders, web crawlers etc) to find new pages and update old ones by following links. How often a page is crawled is determined by Google algorithms like PageRank. Links, user data (browser/toolbar data etc) and social engagement decide how fast and often a page gets crawled. If you have trouble getting new content crawled, you need to get some links and tweets to your domain. Other things that can help is pinging Google with XML sitemaps and adding URLs to social media sites. Or you could try asking to get it index with this form.

GoogleBot is getting smarter and is starting to crawl and index Flash, JavaScript and Ajax, but you better stay away from those for navigation and main content.

Indexing

After a page is crawled it will be processed before it gets added Google’s huge index. The index contains URLs, meta data, links and text. Not all content like text in images, Flash and Ajax can be indexed. To make sure your content can be indexed properly use text and pictures with descriptive meta tags. To see what is indexed type site:domain.com in the Google search box.

Video on YouTube is not automatically indexed without transcripts, but I think Google soon will start to convert voice to text and index them as well, making all video searchable.

Not only HTML documents gets index, Google indexes Docs, PDFs and Spreadsheets. They are treated as regular pages, and can outrank your HTML pages. So be aware of your non-HTML documents on your site.

Ranking the search results

For every search Google wants to return the most relevant answers. Understanding how Google is ranking web pages is where things gets interesting. They have said they use more than 200 factors to rank results. Since 1998 PageRank and links has been the most important one. This is changing.

Google Search Plus Your World you will get results served based on your social connections and your profile. This is not completely new, they have served results based on personalization before. How many Google products do you use (Search, Chrome, Chromebook, Android, Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Google+, Google Reader)? Well, that’s how many data sources Google have on you, to serve relevant results for you.

Google want’s users to find relevant and great results. They use “long vs short clicks” as a quality signal. If a user click a result and stay away for a long time it means they found a great result, if they quickly bounce back it means they were unhappy with the result.

So make sure your site is found by Google, is indexed and gets lots of links and social engagement!

Inspiration for this blog post: Google basics.

Want to get your self a nice creative SEO job title? Check out the SEO Job Title Generator. Just for fun:)

Did you get some good ones? Feel free to tweet and share:)

Google is moving fast and algorithms improve rapidly. It’s not easy keeping up with the latest in SEO, so I asked the top SEOs of our industry what we should do more of in 2012, and what we should stop doing. Enjoy these 2012 SEO tips!

The experts

• Rand Fishkin (CEO, SEOmoz)
• Dr. Peter J. Meyers (President of User Effect)
• Will Critchlow (Founder, distilled)
• Danny Dover (SEO Consultant and Author, DannyDover.com)
• Bas van den Beld (Speaker, blogger and owner State of Search)
• Ann Smarty (Owner at MyBlogGuest)
• Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney)
• Aaron Wall (Founder, SEObook)
• Neil Patel (Co-founder Crazy Egg and blogging at Quick Sprout)
• Justin Briggs (SEO Manager at Big Fish Games and blogger)
• Tom Critchlow (VP of Operations NYC, distilled)
• Gianluca Fiorelli (SEO Consultant, ItaliaSEO and blogger)
• Stephan Spencer (Author, SEO and Internet marketer, Stephan Spencer)
• Marcus Tandler (Partner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner and blogger)
• Dennis Goedegebuure (VP Internet Marketing at Geeknet and blogger)
• Scott Polk (VP of Internet Marketing, ObsidianEdge Marketing)
• Trond Lyngbø (SEO Strategist, Metronet and writer at Search Engine Land)
• Russ Jones (CTO, Virante)

1. What Is Your Best SEO Tips For 2012?

Rand Fishkin

Move outside of classic, old-school SEO. If you’re sticking to keyword research and targeting with a dose of site accessibility and link building, you’re almost certainly going to lose out to someone who’s broadened to include content marketing, viral product incentives, email, social media, conversion rate optimization and branding as part of their online marketing efforts. The power of combining tactics and reaping the benefits of overlapping marketing practices is insanely awesome.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. I think the big lesson of Panda is that more isn’t always better. More indexed pages cost Google money and often dilute your most important content. Canonicalize true duplicates, tame near-duplicates, and burn thin content to the ground. If you syndicate, make sure you bring something unique to the table, and if you’re a thin affiliate, fatten up.

Will Critchlow

More than ever, I believe code is the new content. I think we will see interactive data visualisations getting bundles of links and shares.

Danny Dover

SEO has grown beyond simply building links, writing comments and optimizing tags. It now involves the entire website experience. Don’t focus entirely on doing traditional SEO, instead diversify in other  marketing channels (e-mail, CRO, social, PPC). I think the winners will be the ones who excel at online education. I predict that industry will grow much bigger in 2012.

Bas van den Beld

1. Watch out for personalization and make your content shareable. Things are getting personal. Google is making Google+ the center of it all to make everything as personal as possible. This means that we will be seeing a lot more personal elements, for example in the SERPS. This means you should make your content as shareable as possible. Get people to share and they will spread it to their network. It will show up in their personalized SERPS.

2. Optimize your snippets. Google is putting a lot of emphasis on snippets. Optimize all your snippets, not just the meta description, but also the rel-author, the reviews, everything.

Ann Smarty

If your focus has always been content and quality, there will hardly be anything to change for you next year. Maybe you should try playing with some fresh content and thus tracking hot trends for that. But other than that, just keep on!

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker

For 2012 I suggest that people should build websites that people want to link to.

Aaron Wall

Google continues to bias the algorithms toward brands. As Google promotes brands then in many cases you might find using one of those promoted platforms offers a higher ROI than building out sites from scratch. If you look in the SERPs across a wide selection of keywords you will see that many people are building business models based on being the eHow of Facebook or the eHow of Youtube. In addition to that low level sort of stuff, one can list their products for sale on sites like eBay, Amazon or Etsy.

Neil Patel

Stop building links too quickly. If you grow at too fast of a pace, you’ll find that it becomes really hard to achieve top rankings. In 2012, slow and steady will actually win the race. Don’t go after quantity, go after quality links.

Justin Briggs

I’d keep a look out for the growth of entity specific search algorithms, with a focus on building a brand, building out AgentRank/AuthorRank, and citations for “real world” items, such as specific products, locations, movies, songs, etc. I think increased brand detection, rel author, the social graph, and schema are early stages of this style of ranking algorithms. Search engines are moving beyond page and domain level algorithms and becoming increasingly sophisticated at understanding entities / objects.

Tom Critchlow

Focus on user engagement. I think marketers will get a lot more aware of user retention and loyalty and that Google will publicly discuss how they reward these metrics by measuring brand loyalty and search history. Whether it’s that exact metric or not, I think we’ll finally see a slight weakening of link-based metrics and more emphasis put on social/user metrics.

Gianluca Fiorelli

I would strongly suggest in implementing the rel=author and rel=publisher tags, hence using Google+.
In fact, I consider that the “author rank” is going to be one of the most important factors for Google in order to discriminate authoritative sites in the next months, as it will “identify” what authors and publishers sites are really popular both in the social and link graph.

It is my firm conviction that SEO and Social Media are going to merge in many aspects, and those rel are going to be tool Google will use (alongside others signals) to do that merge.

As a consequence, that means that sites will need to finally embrace what we call “Inbound Marketing”, spending less time with old classic tactics (which will still have their importance though, even if reduced IMO) and strategically planning a real content marketing plan, which will need to focus on the users needs, and without forgetting where their users spend time: on search (SEO) and social networks (SMO).

To conclude, my best tip is: SEOs, if you want to rank well in the years to come, you must become Inbounders; use data and code like SEO, communicate like Social Media Specialists and plan content as Content strategists.

Stephan Spencer

One important new area of focus is enhancing your Google listings via rich snippets. Focus in particular on marking up videos. Very few companies are taking advantage of this. I expect that Google will, over time, introduce additional types of rich snippets, in particular, ones that will help promote Google+. Think about such things as Google Hangouts and public Circles showing up as rich snippets in the search results.

Marcus Tandler

Become a Brand (or at least look like one…). Be Social (just don´t spam and annoy people). For any given term, Google doesn´t really want to rank those sites the best, which do the best SEO – Google wants to rank sites, which are the best result for the user – Be one of those sites, be the best result for the user for all the keywords you´re targeting!

Dennis Goedegebuure

Link & anchor text diversity. Any backlink profile of your site needs to be natural and diverse. This has already been important in 2011, but will be getting more important as algorithms become smarter. This includes having a natural follow vs no-follow ratio in backlinks.

Scott Polk

Concentrate on Social Signals that the search engines look at from trusted sources. The NSTIC is going to change things – Google and Bing will give more weight to signals from trusted sources … Google Plus/Profiles, etc.

Trond Lyngbø

All traffic is not equal. Small businesses realize this. Instead of targeting high volume keywords, they will focus more on local SEO strategies that not only attract customers into stores, but also ensure they’ll spend money. Conversion, and not just traffic, will be king.

SEO experts will help businesses discover ‘customer intent’ as they search the Web, to target long tail keywords that address customers’ needs, and do it while communicating their values and USP. They will measure ROI and long term profitability over visitor counts, or search rankings.

Paradoxically, this lowers expenses, since higher quality traffic means better conversion to sales, lesser competition, and reduced advertising costs.

A twist that further boosts local SEO effectiveness is ‘social optimization’. Location-based targeting that focuses on prospective customers where they already gather online, and communicates with them using the right tone and approach, gets explosively more powerful when combined with ‘social marketing’, where friends vote up a product through Facebook likes, or a friend’s ‘customer reviews’ show up on search engine results pages or social media platforms.

Those will be the ‘big wins’ in 2012 and beyond, I think. We’ll see this being the year when ‘search’ and ‘social’ meld together into a future of Social Search.

Russ Jones

Start using metrics to make decisions religiously. Half the battle is being efficient with your marketing dollars. You should know how valuable every link is that you attempt to acquire, how much closer it brings you to overcoming your competitor, and how much it costs relative to the potential traffic it will bring in.

Multi-site strategy. There is absolutely no reason all your eggs should be in the same basket. The only algo-update-proof SEO strategy for your site is to have more sites.

2. What SEO Techniques Should We Stop Using In 2012?

Rand Fishkin

Folks have talked a lot about Google’s webspam team negating the value of a lot of “article marketing” link sources. If I were a betting man, I’d say the next large-scale link spam devaluation algo they’ll launch will be in that realm (and thus, I’d avoid the practice). I did a whiteboard friday earlier this year noting that article marketing is mostly a scam, even though there are times when it can work. I expect to see those “working instances” drop even further.

Of course, that’s not to say that good practices in similar fields like guest blogging, white hat comment marketing and the like aren’t still great techniques.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Stop buying exact-match domains just to rank for long-tail keywords. One or two are fine, and domain keywords still matter, but Google is turning down the volume, and the days where you could register 100 domains and link them all to yourself are gone. You’re wasting time and money on a tactic that will eventually crash and burn.

Will Critchlow

I’ve noticed the web spam team using article marketing more and more as their go to example of low quality link building. I have to assume that means they are talking about it a lot in their meetings…

Danny Dover

I recommend you stop basing your day-to-day efforts on “change over time” metrics and start to move toward cohort (preferably tied to an event like sign ups) based metrics. That said, keep the “change over time” graphs for your boss, cohorts are confusing and “up and to the right” graphs are much simpler to showcase your work.

Bas van den Beld

Stop looking at things from your own perspective and start looking from a users perspective.

Ann Smarty

You should have stopped them long before 2012 but if you haven’t yet, here they are:

• Wasting your time on directory submissions (there are just a couple of them still worth the time and the money, like BOTH and Directory Journal);
• Wasting your time on article marketing (better try guest blogging instead);
• Wasting your time on on-site optimization myths (like focusing on keyword density and trying to nofollow all your external links);
• Wasting your time on trying to cheat rather than investing in quality and long-term approach!

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker:

I suggest that people should stop building websites for search engines and start building websites for people.

Aaron Wall

Anything which has a high upfront cost structure without either building brand signals or offering immediate returns is suspect at this point. You not only have latent algorithmic risks from things like the Panda update, but also the fact that Google will scrape & re-purpose as much as they can to launch their own thin arbitrage sites (hotel finder, Google Advisor, product search, flight search, Google places, YouTube, etc.) and preferentially place those at or near the top of the search results.

Look at what Google has done in these verticals. Unless you are in a micro-niche that they view as a waste of time they will eventually try the same in your vertical.

In many cases the parasite will kill the host. Look how many of the yellow page companies have been through bankruptcy.

Neil Patel

SEOs should stop using article spinning and directory submission services. Sure you may see a bit of an increase in rankings, but it doesn’t really help that much. Instead you should focus on building high quality links.

Justin Briggs

From a search quality perspective, I’d tread more carefully with off-topic, inaccurate, and low quality infographics. It’s certainly on Google’s radar. I’m a big fan of infographics, but they’ve worked too well, which has lead to a lot sites and SEO shops just pumping out bad infographics. This will certainly cause a relevancy problem for Google (if it isn’t already), by ranking sites not on their quality, but on their ability to get a lot of infographic links. A number of lower quality affiliate sites and lead gen sites are able to acquire links from hundreds of domains by putting up an infographic on their domain. We’ve seen something similar with widgets back in 2008. I’m not critizing the technique, because I’ve used off-topic linkbait, but you have to be careful when balancing the link profile and creating something defensible.

Tom Critchlow

Article marketing. I doubt many people are still using it anyway but if you are I really think you should stop!

Gianluca Fiorelli

I don’t think SEOs should really stop using any old classic techniques in 2012, for the simple reason that they probably will work still. But surely, as I said before, SEOs should start to spend less time and energy with them. I am thinking especially of techniques like Article Marketing, that has been reduced in spinning articles in hundreds of article marketing sites, which mostly have been penalized by Panda (therefore does not drive that much traffic), and whose links are really bad quality once. Better to spend the time invested in article marketing in creating more quality content for your site and then promoting it with inbound marketing actions.

Stephan Spencer

Stop focusing on exact match keyword-rich domain names.

Marcus Tandler

Stay away from (exact match) keyword links – be glad about every link you´re getting, but don´t obsess about the anchor text.

Dennis Goedegebuure

Outing websites.

Scott Polk

Antiquated Link Building, Article Marketing, You really need to think about the future and plan strategies around where you think the search engines will be heading. It is time to stop chasing the dragon and be proactive.

Trond Lyngbø

Social signals synergizing with search is powerful because it builds trust. We rely more on word of mouth and a friend’s recommendation, over a faceless company’s marketing campaign.

But a disturbing trend is emerging, as companies and professionals endorse black-hat SEO tactics like selling Google+ likes, posting fake customer reviews, and building dozens of dodgy profiles across online communities in an attempt to cheat and lie their way to the top of search rankings. I don’t like how this evolves.

Attempting to “build trust” through lying is just wrong! It has got to stop. I’ve always advised against black hat SEO. As a consultant, it’s important for me to know how these tactics work, but I would never suggest thinking that you can outsmart Google. That could end up a disaster.

A better strategy would be to embrace SEOnomics, rooted in economical leverage of SEO through understanding the psychology of your prospects. That’s the kind that will pay off handsomely in the long run.

Russ Jones

Renting text links. Yes, they can still work, but there is hardly a single link out there that you can’t acquire on a permanent basis for less than 1 year’s pay. Yes, it will take more leg work, but at the end of the year you will have a great link profile that you don’t have to keep paying for every month.

What are your best SEO tips?!

What do you think will be more important in 2012, and what should we stop doing? Feel free to post your best SEO tips. Follow me on twitter, RSS and Google+ if you want more SEO tips in 2012. Happy New Year!

Updated: Added answers from Russ Jones.

Let’s look at the links

As you can see they have lots of links, not just from hidden links. This could make it hard for Google to pick up on the hidden links.

They have 3234 root domains using templates with hidden links. That is a lot of links!

High-profile clients

Many of the domains are high-profile and trusted sites. I found hidden links on sites like a Nobel winner and a Prime Minister. They have 6% of their backlinks from .edu domains.

Link hidden inside a H1 with a div

The code looks strange, right? Not sure why they did this if they didn’t know hidden links was against Google quality guidelines. Feel free to comment on this.

Takeaways from this case

Always look closely on any template or plugin you use. If you are going to reuse it for clients make sure there are no hidden links or other sneaky stuff going on in the code. Hidden links can work and give you a toolbar PageRank 9. It would be interesting to know what Matt Cutts and his team thinks about this..

Photo by Juan Nosé, on Flickr

WordPress takes care of pretty much everything out of the box. But one of the few things you need to fix on a new install is the URL settings (permalinks). Making this blog, it got me thinking. Is the %postname% format always the best option? 

Choosing the perfect URL structure in WordPress can get tricky. Especially with the new Google freshness update. Here is why.

The ideal URL

• Semantic
• Descriptive
• Robot and user-friendly
• As short as possible

More info on optimal URL design: SEOmoz, Google

Planning your structure

If you plan on building a simple site with static pages you can just go with %postname% and you will have the perfect setup.

Plan your structure as if you had to write it in stone. Once you pick one, thats the one your stuck with. Make it very obvious and predictable such as apple.com/iphone/ (see? I knew the URL just by guessing).

How will you use categories? If you plan on putting one blog posts in more than one category, you should not use category name in you URL structure.

Taking a closer look at these options there are some good choices and some that should be avoided.

The default (The ugly)

Tag: none
Preview: http://edgyseo.com/?p=123

The ugly is not optimal because it’s not user-friendly. If you want a short URL for sharing use a URL shortening service. Or make your own.

Including date

Tag: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Preview: http://edgyseo.com/2011/11/17/sample-post/

The problem with dates in the URL is that you can’t re-use the URL without changing the URL. That’s not the biggest problem with this option. Think about it, if you see a URL that is 6 months old, would you click it over a 1 week old URL? Probably not. I don’t hate this option for personal type blogs or breaking news sites.

Before using dates you should know about the Google Freshness update:

“Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.” - Amit Singhal, Google, 11/7/11

Pros

Easy for users to find blog posts by year, month and day. See how it’s used by Mashable and TechCrunch.

Great for breaking news. Could be a signal for Google that the content is really fresh.

Cons

In the second position of the screenshot above Mashable has written a very relevant guide that could still be useful even if it’s from 2009. (To avoid date in URLs for guides they could use custom taxonomy for guides.)

If they there were to update this blog post from 2009 they would need to make a new URL and “lose” some of the link value. Or they would have to keep the old URL.

When a post is getting old the date in URL is a negative signal for users (lower CTR% from Google search results) and for Google freshness algorithm.

Numeric

Tag: /archives/%post_id%
Preview: http://edgyseo.com/archives/123

The worst option ever. Please don’t do this.

Postname

Tag: /%postname%/
Preview: http://edgyseo.com/sample-post/

Example.com/postname/ is a classic and it’s a pretty safe choice. Make sure you write good slugs (URLs) with your target keywords in them when you use this option.

Pros

• You get really short and user-friendly URLs
• Good if you have many categories. You don’t have to worry about putting a post in the wrong category

Cons

• It doesn’t properly reflect your site structure
• User’s can’t easily go back to the main category by removing the post name from the URL

Category and postname

Tag: /%category%/%postname%/
Preview: http://edgyseo.com/category/sample-post/

When using this option I recommend removing /category/ from the category URL base (default category link is domain.com/category/category-name/). It makes it more user-friendly.

Pros

• Users and robots can easily understand that this is X blog post in Y category.
• Your URL structure will signal to Google that all the posts in x category is about the same topic and build authority. But remember site structure as well (like Dr. Pete says).
• Works well with breadcrumbs and natural navigation.
• Reflects your site structure.
• Is way better for Web Analytics. You can make better reports when you filter by category.

Cons

• Not optimal for long category names like Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism
• Not optimal if you have many categories and put blog posts in more than one category
• You will need to fix your category URL path so that its example.com/seo and not example.com/category/seo/. Then you also can’t have a page and category with the same name.
• If you are making a blog and it’s in a subfolder like /blog/ urls can get too long.

What if I already have the wrong settings?

If you have an established WordPress site with another URL structure you should not change it, if you have many incoming links and social likes. If it’s new and got a horrible structure I would change it.

Hey wait a minute.. what about performance issues?

There are some performance issues with starting a URL structure with category or post name, but it’s being fixed. Use a cache plugin (you should anyway) and it will be fixed in WordPress version 3.3.

Other great resources for optimal URL design

• Using Permalinks on wordpress.org
• Appthemes permalink structure
• WP Beginner on URLs
• Efficient WordPress permalinks
• Yoast on SEO URLs

Do you agree? I would love your input on this subject.