Brute Force SEO Evo 2

  




Chandigarh, India — (SBWIRE) — 03/28/2010 — In today’s age large number of people know about the term SEO i.e. search engine optimization but not properly aware from its benefits. Each and every month thousands of new websites go online and the problem is that there are so many websites competing for the same keywords online and only few of them get benefits from that keyword.

Only making a well designed website with good content is not enough for getting business through them. For getting online success in business with a website SEO is essential. Without optimizing a website you will not be able to make your presence in the crowd . To rank higher in search engine results and this is only possible with SEO. Naturally, the higher a website is shown in the search engine result list, the more traffic it will get. SEO is a process of structuring a web page in that manner so that it is found, read and indexed by search engines for specific keywords.

You can get good position in search engines such as Google by using some good seo strategies. It is a process that is meant to convert site visitors into online customers.

Through SEO you let the search engines know that what each page of your website is about. Only doing search engine submission is not enough. your website has to use some techniques and technologies that make your site rank high in search engine results with a targeted keyword. There are some tips which are important while doing search engine optimization. There are so many strategies that are used to optimise a site but not all the strategies are working, while optimising a site you have to make a balance of them so that you get good results.

SEO can give your business a very good start in organic way and for long term. Mainly SEO has divided in two steps which further categorized in various steps.

1. Onpage Optimization
2 .Offpage Optimization

Onpage Optimzation – On-Page SEO is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. It involves changing page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings. Steps followed in Onpage Optimization are:

Website Analysis The process of optimization is start with website analysis. It is the most important part of SEO and it is the combination of several sub processes. In website analysis first have a look on website structure because structure of the website affects the position of website in search engines. While your website constructed in a search engine friendly way or not means website is made in static or dynamic . Because for search engines it is a tough task for crawling and indexing a website made in dynamic, flash or frames. Check the links while there is any broken link occur in website. Check the current position and traffic of website or ways to improve them.

W3C Validation It is also a part of website analysis. Validation of a website is done to keep a track on any errors or warning. Every website should be validated through the W3C validator if there is an error in the coding. W3C is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability; it does not have a direct impact on Google rankings.

Checking Urls Static or Dynamic There is one more aspect in seo is checking of Urls of website while they are static or dynamic. The static urls of a website score better than dynamic and they are seo and user friendly. Static url are more helpful in seo because firstly it is permanent and are crawled and indexed by search engines easily.

Keyword Analysis Keyword analysis is the most critical part of SEO. While starting keyword analysis first you will need to use google adwords for relevant or profitable keywords. The purpose of keyword research is to choose good keywords for a website. The closer the keyword match what the consumer is looking for, the better chance of getting good ranking and more traffic. Select right set of 6 – 7 keywords which can drive traffic to your site and rightly represent your business.

Meta Tags – Meta Tags play a vital role in SEO. For any SEO campaign meta tags is mandatory. These includes the folllowing tags:

a) Title Tags – Title Tags are most important factor for improving search engine optimization for your website. make sure to include your main keyword in the title with proper keyword density of your website. Give every page of your website its own title because your site’s main purpose is indicated title tags to the SEs. Remember Google can read only 66 characters in title tag, so be specific..

b) Description Tags – Meta description tag is a brief and concise summary of a website. There is a limit of 160 to 170 characters in it. It is important to add unique and effective meta description for each page of the website.

c) Keyword Tags – While doing optimization remember to choose the best possible keywords for a website which are essential for reaching your target audience. It helps the search engines and people to find your website easily.

Image Optimization/Alt Tag Attributes – Search engine crawlers are very good in reading text but at the time of images it fails. But images are a great way to enhance a website from a user’s perspective.So if your site contains images then it needs optimizing i.e. Image optimization and using special tags i.e. Alt tag which describe the images. Alt tags are the HTML code which describe an image. HTML is a way to specify the textual content for an image using the alt attribute. Alt tag is used for describing the image and that is very helpful but only use meaningful and relevant keyword. Search engine give more emphasis on that images which use alt tags.

Sitemap Creation Sitemap is a way or a list of pages on your website which helps to tell the search engine about the pages on a website for crawling and for users. The XML sitemap of google makes it possible for a website to get listed and get updated by the Search Engines. The XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of url’s and related attributes with in a site. Sitemaps helps to speed up the addition of the web pages of a site to the Google listing.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool – Google analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing traffic on your website. By creating account in it you will be able to keep track of all the activities made by the website. It generates website’s detailed statistics about the visitors that from where they visit and which keyword they search. Webmaster tool is a tool in which you can submit your sitemap, create robots.txt so that the Search Engines spider crawl through our website and index our website in their listing.

Header Tags Optimization – These are the html tags such as (H1 to H6), bold, italic etc. Make sure of using these tags while optimization means have to highlight certain parts of your website which you want your readers to look at. These tags are the essential part in search engine and gives web page a positive factor in search results.

Navigation/Internal Linking – We need to take care of Navigation or internal links that they are strongly structured and correctly working and all the main pages of the website should be linked through the main homepage so that search engines can go through all the pages properly and get them indexed.

Content Writing Adding or updating fresh content to the website on regular basis will encourage search engines to keep return to the website again. If you release new content time to time then search engine or users both start to re-visit your site for updates. It will improve your SERP.

Content optimization – In SEO content is the king. It is the key of search engine ranking. The content of your website is unique, informative, descriptive and well written and include main keywords of the website in it. Remember, not to overcrowd your content with keywords it is safe to use keyword density of 5% to 7%.

Off-page Optimization The Second factor in Search engine optimization is Off-page. It is done external or off page to the website to maximize the performance of targeted keywords of the website in SERP (search engine result page). Off-page is done to increase the backlinks for a website because more the backlinks to the websites will increase ranking in the search engines. It involves number of activities such as Link Building, Blog Writing and Submission, Article Writing and Submissions, Social Bookmarking, Press Release writing and submissions

Search Engine Submissions Ist step in off-page optimization is submit the website manually in search engines. Mainly there are three search emgines i.e. Google, MSN, Yahoo.

Link Building Links play imperative role to increase search engine rankings. Link building is the process of creating inbound links to own site. Exchanging links with similar website means site X will place site Y link in it’s website and site Y will place site X link in it’s website . This type of link building is known as reciprocal links but now a days Three way linking is more popular. In this there are 3 websites links to each other e.g. Site X will place site Y link, site Y will place site Z link and site Z will place site X link.

Directory Submissions This is the most popular way of getting hundreds of free quality backlinks. It is the one way inbound links to your website. It drives relevant traffic to your site which converts into sale. It is a long term and efficient process. There are thousands of web directories over internet and they offer both free and paid links.

Press Releases It is a way of publicity that can be done for an online business or website. You can post press release include fresh, interesting information or news related to a site in Press release site such as prlog.org .It is a public relation announcement issued to the news media and other targeted publications for the purpose of letting the people know of development of company.

Article Submissions – It is one of the off page technique which is very useful. Write keyword and content rich article on your own niche topic and then post it to article sites available online will create backlinks and some traffic. You might get more traffic if your article is published on other websites.

Social Bookmarking/Marketing It is a process which not only create backlinks but also help in gaining popularity of a website and getting huge traffic. There a whole bunch of social websites online which allow you to insert a link and information of your website by making account on them. It drive quality traffic and increase link popularity because search engines index the pages within these sites more fast then others..

Blog Submissions It is another Off-page technique that will give lot of quality links to the website. Write good quality and informative blogs and submit to reputed and search engine friendly blog sites.

RSS feeds This is one of the great tool of off-page in SEO. It is used to provide items containing short description of web content also with a link to the full version of content. Internet users will be interested in subscribing to your RSS feeds if you publish information or news in the way they like.

SlideShare: Make PPTs(PowerPoint Presentations) and submit it to slideshare.

Video Submissions: One of the seo step is video submission which is widely considered as a great captain for the success for generate traffic for a website or when dealing with website advertisement. Placing a videos in several distribution channels like you tube, veoh etc you add the video community traffic to the existing ones.

61DesignStreet.com offers you with best SEO and as well web design services. It is a award winning web design company provide wide range of internet business services. It is the right place for reliable and quality web solutions like Web design, search engine optimization, web development. They have the experts which club their creativity with innovative ideas to deliver you best product fulfilling your business goals.



SEO Checklist and Importance of SEO Step by Step

Technorati Tags: google, web page

  





Welcome to part 2 of our 3-part group interview series on backlink profile analysis. Part 1 covered backlink analysis for link building campaign design. Part 2 covers the more technical aspects of analysis, and what elements that link building experts look at to gauge the overall strength of a backlink profile.

14 URL factors in backlink profile analysis

The URLs of linking pages can tell you a great deal about a given site’s backlink profile. The URLs themselves can shed some light too when evaluating the quality of a given link prospect. Some of the link builders interviewed didn’t place value in URL analysis when investigating backlink profiles. Some did. Often, this comes down to differences in style and process.

1. TLD (if .govs or .edus have been linking it can indicate high-trust, high-value content)
2. Target keywords in the URL
3. Target keywords in the hostname
4. Number of URL parameters
5. Depth of the page on the site (as measured by /’s)
6. Iterations of ? and other extraneous characters
7. Excessive hyphens in a URL can indicate over-SEO’d content
8. URLS on blogspot or wordpress
9. Avoid https:// and ftp://
10. “links4free,” “getfreelinks,” etc…
11. The words “review” or “advertorial” (can indicate paid posts)
12. The linked-to site mentioned by name in the URL (can indicate a paid review)
13. Words that indicate content types (ie: “blog,” “news,” “forum,” etc…)
14. Excessive amounts of links.html and links.php indicates a weak profile

Key comments on URL factors

“Anything that indicates a news and information site is high on my list.”-Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

“I’ll look for footprints that can help me find more link sources similar to that one.”-Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI

“It is not something I spend time on. It is nice if their URL has keywords in it, but the link is valuable with or without that being the case. Other factors matter much, much more.”-Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

“When reviewing URLs, one strict but useful criteria is to scrutinize any website that uses hyphens in conjunction with keyword phrases in their domain name. A little SEO knowledge can sometimes be like a sharp stick in the hands of a child. Hyphenated domain names can be an indicator that a webmaster is running around with a sharp stick.”-Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

“I’m looking for the presence of target keywords in file paths and names and at TLDs. I’m also looking to see if there’s an opportunity to purchase a similar domain name (in the case of exact match), with an alternate TLD.”-Ken Lyons, of Wordstream

“Even an ugly URL can get indexed, but you want to make sure that it’s the canonical URL for that page and that your link didn’t wind up on some duplicate page. It’s also preferable when the URL structure is clean and uses descriptive phrases.”-Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

“To me, if a page is quality (i.e. relevant, has PR, dofollow, ranks well etc), then I don’t really care what the URL is.”-Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

“It’s more of what I DON’T look at. A URL itself can be an amazing source of signals, but more often, I look at URLs as a means to steer away from the junk.”-Eric Ward, EricWard.com

“If you see a lot of gardening-resources-7 or links.html near the top of their backlinks you know their profile is pretty weak.”-Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

“I look for things like keywords in the URL (more is good), URL parameters (fewer is good), and the depth of the directory (fewer slashes is good).”-Jeremy Bencken, of WebSimple

29 on-page factors in backlink profile analysis

When investigating backlink profiles, it’s vital to look at the pages that contain (or will contain) the link. Link builders consistently cited on-page analysis as a crucial element of backlink profile analysis.

1. Link embedded within relevant content that discusses link target
2. Title, headers, and content to see if the theme of the page is on topic
3. Text surrounding the link
4. Does the link appear paid or given freely, by editorial choice?
5. Does the page rank for its title?
6. Spam content in comments
7. The anchor text of the link
8. Page linked from other external websites
9. Proximity of the page to the root location
10. How well the page is linked to from within the website
11. The URL being Linked To (home page or deep)
12. Location of the link (on the page)
13. Number of outbound links on the page
14. Page Content (topic and amount)
15. Page back links
16. Page cache date
17. Pagerank
18. Quality of outbound links
19. Logical, appealing page layout
20. Page is bot-readable
21. Title and HX tags present?
22. Content buried under CSS and javascript?
23. Important page on the site vs. a “throw-away” blog post
24. Can you add directly to the discussion
25. Excessive advertising
26. Intent
27. Excessive links from link directories or blogrolls
28. Excessive links from links.php pages
29. Duplicate links on the same page (what is the first link’s anchor text?)

Key thoughts regarding on-page factors

“On page criteria is integral to the backlink analysis process. Outbound links are critical. It’s important to do a double backlink analysis. Analyze the backlinks of the sites your link candidate is linking to. This will help determine exactly what kind of link clique you are going to be associated with. Building a link clique independent from established link cliques is a way of combatting the established 800 pound gorillas that are entrenched in the top three. When you study the backlink of established sites you will generally see a relevancy pattern. Poaching from their backlinks only makes you a part of their sphere of influence. In my way of doing things, I aim to establish my own, and it has worked in overtaking websites that are a part of multi-million dollar networks for important two word keyword phrases. On page criteria is a key part of this process.

The ideal web page, in terms of on page factors, is a web page that has zero SEO fingerprints. Zero.”

“In general, I prefer to see a fairly decent pagerank (1-3 depending on how far down the page is in the site architecture) with a good amount of both external and internal links (can’t stress this point enough). Obviously relevancy is a must, but a more telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.”-Paul Teitelman, of Search Engine People

“The page must be closely geared towards my client’s target term or I don’t even bother. I want prospects where I don’t have to convince them to link; they just do it because it’s a logical fit. ”-Melanie Nathan

“A neat tool for quickly analyzing the value of getting a link once you’re on a page is Foxy Rank”-Tom Demers, of WordStream

“Is the link in the middle of content on the middle of the page, if not, take that into account. What other links are around it? Where do all the external links point out to on the page as a whole, are they relevant destinations to your site? Was this link added to the page after the fact or did it show up when the page was created?”-Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

28 on-site or sitewide factors in backlink profile analysis

When analyzing a potential link prospect (or a key competitor) there are a number of sitewide inbound link factors to analyze.

1. Site type distribution of inbound linking sites (Blog, Directory, Social Media, Press Release, Website, ETC)
2. Domain age
3. Toolbar PageRank (both domain and linking page)
4. MozRank
5. Recency of the latest post or other newest content
6. Estimated traffic
7. Presence of social network widgets
8. Unique linking IPs
9. Unique IP blocks
10. Does the site rank for its domain name?
11. Does the site rank for its target terms?
12. Which pages of the site are getting the most links (helps to determine what has worked as link bait)
13. Unique link distribution (Unique IP Adresses, Unique IP Blocks)
14. PageRank distribution across site
15. Link Type Distribution (No-follow, Do-follow, Missing, Broken)
16. Reciprocal links
17. Number of indexed pages (gauges how SEO friendly their site architecture is)
18. Link accumulation speed
19. RSS subscribers
20. Human comments
21. Does the site have a logical structure and hierarchy?
22. Is it easy for a human and bot to navigate?
23. Hosting Location Distribution
24. The sites’ relevance to and focus on subject matter
25. Site using KWD rich internal anchor text
26. The total link count.
27. Does the site come up for country-specific searches in Google
28. Anchor text distribution

Key insights regarding on-site factors

“I look for evidence of human activity. I’ll want to see who writes the content and how dedicated to the task they are. I’ll also look at evidence of audience participation – do people leaves comments on articles for example. Once I’ve established in my head that it’s a quality site, I’ll look for opportunities such as ‘write for us’, ’submit an article’, ‘editorial guidelines’, etc. I’ll also look for partnership opportunities with sites I’m really taken with.”-Ken McGaffin

“We look at the website’s linking profile and overall strength of backlinks. Specifically, we look at deep links within a website we’re trying to acquire a link from for our client. If the homepage is very strong and the site has no deep links, then the value is typically lessened. The structure of the website and how strongly focused it is to the client’s business is the next best indicator for us. Is it easily spidered and indexed by Google. A quick way to see this would be to type in “site:widgetsite.com,” then look at not only the pages indexed, but also pay attention to the diversity of the title tags, descriptions, and URLs being indexed in Google. Stronger websites nearly always have a wider and more clear diversity while previewing the indexed pages from the website.”-Brian Gilley, of Social SEO

“A lot of the link stuff is recursive. So when you look at an individual page or site that someone is getting a link from sometimes you can also see where that site is getting links from and come up with new link building ideas based on that.”-Aaron Wall

Further reading:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• Paul Teitelman’s extended answers to the backlink profile analysis questions

Here is a complete list of our contributing link building experts. Thank you to all the contributors for their time and gracious contribution of hard-earned experience.

71 Technical Factors For Backlink Analysis (From 30 Link Building Experts) – Part 2

Technorati Tags: edus, elements, excessive amounts, interview series

  





Whether you’re building links for yourself or a client, at some point you need to make sure that you’re procuring inbound links to not only your homepage, but also your critical subpages. Chances are, that if you have a nicely fleshed out site that has been built (and updated) with sound SEO principles in mind, you’ll have fantastic subpages that are worthy of those links.

You’ll probably also already have some quality inbound links coming to those pages. But, from what I’ve seen across a wide variety of sites, the need for purposeful deep linking efforts is definitely still there. Many websites will simply choose to link to your homepage when they reference you, whether or not your homepage is the most appropriate place for their purpose. The reasons for this range from not knowing the best approach to simple laziness.

Deep links serve a variety of purposes

1. Usability.Deep links can immediately get users to targeted information and thus decrease frustration (and site bounce rate, perhaps.) This, to me, is perhaps the most important point because (gasp!) it has nothing to do with either rankings or traffic. When have you heard that in a link discussion? This is about usability, and all the links in the world won’t make people want to use your site.

Just because users get into your site through a link on another site does not mean that they want to dig for the information that brought them there. If they clicked on a link with the anchor text “chalkboard calendars for kids” then they don’t want to go to a homepage and have to search to find the products. This also looks a bit…spammy. If I click on a link, arrive at a page where the anchor text isn’t immediately apparent in the content, I’m not happy, and most times I’ll exit very quickly.

2. Link Profile. Deep links can improve your overall link profile. As most anyone knows by now, a healthy backlink profile is not one-dimensional. It contains homepage links, subpage links, links with missing anchor text, links with “Click Here!” anchor text, links with fantastic anchor text, sitewides, footer links, in-content links, links from site you wouldn’t want to show your mother, etc.
   Organic link growth truly does happen in a somewhat random fashion, and if you have more than one decent page on your site, you should have links to those pages sprinkled here and there.
3. Traffic.Deep links can grab traffic from new and varied sources. Let’s say that a site mainly sells punk rock vinyl but the site owner happens to have an interest in ska. There are fifteen punk pages on the site and only one for ska records, so obviously he’s not going to clutter up the main navigation with the one little ska page.If the page has good content, then of course you could find it ranking for a ska search but it would obviously get more targeted traffic from some quality deep links on relevant sites (not to mention rank much higher with some inbound links!)
4. Rankings. Deep links can increase the amount of long-tailed phrases that you can rank for in the various search engines. Unless your homepage is cluttered with tons of long-tailed keyphrases, you’ll probably find that a lot of your long-tailed traffic is already going to subpages. Why not throw some links at those pages and boost things?
5. Avoiding Penalties. Well, this one’s more of an ‘I hope it does” than an actual rule, but it makes sense that if a site ONLY has backlinks coming into the homepage, it looks a bit unnatural.

How to improve your deep linking

First off, if you’re not sure of where you stand with regards to existing deep links, do a quick analysis:

How many current inbound links do you have? How many go to the home page vs. subpages? Do you need to do some work? If you’re totally happy with the way everything looks – read no more, but if you’re not…keep going.

Secondly, identify the subpages that you wish to promote. This takes a lot more time. Things you’ll want to look at in detail are:

• How many current inbound links do you have for each subpage?
• What are the main anchor texts?
• How are these pages currently ranking in the engines?
• Is the ratio of deep links to the homepage one that you think is accurate for the importance of these subpages?
• Can these subpages exist as standalone results in the SERPs? If so, great. If not, it might not be worth linking to. Why invest the time if a user is very unlikely to click on the result or, if a user does click, is going to leave in the first 5 seconds? You can use analytics data to check bounce rates for these pages also, to see if you need to improve anything.
• What are the filenames for these subpages? Can they be optimized? Is it even worth the trouble, since you’d have to do some 301s?

Next, evaluate your internal linking strategy

Finally, go out and get some links!

Whatever your link building strategy, just do it with the following two tips in mind:

1. Don’t neglect directories. Is your subpage listed in any directory? If not, consider it, as some niche directories are perfect for deep linking to good subpages.
2. Analyze your existing homepage inbounds to see if anyone that currently links to you might benefit from being alerted to a more appropriate page. If a website master cares about relevancy, he or she will definitely care about linking to the best page possible.

Troubleshooting

Obviously you can’t put a homepage link to every single subpage, so you do have to pick and choose your most important pages here. If you’re not very technical and don’t want to make a lot of changes, I’d certainly not recommend that you drastically overhaul your navigation just to get a homepage link (or an internal sitewide) to a subpage that may or not truly be that important.

Some subpages may not be able to hold their own in the SERPs. They may be worthy of some deep links simply to get a better inbound link profile and better rankings, but the downside is in turning off a user who might not return. Whether that is worth it or not is up to you.

5 Reasons To Make Sure You’re Deep Linking

Technorati Tags: anchor text, backlink, important point, traffic, usability

  

Posted 25 March 2010 10:30am by Jaamit Durrani with 29 comments

Running an ongoing SEO campaign is a lot like spinning plates. With so many factors in play in search engine algorithms, you really need to be aware of all of them at once to ensure a successful campaign – it’s all about keeping a balance between all of them.

This post is a compilation of various pitfalls, gripes and bugbears I’ve come across where something is lacking in the balance required for success in organic search.

1. Obsessing over onsite SEO

image credit:Kern Creative

I’ve always thought the term “Search Engine Optimisation” is a bit misleading. The word ‘optimisation’ makes you think that it’s all about fiddling with your site to make it more accessible and matched to keywords for search engines. Yes, that’s certainly a crucial part of the process but anyone who’s managed a successful SEO campaign in even a half-competitive niche will tell you can’t get anywhere with onsite optimisation alone. 

It’s the link building (offsite) part of the equation that really separates the wheat from the chaff in any particular niche. It’s links, both quality and quantity, that Google looks at to rank a list of webpages targeting the same keyword. Yet I’ve seen so many cases of sites that have supposedly been ‘SEO’d’ where the only ongoing work seems to have been tweaks to title tags, headings, copy and internal links.

Obsession over setting up XML Sitemaps and PageRank Sculpting is another symptom – see Jill Whalen’s excellent rant on SEO Boondoggle from last year. 

Yes, onsite SEO alone will get you a long way if you already happen to have a lot of backlink authority; in some cases of big brands with powerful sites it might even get you to number one for your target keyphrases, but for everyone else continuous improvement has to focus on ongoing link building. If your SEO campaign isn’t bearing fruit after a lot of time and investment, ask yourself (or your SEO) whether this is the reason why.

2. Forgetting about the foundations

I need to balance the first point here, because throwing everything into link building without making sure your onsite keyword targeting is in order is a bit like trying to build roads to a new shopping centre before the building’s foundations have even been laid down – it’s pointless. 

Search engine algorithms ultimately boil down to two facets – relevance (ie keyword targeting) and importance (ie backlink authority).  You need both parts to be happening for the sweet sweet feeling that comes with great rankings, traffic and profit. This is why I’m sceptical of people who go for link building-only services without having a handle on the onsite side of things. 

3. Worshipping the false idol: the homepage

image credit:tnoyf.com

Now this is really a pet peeve, and I know a lot of my fellow SEOs will be nodding away at this point. It’s true, your homepage is usually the strongest in terms of SEO and where you want your primary keyphrase rankings to come to. But that doesn’t mean you can rely that single page to do everything for you while neglecting the rest of your site.

How often have you come across a site in which the homepage is the only clearly defined landing page in terms of search engine traffic? It’s one of the reasons why entirely Flash-based sites are usually a no-no because they’re typically just a single page as far as search engines are concerned. 

It’s also often the case that when we get a new client we can see that the incumbent SEO has clearly only been link building to the homepage. For me the best long term SEO strategy, for all but the single-product websites, is to build landing pages throughout your site, each focusing on a different keyphrase variation, and build links to all of these as well as your homepage.

4. Fawning over ‘BigHead’ keywords

image credit: LeftClick

This is the companion to homepage worship. You’ve done your keyword research and seen those ten or so juicy keyphrases with the biggest search volumes – naturally you want to focus on those to get a piece of that search volume pie. These are also the ones that make you look cool in reports and presentations to your client/boss. 

Every successful SEO campaign I’ve worked on gets the majority of its organic search traffic and sales via the depth of long tail of referring keyphrases – ie terms which in themselves don’t command much search volume, but taken together kick the arse of the biggest head you can think of (er, so to speak). 

On the other hand I’ve seen sites which rank top of page one for their big keyphrase targets but still aren’t getting much in the way of traffic and conversions because they lack the rankings across the board for those smaller terms.  As well as this, chances are your competitors are all also fighting over those big terms and putting much of their SEO resources into – by being smart over long tail targets you can really steal a march on them (I made this point in my last post on ecommerce SEO, but I figure it bears repeating here). 

For some more detail, stats and strategy on this subject I recommend reading Single Keywords Are For Losers, which also looks at the power of grouping keyphrases together into themes.

5. Ignoring conversion & analytics

To my mind, a good SEO won’t just be satisfied with measuring rankings to gauge success – they will regularly refer back to the site’s Analytics to see what is actually happening in terms of traffic. Are those positions actually bringing traffic to the site as you predicted? If it is, are there any unusually high bounce rates suggesting you might be going after irrelevant or too broad terms? Are the number of referring keywords increasing? If not, why not?

This may all seem obvious, but unless you develop a routine of checking analytics as part of the campaign you can easily miss some pretty important insights that should be feeding back into your SEO efforts. Often, blindness to this data is borne out of not wanting to be proven wrong or face challenging questions about results achieved so far.

Beyond this, I’m a big fan of tying SEO measurement with conversions and sales. Setting up ecommerce tracking, goals and funnels within your analytics package is crucial if you really want to get an idea of whether your organic traffic is making any real difference. Again, purely focusing on traffic and ignoring conversions is a sign of not wanting to deal with bad news.

6. Obsessing over analytics

image: campusblues

As with anything, you can take Analytics too far though. The sheer volume of data, reports and levels you can drill down into can very easily suck you into spending hours and days analysing traffic, trends, year on year comparisons, weird referring keywords that make you go ‘ooooh’ and strange anomalies you start pointing out to your annoyed colleagues.  

Suddenly you realise you haven’t actually done any productive work, you’ve just been staring at pretty graphs and have nothing to show for it in terms of results.

Believe me, I’ve done this (can you tell?), and have come to the realisation that at some point you have to stop looking at analytics, get off your arse, and get on with some real work (erm ok you’ll probably still be sat on your arse to do that, but – you know what I mean). 

7. Tweakophobia

Several times I’ve had an SEO client say they’re reluctant to carry out changes to a page, whether it’s updating or adding copy, changing a page title or including a new feature because they don’t want to “mess with their rankings”. I guess the closed door nature of search engine algorithms have built up a mystique around them.  

This mythical beast they call “Google” has the power to giveth (enough traffic to keep entire businesses going) and to taketh away (we’ve all heard the stories of bans, penalties and filters for doing the wrong thing, causing rankings and traffic to bomb overnight). Somehow this translates into an irrational fear of ‘poking the beast’ which kicks in when your SEO suggests changing the copy or titles on a page.  

If this is you, I want you to listen very carefully. First, SEO is not voodoo - it’s actually a pretty clear set of principles, and most of the time (barring the very occasional truly baffling occurrence), making the right changes leads to positive results.  Second, change is normal and healthy.  

A naturally ranking website (ie without a specific ‘SEO’ campaign behind it)will be drawing lots of visitors and will inevitably be adapting and changing its content and look as time goes on. Google recognises this, and in fact gives a lot more attention to a living, breathing webpage – by crawling it more often – than it does to a page that has been stuck with the same content since it launched in 2002.  

Third, your copy/page title/meta description/navigation menu is not a sculpture of fine art. It hasn’t been ordained to be that way by angels who have wished it ‘just so’.  Take a leaf out of the experts in Conversion Rate Optimisation, who have proven the power and profitability of constant change, testing and tweaking. 

8. The Premier League chairman factor

Non footie fans will (hopefully) forgive the analogy, but to me it’s a perfect one. In modern football, especially the Premier League, owners and chairmen are so impatient for results that oftentimes a new manager is sacked only a few months after he was brought in, because the results aren’t coming in as expected. (Take a look at this list for some background evidence – it’s OK, you can tell your boss you’re working and blame me).  

It frustrates me because so often the manager isn’t even given time to settle in, get to know the players and mould a team in his vision. This is why Arsene Wenger has been able to construct one of the finest football teams on earth, because he has been given over a decade to work his magic (there’s another example of a manager that’s been around for donkey’s years and built a pretty good team too, but I don’t like to speak his name).

The point? Ah yes. Well you see the same thing happens so often with SEO – clients and site owners fail to grasp that the onsite SEO, linkbuilding work and building of domain authority is a long term investment and will not get you to the top of Google for all your keywords within a couple of months. Results take time in this game, and sometimes, particularly when you’re in a very competitive niche, you need to be patient and have an understanding of what is happening under the surface.  

There’s definitely a tipping point in a lot of cases where good things start happening all at once after a period of stagnation in rankings. One of my clients didn’t see significant progress until six or seven months into the campaign – yet after a year the ROI on their SEO campaign was more than 1,800%! Now this should never be used as an excuse for crappy SEO – I guess it requires trust and understanding on both sides, but it can be frustrating when clients get twitchy in this way and you just know good times are around the corner.

The other symptom of this twitchyness happens on a smaller level: you make a significant change to a site based on sound SEO practice – perhaps a URL rewrite or introduction of copy – and there is an immediate negative effect in rankings.  

Immediately the pressure comes on the SEO for suggesting such a change and aspersions are cast as to his/her sanity. It is also responsible for severe cases of Tweakophobia (see number seven above). But it’s so often the case that Google – for reasons best known to itself – will often react this way for major changes while it updates its index, and after a while the positions come back stronger than ever.  

Have patience, my friend, and courage in your convictions – backing out of such changes is probably the worst thing you could do, because when the rankings come back, it looks like that change was a bad idea.

9. Reading too many SEO blogs!

image: Bookworm by ittybittiesforyou

OK, this is perhaps a bit controversial for someone who blogs about SEO to say, but I’m not alone. Now I’m the first to recommend keeping up with what the prolific SEO industry is talking about; indeed without SEO blogs and forums I wouldn’t even be an SEO. But you can take it too far. 

You don’t have to read everything that comes out there to be a good SEO (in fact, if you did, you wouldn’t have any time left to actually do anything).  You do, on the other hand need to spend your time actually doing SEO to be able to really master it. Once you reach a certain point in understanding the fundamentals, practical experience is really the only way to truly grasp what works and what doesn’t.  

A young fella by the name of Glen Allsopp (aka ViperChill) – who incidentally makes me feel both old and dumb – recently highlighted this point in the best possible way by writing about SEO techniques that he has found to be very effective, based not on reading hundreds of SEO blogs, but by trying things out for himself.  

I strongly urge you to read that post and then, take a break from obsessive reading and just get on with it.  I’ll try and do the same, right after I’ve read these posts in my Twitter stream… [doh].

I’d be really interested to know if you’ve come across issues like these, if you have others, or just think I’m plain talking nonsense and want to let it all out – please leave a comment…

Learn more…

The latest version of our comprehensive SEO Best Practice Guide will help you understand search marketing like never before. It contains everything you need to know about search engine optimization, whether you work for an in-house client team or for an agency.

The SEO Best Practice Guide is invaluable for anybody working in internet marketing, or looking to appoint an SEO agency, or simply trying to secure better Google rankings.

Nine common SEO campaign mistakes

Technorati Tags: bearing fruit, sculpting, search engine algorithms, target, term search engine, wheat from the chaff

  

Recently the company I worked for made a big decision to rebrand and with it came the dreaded domain name change. We are also having a new website being built so another SEO favourite URLs. This article will share my leanings from my sleepless nights and epic amount of research into making sure it didn’t go wrong.

After my research I decided to not listen to what I read and decided to change our domain name and page paths all in one hit. I bet you’re thinking “That’s suicide”, well yes but my results further on may surprise some.

Post Migration Preparation

I know of all too many bad experiences of this, from things like pages dropping forever to massive Google penalties for doing it wrong, which is why the prep work into this was huge. Just from my research I was getting worried about the task at hand. On our website we have over 70,000 URL’s. There were also a lot of rule sets for the different types of url paths our development team created the rules based on my rule sets and there was a huge amount of testing on a server that we had set up purely for testing.

Also being a solo In House SEO it can be hard to bounce ideas off people; luckily I have some good contacts through LinkedIn and Networking that I conversed with on a regular basis on these matters. I am also willing to do the same should you need the reassurance of what you are doing. (Details at the bottom of this post)

A big BIG URL List

Initially you will need a comprehensive URL list. You can get these either by spidering the site using tools such as Xenu or by asking your developers to create a script that will query your CMS’s database to generate a list of EVERY page on your website. But beware here, if your computer is of an average standard and you have a large site. Prepare for Excel to turn into a cripple when you need to work with the data.

With this list and the rules creates you can magic up some formulas that will create the new URL’s in the cell next to the old url. (This list will prove to be a bible for your PPC manager and affiliates if you have them) For me I used it for easy reference when people asked me “What’s the new URL for xyz page?”

If you have a smaller site then this will begin to form the basis of your 301 list. If you need to know how do 301’s then please Google it based on your server architecture. (As that’s another article separate to this) If in my case you have a large site then you need to sit down with your development teams and run through redirect rules based on your new URL construction rules. Prepare to call RegEx a friend by the time you finish this. (or just get your developers to do it if you are not sure)

Look at all those backlinks

Yet another long winded task in this project was updating of backlinks. In reality you cannot update all of your backlinks. If you have a portfolio of 100k backlinks in Yahoo you definitely have a lot of late nights. Luckily there are some awesome tools around to help you work out the importance of the backlinks. You can take your pick of SEOMoz’s Linkscape and Majestic SEO’s Link Intelligence as they are both brilliant tools, or like me, you can use both of the tools and mash them up in excel using some crazy formulas and pivot tables. From doing this I have worked out the top backlinks by order of importance. We’ll just store this for now until the day of the switch.

Testing

We have many development servers that we always test new functionality on. So with this task we dedicated on solely for the Migration Project. This server took a beating with the amount of spiders and load testing we threw at it. If you have the ability to do this then do, I cannot stress how much more weight off your shoulders it will be for you to see the success on there before putting it all live. What am I looking for in testing? Mainly I was looking to see any 404’s, 500’s that appear and to make sure the 301’s went through to the correct place. On a site as big as ours to check all results would have meant I’d be there for years. So we did a cross section of around 70% of our heavyweight pages and the rest being the lower converting pages.

Ranking reports

Make sure you have set up your rank monitoring programs to run every day for a few weeks after you make the switch. This will help to identify anything instantly should it go wrong.

Webmaster Tools

Make sure you have your Webmaster accounts for the new domain set up and verified. Google especially not only because its the big one when it comes to Search Engines but also because they have the Change of Address {link to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83106} function in there

Oh and Just in case…

Make sure your 404 page is a helpful one. Chances are some people will get some 404’s, in fact its highly likely with this risky a process. Make sure that your 404 page is a helpful one with links to some top level pages your link to sitemap and maybe even a site search.

Day of the Switch 

So you’ve had your sleepless night and are probably up at a silly hour so as not to affect traffic. You get in and you deploy. The developers make the switch to the websites URL’s and Paths. It goes all tense until someone says shouts done. Now what…

Spider the site

First thing I did was browse the website, see if the page addresses had changed. I then went to Google and did a site:olddomain.com and clicked some of the top links. Using Firebug for Firefox I could see they were 301ing to their new homes.

To ensure it all further I now ran a web spider and waited. I used A1 sitemap generator to spider the site. When it was complete I had some results and also the ability to generate a sitemap.xml from the results. Make sure this is uploaded

Now you can log into Google Webmaster Tools and begin the Change of Address make sure that you have added your link to the sitemap.xml into the new profile. Google will now begin to make its necessary changes. This could take some time.

Is your analytics reporting?

If you have kept the same analytics account make sure you change the details so that it works with ok on the new domain.

If your site is an ecommerce one, do some test orders and see if the URL’s in your basket path have changed at all. Check your URL’s at every basket stage and make sure they match the basket stages in your Goal path funnels. Also check your final Goal URL’s. If they have changed then you’ll need to update all of your Goal points to reflect this change

Hello Webmasters

Now you need to pull out that list of backlinks you created and spend some time every day for the next few weeks contacting webmasters in that own the sites that you have heavyweight links on. Some sites are easy and have contact forms or even email addresses that you can use. Some sites can be harder. Firstly you need a name, if there is nothing on the site with a webmasters name you can check the code. Does he have a <meta name=”author” content=”Joe Bloggs” /> in there? If there is no name anywhere on the site pull up your favourite whois tool (I use Domain Tools) and tap the url in there. You should get sufficient information there to be able to jump on LinkedIn or something else that you use to find people.

I had quite a consistent message that I created. Part of it was that same for all sites and a section customised for that website. The intro went into the changes undergone and the custom part said something like “we have a link on your xyz page pointing to http://old-domain.com/dull-coins please can you update this to http://new-domain.com/new-coins”

Are your eyes peeled

You need to monitor everything daily now to make sure the transition goes smoothly. Keep a close eye on your webmaster tools accounts for 404’s, check your websites error logs. Look for anything odd in your analytics packages. Make sure your website is converting and sales are coming in.

PR / Newsletter

You need to tell the world of your new domain name change. If its just the domain change then it is a smaller Press Campaign and an update to your customers. If you did a site rebrand at the same time then you will obviously do a larger Press Campaign and a Newsletter. Most people won’t even spot the changes as you will have set up all your redirects correctly.

Finally keep monitoring EVERYTHING very closely to do with the site until you are comfortable that its all gone right. I was happy and comfortable after about a month and a half.  Some people say three months before it is all back to normal for you.

Some of my results

Unbelievably the process for me was so smooth I thought something was really wrong. My main ranking report has 16 big generic keywords in all of them are front page on Google. We did our switch on the 22nd December 2009. 2 days after the switch I started noticing some rankings appear for the new domain (shocked me). 5 days in and all of the rankings had moved over. Granted they were around 30 – 50 but they had moved over. 10 days in and the rankings had gone top 20 and by there they fluctuated for a while. Then one day on the 13th of January they got back to the positions they were before the switch +/-2 positions. A month later we seen a substantial increase in our rankings and they are now at better positions than before the domain switch. My personal thoughts are that the domain name we switched was twice the age of the old domain name, this must have had a bit of an impact with the rankings. Also my increased link building and quality directory submissions could have helped. As with everything in SEO there are a number of factors that have helped me get to a better position all of them together make for great success.

Things to remember

• 301 301 301 Three Oh One did I mention 301? The most important thing here forgetting this or missing important pages will be very costly.
• Remember to update your links on your website to point to your new url’s and page paths.
• Try to contact as many webmasters as possible to amend those back links.
• Test until you cannot test no more. If it all works brilliant and no broken links are on the test machine then it should be good to go.
• NEVER forget your PPC campaigns. You will need to modify all of the display and target URL’s a big task if you manage a few hundred thousand keywords.
• Tell all of your affiliates of the changes and where possible pass them and old to new URL list to make their life easier with the change. Also on any banners ensure you have the correct URL in them.
• Never expire your old domain, it’s been yours for a few years. People like to type it in. It should be redirecting to the new domain homepage.

Because of the amount of research I did on this and the success of it all (so far so good) I will gladly answer any questions you may have on migration. The best way to grab my attention is through my Twitter account @shanejones {link to http://twitter.com/shanejones}

Shane Jones is an In House SEO working in for a leading Online Travel Agent in Manchester, England. You can contact him thought his site or follow him on twitter @shanejones{link to http://twitter.com/shanejones}

Migrating to a New Domain and URL Structure – My Learnings

Technorati Tags: developers, experiences, magic, sleepless nights

  

I have a small blog with the google ranking of 5. When I use an online calulator: http://websiteoutlook.com/ it says my blog is only worth only $65! how does this work? The sites value has gone down, yet my rating has remained the same for some time.
Just wondering how they both work – thanks.
Molly

How does the google ranking and web calculators work?

Technorati Tags: blog, google, google ranking, molly, online calulator, web calculators

  

I want to get my website on the first page of google and maybe on other search engines as well. Anyone care to show me the way?

how do you get to google rank #1? how do you get search engine ranking to increase in all search engines?

Technorati Tags: google, other search engines, rank 1, search engine

  

Should I expect my Webmaster to correct ALL of my site’s XHTML Errors? or is it common to have these Errors?

When running a validation test, it returns 34 Errors. Would it effect my SEO efforts?

Thank you

XHTML Validation: How Important is it to have Pass XHTML Validation Test?

Technorati Tags: validation test, xhtml

  

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Your keywords are your most important piece of information you will ever need to be successful online when it comes to search engine optimisation. To get the optimisation you require for your website you will need your site to be search engine friendly. Your site has to have content and that content must be words relevant to your website at all times, using certain words at all times, your keywords. Keywords are words searched often for websites in your industry. The higher search rate for words the better for your site but harder to achieve, which is when patience comes into play.

The first step when chosen your keywords is finding the best keywords for your website. Google offers many services to help companies when it comes to this, such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which gives statistical information from the past month in terms of how many search’s for chosen keyword(s). Usually, low searched keywords should be chosen first to collect some page ranking before attempting higher searched keywords.

When choosing keywords you should use a mixture of high and low searched keywords. This will give your website a fighting chance at getting the best positions for your chosen keywords. Once your website has a better PageRank you are more likely to begin competing against other websites for the higher searched keywords. This may take time, but once you’ve achieved and maintained your positions you will realise your time was well spent.

Once your keywords are chosen you must begin placing them strategically around your website. Your homepage is where you must include your main keywords, this is because this is where you want your potential customers to enter first – you wouldn’t want someone entering your house through the back door would you? Creating multiple pages based around these keywords is essential. The more information on these pages about your keywords will help strengthen them. Try to use one keyword more than any other to optimise it as much as possible.

A linking structure is just as important as your keywords as this will help search engines find your web pages with information created about your keywords. Your links can either be internal or external, but the words you used to link with should always be the chosen keywords from earlier. Search engines follow all links to the designated pages and cache them, which will then be displayed to potential customers when using search terms with your chosen keywords in. Avoid spamming links all over your website else it will be penalised and black listed by search engines, putting any efforts to waste. You should try to include each keyword with a link to the correct page on every page as this will add weight to the links, optimising the website in the process.

The best but hardest process is to get external links from other websites relevant to your industry. The better ranked the website the better for your website. Linking from low ranked websites is useless, but if you achieve to collect a few links from well ranked websites your website will benefit extremely. Getting links from highly ranked websites may cost, but the cost will pay for itself once your website is ranked highly on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.

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Choosing Keywords for Search Engine Optimisation

Technorati Tags: adwords keyword tool, chosen keyword, fighting chance, google, mixture, patience

  

I don’t often jump into the world of SEO advice–there are plenty of excellent blogs that do that–but when Google’s Matt Cutts confirms that 301 redirects do, in fact, lose PageRank, well, that’s worth sharing.

Eric Enge gets the scoop–boy, is he gonna get a lot of backlinks from this–getting Matt Cutts to confirm something that I have suspected and cautioned clients for many years: 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay. Here’s the quote:

I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

So now you know. But, don’t stop there, read the rest of the interview, you may just learn some other propaganda SEO tips.

(via)

Social Media Monitoring in Just 60-Seconds. Guaranteed!

Google Confirms: 301 Redirects Result in PageRank Loss!

Technorati Tags: blogs, enge, scoop