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.

Many people enjoy using flash on webpages. They feel that moving images and movie-like quality make a website seem more flashy, more professional, and cooler. The problem is that when you use flash Google has no idea what that super-cool movie says.

What does this mean for your SEO? Any keywords you use in your flash graphic or header are worthless – it’s like giving part of your website away for nothing in return. If you’re trying to target keywords for organic search, every keyword counts. Google doesn’t know if that section of your website is relevant or high quality. It just sees it as space, because search engine spiders cannot crawl that area.

Even if you think that flash is amazing and high quality, do a survey of your demographic. The odds are they would feel less overwhelmed finding information if there wasn’t a bunch of moving pictures distracting them from your menu or content.

Making sure your website is simple to navigate and easy to read is a far better alternative for both your website visitor as well as the search engine ranking of your website.

Everything you do for your website should be geared toward your visitor and the search engine. When in doubt, definitely default to the needs of your visitor, because even if Google sends oodles of traffic to your website, it won’t matter if your website usability is nil due to a bunch of flash graphics all over your site.

Keeping it simple can not only save your pocketbook, because flash is not inexpensive to contract, it can also help your conversion rates once you do get visitors to your website.

So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.

Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.

What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.

For regular websites:

• Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
• For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
• The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.

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!

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.

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)

Your domain name is one of the most important aspects — if not the most important aspect — of your web site and your branding efforts.

“Your domain name goes on your letterhead, business card, printed materials; it must be spoken verbally over the phone, presented in email communications, and appears in the search results when your site ranks well on important keyword searches.”

It sums up your entire on-line presence, and it needs to be great. Don’t just buy the first thing that comes to mind — give your name a lot of thought. Here are some tips:

1. Get a business name domain
…if your business name is not already taken by another business or a squatter.

2. Get a Keyword domain
…this will bring in more traffic.

3. Make the name short and memorable, and avoid hyphens
“Long domain names or domains with hyphens are often just too cumbersome for someone to remember or even pass along to others.”

4. Make sure the name is spelled correctly
“The exception to this rule is if you have secured both the correctly spelled and incorrectly spelled URLs” and you then use “redirects to send visitors from the correctly spelled URL to your main (misspelled) address.”

5. Secure a ‘.com’ domain
These “domain names are by far the most common and most remembered.”

(See isedb for more)

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.

(Via Matt Cutts Blog)

On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.
Example 1: Danny Sullivan actually sat down and checked the spam filtering accuracy of SpamCop, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. And not once or twice, but three different times. Personally, counting false positives in your Spam folder would annoy me to death, but putting in that work generates insights on the differences between the competing services. Admittedly, the results will vary by individual, but as the great Fred Brooks would remark, often some data is better than no data at all. Now Danny doesn’t need any more links than he already has, but it’s producing info-laden content that makes a site or blog well-known over time.
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