SEO and More

I just published this excellent article by Robin Nobles, called “Chasing the Search Engines’ Algorithms . . . Should you or Shouldn’t you?” .

All the points that Robin makes in the article are especially important for those looking to get high rankings in the long-term. I know this approach works because I wrote the manual on it. The sites I used it on are still #1 for their choice of key phrase even after YEARS…

When you chase algorithms, you’re have to keep running to stay one step ahead of the search engines and the changes in their algorithms. How well you do then depends on how far you’re willing to run. We believe that approach is strictly suitable for those looking for short-term gains.

One the other hand, when you create a website with good content, backed up by a well-planned, well-executed linking campaign you’re setting yourself up for success in the long term, and your time and effort is spent building a great brand that will attract links, publicity and traffic for a long time to come.

Which would you rather have? If you’re wise, you’ll choose the latter.

In that case, you should keep Robin’s recommendations in mind -

1. Forget about the search engines. Write your web content for your readers and visitors.
2. Keep the basic SEO rules in mind so that your pages are well optimized.
3. Focus each page on ONE keyword phrase only.
4. Add fresh content, use synonyms

I especially liked this statement by Jerry West of WebMarketingNow.

“Take it from someone who has been in this business for nine years and studies the algorithms closely - don’t chase the algorithms. You say that you have a #2 ranking for a certain keyword phrase that alone is bringing your site 550 visitors per day? Great. In the time that you have spent gaining that ranking, I have written 285 pages of unique content, obtained 821 links, etc., and collectively I am getting over 1,300 visitors per day.”

Focus on building a more useful website and reap the rewards of top rankings in the long-term.

Is your retail site optimized for the search engines? If not, you’re leaving money on the table, says a new study by Oneupweb titled “There’s Still Money on the Table: Internet Retailer Study 2005“.

The study shows that only 17 percent of Internet Retailer’s top 100 sites are fully using search engine optimization and marketing, while 83 percent are not and so are missing profitable opportunities. Oneupweb studied each site’s meta tags, site architecture, keywords, content and other tactics.

They also examined the level paid search use among the top 100 sites, and found that moderately optimized sites had the highest rate of paid search marketing (68 percent), compared with 53 percent of well-optimized sites. Some 40 percent of nominally optimized sites, and 26 percent of not-optimized sites use paid search.

Via Marketing VOX

We truly believe in the power of online press releases in building online visibility and backlinks. Google’s new algo also views links from news sites with more authority, so a live link from a press release is very valuable to your business.

We just submitted our first press release, titled “SEO & More Offers Free Whitepaper on Blogging and Search Engine Visibility” , to PRWeb (for many reasons the top choice of PR professionals online) using the $80 submission option which guarantees Yahoo news coverage.

Within just a few hours of its release, it was read 3031 times and picked up 201 times by media outlets. Now THAT’S the power of publicity!

Shameless plug: Did I mention we also offer press release optimization and distribution as part of our services?

In the last post, I mentioned why we lay a great deal of stress on content as one of the mainstays of our SEO strategy.

But just any old regurgitated content won’t do. Google has been trying to implement a duplicate content filter for a while now, and sites that host similar content are being weeded out.

We don’t need to mention that using someone else’s content is also illegal and violates copyright laws (unless the content comprises free reprint articles that have a link back to the author’s site).

To avoid Google’s duplicate content filter and take your site to the #1 position, your content needs to be:

1. Unique

2. Relevant

3. Fresh and Updated

A well-written blog is one of the best ways to create fresh, unique content, and we’ve used blogs with great success. So to demonstrate exactly how blogs can benefit your SEO efforts, we’ve written a whitepaper on this sizzling topic.

Request our free whitepaper “Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS”

Update: Read snippets from our whitepaper in the article here
How Blogs And RSS Boost Your Search Engine Visibility

According to the new issue of the Axandra newsletter, a recently conducted study examined the links users followed on the search engine results page and found that 42% of users clicked the top result, and 8% of users clicked the second result. This confirmed previous studies that the number one result gets many more clicks than all other results.

The study titled titled “Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough Data as Implicit Feedback” (pdf) is available for download as a PDF document.

How can you benefit from this?

Well, the study confirms the importance of being listed on the first result page. If your web site is not listed on the first result page, changes are that web surfers won’t see your site. A previous study of the Georgia Institute of Technology found that 75% of searchers never look further than page one. It is important that you get your web site on the first result page.

How do you do that?

Our #1 strategy is CONTENT! Good content combined with a well-planned and exceuted SEO and linking campaign is almost guaranteed to get good rankings.

Just came across this news item about Terrawiz.com, a new search engine for India related content. According to the press release,

Terrawiz’s intelligent crawler automatically identifies and classifies the web content, indexing only India related information and ignoring other content. By having an Indian centric database the relevancy of the results are far better. Terrawiz’s intelligent crawler automatically identifies and classifies the web content, indexing only India related information and ignoring other content.

No details are provided on how they do that and what parameters they use to classifiy a document as “India-related” since many Indian sites don’t provide contact information at the bottom of the page.

But Anurag Dod, Founder of Terrawiz and IIT Delhi alumnus claims that “This is one of the most comprehensive search engines for India.”

The user interface is simple, a lot like Google. I tested it out and found it hadn’t indexd many of my sites (and I usually add an Indian address at the bottom of the page). Ah well, if your site is specific to India, here’s another engine to submit to.

According to Google engineer, Matt Cutts, Google is trying out a new initiative to allow users to block spammy or non-relevant sites from their personal search results.

For now its just an experiment and the results are restricted to the users personal search results - for which you need to register with Google and let them monitor your cache. Removing a site from your personal search results does NOT remove it from the index (not yet, anyway).

But it does grant searchers wth new-found powers to improve their own search experience, and gives Google the power (since they monitor personal search results) to manually check and remove spammy sites with even more efficiency.

Trust Google to improve the users experience by granting more power to them! Its no wonder they’re enthused by the possibility.

As one of them notes,

its use goes beyond removing spammy sites. You can remove links that may not be spammy but are just not relevant to the context in which you are doing the search… doing this can surface useful stuff that you may not have noticed because it was buried further down the serps.

Of course, the experiment has plenty of SEOs worried about competitors using this feature to get them banned from the general search index. Dan Thies warns Google:

Just don’t let anyone talk you into baking this into the regular search results without some serious thought about the concept of a “trusted user.” Community spam filtering works marginally well for email spam. Community filtering would work fine for search, for about 2 weeks, until someone starts a sweatshop in Jakarta to filter out their competitors… all of them.

But its seems unlikely for now, as Matt responds, because

you would definitely need to have a lot of trust in that data to use it for general search quality, and it’s early to even be thinking about that. For now, it’s an experiment to see how people like it.

Hopefully all it will do is just help Google filter out the spam better so the quality sites can thrive.

Black hats are often experts at manipulating code to stay a step ahead of the search engines, and the latest issue of the Axandra newsletter reports that some webmasters are using a new bad trick to get higher Google rankings.

The latest trick takes advantage of a hole in web search scripts that are used by some company web sites and search engines. Webmasters can force other web sites to link to them if they use the correct code in a link to the search feature of the other web site:

• A webmaster links directly to a search request page on a reputable web site.
• The link code contains information that causes the search script on the reputable web site to include a link to the web site of the webmaster.
• When search engine spiders (including Google’s spider) index the linked search results page, they find a link from an authority web site to the webmaster’s site.
• As a high authority web site links to the web site of the webmaster, his web site gets higher rankings on Google.

In addition, the link also adds a H1 tag with the important keyword on the page and it also adds the keyword to the title.

This is NOT the fast track to better rankings on Google. The Axandra newsletter strongly recommends that you not use this trick (and we second that). They warn that you might get short term results with this technique if you find enough web sites that can be exploited that way.

However, search engines don’t like to be tricked. As soon as search engines find out that you tried to trick them, it is very likely that your web site will be banned from the index.

Instead focus your efforts on ethical search engine optimization techniques that get you long-term results.

More information:
Axandra’s SEO code of ethics
Google Webmaster Guidlines

I wrote this article a while ago to demonstrate the power of article marketing as a way of getting backlinks and visibility online.

I usually encourage our clients to provide me with articles 300 to 500 words in length, at least once a month (more often is better). I use these articles to boost their PageRank and get them more visibility by submitting them to article directories.

6 Article Marketing Smarts- How To Get More Reprints And Exposure

Copyright © 2005 Priya Shah

Article marketing is the latest buzzword for marketers looking to promote their sites and products online. But how do you measure the success of your article marketing campaign?

It probably depends on what you expect your article to achieve for you - better branding, more sales, or more publicity.

One way to measure article performance is to check how many times your article has been picked up and reproduced on various sites.

To do that, just copy and paste the article title in quotes into a search engine like Google, and you’ll see how many sites it’s been reprinted on.

My article “How To Get To The Top Of The Marketing Food Chain” shows 1061 links in Google.

That means Google has indexed 1061 sites on which this article appears.

This gives me about 1061 quality links to each of the sites I included in my resource box.

As you can see, this makes article marketing a very powerful way of building quality links.

So how do you ensure that your article gets picked up and reprinted by as many publishers as possible?

1. Pick A Topic That’s Hot Or Always Fresh

For instance, my article on Neuromarketing got picked up pretty quickly because it was a hot topic.

The problem with hot topics is that they also tend to cool off quickly. So while they may get a lot of reprints over a short time, they may get very few reprints once the craze is over.

There are some articles that are slow starters but eternally fresh, like the one I wrote here.

To Be A Champion, Become A Child (591 links in Google)

These are the ones that will give you reprints over a longer period of time. I think in the long run, these are more valuable.

2. Target A Large Audience

Another way to get a lot of coverage is write an article for a large target audience or one that is very active online - like bloggers.

This one gave me 164 links back, mostly from other blogs, even some for which I had to use a translation service

This shows 248 links back. 316 links for this one.

But again, it’s the quality of links back that matters - not the quantity.

Another large target audience is the health market. I get a lot of links back from my health articles.

3. Craft A Catchy, Relevant Title

A catchy title ensures that your article gets the attention of publishers - the first step to getting your article published.

Follow the basic rules of copywriting to make your article interesting and readable.

Publishers are more likely to pick up an article if its title includes the keywords that they (and you) want to target.

Use your main keywords in your title, preferable in the first half (like I did in the title of this article), to ensure better rankings for those who reprint it.

4. Offer Publishers A Monetary Incentive

Give people an incentive to publish your article. I have an affiliate program and I allow publishers to use their affiliate link for my ezine in the resource box.

Allow publishers to earn by publishing your article and they will gladly reprint it.

5. Write An Article Series

Break up a long article or report into a series of articles like I did with my “Marketing With Blogs” series here.

Marketing With Blogs - Part 1, 2, 3 and 4.

These gave me 5270 links back in all.

As you can see, a series of articles can be a very powerful link-building technique.

6. Distribute Your Article Widely

Ensure that your article is distributed to the best and most appropriate article directories and announcement lists online.

Feel free to browse through my own collection of article
directories and announcement lists.

_______________________________________________

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine optimization firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Visit Article Writing Tips for more article marketing tips and tools.

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
_______________________________________________

Have you been using black-hat techniques, javascript redirects or web page generating software on your website? Well, you might just be the next recepient of a letter from Google, like the one posted on the Search Engine Journal site.

It markes the beginning of Google’s New Webmaster Communications Initiative. To put it simply, Google will now send you a warning letter, advise you to remove the offending pages, and impose a 30-day penalty on your site, to give you time to clean up your act.

According to Google engineer, Matt Cutts (book mark his blog for more news on this),

Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we’re removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we’ve also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that “Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95? software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we’re taking action is a really good thing–a site owner doesn’t have to guess about what happened. But again, we’re starting with a trial program.

This is good news for the SEO industry. It marks a turn in Google’s non-communicative stance and makes it less frustrating for webmasters to communicate with them. Besides even black-hats deserve a second chance, no?

Now, will Yahoo follow suit? Let’s wait and see…

Read the posts on Threadwatch and the Search Engine Watch Forums for the complete story.