SEOptimise » link building

30 SEO Resolutions for 2012

Tad Chef — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:05:14 +0000

Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Content Creation

I will create less shallow content and more quality “one of a kind” pieces of content.
I will create more content using multiple rich media such as images, audio, videos and the like.
I will write shorter, more readable postings instead of long, hard to read ones that nobody can follow.
I will create more content on site and waste less time on third party sites that require me to give away “User Generated Content”.
I will provide less average sales copy and create more outstanding content for inbound marketing purposes.

Link Building

I will perform fewer tedious tasks such as contacting unwitting webmaster about link exchanges and provide more appealing incentives for people to link to me voluntarily.
I will go after more citations and fewer links to get traction on local search and Google Places instead of just the organic index that gets less exposure.
I will make sure my old inbound links are still there and also fix 404 errors on my own site.
I will link out more, not only to get noticed and more links back, but to reach out honestly to like-minded industry professionals – after all, we don’t compete most of time.
I won’t sneak in “free links” anymore on unsuspecting sites that would not voluntarily link to me.

Social Media

I will market less and contribute more in order to become a valuable contributor to social media.
I will get organised while social networking and not just waste time drifting from update to update on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
I will follow fewer hypes and not just jump in on every social site that web celebrities want me to. I will go where the real value is.
I won’t just share links all the time on social sites but instead use them in a balanced way, adding networking and conversation to my daily habits.
I will schedule times for my social media activity instead of just dropping in and getting distracted all the time during work hours.

Blogging

I will blog more regularly instead of just updating my social media profiles on third party sites.
I will guest blog on other blogs, both the already important ones and the not yet very well known.
I will focus my blog writing on the desired outcome – not just blog for the page views and social shares.
I will socialise with other bloggers both online and in real life to establish lasting relationships.
I won’t check web analytics daily or more often and obsess about metrics that only make sense to check in the long term or every other week.

Tools

I will use fewer tools and more techniques. SEO and SMO are still about how you use them, not how many tools you use.
I will use the tools I prefer more in-depth instead of just scratching the surface of the features.
I will take more time for social media analytics and monitoring and find out what real humans say about me, my contributions and why.
I will not trust tools with everything and make sure to cross check data and compare with other outcomes.
I will recommend only the tools I truly use, not the ones I’m an affiliate of.

SEO

I will perform more SEO tests and publish the results to the benefit of the SEO community, no matter how vague the outcomes are.
I will provide more advice to educate the clients and their teams and make them more self-sufficient.
I will share my techniques, tools and case studies, not just to show off but to get recognition from the SEO community.
I will rant and complain less about Google, other SEOs and bloggers and instead keep on improving my own arsenal.
I will build a recognisable brand instead of just relying on generic rankings on Google.

These resolutions are written in the first person to make it easier for you to identify with them and to apply them yourself. They are not necessarily my personal resolutions.

On a side note: this is my last post on SEOptimise after more than four years. I hope you liked my posts. If you did, you can keep on reading my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

The SEOptimise team will take care of this blog completely from now on, so there won’t be any shortage of posts.

* Creative Common image by Aftab Uzzaman.

5 Ways a Client Can Sabotage SEO

Rachel McCombie — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:17:55 +0000

Running an SEO project smoothly and effectively requires juggling many skills: creativity, proactivity, effective time management and organisation, to name just a few.

But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge – within an agency, of course, but also (perhaps less obviously) with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That’s what we’re here for, after all. But it’s unfortunately a fact of life as an SEO that algorithm updates and other external factors are not the only risk posed to a successful SEO project. Without at least a minimal level of SEO education, actions taken by a client can actually be detrimental to the SEO efforts of their agency or consultant.

One of my SEO New Year’s Resolutions (more Resolutions from SEOptimise in a forthcoming blog post by Matthew Taylor) is to help clients to help us by ensuring they have enough knowledge to understand our work, its aims and methodologies, and what they can do to ensure that we’re able to get them the best results possible. So I thought I’d kick off the New Year by taking a look at the top ways in which an SEO project can be sabotaged by a client. This is not me ranting about my lovely clients by the way – it’s more a retrospective look at some of the bottlenecks I’ve encountered in otherwise smooth SEO projects over the last year or so.

1. Changing the website without telling us
Whether it’s launching a new section, rolling back to an old version of the site, rewriting copy or even a full blown redesign, it’s really important to get the SEO perspective before any changes are made, to ensure that a) new material is optimised from the word go and b) prior SEO efforts are not damaged or lost. There’s nothing worse than finding that your client’s rankings have plummeted because the site has been reverted to an old, unoptimised version without your knowledge.

The solution: emphasise to your client the importance of liaising on potential website changes before they happen, and in plenty of time. If there’s a redesign in the offing, ensure you’re involved from the outset to ensure that the new site is structured in an SEO-friendly way. It’s much easier to make changes in the planning stages than it is to change things once it’s live.

2. CMS that doesn’t allow crucial SEO changes
Not the client’s fault, but a CMS system that doesn’t allow the implementation of such vital elements as title tags is clearly a major spanner in the works. The worst thing is not being prepared for it – you get your title tags written and signed off, then get granted CMS access only to find that you can’t actually implement them because the title tag is taken automatically from the H1 field and can’t be edited separately!

The solution: ascertain before the start of the project whether the CMS has the appropriate functionality. Ask the client to get their web developer to implement it if necessary, so that you have no nasty surprises awaiting you down the line.

3. A cripplingly slow sign-off process
SEO is continually evolving, and dramatic changes can happen overnight, without warning – just look at the Panda update, for example. That means that we have to be quick to react, and we need the flexibility to be able to adjust both strategies and actual on-site optimisation quickly and decisively if necessary. Our ability to do this can be severely hampered by the need to go through lengthy sign-off procedures.

Even in the course of normal, day-to-day SEO work, project delivery can be significantly delayed by slow sign-off on crucial elements of the campaign – for instance, not having approval for targeted keywords means we’re not able to proceed to writing title tags, which would clearly have a big impact on rankings. Similarly, if content for use in link building is slow to be approved, this will obviously limit our ability to build the highest quality links in a timely manner. It’s frustrating when ranking performance is hampered because we’ve done as much of the agreed work as we can, but can’t actually implement it.

The solution: establish a mutually agreeable sign-off process and, where possible, minimise client involvement. For example, once guidelines are in place, ask them to approve the titles of blog posts only rather than reading through every post.

4. Confusing SEO with PR and advertising
What a lot of clients don’t realise is that some SEO methods are nothing to do with their brand. When it comes to building links, for example from guest blog posts, the emphasis is on finding interesting angles that will work well as blog posts. This is particularly important when the client’s company or products are not especially interesting in themselves, meaning that we have to create the interest by looking at wider or related fields in order to gain bloggers’ interest. When clients apply their own brand guidelines to completely external (anonymous) posts, or even insist on us only writing about their products, it can become very difficult to do our job – because often what you’re left with is a salesy piece in a style that simply isn’t suitable for a blog and which will not get accepted for publication.

The solution: give your client a thorough explanation, along with examples, of what your work will entail, showing how and why it’s being done and reassuring them that their brand will not be harmed in any way.

5. ‘Helping out’ with link building
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when clients take an interest in link building. But not when they get involved by paying a fiver for 10,000 links (this has happened to us). As we’ve previously established here on the SEOptimise blog, this tactic doesn’t work and this sort of activity would seriously undermine a carefully considered link building strategy. Obviously we should be educating clients to aid our efforts by including links in their PR material (for example), but clients should be strongly encouraged to check with you before ‘helping out’ with link building.

The solution: when forming a link building strategy, take the opportunity to educate your client about link building and explain which practices are outdated. Make sure your project plan is clear on who has responsibility for tasks.

What common problems do you encounter in running SEO projects and how do you solve them? Let us know in the comments below!

To blog comment or not to blog comment? 65% say YES to blog commenting!

Rachel McCombie — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:01:53 +0000

Blog comments: quick link building win or spam-tastic black hat method you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole?

I wanted to find out what the general consensus was on this controversial topic within the SEO world, so I set out on something of a fact-finding mission to attempt to answer one question: does blog commenting work, and if so, can it be done in a white hat way? (Ok, I guess that’s two questions then.)

Let’s clarify what we mean by ‘blog commenting’
We’ve probably all left comments on blog posts we’ve enjoyed or where we’ve felt we had something to contribute. What we’re talking about here is the use of blog commenting purely for the purposes of gaining links – i.e. you wouldn’t have left a comment if you hadn’t been trying to build a link. That might mean an anonymous blog comment with an anchor text link in true old-school black hat style, or it could mean the more socially acceptable form of an actual contribution to a post but including a link back in the author profile, with your name as the anchor text. Or it could mean a comment linking to a resource on your site because it’s relevant to the post in question. Either way, the motivation behind the blog commenting I’m talking about is self-serving, making it ethically questionable in the eyes of many.

Are people still using blog comments in this day and age?
I ran a quick poll to gain a rough idea of what proportion of the SEO community actually use blog commenting as a link building tactic. Here are the results, based on 52 votes:

So, based on this sample size, that’s 65% of SEOs saying yes to some form of blog commenting being used for link building. Encouragingly, it looks as though most are doing so using their real identity, but that’s still 35% who don’t ‘do’ blog commenting (or at least, won’t own to it).

So does blog commenting actually help your rankings?
One could argue that if it didn’t work, people wouldn’t still be building links using this method. But then, plenty of people still use the obsolete meta keywords tag. Does blog commenting still work, or are the 65% who said they do it wasting their time?

The anecdotal evidence certainly supports the argument in favour of blog commenting for link building. One particularly enthusiastic commenter on the poll said:

“I, and many other people, have ranked pages using nothing but blog comment links.

There’s no opinion in if it works or not – the answer is yes. How *well* it works vs. other tactics, what types of terms it can work for, and if it’s worth the effort of doing manually are other questions entirely.

But, as a sweeping statement – anyone who claims it doesn’t work either… did it wrong, never tried for themselves, or didn’t do enough of it.” – Ian Howells

I also asked SEOptimise’s very own link building genius Marcus Taylor for his opinion, and he said:

“Blog commenting is something I’ve experimented with considerably over the years and have ranked sites competitively using just blog commenting as a strategy, so I can confidently say that it does work, although it’s certainly not the most effective link building strategy.”

Overcoming the obstacles
What are the main obstacles to blog commenting? Do the obstacles mean that it’s ultimately an ineffective link building method? Let’s take a look:

Perhaps the main obstacle to blog commenting for link building is that many of the comments you make may be filtered out, either automatically by spam software such as Akismet, or manually by whoever approves the comments.
You have to spend time finding blogs to comment on. If you’re putting any thought into blog commenting, you may be finding blogs which are relevant to your industry – thus providing links from relevant pages.
You have to take the time to make an actual contribution if you want your comment to be approved. That really means actually reading the post, which can be time consuming.

So is it still worth it? Some surmise that blog comment links, even followed ones, may carry less weight with Google than regular links. However, as Rand Fishkin points out in this useful post on blog commenting, if you leave a helpful enough comment, the author of the post might even edit the original post to include your link in the post itself – and that’s a lot better than relying on comment-based links! The bottom line: a helpful response that suggests your link as an additional resource is likely to result in sufficient success to justify the extra time it takes to leave a worthwhile comment.

Blog commenting isn’t just about rankings
Those who scream “black hat” at the practice of blog commenting are perhaps forgetting that there are benefits other than rankings. For example, it’s certainly helpful in blogger outreach – if you’ve contributed useful points to someone’s blog posts in the past and they recognise your name as someone who knows what they’re talking about, you’re much more likely to be able to guest post for them. It’s also a reasonably effective way of engaging with relevant communities – i.e. your target market.

This is what my Twitter followers had to say about blog commenting…

“Not sure I use it for link building per se, but I do leave them for the engagement side. I encourage clients to engage in communities in that way – would I do it on their behalf? Not unless I really knew what I was saying inside out, as saying the wrong things is more damaging for the brand than any link gain may give.” – Peter Handley

“Although I don’t use commenting for link building directly, I do sometimes use it as an early stage of building a relationship with a blogger or particular author as part of outreach projects.” – Paul Rogers

Marcus Taylor added, “I think the greater benefit of commenting is to build relationships with the bloggers themselves. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with blog commenting, providing you don’t do the whole spammy anchor text name thing and you do add value to the post. Steer clear of overdoing it or doing it on spammy/irrelevant sites solely for the links and you’ll be fine.”

So from what I’ve seen, the consensus seems to be: there’s still a place for blog commenting – but not the spammy black hat kind. Blog comments can build you valuable links both directly and indirectly, but maximum benefit comes from genuine engagement – communicate what you’re interested in and knowledgeable about, and the time it takes will more than repay itself.

Image by Kristina B on Flickr.

74% of SEOs Buy (or Would Consider Buying) Links!

Kevin Gibbons — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:13:10 +0000

The results are in! We now have 202 votes for yesterday’s ‘do you buy links for SEO‘ poll – and it’s fair to say the results are very interesting.

The reason I asked this question in the first place was because I wanted to forget about the usual best practice advice we always hear and get an honest and realistic representation of what it actually takes to achieve top rankings in Google.

So let’s get straight to the answers:

So what can we read into this?

26% answered with “No – we keep clear of any link buying activity”. I decided against the post title of “26% of SEOs are liars!”. I actually think this number sounds very accurate, although it does depend on where you draw the line on what you classes as a paid link.
22% answered with “Yes – depending on the niche and competitiveness”. This was my answer too; in my opinion, as long as you are 100% transparent with the client and are looking at long-term organic success, as opposed to risky quick-win strategies, in some niches it can be very difficult to compete for top rankings without buying links. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but if buying links is clearly working for your competitors, then realistically it’s going to be more difficult to catch/outrank them with touching paid links. You just have to be more careful as there is obviously a risk element involved.
20% voted for “No – but would consider depending on the scenario”. I think that’s very similar to the above answer – you may not have felt it necessary to buy links yet, but it would be a different story in competitor niches where this is a more important strategy for competitors.
16% say that “Yes – link buying is a major part of our SEO campaign”. To put this into context, this was 33 votes – which I think is very high. Obviously it’s a risky tactic to rely too heavily on paid links for any search campaign – but I also received many private comments such as “yes, it’s essential – we couldn’t rank without them!” and “we tried reducing our £xx,000 paid link budget but rankings dropped dramatically – so we had to start buying them again”. This makes things very difficult for the client or agency – because you want to have a long-term, ethical organic SEO approach. But you also want to do what works right now – and if that’s paid links, you have to decide if you want to maximise online revenue right now, or whether you are prepared to lose out to competitors in the hope that long-term you will come out on top as Google improves its paid link detection algorithm. In my experience, nobody ever likes to lose out to competitors!
13% voted for “Yes – as a small percentage of our link building campaigns”. Personally I thought this may have been higher. There are paid links which clearly still work – Google wouldn’t even have the paid link reporting tool if their algorithm caught them all – but it’s going to be less of a sign to Google if it only accounts for a small proportion of your backlinks. That’s why big brands often get away with buying links, but it’s always going to be far more noticeable for smaller sites.
And 3% voted other – ignore some of the comments, such as the SEOptimise one, that wasn’t us. But the results are interesting nonetheless, mainly because it’s that question again: where do you draw the line on paid links? Does online PR for SEO count as paid links? Are you buying links as soon as you hire an agency for SEO?

Which countries buy the most links?
I found this very interesting to compare how the answers differed across different countries:

It’s interesting to look at the differences in ethics and laws/guidelines which may influence SEO strategies here. Although, with the largest samples sizes you can read much more into the UK and US results – unless you believe that in Greece they don’t buy links!

Comparing the US and UK is interesting though – the major difference being that 34% of SEOs in the US don’t buy links, compared with the lower 25% in the UK. The other options being very similar across the two.

Would be great to hear your comments on the results? Do you think this is accurate? When do you feel link buying is acceptable (if at all)? And where do you draw the line between a paid and a non-paid link?

Do You Buy Links? An Anonymous Poll

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:45:34 +0000

Following Matt’s SEO ethics post and having had many interesting discussions about buying links with some SEO’s recently, I thought it would be interesting to run a quick anonymous poll to find out whether buying links still has a part to play in your SEO strategy.

So here goes:
Poll now closed – please see our results post

This is intended to show what is actually happening in the industry, perhaps against best practice advice – so I think it will be interesting to see the results. Obviously this is an anonymous poll and only vote information is collected. If you’d like to show us examples, feel free to leave them in the comments. But I’d probably advise against it to be honest!

High Risk SEO: 33 Ways to Get Penalised by Google

Tad Chef — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:35:18 +0000

On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.

While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.

Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.

Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.

So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.

Backlinks

Large parts of the SEO industry still focus on link building or getting links to improve search engine visibility especially on Google. There is nothing wrong with that. Of course there are limits. There are now so many pitfalls to link building that you have to be very exact when it comes to following the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

5000 links for $19 – dubious offers from spam emails offering you 5000 links for $19 are too good to be true. They lead almost directly to a penalty.
Paid links on high PR sites – while you can get away with paid links in many cases, it’s quite easy to get noticed when you buy links on so-called high PR sites where the toolbar PageRank is 6 and above. There are only a handful of sites that have PR9 and even the number of PageRank 8 sites is easy to monitor. PageRank sites like Piwik.org that have a ten are so obvious you could call Matt Cutts and tell him about it yourself.
Reciprocal links on large scale – link exchange and reciprocal links are natural to some extent. I link out to bloggers who link to me on a daily basis. On the other hand, obvious and massive link exchange schemes or networks can be detected algorithmically, so you end up penalised sooner or later.
Hidden links in WordPress themes or counters – these days many top ranking free WordPress themes sites are just SEO scams which rely on hidden links in the themes to be spread around. If you rely on such links for “link building”, it’s no wonder you are being penalised. Some visitor counters have done that in the past as well.
Artificial link profile with always matching anchor text – when every single link to your site is well optimised saying something like “SEO company” this might look too artificial to stay unnoticed by Google.
Wrong language links – an English site having thousands of links from Russia or China makes me go hmmm. Google engineers are smart enough to compare the language of your site and the sites that link to you. In the best case you just rank in Russia and China. Else you drop altogether.
Gaining too many links too fast – it’s not always the more links the better. Even good links gained too fast can result in a penalty. Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.

Outgoing links

Linking out is crucial for blogs and even static websites. Many webmasters stopped likning out in order to hoard PageRank. Google engineers have discouraged this and suggested linking out instead. Linking out can be risky though.

Broken links – too many broken links on a page raise a red flag in the Google algorithm. This might not be a penalty in the strictest sense, but you drop suddenly in rankings once more than one or two links are broken on a page.
Links to bad neighborhoods – even worse than 404 errors (aka broken links) are links redirected to so called bad neighbourhoods. Spammers even use this technique on purpose to fool you. Most such links happen more naturally as part of link decay. Sites disappear and domain grabbers buy them to display ad loaded “domain parking” pages.
Too many outbound links or none at all – a site that has more outgoing links than content itself can lose its search visibility. This might not happen overnight like the typical penalty you’d expect, but it can amount to one in its effects. Also, sites that are dead-ends (that do not link out at all, or use use nofollow links out of the misguided belief that it’s good SEO) might get penalised completely.
Hidden links in third party services (menus, widgets, counters) – free services for websites often have a rather sneaky business model. They sneak in a hidden link with their offering. It can be a CSS menu, a sidebar widget or a visitor counter. Sometimes these links are not only hidden; they are also off-topic and downright spammy. Look out and check the source code of stuff you add to your sites. Google, of course, doesn’t allow hidden links.

Content

Though Google always stresses that “content is king”, it also can mean trouble. If there is no king in your kingdom, or the king is dressed in rags, you look bad when the Google robots visit.

Duplicate content – duplicate content on your own site or even elsewhere can result in a significant ranking drop. While Google does not consider this a penalty, most webmasters who experience the problem do.
Low quality content – Google’s high quality update dubbed Panda focused on low quality content. Shallow, keyword-rich content on some pages can make your whole site drop in Google.
Scraped content – scraped content, that is text taken from other sites and displayed on yours, is a surefire way to get downranked.
Unreadable content – content that is written in broken English can be seen as scraped and then “spun” (some words get replaced with synonyms to fool Google), so make sure a human being understands what you write. Also, text decoration is crucial. Human quality raters employed by Google check that as well.

Ads

Analysts argue that Google is not a search engine but an advertising company as almost all revenue of the Google corporation stem from ads displayed in the search results themselves and on third party sites. Nonetheless, the pressure on Google has grown over the years to tackle the problem of so called MFA (Made for Adsense) sites that pollute the Google index. With Google “Panda” the search giant finally did.

Too many ads (low content to ads ratio) – ever since Google “Panda” has been the talk of the town, most pundits have pointed out that a too high number of ads, especially Google Adsense ads, may lead to a penalty. I agree with that opinion.
Affiliate sites with no value – Google always explained that affiliates are OK, but only as long as they offer some additional value beyond the actual affiliate offer. Be sure to add value or you will face a penalty sooner or later.

Bad press and reputation

The issue of so-called “SEO outing” has been a hot one in 2011, as numerous high profile websites have been outed and with them also their SEO teams or companies. Many SEO practitioners argue on moral grounds that outing is a despicable practice. They might be right, but as long as there is nothing to out you fare best. So you’d better manage your reputation online and from time to time check what the SEO team does.

NYT and WSJ – high profile old media outlets like the NYT (New York Times) and the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) like to scandalise SEO, so if you get a call from a journalist you’d better not brag about your shady SEO tactics. Google, in most cases, reacts to high profile outings aka bad press.
Industry blogs like SEO Book – some SEO industry blogs might focus their attention on your shady SEO business model when you get too flamboyant or obnoxious. Aaron Wall of SEO Book got so offended by the “SEO is bullshit” tirades of Mahalo owner Calacanis that he attacked his site for sites. Finally Google had to act, and penalised the thin-content site along with other offenders in the Google “Panda” update. Be sure not to slander the SEO industry if your online property is not 200% clean.
Asking questions in official Google Groups – some disgruntled webmasters tend to speak out on Google groups or forums when they feel they have been singled out and penalised. Some of these webmasters have been penalised for a good reason. These people will be outed by Google employees in the worst case scenario when they don’t admit their mistakes and keep on complaining.
Third party trust metrics like Blekko, WOT, McAfee Siteadvisor - if you don’t show up in Blekko, aka you are banned there, and when sites like WOT and SiteAdvisor list your site as deceptive or dangerous, this might mean you are heading towards a Google penalty. Google does not use these sites’ data but has other means to screen the Web for the same issues.
Making Google look stupid – you don’t need an NYT article, a SEO blogger or Google employee to get penalised for a bad rep. Publicly showing off your black hat SEO successes makes you vulnerable to the “making Google look stupid” penalty. Leading SEO specialists agree that from a certain point on, Google can’t keep quiet about it and will penalise you in order to keep its face.

Google filters

Some Google penalties are just filters that are applied automatically. While many penalties can be both manual and automatic, some of the filters are obviously algorithmic.

New domain (sandbox) – the so-called sandbox filter has been around for years, but was never officially acknowledged as far as I know. It applies when you change domains or start out with a completely new domain and site. Without a proper “moved to” sign Google will apply this penalty to old established sites as well when they change domains. Use a 301 redirect for old sites and try to gain a significant number of authority links in the early days of a new domain to beat this filter.
Multiple h1 tags – a book has just one title. Likewise a web page has only one h1 title tag. Google assumes that multiple h1 tags are a trick to spam its index, and penalises sites using multiple h1 tags. Use h2, h3 and other headline tags instead.
Keyword stuffing (high “keyword density”) – one of the oldest spam techniques is so called keyword stuffing. To this day, fake SEO specialists advise webmasters to ensure a high “keyword density” on your site. That’s nonsense. Be sure to add your keywords to your website copy, but no more than a few times. It’s more important to keep the text readable than any percentage of keywords. It might rather hurt you in Google.

Technical issues

Not every sudden drop in rankings and traffic is a penalty; some are stupidity or gross negligence. You can shoot yourself in the foot by messing with some technical aspects of web development.

Robots.txt – the robots.txt is not really needed to improve SEO. It can break a lot of things though. Just recently I blocked one of my blogs from being indexed by Google. Of course I suspected a penalty at first but then checked Google Webmaster Tools to find out I made the mistake.
Nofollow – I’ve seen leading blogs barred from the Google index because they activated the WordPress privacy mode. It simply meant that all of the blog was set to noindex, nofollow which equals blocking it in the robots.txt.
Duplicate titles and descriptions – when your site uses the same or a very similar page title and description for every single page, it’s no wonder most of them won’t show up in search results. This isn’t a penalty either. It’s just logical.
Not crawlable links in JavaScript – there are still JavaScript site menus out there that can’t get crawled by Google. Always check whether your menu uses real HTML links with “” in it. Or at least the whole URL must show up.

Neither a penalty nor your fault

In some cases a loss of rankings or search traffic has nothing to do with you or your site. Something else changed instead, and that’s why you get outranked all of a sudden.

Algorithm change – Google changes and refines its algorithm all the time. Major changes are called updates, and sometimes mean dramatic shifts in search results. Just search for “Google Panda”. The only thing you can do then is to find out what changed and why your site does not match the new ranking factors.
Competition got better – a common “problem” is also that your competition does more SEO work than you do and one day they outrank you. A ranking change from #1 to #2 on Google can mean a traffic loss of 60 to 80%.
Current events – sometimes breaking news may push your site down. Google News results get displayed on top, and for less competitive phrases news media start to rank in regular results as well. Most of these ranking changes will vanish ofter a few days.
SERP display change – Google experiments all the time with its search results’ display. Most notably, local results from Google Places take away large parts of the screen real estate. You might rank at #1 in organic results and still get displayed at the bottom of the search results page.

There are numerous reasons to see a search traffic slump one day out of the blue. It doesn’t have to be a penalty, but if you engage in some of the high risk SEO tactics mentioned above it can be one. Make sure you have at least two web analytics tools to check what happened. Google Analytics is not perfect and sometimes the ways it measures traffic get changed overnight without notification.

Just recently, traffic from Google Image Search has been quietly moved from the referrers to search engines (where it belonged in the first place).

Once both of your web statistics tools confirm the search traffic slump, you can check out this list of 33 ways to get penalised by Google to find out whether you’re a victim of one of them.

* Image by Alexandre Syrota.

Everything Webmasters Need to Know About the Google +1 Button for Websites

Tad Chef — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:03:41 +0000

Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.

I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.

The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.

It seems that Google is also adding up the best technologies from its former failed social services and products. I see features from Google SearchWiki, Google Bookmarks, Google Buzz etc. converging.

Google’s own +1 resources

Google +1 was introduced initially at the end of March, and I provided a list of 40 resources back then. Thus here I’ll add only those you need for the actual button. Most importantly, there is the code to include the website button, which is as easy to implement as Google Analytics or even more straightforward. So if you use Google Analytics already, inserting Google +1 is even easier to accomplish.

How to install Google +1 on WordPress, Blogger, Joomla etc.

You can of course add Google +1 buttons to your blog or CMS, either including the code yourself or using extensions, add-ons or plug ins. There are ways to do so on WordPress, WordPress and Thesis, Blogger, Joomla (both a how to and an extension), Magento, Open Cart… For those who want to add the button according to web standards (so that it validates), there is also a small tweak or a bigger workaround for HTML5.

Add your extension, tutorial or how to below in the comments.

Google +1 Extensions for WordPress

While you can include the +1 button manually as suggested above, there are already plenty of Google +1 WordPress extensions. I have tested several of them. There are simple ones, even one you have to save as PHP file to add-ons with multiple customisation options and features.

Choose the one that fits you best and that you trust the most to get updated in the future. I currently use the one by Alex Moss from Pleer SEO. For bloggers who already use a Google Buzz button, there seems to be a conflict and this extension has been suggested as a solution.

How to track Google +1 in Google Analytics and elsewhere

Yoast has quickly come up with a way to track Google +1 votes in Google Analytics. Others have expanded on this script with the actual URLs that got clicked and to consider negative clicks (when someone clicks +1 again to revoke the vote).

Several bloggers have come up with similar scripts. Google has already suggested that +1 votes will both get counted by Google Analytics by default and that +1 will get its own analytics suite, at least according to screenshots shown on a conference. Other analytics tools use their own hacks to allow +1 click tracking: Sitecatalyst.

I’m still on the lookout for Piwik, Woopra and other solutions.

How to use Google +1 on websites that don’t have a +1 button installed

While the quick adoption of +1 buttons on websites is quite impressive, and there are far more of them than Google Buzz buttons already, many sites don’t yet include the button. If you want to +1 them anyway, you need a bookmarklet or a browser extension for Chrome. Of course, you can still vote the site or article up in the search results as well. I haven’t found an extension for Firefox yet, but expect one to appear soon.

Why or why not use Google +1?

Many bloggers argue that it makes no sense to click the +1 button on websites because there is nobody you actually share your endorsement with, at least not directly. This may indeed be an advantage, as you can +1 twenty articles on the same topic in a row without alienating your friends or followers. Theoretically, there are many reasons to actually click +1 instead of liking or tweeting. On the other hand, privacy concerns get cited as a reason not to use Google +1 and Google forces you to join a social network again.

The single biggest reason to click +1 right now is, of course, that it is a ranking factor for Google. So webmasters want visitors to click the button. Social Media B2B suggests informing all your existing connections. Also, Google users customise their search results using +1. They see their own votes and those by friends while searching. Logged out users also see the +1 votes. The first search results on Google for a given keyword displays the number of +1 votes, if there are any.

How does Google +1 affect your SEO and social media optimisation?

Judging from my own use of +1 buttons, I tend to click +1 instead of like on Facebook or tweet it. It easier than sharing on Twitter, and it prevents flooding your followers and friends with your numerous votes. So some people may vote more often now, while the number of likes and tweets may suffer. Another point to remember is that many people tweet just for the SEO of it. Now, with +1 they can go the direct way to improve their rankings – they don’t have to tweet.

Aside from my subjective musing, there have been two very impressive studies, one by SEO Effect to test the actual ranking and CTR impact and another one that analyses the performance of the Google +1 button and the scripts it uses. While the SEO is seemingly improving significantly, the website speed issues are a drawback right now. The Google engineers haven’t done their homework here. Also, there seem to be canonical issues.

I have to repeat here: Google has officially announced that +1 votes will count as a ranking factor. Many in the SEO industry doubt that the impact will be big, but as we see the actual tests show otherwise. So using +1 buttons on your site and encouraging your readers to click them will be a part of link building from now on.

What else you need to know about the Google +1 button for websites

Google +1 buttons are also displayed on YouTube and Google Shopping (products) search results. As of now (June 8th, 2011) only Google.com users can see the +1 votes from their so-called social circle. These might be people connected to you via the various existing social sites like Twitter, Google Buzz, Quora, Friendfeed etc.

Still, so-called social search results seem to be separate from +1 votes right now. Both are connected to the same social circle you can manage on your Google Profile. While Android smartphones of course support +1, it seems that the buttons do not display on iPhones.

Additionally, WebProNews has compiled a list of things you have to know about Google +1. Kikolani has also a great guide.

How to Get Links by Creating Content People Actually Want to Link To

Tad Chef — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:11:20 +0000

Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

In the early days it was assumed that search engine optimised sites are, by definition, keyword stuffed pages which no sane human would link to. Thus you had to artificially inflate their link popularity. Much of link building today is still marred by this absurd dogma, despite the Web being quite a different place in the second decade of the 21st century.

Today the work of the link builder is to a large extent about earning the links while not actually touching the pages that are linking.

So it’s actually the content creation part of link building that takes most of the time and effort these days. Whole teams work on infographics, widgets or other content-driven link baiting campaigns.

Getting links does not require a whole team though; I do it myself all the time. It’s better to have a team, but one dedicated person can achieve quite a lot as well when it comes to creating linkable content.

Before you actually get links, or rather before you create the content to get links to, you have to ask yourself a few questions.

What links are you after?
Who will link to you, and from where?
Why will these people link to you?

If you can’t answer all three of them without flinching your linkbait article, your whole campaign to get links will probably fail. You may get the wrong links by the wrong people for instance, or you may get no links at all.

What kind of links are you after?

What do you mean, what kind of links? Aren’t links all the same? Well, there are:

Natural links and optimised links
UGC links and editorial links
Nofollow links and “dofollow” links
Site-wide links and page-level links
Footer links and in-content links
Low quality links and authority links
Static links and social media links
Likes, tweets or HTML links.

I always combined a contrasting pair to make the meaning of each a bit more clear.

Who will link to you and where from?

A clear goal would be to get high authority editorial in content links from a list of bloggers, to answer the first two questions. Then the third answer could be “because you write a flagship blog post for them as a guest blogger”.

Another typical goal, one that is easier to accomplish, could be to get natural UGC links with the nofollow attribute to get social ranking signals and a healthy backlink profile. In order to do that you have to target certain social media outlets, not necessarily Facebook and Twitter, as you do not go after likes/tweets as part of this goal.

In many cases, niches and countries you would try to contribute to forums and similar communities.

Why will these people link to you?

You still have one question left: why would forum users would want to link to you?

Real communities are always self conscious; that is, when you write about them you’ll get members to notice and get interested in you. Unless of course there is no real community or it is not web savvy enough to notice by itself. Then you have to actually tell them. An article “Why community x is the best place to go” is the easiest way to win hearts, unless of course you lie and it isn’t that great. People may notice and a backlash may even ensue.

A good way to approach a community is to do something that is specifically of use for them.

Some competitive niches require high quality authority links, while you dominate others with less effort.

Your link profile also needs all kinds of links, so it’s never a mistake to use simple ways to get more links even if these are low quality. By low quality I mean not spammy on purpose, but simply of lower quality than an editorial link at a well-known publication. For example, you can publish a blog with a full RSS feed and declare the content to be under a Creative Commons License. So people would copy it and redistribute your links along with it.

This works even without a CC license, as a lot of aggregators, social sites, scrapers and content thieves republish it elsewhere or at least snippets of it. Indeed, Google and Facebook are the biggest content thieves as they copy whole articles and reuse them on their sites.

The Link of Attraction

So in short you have to ensure that you attract the people who can bring you the links you need and give them a reason to link to you. That reason is your laser targeted content created especially for the audience that has to link to you. You attract the people you have chosen to attract and give them what they want.

* Image: abandoned building site by 2xtrouble

30 Link Building/Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011

Tad Chef — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:15:08 +0000

With the recent “Panda” Google quality update one of the key changes was that low quality content and links within it have been discounted by Google. It means that

not only so-called content farms got hit by the Panda update, but also sites which heavily relied on content farms for inbound links.

Perhaps the most obvious casualty was article marketing. If article marketing was one of your key link building tactics prior to the Panda update, you finally have to adapt to modern link building and link baiting techniques that still work in 2011.

In this list I focused on common sense, widely used techniques, of which you’ll find plenty of examples on the Web. I didn’t want to be particularly creative and spectacular. So if you are Eric Ward or Michael Martinez you might not find anything new here.

For everybody else: check the list to find out whether you use all of them or at least those fitting best in your area, niche or industry.

When I refer to ‘links’ in link building, I don’t just mean only old school “a href” links but also new school links like Facebook likes or tweets.

Guest blogging

While Matt Cutts has already warned that guest blogging might be not the best way to get links, it’s still a widely used technique and as far I can see it works quite well. You can get authority links from top blogs this way.

Infographics

2010 was the year of the infographic. With the slow demise of Digg, where most infographics have been pushed, and the over-saturation of the web with all kinds of infographics, it’s not as successful as it used to be but still a valid technique to get both large numbers of links and good ones as well.

Blog commenting

It’s not what you think. Blog commenting for SEO is not about worthless “thank you great post” bot comments and keyword stuffing in the “name” input. Blog commenting for SEO is about suggesting a resource that might get included in the article, or better forging a relationship with a blogger who then links to you of her/his own accord.

Widgets

Widgets are often considered an annoyance that clutter your blog sidebar. They don’t have to be. Also, they still can be awesome for link building. Just take a look at LinkWithin, the related posts widget many blogs use. It’s not very accurate when it comes to determining which posts are really related, but it’s nonetheless hugely popular for its ease of use.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, when applied to blogs, can mean asking people for contributions to a blog post on Twitter. There are even better ways to apply crowdsourcing. An excellent example has been provided by DIYSEO blog recently. They have featured 40+ SEO experts in a monumental group interview on the worst mistakes small businesses make when it comes to SEO. The more people contribute, the more will like, tweet and link back. I just did!

Freebies

Offer a free service or software package to get links and you’ll see that you get far more links than your paid-only competition. So making sure that there is a free entry level plan for your SaaS app is saved money when it comes to marketing and tedious manual link building.

Web hosting

Major web hosters still successfully give away web hosting plans for charities, blogs and artists. In exchange, they get a link or button which says “hosted by x”. All of the above mentioned can get quite popular and get many links themselves. Thus your link gets quite a lot of juice as well.

Web design

Many web design agencies offer discounts, or even require all clients to link back to them. Of course forcing clients to do so is a bad business practice, but offering incentives is perfectly fine.

Niche directories

While most web directories were discounted long before the latest quality update, one kind of directory has been gaining trust over the years and has been recommended by Google employees: high quality, selective niche directories. They must be highly relevant, topical and/or local in nature.

Trackbacks

Having a WordPress blog allows you to automatically trackback or pingback other blogs. While most links will be nofollow, it is still a very powerful link building tool that also allows you to reach out to other link-minded bloggers. Simply link out to actual posts by other bloggers or manually add the trackback URI they offer. Even some bigger news outlets allow trackbacks and pinkbacks.

Contacting brand evangelists

I couldn’t come up with a really good name for this technique, but it’s one of the best working ones these days. It’s about finding out who is talking about your site, brand, products or services and contacting them. Then you say politely “thank you” and add an incentive to link back to you. This might be as simple as suggesting adding a link to your site they forgot last time.

Going after competitors’ links

Competitor analysis is perhaps the most common and hailed link building tactic these days by SEO experts. I do not like it very much, as mining competitors’ links is more an analysis tool than actual link building method, but at the end of the day you’ll discover all kinds of links your competition got and you can employ similar tactics to get them as well.

Blogger relations

Blogger relations is one of the most obvious but neglected link building techniques. There aren’t enough journalists to cover every company and industry, but for each niche there are (in most cases) numerous bloggers interested in that subject.

Bloggers are always glad to get invited to a fair, be given a product sample to test or just get the latest scoop on new products. Blogger relations is not about spamming bloggers with a generic press release once a week.

Contests

“Tweet this” or “like us” to “win an iPad” type contests still seem to work. They’ve become a bit common lately, so try to stand out a bit rather than being just another generic contest.

Free premium content

White papers and other ebooks or PDFs still get a lot of attention and links. Just consider this excellent white paper one by Hootsuite on social media metrics.

Interviews

When conducting interviews on my SEO 2.0 blog I never did it for the links, but I was glad to see that most interview partners link back to the interview I did with them.

Testimonials

Provide testimonials: you praise the products/services you love anyway and they link to you.

Badges

The Ad Age 150 is perhaps the best example of how a badge can work. Of course they rank #1 for marketing blogs. We also link to the list.

Rants

Write when angry and offend people and you’ll get links. At least by people who will link to you for being a jerk. I know this is isn’t really right but Google does not make a sentiment analysis. The links count. Just check out who still outranks us in the UK for the term [seo faq] without even providing one.

“SEO is dead”

Did you know? SEO is dead! Yeah, it has been dead almost since its inception and every time it was pronounced dead again to get many many links from SEO specialists and those who hate SEO. It works with other disciplines as well. I do not like this type of link bait, but it works again and again.

Forum and community participation

On most forums you get a link on the profile, in the signature, and of course in posts. Also, once people know you they’ll keep on linking to you of their own accord. Google considers forums and communities to be quite important. They are even in the menu on search results pages under “discussions”.

I’m not sure about the actual link value for Google, but I’ve seen forums drive traffic quite a few times and bring you dedicated visitors who will return. Thus participation is key. Only getting profile links by the dozens doesn’t work these days IMHO.

Answering questions

Yahoo Answers is a bad resource for answers but a great resource for questions. Also, forums are full of questions people ask. In many cases you just need to provide a resource on your site and people will gladly link to it. You can even link to it yourself and people will be thankful.

Humour and cartoons

Do you know The Oatmeal? You don’t? Well you have probably slept the last few years. Matthew Inman, formerly a renowned SEO expert, has been so successful with his humorous cartoons that he stopped doing SEO altogether and now focuses on the linkbait itself.

Blogging

Consider Laughing Squid, one of the most popular blogs out there. It’s actually run by a web hosting company of the same name. I’ve checked the keywords they optimise for and they seem to rank quite well just by blogging about cool stuff. How do they do it? They check out what’s popular elsewhere and blog about it themselves just a few hours later, so that many people discover it there and link back to them as the source of the great find.

Donations

Open source software and charities are so grateful that you donate to support them or their cause that in many cases they will link back to you to show their gratitude. This is still a legit way to get links.

Event sponsorships

Recently I pointed out that German blogging conference re:publica is selling links to its “sponsors” without using the obligatory “nofollow” attribute Google requires for such cases. Heck, they even linked to Google as one of their main sponsors. So it seems that event sponsorships do not count as paid links.

Linking out

Many people in the SEO industry still don’t believe this but actually linking out to others, especially bloggers covering the same subject matter and your peers who’ll notice it, is one of the best ways to get actual links to your site. This works in multiple ways, the simplest one being that people will check out who links to them and maybe discover something worth being linked to on your site as well.

Fix other people’s broken links

The Web deteriorates fast. Web pages or whole websites disappear, documents move or vanish. Most sites and blogs do not even notice or care. They don’t even know they should and how they could check for broken links. You can. Just contact the bloggers and webmasters and suggest a resource from your site as a substitute.

Web statistics

Looking at some of the most linked websites out there, you’ll notice the likes of Statcounter and Piwik. Piwik doesn’t even require you to link back to them, but they already have PageRank 10 due to all the links they’ve got. So providing a free web statistic tool seems to be one of the most successful link building strategies ever. This is, of course, not something everybody can do, but it’s certainly cheaper than spending the millions the actual links are worth. I’ve personally witnessed more than one analytics tool go out of business lately, so they must be cheap to acquire. I’d buy the now defunct 103bees search analytics tool if I could afford it.

Strategic partnerships

These days there are numerous services you could offer, but in most cases you won’t be able to provide all of them unless you have a huge team of at least dozens of people with different skillsets. The solution is to join forces with fellow freelancers or small business owners. Am SEO agency, for example, could partner with a web design or web hosting provider. Guess what, you could link to each other as well. Just ask the business owners you already cooperate with if they are interested in a more close business relationship.

Unfortunately these 30 link building/link baiting techniques are not the only ones that still seem to work in 2011. So-called paid links do as well. I do not recommend engaging in buying links, but so many others do that you might end up below them in the search results if you don’t. In this case, you may want at least to mimic the way paid links work.

* Image by Hugo Cardoso.

How to Perfect Your Press Releases

Rachel McCombie — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:38:41 +0000

As the importance of SEO becomes increasingly widely recognised, millions more marketers have started churning out press releases. Unfortunately, many seem less concerned about the potential media coverage than about the optimisation benefits.

A good press release, when it’s picked up on and used by the media, can do wonders for your brand awareness and corporate authority. But it’s also great for optimisation, and if your agency is writing slapdash articles, calling them press releases and distributing them to a bunch of websites where nobody will ever read them, then you’re barely scraping the surface of your press release potential.

By creating press releases that writers and bloggers will actually use, your effort can pack a far more powerful punch both in online and offline marketing. Here are some of my top tips for dramatically better releases.

Run some analysis or research

Forget every other tip in this article; if your press release doesn’t have a good story then it won’t even get read, let alone used. Although a good story for an industry-specific publication may not be something the editor of The Times would publish, your releases have to have a decent hook, no matter how niche your field. Otherwise you are doing nothing more than churning out half-hearted copy that no human will ever read!

Pro top tip

Invest in your release! Analyse your company’s sales data and see if there’s an interesting trend you can highlight, run a survey among your customers or on your website, or even consider paying an agency to conduct research on your behalf.

That way, you have an actual story that goes beyond ‘new product launched’. You can of course put out a release when you want to sell a new service or product, but make sure there’s something juicier in there for the writer too.

Build relationships with writers

The best way to garner press attention for your release is to have an existing relationship with the journalists or bloggers you’re targeting.

For larger brands with bigger budgets, this can mean taking a few writers out for a meal to discuss working with them in the future. Companies with less cash and smaller teams may do better chatting to relevant writers via platforms like Twitter, commenting on their blogs and gaining introductions at conferences and other industry events.

You may also benefit from ringing around a few of the writers you know, just to bring their attention to your release. A quick, friendly chat on the phone can work wonders.

Pro top tip

If you’re friendly with a particularly well-known blogger or writer, then why not offer them exclusive access to your release in advance? You’ll do them a favour by offering them an exclusive and it makes it more likely that your story will get publicity.

Get your spelling and grammar right

All journalists and most bloggers care about spelling, punctuation and grammar. They can’t help it – it’s wired into their minds, and for good reason. Badly written news articles look unprofessional and untrustworthy, and the same goes for press releases.

So, if you want your pitch for their attention to look professional, have it proofread before you send it.

Pro top tip

Forget WRITING IN ATTENTION-GRABBING CAPITALS and ditch the over-excited exclamation marks!!!! They make your content look spammy and unprofessional.

If a writer has opened your release, the sight of an abused caps-lock button or an abundance of exclamation marks will just make them close it again. And what’s more, they’ll be less likely to open your emails in the future.

Be clear, precise and concise

Writers are busy, busy people. Don’t waste their time – get to the point as early as possible or you risk them never getting as far as your actual story.

Say what you have to say in as few words as possible and be strict with yourself when you come to edit your release.

Use a professional writer if you aren’t confident about writing well. There are even some copywriters who charge just a few pounds to proofread work, so you can get a professional’s opinion even if your budget is stretched.

Pro top tip

While puns can be fun, a good headline is a clear one that shows the writer exactly what they will get from the release.

The really good news is that this is also great for SEO, as it makes it more likely that your keywords will fit neatly into your headline.

Justify your claims

Once people start actually reading your press releases, you’ll quickly learn how essential it is that you can justify any claims you make.

Journos and bloggers can be a clever bunch, and are likely to pick up on any claims you can’t substantiate. That means that your release could result in a negative story, which is hardly the point.

Pro top tip

When making any kind of claim, asterix it and include as much information regarding it as possible beneath the article, such as links, survey size and so on.

If a writer is half-heartedly considering running your story but then decides they would need to contact you for additional details, it might just put them off using it.

Journalists are an overworked race, while bloggers often work in their spare time, meaning they don’t always have time to research. Make it easy for them.

Link Building: Link Context and Anchor Text Optimisation

Tad Chef — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:37:57 +0000

When it comes to link building one of the most important aspects of it is the optimisation of the actual link. Whether getting the link voluntarily or by contacting webmasters, you have to exert the utmost influence on the link itself. Unfortunately this is also a Catch 22.

When you start controlling the appearance of your link it stops being a natural link.

Thus Google can use filters on such a link to determine it’s ”manufactured”.

So there is a really volatile relationship between links being natural and useful for SEO. Most successful SEO techniques have been abused in the past by spammers so that Google tweaks its algo to curb overtly artificial link building.

Examples of such devalued links are:

Reciprocal links
Footer links
Site-wide links
Off-topic links
Exact match anchor text links.

None of these tactics is by itself ”evil”. It’s just their overuse that leads to penalties. Indeed I was reviewing one of my favorite SEO companies to find all of these techniques used in a fairly legitimate way and indeed combined. Let me explain:

Reciprocal links: This SEO company linked to its clients in their case studies and the clients linked back to them.

Footer links: The client sites were linking to them in their footers as it was “who built the site” info nobody expected to see in the content itself.

Site-wide links: Because the footer was added to every single page on the site, the footer links were site-wide, adding up to dozens, hundreds or even thousands

Off-topic links: A fashion or car website linking to a web design and SEO agency is not really a relevant context.

Exact match anchor text links: As the company has built the clients’ sites as a whole, most of the clients had a typical “web design by x” link added where web design was the actual anchor text.

So you see all these techniques by themselves are quite natural; many websites link their web designers like this. Combined, these links look very artificial though. Spammy paid links look very similar in many cases.

Let us return for a while to the concept of a healthy natural link profile. You do not want just each link to be of SEO benefit. You also want to have a healthy natural link profile as a whole. Such a profile is including nofollow and scraper links. An abnormal link profile raises a red flag for the Google algo.

You might get penalised for perceived paid or low quality links without even having them. Depending on the industry, niche or even language of your site, a healthy link profile might look different. So it does not make sense to create another faulty ”keyword density” that allows you to find the perfect numbers for each one link type.

One again it’s common sense that will guide you through the link context and anchor text optimisation. Let me show you the advice I had for this particular colleague of mine:

Add context

Write a post or at least a short paragraph about yourself, or let your clients introduce you on their blog or site. Do not just add the link. Introduce the site you are linking to.

Add branding

Do not only link the generic text as in ”web design”. Link to ”web design by x” or ”thank you to our web designers from x”. Insert your brand for x.

Make it readable

Do not hide the link and its context in the footer or somewhere where nobody will read it. Let them proclaim it right there where we can see and read it. After all, they like your services, don’t they?

Less is more

Linking to you on 2000 pages does not make sense in many cases. One laser targeted page may bring even more leads. Search engines like Google can count links of course, and group them together so that 2000 links from one site is not much better than just one or two.

Treat each link as an individual

Do not use a template or require your link partners always to link in a certain manner. Ask them to include your brand and services, and let them do it themselves or suggest a way that’s appropriate for each site.

Now you could argue that all these link optimisation techniques work only when you actually engage in artificial link building by contacting other webmasters. You can apply the same rules to link bait as well. People are lazy, especially on the Web, so that they share and link in a quick and dirty way.

The title, headline and first sentence or paragraph of the linked-to page will often be the text used to link to you.

Also, typical linkbait techniques like badges, widgets, infographics or downloads can by their very nature be only displayed in certain places and contexts.

Thus you can influence the outcome of your link baiting efforts by creating a badge that is small enough to fit in the sidebar but big enough not to be placed in the footer. Infographics often include an embed code. You could even run a script that randomly chooses one from several anchor text options.

Aside from the technical aspects, Google displays a tendency of trusting brands more and more over the years, so that focusing on generic keyword rich anchor texts is probably the most widely overused SEO techniques nowadays. It might still work; even the other outdated SEO practices mentioned above have all worked in the past. It’s far easier to influence a link when it is put up on a page than trying to fix it afterwards.

Also, don’t change everything at once when fixing your links and anchor texts and adapting to a newer algorithm. It’s pretty certain that link history and stability is taken into account as well, so that links that appear and disappear potentially raise another red flag. Your natural link profile does not change overnight. It grows and withers organically. Don’t hurry when applying changes. Otherwise you might look like a spammer to the indifferent bots.

* Image by Oceanik.

Osama Bin Laden, the Royal Wedding and ‘News Tsunami’ SEO

Tad Chef — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:01:55 +0000

In recent weeks we have witnessed two overwhelming waves of news I’d like to call ‘news tsunamis‘. Like real tsunamis you have no choice, you can’t escape the news when you are in the nearby area. For this kind of news the whole planet is nearby.

Maybe some tribes in the Amazon jungle or a few monks in the Himalayas haven’t noticed the death of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding, but apart from those lucky few, we have all been drowned in these news waves.

While I was unable to escape the news, no matter how much I tried, I at least tried to reroute the hype induced into something useful: SEO.

My first urge was to catch up quickly and take advantage of the huge waves of traffic.

Instead, I decided to watch the waves of news and to follow the steps of others who have tried to use the energy of these waves to power their websites. Why? It doesn’t make much sense to get huge news traffic without planning what to do with it.

I could have written this a few days later to get some traffic from Google News users; I did it back when the swine flu craze was all over the Interwebs. That’s a bit short-sighted of course. Back then I wanted to inform people. Today I want to be more practical, in a way. You can’t inform the people in a meaningful way anyway; people want to believe the likes of

CNN
BBC
Reuters

So telling them that the swine flu vaccine might be potentially more harmful than the virus itself is futile in most cases. You can’t tell people that what they believe is wrong. You can only give them what they want to succeed, also financially.

A true SEO is always on the look out for opportunity in the attention economy.

The more attention, the more potential bounty. A huge attention wave propelled by a massive news story is an opportunity you can use.

Many people already monitor Google Hot Trends to react accordingly. In the case of a ‘news tsunami’ you don’t have to. Either you expect it beforehand and are prepared, or you watch where the attention and traffic goes.

I want point out two less obvious examples of recent ‘news tsunamis’, as you can’t rank quickly or at all for [osama bin laden] and [royal wedding] as keyphrases. I’d like to point out two examples of less importance but more opportunity.

Pippa Middleton

What you can do is watch out for unexpected aspects and the ensuing demand. In the case of the royal wedding it was Pippa Middleton, the sister and bridesmaid of the royal bride.

Map Abbottabad

When it comes it Osama bin Laden’s death it is the town he was hiding in, and thus the search for [map abbottabad]. It seems that nobody in the West besides the intelligence agencies had ever heard of it prior to this infamous event.

While the first SEO’ed result for [map abbottabad] is like an unintended parody, it shows ”the nearest hotels” being 100 or more kilometers from the actual city, while Pakistan’s capital is just 60 kilometers away. Apparently the site has been there since before the city became famous for 15 minutes.

On the other hand there are four impressive sites for Pippa Middleton which we can learn a lot from.

pippasass.com
pippamiddleton.net
pippa-middleton.co.uk
philippamiddleton.org

Surprisingly the first one in this list ranks at #2 in the UK, Ireland and Canada for [pippa middleton], just below Wikipedia and Universal Search results (news and images). The .co.uk and the .net domains rank somewhere in the top 30 right now, but I’ve seen the co.uk in the top 10 at #9 or 10 for a while.

Of course there is fierce competition right now when it comes to search results for her name; mostly mainstream media from all over the world is clogging up the top results. So anybody ranking there fast on a low budget with a new site is worth a look. How did they achieve this? Let’s look at what the sites have in common.

All four sites have more or less exact matching domains
They all use WordPress
They use keywords quite a lot onsite
They started blogging in April
They have just a few or several posts
There is not much user interaction (comments or likes)

All in all, this appears to be proof that the use of old SEO tactics is still working. When I started out in SEO in 2005, I took part in an SEO contest to find out what the best SEO techniques were. Surprise surprise, back then the same strategy worked out best: using a WordPress blog on a keyword matching domain with just sufficient content to be relevant and quite a few keyword mentions.

Another key component has been neglected in this post until now: link building. I took a closer look at the winner, pippasass.com, to find out how they did it. The answer is reciprocal links! A blog covering celebrity bums daily linked to it, embedding the actual RSS feed the last 5 posts). After that some press outlets (not only tabloids) linked to, one from the US, one from France and one from the UK: The Independent.

So a healthy mix of reciprocal and authority links has been key to achieving top rankings, as the site wasn’t on top just a few days ago when I first checked. The reciprocal links were enough to get noticed for a more targeted search, where the journalists apparently discovered the site and then linked it up to #2 for the main keyphrase, the actual name.

The WordPress sites get monetised via all kinds of ads, PPC, affiliate or even a shop with T-shirts, so there are always ways to earn money on a traffic wave.

How can you monetise a map? Either you sell maps, get commission from hotels or place ads as well. So even the other example could be profitable. Both examples are not really what you would work at out of sheer interest. These are sites you create for profit. The mainstream media knows as well; thus they have ads below the map. For instance, they sell flights to Pakistan in their ads.

So the business of news is ultimately that of predefined views and for SEO of page views. It’s not about what is most important but what the people want. Once you notice the wave and how to use it, you have to act accordingly and quickly. Don’t fight the current or you drown.

40 Paid Links Resources

Tad Chef — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:41:37 +0000

In late 2007 Google officially announced that so-called paid links are outside its webmaster guidelines, and asked webmasters to report paid links they find on the Web via a special form. Fast forward to 2011 and you’d expect that paid links are long gone, like stuffing meta keyword tags or inflating keyword density on page. They aren’t.

There is even a surge of interest in buying links after many large brands have been caught using this technique successfully to manipulate Google’s algorithm for months.

These large brands are not alone; indeed, even Google itself has been sponsoring sites that link to it without using the nofollow attribute required by the Google webmaster guidelines. So it’s no wonder that in this world where some people are more equal than others, many webmasters resort to buying links from text link brokers who are still more or less openly selling them.

Personally I was both buying and selling links prior to the 2007 announcement and let it go when it became apparent that it’s not a white hat SEO tactic. I may have been a little naive back then, but I assumed that links to advertisers you approve of are like editorial links; after all, you agree willingly to link to sites you have checked before. Google doesn’t think so though, as this way just the sites with the richest owners would succeeded in Google.

I can smell paid links from afar, while many webmasters fail to notice them even on their own sites.

Many people do not even know of the nofollow attribute, or that you have to use it on your ads. Others can seemingly get away with it because they are too huge to get penalised or have enough real links. Nonetheless, some large and renowned sites have been penalised for paid links in 2011 already.

Sometimes it depends on the amount of bad press. If you manage to make the New York Times aware of a large brand that buys or sells links, you might force Google to take action.

In the above mentioned example, where Google itself appears to buy links among dozens of others, nobody even cared about it. So apparently, depending on who you are and how you do it, paid links can work for you. Ironically, even those companies that have been caught and got penalised for paid links did get so many editorial links from the press and the blogosphere after getting busted that they probably don’t need to buy links anymore anyway.

In some countries or industries, paid links are so widespread that you’ll get outranked without them.

On the other hand, it’s a risky technique which you don’t have to use in most cases, or better still you can mimic its effects without breaking the rules. The best example of an exception has been paid directories. Sponsoring events seems to be another exception, as in the example cited above where Google has utilised sponsored links itself.

Definitions

The paid links definition seems to be quite straightforward and easy to grasp, but when you think about it for a while you’ll notice that it’s far less obvious in many situations. Also, sometimes the paid link definition is not enough. What about paid content, for example? Last but not least, paid links are OK when they are used for PPC.

Analysis

So while it seems that the paid links definition itself is not so obvious, the question of whether you buy links or not is a bit more complex. Search marketers have dealt with it for a few years now, and there is still a lot of disagreement in the SEO industry about paid links. The voices in favour of paid links seem to be outnumbered, but that’s just in public.

When it comes to the actual SEO practice my impression is that it’s rather the other way around. Most people don’t admit it, but they are doing paid links. Until Google finds a way to detect ”link intent”, we will have have to deal with this issue.

To even understand both positions you need to take a closer look at what’s at stake when it comes to paid links. Some deeper analysis has been done by some search bloggers.

Opinion

The pros and cons of using paid links as an SEO tactic are evident you’d think but there is even disagreement in the industry when it comes to link building as a whole. Some consider it ”paid links” as well.

I guess they argue in favor of allowing paid links, but I think they rather make Google limit link building altogether in the webmaster guidelines. In any case, it’s intriguing to witness the on-going discussion and wide variety of opinions present in the SEO arena.

Google Buying or Selling Links

Why would Google itself buy or sell links? Is it at all possible? It seems yes, it happened again and again in the past and I was quite disenchanted when I discovered a high Pagerank site that has a ”sponsors” link to Google without the nofollow attribute, and hidden anchor text on top of that – another breach of the guidelines.

In the best case scenario, Google employees who have no clue about SEO and their own guidelines have made a mistake. In the worst case, Google itself does not have to adhere to its own guidelines.

Who sells or buys links?

The question who sells or buys links is wrong. The more apt one is: who does not sell or buy links? Sometimes it appears that most people do it and I am the only idiot who does not. If you want to stick completely to white hat SEO techniques, you’ll end up frustrated sooner or later with the competition who does not have such lofty ideals. Also, just the few cases where links been bought or sold admittedly show that “everybody” does it: big brands and news media are no exception.

Paid link SEO techniques

Do you want to buy or sell links? Well, think twice. Also consider similar tactics that at the end of the day have a similar effect but where the links are not directly paid. On the other hand, in cases where the competition does paid links and ranks with it without getting a penalty even a year after you have reported them to Google, you may have no choice.

Try everything else first though. Paid links are just a short cut and not a sustainable long term SEO strategy. It’s just an SEO tactic or technique that happens to work. Next day it might not work anymore. Better you prepare for tomorrow today, rather than just focusing on current results.

Do you really need paid links? Personally I’m a firm believer in the “link love” concept. It’s a very suitable metaphor. When it comes to love the more you give away the more you get. It works perfectly on the Web; the more you give away, the more you get in return, be it content, software or just links itself.

You have to give to get. So the money is spent indirectly. You spend it on the stuff you give away, and therefore you get the links. You can spend time or money to get links – you don’t have to do it by actually paying webmasters to link to you. Why not fund something else, then send out a press release about it and get interviewed as being the generous contributor?

Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google

Tad Chef — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:05:01 +0000

Recently I noticed that the SEOptimise blog ranks at #1 for the query [seo blog] in Google.co.uk

Then it dawned on me why we rank at #1: the single most important factor to getting there was linking out.

Yes, it wasn’t link building or even getting links; it was simply linking out. You could argue that it’s lots of great content etc, but many SEO blogs from the UK have great content. Nobody is linking out like we do though.

Just consider my most popular posts, the 30+ lists you love. Many of these lists link out to 30+ resources; some don’t, but most of them contain at least several links to resources outside SEOptimise.

I have often pondered whether it’s good or not. I have linked out to authority sites in the SEO industry but also beyond it. In most cases my motive for linking out was a great article, tool or other resource. I’m quite sure that many links were influenced by my virtual friendships. I know and trust many people in the SEO arena now, even without having met them in real life. But even given that bias, the links were genuine.

Great content by itself does not rank

There are lots of great SEO blogs in the UK. I often read and link to them, but many of them rarely show up in the generic rankings for [seo blog]. There are, of course, other reasons not to rank for that particular keyphrase; because it’s not as popular and lucrative as others, some people who blog about SEO don’t aim for it.

Some SEO blogs call themselves search, search marketing or online marketing blogs to name just a few synonyms. Some of the bigger agencies and more well-known SEO companies from the UK do optimise for [seo blog], but don’t even rank in the top 10 – despite publishing regularly and getting links from all over the place. I mean very well known and valuable blogs by the likes of Dave Naylor or Freshegg, who really deserve to rank in the British top 10.

Note that both SEO blogs mentioned above have a PageRank of 5, while we only have a 3. SEOptimise is linking out more than getting links in from other industry publications, so that we actually lose PageRank. As toolbar PageRank is not really a ranking factor but just a metric measuring the number of incoming vs outgoing links, it proves the point even more.

There are only two other UK blogs on the first page for the [seo blog] query on Google.co.uk, while #2 to #6 are firmly in the hands of the US allstars.

Of course I cannot prove the theory that linking out made us rank; it’s my gut feeling. I can’t show you pretty graphs of the number of outgoing links vs the ranking for [seo blog] over time, as I don’t watch these numbers that closely.

What I know for sure is that people I link out to often notice it and either link back sooner or later or at least spread such a post on social media. This is of course logical, and who isn’t glad to get mentioned on another publication. Also, contrary to popular belief, sites that link out plenty do not necessarily lose readers; the best example is Drudge Report which has a much higher engagement than other news sites despite being simply a one-page link list.

Moreover, Matt Cutts acknowledged in 2009 that outbound links are a ranking factor.

Linking out is a strategy not a tactic

Ok, now you think linking out may be an SEO trick or something, you try it out and… nothing happens. Michael Gray of Graywolf SEO did that a few years back. He linked out for testing purposes and tested whether his ranking would go up just by the sheer fact of linking out. His logic was to test whether Google uses linking out as a direct ranking factor and rewards sites that link out accordingly. It didn’t work, at least back then. Still, it doesn’t suffice to link out to Wikipedia from time to time.

Linking out is a strategy you have to embrace holistically.

You link out to make people notice you.
You link out to get returning visitors who want more links.
You link out for Google to notice that you are a great resource, a hub, offering relevant links to all kinds of valuable resources.

This is what happened here on SEOptimise. It’s not just the great content we have. Other UK SEO blogs have great content as well, maybe even more in-depth content, but we offer a resource which is like a gate in many directions, while other blogs focus on making the readers stay longer on their own sites. We are not afraid to send you away because we know you will come back. Also we don’t hoard PageRank because we know it’s not been a real SEO metric for a few years.

Linking out also establishes credibility on the Web so that users ultimately come back to your site for more, even where they left via a link they’ve found on your site.

I’m not the only one to suggest that linking out is actually a modern SEO best practice. Check the following articles from renowned industry publications and experts for more opinions on linking out:

What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours?

Marcus Taylor — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:08:06 +0000

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised.

While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn’t. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are, it helps me build a bigger picture of how Google treats link building.

So during the Christmas period a few months back I decided to set myself a challenge: to see what would happen if I built a very large quantity of low quality links in a short period of time into a new domain, in order to gauge where Google draws the line with this type of link building and to understand better what pattern this kind of link building penalty might have. Call me crazy, but these things are good to test and they help you to understand what to do and what patterns to look for when something goes wrong unintentionally.

So, I took a new domain that I wasn’t too worried about destroying, picked a reasonably competitive keyword, and built about 10,000 really nasty-looking low quality links in to the home page with a mixture of phrase and exact match anchor text (note: these weren’t ‘paid links’ per se). I assumed that this should easily be enough to obliterate the site from search results.

The Result

The site ended up ranking #1 on Google.com for this keyword for about three weeks, which as you can see had a significant impact on increasing the site’s traffic. Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.

Analysis

The test confirmed what I had assumed might happen (the site would receive a ranking penalty), but I was surprised to see that it took over 3 weeks (and several thousand visits) before Google decided to do anything about it. So how could you utilise this?

I think one of the most practical uses for this tactic is to get a website ranking for a seasonal or short-term one-off high traffic keyword. For example, it might have worked wonders to get a website ranking competitively for ‘vuvuzela’ for a few weeks around the South Africa World Cup last year, or you could use it to rank for a term such as ‘gym equipment’ for a few weeks after new year when people are keen to get back into shape. However, it’s important to be cautious and aware of your local advertising laws and to know Google’s view on this type of tactic.

A Natural Link Profile and Nofollow as a Ranking Factor or Signal

Tad Chef — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 12:49:20 +0000

SEOptimise link profile on Blekko.

Every site owner engaged in SEO has to strive for a natural link profile. Just as you want to have natural-sounding copy on your page without keyword stuffing and other antique spam techniques, so you want to have a link profile that does not look like one powered solely by artificial SEO.

A site having only

comment
directory
footer links

most probably from link exchanges does not have a healthy link profile, while a site having links of all kinds from all kinds of sources has. While it’s difficult to have a 100% natural link profile, where you don’t build links at all and get all your links from webmasters voluntarily without contacting them, you can still have a natural link profile.

Now here comes someone and asks me about nofollow and whether it is a ranking factor or signal.

Usually I don’t care about nofollow and whether my links are nofollow or not. The nofollow attribute is usually a topic only low quality manual link builders care about. I always aim for editorial links by real people; that’s why I blog and socialize so much. This way, I don’t even have to care about the nofollow attribute.

Still, there are niches where there are not as many blogs or people to socialize with. So you might still be in the position to actually care about manual link building – that is, actually visiting sites yourself and submitting your link there or asking for a link.

Before you engage in manual link building and focus on things like so-called “dofollow blogs” or “dofollow directories” you have to consider the bigger picture. You have to think about your link profile carefully. Also, you might want to start using Blekko to take a look at your actual link profile.

While I have no proof of course, I’m quite sure that Google engineers are smart enough to consider your link profile in their ranking algorithm. We know that the geographic location of your links has a visible impact on your rankings. For instance, having links from the UK is more likely to make you rank in the UK than, say, in Australia.

Likewise, other parts of your link profile will most probably have an impact. Google can determine whether a link is a comment link, a directory link or a footer link as well. I’m not saying these links do not work anymore, but they do at least count less. Furthermore, having only these links is most probably a negative ranking signal.

According to Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin, nofollow links are just a tiny percentage of the overall number of web links. I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s allegedly something between 1 and 2% of them.

So can having more than 2% of nofollow links in your link profile have a negative impact on your rankings?

Well, it’s not that simple. Every niche, type of publication and country has probably slightly different numbers here. I assume that blogs, for example, have a far higher number of nofollow links than other sites, as bloggers socialize among themselves and link to each other. As most blogs have nofollow enabled in their comment section by default, whenever you comment on such a blog or ping such a blog you end up having a nofollowed link.

Now consider some of the tools and data Google has and offers: Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools. Using them, you can compare your data to the average of websites in your industry in GA or all websites when it comes to website speed. Google will most probably check all kinds of data in a similar manner. The algo will compare your site to the industry average. Furthermore, your link profile will get compared. So when everybody has 10% nofollow links and you have 1% or 20% this might appear strange. So nofollow might work as red flag.

Other red flags in connection with the nofollow attribute can be:

Internal links use nofollow in the so-called (obsolete) practice of PageRank sculpting. Red flag: this site is “over optimized”.

External links use nofollow as above or for other reasons. Red flag: this site either has lots of low quality (user generated) content, paid links or links out to untrustworthy websites.

Even worse is extreme usage of nofollow. Some sites use nofollow on all external links for example. Just because it works on Wikipedia doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. So make sure your link profile is a healthy, natural one with lots of “organic” links of all kinds, nofollow links included. Otherwise red flags – such as too many or too few nofollow links – will make your site vulnerable in the Google search results.

30 (New) SEO Terms You Have to Know in 2011

Tad Chef — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:44:29 +0000

Recently I bookmarked a good entry level SEO glossary of current SEO terms. A few weeks ago I complained about some people still using obsolete and inaccurate SEO terms such as “keyword density”.

Additionally, I missed many new or important terms on this list which I read about and often use, but many people, on the Web at least, don’t. Thus I won’t assume that everybody knows them already. Instead I want to define here 30 (new) SEO terms you have to know in 2011.

Some of them have been around for years but have been largely ignored by the SEO industry. Others are well known by SEO practicioners but completely off the radar for the general public, it seems. Last but not least there are terms from adjacent industries we now have to deal with in SEO. It’s 2011 – we have flying cars by now! – so it’s time to adopt new terminology as well.

503

Most of you probably know what a 404 code is. SEO pros use 301 redirects as well. What is a 503 though? It’s a code telling the Google bot that a site is temporarily unavailable and not broken for good. You need it when performing site maintenance resulting in downtime. See:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html

A/B Testing

The process of comparing two (or more) versions of a page to find out the best performing one, i.e. the one that is yielding the highest conversion rate. See:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/07/30-multivariate-ab-split-testing-tools-tutorials-resources.html

Advanced segments

Advanced segments allow you to show only particular parts of your site’s traffic in a Google Analytics report. You can customize and save them to return to the same report again. If you are serious about SEO, you use them all the time. A common advanced segment is social media traffic, for instance. See:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/urban-apparel-and-advanced-segments.html

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/google-analytics-releases-advanced-segmentation.html

Citation

Citation is the equivalent of a link for local SEO, but of course it’s not really the same as a link. It’s more a mention and a link on a site that is relevant for the Google Places algorithm. In a way, citations are even harder to get than links, as only a select few sites get counted for citations. See:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/general-marketing/local-seo-citation-is-new-link/

http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2010/03/31/creating-a-citation-plan-to-rank-higher-in-google-local-listings/

Content farm

A content farm is a site, often a huge one, that produces large amounts of keyword laden, low quality content to flood the search engines. Blekko and Google consider them to be almost as bad as webspam. See:

http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/01/21/what-is-a-content-farm/

Via @mmhemani

Content marketing

Content marketing is a new term describing all the means to promote your site online, be it text, images, video or other “rich media”. Content marketing replaces, to some extent, simple copywriting. See:

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-copywriting/

CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short, is sometimes referred to as conversion optimization, and is the art and science of streamlining traffic once it reaches your site. In other words, it’s a set of techniques to make the user do what you want them to do on your site, e.g. clicking ads, subscribing, buying. See:

http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimization/conversion-rate-optimisation/

Deep link ratio

Any site with a natural link profile has at least some links leading to its content that is not the homepage itself. Back in the days, overzealous SEO practicioners would build hundreds or thousands of links to a website’s homepage, leading to a very low deep link ratio and thus being obviously “over optimized”. See:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/deep-link-ratio-backlink-profile-natural/

Editorial links

Editorial links are not links in the editorial but links set by site owners, bloggers or content creators within a text itself. Also, editorial links are mostly natural in that they are given voluntarily (in contrast to paid links). While many people talk about paid links even years after they have been discounted by Google, most SEO pundits still rarely use the term ‘editorial links’. See:

http://www.stonetemple.com/blog/?p=196

Internal link hub

An internal link hub is a very important page on your site which has collected many inbound links from other sites, and thus can have a big impact on the overall distribution of your site’s authority. See:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/link-hub/

Intelligent content

The definition of intelligent content is not one you can summarize in one sentence I’m afraid. Intelligent content has many characteristics, like being available in many formats, on many platforms and readable on different devices. See:

http://thecontentwrangler.com/2011/01/17/what-is-intelligent-content/

Jaamit

A jaamit is a very strong link, a human bond that results in a link on a website. A jaamit is a link that outlasts the link building efforts or even the link builder. A jaamit link reflects trust, friendship, mutual respect and overall appreciation.

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-build-links-like-jaamit

LDA

As far as I understand, LDA or “Latent Dirichlet Allocation” refers to the way a search engine might analyze word combinations or context on a page. Example: a page about the sky would also contain the words “blue”, “limit”, “high”, “reaching”, “scraper”. So Google might expect these terms to appear, while on a low quality page they wouldn’t. I’d be glad to find a better definition somewhere though. See:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-is-onpage-optimization-the-seo-secret

Link decay

Link decay is the process of a link losing its value over time. See:

http://searchnewscentral.com/2010112997/Link-Building/how-link-decay-can-cause-cavities-in-your-link-profile.html

Link equity

Link equity is like the link budget you have on a site and the way you spend it. Do you waste it on linking to the wrong places or in the wrong way? See:

http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/spending-link-equity-wisely/

Micro conversions

While conversions ofter refer to major goals a website can have, micro-conversions can reflect any goals you choose to measure user engagement with your site – something like a lead, a sale or at least a subscription. A time on site of more than 5 minutes could be a micro-conversion, or a third returning visit. See:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/03/excellent-analytics-tip-13-measure-macro-and-micro-conversions.html

Microformats

Microformats is a term describing a set of standards to annotate web sites in order to make them machine readable. For instance, you can tell search engines what an address is using a microformat. See:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897

Via @leeodden

http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/2010/10/microformat-reference-guide-for-seo-and-developers/

Natural links

Natural links are links by people whom you haven’t asked for a link. If somebody decides to link to you out of the blue without being asked to do so, the link is natural. See:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/natural-link-building-future/

QDF

QDF stands for the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm by Google, which determines the ranking for newly important queries. Breaking news is a good example. In many cases, a blog or news site can outrank old authority sites for a keyphrase because the QDF algo determines that they are the most current source on that subject at that moment. See:

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/05/agile-seo-using-qdf.htm

http://www.orangesoda.com/blog/does-your-query-deserve-freshness/

QR Code

A QR code is used to enable mobile phones to read symbols from print material. They are real life links or additional data. See:

http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-qr-code-and-why-do-you-need-one-27588

Relevant links

Relevant links are – in theory – links which have a topical connection to your site, e.g. a link from a travel site to a hotel. While the concept of relevant links is controversial in the SEO industry, it’s important to know that some links are more relevant than others. See:

http://seo.site-reference.com/traits-healthy-link-profile-link-relevancy/

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are based on the RDF format or microformats mentioned above. They are machine readable codes and provide additional information that is displayed in Google search results. See:

http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk/2010/01/24/seo-and-rich-snippets-crucial-to-your-2010-armoury/

Sales funnel

While the idea of a sales funnel is not new, it has entered the SEO arena quite recently. The sales funnel can be tracked and influenced on websites. I can’t explain it in one sentence though; you have to see it to understand the idea/metaphor. See:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_94.htm

http://searchengineland.com/attribution-alchemy-mining-your-sales-funnel-18721

Semantic

Semantic means “dealing with meaning”. Semantic search and SEO has been around for a while but it’s still nascent. Bing uses some semantic technologies from the semantic search engine Powerset which it acquired. Google, in contrast, doesn’t understand the meaning of a web document yet. It just analyzes the keywords contained in it. A semantic search engine can, for example, distinguish between spears and Britney Spears, while one that doesn’t will offer you both results. See:

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/semantic-seo-your-website-is-a-goldmine-with-on-site-seo-20

Shopping cart abandonment rate

You probably know the bounce rate – that is, the percentage of users leaving your site after landing on it without performing any other action on it beyond clicking an external link. On e-commerce site the SCAR leaves scars on your revenue as it’s the percentage of customers who have left in the middle of the shopping or checkout process. See:

http://www.pinnycohen.com/2008/12/29/marketing-wisdom/shopping-cart-abandonment/

Slashtag

A slashtag is a customized vertical or niche search engine on Blekko. See:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/11/a-slashers-guide-to-blekko-the-most-advanced-search-engine-ever-created.html

Social CRM

Social CRM refers to customer relationship management before they are customers or forging relationships beyond CRM. It uses social media for that purpose. See:

http://hkotadia.com/archives/2157

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/social-crm-strategy/

User testing

User testing is a form of usability and website testing where you actually invite real users to test your site and watch/record what they are doing and where they fail. You improve the site based on these user testing findings. See:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

Usability is not UX/User Experience (Design); it goes beyond it. It encompasses making the user want to use something for instance. A good example is the iPhone. While many phones might be usable, the iPhone is also desirable in the UX sense. See:

http://uxmyths.com/post/1533970267/myth-27-ux-design-is-about-usability

Wonder wheel

The Google wonder wheel is an excellent Google search tool which allows you to overview keyword clusters which are related to a particular query. It has been around for almost two years now, but many people still don’t use or even know it. See:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-03-24-n84.html

Are there more terms I haven’t mentioned and explained but which you think are indispensable in 2011? Add your suggestions in the comment section!

Using the correct and current terms is a prerequisite of modern SEO. How can you grasp it when you still talk about PageRank, meta tags and search engine submission? So be sure to learn what those above mean; I still haven’t fully understood some of them, like LDA or rich snippets.

Keyword Temperature and Other Exotic Metrics

Tad Chef — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:45:58 +0000

Do you measure keyword temperature to improve your SEO? You don’t? Well what about keyword density? Also there are other exotic metrics to fool you into believing you do something for your site’s SEO. Sounds weird? Then read on. The story starts like this:

In recent days I’ve been haunted by the ghastly specters of the past.

In several cases I’ve had to do with metrics long gone or which weren’t ever meaningful in the first place. There seems to be a need for simplistic metrics that can make complex issues appear straightforward and clear.

Such metrics are

Keyword Density

In the nineties of the last century some first generation search engines were easily tricked by repeating keywords on a page. So the more you repeated a keyword the higher you ranked. It may have worked back then and in some cases even later but it was always a SEO trick never a best practice for a legit business. Still the term keyword density appeared. It signified the number of keyword mentions in a text. Your keyword mentioned 10 times in a text with 100 words equaled a keyword density of 10%.

Google hasn’t counted keywords on page, instead it relied on links to a site or page to determine its worth. Thus the first generation search engines disappeared. Keyword density stayed with us though. to this day some people offer keyword density tools and advice on the best keyword density. It’s all nonsense. You’re better off measuring keyword temperature, really, at least it won’t affect your SEO. A keyword density beyond the common sense median will hurt your site. You will be treated as a spammer.

Google (Toolbar) PageRank

Until 2007 it was still quite common to obsess about the Google (Toolbar) PageRank aka the little green bar in your Google Toolbar. It was never an accurate representation of your actual PageRank and only in the early days was there a real correlation between TPR and actual rankings in Google but it was a good thing to brag about. Also people used it to sell links, the higher the TBR the higher the price for a paid link.

Sometime in early 2008 Google ended this madness by manually adjusting the TPR of link vendors. From then on nobody serious about SEO really cared for the little green bar. Still just recently a client of mine called me out that a blog of mine was a failure beacuse (it has a ranking of 0). He meant PageRank of course and he didn’t even consider that it was on a new domain and thus couldn’t display toolbar PageRank yet. Toolbar PageRank is not a metric you use in SEO. It hasn’t been used for years. In case you don’t know that or accept that I can’t really help you. You can buy some high PageRank links from a text link broker or from a spammer and then you might get more TBR. Your site might get banned in the process as well. Again you are better off measuring something else, for instance page radiation.

Google Backlinks

It has been said and written countless of times: Google doesn’t show an accurate number of backlinks with its “link:” operator. To say it’s inaccurate is like saying that an elephant is not as tiny as an ant. There is a huge difference between the real number and the few links Google shows you.

Just compare it to the number of links Google Webmaster Tools shows instead. for the client who complained that has only 9 backlinks in Google the number in GWT was something like 270k (thousand) links. There is a small difference don’t you think? So measuring SEO success by the Google backlinks number is as accurate as counting Matt Cutt’s hair to determine it. Especially when he’s.

Number of Links

OK, the number of links as offered by Google Webmaster Tools must be it then! Isn’t it? Nope. The sheer number of links says as much about your SEO success as the number of sex partners about your love life. One link from an authority site might by worth as much as 100k from scraper and other low quality sites. You don’t measure SEO efforts be the number of links. Each link has, depending on its anchor text, topical relevance, position on the page and a plethora of other factors, a wort of it’s own.

You can’t compare a Rolls Royce with a Tata Nano. Even in case you count 100 of them with one RR. Ultimately links are just a means or a tool to accomplish a task or even a series of tasks like getting attention, traffic, conversions and/or sales. So you have to determine lots of factors having impact on link quality and report them, don’t you? In case you get paid by the link or have to measure your link building efforts you might try this approach. Still, showing of quality or authority links doesn’t prove that you have doe your SEO properly. You might as well measure link anxiety to find out how afraid you are of losing each one of them. Counting or measuring links for reporting purposes is the road to excess not success. Measuring the quality of your sex partners doesn’t mean a healthy relationship either.

Number of Keywords

The more keywords you optimize for the better! Don’t you think? Still many potential clients approach me with huge keywords lists, often directly from Adwords. Then after a few hours of market and keyword research I come up with just a few, sometimes as few as three they have to go after and focus on. They are often not the most prominent ones like cars, SEO or hotel but the rather keyword phrases, combinations like [used cars uk], [local SEO services] or [hotel munich]. In the past often disappointment would set in: “What? Just a bunch of keywords? Not even the big cool ones among them? You must be a very bad SEO if you target just a few low level keywords at once.” Market and keyword research is not the process of compiling huge lists of keywords though. It’s the process of finding out the keyphrases that you can reach within a reasonable time frame on a realistic budget. You want to find the few “money keywords” that will bring the revenue.

You’re after the few terms where you can compete within your industry or area. Also you can’t compete for everything at the same time. Your business has just one home page and one description. You can’t keyword stuff it unless you want to scare off your potential customers. A few years ago some SEOs would just automatically generate pages for each of your keywords and redirect searchers to the home page. Were these guys the good SEOs? No, they failed. I’ve seen client sites dropped from the index for such “SEO tricks”. So it’s not the number of keywords you optimize for, it’s the choice of keywords. Treat your keywords like friends, better a few good ones than hundreds of fake ones you don’t really care for or even know. Instead of measuring the number of keywords you could also count the number of times you have to pee as a SEO metric.

I hope by now you understand what I tried to express. There are no simple SEO metrics. Even the metrics we still use or use more and more these days are always a compound of several aspects of SEO, web design, usability, pricing, product and service quality etc.

bounce rates
conversions
ROI

depend on numerous factors:

The industry
the time of year
general market trends
the economy
the geographic location.

Don’t blame SEO for everything.

Also don’t forget that you can’t measure everything: You can’t measure your image, trust, or brand loyalty. You can try to. You can’t depend on these metrics though. You have to think for yourself and not let simplified numbers decide for you. Keyword temperature is a great metric don’t you think?

* Image by Daniel Novta.

How To Use Infographics for SEO & Linkbait

Tad Chef — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:22:29 +0000

2010 is the year of the infographic. Infographics are probably the most popular way not only to visualize data but also to get links this year. In modern SEO linkbait is the most common method of “link building”. To be more exact: Linkbaiting is not link building as you don’t build them manually like say in directory submission but you create content and then get the links by people you do not even contact.

Infographics have proven ideally suited to both spread awareness about issues and as viral content people share and link to.

It’s surprising though that SEO blogs and forums rarely deal with the creation of infographics to get links and exposure. The reason for this lack of tutorials may be the interdisciplinary approach an infographic requires.

A viral marketer determines the topic of the infographic.
An SEO specialist will find out the keywords you want to target.
A journalist or statistician has to to research the data needed to display.
A graphic designer has to actually make the infographic.
A social media marketer is needed who pushes it out to social media and influencers.

Of course one person can perform several of these tasks maybe even do all of it in some cases but usually more then one person will be involved. Thus a blogger can’t really cover all of these steps. There are some blog posts out there introducing parts of the process. I’ve collected them and compiled a list of a dozen resources showing you how to use infographics for SEO and linkbait. Scroll down to check it out.

As you see below roughly half of these posts deal with the circumstances of publishing an infographic and actual examples or case studies. The other half are tutorials that explain different ways of actually creating the infographic itself.

Where do you start? The idea is the most important part. You can’t take any random data set, create an infographic and expect people to share it all over the place. An infographic has to strike a chord with many people without being the lowest common denominator. It really has to contain some info. You can’t just focus on trivia like celebrities.

Also infographics work best for huge numbers or complex processes nobody can really fathom. A great example is the BP oil catastrophe which by far extended the term spill from day one but people couldn’t really imagine the sheer size and the dire consequences of it. The BP oil spill thus spawned a huge number of infographics to illustrate the disaster.

While the term infographic also entail the “graphic” it doesn’t have to a fancy graphic. Often a combination of maps, diagrams and a few images reduced to their symbolic character are enough.

The starting point for a successful infographic one it is ready is still often Digg, the almost dead social news site. While Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr have by now much more overall traffic and influence than Digg, the Digg frontpage can make the infographic succeed elsewhere.

Of course many bloggers, especially the less important ones who lack the ability to create killer content themselves love to include infographics in their blogs. It’s a good idea to contact some bloggers directly and send them the infographic. Of course you have to research bloggers who really care for the topic you illustrate.

On the other hand you need to display the infographic on your site or blog to get the credit and links in the first place. So you have to make sure that you are the first to publish it and that a predefined embed code includes your site as the source. Don’t forget to add the source at the bottom of the graphic itself as well.

12 infographic resources:

Clever Tricks You Can Do With Google Alerts

Kelvin Newman — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:54:26 +0000

This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.

Google Alerts is one of the most powerful tools made available from our friends at Mountain View, but despite it’s huge potential it’s largely under-rated and doesn’t get the appreciation or the acknowledgement it deserves.

It’s been around for donkey’s years but is still in Beta, and the chances are you’re using it already in a simple way, perhaps to keep track of your own name to see whether there’s a Footballer in Spain with your name or a namesake who’s running for the local council.

You might even have it running for your companies brand name to keep tabs on any good or bad press you’re getting.

And if you aren’t doing either of those two things stop reading this article now (we’ll wait for you) and go and get that set up before you do anything else.

Seriously sort it out now…

But I wanted to share with you just a few of the cleverer ways it can be used that will surprise you and almost certainly make you life a bunch easier.

Using Google Alerts to Find Out If You’ve Been Hacked

With everyone switching to WordPress as a CMS there’s a very real danger of more sites getting hacked. It seems currently the main reason people are hacking WordPress sites is to fill them with links to websites in the less savoury corners of the web.

They’re even clever enough to cloak your website so only search engines can see the links and they are invisible to you.

So how do you find out if your website has been attacked bar waiting for your rankings to tank for linking to spam sites?

You can use a Google Alert, rather than entering a simple keyword set up your Google alert using site:yourdomain.com then add multiple keywords like viagria, cialis web cams, etc. If you add OR in caps lock between the words then it will look for any mentions of they keywords on your site.

Essentially you’re setting up a system which says email me whenever you find any of these dodgy words on my site, you might mention them innocently and get an alert but if something untoward is going on this should give you a early warning.

The only real downside is Google have already spotted the problem so it may already be too late.

This is a great little tip with a hat tip to Patrick.

Using Google Alerts to Find Out Who’s Linking to You

You no doubt know that search google with link:yourdomain.com will give you a rough approximation of some of the links pointing at your site. It’s no big secret that the data you get from this search is a little flawed, but setting up a Google Alert with this syntax is not a bad way to find out about some new links you’ve attracted.

Keep Track of Your Competitors Links

You can use exactly the method discussed above to keep track of new inbound links to your competitor sites, this method is arguably it’s even more valuable. If you discover they’ve had a series of infographics which have gone viral perhaps you should be exploring a similar approach, or maybe competitions are leading to high quality editorial links? Well then you should get your thinking cap on.

Find out Every-time Google Index a new Page of Your Site.

A real trend I’ve seen over recent months is websites suffering from decreasing number of indexed pages in Google, in most cases this hasn’t adversely influenced their search traffic or search entry pages but is still an issue of concern. Do you have a system in place to monitor whether your pages are getting indexed as you hope? or are you just submitting an XML site map and crossing your fingers? If you set up a Google alert for site:yourdomain.com you’ll get a notification every time a page is indexed, which will help spot any indexing issues you may be suffering from.

Use Google Alerts to Keep Track of Changing Content with RSS feeds

There’s certain areas to certain websites that you’d really like to keep track of but for what ever reason don’t have RSS feeds, I’ve found this a lot in press centre sections of company websites, for example.

It can be really helpful to get updated whenever a new page is added to this section of the site. Again a bit of clever Google Alerts syntax can help you. Setting one up for a query like site:theirdomain.com/press-centre/ would do the trick nicely.

See not bad for a free tool that’s been in beta for donkey’s years.