SEO UPDATES

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

There is a movement going around the blogosphere encouraging bloggers to remove the nofollow tag that is automatically added to comment links. The nofollow tag was implemented by Google to deter spammers from comment posting since their link wouldn’t count towards a vote for PageRank.

Looking to reward those who leave legitimate comments, bloggers have begun to install plugins or make other adjustments to their blogs that remove the nofollow attribute from comment links. It’s sort of a “thank you” gift to the person leaving the comment. There are even do follow badges that these bloggers can display on their blog showing that they do follow. It is a nice sentiment but it is being exploited by some leaving comments. These unwanted comments have caused some bloggers to go back to using nofollow on comments. Others are wondering if they should do the same.

The do follow movement is a good idea. It can help smaller blogs to build one way links and also encourages people to leave comments. The badge is a bad idea because it doesn’t take long for spammers to target those do follow blogs. This already seems to be happening and causing some to leave the fold.

Better spam plugins are being written everyday to combat those who try to exploit do follow blogs. It’s discouraging to see those trying to do something nice for their readership being exploited. Hopefully the do follow movement will survive since in theory it can be a great way to build one way links to your blog.

There is a new company - BuyBlogComments.com - that will actually make spam comments on your behalf to blogs. This is just a bad idea no matter how you look at it. Buyer beware of buying such comments for these reasons.

Comments that look either generic or generated might be past the spam filter of a website but not the blogger. Most bloggers keep a check on their comments as they should. If something looks spammy, then most likely they will mark it as spam or just delete it altogether.

While most blogging platforms use the nofollow tag in comments, some plugins or workarounds have been developed for bloggers to turn off the nofollow. What this means is that those comment links now pass a “vote” to Google for that website  when Google updates the PageRank. A lot of bloggers have been proudly displaying their choice to turn off the nofollow tag. Sadly, it hasn’t taken long for someone to decide to exploit this.

BuyBlogComments.com promises to place comments on these blogs that have disabled the nofollow tag. The problem is that these bloggers really care about their comments and the people who comment. So they are extremely diligent when it comes to moderating comments. Let a batch of spam-like comments start hitting all of these blogs, and bloggers will get the word out. They can possibly delete the comments or even blacklist the IP of the commentor.

If you want links from comments, take the time and comment yourself. You will gain the “vote” from the link. You might also gain readership if your comments are well thought out. People will click your website to want to read more of your work.

It’s an age old tradition in webmastering and search engine optimization to code your pages especially with Yahoo in mind. They were one of the largest search engine teams that took pride in personally inspecting each submission. But are those personal services of the past, dead in the grave? Yahoo still claims pride in how they submit sites to their engines. Times have changed in SEO, and much of it caused by those annoying spam engines that go posting site after site in the search engines mucking them up so that others cannot actually find anything detailed that they are looking for. This is one of the reasons that Yahoo’s personal attention made them so great. But then came google … and it started putting Yahoo to shame. Then came the age of selling listings, and Yahoo was quick to jump on the bandwagon with outrageous prices that ensure that your listing can be at the top of the page.  So is it still worth registering with the engines for free? I still believe so. Even with Yahoo. You can do so here : http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request  but remember, they do take $$ to put listings ahead of you. But I was told ages ago, the best way to ensure a good listing with Yahoo, is to write to them through snail mail, with your listing, so that its hand submitted by their staff. Give it a try, you never know, might still be the best way to go.

If you have a website, should you be obsessed with search engine optimization (seo)? Well, it depends. I do feel that all websites should be as optimized as you can get them but their is no reason to have a meltdown over it.

Google changes how it ranks every few months and many hold their breath wondering what will happen to how they rank in the search engines depending on the phrase they use. Some can see their business and amount of visitors daily lower significantly after such an update to Google’s system.

The thing about that is, if your only way of getting customer’s or just visitors to your website is through search engines, then depending on what your site or blog is about, your going to lose in the long run. Things change, you can’t expect to put all your eggs in one basket. If you are not a business and only make money on the side of your site then considering doing link trades.

Trading links helps you with your ranking plus gets you knew visitors who wouldn’t have been searching for your site. Also there are lots of places online in which you can get advertising on individual websites at no great cost.

I like Jim Boykin’s way of presenting his opinions, and the lattest in date is one that I thought I could share, given that it seems to me like both interesting and useful. Without much ado, it can simply be summarized as follows:

The main idea I’m trying to make is that by focusing on relevance and links within good content is much better than the “old way” of making “links” pages. Link pages are dead. Long live content pages with link embedded within.

Have a look at the following post about how to create better link pages by embedding said links into relevant text, such as “tips and tricks” instead of basic lists. By opposing two examples of links pages, a “bad” one and a “content” one, Boykin easily demonstrates that not only can it be more useful for the search engines bots to crawl and index your page, it’s also more pleasant to the reader, who can this way easily target a paragraph that catches his interest (along with the embedded URL) rather than having to weed through a long list of sites with somewhat boring descriptions.

All in all, I must indeed say that I prefer the embedded links method.

Blog Business World has a somewhat long but nonetheless interesting article on how to optimize a Blogger blog so that it ranks well in the search engines results pages.

Some of these tips may seem evident at first, but I think that they’re worth a look no matter what: Blogger services can be easily overlooked, since they operate from subdomains and not from “your” URL, which isn’t an advantage in terms of SEO.

Among other things, the entry explains briefly how to create a blog on Blogger, then jumps to tips about links, crafting useful titles, and appropriate use of the H tags in posts.

Like all free web hosts, Blogger hosted blogs face unique optimization challenges. Unlike sites where the domain name is owned by the webmaster, free blog hosts maintain ownership of the blog. In fact, the blog name is a sub-domain of the blog host, making value from the blog URL a less powerful optimization tool.
Despite the limitations faced by a blog hosted by Google owned Blogger, there are many very powerful optimization techniques available to the blogger. As we will see, blogs have some optimization methods, that are only available to blogs in general, regardless of host.
When considering the optimization techniques to apply to blogs, the basics of fresh keyword rich content, theme relevance, incoming links, and link anchor text all apply to blogs. In that sense optimization for blogs is no different from other websites.

It seems that it can, at least according to this entry I’ve found on Multinlingual Search:

Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name - ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english - which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.

Is there anything you can do to prevent this from happening to your own website? Yes, if you can get enough inbound links in the appropriate language again. I wish this page would detail the process a little more, though. At least it’s already a good thing to be aware of the problem, since it’s probably not what webmasters will think of first when their sites suddenly fall in ranking…

This indeed was something that had me confused at first, and I know I’m not the only one in this case. It can thus be interesting to have a look at this post on Blog SEO about playing with robots.txt. While, as usually said, meta-tags and the likes don’t have as much importance as they once had, it’s nevertheless interesting to know this kind of little things.

Better than this, though, is the link added at the end of the post, and pointing to robotstxt.org, where one will indeed find all there is to learn, and in details, along with FAQ, recommended sites and readings, and how to direct robots to visit your website.

After having read this, there’s no excuse anymore to not knowing what robots/spiders are!

This isn’t about SEO in general, but more focused on blogs and how to build (good) links networks and get some viewage along the road. Aaron Wall from SEOBook hands out a few pieces of advice, as well as links to posts and resources illustrating the point:

With blogs you can just whinge on about whatever, and so long as it is usually on topic some people will read it. Sometimes the smallest things, like mentioning a 20 pound AdWords coupon can get you multiple free links from other regularly updated channels, and the attention of people who read those channels.

If you are looking for resources to cite you can use a tool to look at topical trackbacks (which also point links your way) and help get you noticed by some of the leaders of your community. Of course you can go too far and be labeled a spammer so you want to use some caution / restraint.

A few tips that are likely worth to be taken, here.