New Orleans Internet Marketing » Search Engine Optimization

Affiliates Go “Cha Ching” with Bing

Chris H. — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:37:15 +0000

I was just browsing through some of Bing’s search results for “dedicated server” because I have a site in that niche these days, and I came upon something pretty interesting:

If you notice, the last search result for LiquidWeb’s homepage is indexed with an affiliate tag! I wonder how much commission “sdawkins” is getting off of Bing for this? How many search phrases is it showing up for? Must be nice!

If you look at the backlinks for the URL, it’s nothing but link directories and such. Lucky guy. Bing needs to work on their canonical URL issues here. It wouldn’t hurt for LiquidWeb to have a good SEO on staff either. I can almost guarantee you won’t see this in Google.

BlogCatalog.com Gets Toolbar PageRank Penalty from Google

inlayout — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:23:07 +0000

In the past I’ve done a few posts about PageRank that may help newcomers understand the difference between “actual” PageRank and “Toolbar” PageRank, along with some of the anomalies you will see if you look at the Google Toolbar for a long time (no, not visions of Mary either, just the little green bar).

One of the things I discussed in my post “Anomalies with Google’s ‘Toolbar PageRank,’” was the fact the sometimes search results will look strange when there is a site with low “toolbar PageRank” ranking high for competitive keywords. This is sometimes due to the possibility that Google has penalized the website’s “toolbar” PR for selling links.

This appears to be what happened to Blog Catalog today. Blog Catalog used to have a PR 6 or 7 homepage, and many interior category pages that were PR5, but if you check today, you will see that they’ve been bumped down to a PR4. Is Blog Catalog really selling links? You be the judge – have a look at the top right of the “Health” section page (click here).

Will this affect BlogCatalog’s search engine rankings? Probably not.

Although it has been argued both ways, I am of the opinion that it WILL affect the “link juice” that gets passed down to all of the blogs listed in their directory.

301 Redirect Your Domain w/ Apache Mod Rewrite Keeping File Path Intact

Chris H. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:26:47 +0000

I’m posting this because I Googled it to death this past weekend trying to find the code for it, and it was nowhere to be found. I’m positive I’ve used it before in the past too, but the code was not in any of my old projects either. After hours of googling for what I knew was a simple mod rewrite for .htaccess, I submitted to defeat and asked (more like begged) an expert on the subject. Here was the problem:

301 Redirect every URL from www.domain1.com to the coresponding URL (keeping the trailing file path intact) on www.domain2.com, when both domains are being pulled from the same directory on the same server, and respecting URL canonicalization issues (www vs. non-www).

This should be a readily available mod rewrite written about on SEO blogs worldwide right? Wrong.

I offered to pay my expert for the consult, but he refused, probably laughing at the trivial request I submitted. So here it is – hopefully good ole Google will pick up this post so the next guy coming along will find this, no problem:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain2\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cut, paste into .htaccess file, use notepad, must have Apache server with mod rewrite enabled, works like a charm :) It worked the first time in fact, not like when I do a mod_rewrite and have to test it out 20 times to get it right!

Anomalies with Google’s “Toolbar PageRank”

inlayout — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:12:16 +0000

I wrote this because I was explaining PageRank to someone today, and I realized that my first post on PageRank didn’t do a good enough job of explaining some of the strange things you will see from time-to-time. I also added it into that post.

Anomalies with “Toolbar PageRank”
Another important aspect aspect to consider is that there are a few anomalies associated with the PageRank scale as it’s shown on the Google Toolbar. One is the fact that it’s only updated every quarter, and sometimes less often than that. Because of that, sites that are new, may take a while to get “Toolbar PageRank.” I’ve also seen a lot of cases where the initial toolbar PageRank was higher than what they ended up having in subsequent updates.

Another anomaly is the fact that the scale seems to change over time. If you think about it, it makes sense because the internet is constantly growing while the scale remains a number 1 – 10. That being said, it should follow that websites who were at one point a PR5, that don’t build links over time, will see a decrease in their PageRank as it’s displayed by the toolbar over time. This is something I’ve seen on older websites I own. I used to be able to get a PR5 from the toolbar with just a few hundred average links, whereas these days it takes significantly more link building effort to achieve the same toolbar PageRank. The “kicker” is that these “toolbar PageRank” changes may not be associated with loss in rankings at all.

It’s because of the concept of internet growth mentioned above, and penalties that I will discuss next, that I’ve often seen a website’s search rankings go up, even though their toolbar PageRank went down!

The last anomaly I should address about the toolbar is that occasionally you will find websites whose toolbar PageRank has been penalized. It’s something that is most often noticed when you’re looking at competitive search results, and you find it strange that the top results are all well-optimized web pages, yet one on top has a significantly lower PageRank than those beneath. While this can usually be attributed to on-page SEO factors, sometimes it’s because Google actually penalized the toolbar PageRank of the site because it was selling links at one point in time. The strange thing about these types of toolbar PageRank penalties is that they seem to only affect the toolbar and not the website’s actual search engine rankings. This would indicate that “actual PageRank” has not been affected. Sometimes these penalized websites can get their “toolbar PageRank” back through appeal, but that’s not always the case.

As you can see based on these anomalies, there are quite a few reasons that the toolbar may not be indicative of how a website ranks in the search engines.

How to Make PayPerPost an SEO Rocketship

inlayout — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:09:54 +0000

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost.

Use the PageRank Option
PPP has been pushing their “RealRank” and coming up with lots of excuses to make it seem like RealRank is great. The fact is, that the “RealRank” system is flooded with penalized PR0 blogs that Google knows are selling links. What do you think has a better chance of increasing your rankings, a blog known for selling links or one with decent PageRank that’s still under Google’s radar?

The good news is, that the bloggers are getting smarter about advertising the fact that they do paid posting. The ones who keep their PageRank aren’t linking back to PayPerPost or hosting their banners on their blogs.

Buy a Mixture of Different PageRank Posts
To make your campaigns look more natural to Google, don’t purchase all of your posts on blogs of the same PageRank. Try to mix things up as much as possible by using different campaigns targeting different PR blogs. If buying a lot of posts, spread them out over time also.

Require at Least 200 Words
Google values content, and a post with 200 words of relevant content looks more valuable and less like an ad than a 50 word post with a link to your website. You may have to pay more in order to get the posting opps taken this way, but it pays off in the long run.

Stay Away from Per-Post Disclosure
“This is a sponsored post,” is a dead giveaway to Google and visitors. You can avoid bloggers who disclose on a per-post basis by adding this line to your opportunity description:

**Bloggers, please do not take this opportunity if you disclose on a per-post basis.**

Generally, that works pretty well. Give the blogger a bad rating if they ignore it and disclose your paid post on that individual post.

Categories and Regions
It should go without saying that you should choose the most appropriate category for the blogs you want posts from. If you have trouble getting your opps taken though, you may want to try another campaign using a different category if it’s appropriate.

Another helpful tip is to block out blogs from the free blogging services. While it looks more natural to have a little bit of both, if you allow the free services you will get a majority of blog posts hosted by those services. You can usually get all of your opps taken with blogs hosted on unique domain names if you offer the right amount of money. I usually block out all of the free blogging services. I also add these to the “other” exclusion box: i.ph, bravejournal.com, blogrox.com.

For regions, if you’re promoting an American website, exclude all of the other regions. Most of PPP’s bloggers are from the US, so it’s easy to get your opps taken from US bloggers.

Links (most important!)
Don’t be lazy. Create different anchor text for every single link. While this can be very time consuming, it makes your posts look much more natural. Try to think of ways to write your anchor text so that bloggers can easily fit the wording into the post. Use articles, prepositions, and pronouns around your keywords to make it look more natural, and don’t link them all to the same page on your website. Match up keyword anchor text with content on your pages.

Example:
Keyword You’re Targeting: Blue Widgets
Anchor Text to Use: blue widgets, these blue widgets, some widgets that are blue, I found these widgets, website with blue widgets, check out these blue widgets, page about blue widgets, etc.

Remember the goal is to make the posts look natural, like the blogger likes your page and is recommending it.

Other Important Tips
Don’t use PPP as the sole form of link building for your website. Combine it with many other forms of link building to give your site a more “natural” looking link profile. Spread your posting opportunities over time to make it look like there is regular, ongoing buzz about your site in the blogosphere. PayPerPost can be an extremely effective SEO tool if used with these considerations.

The Downside
The downside to using PPP for SEO is that neither their system, nor the bloggers who write for them are perfect. Sometimes opps get taken by bloggers who don’t meet your PageRank requirements. I flag every one of these and complain about it; hopefully PPP will get the picture and fix this glitch one day. I’ve also had bloggers from regions that are excluded take opps they weren’t supposed to. As far as the bloggers go, sometimes you may get a few who are just bad writers, and there is nothing you can do about that. You also can’t control what the bloggers write, so there is the danger that some careless bloggers will post some misinformation just to get paid for a post. You can use their rating system to avoid poor writers, but that’s not perfect either.

Why Your SEO Campaign Should Include Outsourced Link Building

inlayout — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:25:43 +0000

There’s a lot of ways to get links for most SEO campaigns, but one thing I almost always do is hire some outsourced personnel who contact related websites asking them to link to the site we’re promoting from their “Resource” pages. This can be very time consuming work, that’s why most of the people I’ve met who do this are from India. The value you get for your dollar is very good in India. We pay these link builders anywhere from $5 – $50 for a link, and we get a one-time fee, permanent link from another website. Outsourcing companies, like OutsourcedLinkBuilding.com are getting more and more popular due to the cheap price of labor overseas. Outsourced Link Building dot com in particular, has secured tons of valuable links for me in the past. Granted, there are times when I wind up paying for a few I wish I hadn’t, but the overall service is incredible for the price you pay.

The value you get from one-time fee, permanent links is so great, because when you specify a decent part of your budget for that, the links really build up over time. So does your PageRank, and so do your rankings. I’ve found so many ways to get permanent links these days, that it’s rare that I rent links. To me, renting links (paying a monthly fee) is little different from pay-per-click advertising in that you’re renting your space at the top. Don’t rent! Own!

How to Change Domain Names and Keep Your Search Engine Rankings

inlayout — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:50:24 +0000

First let me say, that Google does not recommend changing domain names, and neither do I. My next disclaimer is that I can’t control what Google does (the classic SEO disclaimer that every long-term SEO has had to resort to at some point in time). So if you try this at home and it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault.

The internet marketing firm I work for recently ran into a problem that is likely to happen to anyone who names their firm after the partners – one partner left, and we had to change the name. So “Foreman & Pike Consulting” became “Reciprocal Consulting,” but that was the easy part. We had top search engine rankings in Google for “Internet Marketing Firm” and “Internet Marketing Firms,” which had been two productive keyword phrases. How were we going to change our domain name and retain our search rankings?

I’ve been doing SEO since 1998, so I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done (301 redirects) without looking anything up, but this was a big deal, and the other guys in the firm were depending on me! I’m the only SEO guy, and I needed to get it right!

What helped things out, was that I had done some research for a consulting job on this very thing not long ago, and I tried to find out what Google’s “official” recommendation was on the matter. Here are a few good snippets that I found:

From Google.com: If you have recently restructured your site or moved to a new domain, pages that previously performed well may now rank poorly. To avoid this, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.) For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt.
Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&query=301+redirect&topic=&type=

From Matt Cutts: Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later.
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/

Nothing new here for me, but at least I was armed with the official word on the matter from Google in case things went South. I could say “hey, we did what Google says to do!”

Here are the steps I took.

We made a new copy of the site, with all of the identical pages, only changing the name of the company, logo, and adding a page about the name change.

The new domain name was pointed to the new copy of the site.

We used Apache’s mod rewrite to 301 redirect the old site to the new. Each page on the old site redirected to the corresponding page on the new site.

We contacted all of the sites that linked to us, asking them to change the links to point to the new site, and we changed the links we had control over ourselves.

We watched the old site fall out of the search results for nearly 30 days and held our breath.

The other guys in the firm were curiously silent about our missing rankings for the whole 30 days, and the one time they mentioned it, I calmly said, “don’t worry, we did everything like Google says to do it, we should be back up in no time.” :)

Apx. 30 days after the switch, we started showing back up in our old positions (yeahhh!!!)

Looking back on it, I learned a few lessons.

I was really worried about duplicate content issues and having both sites live at the same time, so I used robots.txt to exclude Googlebot from the new site until I was ready to do the 301’s. This probably wasn’t a good idea with the way that Google handles duplicate content these days. I think the change would have even gone quicker had I let Google crawl the new site first.

We put out an SEO’d press release about the change. This was a good idea, it got us links and showed transparency in what we were doing.

We paid attention to trust factors with the new domain, we registered it for 10 years, used the same contacts as on the old domain, didn’t hide the registrant information using privacy protection, etc. These were all things that probably helped.

How to Use Title Tags Effectively for SEO

Chris H. — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:00:41 +0000

Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimization. While there are a lot of aspects of a web page that help it to rank well for keywords, the title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important.

The title tag is the html code that looks like this: <strong>Title Goes Here</strong>

It is contained within the section of the html document and shows up at the top of the web browser. It is also the link that shows up at the top of your site’s listing in the search results. Here are some important considerations that will make your use of title tags more effective.

The title tag is especially powerful when the keywords are also contained in the text on the web page, even more so if there is a lot of relevant text with paragraph or section headers organized using keywords in
,
, and / or
tags.

For more competitive keywords, keep it simple. If you are targeting a competitive, 2 or 3 keyword phrase, you will do better with a short title tag with only the keywords you are targeting, and a long page with lots of relevant, well-organized text.

If your keywords aren’t very competitive, try to make your title tag very keyword-rich, including other relevant text that people might search for. I generally try to stay under 12-14 keywords for longer title tags, and these can be very effective in returning your pages for lots of “long-tail” searches. Again, this will be most effective when your keywords are also contained within text on the page.

Think about clickthroughs in search results. Keep in mind that your title tag will be the most prominent part of your search snippet that people see when they search Google and other search engines. For that reason, just listing keywords without giving meaning to the title tag could decrease your clickthrough rate in the search results. A meaningful title tag will be more powerful in getting users to click through to your website. Try not to make your title tag look like spam.

For dynamic pages, we frequently don’t have as much control over the title tags and how they are generated. Blogs such as this one are a good example. Although the pages are generated dynamically using Wordpress, there is a plugin available called, “All-in-One SEO Pack,” which gives the publisher a lot more control over individual title tags and how they are generated. If your web pages are generated dynamically and you don’t have control over how the title tags are generated, you may be able to hire a programmer to come up with a custom solution. Many out of the box content management systems are more SEO-friendly these days though, and if the functionality isn’t already built in, there may be a plugin available.

While title tags are very important for ranking well in the search engines, there are many other factors involved in ranking web pages – too many to list here. Be sure and read SEO Basics for a brief overview, but keep in mind that title tags are the single most effective tool for on-page optimization that search engines use.

Top 5 Reasons Why Organic SEO is a Great Investment for Your Website

Chris H. — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:59:56 +0000

I do a lot of pay-per-click management for the firm I work for, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I can build out good ad groups and ads, lower click costs, improve clickthrough rates, build good content match campaigns etc., etc., etc., but every now and then I do a consult for a client that’s thinking about using us for SEO. Here’s where I shine. SEO is my one of my favorite topics, and I have been doing it with success for many years now. These are the top 5 reasons I think SEO is one of the best investments you can make in your website:

Improvements to the way you organize your site and it’s content, will help the Search Engines to find and index your site better for the rest of its life. Best of all, it should help visitors as well.

The suggestions that your SEO gives you will be “best practice” standards that you and your designers can use for any future work you do.

New, original content that you add will be yours forever, and you can bring in search traffic from it for as long as it’s there.

Many links that you get will be permanent links, that will continue to exist, drive traffic, and help your search results for as long as the linking site remains online.

Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.

How PayPerPost is Ruining Their SEO Business

Chris H. — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:21:24 +0000

For those of you that don’t know who PayPerPost is, they are probably the biggest paid blog posting service on the web. They have a network of (according to them) around 80,000 bloggers, and anyone can sign up to create an “offer” for paid posts from the bloggers. Advertisers can request links from the blog posts, and specify PageRank requirements from the bloggers as well.

This has put PayPerPost in a position to get a LOT of business from SEO’s looking for relevant links. At the same time, it’s put a target on the backs of all of their paid blogging network that Google is aiming at sharply. Last month, Google dropped the axe on many PayPerPost bloggers, reducing their PageRank considerably. If you didn’t see it coming, you don’t know much about SEO.

How does Google identify “paid bloggers” from real bloggers? There are a lot of ways it can be done, but PayPerPost makes it easy by encouraging their bloggers to put PPP badges and buttons on their blogs. Many bloggers participate because they don’t know that google can easily identify that stuff. All of the badges have similar characteristics that leave a nice breadcrumb trail for the search giant. This, in conjunction with the similar format of paid posts, tracking images, and disclosure policies (especially when it’s done on a per-post basis), has made it easy for Google to track down the “Paid Posting Offenders.”

PayPerPost, stop shooting yourself in the foot. Bloggers need to wise up to the fact that Google is smarter than they think.

What is Your Monthly Link Building / SEO Budget?

Chris H. — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:38:21 +0000

How much per month do you spend on SEO, not including on-page stuff like content and changes to your site? Is it enough? How much would you need to spend to be comfortable with the SEO effort?

I do SEO for a bunch of sites, some for other people, some for myself. I think I spend around $700 / mo. on link building for my own sites. Although I’m really not happy with that. I would like to spend $1000. If I spent $1k / mo. on link building I think I could totally dominate the keyword phrases I want. But I do have top rankings for like 7 out of 10 kw phrases I want (see the correlation there?) :)

Without going into details that would help my competition devour me (I think they probably spend twice as much for not nearly as great results), my budget breaks down to about an even split of several different forms of link building. Including the occasional email from yours truly to the more exceptional websites I want links from.

For my clients, I find I can hit moderately competitive keyword phrases for around $600 / mo., given about 6 months time if they were no where on the charts before I start. By “moderately competitive,” I mean the top results have some well optimized PR4 sites, maybe a PR5 or two. It seems like a PR5 is more difficult to attain these days than it was a year ago.

What do you guys spend on link building, and how competitive is your market?

A Smart Link Marketing Technique

Chris H. — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:38:31 +0000

This morning I ordered a new battery for my digital camera through a company called MemorySuppliers.com, they have a really good online store where you can buy all kinds of memory, batteries, etc. I got an email an hour later stating that my order had already been shipped! Great service!

Then I get this email from them, and it says:

We have a special money saving offer for you today: If you would like to receive a $15.00 credit back on your credit card for this order, simply post a link to MemorySuppliers.com on your website, blog, personal profile page (i.e. myspace) with a short one or two line description of our website and products. When finished, email us the web address where the link is posted and we will give you a $15.00 credit back on to your credit card.

This is a great idea, that I have actually tried in the past. The only problem was that I tried it on my marriage counseling directory, for new therapists who signed up to advertise. That population is not very tech savvy, and I got so many questions about how and what to do in the first few weeks, that I abandoned the campaign completely. It wasn’t worth the time it took.

Still, a great idea if you’re in an industry that deals with tech-savvy people. Try it out!

Chris’s List of Article Directories

inlayout — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 14:57:13 +0000

SEO Basics: Write Articles to Help Build Relevance and Links

inlayout — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 05:19:33 +0000

There are many article directories on the web these days, and many websites that accept free article submissions as well. But how do articles help your website rank for keywords?

Ok, here’s an example: I have a website about cats, and I know that building quality relevant links to my website will help it in the search results. But most of the time, that’s eaiser said than done. Writing articles about your topic is one way that you can accomplish this. Here are some ideas for keyword rich articles for my “cats” website-

Caring for Your Cat
Feeding Cats: What’s the Healthiest Cat Food?
Grooming Your Cat

I have a list of general article directories I will publish in my next post, but most are free, and they all accept articles that are allowed to have an outbound link near the bottom (the Author Bio). It will be even better for my “cat” articles if I can find niche websites about cats that accept article submissions. If you’re considering a website for submitting an article, make sure they allow a link to your site, and make sure that the link doesn’t contain the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass PR down to the site that is linked to.

Some people will submit the same article or slight variations to hundreds of article directories… I don’t think that helps much. Search engines today are very aware of “duplicate content,” and work hard to weed it out. They try to determine the original source of the content, and then copies get penalized in the search results. So I say, submit your articles once to the most appropriate website. Quite often, the articles themselves will achieve decent search engine rankings, and can bring in natural traffic to your site that way as well.

Are Yahoo! Directory Listings Worthwhile?

inlayout — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 16:17:48 +0000

There was a front page thread on WebmasterWorld about this recently, and it’s something that’s frequently asked. Probably because it’s so infrequent that someone gives a good answer. I posted on the thread, but I’ll go into more detail here.

So what’s the good answer? “Maybe,” is the best answer.

This is what I consider when I’m thinking of listing a site in Yahoo!

How deep is the category where the site will be listed?

Is it a deep category like this?

Regional > U.S. States > Louisiana > Cities > New Orleans > Business and Shopping > Business to Business > Communications and Networking > Internet and World Wide Web > Web Site Designers

If so, it will have much less value than the upper level categories that get more traffic and have higher PageRank.
Is the category relative to the keywords you want to show up for?

In most cases, the category will be relative to the keywords you’re targeting. If it’s not, you should consider changing or adding content to your site that represents those topics.

How many other sites are in the category?

If your site looks like it will be buried in with 100 other directory listings, the value of the listing will be less.
What is the PageRank of the category your site will be listed in?

Some of the upper level categories have good PR, while some of the deeper level categories have none at all. PageRank should not be the deciding factor. There are many other factors that make the listings worthwhile, but it should be a consideration.
How will the Yahoo! editors list your site?

This we don’t always know, and if the title and description aren’t relative to the keywords you’re targeting, the listing will be less beneficial. So consider the accuracy of the listing you’re about to submit, if you feel like you need to “manipulate” the title or description of the site, that might be a sign that you won’t get what you want. The editors can also put your site in a different category if they feel it’s more appropriate.
Is the category likely to get traffic?

I have one listing that gets enough traffic from the Yahoo! directory to make it worthwhile regardless of other factors, but most of my listings benefit very little from natural directory traffic.

Lastly, Yahoo! directory is definitely one of the oldest, most trusted, and top ranked web directories in the search engines. Your listing’s acceptance into the directory is a sign of trust to Google, and any other search engines that consider such factors. Therefore I feel that in most cases, it is beneficial.

Advanced SEO: Link Building Explored

inlayout — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:56:16 +0000

Link building has long been a source of success and frustration when doing SEO. When it first became known that links form other sites affected search engine rankings, immediately FFA (Free For All) sites appeared that allowed users to add their links for free. There was no editorial discretion in the placement of these links and commonly, they were all thrown together on one page with no relevance between them.

This is when the search engines became charged with the task of determining link quality. I’ve long said that “a link to your site is like a vote for your site, but all links are not created equal.” Obviously, Google and other search engines found a way to devalue FFA links over time. So much so, that FFA sites are virtually non-existent today. Then came link exchanges, which are also not nearly as effective these days.

Today, SEO’s realize that our task is building quality, relevant links over time. Let’s have a look at some of the aspects of links that can signal value or lack thereof.

Poor Quality Links:

Are surrounded by other poor quality links.
Are not relevant to the contents of the web page.
Have anchor text not relevant to the page they link to.
Are placed on a page with content not relevant to the page they link to.
Are on sites that aren’t as “trusted” (determined by many other factors).
Are placed at the same time as many other links on the same page. (Giving the appearance of link selling)
Change frequently (“link churn”).
Surrounded by links that change frequently.
Are on sites that haven’t been around long.
. Are all “built up” at or near the same time, giving the appearance of being “bought.”
. Are done in a reciprocal fashion (exchanged). “3 way” or not.

Disclaimer: These signals of poor quality links are based upon my experience with the search engines, namely Google. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a link isn’t valuable to a user.

Example: A brand new “News” site starts and does TV commercials promoting their site. Meanwhile, a story breaks about a pop-singer, and the young “News” site links to that singer’s website. To a search engine the link might not have much value because the site it’s on is very new, and the site covers many topics so it’s not highly relevant. Yet to the public, it has more value because tons of people know about the site (TV ads), and the visitors are interested in “breaking news.”

Signs of Quality Links:

Are placed on other relevant web pages.
Are built up slowly or “naturally” over time.
Are placed on sites that themselves, have high quality links.
If surrounded by other links, are surrounded by other quality links.
Are placed on older, more trusted sites.
Are placed on sites that use editorial discretion in the links they have.
Are placed on sites with a “natural” distribution of PageRank. (Not on all high PR sites or all low PR sites)
Remain for longer periods of time.

How does one get these quality links? Do people just link to your site without asking? Sometimes, if your site is really good. If your site attains “Authority” status, people will often link to it because they think it will help their site. Sometimes you have to ask. The most important thing to do is to let people know about your site and to promote it. If no one knows about your site, no one will link to it. Content syndication through rss feeds are a good way to get backlinks as well. Try working out advertising deals directly with relevant sites that aren’t hosting text link ads. Also let people know that it’s ok to link to you; believe it or not, many people new to the web think they need to ask if it’s ok to link to your site. I usually add something to the “About Us” page asking people to link to the site. The easier you make it, the more likely it is to happen.

For better or worse? The days of being guaranteed top search results through traditional link building are ending.

I say “for better.” It’s much more difficult for sites to spam the search engines these days, due to the fact that “quality” links are much harder for them to get. It gives webmasters something much more important to focus on: site quality. If we constantly work on the content and quality of our websites, it will be much easier to get quality links.

SEO Basics: Is PageRank Important?

inlayout — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 16:03:35 +0000

What is PageRank?

If you’re completely new to search engine optimization, then you may not even know what PageRank is. Start by downloading the Google Toolbar. You may have to enable the PageRank display in the settings. Below are some examples of what PageRank indicators look like on a page form the Google Directory, viewed through a web browser with the Google Toolbar.

PageRank is displayed on the toolbar as a scale from 0 – 10, with “10″ being the “most important” pages on the web, and “0″ being the “least important” pages on the web. On the toolbar, PageRank is only displayed as an integer; however, in reality, PageRank is an infinite scale from 0 – 10. It is important to differentiate between “Toolbar” pagerank, and “actual” pagerank.

Actual PageRank is the factor that is computed by Google’s algorithm to determine the “importance” of a web page. While the toolbar PageRank is only updated about once every 4 – 5 months, actual PageRank is dynamically updated as changes occur in Google’s index.

The main variable used to compute PageRank was linking structure throughout the web. It was noted that one of the best ways to determine the importance of a web page was by looking at the sites that link to it. The idea being that better quality sites would “naturally” get more links; therefore, a link to a web page could be treated as a “vote” for that web page. While this remains the basic concept, it becomes far more complicated as algorithms evolve due to the many different aspects of web pages and the ability of people to manipulate search results if more factors aren’t considered.

All “votes” are not created equal in PageRank. A link from a high ranking site, like dmoz.org, is more important than a link from a low PageRank site with few links going to it. I’m going to intentionally leave out a lot of search engine ranking factors here because I want to keep this post on topic. Search engine rankings for particular topics or keywords are not directly correlated to PageRank. There are many cases when more relevant pages show up higher in the search results than less relevant, higher PageRank pages.

Anomalies with “Toolbar PageRank”
Another important aspect aspect to consider is that there are a few anomalies associated with the PageRank scale as it’s shown on the Google Toolbar. One is the fact that it’s only updated every quarter, and sometimes less often than that. Because of that, sites that are new, may take a while to get “Toolbar PageRank.” I’ve also seen a lot of cases where the initial toolbar PageRank was higher than what they ended up having in subsequent updates.

Another anomaly is the fact that the scale seems to change over time. If you think about it, it makes sense because the internet is constantly growing while the scale remains a number 1 – 10. That being said, it should follow that websites who were at one point a PR5, that don’t build links over time, will see a decrease in their PageRank as it’s displayed by the toolbar over time. This is something I’ve seen on older websites I own. I used to be able to get a PR5 from the toolbar with just a few hundred average links, whereas these days it takes significantly more link building effort to achieve the same toolbar PageRank. The “kicker” is that these “toolbar PageRank” changes may not be associated with loss in rankings at all.

It’s because of the concept of internet growth mentioned above, and penalties that I will discuss next, that I’ve often seen a website’s search rankings go up, even though their toolbar PageRank went down!

The last anomaly I should address about the toolbar is that occasionally you will find websites whose toolbar PageRank has been penalized. It’s something that is most often noticed when you’re looking at competitive search results, and you find it strange that the top results are all well-optimized web pages, yet one on top has a significantly lower PageRank than those beneath. While this can usually be attributed to on-page SEO factors, sometimes it’s because Google actually penalized the toolbar PageRank of the site because it was selling links at one point in time. The strange thing about these types of toolbar PageRank penalties is that they seem to only affect the toolbar and not the website’s actual search engine rankings. This would indicate that “actual PageRank” has not been affected. Sometimes these penalized websites can get their “toolbar PageRank” back through appeal, but that’s not always the case.

As you can see based on these anomalies, there are quite a few reasons that the toolbar may not be indicative of how a website ranks in the search engines.

So is PageRank important?
Yes and No. In my opinion focusing on PageRank is a waste of time. You should focus on building content and relevant links to your site. As far as incoming links go, it’s my opinion that the ideal is to have a mixture of high and low PageRank sites linking to yours. Ideally you want your incoming links to have a “natural” appearance to the search engine. If only high PageRank sites link to yours, it may appear that the links were bought; and if only low PageRank sites link to yours, it may appear that your site doesn’t have valuable content. I will discuss link building in more detail in later posts. There are many different link building techniques that can have a dramatic impact on your search engine rankings.

Chris’s List of Web Directories

inlayout — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 02:57:10 +0000

Not all Web Directories are Created Equal.
These are a few I know about, as well as some links to other lists. Getting your site listed in web directories is a small way to help your site’s relevance and link popularity in the search engines.

Most Important:

Yahoo! Directory
ODP – Open Directory Project
Best of the Web Directory These are others I’ve used:
Aviva Directory – World
Resource Stop
800 Internet Directories to Submit Your Site To
800 Web Directories – Alphabetical Web Directory List
AardvarkBusiness.net Business Search Engine
Adison University Web Resources EDU Website Directory
AllInOrder.org
V7n Directory
Business.com – The Business Search Engine® and Business Directory for Business Information
CANLink Directories – Canadian and Worldwide Links
Crosswalk Directory
DataSpear.com Directory & Search
Directory and Search Engine JoeAnt.com
Directory Portal IT
Directory Rex -
DivingIndex.com – Worldwide Scuba diving web directory
Free Links Find, Review & Discuss Free Advertising & Marketing To Promote Your Website
Galaxy Search Engine & Directory Serious Searches Relevant Results
Gimpsy – Active Sites for Active People
GoGuides.Org Directory & Search
Google Directory – Computers Internet Searching Directories
Home-Add URL Free Guaranteed Inclusion Web Resource Directory
Internet Search Engine Guide to Search Engine Marketing and News
Isins web directory and search engine
Jayde.com – The B2B Search Engine
lifedirectorys.com Search Engine-index
Link Centre Internet Directory and Search Engine
Listings United States
MaxLinks – Web directory
Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory
NationalDirectory Add URL
NetInsert web directory – free web url submission
New Orleans Website Directory – Over 6000 New Orleans Websites – New Orleans Shopping Guide
PsychLinks Dr. David J. Baxter – Ottawa Psychologists – Psychologists in Ottawa Counselling,
Refdesk Reference, facts, news, free and family friendly
RubberStamped.org – Human Reviewed Directory and Citation Data
SCM’s American Business Directory – Web Directory
Search Engine and Web Directory – KingBloom – Search Engine and Web Directory
Search Engine and Web Directory by Clush.com
Search Engine Friendly Links With Direct URLs
SevenSeek Web Directory
Skaffe.com International Directory and Search Engine
Umdum Web Directory ~ Humanity at work!
Uncover the Net Web Directory
Web 10 – U.S.A. – Directory
Web Directories
Web Directory – Online Games – Free Ecards
Web Directory Index – AroundTheWeb.com
Web Directory Submission Services v1.56
Web World Directory and Search Engine
WebAtlas Web Directory
WoW Search Engine and Directory Service – World Directory – WoW Search Engine and Directory Ser
www.adison.edu – Adison University, Student Knowledgebase
XEIT – Internet Directory -
Yahoo! Canada

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

inlayout — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:13:41 +0000

People ask me how to get their web site to show up in search engines once a week. Then there’s the question about the spam email they got that guarantees to submit their site to over 1000 search engines! Or, “I keep submitting the site to Google, once every day, and I’m still not listed.”

Let the truth be known….submitting your site to Google is a waste of time. If that’s all you’re going to do in order to get your site listed, then I guess it’s better than nothing. And if your site is about some really obscure topic that no one else talks about on the internet, you might show up eventually. And that’s if your on-page factors are well optimized for the search engines.

With that being said, there are some very basic ways to get our websites to rank well in the search results. They’re not as easy as typing in the URL and clicking “Submit,” but if you’re going through the trouble of designing a site, you can certainly pay attention to these details along the way.

Choosing Keywords

First and foremost, decide what keywords you want to target in the search engines. You can use tools like the keyword selection tools I link to on the SEO Tools page. Make a comprehensive list, then decide which you think will bring in the most relevant traffic; then decide which ones you should target based on your time and budget. The competitiveness of the keywords you wish to target will determine how much work you need to put into search engine optimization. If you target highly competitive keywords, and you don’t plan on spending every waking moment developing content and marketing your site, you probably won’t show up for those keywords.

In order to determine “competitiveness,” look at the sites that show up for them in the search results. Do they follow the guidelines described below? If so, they may be harder to beat. You can also look at the number of people who search for those keywords (using the SEO Tools mentioned earlier), and the number of results that Google returns when the search is made. If there are 1,000,000 results for a search – that means you need to find a way to tell Google that your site is the most relevant out of 1,000,000 pages it has in its index! Don’t worry though, it’s easier than it sounds.

Use the list you made as a guideline for developing content for your site. Be aware that anything you want to show up for will need to be represented in the content on your web site, and that you’re going to have to work to get quality links from other relevant sites. It’s important to be realistic when targeting keywords; if you give your web designer a list of 1000 keywords with no prioritization among them, your site will probably not show up for any of them.

There are 2 main aspects to consider when optimizing a site for search engines, On-Page factors and Off-Page factors. Here’s the rundown:

On-Page Factors

This is the easy part. These are all factors that we have infinite control over. On-Page factors are your site’s content and how it’s presented to users and to the search engines.

Does your content match what you want to show up for in the search engines?
Example: I have a site about dogs, and it’s all about dogs. But now I want to sell “cat food” on the site. If I don’t have information on my site about “cat food,” my site will probably never show up for those search terms. A good idea would be to add a section on “cat food.”

Is your content actual text on the page, or is it represented by graphics?
It’s hard for most people to tell the difference. An easy way to tell is if you press down your mouse button while dragging it across the text areas on the web page. If it lets you highlight parts of the text, it’s more than likely real text. If not, if it highlights a whole area, it’s probably a graphic or flash. The problem with graphically representing content (well, one of the problems), is that search engines don’t read graphics like they do text. Of course, you can specify an “alt” tag in the html, which is supposed to describe the graphic in certain instances; but search engines don’t lend much relevance to that. There are also workarounds for things like logos and company names; there are always other ways to incorporate them into text on the page. The same goes for Flash – don’t put your important content in Flash. It’s ok to use it for parts of the design, but if you want to get good search engine rankings never do an all-Flash web site.

Are the keywords you want to show up for in the “title” of your pages?
The title of the web page is the part that shows up on the top of your browser window. The title is probably one of the most important places to have the main keywords for your pages. Try to use words in the title that are actually represented in the content of the page. Some people suggest 8 – 14 keywords in title tags, but it really depends on the nature of the keywords you’re targeting.

Did you spend hours writing meta tags?
If so, you probably wasted a lot of time. Although meta tags are pretty irrelevant today, I still write them because it’s good practice. Some web sites and search engines actually use the descriptions. There’s been talk recently, that if you’re not going to do original description tags for each page, that it’s better not to do them at all. Some people warn that this can cause your pages to go “supplemental,” which is another whole topic I’m not going to get into in this “basics” discussion. Meta tags should be descriptive and relevant to the content on the page.

How did you organize your content?
Example: If I have a web page (one page) that talks about “cats, dogs, and elephants,” it may show up for a search on “cats, dogs, and elephants.” But if I want it to show up for the individual keyword searches, like “dogs,” then it probably won’t do as well. If I want my page to show up for “dogs,” I would do better separating my “cats, dogs, and elephants” page into pages about each animal. I could even do a summary page, called “cats, dogs, and elephants,” that links to each individual page – “cats” – “dogs” – “elephants.” Organization of content is an important aspect of search engine optimization that is frequently overlooked.

These are the On-Page basics of search engine optimization. There are many factors not discussed that affect On-Page factors; those will be addresses in future writings.

Off-Page Factors

Off-Page factors are things we have less control over than On-Page factors. Off-Page factors are the other sites on the web that link to your page, and the manner in which they do so. Think of Google’s search results like a “popularity contest.” In this contest, the best, most popular web sites show up better in the search results.

How does Google decide who is the best?
On-Page factors aside, Google uses the links pointing to a site (from other sites) to determine quality. The idea behind it, is that the better quality web sites will “naturally” get more links from other sites over time. But there are many different factors Google considers when looking at links. Here are a few:

The number of links pointing to a site
The relevance of the site linking to your site (links from a site about “sports cars” won’t do much to help a site about “dogs” show up for “dog” searches).
The quality of the site linking to your site. Does the linking site have good search engine rankings? Quality inbound links? Good, relevant content?
The text used to link to your web site. If it’s always your company name, and your company name isn’t relevant to what you want to show up for in the search engines – that could be a problem.

These are just some of the basics that should be considered when optimizing your site for the search engines. Search Engine Optimization can be a lot more comprehensive than what’s discussed here; and the level of work that needs to be done is dependent on the competitiveness of the keywords your site intends to target.

Always keep in mind that long term sustainability of competetive search engine rankings is directly proportional to keeping your site up to date and developing relevant content that is useful to searchers. A “create it, and leave it” attitude about your web site will result in a site that loses relevance over time.