Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
My wife looking for sea glass on a recent trip to Jalama Beach
If you read “The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO“, you know that there are many, many things that you can do to increase your search engine optimization and get more traffic.
The very easiest way to get traffic is to comment on other people’s blogs and leave a link to your site. They usually link your name to your site. Don’t be obnoxious about it. Don’t oversell yourself or be rude, but leaving a link is common and acceptable.
The other benefit of commenting on other people’s blogs is that they usually read your comments. If you are witty and relevant enough, they might even come check out your site. If you have great content on your site, (and you do, right?), then they might even become a fan of yours. Maybe they become a friend. Poof! A relationship is born.
The hard part of commenting on other people’s site is that it takes time. You don’t see results right away.
I nagged coached Deborah, my wife’s friend with the sea glass jewelry site, to leave comments. (Did you notice that? I linked to her again. Darn, she’s good.) Her attitude was “Yeah. Yeah. Whatever…” but I kept after her. She tried hard, but it was difficult to keep up the energy when the results don’t come quickly.
She checks the number of inbound links to her site using Site Explorer, a tool I discuss in the book.
I got this email from her recently.
We’ll today I’m officially over a thousand. Am I supposed to put this in a diary of something? I remember in late October when you were on me about having 46…It was drudgery to even think about posting comments, etc. Now it’s the 1st thing I do for work every morning. Thanks for the push.
-Deborah
It warms my little heart. Yes, she went from 46 inbound links to over a thousand. It took her 5 months. She achieved it. Along the way, she’s made new friends and her site is better known to the community.
I’m so proud.
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
I was shocked when I read the statement below. You need to read the whole article. It’s got great, solid, and TRUE, information.
If you read my page describing the SEO book, you’ll see that I actually wrote that the book addresses the 80% of SEO information that you need to know and not the 20% you don’t really need to know.
The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?
1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler
You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/learning-seo-noisy
Posted in SEO |
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
If you’ve read the book, you know the basics. I can tell you to work on getting more inbound links, but until you actually make a plan and then work that plan, your efforts will be haphazard and not as effective.
I suggest that you spend a set period of time, every day, to do some activity that will build more inbound links for your site. Leave comments on other blogs, post in forums, guest blog, submit articles to directories, the choice is yours, but the key is having a plan and doing it on a schedule.
Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/strategic-link-building-how-to-productize-link-acquisition-and-dominate-your-niche
Posted in SEO |
Monday, March 1st, 2010
I LOVE getting comments on my blog posts. It makes me feel validated as a human being. They love me. They really love me! (I need to get out more.)
When I got the comment below on one of the last posts, I realized, “Oh, yeah… I need to explain this stuff, huh?” I keep forgetting that.
All of the five would have been wonderfully informative IF I knew the DEFINITION OF EACH TERM. For those as dumb as me, what is an H1 Headline Tag? How about Internal Link Anchor Text? I was so excited to be led to the most important five and then I dropped from the cliff when I couldn’t understand what you were telling me. Eeeek~
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2010/02/25/search-engine-ranking-factors-seomoz.html#comments
So here’s what those mean, and more importantly, what they mean to you.
Flowers on cactus in my backyard
The number one says “Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag”. This one is easy and important. The title is a technical bit of information on a web page. It’s displayed in the browser window, up there at the top.
You can see where it actually is on a web page by doing the “view source” in your browser to look at the code behind the page. Look at all that gibberish. Look towards the top of the gibberish. There will be a bit of information that says “<title>This Text Is Whatever Your Title Is And Where Your Keywords Should Be</title>”. That’s the title and what this says is that your keywords should be inside of those “title tags”.
You can control the title in many different ways in many different systems. In Wordpress, the title of your page or post becomes the title, following the name of your site. In Etsy, the title of your product becomes the title, followed by your shop name. You’ll have to look at your own site and figure out how this works.
What you should do is make sure that your keywords are in that title. If that means adding it to the name of your product or your post, then do it. Experiment until you know how to make it work.
2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
The second most important factor is having those keywords as the FIRST words in the title. I’ve actually heard the they should be after the initial word, but I can’t prove that. The trick is to get them in the title towards the beginning of the title.
Since Etsy seller Warmth left the comment, let’s look at one of her products on Etsy.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22247701
The title of the page is “Jilly-from the Easter Mice Felt Mouse Collection by Warmth”. I’m guessing her keywords are “felt mice”, so I would reword this product, so the title changes, to “Felt Mice Collection: Jilly, from the Easter Mice by Warmth.” See how the keywords are first now and it still make sense to real people?
3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
Third factor is having your keyword in your domain name. If you have a domain name, then it counts to have the keyword in it. If you’re on Etsy, the domain name is “etsy.com”, so unless you are targeting “etsy guide” or something, you’re out of luck on that one.
4.Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
Fourth refers to an “H1 headline”. The H1 tag is one of 5 levels of headline. They are named H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5. They correspond to levels of importance and usually have some formatting attached to them, like they are larger and bolder. If you don’t know what these are or you can’t actually touch the content of your page to put them in, you’re out of luck on that too. If you’re using Wordpress, you can actually put in <h1>the text you want to highlight</h1> into the HTML edit field on your post.
5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
“Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page” means that when you link from one page to another on your site, which is an “internal link,” you should use your keywords in the link. If you link to other web sites, those are “external links”. The “Anchor text” is the actual text that you use in to link with. So if your keywords are “felt mice”, then you should use the words “felt mice” to link to other pages on your site.
If you are using Etsy, this is difficult. About all you have for links are the ones from your shop page to your product pages. If you have your keywords in your product names, these links will already have your keywords in them.
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Here are the top 5 factors, out of 24, that are important for SEO on a page. These were ranked by their panel of experts (people smarter than me.) Click through to read the whole list. The whole site is filled with great information.
1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
8% moderate consensus
2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
11.3% light consensus
3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
60% high importance
11.2% light consensus
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance
10.2% light consensus
5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
47% moderate importance
13% moderate contention
One tip to take away from this is when you are using Wordpress and the “All in one SEO” plug in, the default for all of the titles is: “%blog_title% | %post_title%”. Change that to “%post_title% | %blog_title%” to get those keywords closer to the beginning of the title.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-keyword-specific-ranking-factors
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
This is a great post with a lot of solid ideas for building links. Please click through and read them all, both the right ways and the wrong ways to build links. There’s a good introduction about the value of links now and in the future. Bottom line is that you should spend considerable time building high quality links to your site.
You want more traffic?
Build more links to your site!
What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn’t count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.
But please, don’t fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)
Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Anyway, enjoy the update.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
If you want your site to rank for a keyword, before you do anything else, you must first decide that that keyword is!
Which keyword should you focus on?
I’ve gotten a couple people asking me that very question in the last week. The answer is tricky, but needs to be answered before you do anything else.
Green grass and trees
The first consideration is “what do you want to be found for?” What do you want people to think of to get to your site? What is your site about? Who are you? What are your desires in this?
The second consideration is what are people looking for when they find you? What are they thinking of when they want to get to your site? What are they about? Who are they? What are their desires?
The third consideration is how many other web pages are targeting the same keyword? How much competition is there? How good is that competition?
Deciding what you are about if pretty easy. Just say it. Say it a few different ways.
Now do some research on what they are looking for. Use the Google Adwords tool to look up the number of searches for your terms.
You might find out that people don’t search for what you think they search for. They use different terms than you use. They say it a different way. They misspell the words.
Recently, I was looking for a black backdrop for some video tutorials that I’m working on. I looked up “material” in Google maps. Not a lot to be found. I looked up cloth. Still not a lot. I thought and thought. What did my mom call that stuff that clothes are made out of?
Fabric. It’s called fabric. I don’t call it fabric, but everyone else does. I found a “fabric” store and all was well with the world.
It’s that kind of stuff that you need to consider for the “who are you” part of this.
Google Adwords will tell you how many people search for a specific term on average, compared to other words. That’s one thing to know.
You can search for your term yourself and see what that “1 through 10 out of blah, blah, blah” number. This is your competition, the second thing to know.
Then, look at your Analytics. What keywords do people find you with now? Are those good keywords? There are always some strange ones in that list. You can also ask your clients if you have that kind of relationship with them.
The hardest part of this is that you have to think about it, use deductive reasoning. You have to look at the data you can find and figure out what the best keyword is to target. You might have to do a little math to get ratios if you know how to do that.
Look for a keyword that makes sense for you, makes sense for your clients, has enough traffic to make it worthwhile, and doesn’t have much competition.
That sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
This is the second in a series that I want to revisit. The original article outlines exactly the research we did on one shop’s competition so we can plan out how to beat them in the search engines.
Why Do They Rank So High?
Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.
westcoastseaglass.net
westcoastseaglass.net has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition-part-2.html
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Since we just got a bunch of new subscribers from Etsy, I wanted to revisit a post that I wrote last Summer about doing research on keywords.
Keywords are the root of SEO. Picking the correct keyword is critical. You can’t optimize for everything. You can only optimize for one or two things. You need to figure out what those specific things will be. One keyword different can make the difference between a flood of traffic and a trickle of traffic.
Here’s an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.
What Keywords Should We Target?
Starting with “sea glass”, I used Google’s keyword tool and found that “sea glass” had 2,433 searches a day. I assume that people were looking for all kinds of sea glass, where to buy bulk sea glass, methods for finding it or cleaning it or whatever else. It’s not that targeted at jewelry.
Next came “beach glass”. I’ve never heard to it referred to this way, but Google has. 1,332 people search for “beach glass” every day. We also have “seaglass” at 398 searches, “sea glass jewelry” at 325 and “beach glass jewelry” at 95. From there, we have all sorts of other keywords with less than 100 per day, including “sea glass jewellry” at 24, so make sure to check those misspellings.
These are the keywords we’ll concentrate on; sea glass, beach glass, seaglass, sea glass jewelry, and beach glass jewelry. Next we’ll look at who else ranks for those keywords.
Who is the Competition?
We’ll do a search for each phrase or search term and see who comes up in what order.
When we search for Sea Glass: Wikipedia comes first. I don’t think we’ll beat them, but they aren’t selling jewelry, so I don’t think we have to. The seaglassassociation.org comes next. Again, not sure we need to beat them, but it would be nice if we could. The next two are westcoastseaglass.net and naturalseaglass.com. These look like they might be our biggest contenders.
Let’s look at “beach glass” next. Wikipedia is first. The next two are relishinc.com and bytheseajewelry.com. These are the ones to beat here.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.walton.com/2009/06/06/small-business-seo-%e2%80%93-sea-glass-jewelry-keywords-and-competition.html
Posted in SEO |
Friday, February 5th, 2010
My apologies to Stanley Kubrick.
I was talking with a potential client the other day. They had been referred by someone else, so I asked if they had seen my web site. They replied “Yes, and you’re not going to get me to blog!”
I understand how much some people hate to write blog posts, people like me, for instance.
We all need to get past that.
The advantages of write blog posts on a regular schedule are huge. I know. I know. You don’t have time and you’re not a good writer and you have nothing to say and blah, blah, blah.
I don’t want to hear it. If you want to have any success at this stuff, you need to have a blog and you need to write on a regular schedule.
Google loves a “regularly updated” web site. You get points for not being stale. If someone is taking the time to update a site, it must be more valuable than one that’s not been touched in years. I love to blog.
If you have 5 posts written, publish one a day for 5 days instead of 5 all on one day. Google loves that too. I love to blog.
Google will come back and crawl your site more often if you publish more often. If nothing changes for a week at a time, why should they come back any sooner than that? I love to blog.
Every time you publish a new post, your blogging software creates a new page with that post on it. More pages equals more authority for your site. I love to blog.
On every one of those new blog post pages, you have a menu that links back to pages on your own site. More pages have more menu links that increases the number of internal links that your site has. I love to blog.
Every time you publish a new blog post, there are more words on your site. If those words are your keywords that you are trying hard to rank high for, then you will rank higher for them. More words equals higher rank for those words. I love to blog.
Every blog post that is interesting will draw in links from other people who are interested in it. More external links is good for search engine ranking. I love to blog.
There are probably other good reasons to write blog posts, but these are all I can think of off the top of my head on a rainy Friday afternoon.
Did you get my point? I love to blog! You should love it too.
Posted in SEO |
Monday, February 1st, 2010
I updated the landing page for the FREE SEO Book and revised the promotion in the sidebar.
I asked for my landing page to be reviewed and got some great feedback.
They pointed out that the story of how I beat Wikipedia for the word “survivor” was powerful and I should move that up a bit. I added a new image that points out the rankings on Google.
It’s really important to ask other people to review your site. Other people will always see things differently than we see things ourselves. That’s true for everyone, no matter how experienced or smart you may be.
This is especially true for copy. Having a proofreader review your copy is really helpful. Review it from the marketing point of view, did you hit all your marks?, and from the proofreading point of view, did you make any typos?
No matter what you write or design or post, run it by someone else first. It will ALWAYS make it better.
Posted in SEO |
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
If you want to know the easy way to do SEO, here’s the book for you, and it’s FREE.
I finally got my book on SEO finished. There’s now a page where you can find out more about it and download it.
It’s aimed at beginners, people who are afraid of the web and know nothing about any of this computer stuff. It lays out, in simple step by step instructions, how to optimize your site for search engines.
I’m giving it away for free for a while to build up my mailing list. At some point, I’ll start charging money for it, so don’t miss your opportunity to grab it now.
Click on this link to find out how to download your free copy:
The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
If you use Wordpress for your blog and you can’t think of something to write about, go find some relevant blog posts to inspire you. Use Google news or Technorati to find something.
Here’s the secret tip. Go to Tools -> Tools in your site. See that thing that says “Press This”? Read that.
Grab little bits of the web
It lets you “grab little bits of the web”. I have a more sophisticated tool that does this exact thing for Survivor.com. None of the content I publish on that site is my own.
Drag and drop that link to your bookmark tool bar in your browser. It should stay there.
Go to some random, relevant page out there on the web, maybe one that you commented on.
Select some text that you want to quote on your site.
Click on the “Press This” toolbar link.
It will copy the text that you selected, open your blog with an “add new post” page, and plop that copy into it, with a link back to the original site. It will put the text into a “blockquote” which changes the formatting.
You can comment on what you’ve copied.
Look at this post on my site.
http://www.walton.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-marketing-hard-remarkable-communication.html
I write some of my comments at the top and put in one of my photos. Then, the quoted copy is below that in a “blockquote”. There are a couple lines from what Sonia wrote on her page with a link back to her page below.
This gives you content and something to write about, plus it’s a link to a relevant page, plus whoever you link to will appreciate the link and might come read your site.
Don’t copy too much from someone else’s site, no more than 3 paragraphs or so. This is “fair use”, not plagiarism.
This is a great way to get ideas of things to write about and build some relationships with other bloggers.
Remember that more pages on your site means more internal links and more authority with Google.
Now, go Press This!
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Here’s a list of SEO terms that you should be aware of, if you aren’t already. There are more where these came from, so go check out the site.
Long tail
In SEO terms, the ‘long tail’ refers to the less obvious, more specific (and therefore less competitive) but still relevant keywords and phrases you can optimize your site for. So instead of trying to optimize for very general and competitive phrases such as “coffee”, a long tail phrase might be “buy Costa Rican coffee.” For a very competitive field such as coffee, you might have to think of even more specific and niche phrases than that in order to find the ones you can rank highly for.
Why You Should Care:
If you are a small business, or just starting out, the long tail will help you find free & targeted (there’s that phrase again!) traffic. You will be able to rank more quickly for long-tail phrases instead of wasting your time trying to compete for very general terms that have established competition.
SERPs
This simply stands for Search Engine Results Page – i.e. the list of results that comes up when you perform a web search.
Why You Should Care:
That’s where you want your site to be!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.webtrainingwheels.com/2009/11/online-marketing-terms-seo-edition/
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Give Me Money! - Richard Rosenblatt
I worked for Richard Rosenblatt when he ran Intermix, the company that created MySpace and sold it to FOX. The company had been sued for putting adware in free, downloadable tool bars and settled just before I got there.
We had a game room with an Xbox and a PlayStation with a flat screen TV, plus the old school arcade style video game. Lunch on Friday was catered. We came and went as we pleased. The company made a ton of money.
It was immediately obvious that the goal of the company was to make money, any way possible. I worked on a community casual gaming site that was pretty straight forward. I was eventually assigned tasks working on other sites that were more unseemly. They depending on sending out millions of emails per day, yes, per day, and getting people to click through to these junky sites.
We had tricked people into signing up for these spammy emails, so technically, we weren’t spammers.
When the company was sold, everyone I worked with left, so I left too.
Now Richard has moved beyond community sites with his new company, Demand Media. They are doing classic niche site marketing, or maybe ultra SEO.
Demand Media
The idea is that they take 3 bits of data and compare them to get the most money out of them. They look at terms people are searching for. What terms have the most search traffic? They look at what advertisers are willing to pay for. What are the highest cost per click terms? Then they look at the competition. What terms have the least amount of existing pages already?
The intersection of the most search traffic, the highest advertiser dollars, and least existing competition is money. They are doing that thousands of times a day.
They publish little bits of content, cheaply made, poor quality content, for the search terms at the intersection of those numbers. They built a machine and pump out the content. Wired magazine just put them on the cover and wrote an article about them.
When you are producing content for your site, keep these 3 factors in mind. Maybe the point is not the advertising money, but just getting traffic to your site will be easier when you look at the competition.
What can you do to improve your site using these factors?
How to Give the People What They Want
Demand Media has created a virtual factory that pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. It starts with an algorithm.
The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), The ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and The competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results).
Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
After you build your web site push it out there into the bright, shining world, you wait and wait, but the traffic doesn’t come. What should you do?
The easiest thing that you can do is to build inbound links to your site.
The MOST important and easiest thing that you can do is to build inbound links to your site. Some links are better than others and if you want to learn the nuance of them you can, but the bottom line is the more links that you have pointing at your site, the better your SEO will be.
Volume. More is better.
There are hundreds of ways to accomplish this, but the easiest way is to leave comments on people’s blogs. Go do some searches for sites that are on a similar subject to your site and read what they say. If you notice something cool, leave a comment. It will (should) link back to your site.
People are wary of people spamming them, as they should be, so don’t do that. Don’t drop by and say “Nice post! Buy my stuff!”. That’s just rude.
I actually had an acquaintance leave me a comment on a post that I linked to on my Facebook page. They said “I didn’t read your post, but I was wondering if you would be interested in” buying some product they were selling. I was taken aback. Really? You’re not going to read my post, but you’re going to try to sell me something? Yeah. No. I don’t think so.
Leave a useful comment. One that relates to what the person was talking about. One that adds some information to the conversation. This is all about relating to people, making that connection. It’s not just links.
Links are the byproduct of the connection, so make lots of connections and you’ll get lots of links and links turn into traffic.
Forums are another solid place for this activity. Connect and link. Any place that people are talking, go talk there too.
Focus on the inbound links. That’s the bottom line for building traffic to your site.
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
In the midst of an article on Bing, SEOBook.com has this advice. Nail the basics. This is the best summary of the basics of SEO that I have seen. It’s good, basic advice that you should be following.
Make sure your content is unique, use H tags for titles, use alt tags for images, use unique page titles and description meta tags, one topic per page and ensure your copy is free from spelling and gramatical errors.
I must point out that the word “grammatical” is spelled incorrectly on the original page. Yes, yes, it is. There are two Ms.
That’s why you should get your SEO information here. I’ll give you good advice, PLUS I’ll spell the words correctly!
Read the entire article at:
http://www.seobook.com/optimizing-bing
Posted in SEO |
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
The Care and Feeding Of Search Engines is the new name of the SEO book that I’m working on. It’s very, very close to being ready to publish.
Like any project, the bulk of the work was done in a few days, then we started to edit. That took a week. More material was added, which took a few more days, then a second edit, which was two weeks worth.
We’re down to the last edit and adding the illustrations, so we’re THAT close to being ready.
But.
And like PeeWee Herman said, “There’s always a big butt.”
Tomorrow, Thursday night, Sept. 17, at 8pm, is the first episode of Survivor Samoa. That means that one of the 4 busiest days for my poor little web server will be tomorrow. After the show, I’ll have to update the site to reflect what happened and what everyone else said about what happened. On Friday, I’ll be interviewing the poor person who got thrown off the island first, then updating all of that new information. That will take up all day Friday.
Sigh. It’s a glamorous life, isn’t it?
The book should be ready by the beginning of next week. Or so.
Posted in SEO |
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Working with a search engine is similar to training with a puppy. You find out what they like and use that to get the behavior you want from them. Figure out what they are aware of and what is important to them, then figure out what response you want from them. This is really about training the search engine to fetch.
Working with a search engine is similar to training with a puppy.
The first step that a search engine takes is to send out a robot, which is just an automated program, to read each page on your site. As it reads the page, it will evaluate it and try to figure out what it’s about. It won’t keep a copy of the entire page in the search index. It will only keep a score for specific words and phrases and characteristics that it finds and deems important.
This process of reading web pages is called “crawling” a site. After it crawls one page and evaluates it, the robot “indexes” the page. Indexing means that it puts the scores for the page into it’s index, so it can find it when someone searches.
It’s not a human, so it can only guess what the page is about, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it look for and what is important to it? How would you determine what a page is about?
If you looked at a page in your favorite browser and looked at the “source” or the actual HTML that makes up the page, what would you see? Most of us see a bunch of gibberish, but that’s HTML.
The robot sees that same code and tries to figure out what the subject of the page is, based on what’s there. Robots have no nuance or intuition like we do. They are pretty dumb and pretty literal. They only see what they see, which is really just a string of characters.
Robots also look at and track the links on a page and all the other pages on the Internet. They use what they can figure out about these links that are pointed at your page in determining what your page is about also.
Each web page that’s indexed in the search engine has various scores associated with it. These scores are based on, 1. what it finds on the page and, 2. what links it finds elsewhere, that point to the page. When someone types a keyword into the search engine, it goes through it’s index of scores and finds the pages that score the highest for that keyword. It doesn’t read all of the web pages and calculate the scores when someone searches. It only reads the scores that it’s already calculated.
Since how these scores are calculated is a company secret, and probably changes weekly, so we can’t know exactly what they are or how they think. We do know the general idea is that the search engine looks at all of the scores for pages with the specific keyword, then returns the list of pages, the SERPs, to the user in the order of the scores. The page with the highest score for that keyword will be the first result. Our goal is to increase those scores for your pages.
Posted in SEO |
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
This is a great article on some common SEO problems, but I want to point out two of them in particular. Write it and forget it is one that I wish I could solve easily. It seems that there’s a common idea that SEO is something that you can sprinkle on at the end and then it’s good to go, that you never have to touch the site again. Wrong. The site must be updated at least once a week and more often is better.
This is not a spatula. This is a ramp of people falling into a pit. Look again.
Only looking at ego phrases are also an easy pit to fall into. You know that THIS phrase is the one that everyone should be looking for, but in reality, everyone doesn’t know as much as you do and they search for what they think is the right phrase.
I’m constantly surprised when reading reports on traffic for related keywords. There are always phrases and keywords with what I think is way too much traffic. Don’t people understand the best way to search? Well, no they don’t. You have to look at what people ACTUALLY search for and optimize for that. It doesn’t matter what goodness and truth is. It doesn’t matter what you know is the right way to search. It only matters what THEY actually search for.
by Jolina
2. Write It & Forget It
Website content is not a ‘set and forget’ project. Rather, web content should be treated as a living organism which needs ongoing care and nourishment (read new content).
A ‘set and forget’ mentality when it comes to web content will only keep you successful for so long. Eventually, competitors catch onto to the benefits of SEO as well and if they are creating new content they are likely to trump you for target keyword phrases.
4. Focus on Ego Phrases
Some clients make the mistake of hanging success of the entire program on what we call ‘ego phrases’. i.e. wanting to rank for a particular phrase because they think it is important, not because data predicts it will drive traffic
Read the entire article at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/09/seo-pitfalls/#comments
Posted in SEO |
Fair Winds and Calm Seas,
Deborah Leon
www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com
