A few weeks  ago @etnainteractive asked me a question on twitter about HCards and Microformats, and do they matter for SEO. I’m going to explain what they are for those of you who don’t know what thay is. I’m also going to be taking a bigger look at address data and SEO implications.Ok HCards are supposed to be the web page equivilant of VCards for email. They are supposed to provide properly tagged information that can be read by spiders, crawlers, browsers, toolbars or a myriad of other devices. If you go to the official HCard Microformat wiki website and try to learn about HCards, your head will explode … really. It’s so complex, non intuitive, and written up in the stratosphere, only a PHD and patent attorney could love it … really. Thankfully I’m here to cut through the BS and give it to you straight, because it’s really simple. Here’s an example of a name and address with the proper HCard formatting tags:

Doesn’t look that different does it … the real magic is behind the code

<div id="hcard-John-Henry-Smith" class="vcard"><span class="given-name">John</span> <span class="additional-name">Henry</span> <span class="family-name">Smith</span>
Big Wig Corporation LLC<a class="email" href="mailto:jhsmith@gmail.com"> </a></div>
<div class="vcard"><a class="email" href="mailto:jhsmith@gmail.com">jhsmith@gmail.com</a></div>
<div id="hcard-John-Henry-Smith" class="vcard">
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">123 Main Street<span class="locality"> Mountain View</span>, <span class="region">CA</span>, <span class="postal-code">94043</span>
<span class="country-name">United States</span></div>
</div>
<div class="tel">650-555-1212</div>
</div>

You can see each of the elements has a class applied to it like “street-address”, “tel”, “given-name” and it all sits inside of a big “vcard” div class. These names are standardized, you can’t make up your own as you go along. Stick with the standard names and anyone who builds an HCard reader into any of their tools will able to parse your data. If you want to see a full list of all the HCard tags I suggest using the HCard tool to build a sample and copying those tags.

Onto part two and the real question, does this help your SEO efforts. After looking at different data I wasn’t able to see any ranking boost I could even loosely connect to the implementation of HCard usage.

That said I don’t think HCards are something you should ignore either. If you are working on any local address driven project implementing HCard tags is something I would put on the long term project list or on the “to do” list next time you touch the programming. At some point there will be enough critical mass and search engines will start to give it some small amount of weight and it’s better you be prepared and ahead of the curve, than playing catchup when that happens.

The next logical question is what are some ways I can use address data to get a boost in my rankings, if I don’t have my address on my website should I put it there, and what about the address on website registration information.

Going back to the 2006 Google Librarian Newsletter where they talk give hints to Librarians on how to know whether a website is trustworthy, they hint around the concept of address, telephone and other physical real world “markers”.

If you have a verified Google Profile, you’ll know one of the methods they use to verify is phone number. I have multiple phone numbers, they have been around for years and Google knows about them, but the only one they would verify me on was my home number, which happens to be in Google’s database with my home address. The same is true for a verified Google Knol profile. Faking an address won’t work anymore, they know a real address from a fake one.

If you’re going to put an address on a website, I’d suggest putting only one per page and put it in a normal format (name, street address, city, state, zip) no mystery meat formats from designers who are experimenting with visual nonconfomity. If you have more than one location put the main address on all the pages and give each address their own page. I’ve seen much better local one box results when you do. This applies to companies with a handful of locations, have a lot of locations and it’s a different set of rules.

Lastly let’s talk about private registration information. I know there are a lot of valid and legitimate reasons for having registration information hidden, but I’ve seen a lot of indications google doesn’t like it. Perhaps I should clarify that, it’s not that google doesn’t like it hiden it’s that they do like when the domain registration information matches the information on the website. Can’t show you any examples but go look for yourself on big KWD local searches, it’s not a 100% thing but it is a  preferance. You can spend hours, days,weeks, and months protesting and debating how “wrong” google is about it or you can adapt, overcome and give them what they want. The choice is up to you.

So let’s wrap this up into a few actionable points:

• Put only one address on a page if possible
• For multiple locations give each location thier own address
• Try to match domain registration address information with on site information
• Make hCard formatting a rainy day project in the near future

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

HCards, Microformats and Address Data does it Matter for SEO

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So while I was away I made it onto the Most Influential Online Marketers of 2008 list. Not that I don’t appreciate everyone who was nice enought to vote for me, and all the hard work that went into putting a list like that together, but I wonder about the culture we create and want to live in where people strive to be on lists like this and use them of some measure of personal or professional validation.People who set out to make sure they are known by the “right” people or make it onto the “right” lists worry me. Sure it’s cool to be a celebrity and get invited to all the cool parties, but it’s much better if you actually did something other than stroking the egos of the right people to get there. Let’s face it who wants to be “that guy” who poeple invited because they had to, not because he was interesting or informative (and I use he to mean everyone male and female not just men so don’t be hatin’ on me).

So please don’t be playing the fame game and like Loren Feldman says don’t be obsessing over personal branding, instead focus on doing good work. At then end of the day making onto some list and being internet famous is a waste of time unless you can figure out how to make some money with it, because it’s “tough to pay the bills with a wallet full of famous” (credit Lee Odden).

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

So I Made it Onto Some Silly List

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We’re getting close to approaching critical mass on friend feed, and with twitter’s horrible performance and feature removal yes I think it’s time people start looking at friend feed.

if you’re interested you can follow me there Michael Gray on Friend Feed

Feel free to drop a link to your profile in the comments, spam from low cost credit card debt reductions with cheap viagra online will be ruthlessly culled

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Follow Me on Friend Feed – Yes it’s Time

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One of the questions I get asked frequently is “which search conferences should I attend”. Seeing as conferences end up costing you between $3500-$5000 a pop when you include travel, lodging and meals I thought I’d share my experience.

Year 1
if you’ve absolutely never been to search conference before start with one of the smaller shows like SES Chicago, or SES Toronto. Sometimes the big shows can be a bit overwhelming for a newcomer.

SMX East or SMX West – These shows are solid places to start learning what you need to know and need to start networking. OK there hasn’t technically been and SMX East yet, but I’ve got a hunch it will be similar to SMX West.

SES NY or SES San Jose – These shows are much bigger than the smaller SES shows, they also have different speakers, and are a completely different conference experience.

Year 2
SMX East or SMX West – Whichever show you went to last year go to the other this year.

SES NY or SES San Jose – Again which ever one you went to last year go to the other one this year

Pubcon – Pubcon has a much more in the trenches feel than the other shows. The majority of the speakers at Pubcon are actively involved in owning, running, or managing sites, their knowledge is much more hands on, as opposed to “agency” folks at the other shows.

Year 3
Ok by this point you are conference veteran and probably have your favorite shows. You also have seen most of the speakers more than once and you know who gives new presentations each time and who … umm … recycles.

SMX Advanced – By this point you know enough to make the most of what you can learn here, and you can also network with people who are just unreachable at the big shows.

Then I’d go back to your two favorite shows, Either of the SMX, SES, or a Pubcon show. Once you’ve been more than once you’ll really have good idea how much you can learn.

Year 4+
Ok this is the year where you can get the most out of the niche shows. Shows like SMX Mobile, SMX Social, or SES Travel, whichever makes the most sense for you.

If your budget can support two shows pick the two you liked the from SMX, SES, or Pubcon. The next year go to the show you skipped last year, working with a rotation.

Should you go to every show? Unless you are speaking or doing some heavy networking that leads to lucrative deals at a certain point it’s hard to justify the expense. But IMHO you should be going to 1-3 shows a year, there are always new topics, and be in the loop with your peers.

If you really want to get the most out of conferences network with people. Really sometimes the information and ideas you get at the parties or bar is just as valuable as what you get in the sessions. Really. I know it’s hard and scary to talk to new people especially if you’re shy, but make the effort it will really make for a better conference. For more on how to network check out SEO Conference Tips and Tricks and 15 Ways to Be a SEO Conference Douchebag by Stuntdubl.

Don’t believe me … sometimes being it the right spot at the right time you can get three people you probably could never afford to hire at the same time who will keep talking as long as you pick up their bar tab. Worst scenario if you cant get to a conference check out Outspoken Media’s coverage of SEO conferences.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

What Search Engine Conferences Should I Attend

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So I’m cruising through twitter this AM and I get a message from DaveR about a job he thinks he’s found for me. Now my first thought was Dave sent me a link to the Disney Chief Magic Officer job, which is very cool, but more of a ceremonial position more than anything else. However what he actually sent was a more interesting, more frustrating, and to be quite honest … insulting.

The job that Dave sent was for an SEO Manager at Walt Disney . I make no secret of my love for all things Disney, I think it’s cool when people send me interesting Disney links, and I’m even on a one man campaign to get Danny to hold an SMX show in Orlando, so he can finally get to experience what a real Disney park is like, not that tiny beta version in California (inside joke).

Now I’m not really looking for a new job, but it looks interesting so I scan down the page. Looks like I’m fully qualified for the job, until we hit that last line:

Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent … REALLY …. WTF?

Now I feel I’m a reasonably intelligent person, but the path that my life took led me to graduating near the bottom of my high school class, and taking some college courses, but I never got a degree. To be honest I don’t think most people need a degree. To be even more blunt, one of the major problems with schools is they stifle and punish creativity and original thinking, and reward mindless robotic compliance and “fitting in”, but I digress.

Here’s the bottom line, getting an education or being and educated person has zero correlation to being smart, getting things done, or making things happen. However we’re stuck in some bullshit bingo cycle, of college graduates perpetuating the myth you need a college education to get somewhere.

So Terry Cox, Search Engine Marketing Manager of the Walt Disney Company, perhaps it’s time to rethink your approach to hiring people, and find the people who are the most qualified, and not those who perpetuate the status quo …

ps (wonder if Matt Cutts is recommending me for the job now and pulling strings to get Terry’s email, figuring if I’m a happy camper working at Disney I’ll stop picking on Google so much …)

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

DaveR Twitter and the Disney Job I’ll Never Get

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Vanessa recently spoke about Twitter By Phone, Now With Default Scoble, and I agree with her it’s a problem, however what we really need to do is deal with the cause of the problem not the symptom.

The problem is the age old one facing bloggers, excessive cat blogging or in this case cat twittering. People really need to go back and get a grip on the 80/20 rule of focus originally published by Nick Wilson on Performancing. While you should go read it for those of you who are lazy, basically it says you need to keep at least 80% of your posts on topic and no more than 20% of your posts should be off topic. Not to pick on Scoble as my buddy Jason Calacanis is the same way. I may want to know what they feel about Techmeme (scoble on techmeme and calacanis on techmeme) but I don’t want to know what conversations they have with their neighbors or what movie they saw. Again I’m ok with a little personal life entering into twitter, I do it myself, but when your twitter feed loses focus, it loses relevancy, and value. I guess it comes back to the yet unsolved mixture of personal and professional information intermixing with no way to sort it. If Pamcakes wants it so does everyone else.

Lastly let’s discuss Guy Kawasaki and his twitter feed. Umm dude … your spamming … really. I want to follow you on twitter and see what you have to say, not every single item that gets auto posted from Truemors. I’m ok with people twittering when they make a blog post, see Barry Schwartz posting Daily Search Cap Roundups, but I don’t want tweets that aren’t from you directly (especially hundreds of them). What you really need is a role account for truemors, oh but nobody would probably “follow” that (and you wouldn’t get traffic from it), and Web 2.0 companies don’t get role accounts either, they think you are a spammer if you need more than one account or manage/run more than one website.

So until someone figures out the filtering of personal data, you need to decide do you want to publish “information tweets” or “cat tweets” and stick with it, cause I’m dropping the “cat” people in the next week or so …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

We Don’t Need Less Robert Scoble We Just a More Filtered and Relevant One

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if you’ve been experiencing an unusually high vote count to get to the homepage or are getting buried more often than not in the past week drop me an email, and let’s compare notes.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Digg Oddities and Bury Brigade

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I was up late last night watching as Digg’s citizens fiddled while Digg burned, here’s my opinion on the matter.

I’m an opponent of DRM in fact I outright think it stinks, but we operate in a civilization where we need laws. Without those laws we will descend in to chaos and are governed by mob rule in some Ayn Rand inspired dystopia.

Here’s the background a code to break the HD DVD encryption that was already available online was posted on Digg. The lawyers found out got wind of it and fired up the nastygrams. Digg did the responsible thing and started to remove them from the system.

The users revolted, they felt this form of censorship was unacceptable. To demonstrate this dissatisfaction they created hundreds of stories containing the DVD code and flooded Digg with them. At one point between midnight and 2AM they had the entire homepage with 100% HD DVD stories, I have a screen shot but I’m not posting it for obvious reasons. Soon there after Kevin rose posted on Had this to say

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin Rose I give you street cred for standing up to the man and fighting the good fight, but this really shows why you need grownups around, preferably ones with years of business experience. Kevin has a fiduciary responsibility to the venture capitalists who poured millions of dollars into Digg to protect that investment. Making statements like “If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying” shows a lack of experience and short sightedness that goes hand in hand with youthful fool headed stubbornness (trust me I’ve been there and lived it). Venture Capitalists are in this to make money, not to make a stand against DRM or other big business, I can’t see how they can continue to support him and leave him as the man in charge.

What last night also proved is the administrators and silent and invisible moderators at Digg aren’t in charge. They were unable to stop the systems as the users gamed it for their own short sighted self interest and amusement. They fiddled while Rome was burning. This ochlocracy is something everyone who spends time on Digg has experienced, and last night was nothing new. However what was shocking is level it reached, this one went way beyond 11.

While the Diggers may be congratulating themselves on a hard fought victory, it will be short lived. Basically they set their own homes on fire and burned them to ground to prove the point they were in charge. When the “suits” come in I fully expect there to be some changes and the power and freedom the users had will start to be throttled back. The simple reason, no one wants to advertise in the middle of a riot, and without the advertising dollars, there’s nothing to pay for the hardware and bandwidth the diggers consume like a plague of locusts.

May you live in interesting times …

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

The Day the Digging Died

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Since I received a few ‘hey are you ok it’s been more than 2 days since you blogged emails’ Thought I’d let you know I’m alive and doing well just buried under a mountain of work with some looming deadlines.

I was also just appointed moderator of the Social Media Tagging and Bookmarking Optimization forum at WebmasterWorld. It’s a new forum and it’s just getting off the ground, but feel free to stop by and post your questions or comments.

I’ve been a member on WMW since 2002 when I wandered into to ASP forum with some noob questions and some helpful folks set me straight. I can also say that WMW was a very big part of helping me learn the skills I needed to leave my 9 to 5 day job and go out on my own, so I’m glad to be in a position where I can hopefully do the same for others.

Tags: wmw, webmasterworld, seo, social bookmarking

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

WebmasterWorld Social Media Tagging and Bookmarking Optimization

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Since I was recently deputized an officer of the Facebook SEO, SMO, SEM group (my real title is NSFW) I was informed my wall comments were lacking in diversity. Since well I am a whore and not in any way too proud or above begging, consider this an invitation to be my request being my friend on facebook. Ok it actually helps if I know who you are, but I’m flexible. Also bonus point if you write on my wall.

What are the benefits of being my facebook friend … well as my crackberry addict friend told me recently, in her gentle and supporting way “dude you’re addicting to poking”. Also Lisa can tell you the benefits of being on my list of stalkee’s (how funny will it be when BruceClay.com starts ranking for the keyword “Lisa”) and I’ve even been known to give facebook gifts every so often, especially to my BFF.

Sure we have a lot of fun but there have been at least a handful of interesting posts back there. Also since we are absolutely free to hold you up for public ridicule if you have the idiotic idea to try and spam back there the signal to noise ratio is pretty high, so c’mon in you know you want to give it a try and here’s my profile if you want to be my friend.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Facebook Begging

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