Want to get into the top 5 of either Google or Yahoo? Make sure your website contains the top 10 factors for deciding a top search engine ranking.
It does not matter if you have the cure for cancer, if nobody knows about it you are not going to make any money. A top search engine ranking in either Google or Yahoo is the surest way for buyers to find your products so you can become a wealthy marketer. Google and Yahoo are responsible for about 80% of all search engine traffic in the world.
Make sure your online business or website contains these top 10 factors used for determining sites with a top 5 search engine ranking in Google and Yahoo.
Factor #1: Number of Quality Sites that Link to Yours
Google and Yahoo put a lot of significance on how many quality sites link back to yours with a page rank of at least 4 and above. This is probably the most important factor when considering a top search engine ranking.
When search engines see lots of important sites link back to yours it must mean that your site is also pretty important.
Remember the purpose of the internet is to provide information back to the end user. As someone is conducting research on the World Wide Web, sites must also participate and flow and connect to other related sites allowing those searching for your keyword terms various paths to the information being inquired.
Factor #2: Number of Pages Your Website Has
A website with less than 50 pages is really going to struggle to get a top search engine ranking unless it has more quality back links coming into it than their competitors.
Factor #3: Keywords in Your Title Tag
Google and Yahoo look to see if your keywords are contained in your page title and description. Make sure your keywords are also listed within your heading and subheading tags.
Factor #4: Keywords Showing in Links
Keywords that are highlighted within a link are considered more significant than those not at all highlighted within a link.
Factor #5: Keywords in Bold
Likewise words in bold are also considered more important than those not in bold.
Factor #6: Keywords in URL
Websites that are in less competitive markets that contain the keywords within their URL are considered more important than those sites that respectively do not.
Also keywords in the URL that come before unrelated words are considered better than a URL that follows an unrelated word within the URL. For example if your keyword is televisions, a URL with `televisions’ followed by unrelated words such as your name `Mike’ is better than putting your name `Mike’ before `televisions.’
Factor #7: More Significance Given to First 25 Words on Page
The first 25 words of each page are given more weight than all other words on the page. Make sure your keywords are in the first few words of your page. However, if you try and just list the same word or phrase 25 times repeatedly Google and Yahoo will penalize you.
Factor #8: Greater Than 300 Words on Your Homepage
Make sure you have at least 300 or more words on your homepage.
Factor #9: Keyword Density
Keyword density is not as important as it once was in the past but it still is an important factor. In order to get a top 5 search engine ranking look at your competitors sites and compare the density of their sites to yours and try and match their density.
Factor #10: Page Rank
Want to find out the page rank of your website or the page rank of another site? Download the Google toolbar and make sure the page rank indicator is activated. One major factor in determining your page rank is the first factor listed in this article. Quality back links are the most important factor for formulating your page rank.
A top search engine ranking in Google and Yahoo is decided most often by the combination of these 10 factors. If you want to get into the top 5 of the two most important search engines than make sure your website applies these major search engine ranking factors.
Author: Tim McGaffin
Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts
Friday, November 7, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Search Engine Optimization: Ten Golden Rules For Beginners
The following are the ten simple ways to optimize and increase traffic to your website. The guide is meant for those who intend to or are just starting out in Search Engine Optimization. It shows you all the basic things you need to know and what do to improve your rankings with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. No geek speak. No technical jargons. Just practical, easy to follow tips.
Directory Submission:
Submit your site to online web directories. There are several directories you can list your site with. There are free ones as well as paid services. Directory registration can be a time-consuming elbow grease so the temptation is to go for a paid service whereby you pay a company or any other concern to help submit your site to all relevant directories. However you do not really need to shell out to get listed in the right directories with decent traffic and pagerank. The search engines have their own directory services and is a great place to start. Yahoo has its directory service www.dir.yahoo.com. Visit the site and submit your URL and feed in the category that matches the kind of website you run and / or your kind of business. It might take a while but your site will be listed. Getting listed in a directory like that offers all the exposure and presence a major player like Yahoo has to offer. Another directory to aim for is the Open Directory Project (dmoz). It does take some effort to get listed here but given the fact that this directory is highly valued by most of the big search engines, then it must be worth every effort. It can be found at www.dmoz.org.
Search Engine Registration:
Register with the search engines. Registering with the search engines is introducing your website to them, inviting them to visit the site and help announce your existence to the world wide web. This can be explained simply without getting into geek mode. Forget about algorithms, spiders, crawlers and all that. In plain terms, the search engines on being registered with, will visit your website and index it. Hopefully they like what they see and they keep coming back and once someone searches for the contents they have found on your site, they point that person towards your site. So a sure way of being noticed by the search engines is simply to register with them. Of course Google should be your number one target here. Other prominent search engines you should register with include Alexa, Entireweb, Scrub The Web, Jayde, Info Tiger, Exactseek, Lookseek and Lifetips.
Article Submission:
Submit articles to online article publishing and syndicating websites. When you do this, put a link to your website at the end of the article or any other appropriate place depending on the website you are submitting to. Be aware that this does not correlate to just a blatant plugging of your site. The article should be well written, informative and most preferably relevant to what your line of business or website is about.
Build Links:
Link building is perhaps the most important and influential factor to consider when looking to increase your standing with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. Basically link building can be seen in two broad terms: Viral and Organic. Viral links are from websites who belong to a link building group or association of websites all exchanging links for the basic purpose of having as many links as possible irrespective of any other considerations. In other words people join certain websites where all the members are there for the sole express reason of populating their link list. This is deemed as cheating by the search engines and is frowned upon. Some of the sites could have been blacklisted or penalised by the search engines. Some may have no relevance to your website. So you want to avoid this kind of link building like the plague. If your website gets blacklisted by Google for instance, it takes up to the better part of six months to get back in their good books. Organic link building is the way to go. These are links that that you acquire naturally. Examples are websites that link to your website due to its relevance or quality. Organic link building can be attained by various ways. See below for some of these.
Join online Groups and Forums:
By joining a group or a forum you can network with people with the same interest as you thus it follows that these people will visit your site. Not only that your group members will visit your site, they might mention your websites on their own sites thereby giving you more exposure. Since most of you in the group are members because you share a common interest then this can also serve as a source of quality links for your website thus improving your pagerank. Remember that the relevance of links to your website is considered by the search engines in ranking your site. You increase your exposure by posting on forums that relate to your website. A lot of people read forum postings even without being members and i even know people who use forums as a search method. Yahoo Group is one of the earliest and is my choice. However there are now a plethora of groups and forums that will deliver just as well.
Closely related to these two is Yahoo Answers. Here you can establish yourself as a source of reliable information regarding the subject matter of your website or the business you are in. Put a link to your website when you post an answer to a question. If people find your answers useful and relevant of course the tendency is that they will visit your website.
Advertise:
Paid advertising is a more direct strategy in increasing or improving your web traffic. A very effective strategy it must be said. The best idea is to go for a Pay Per Click deal. Google Adwords is the one to target here. Basically, a banner of your website is displayed on Google search results and if the banner is clicked the person is automatically directed to your website. You can find more information on Google Adwords and how to start at http://adwords.google.com
Use Web 2.0 and Social Media:
Open accounts with sites like MSN Windows Live,Yahoo 360, Blogger and Wordpad. Register with sites like Technorati, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Ryze and Facebook. They all afford you to maintain a presence on the web. You can reach a wide audience or potential customers through these pages. Even big business concerns have realised the power of Social Media and are making use of it to maintain a competitive edge. Also you need to register with pinging websites. These are sites that work for you while you sleep so to speak. All they ask is you let them know once you have new contents on your site and they will bellow it to the whole world wide web. My pick here is pingoat.You can join pingoat at www.pingoat.com.
Content is king:
This fact is a dog eared expression in Search Engine Optimisation these day. So much so it is fast attaining the status of a cliche. I am not one easily caught dropping cliches but if it is a crime to do so then i plead guilty on this instance and will gladly do my time. Your site`s content should be well written. No grammatical errors or spelling howlers. Such errors make a bad impression on visitors to the site. Keep your sentences short and compact. Aim for clarity and try to make the site as easy to understand as possible. Again it is paramount that the content of your website should be relevant to it`s title or your business. This is important for two main reasons: If the site contents and site description do not tally, your standing with the search engines might be adversely affected or worst still they might suspect you of being a spamming or other dubious site. And you do not want that. The other reasons is that visitors might be disappointed and discouraged from re visiting a website they thought was about fishing but found out, on visiting the site that it was about computing. Sure you can have some computing talk on a fishing oriented website but your main focus should be on fishing. As implied in your website`s name or description. Update your website with new contents regularly. The search engines love new contents. The search engines periodically scan the net for new contents. As i mentioned earlier, they send out feelers (robots, spiders or crawlers in geek speak) to see what is there in cyberspace. If time after time your website is visited they have something new to report back then they will always come back. The result of which is that your pages are constantly updated. This improves your standing in their search queries for a keyword related to your website
Use your e-mail as a campaign tool: You can do this by using the url of your website as a signature. So every mail you send carries a clickable link to your site. This is quite easy enough to do. Most e-mail clients have this facility. For example if you use hotmail go to Options> Preference >Signature and insert the full address of your website.
Create a sitemap:
A sitemap outlines the structure of your website. It arranges your website into sections. This makes the website easy to navigate by search engine robots and spiders. This of course makes the indexing of your site easier. To learn more about sitemaps go to www.xml-sitemaps.com.
by: Leo Jackson
Directory Submission:
Submit your site to online web directories. There are several directories you can list your site with. There are free ones as well as paid services. Directory registration can be a time-consuming elbow grease so the temptation is to go for a paid service whereby you pay a company or any other concern to help submit your site to all relevant directories. However you do not really need to shell out to get listed in the right directories with decent traffic and pagerank. The search engines have their own directory services and is a great place to start. Yahoo has its directory service www.dir.yahoo.com. Visit the site and submit your URL and feed in the category that matches the kind of website you run and / or your kind of business. It might take a while but your site will be listed. Getting listed in a directory like that offers all the exposure and presence a major player like Yahoo has to offer. Another directory to aim for is the Open Directory Project (dmoz). It does take some effort to get listed here but given the fact that this directory is highly valued by most of the big search engines, then it must be worth every effort. It can be found at www.dmoz.org.
Search Engine Registration:
Register with the search engines. Registering with the search engines is introducing your website to them, inviting them to visit the site and help announce your existence to the world wide web. This can be explained simply without getting into geek mode. Forget about algorithms, spiders, crawlers and all that. In plain terms, the search engines on being registered with, will visit your website and index it. Hopefully they like what they see and they keep coming back and once someone searches for the contents they have found on your site, they point that person towards your site. So a sure way of being noticed by the search engines is simply to register with them. Of course Google should be your number one target here. Other prominent search engines you should register with include Alexa, Entireweb, Scrub The Web, Jayde, Info Tiger, Exactseek, Lookseek and Lifetips.
Article Submission:
Submit articles to online article publishing and syndicating websites. When you do this, put a link to your website at the end of the article or any other appropriate place depending on the website you are submitting to. Be aware that this does not correlate to just a blatant plugging of your site. The article should be well written, informative and most preferably relevant to what your line of business or website is about.
Build Links:
Link building is perhaps the most important and influential factor to consider when looking to increase your standing with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. Basically link building can be seen in two broad terms: Viral and Organic. Viral links are from websites who belong to a link building group or association of websites all exchanging links for the basic purpose of having as many links as possible irrespective of any other considerations. In other words people join certain websites where all the members are there for the sole express reason of populating their link list. This is deemed as cheating by the search engines and is frowned upon. Some of the sites could have been blacklisted or penalised by the search engines. Some may have no relevance to your website. So you want to avoid this kind of link building like the plague. If your website gets blacklisted by Google for instance, it takes up to the better part of six months to get back in their good books. Organic link building is the way to go. These are links that that you acquire naturally. Examples are websites that link to your website due to its relevance or quality. Organic link building can be attained by various ways. See below for some of these.
Join online Groups and Forums:
By joining a group or a forum you can network with people with the same interest as you thus it follows that these people will visit your site. Not only that your group members will visit your site, they might mention your websites on their own sites thereby giving you more exposure. Since most of you in the group are members because you share a common interest then this can also serve as a source of quality links for your website thus improving your pagerank. Remember that the relevance of links to your website is considered by the search engines in ranking your site. You increase your exposure by posting on forums that relate to your website. A lot of people read forum postings even without being members and i even know people who use forums as a search method. Yahoo Group is one of the earliest and is my choice. However there are now a plethora of groups and forums that will deliver just as well.
Closely related to these two is Yahoo Answers. Here you can establish yourself as a source of reliable information regarding the subject matter of your website or the business you are in. Put a link to your website when you post an answer to a question. If people find your answers useful and relevant of course the tendency is that they will visit your website.
Advertise:
Paid advertising is a more direct strategy in increasing or improving your web traffic. A very effective strategy it must be said. The best idea is to go for a Pay Per Click deal. Google Adwords is the one to target here. Basically, a banner of your website is displayed on Google search results and if the banner is clicked the person is automatically directed to your website. You can find more information on Google Adwords and how to start at http://adwords.google.com
Use Web 2.0 and Social Media:
Open accounts with sites like MSN Windows Live,Yahoo 360, Blogger and Wordpad. Register with sites like Technorati, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Ryze and Facebook. They all afford you to maintain a presence on the web. You can reach a wide audience or potential customers through these pages. Even big business concerns have realised the power of Social Media and are making use of it to maintain a competitive edge. Also you need to register with pinging websites. These are sites that work for you while you sleep so to speak. All they ask is you let them know once you have new contents on your site and they will bellow it to the whole world wide web. My pick here is pingoat.You can join pingoat at www.pingoat.com.
Content is king:
This fact is a dog eared expression in Search Engine Optimisation these day. So much so it is fast attaining the status of a cliche. I am not one easily caught dropping cliches but if it is a crime to do so then i plead guilty on this instance and will gladly do my time. Your site`s content should be well written. No grammatical errors or spelling howlers. Such errors make a bad impression on visitors to the site. Keep your sentences short and compact. Aim for clarity and try to make the site as easy to understand as possible. Again it is paramount that the content of your website should be relevant to it`s title or your business. This is important for two main reasons: If the site contents and site description do not tally, your standing with the search engines might be adversely affected or worst still they might suspect you of being a spamming or other dubious site. And you do not want that. The other reasons is that visitors might be disappointed and discouraged from re visiting a website they thought was about fishing but found out, on visiting the site that it was about computing. Sure you can have some computing talk on a fishing oriented website but your main focus should be on fishing. As implied in your website`s name or description. Update your website with new contents regularly. The search engines love new contents. The search engines periodically scan the net for new contents. As i mentioned earlier, they send out feelers (robots, spiders or crawlers in geek speak) to see what is there in cyberspace. If time after time your website is visited they have something new to report back then they will always come back. The result of which is that your pages are constantly updated. This improves your standing in their search queries for a keyword related to your website
Use your e-mail as a campaign tool: You can do this by using the url of your website as a signature. So every mail you send carries a clickable link to your site. This is quite easy enough to do. Most e-mail clients have this facility. For example if you use hotmail go to Options> Preference >Signature and insert the full address of your website.
Create a sitemap:
A sitemap outlines the structure of your website. It arranges your website into sections. This makes the website easy to navigate by search engine robots and spiders. This of course makes the indexing of your site easier. To learn more about sitemaps go to www.xml-sitemaps.com.
by: Leo Jackson
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
The Art of Website Maintenance
Now that you’ve designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it’s important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information. Just like regular maintenance on your car, you have to make changes on your website every few months to make sure that things run smoothly.
If you update the content on your website on a regular basis, potential clients will be drawn back to your site to find out “what’s new”. The search engines pay visits to websites in their queue regularly. The catch is that you’ll stay in the queue only if you update your site regularly. If the search engines visit your site several times in a row, and don’t find anything new, they may decide not to come back-which can be a blow to your search engine rankings.
So, when is it appropriate to update your website? You don’t want to waste time and money nitpicking at your site if you don’t have updates of real value to add. You should update your site if you’ve:
- Grown your skills. Have you gotten a new accreditation? New licensing? Improved your skills? Any change in your skill set is a great reason to update your website-and your potential clients-with your new capabilities.
- Expanded your products or services. Do you have a new offering? Add it to your website and start making new sales in that area.
- Completed a successful project. If you’ve just finished a project, include it on your website. Create an online portfolio, add a case study-build a section on your website to use as a place to show the world your success.
- Gotten more testimonials, or added to your client list. Including more feedback on your offering helps to build your credibility. Be sure to get a testimonial from each of your successful client projects. Updating your testimonials regularly will also show clients who have visited your site a few times that your offerings are “up to snuff”.
- Written an article. Writing articles is a great way to keep your website up-to-date and to put more content on your site. Search engines love content-rich sites, and visitors will love to see the new information. So, if you write articles to educate your clients and promote your business, be sure to place them on your website as well. They’re likely to be full of keywords related to your area of specialty, which will help your ranking in the search engines.
- Press releases. You should post all press releases and other information you publish about your company to your website. You never know who may be visiting, and you may get written up for your accomplishments.
- Changes in your business. Have you hired someone? Changed your business structure, and you’re now required to notify the public of that? If so, you should probably review your website and evaluate how you can add that information.
- Yearly check-ups. You should do a basic check on your site at least once a year, to make sure that the content is current. Some things to check on include:
- Your copyright statements should be updated yearly
- Test and validate your links, to ensure that they still work
- Your time references should be changed. If your “About” page says how many years you’ve been in business, this is the time to change that!
- Your pricing and offerings-do you have new products or services? Have your prices increased over the past year?
Spotlight any major updates on your home page as well, so that people will learn of those updates as soon as they enter your site. The search engines will also discover the new update as soon as they enter your home page if you leave a bit of information, with a link to the full story, on the home page. That will act as a breadcrumb for the engine to follow-the engines will follow your link to learn more about it.
Any of these reasons, and dozens of others, are great reasons to make changes to your site. If you make keeping your website current a priority, it will pay off with better search engine rankings and increased sales and leads through your website.
Once you’ve decided to make your changes, the next choice is how to go about doing that. There are two steps involved in maintaining your site:
- First, decide whether you prefer to edit your content on paper or online. This can be done in a couple of ways. You can start by printing the pages that have outdated information and then updating that information on paper first. Or, you can copy and paste the outdated content from your website into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word and then edit that file on your computer.
- After you have updated your text content you can choose either to make the changes yourself or to hire a web designer to make the changes. There are several tools that you can use to make changes to your site yourself. We recommend an easy-to-use tool called Macromedia Contribute. It’s fairly inexpensive, its simple to set up and learn, and it allows you to back up to older versions of your site if you make mistakes.
We suggest that you use this tool to make only simple text changes. More complicated changes-for example, to the overall design or navigation-are more difficult to make, and having a professional make those changes will save you energy and frustration.
If you are comfortable with a more complicated software program, then we recommend a professional-grade tool such as Dreamweaver. With a better software package, you’ll be able to make some of the more complicated changes yourself.
By building more-and more current-information into your website, you will also begin to build trust with your potential clients, since they will have a snapshot of what’s currently happening in your business and available to them. Your website can go a long way towards making sure that your online prospects know, like, and trust you-which can lead to more sales from your website.
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By Erin Ferree
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
There is no doubt that links from other websites to your website is vital for an ecommerce business. It all filters down to the Google Page Rank. This is the Google tool that is used to determine how important a website is to people surfing the net.
Google will balance the number of links, the PR of the pages exchanging the links, the keyword similarities on the linked pages, how often the site is updated, and the number of hits a site receives. Two PR 4 sites sharing links between pages with ‘small business’ as the main keyword, will benefit more from a small business website with a PR4 and a private blog that discusses ‘wealth building.’
Also, 100 links between a PR6 site and a PR4 site will increase the ranking of the second site faster than 100 000 links from a PR2 site and the same PR4 site.
This can all be a little confusing. Google’s PR algorithm controls everything. The confusion comes from the fact that search engines cannot think. Both the PR4 ‘small business’ site and the PR2 ‘wealth building’ site can be helping small business owners improve their page promotion. However, search engines cannot read. If they don’t see similar keywords, then they do not understand that the sites really do have similar content.
Building Links
The main problem with generating inbound links is the time needed to generate links. Even a strong link building campaign can take months to build a few thousand organic links. This brings up the question, should you buy links from other sites with high ranks?
The benefits are solid, if the link is in the right place. Some link buying services let the business owner pick what sites their links appear on, and which pages they appear on. This is the only type of ‘static page’ service to use.
Another service puts links on blogs. This type of service, like www.payu2blog.com and www.blogsvertise.com or www.payperpost.com let business owners pick the PR ranks, topics, and quality of blog, their links are posted on. Blogs have a benefit that static websites don’t. First, blogs always put the link inside the content, hidden within keywords that the business owner chooses. This guarantees that the keywords at both sites match.
The second benefit is that blogs are pinged to blog search engines, and directories, every time the blogger posts a blog, or a comment is posted. This means that a single blog can be ‘pinged’ to the search engines daily, where a static web page is pinged every few months – if ever.
However, a static page that is linked to a blog will be ‘crawled’ every time the blog post is published and pinged.
Crawling Your Site
Many people buy links from PR4 to PR8 sites for no other reason than to have the search engines come and crawl the site. It doesn’t matter if the link goes down, because the benefits have already been received. This is the best way to have a new website resolved by Google in a matter of hours, instead of weeks, or months.
Cost
Cost can be prohibitive. Some companies have a budget of $1million for blog advertising. However, a small company can get started for $1000. In fact, if the blog owner finds blogs with ads hidden among the posts, they can contact the blog owner and deal with them directly. A PR 2 or 3 blog will cost $5. A PR 4 – 5 will cost $10. A PR6+ can run as high as $100.
However, the traffic driven to your site by Google can easily offset the cost. Buying 10 links from 10 PR5 websites or blogs can result in 100 000 extra hits in a month, which can produce 1000 extra sales.
Link Farms
Whether you buy links on blogs or web sites, avoid link farms. These are sites that are in business to sell links. If the search engines find these sites they will ban them. This can result in your 1000 PR7 links disappearing – forever. It can take Google six months, or more, to apply new links to your website. This drops your page rank, and profits, for a few months.
Outbound linking
It is also important to remember to link from inside your website to similar sites. Google will count these links too. In the end, it is up to each individual business owner to decide whether they should build organic links, or invest in buying links.
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By Mark Walters
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Copywriting Makeover: It’s What You Say AND How You Say It
The old cliché is wrong. All our lives we’ve heard, “It’s not what you say, but how you say it.” That may occasionally be true, but for the most part it’s what you say AND how you say it. Case in point: Announce It!, a custom candy-bar-wrapper manufacturer, had copy on their home page that was acceptable. It mentioned pretty much all the important things a site visitor would need to know about ordering candy wrappers. Yet the copy wasn’t pulling as well as it should have been.
The Problems
The target audience consists mostly of women. In addition, these women order favors for special occasions. That means (stereotypically speaking) you have people who ask a lot of questions and are especially cautious of buying something they can’t touch, feel or see (in person) for use at a major life event. Communication (what the copy says as well as how it says it) is vital.
The text had to convince women that they could trust “Announce It!” to produce something they would show off in front of all their family and friends for important occasions such as birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, weddings, showers and more. That meant answering the questions these women have as well as instilling confidence that their party favors would be the hit of the event.
Technically, the copy was OK. But it lacked excitement. No, not hype… excitement. It needed to reach out to women and make them feel welcome while also reinforcing that “Announce It!” was the perfect solution for them. You can see the original text here:
As I’ve always said, you never want to “we” all over your copy. The content needed to speak to the site visitor, not talk about the company. The old text was full of “we” and “our” and hardly even acknowledged the site visitor.
From a search engine standpoint, the site was bouncing around a good bit. According to the site owner, “For a long time, I held the #1 position for many of my keywords. As search engines evolved, my site started bouncing. It was time to hire a professional.”
The Solution
The plan was to make the text more inviting and supportive while providing information that was easy to immediately identify. I wanted to help “Announce It!” differentiate itself from other candy-bar wrapper and favor sites. That meant making important benefits clearly visible. In addition, a glimmer of excitement would be added to the copy to get the women in the mood to buy.
A complete change of focus for the copy would also happen. Rather than “we” and “us” the copy would be directed toward the visitor while still communicating important benefits about buying from the company.
Lastly, correcting an elementary mistake would help the copy read better and assist with SEO. The hope with SEO was to give “Announce It!” some stability, as it had a history of bouncing back and forth between the first and second pages in the SERPs.
The overall goal was to increase conversions for this site. As the site owner herself said, “Without conversion, your rankings don’t mean as much. You really have to convert the visitors once they get to your page.” Oh so true!
First I introduced you to Announce It!, an online candy-bar-wrapper manufacturer that was seeking professional help with their search engine copywriting. Facing an audience that consisted primarily of women who were purchasing favors for special occasions, “Announce It!” copy had to be spot-on with its communication. The primary problems were that the copy did not convey a sense of excitement or answer all the questions customers might have. It also focused too heavily on the company rather than communicating with the site visitor.
Let’s see how the changes were worked into the copy and what the results were.
The Rewrite
You can see the original copy at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/customcandybarwrapper-original.pdf and the revised copy at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/customcandybarwrapper-new.pdf.
Headlines are one of the most important elements of advertising copy and of search engine optimization. The original web page didn’t have any type of headline — a fundamental mistake that needed to be corrected. The introduction of the text now begins with using a key phrase and stating a benefit. The headline reads:
Creative, Custom Candy-bar Wrappers Designed To Make Your Event a Hit!
Since “Announce It! key phrases all deal with candy-bar wrappers, it’s obvious that visitors who find this site are already familiar with the general product. (At least to the point of knowing what a custom candy-bar wrapper is.) The question they still have is, “Why should I buy from “Announce It!” instead of all the other candy-bar-wrapper sites?”
As the visitors read on through the copy, they find reassurance that their idea of using custom-designed candy-bar wrappers is a good one. Visitors are also provided with several benefits available from Announce It! that other companies don’t offer. For the sake of scan-ability, bullet points are used to further highlight differentiating factors about Announce It!. (Low minimum orders, free color proofs, free photo inclusion, etc.) This all helps to clearly explain why this site is the better choice over others the visitor may have gone to previously.)
Because the product itself is graphic, it was important to retain the product images used on the original home page. Certainly, customers would expect to see samples of the wrappers. However, to create a greater impact, each image was captioned with a short bit of occasion-specific, persuasive, keyword-rich copy. For instance:
“Custom candy wrappers are a truly creative way to send your retiree off in style.”
The finished product now speaks directly to the site visitor, sounds more professional, outlines important benefits and uses key phrases in an appropriate way so as not to hinder the natural flow of the copy.
The Results
The results showed improvements in both conversions and rankings. According to “Announce It!” their conversion rate quadrupled! They also report, “[The copy] has really made a difference in the way the site is perceived and how the customer reacts. I have gone from a one-person operation to a full-fledged business with five employees. The traffic and orders continue to increase every year!”
You couldn’t ask for much better than that!
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By Karon Thackston
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Blogging 101: The Care and Keeping of Your Business Blog
So you’ve got your business blog up and running. Congratulations! But don’t think that your job is done yet. Starting a blog is kind of like keeping a pet. It’s fun and exciting and new at first, but there’s a lot of maintenance that goes into it, and if you don’t take care of it, you’re going to have one heck of a mess on your hands.
Blogs are a major benefit to your business, there’s not doubt about it. But you’ve got to put quite a bit into it in order to really reap the rewards.
Protect your Blog from spam
Many people aware of the power behind blogs will attempt to find programs that allow them to auto post spam to your blog in the form of comments and unless you take the necessary steps may end up with the wrong kind of audience. Most blogs will allow you to require that people create an account on your blog first, which we strongly recommend.
Update frequently
You don’t have to update every day (though it would be nice if you could), but once a month, or even once every two weeks, is not going to cut it. If you let your blog go too long without a post, people will quit reading it. Not only will that hurt your blog, but it will also reflect negatively on your business. People may think that your company is going out of business, or simply old and tired because you don’t put the effort to continue something you started. Pick a schedule, be it daily or twice a week or whatever, and do your best to stick to it.
Don’t talk if there’s not something useful to say
The only thing worse than a blog that never updates, is a blog that updates with posts about nothing. The concept may have worked for “Seinfeld,” but it’s not a good philosophy for your business blog. Posts that don’t say anything are boring, and people aren’t going to read boring posts. Remember your target audience here. Keep a log of topics to write about that they would find interesting, and stay abreast of industry news.
Length isn’t important
No, a post that’s two sentences long is not the way to go, but neither do you have to write a novel of “War and Peace” proportions for every blog post. If you’ve just got a little company blurb that’s 150 words long, don’t worry about stretching it out. What you’re saying is far more important than how many words you use to say it. Interact!
If you’re lucky enough to have people actually responding to your blog posts, rejoice. Now you’ve got to talk back to them. If they ask a question, answer it. If they bring up a good point, mention it and give them your own feedback. If they have something negative to say, give them a polite, professional counterargument. It’s called “social media” for a reason. If you want to take it one step further (and you should), read some of your posters’ blogs and comment on those. You could end up making priceless business relationships.
Track the things that matter
So Google Analytics regularly tells you how many people are looking at your blog. Those metrics are easy to check, but are they really what you want to know? You may assume that the more readers you have, the more customers you’ll get, but that’s not necessarily the case. Don’t focus so much on the analytics numbers. Find out from your readers what works and what doesn’t, and fix your blog accordingly.
Don’t let your blog founder because you weren’t sure how to maintain it. Take care of your blog, and you’ll find that it will benefit your business for a long time to come.
By Tony D. Baker
Friday, October 17, 2008
Advanced SEO - The Characteristics Of A Perfect Incoming Link
What is a quality incoming link? This article describes the key characteristics of a perfect link. For explanation purposes, the sample company is a shoe retailer called Fred’s Sports, and the keyword phrase being optimized for is “blue Nike sneakers
Key word phrase in anchor text
Unless you put your keyword phrase in the anchor text (the text that describes the web site being linked to), you are wasting a lot of link power. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t know this an end up putting their company name in the link text rather than the keyword phrase that they want their company to be found by. Much better that they link anchor says “blue Nike sneakers” than “Fred’s Sports Store”.
The link is from a relevant page
Google and the Google-powered search partners seek relevance in the interconnectedness of web pages. Incoming links should be from pages where the content on that page is related to the content of the page that is being linked to. A fishing related page linking to a casino site is an example of a non-related link. A jogging related page linking to a blue Nike sneakers product page is related and is looked upon favourably by the search engines.
The link goes to a relevant page
Another mistake that people make is always linking to the home page rather than to the most relevant page to the anchor text. If the link anchor text is “blue Nike sneakers” then the link should go to a page about blue Nike sneakers, not the home page. This is by far and away the most common linking mistake.
The link is from an authority site
Links from high Google PageRank sites are worth more, a lot more, than links from other sites. It’s all about trust. A link from a trusted site tells the search engines that the sites linked to are also trusted - it’s a vote of confidence from a credible source. Links from .gov, and .edu sites are also reported as having more weight than standard links. They are also more difficult to get adding to their perceived quality.
The link is at top of the page
Links from the top of a page (except for the header), are said to have more weight than links at the bottom of pages. It’s the same with keyword phrases. A keyword phrase in the heading is worth more than in the body text.
The link is one-way, not reciprocal
Google’s algorithm looks for link exchanges between sites and rates these links lower than straight one-way links. If possible, look for one way links by creating link bait - compelling content that will encourage people to link to your pages.
The link is within the body copy - not an advertising zone
Linking should be a natural part of the body copy. Recent reports suggest that the search engines will derate links from parts of the page that are traditionally sold for advertising. these tend to be the margins, header and footer areas of the page.
The link does not have a nofollow tag
The nofollow tag is a recent innovation that tells the search engines that although I am linking to this other page, I do not vouch for the page’s integrity. In short, the nofollow tag tells the search engines to ignore the link. Obviously you do not want links to your web pages to have nofollow tags. Be careful with link exchanges. Some dishonest people will exchange links with you but use nofollow tags in the links to your pages to preserve their own link power.
There are few links on page (less than 20)
One link to your web site from a page with hundreds of links does little for your SEO results. The page’s SEO power is being distributed over all the other links on the page. Goo;le’s guidelines recommend no more than 100 links per page, but I believe 20 is a reasonable goal. You never know when the Google algorithm may change. The perfect page that links to your pages should have no more than 20 links.
-----By John Hacking
Monday, October 13, 2008
Getting Your Press Release to Somebody Who Cares
Newspapers, both online and print, are inundated with hundreds of press releases every day. With that kind of capacity, you’ve really got to make sure that yours stands out from the pack if you want it to catch the eye of the editors and make it in front of their readership.
Don’t start at the top
One of the best ways to increase your chances of getting published is to hunt down the person at the newspaper who cares about what you’re trying to say. The editor-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time to look over every press release that comes in, and if you’ve got a press release about a new pet product, chances are that the business editor won’t care too much.
Whether you’ve got a story that needs to get into the right hands, an unusual topic that needs a special reporter, or you just want better coverage for your piece, finding the right person at the newspaper can make all the difference.
Good things take time
Unfortunately, building a press list is not exactly an instantaneous process. Finding the right person at a newspaper can take quite a bit of time and research, but if it can get your press release wider distribution, it will all be worth it.
In addition, you’ll have the contact information for future releases, and if you’ve treated your newspaper contact right, then you’ll have an established relationship, which could be mutually beneficial in the long run.
Search for similar stories
Initially, try searching Google News and Yahoo News to locate individual reporters who might be interested in your story. If you’re looking on a national level, look for people who have written several articles on subjects similar to yours, without a regional focus.
Don’t just look at titles, and don’t just look at one story. Actually read the stories to get a feel for the writer and the tone they take. That will help you make your decision about who to send your release to.
Broaden your focus
Think outside the box. You may have a press release that hits multiple categories. For instance, a technologically advanced gizmo that vaporizes dog poop would probably be of interest to both a pet writer and a technology reporter.
One exception to that rule is writers who work for the same publication. Tempting as it may be, don’t send your release to more than one writer at a publication. This is a serious faux pas, and will build a very bad foundation for future press relationships. Rather, take the time to figure out whose style best fits your piece, and send it to them.
Make it easy for them to contact you
Above all, make sure that no matter what, your contact information is clearly printed on every press release you submit. Few things are more frustrating to a reporter than having a good press release and no way to contact the company for more information about it.
Searching for the right person is going to take a long time. But finding the right person for your press release will make it a lot easier to promote your business in the long run. Ensuring your release gets into the right hands is an investment that’s well worth the time spent.
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By Jessica Cox
Don’t start at the top
One of the best ways to increase your chances of getting published is to hunt down the person at the newspaper who cares about what you’re trying to say. The editor-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time to look over every press release that comes in, and if you’ve got a press release about a new pet product, chances are that the business editor won’t care too much.
Whether you’ve got a story that needs to get into the right hands, an unusual topic that needs a special reporter, or you just want better coverage for your piece, finding the right person at the newspaper can make all the difference.
Good things take time
Unfortunately, building a press list is not exactly an instantaneous process. Finding the right person at a newspaper can take quite a bit of time and research, but if it can get your press release wider distribution, it will all be worth it.
In addition, you’ll have the contact information for future releases, and if you’ve treated your newspaper contact right, then you’ll have an established relationship, which could be mutually beneficial in the long run.
Search for similar stories
Initially, try searching Google News and Yahoo News to locate individual reporters who might be interested in your story. If you’re looking on a national level, look for people who have written several articles on subjects similar to yours, without a regional focus.
Don’t just look at titles, and don’t just look at one story. Actually read the stories to get a feel for the writer and the tone they take. That will help you make your decision about who to send your release to.
Broaden your focus
Think outside the box. You may have a press release that hits multiple categories. For instance, a technologically advanced gizmo that vaporizes dog poop would probably be of interest to both a pet writer and a technology reporter.
One exception to that rule is writers who work for the same publication. Tempting as it may be, don’t send your release to more than one writer at a publication. This is a serious faux pas, and will build a very bad foundation for future press relationships. Rather, take the time to figure out whose style best fits your piece, and send it to them.
Make it easy for them to contact you
Above all, make sure that no matter what, your contact information is clearly printed on every press release you submit. Few things are more frustrating to a reporter than having a good press release and no way to contact the company for more information about it.
Searching for the right person is going to take a long time. But finding the right person for your press release will make it a lot easier to promote your business in the long run. Ensuring your release gets into the right hands is an investment that’s well worth the time spent.
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By Jessica Cox
Monday, October 6, 2008
Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research
There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that.
The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:
Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice
Phase 2 - Befriending the keyword research tool
Phase 3 - Finalizing your list
Phase 4 - Plan your Attack
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat
Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.
Or so they thought.
One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.
This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your customer probably doesn’t work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn’t need you. When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers aren’t searching that way and if you center your site on these terms, they’ll never find you.
Another misconception is that generic or “big dollar” terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you’re going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women’s clothing store trying to rank for the term “google”. Sure, thousands of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they’re not doing it looking for you. They’re looking for Google. Being ranked number one for a term no one would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won’t stick around.
Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice
The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.
The trick is to start slowly.
The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won’t drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.
If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don’t be afraid to take a peek at your competitor’s Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It’s okay to get a little sneaky here. All’s fair in love and search engine rankings.
Phase 2 - Befriend the keyword research tool
Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.
In the early days of SEO, measuring the “popularity” of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.
By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren’t aware of.
There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here’s a few of our personal favorites:
Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture’s Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, “boots” and “boot” would appear under one category of “boot”. This can sometimes cause problems.
Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.
Trellian Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).
Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s keyword PPC tool doesn’t provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.
Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list.
Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.
If those don’t tickle your fancy, we’d also suggest Bruce Clay’s Check Traffic tool, which estimates the number of queries per day for that search term across the major search engines.
Keep in mind that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.
Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites’ rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that word or phrase even worth your time? If it’s not, move on.
While you’re testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.
Phase 3 - Finalizing your list
Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it’s time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.
We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.
The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don’t have sufficient content to support (unless you’re willing to write some). You can’t optimize for words that you don’t have content for.
Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You’ll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won’t increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.
For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms “boots” and “cowboy boots”. These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified. Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede cowboy boots or women’s cowboy boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won’t know what you offer until they land on your site.
Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be “men’s cowboy boots”, “blue suede cowboy boots”, “extra-wide women’s cowboy boots”, etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it’s targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.
Phase 4 - Plan your attack
So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!
Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many pages you’ll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used.
We typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.
Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description Tags
- Meta Keywords Tag
- Headings
- Alt text
- Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
You’ve spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat.
Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You’ve created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You’re done, right?
Unfortunately, no. As your customer’s and your site’s needs change over time, so will your keywords. It’s important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.
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by : Lisa Barone is a Sr. Writer at Bruce Clay Inc.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Top 5 Benefits of SES NY
The eighth SES New York conference is coming up pretty quickly and as one of the last “Danny” programmed events, it should be a great one. I’ve been blogging SES shows for several years now and have advanced both knowledge and industry contacts tremendously by doing so. Barry, Chris and Ben have also done a bang up job in the past with triple and sometimes quadruple coverage of the event.
Whether you are an old hand SEO and online marketer or a noob, large conferences like Search Engine Strategies offer a number of excellent benefits. Here are my top five:
1. Mix of content. With a big show, there’s pretty much something for everyone whether your a PPC marketer, an in house SEO or work for an interactive marketing agency. SES conferences bring in a variety of speakers and topics. The New York show in particular has an agency slant that should appeal to all the East coast interactive, ad agency, pr firms, web dev shops as well as the abundance of in-house marketers. In fact, here is a list of the four star rated topics for SES that will be a part of the SES NYC programming:
- Video Search Optimization
- Mobile Search Optimization
- Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
- Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
- SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
- Social Search Overview
- SMO: Social Media Optimization
- Wikipedia & SEO
- Retailer Forum
- Search and Regulated Industries
2. Interest specific tracks. Along with a variety of content to pick from, SES provides tracks to give you a sort of iterative sequence of sessions, that can build upon each other. The tracks offered at SES New York include:
- Fundamentals
- Multimedia & Mobile
- Advanced Advertising
- In House
- Click Z Network
3. Networking. There are tons of networking opportunities at SES conferences. Networking with peers, competition (keep your friends close but your enemies closer) as well as prospects. Connecting with 2-3 or 20-30 new people at a single event like SES can help you create any number of new business relationships for recruiting new staff, outsourcing work, referring work and finding new prospects.
On top of all that, networking with other like-minded professionals can help you build that mastermind group to bounce ideas off of and share tactics, insights and what becomes the “real” learning opportunity. Search marketers produce an overwhelming amount of content with a significant signal to noise ratio. Befriending other smart marketers can go a long way towards zeroing in on the signal that comes out of sessions, after hours networking and after conference communications.
4. Sourcing content. If you’re a search marketing blogger, attending a conference presents a goldmine of content opportunities. Take notes from the sessions and write up articles. Take your camera and do some informal video interviews. Make Rebecca style comics or use cool tools like VoiceThread to present your photos. Here are a few tips for really milking the value out of content gained from search marketing conferences like SES;
- Take notes from sessions and use them to create 200-300 word blog posts
- Expand those notes into articles and submit the articles to one or some of the following: WebProNews.com, ISEDB.com, SearchEngineGuide.com
- Use the content outline from articles to create a PowerPoint presentation for: internal company training, client training or for use when speaking at an event. This can work the other way around too. Write an article, break it up into smaller blog posts. Or take your PowerPoint presentation and break it up into blog posts and/or articles.
- Interview other SEO/PPC attendees at the conference. Try a different angle than just the “popular” SEO/PPC rockstars. Possibly a series of subject specific interviews. Or interviews with uber talented, but not self-promotional SEO and PPC experts.
- Use photos and videos for your own social media promotion of your blog and company’s services
- There’s a lot more, but people pay us for that.
5. C’mon it’s New York! I don’t know about you, but whatever excuse I can get to visit New York again, I’m going to take advantage of. The problem is, it can be a bit difficult rationalizing the time away and expense to your manager or business owner using that reason, so stick with suggestions 1-4 above and you should be fine.
The early bird discount ends Friday March 23rd, so you’d better get more information on SES New York here or get registered ASAP.
For even more great insight, read Jim and Todd’s excellent advice on how to make the most out of search marketing conferences.
---------by Lee Odden is President of TopRank Online Marketing
Friday, September 26, 2008
Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.
The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.
It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.
by Vern Black is the owner of Pinnacle Publishing,
Sunday, September 21, 2008
SES NY2007 Session Coverage From SERoundtable
Big thank you to Debra Mastaler, Chris Boggs, Greg Meyers, Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Tamar Weinberg for helping me out with this awesome coverage. Here are the sessions we covered, somewhat in order.
Here are the fifty-plus sessions we covered at SES NY 2007.
- In House: Big SEO
- Video Search Optimization
- Compare & Contrast: Ad Program Strategies
- Podcast and Audio Search Optimization
- Benchmarking an SEM Campaign
- Online Video Advertising
- Advertising in Social Media
- Mobile Search Optimization
- Where Are Your Spending Your Client’s Money?
- Advanced Paid Search Techniques
- Ads In A Quality Score World
- In House Big PPC
- Keynote Conversation with Steve Berkowitz
- Sitemaps & URL Submission
- Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
- Link Building Basics
- Introduction to Search Marketing
- Web Analytics & Measuring Success
- Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
- Converting Visitors Into Buyers
- Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
- Writing for Search Engines
- Meet the Search Ad Networks
- SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
- Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix
- Earning Money From Contextual Ads
- Fun with Dynamic Websites
- Landing Page Testing & Tuning
- Search and Branding
- Robots.txt Summit
- Successful Site Architecture
- B2B Tactics
- Social Search Overview
- Creating Compelling Ads
- SMO - Social Media Optimization
- Images and Search Engines
- Search Behavior Research Update
- Social Bookmark Strategies
- Shopping Search Tactics
- Organic Listings Forum
- Microsoft adCenter: Today and Tomorrow
- Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
- Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan
- Search & Regulated Industries
- Wikipedia & SEO
- Linking Strategies
- Usability and SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One
- Link Baiting and Viral Success
- SEM For Non-Profits and Charities
- SEM Agencies: Working With Ad Agencies
- CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
by Organized by Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick)
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Don’t Risk Your Rankings With Unethical SEO
The worst kept secret in Internet Marketing is the advantages of a well-wrought search engine optimization campaign. Companies are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimize their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. However, not all SEO practitioners are created equal so be sure you know what you’re getting before you sign a contract.
With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. These techniques are known as spam and can get you penalized or banned from the search engines.
Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.
Consequences of Spam
While search engines may have different rules for detecting spam, in the end, the results are the same - you lose your rankings and can be taken out of the index. It is not easy to recover from a ban, so it is important to know the techniques that must be avoided.
Many sites may be unwitting victims of spamming techniques used by aggressive SEO vendors. Whether it happens inadvertently or not, the search engines will penalize and ban, temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on search engine traffic, you could be in trouble. When infractions are serious, it can take many months to convince the search engine that you corrected the problem and deserve a second chance.
SEO Techniques to Avoid
Search engine optimization practitioners are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success. A number of Black Hat vendors have turned to White Hat techniques over the past year; however, there are still many unethical vendors claiming to practice SEO soliciting business.
Below are some basic spam techniques to avoid. Obviously this list isn’t exhaustive but it will give you a good idea of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable. Familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you know if what is being done to your Web site is in agreement with those rules.
Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. When determining the appropriate keyword density for your page content, plan to repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. You can use the keyword density analyzer available on our free SEO tools page in order to determine if you or your SEO is using a particularly keyword too often.
Hidden Text or Links: This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site’s human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, the easiest of which is by using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won’t be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.
Cloaking: This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have proper uses–some sites use it to redirect based on location. For example, if they sell a product that is illegal to market in a particular area, they can direct those users to a different page where the illegal products are not mentioned. However, by and large, cloaking is used to deceive the search engines and must be considered a spam technique.
Doorway Pages: Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page irrelevant to the search query. These pages frequently auto refresh to a second Web site. Be sure that every page on your site that you want indexed can be accessed by at least two internal links and that the page provides value to the user.
Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content: This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users. An optimization company who suggests that you interlink all the Web sites that you own is doing you a great disservice. These types of incestuous link rings are a clear violation of the search engine’s spam guidelines.
Link Farms: Google’s quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with poor neighborhoods. Avoid these inbound links at all costs because they will result in serious penalties and banning.
Ask any prospective search engine optimization company about their best practices and be sure you know what they’re doing to your pages. Beware of spammers who claim to be legitimate search engine optimization experts. Realize that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.
Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. When you use spamming techniques, your site may benefit briefly from high rankings that last for days, weeks or months. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated. You might even have to start over with a new domain name. So beware of unethical SEO techniques and ask any prospective vendors if they adhere to a Code of Ethics and/or a Code of Conduct. Once achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. That’s why it’s important to acquire your search engine rankings fairly and maintain them ethically.
by Susan Esparza is a writer with Bruce Clay Inc
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Let Google’s Algorithm Show You the Traffic
Recently Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world’s Top SEO experts to tackle Google’s Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the Holy Grail of site optimization.
Google’s ranking factors affect how and where you are listed in their search engine results or SERPs. Since obtaining top positions for your targeted keywords often spells success for your site, knowing Google’s ranking factors can be very beneficial.
Every experienced webmaster will know Google is the main supplier of search engine traffíc on the web, getting listed on the first page or anywhere in the top 10 positions for popular keywords will result in plenty of free quality targeted traffíc.
Briefly listed below are some of the main ranking factors you should be optimizing your web pages for in your marketing. The majority of these ranking factors will be very familiar to most webmasters who take full advantage of any and every SEO tactic which will give their site an edge over their competition.
Here are some of the main ranking factors to consider:
1. Keywords In Your Title And On Your Page
Place your keyword or keyword phrase in the title of your page and also in your copy. Many webmasters use variations of their keywords on this page and also include it in the H1 headline.
2. Keywords In Your URL
Keep your page on topic and place your keyword in the URL. Use your keyword in the H2, H3… headlines. Place it in the description and meta tags, place it in bold/strong tags, but keep your content readable and useful. Be aware of the text surrounding your keywords, search engines will become more semantic in the coming years so context is important.
3. Create High Quality Relevant Content
Have high quality relevant content on your pages. Your content should be related to the topic of your site and updated regularly depending on the nature of your site.
4. Internal Onsite Linking
Internal linking is important to your overall ranking. Make sure your linking structure is easy for the spiders to crawl. Most suggest a simple hierarchy with links no more than three clicks away from your home/index page.
Creating traffíc modes or clusters of related links within a section on your site has proven very effective for many webmasters, including this one. For example, creating a simple online guide on a subject related to your site’s topic can prove very beneficial. Keep all the links connected and closely related in subject matter and don’t forget to have occasional external ‘anchor keyworded’ links coming to these internal links on your site instead of to your homepage. Deep build your links.
5. Only Linking To High Quality Related Sites
Don’t forget to link to high quality PR related sites. Linking to high quality sites shows the search engines your site is very useful to your visitors. Build relationships within communities on the topic of your site. Be extremely careful not to link to bad neighborhoods, link farms and sp@m sites… when in doubt, don’t link out!
Unless your site has been around for years and is well established and trusted by Google, this factor will have an adverse effect on your site’s overall ranking. Linking only to high quality content sites will give your site an edge over your competition.
6. Global Linking Popularity
One of the major ranking factors is the Global Linking Popularity of your site. You should try to build plenty of inbound links from quality sites. One simple and effective way to do this is through writing articles and submitting them to the online article directories. Only related sites will pick up and display your articles with your anchor text links back to your site. These are often ONE-WAY-LINKS.
But don’t just write articles to get links, write quality content that will help the reader first and the links will come naturally. Also remember an article is an extremely good way of pre-selling your products and gaining trust with your potential customers.
7. Anchor Text Is Very Important
Anchor text is an important factor your must not forget to use. Perhaps more importantly these inbound links should be related or relevant to your site’s topic, which will play an important role in your rankings. Don’t ignore the text surrounding your links and use different anchor text links to avoid keyword sp@mming.
Keep in mind, as search engines become more semantic, the whole text of your article will probably be considered your anchor text, thus making articles even more important to your rankings.
8. Number And Quality Of Your Inbound Links
Your inbound links should also come from related high Global Link Popular sites. The more links your have from these popular related sites the higher rankings you will get. Many SEO experts suggest you should have a steady stream of new sites (inbound links) added each month to keep your rankings growing. These links will age and íncrease your rankings after 4 or 5 months. Both quality and quantity is important.
9. Reliable Server And Service
Like any business, Google is only serving up a product (SERPs) to its customers, this service must be continuous and available at all times. Make sure you have a good reliable server because any extended downtime when your site is inaccessible to the Bots may be detrimental to your rankings. If it is down for over 48 hours, you could be dropped from the index. Ouch!
10. Duplicate Content Is A NO NO!
Make certain you don’t place duplicate content on your site. This may affect your rankings and get your pages thrown into the supplemental index. Be careful not to use duplicate title or mega tags on your pages as this will lower and disburse your internal page rankings, resulting in poor optimization.
Your overall SEO strategy should be to provide valuable relevant content and links for your visitors and the search engines. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, be extremely careful who you link out to from your site. Avoid sp@m sites, link farms or selling links. Although it is a bit outdated, using the Google Toolbar will still give you a general overview of a site’s PR or Page Rank.
These are some of the most common and important ranking factors Google uses to rank and display their search engine results. Optimizing your site or keywords for these factors can prove very beneficial and rewarding.
There are many more factors so you should use the link in the resource box below to get all the gory details. For any novice or experienced webmaster it makes for a fascinating read and is extremely helpful in tackling Google’s complex ranking system or algorithm. Conquer it and an endless supply of free organic traffíc is yours for the taking.
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By Titus Hoskins
Friday, September 12, 2008
Stuntdubl’s SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it “competitive webmastering”, “SEO”, or any one of a slew of other titles - it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most. It is a line of thinking that necessitates doing what is optimal: when to balance user experience with “bot experience” to create a site that will harvest any legitimate traffic without detriment to conversions, or without venturing into areas beyond the given risk threshhold for the project.
by Todd Malicoat is an internet marketing consultant specializing in internet advertising
Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between. In my mind, the reason SEO goes well beyond just search marketing into most areas of business is because search engine marketing IMPACTS many of the decisions that are made in a business. Marketing, infrastructure, customer relations, analytics, accounting, human resources can all directly impact search marketing and vice versa. SEO has become more and more of a strategic vision as top rankings become more competitive, and more valuable. SEO is in large part the communication gap between marketing and IT, combined with top level executive strategy (The only good SEO’s that leave the field at this point, do so to become CEO’s - visual illustration).
This is intended to be an “advanced beginner’s guide” - which is a bit of a paradox, but the idea is that even the most proficient of SEO’s often revisit the basics, and that execution on simple solutions can be very elegant and effective. It will also help to cover many of the things that all too often get overlooked. Executing on basics is the most advanced play in the search engine marketing game. A little secret I’ll let you in on - Even the “SEO Pros” go back to basics - content and links. They’re only pros because these two critical elements have become second nature, and nearly every waking thought is based around how to create mo’ betta content, or get some new links in creative ways.
cont. from front page –>
Even if you understand every single technique available - no matter what play you call - you still have to block and tackle to reach the endzone and score your top rankings. The most proficient SEO’s realize that search ranking, branding, marketing strategy, conversions, and postive conversations consist of two major elements - CONTENT and LINKS.
Content
User Experience and content organization
The user experience should be concise, and simple. Simple is elegant. You can have multitudes of functionality locked within a extremely simple streamlined interface. Read Don’t make me think, and the Big Red Fez.
Key tips with site architecture:
1. User architecture and bot architecture don’t need to be identical. A bot will determine the heirarchy of a site through it’s link structure. A user will determine the heirarchy of a site through the placement of the main navigational elements.
2. Search engines are becoming extremely proficient at incorporating semantics into link structure. Keeping a site sectioned into themes is extremely important. The importance of internal anchor text to this factor is rarely over-rated.
3. Internal search is incredible for gathering data on your site.
Resources for understanding information architecture, and balancing the user experience with the bot experience:
Content Creation
Keyword based content
Creating content specifically to rank for keywords. This is a borderline practice, depending on the intelligence level of the content. A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters could lookup and change content based on a set of words.
User generated content
The beauty of web 2.0 - people decide to connect together to do something. Whether it’s worthwhile or otherwise, two heads are very often better than one, and conversation is the backbone of the web.
How to content
Everyone loves to know how to do something. I really wish I could download things like “how to do your own plumbing”, and be able to figure it out. Someday, perhaps a well optimized and informative video will be able to do that.
Blog content
Write what you know. Talk about a relevant, cohesive topic.
Linkbait content
Make a GREAT idea even better. Be remarkable.
Commodity content
Sometimes cheap content is better than no content. Don’t be lazy.
Content Resources:
- 10 Web Tools to Help Generate Blog Content Ideas
- Adding content pages - 78 possible topics - Jim
- Can your content pass a hand check - Martinibuster_
- Content Planning for Search Engine Optimization - SEO by the SEA
- Content to create links - SEW
- Read Copyblogger through twice
- Directory of Government RSS Feeds _ Threadwatch.org
- Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing - lifehack.org
- Search’s Long Tail
- The Long Tail_ SEO Tips
- When Unique Content Is Not “Unique” - Sugarrae
- Finding Hidden Content - Content idea - RogerD’s notebook
- Editing Press Releases
- Writers’ Block_ Breaking Out With Ten Simple Ideas
- WebmasterWorld Supporter’s forum:
- 63 Questions to Ask Prior to Building a Content Site
- Content creation What do you know about writing for the web
- Providing Decent Content vs Providing Crap Content
Content Structure:
LINKS
The “Bot Experience”
“Create a site with your users in mind” has become an oft-quoted mantra of search engine representives when asked about how to rank better in search engines. While the logic is sound, it is also somewhat incomplete. The “experience” that a bot has when visiting your site will often determine the initial experience that a user has with your site as well. Controlling where the bot enters the site, and how the bot “sees” the site is of paramount importance to determining how users will find and navigate through your site.
Information architecture is one of the most overlooked areas of good search marketing. Mainly because it is one of the most difficult areas to retrofit on a site, and it’s extremely difficult for consultants to demonstrate the value to justify the workload needed to overhaul a site.
Link Development
Old is good - Old sites are trusted. Trustrank is a part of the game, and if you don’t believe it you’ve been sleeping. There is no sandbox, there is only the trustbox, and the trustbox emphasizes old, aged links that are on trusted domains that are relevant to your targeted query.
Link equity is the new brand building. Perhaps I’m a bit wrong - link equity, strategy, and development is the new brand building. Brand building and link building should coexist peacefully. Those folks out there that you’re paying $10 - $20 per hour for link building, are building your brand for the future. Why? because a brand is only a google search away these days. If I want to know how strong McDonald’s brand is - I do a google search. Perhaps I’m ahead of the curve, but even Joe sixpack isn’t that far behind me. He knows that google is a verb, and he’ll soon figure out how to change his default search application from windows live to yahoo or google. New brands don’t underestimate the intelligence of their consumers. Default search doens’t “WOW” anyone. Relevance, and information quality does.
Types of links and how to get them. Learn what they are, and how they apply to you. 12 types of links and how to get them.
Article link development
Write articles - submit to various sites based on automation for quantity or personal contacts for quality.
Press link development
Write articles - see above.
Partner link development
Network at conferences, through IM, or email, and make nice with friends.
Affiliate link development
Start an affiliate program with a service that is in the know. Redirect appropriate pages.
Paid link development
Buy text links on relevant sites
Viral link development
This one is probably among the toughest because it is becoming increasingly difficult to do something remarkable that people talk about.
Try learning what linkbaiting means.
Directory link development
Proceed with caution - you don’t need many.
Reciprocal link development
See above.
Link Development Resources:
- Graywolf’s Linkbuilding roundup on TW
- 10 steps to getting links to your site from M$ employee
- 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 _ SEO Book.com
- 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
- A Few Quick Link Building Tips - Jason Hendricks
- Advice_ Increase Email Response Rate _ Justilien.com
- All links are paid - More No-Follow Fallout
- Are You Guilty of Stinkin’ Linkin’ Thinkin’_
- 7 Even More Effective Ways to Build Links SEO Black Hat
- Building an outsourced team of link builders
- Buying Links - O’Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling
- CSS Redesign list - How-to increase your links through a redesign
- Delegating Link Development_ Outsource or In-house_
- Determining the Value of Links from Link Renting
- Does Your Site Have Link Building Potential
- Doing SEO in a Vacuum - natural link development
- Email is Still the Key to a Successful Link Building Campaign - seomoz
- Filthy Linking Rich by Mike Grehan
- Finding Most Relevant Powerful Page for Link from Jim
- Getting Links 1 of 5 - Neil ACSEO
- Google s New Link Filter
- How to Request Links From Picky Sites - mm - seomoz
- Increase Your Link Request Conversion - Don’t Do This!
- Interview of Patrick Gavin
- Jump-start Your Link Building (without Getting Sandboxed) by Andy Hagans
- Link Building 101 - SEW
- Link Building for Blogs Online Marketing Blog
- Link Building Guide - jim westergren
- Link Building Services - How much $$ per link_
- Link Building Strategies - Who To Link To
- Link Building Wiki - Main - Link Building Wiki
- link building with affiliate programs — does it work_
- Link Building with Landing Pages_ a basic guide
- Link Popularity and Link Building Basics-Linking101.com
- LinkHounds - Great Link Building Tips & Link Popularity Tools
- Linking Strategies that work in 2005
- Linking Strategies, items 1 to 50
- List of Searches for Link-Popularity Building
- Natural Backlinks - Getting backlinks without even asking. - Jim Boykin
- Natural link paterns - How “Internet Phenomenon” Gain Links Over Time
- Recommendations on Content to Attract Links
Secrets from Debra M - SEOmoz - Unconventional Link-Building Ideas
- SEOmoz Blog _ 5 Rare & Valuable Link BuildingTactics
- SEOmoz Blog _ Long List of Link Searches
- SEOmoz Blog _ What a Good Link Request E-Mail Looks Like
- Seth’s Blog_ What makes an idea viral_
- The Link Building Knowledge Base by Andy Hagans @ www.linkbuilding.info
- Threads of the Web - Linking for Success
- Threadwatch to Build Killer Link Analysis Tool
Linkbaiting
- 21 KEYS TO LINK BAIT SUCCESS
- Blogger Relations 101 - Lee - How to pitch a blogger
- How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic The Ultimate Guide
- I Just Hired A Billion Linkbuilders _ Scoreboard
- Link Bait - jim westergren
- Linkbaiting or Link Baiting Strategies - Aaron Wall
- Linkbaiting or Link Baiting
- Linking The Unlinkable_ When Digg Won’t Work
- Viral Marketing With Blogs _ Copyblogger
- What is Linkbait
Webmasterworld Link Development Threads
- Bad Webmaster - No Donut for You!
- Basic Link Dev Strategies
- Buying text links
- Confessions of a Link Building Casanova
- Explaining to Clients How to Get Links
- How can I get inbound links
- How much to quote for link building_
- It’s time to get some new links!
- Link Development in the Blogosphere
- Link Development Persona_ Male Versus Female
- Link Development Post Toolbar PR
- Link Development Strategies In the Age of Sandbox
- Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times
- Link Strategies To Build Presence and Gain Exposure
- New Link Spamming Technique
- Promoting deep linking
- Quality Content as Passive Link Development
- Research your Competition
- The Art Of Persuasion in Link Exhange Requests
- The Dark Side of Exchanging Reciprocal Links
- Buying Links - ‘Staying under the Radar’
Supporter’s Forum (worth every penny of membership)
- How many new links per month to be on the safe side
- Things to watch out for when outsourcing link development
- Tips For Attaining One Way Inbound Links
- If I was a search engine, part 1…
- “Triangular” link exchange
- Brainstorm On How To Get One Way I.B. Links
- Employing Link hunters
- Hints from Search Engine Engineers about Links
- Link Patterns
- The text link market
- They Handy Dandy [Sponsoredy] Linky Getting Guidy
- Paid Links - Is it time to take it seriously_
- Part 2 Explaining to Clients How to Get Links
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice - Resources for those figuring out what SEO really is.
You can take the blue pill or the red pill. The blue pill will take you back to your cozy desk job coding for the man, and the red pill might lead you to insomnia induced by ideas of how to turn your startup into a real company using only your laptop combined with some technical and marketing skills, and a realistic gameplan to pull it off. Or you might end up going from self employed to unemployed real quickly.
The first converstation I have with folks generally consists of them asking some questions about what SEO is. If they are REALLY interested, and get beyond thinking about the fact that I tell them meta tags generally don’t matter much, I would guess it feels a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I am still overwhelmed with information overload on a daily basis, and this is after over about 6 years of studying and experimenting with SEO techniques on a daily basis. I think the information overload stems from having so many opportunities to apply the information, as well as trying to keep up and evolve process with emerging opportunities.
Here’s where to start with your SEO Training if you’d prefer the red pill:
- SEO Glossary
- SEO Beginner’s Guide
- Google hot topics (Tedster is truly amazing)
- Search Engine Ranking Factors V.2
- SEO Tools
- SEO Tools 2
- SEO Manifesto
- Jim Boykin’s best posts
If that’s not enough, check out Lee’s list of SEO/SEM blogs, or Search through them.
More resources on site strategy: 18 questions your CEO forgot to ask when building your website
Practice your blocking and tackling every day. Read these long enough, focus on refining tactics, and experimentation, and you’ll always have a team to play for; your clients, vendors, employer, or partners will be dumping the gatorade all over you for being the one that “made it rain”.
What resources do you use for your SEO Playbook or your SEO blocking and tackling?
--------by Todd Malicoat is an internet marketing consultant specializing in internet advertising
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