SEO UPDATES

If you are writing articles in order to generate traffic to your website, than you are also familiar with keywords. So, this is how this part of it works. You have your website up and it has a theme. You want to drive customers to the website. So, you write articles that have the theme in it. The search engines pick it up and up your rankings because they see more keywords that are legitimate.

And, if you want, you can take the articles and put them in article directories… the hundreds and hundreds of them… Put that with a link on the bottom of the article and magic… you have more links, more keywords and more to your website.

It’s all very logical and robotic, isn’t it? So, as someone who writes these things for a living, I would have to say… there’s a lot more to it than that. Called quality. And, now, because the market is so saturated with thousands of articles, you have to have quality. Otherwise, it’s a waste of your breath.

Okay, get your keywords, put them in your articles and let it go. Guess what? If you don’t have them in there, it doesn’t matter. Because, if you stick with the right theme, you’ll have other keywords in there that say the same thing. And, you will be taking yourself out of the competition that way. Take for instance, if you want the word calendar in your keywords. Well, would if you use ‘telling time’ instead, or ‘dates” instead? Guess what? It still does the same thing.

It’s always quantity over the rest of it. Keywords are definitely something that have been mis-calculated because people want to calculate them. If it doesn’t fit, something else will. Or, you can always put it in another article to have it fit somewhere else. It will sound better, people will like you more for being legitimate and having something to say and you will still get the traffic that you want driven to your site.

Happy Internet building!

It’s not good enough these days to simply get back links.  Back links to your site need to be from thematically related websites and more then that, thematically related PAGES and paragraphs and even sentences within pages.The modern search engine examines content surrounding outgoing links on a page to determine its value.  The content should be in a similar topical vector.  This means if your site is selling golf products you want links from other sports and recreation sites and pages that use sports related terms.  Google specifically uses something known as LSI or latent semantic indexing to determine if the content on a page is topically related to your site and if your anchor text makes sense.

The big question is how best to get these topical backlinks.

Well, article marketing is one of the most time tested methods for building quality thematically related backlinks… and fast.

BUT you do not want to simply write an article and submit it to every directory you can find.

Why?  The major search engines will not count all these versions of your article.  They’ll look at the first few and drop the rest because they’re duplicate content.

Well how do I get them to count?  You simply use multiple versions of sentences, words, paragraphs, and phrases within your article and use a content spinner like Jetspinner from Jetpacked to spin them into hundreds of versions of your article all ~30%-60% unique.

Then you can take automated submission software like Jetsubmitter and submit a unique version of the spun article to each of 400 directories.  Now instead of getting 1-2 backlinks from your article you’ll get much closer to the full 400.
These method alone is responsible for putting tens of thousands of dollars in my pocket and millions of visitors on my web sites.
Use it wisely!

Your site might rank high on search engines, but it could probably go higher — there’s always room for improvement.

How can you achieve this? Try these tips:

Change the focus of your copy
Make the content as visitor-focused as possible. Visitors don’t want to know about you and your business as much as they want to know how your product or service will make their lives easier.

Change the structure of your copy
Put the most important and impressive things first. Don’t ‘lead up’ to the best details, because your readers might not stick around long enough for the climax.

Don’t simply pack in keywords and keyphrases
It’s not a numbers game. “Basing your copywriting strategy simply on the sheer volume of times you can include keyphrases makes the copy sound forced and ridiculous.”

And some final words of advice…

Take the time to explore, experiment and test. Replace a headline. Rephrase a paragraph. Subtle changes can often make noticeable improvements in conversions and other areas of business.

Source: ISEdb)

Stoney deGeyter of ISEdb.com says that the relatively new online market place is really “still coming into its own,” and that “the old brick and mortars might have some wisdom to dispense [regarding] how to run a successful business”:

Achieving top search engine placement is the B&M (brick and mortar) equivalent of choosing your store’s location. We’ve all heard it, when setting up your store, location is everything: location, location, location. Unlike B&Ms, however, websites can’t just buy or rent their location on the organic search results. When you set up a B&M, you can choose your location based on the demographics of the area and your customer. You obviously want to go where your target audience is most likely to shop.

This is similar to the process of keyword research and selection. You want to choose the keywords that your target audience is using in the search results, in hopes that you can achieve the top search engine rankings for those phrases. Unlike B&Ms however, knowing where your target demographic shops (or searches), you can’t just sign a lease agreement and start getting foot traffic. Search engine optimization is a long-term process that requires you to finesse and “earn” your way into the prime locations, i.e. top rankings for your targeted keyword phrases.

But is placement enough? Not quite.

The next logical step when it comes to growing a business is… Advertising.

Even businesses with a prime location are seen advertising on the TV, radio, billboards and newspapers. You might even notice some that advertise in other stores with coupons and discount fliers. All this is aimed for the goal of bringing in even more traffic than the location itself allows. And it’s good business sense that many online business owners forget about.

[...]

Web based businesses can … employ pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns to achieve visibility in those high-traffic keyword targeted areas. Also, similarly to off-line businesses, you can establish strategic partnerships with other online businesses. This can be done via customer referral deals, affiliate partnerships or giving each other a plug in the form of a quality link.

In short, “don’t rely completely on your location. Especially newer businesses because 1) you won’t get those top positions for many months, and 2) top positions can be lost overnight with a dramatic algorithm change (even if just temporarily).”

David Pasternack has an interesting article on SEO Today about Yahoo Subscription Search and its implications for the way we all search, and do search engine optimization.

Currently in beta, Subscription Search will give people the ability to search subscription sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, the New England Journal of Medicine and TheStreet.com directly through Yahoo. It’s like a website search page is built into your browser. People who subscribe to those sites can search for articles they are interested in and automatically be directed to the information they want. People without subscriptions will still be barred from viewing those sites.

Pasternack argues that this development will spark a trend where people will be searching fewer and fewer websites (instead of the billions tracked by Google) to find the specific information they want.

Instead of marking the end of SEO, though, he says this will make optimization even more important. When your site is up against two or three competing sites as the only results a searcher sees, you’ll want your SEO to be perfect so they choose your site.

But while organic search might have lost some of its charm, SEO has gained a tremendous amount of importance for the top-brand companies. Because, if subscription search catches on as well as it does, then two things will happen: 1) people will increasingly use the search engines for what is, in effect, site-search; and 2) you’ll be competing with your closest competitors in Search more fiercely than ever.

Which really means that 3) you should start looking at the search engines as your pre-site sitemap. And, in a SERP that only shows results from three websites - yours and those of your two top competitors - you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure that you win in that SERP.

So your SEO needs to be absolutely, positively stellar. Not only in terms of getting positioning for your site, but in terms of being able to describe and present exactly the right landing page to the searcher who’s looking for what happens to be on your site. Because if you don’t do a stellar job of that, that doesn’t mean that your competition won’t.

It will be intersting to see if things really go this way.

Here’s a guide that every person wanting to learn about search engine optimization should keep under the hand. Compiled by Rand of SEOmoz, the Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization is a treasure chest waiting to be opened. Providing “a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists”, it is available in a MS Word document, as well as in two HTML versions (single page or multi page). Even though the information in this guide may be fully known by SEO specialists, there’s no doubt that any newcomer in this fine art will find it a useful, not to say essential resource.

(Via blogSEO.)

Here’s a very interesting article on seomoz.org about search engine ranking factors. I couldn’t believe it at first, to find such a wide and organized list—perhaphs a little too wide, alright. However, the various factors it lists are gathered according to their importance, which means you don’t have to follow them all scrupulously to see your website climb in search engines.

The article starts with an introduction to these very levels of importance that are going to be used to categorize the ranking factors, and even ends with a list of what can be detrimental to a site. All good material!

(Link via Steve Rubel.)

A post by Bill Hartzer on Search Engine Guide caught my attention recently. It’s titled Does an Over-Optimization Penalty Exist?, and asks a few interesting questions about this “problem” (I’m putting the word between quotes, as by reading the source article, it looks like not everyone risks encoutering such a penalty in their own SEO). Her’s an example of what over-optimization includes:

You decide that your site is not ranking well. So, you change the navigation on your site so that all the home page links say “keyword keyword home” instead of “home”. A few days later you lose your rankings, which is a serious blow to your traffic. Since that was the only thing you changed on your site you change those links to your home page back so it says, “home” instead of “keyword keyword home”. BINGO! All of your lost rankings and your lost traffic comes back a few days later.

If that’s not proof of an over-optimization penalty then I don’t know what is–I would call that an OOP: you do something to try to boost your rankings by over optimizing some element of your website, something that backfires and causes a loss of rankings.

I don’t think I’ve ever have to deal with this myself as of yet, but it’s after all only been a few weeks that I’m seriously researching and using SEO tactics, and I also know I haven’t finishing learning. I very likely rank among the “white hats” described by Hartzer—people who haven’t tested SEO limits to —so this probably normal.

In any case, over-optimization must not be mixed with spamming. Spamming will get a site banned from search engines; over-optimizing won’t.

The article isn’t extremely recent, as it dates back to July of this year, but I found it useful to mention something I had already seen on other sites, during my first attempts at researching SEO tactics more efifciently: domain name registration length. This is especially valid for Google, in fact.

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect the search results at Google? This question has come up recently and a lot of website owners have been wondering about it, especially since it was mentioned in a patent awarded to Google in April. According to the patent, “Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.

It can be an important detail to keep in mind, as determining for how long a domain name is registered is a way for Google to bust out spam sites, as opposed to legitimate sites which owners care about. And this is a key in the way your website will be indexed by the search engine.

Google, in general, is always looking for ways to weed out the bad (spammers) from the good (legitimate) websites. I suspect that they looked for a pattern among the good, legitimate websites and found that most good, legitimate websites have a commitment towards their business and their domain name-they register it for a long period of time. In other words, the theory behind all of this is that if you register a domain name for several years it shows Google that you’re committed to that domain name. If you register a domain name for 1 year then you’re not as committed to that domain name. A lot of spammers use “throw away” domain names and register them for only a year. So, Google uses the length of time that a domain is registered to determine whether the owner of that domain name is committed to it or not.

You can read the whole article by Bill Hartzer here.

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…