Undercover SEO

[Full Disclosure: This post is about Google & the stock market. I currently hold Google stocks in my portfolio. This is by no means investment advice. It’s just my response to a recent article.]

Tech Crunch recently posted an article the other day about Google stock options dropping in value by a whopping 60%! I thought this was an interesting angle about the recent stock market crash. When most of us investors were worried about the general decline of the economy, and swooping in to pick up some bargains. It seems that one of the tech industries strongest players may have an Achilles heel.

Although analysts have downgraded Google’s stock to a ‘hold’, I am optimistic about Google’s overall performance in this downturn. Especially since PPC advertising is one of the most effective forms of direct advertising there is today. Logically if there are any shifts in marketing budgets, I anticipate that much more of those budgets would be allocated to measurable marketing activities such as PPC.

However, Tech Crunch may have found a small, yet concerning angle. Google has declined approximately 58% from their 52 week high at $747/stock. That makes some of the employee stock options either near or below their strike price, making them practically worthless. Which could be a potential cause for some Google employees to leave the company.

But before you dump your Google stocks and consider Google a dud, consider this…

• Google is still the most dominant player in search today. Even though analysts predict a plateauing effect in search revenue in the coming year. Let’s face it, Google still has roughly 60-70% of the search engine market.
• If Google employees left, where would they go? There are some tough times ahead and this is probably not the best time to start job hunting. Start up money is drying up and most companies are cutting back on some new headcount until the economy stabilizes.
• Google stocks are bound to pick up once the economy stabilizes. Google is still a quality company and once the market picks up the strongest players in their industries will rise up as well.

If this happened to a lesser company with really poor underlying fundamentals then sure, a 60% drop in stock options should ring some alarm bells. But this is Google, not (ahem Yahoo). So no, even though on the surface it may look like this stock option issue might be a concern, in reality maybe not so much?

I’ve admittedly been very conservative when targeting keywords per page. Typically I limit it to one or two keyword phrases per page. Simply b/c of the keyword proximity and challenges of incorporating various keyword terms into a single web page. But SEOMoz has finally clarified this (at least from their expert perspective) on how many keywords to target.

According to Rand, it can be as much as 15 key phrases! It’s all about clustering terms that make sense together and have overlaps. Finally it’s not about keyword stuffing or just blatantly dropping keywords into your copy, this is where creativity counts! Having a background in copy writing doesn’t hurt either.

Note to self: brush up on your creative writing.

Recently I bought a whole schwack load of domains lately in the hopes of developing them in the future. These were never before registered domains. I was curious to see if there would be any type-in traffic to the domains so I setup Google Analytics in the hopes that the domains had a built in audience.

When checking into one of my domains I noticed that I had gotten a couple of visits (not much, but hey its a visit). Funny enough the traffic source was Google (organic).

After looking into it further, my site could be found on Google using the keywords in the title. (Woohoo!)

I suspect that Google Search included my site when I signed up for Google Analytics. I setup my sites to share their data.
If you’re curious, of all the domains I purchased I only setup Google Analytics on about 6 of them. These domains have no backlinks from other sites. I could only verify that 3 of the 6 were indexed by Google. As for the other domains that I didn’t setup with Analytics, they’re not getting any Google love at the moment.

So if you have a new site that needs to get index. Forget formally submitting to Google or linking from an existing site. Just setup Google Analytics with data sharing and you’re good to go.

[Update: Since posting this Google’s tightened up Analytics. Can’t get sites indexed using the same method.]

I’ve been contemplating writing a blog for some years now and never could commit to a specific topic. But since I started search marketing a couple of years back I’ve been addicted to all the awesome search blogs out there like SEOMoz, PPC Hero, SEO Book, Conversation Marketing, and the list goes on…

So this is my small contribution to the search community. For most everyday folks they have no idea what search marketing is…but luckily you guys get it.

So keep tabs on this blog, and hopefully you’ll find the stuff I post useful or at least entertaining.

Enjoy!