SEO Information and News Blog

By Shirley Kaiser

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ultimate-seo-checklist

Optimizing your web site for search engines should be an integral part of your web site project, from the very beginning to the very end. Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered, and if possible, implemented, throughout the planning, design, development, and maintenance stages of your web site. Read more…

Rebecca Lieb, Executive Editor, The ClickZ Network, was the moderator for this session.

The speakers were Darren Kuhn, Group Account Director, Resolution Media and Phil Stelter, Director of Business Development, Range Online Media. Speakers focused on how to compel the consumer to click through while the ad complies with editorial standards.

Titles are the most important part of the listing as these help gain attention. The keyword must be used in the title. It is very important to be grammatically correct as errors can hurt brand and results. Once you have users attention the description must eliminate converters from non-converters. Description must also be customized for keywords. Create unique descriptions for every keyword phrase at Yahoo! Next, use display URL which helps user gain the confidence that they are not duped into entering a wrong site. Inform people what you have but do not try overly to sell your product. Have four to six creative styles with different message types like product guarantees, price points, or free shipping. Specific tracking tag are recommended. There are different guideline writings for service site as opposed to retail site. Every brand or service must be customized. Read more…

Sitting in on the link baiting session the presenters made it sound so easy. Rand talked about how, on average, a front page Digg post or exposure on Techcrunch can get you 2000 new inbound links.

That’s an astronomical amount of links and the good thing is, everyone can can do it. Here are some things to consider. Read more…

SEO expert of SEOmoz.org, Rand Fishkin as a guest interviewer made Vanessa Fox clarify many important issues relating to duplicate content, XML and simple text, OAI-PMH and other important topics.

Vanessa Fox Clarifies Sitemaps

Link: SEOmoz.org

But the focal point of the interview was Vanessa clearing the doubts about conflict between sitemaps and other SEO methods.

She said “-Google- Sitemaps doesn’t impact your ranking at all it helps with the very first obstacle of learning about all of your pages.”

It can help in getting good ranks but will not provide them.

Clarifying the difference between Google Toolbar’s pagerank and Google Webmaster Tool’s she answers “-Webmaster Tools- is a little more accurate, a little more up-to-date the Toolbar pageranking doesn’t get updated quite as often, of course it’s only one factor. I feel like people get really hung-up on the Toolbar pagerank. People probably spend a little more energy on it than they need to.”

Watch the video of the interview.

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I logged into the editor forums at the DMOZ or ODP (Open Directory Project) and there was new update on December 10, 2006.

I find it worthy enough for mainstream release, so I’m gong to mention a few things here in the interest of public information. Initially after posting this entry I was contacted about a potential confidentiality breach, so I have edited out some of the specifics (like direct quotes), but still have relayed the main idea below. Read more…

I’ve always been a little skeptical of the Long Tail theory because any way you slice the analytics, hit products still account for the bulk of most companies’ sales.

Obscure Products Need Homes Too

What makes the Long Tail notion work for an online service like Rhapsody (often cited as a Long Tail model) is the fact that data storage costs are so exceptionally low that maintaining a huge inventory of obscure, seldom-purchased titles is still profitable. That doesn’t work for Wal-Mart and other companies that need physical warehouses.

New research by MIT Sloan Professor Erik Brynjolfsson suggests that the other key factor in making the Long Tail theory work is search engines which not only make it easier to find that partridge in a pear tree but also for companies to make partridges and pear trees in the first placeas long as they sell them online.

“More and more people are shopping online, and as search costs also keep getting lower, relatively obscure types of products are becoming a bigger share of overall sales,” said Brynjolfsson, who is also director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. “And as technology further lowers search costs to find obscure items, it creates even more incentives to create such niche products in the first place.”

While the web is typically cited for helping consumers find products at lower costs, Brynjolfsson found that consumers actually benefit far more – by up to ten times as much – from increased product variety than from lower prices. Sellers gain as well. By using increasingly sophisticated search technology (such as recommended products, which are based on a particular shopper’s product search history), on-line merchants are able to help consumers find, evaluate, and buy a far wider variety of products than can be found either in actual stores or traditional catalogs.

Brynjolfsson and two co-authors analyzed consumer purchase data from a retailer that offers an identical selection products at identical prices via both the Internet and a mail-order catalog. He found that while the top 20 percent of products accounted for more than 80 percent of all catalog-driven sales, the same top products represented barely 70 percent of internet sales.

According to ComScore Networks, which measures internet activity, Americans made 6.6 billion on-line searches in just one month (April 2006), and Page Zero Media estimates that paid search advertising will total $15 billion in 2006.

That’s a heck of a tail to grab onto.

Tag: search engines, long tail

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Perhaps, any webmaster or SEO or a search engine marketer is always busy looking for ways to get links. If not, they are just looking for places to get links. So what’s the most efficient to get links?

Building Links Naturally

What is natural link building?

The most powerful links are natural links, so it should be wise to focus on building links naturally.

A natural link is a link someone pointed at your site/page from his site on his own will. Such links are generally created, when the person liked what you have to offer on your site and wanted to share it with his site visitors. Sometimes, of course, linking happens, when someone doesn’t like you, but that’s another story.

So, natural link building is developing your site in such a way that people start linking to you on their own will, because they have liked your website and want to show it to even more people. How do you do that?

Build a valuable website

The main and sometimes the only reason people link to you is because they liked what you have on your website (an article, a post, a tool, an audio, a video, etc). So in order to get links, you need to create something valuable for your site visitors. Though I generally advise to create quality content, it is not always text that you need to create.

For example, you could create:

• a how to guide on your topic
• an easy to scan manual on your product/service
• a comparison of related products in your industry
• a directory for the related products (competition and complimentary ones)
• a forum for your customers, experts and other interested people
• a blog, where you share your thoughts about your industry
• an online tool, related to your product (real estate cost calculator, online translation tool, etc)
• an audio (a podcast) with your thoughts on the industry or a single aspect of it
• a video with you showing how to use your product most efficiently
• user contributed videos with them using your product

The list can go on forever. What you need to create is something absolutely useful and valuable for your people, which they’ll be willing to share.

Help the ideas spread

Creating something useful is only one step in the right direction. You need to help the idea spread:

• offer an easy way for people to share your content (e-mail, social bookmarks, etc)
• communicate with the people – build relations with customers, experts, related blogs, forums, etc
• offer an incentive to share (count the number of referrals and show that in the forum profile, allow an active forum member to have more active links in the signature, for example)

Having a community to spread your idea is one of the factors that influences the efficiency of your content ideas spread. You can:

• post on your industry forums regularly and occassionally show the best topics of yours
• have loyal blog readers
• have your own forum and post interesting stuff once in a while
• frequent other blogs and know more people, so you’d get more people, who know you
• cooperate with other experts in your industry

In short, you need to build a circle of people, who you’d like to cooperate, partner and network with, and who’d like your content and spread the information about it (the URL) via their own social networks

Why creating content first?

You see, the main reason people link to you is that they like your website. If you try to get links to an empty brochure website, you’ll fail, because no one will want to show that to their visitors.

When you have something on your website, it is only a matter of time people will start linking to you on their own will and it is easier to partner with others, as you’ll be able to offer your loyal audience (who visits your site) in exchange for cooperation (an article, some expert advice, forum moderation, a guest post, etc).

In fact, you can write articles specifically for your industry magazines and get published. Mostly, you’ll get links from them too, but most importantly, you’ll be getting recognition and trust in the industry, among the experts and the potential customers.

Rounding up

Natural link building isn’t a short term approach. It requires great effort, determination and a deep knowledge of your industry to be able to create valuable content, communicate with your customers and other experts in your field. You not only need to build great site content, but also a great community of regular visitors to become a part of the industry.

Will this get you the links? Most likely, yes. But the most precious thing this approach will bring you is the recognition in the field, word of mouth referrals, loyal followers and customers. Traffic and links is just a small bonus for the efforts.

Related posts:

Develop your internal linking structure smartly
Introducing the book reviews section
Incoming links value factors

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Tag: link building

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Ask enough questions about how to build links and you’ll inevitably hear the answer that you should look for quality links.

Just What Makes a Quality Link?

Just as inevitable will be a lack of explanation about what makes for quality in regards to links. So how do you determine which of several links is best? What are the signs that a link is worth pursuing? How do you recognize a quality link?

Quality can be slippery to define, since in many respects quality is subjective. What looks good to me may not look so good to you. Since Yuri has posted recently on Incoming links value factors, I offer his post as a somewhat different perspective from my own.

Factors In A Quality Link

Instead of trying to define in absolutes what a quality link is I prefer to think about some of the factors that would be included in an ideal link. Most links back to your pages will not have every one of these factors, but by understanding what to look for you can better decide which links might hold more value than others and when it’s ok to go after a link that may seem to go against common wisdom.

In no particular order I might look for the following:

1. Links from related or topical sites – This site includes the topics of web design and search engine optimization. When I look for links I would prefer them to come from sites or pages on similar topics. I would prefer a mention and a link in an article about web design or seo than I would a link in an article about mountain biking trails in Colorado.

2. Links from trusted sites - Trust has taken on an increased role in search algorithms. Much as with everything else in seo, links have been manipulated to artificially increase the perception of a site’s importance. TrustRank (PDF) is one idea in the battle against spam. Links from .edu and .gov domains may be seen as more trustworthy than a link from other TLDs. A link from CNN will carry more trust with it that a link from John’s Blog of Rumors. A link from a trusted site will bring more value than a link from an untrusted site.

3. One way inbound links (IBLs) - Speaking of trust. When two web pages exchange links do they really think highly of each other or are they exchanging links to raise the count of their backlinks? Search engines likely place more value on a link that is not reciprocated. Matt Cutts provides the official Google stance in his Indexing Timeline post. It’s perfectly fine to exchange links with other sites. Regardless of how a search engine views the link if it brings targeted traffic then it’s a link you want, but if given the choice I’d rather not recirpocate most links.

4. Links from authority sites – We all have friends with opinions and we all have friends who seem to know a little more about a particular subject than some of our other friends. You’d sooner ask your more knowledgeable friend when you have a question in their area of expertise. That friend is an authority on the subject. Websites too can be authorities. Search Engine Watch has long been considered an authority on the world of search. I’d rather have a link from most any page on the Search Engine Watch site than I would from the home page of a site brand new to the field. When your expert friend makes a recommendation you tend to listen more. Same thing for a website. When an authority site makes a recommendation a search engine will usually listen more than if lesser known and respected sites in the same industry had made the recommendation.

5. Links that can be crawled - Some links can’t or won’t be crawled by search engine spiders. Spiders are tripped up by JavaScript so a link embedded in JavaScript isn’t worth the effort in getting. Similarly for a link embedded in a Flash application. In both cases a search engine might not even know the link exists. Many blogs are adding rel=”nofollow” to links within comments. The nofollow is meant to tell search spiders that the site in question is not editorially approving the link. The site is saying this link isn’t a vote for the web page on the other end of the link. Some search engines may still count these links, but they should be considered less valuable than if the nofollow wasn’t there.

6. Links with relevant anchor text - If you need to be convinced of the power of anchor text have a look at Google’s results for the search click here. A page from Adobe is likely the top result. That same page doesn’t include the text ‘click here’ anywhere on the page. What it does have is many other web pages linking to it with the anchor text ‘click here’. Ideally you’d like to get some keywords in the anchor text of the links pointing to your pages. You won’t be able to do this always, but you can sometimes. You always can in your internal links. It’s also part of what makes article writing a popular tactic for link building since you can control the anchor text within the article.

7. Links that can send direct traffic – Sometimes a link isn’t about search engines at all. Sometimes a link can carry little weight in a search algorithm, yet it can send a great deal of targeted traffic to your web page. That link embedded in JavaScript may mean nothing to search spiders, but if a lot of people click it and go on to make a purchase would you really care what the spider thinks?

8. Links to deep pages – Not all links should point to your home. They should point to the most targeted page for the given anchor text. It would make no sense for me to use ‘seo’ as anchor text in a link and point it to my design portfolio page. Your home page will probably get more links than any other page no matter what you do. It’s the easiest page of your site for most to link to and many directories will only link to it. When you have the opportunity try to link to deeper pages within your site.

The list above is hardly exhaustive, but it’s some of what I look for in links back to my pages. You shouldn’t expect to find every factor above in every link, but you can use the list to decide which of two links might be more preferable. If you’re thinking about exchanging links with another site at least do your best to make sure that other site is related to your site and carries some trust or authority. If a site won’t let you link to a deep page on your site see if you can write the anchor text for the link. If getting a link means getting no quality factors with it you may not want to spend the time getting that link.

Quality Is More Difficult To Get Than Quantity

One additional consideration is that quality usually takes more work than it’s counterpart. If a link is very easy to get it probably isn’t very high in quality. The DMOZ gets a lot of flack about its directory, but the reason being included there is coveted by so many is because it’s difficult to get a listing. The difficulty of getting in helps make the link higher in quality than a directory that accepts every site that submits.

Links in forum signatures are relatively easy to get. You sign up for the forum add your link and create some posts. You can build a rather large quantity of links through signatures, but given the ease in getting them they are probably not considered high quality by search engines.

Quantity is easy to replicate. Quality is not easy to replicate. We can all submit our sites to a seemingly endless supply of directories. So can our competition. If there’s a link that’s very difficult for you to get then it will likely be difficult for your competition to get as well. If you can work hard enough to get that link you’re a step ahead of the competition that hasn’t done that same work.

Articles have long been part of a link building strategy. Many see submitting articles to a site like Ezine Articles as a great way to build links. You submit an article which is related to the page or pages you link to and use relevant anchor text in those links. As people download the article and add it to their site you might build a quantity of links quickly.

Many articles submitted to article directories aren’t the best articles in the world. They typically don’t have to be. A better strategy for article submission would be to write a well researched and well written article and submit it to an authority site. It will be more work to write that article, but having those links on one trusted authority site will prove to be more valuable than having those same links on dozens of less trusted sites. It will also be much harder to replicate.

Summary

Quality can’t always be measured in absolutes and most of the time links to your web pages won’t include every possible quality factor you would look for. Knowing some of the factors that go into a quality link though, can help you create a better overall link building strategy and help you determine which links are more desirable. Quality factors can also help you see which links aren’t worth spending the time to get.

When thinking about quality links try to think of your ideal link and why it’s an ideal links. Think about the factors that make your ideal link ideal and think about the factors a search engine algorithm might consider important in a link. The more of those factors you can get in a link the more quality that link should have. Also look for links that are difficult to get. They will require more work and take more time to get, but they will be worth far more than hundreds of low quality links and they will be hard for your competition to duplicate.

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Tag: SEO

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Google has gone live with Patent Search, which lets you search through over 7 million U.S. patents. The search engine seems pretty robust, with a bunch of advanced search operators.

Does My Big Idea Already Exist?

Link: Patent Search

Advanced search options include:

• inassignee: – Search only patents with this assignee (example: Google)
• ininventor: – Patents from this inventor (example: Edison)
• intitle: – By patent title
• patent: – By patent number (which allows you to see Patent Number 1 – AAXL AND OTHER ROADS, which helps locomotive engines gain traction while traveling uphill)
• uspclass: – By patent office classification
• intlpclass: – By international patent classification

You can also search by issue and/or filing date. The patents have been scanned in, with the scan using the same interface as Google Book Search, which means it has all the useful features of Adobe Reader with none of the bloat and crappy performance.

What I really love is the front page, which shows images from five random patents that change on reload. One question: What if this patent comes up randomly?

(via Boing Boing and The Google Blog)

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