SEO Updates - Search Engine Optimization Google, Yahoo, MSN Updates

Ways to Optimization for Google 2011 - Part 3

2011-06-04T19:25:00.000+05:30

In parts 1 & 2 I have already discussed much of the onsite SEO factors, as well as some off site stuff such as inbound links and algorithmic updates. Here are some factors that are only slightly contributing today, but show a very strong probability of being major aspects tomorrow. If Google rankings are important to you, these are a few items you will want to consider seriously.

Social Media and its Impact on Organic

A few weeks into the new year, Matt Cutts officially announced that your social media presence may help improve your organic rankings. Now don’t get all excited and go gung-ho on stuffing your facebook and twitter profiles, that wont do you much good. The way to Google’s heart is by having established facebook and twitter users link to and reference your website, and your other social media profiles. If enough profiles that have a decent reputation start to reference you, it can have a positive spin on your organic search results.

Don’t bother creating dozens of phoney accounts, it won’t work. Instead direct your efforts towards promoting your brand and doing and posting things that will encourage others to talk about you and link over. In the long run you will benefit significantly, not only from a potential boost in organic rankings, but by a larger following in your social profiles leading to more branding, customer loyalty, and of course sales!

There is also some speculation that social profiles may actually start to become stronger than inbound links.

Google’s +1

This is one of Google’s newest editions. The +1 button at Google is Google’s rebuttal to Facebook’s “like” button. While it currently is not believed to impact organic search results, it really just a matter of time before this is an influential factor. There is no doubt that this will become a ranking signal, so better to get on the bandwagon now just in case.

To use +1, you must be logged into your Google account, and have +1 enabled within your Google Profile. Google may be requiring all Google accounts to have a profile page as early as this summer, so if you don’t have one yet, you may want to consider creating yours.

Clicking +1 essentially gives your vote, saying that you like that page. A record of what you have +1’ed can be found on your profile page for others to see. Keep an eye out, as these +1 buttons will be branching out from the SERP’s. Just this week Google rolled out “Plus One for Websites” which allows users to add the button directly to any webpage – making it even easier.

Well, that is our 2011 version of my 3 part series on how to optimize for Google. I hope you found some useful tidbits of information here that you can use to help improve your rankings, site traffic, and bottom line!

Ways to Optimize for Google 2011 – Part 2

2011-06-04T19:19:00.000+05:30

In Part one of How To Optimize for Google, I discussed some of the fundamental on-site SEO aspects and how they have changed over the past few years. This article focuses on a few algorithmic updates as well as some updates in the inbound link landscape.

Google Algorithm Updates

Caffeine Update

The Caffeine Update came out in2010. While it does not directly impact your search rankings, it does speed up the entire optimization process. Before you would make a change on your site, wait for Google to spider the change, Google would index the change, and then eventually apply that update to its search rankings.
Now with Caffeine in place, Once Google spiders and indexes your site updates, the impact on the organic search results is virtually instant. Now you basically just have to wait for Google to spider your site to see the changes, taking what was sometimes, a few months of waiting out of the equation.

Google Instant

Google recently rolled out Google Instant. While this update does not directly impact search results, it does impact how search results are displayed, and can impact the traffic you receive. With Google Instant, search results update as you type in real time. As you type new words into the search box, the results change, which can result in fewer people scrolling down to see the entire top 10. If the searcher does not see what they want in the results above the fold, they may be more inclined to keep refining their search until they see what they want at the top of the list.

With this in mind, it opens up opportunities for more long tailed search traffic, but it also reduces your chances of getting traffic if your rankings are below the fold, making top 3-5 results that much more important. Also, once you are in the top, you want to ensure that your description and title tags are catchy to make sure they attract some visitors!

So while this update does not directly impact your rankings, it can impact your search traffic.

Farmer Update & Unique Quality Content

The “Farmer” or “Panda” update is the latest major update over at Google. While their main target appears to be content farms, any site with substantial amounts of “useless” content is at risk of suffering as a result of this update.

If you are building a new site, or want to take advantage of this update the key is creating useful, relevant, unique content. It’s really something most sites should be doing anyways, but now there is more encouragement to actually do it.

Talking about the “Farmer” update is easily a post in itself, but there is one piece of key info to know about. Unique quality content is good. Duplicated, low quality content is bad. This has always been true on a few levels, only now, that duplicated and low quality content won’t just go “supplemental”, it can actually damage the rankings for the rest of your site, so it is really important now to ensure your site does not have any low quality pages floating around.

Inbound Links

There have definitely been some changes in the way links are handled over the past few years, although some of the fundamentals have remained the same.

Reciprocal Links

These are still not bad, but have much less value than they did 3 years ago. The value of reciprocal links continues to drop, perhaps someday it could reach zero, but given that there are many highly legitimate reasons to have a reciprocal link, I doubt this will be the case.

Keep reciprocal links very relevant. If you can trade the links from contextually relevant pages rather than standard “link” pages, your links will stand a better chance of actually providing you with some value. Links traded by means of a reciprocal directory listing, or link drown out on a lengthy “links” page, are in most cases not worth your time.

As usual, relevance is key, so keep the links within your industry, and also be sure to mix up descriptions and anchor text, and where possible get inline links from actual page copy – they certainly are the most natural, and hold the most weight.

Paid Links

Google doesn’t like this. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that they are much harder on paid links now. If Google finds you buying paid links for SEO purposes (not using the rel=nofollow) they can penalize both you and the site you bought the link from. Unfair? Perhaps, but many still take the risks. If you buy “dofollow” links for the purposes of SEO, be warned, Google may drop the hammer down on you, so tread lightly.

Some food for thought: In theory, paid links may not hurt you – think about this. Google still says that you can’t do anything to harm your competitor’s site. SO, does that mean, if you went out and bought your competitor dozens, or even hundreds of paid links, Google would not penalize them? How can Google tell who bought the link in the first place? Seems to me, unless your name is JC Penny, they will focus more on penalizing the link SELLER, not the buyer… I don’t recommend going out and
buying links however, I think there is a valid risk here, but perhaps not all it is hyped up to be?

Articles and Press Releases

Keep it relevant and unique and writing articles and press releases can still be a great way to help out your link portfolio. Articles tend to work best if you create unique articles for distribution to each publication or blog. Consider guest blogging, where you write for other industry specific blogs in exchange for a link in your bio, or throughout the article. Many blog owners may go for this trade as they get valuable unique content, you get a link – it’s a very fair trade.

Forum Posts & Blog Comments

The value here, if any, is minimal. Do it because you love it and want to contribute, not because you think you will see a spike in rankings. Most links are blocked via nofollow anyways as these areas are so widely abused. This applies to Guest Books as well, if there are even any still in existence – I haven’t seen one in years.

Link Farms & “Bad Neighbourhoods”

Stay away from these. They have been bad for years and years, and they always will be.

Dmoz, Yahoo, and other Authoritative Directories

Yes, some directories can still give you some great links, especially directories that are on topic with your industry. Directories that are moderated are often slightly better, as there is that human element and not all links are posted. Helps to reinforce that they won’t link to just anyone, as is the case with DMOZ.
Look for industry specific, and geographically specific directories, as some can provide you with some good inbound links.

Be sure to check in next week for part 3 on How to Optimize for Google, where I will talk about the role Social Media is playing in organic SEO, and how it may impact things further into the future.

New Ways To Optimize for Google 2011

2011-06-04T19:15:00.000+05:30

It has been nearly 3 years since I wrote my original 3 part series on “How to Optimize for Google”. Since writing that article some things have certainly changed, while others have remained exactly the same.

Here is a redux adjusted to follow some more recent changes over at Google. Note that this is by no means a full-out comprehensive list, That would take a book, not an article.

I Part 1, I will discuss the basic SEO & on-site elements. Parts 2 and 3 will talk about links, major algorithmic updates, and the impact of social media.

Basic SEO elements that have not really changed.

I don’t want to go into any significant depth in many of the basic areas of SEO. Most of these have not changed anyways. Here is a summary of items from my original “How to Optimize for Google Part 1 of 3” that still apply today.

The Right Keywords: As long as search is keyword driven, this will always be important. The focus has switched slightly in many cases avoiding difficult general phrases and targeting long tail and geographic specific ones, but the right keywords are still needed.
Title Tags: Try to keep them to less than 70 characters.
Keyword Placement in Body Text: Keep it natural; include your targets throughout wherever it makes sense.
Synonyms. You don’t hear many people talking about this anymore, but sprinkle in some synonyms just for fun as I believe it can help in some cases
Keywords In Domain: It does look like the value here has dropped, but not off the charts, so it can still help. Just be sure to keep it clean.
Keywords in Filenames: There is some value here, so don’t ignore it, but don’t abuse it either.
Keywords in Heading Tags: Still important if natural.
Inline Links: Still good, get them if you can as they can often appear more natural.
Site Navigation: Not much has changed here. Google has more success in spidering JavaScript, so the potential for a roadblock is reduced, but still be careful how you link.
URL Structure: Messy URL’s can be indexed, but your rankings and your users will thank you if you keep it clean. You may need the canonical tag to help you here, more on that later.

Basic SEO elements that have changed

The Meta Description Tag
This one is really up in the air. It depends on who you ask, but many claim that this tag no longer impacts your position in the organic rankings. That said, often it will still appear as the description used by Google within the SERP’s. So if you think it helps with positioning or not, there is no debating that it can still be very important. Keep it unique on all pages, less than 160 characters and try to get a couple keywords in there too, just in case it is still a ranking signal – it can’t hurt.

Keyword Density
Yikes, this has become a swear word. I hope I don’t get censored. In a nutshell don’t worry about it. Write good content that uses your targets in a natural way and you’ll be fine. No need counting and dividing and calculating. Want some proof on this? Check the density for the top 10 ranking sites for just about any phrase – you likely won’t see much correlation.

Link Anchor Text
This is a funny one. When links first took off as a major signal, having your target phrase as part of the link anchor text was key. Today, while that is still useful, you definitely do not want to go overboard. Text such as “click here” which was once taboo in terms of SEO, now can help add to a natural looking link profile. Bloggers and website owners who are not thinking about SEO will often just use “click here” or use the sites domain as anchor text, hardly what most would consider “SEO Friendly” but very natural.If you are in the midst of a link building campaign, variety is good, so don’t rule out a link just because the anchor text is not exactly what you had hoped.

Newer On-Site SEO Factors

Over the past few years, there have been many changes. Here are a couple onsite items that were not a consideration when the original How To Optimize For Google article was published.

Canonical Tag

In early 2009 Google announced the implementation of the Canonical Tag. This is hardly new news today, but it is new since the last version of this article.

In a nutshell this new(ish) tag allows you to basically tell Google to ignore a URL and specify where the identical URL that they should pay attention to resides. This is particular useful for dynamic websites that contain a lot of duplicate content, or utilize tracking URL’s or parameters.

To use, simply post this tag on any page that should be recognized under a different, more permanent URL.

Now when Google sees this URL http://www.example.com/product?trackingid=1234 they will ignore the extra parameters and instead treat is as simply /product.

Site Load Speed

I for one always speculated that site load speeds played a role in the ranking algorithm for some time. Almost exactly one year ago (April 9, 2010) Google announced that they were incorporating site speed into search rankings.

Either I had been right all along and Google just took this time to officially announce it, or I had been wrong and my suspicions had come true – either way it didn’t change the fact that it was officially made one of the factors to consider.

At the time site speed entered into the algorithm, it impacted fewer than 1% of search queries. I suspect the number is similar today. Regardless, a faster site means happy customers which means more sales – and in this case, it can help get higher rankings, which means even more customers. Do yourself a favor, make your site as fast as it can be.

Google Is Bing’s 4th Largest Referring Source

2010-06-04T18:48:00.001+05:30

What sites send Bing the most traffic? Here’s a surprise. According to Hitwise, Google is Bing’s fourth largest referring source.
Below are the top five sites that drive traffic to Bing, or “upstream” to Bing, as Hitwise calls it:

MSN is by far the top source, the last site visited by 42.7% of Bing users before they went to Bing. That’s not surprising. MSN — Microsoft’s portal — has long been a huge search driver for Microsoft. In fact, the company recently said that half of all Bing queries come from MSN.
Bing is also the default web search engine for Facebook, so Facebook makes sense as the number two referrer, at 4.6% of traffic.
Windows Live Mail — that’s another Microsoft property that ties into Bing search — so it’s another one that makes sense logically. It’s at 4.4% of traffic.
But Google as the fourth largest referring source, at 4.1%? Google, which competes against Bing? How’s that happening? Probably two ways.
First, Bing buys ads on Google, like this:

You can find Bing ads showing up on searches at Google for bing, cashback, search engines, flight comparison and image search, to name some examples. Interestingly, Bing doesn’t appear to be buying ads against its tagline, that it is a decision engine.
Bing also does a lot of TV advertising. TV ads are known to drive search queries. So there’s a good chance that when someone sees a Bing ad, they decide to google Bing and discover what they’ve just seen!
All this also applies to Yahoo, which drives 1.9% of traffic. Bing advertises there, and TV ads probably generate queries on Yahoo for Bing, as well.
It’s clear people do search for Bing by name on Google. Using Google Trends, we can see the growth of this over the last year. Here’s the search volume of those seeking Bing on Google:

Still, that’s nothing compared to the number of searches that happen for Yahoo on Google. Here’s the Bing chart again, this time with searches for Yahoo on Google added in:

Oddest of all, currently more people search on Google for Google than for Yahoo or Bing. Here’s the chart:

Google Adds Biking Directions to Maps

2010-03-11T17:47:00.000+05:30

While you are pondering on the points made by Todd about online retirement, here’s a worthwile albeit healthy activity that you may want to consider – biking. And to help you navigate your way through U.S. cities on your bike, Google has just added useful biking directions and bike trail data to Google Maps.

Google has been gathering these bike trail data for quite some time now and now that they’ve gathered as much data as possible, these biking directions are now part of the Google Maps interface. These biking directions provide efficient routes and allow you to customize your trip, make use of designated bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes as well as customize the look of the Google Maps to suit cycling activities.

Google has also added information about bike trails, lanes, and recommended roads directly onto Google Maps. This will help you get better sense of route and trails worth traversing if you’re into recreational ride. You can check out the bicyling layer on the “more” button at the top of a Google Map. This layer has three types of lines – dark green for dedicated bike-only trail, light green for a dedicated bike lane along a road and dashed green for roads recommended for biking but has not bike trail.

Google Maps currently has more than 12,000 miles of bike trails, and bike lane data for 150 U.S. cities. You may check out Google Maps biking directions here.

YouTube Mobile Now Serving Banner Ads

2010-03-11T17:45:00.000+05:30

With the ever growing site traffic of of YouTube mobile site, it is not surprising that Google will take advantage of this to serve advertisements. In 2009, YouTube mobile’s site traffic increased by 160%. You can just imagine how good this site traffic will be in terms of potential for more ad clicks and brand campaign awareness.

So, YouTube has started serving ads, particularly banner ads on its mobile site’s home, search and browse pages. This is being rolled out to American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites, that is – m.youtube.com on your mobile phone’s browser.

According to Google, this is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. But for us users, this could become pretty annoying and additional data costs if we’re not on an unlimited mobile data plan. It’s a good thing if there’s always free Wi-Fi around.

But then, who are we to complain, right? After all, YouTube videos are free to consume. So, expect more banner ads from the likes of Sony, Kia and the others the next time you browse for the latest sensation on YouTube video. Hopefully, the ads won’t annoy you enough to look for an alternative mobile video site.

If you’re a brand campaign manager, you ought to know that those banner ad spots are sold on a full-day basis. You can extend your ad campaign run from the YouTube website to the mobile site. To know how you can go about this, visit this site.

Understanding the Basics of Page Rank

2010-03-11T17:39:00.000+05:30

You've just built your website and you want to show up on the search engines. You start reading about SEO and one of the first things that jumps out at you is something called "Google PageRank." You know about the big dog of the search engines, but what is PageRank and why is it important in what you're trying to do?

Any good marketing coach can explain that easily. If your site is placing high in free (organic) search results, you're getting free advertising. Notice the word "free." That's always a good thing. Building a strong PageRank (PR) by getting good quality links coming in to your site takes time, but it isn't going to eat a hole in your pocketbook.

You want to work on raising your site's PR to get "authority" with the search engines. A site with "authority" gets better visibility in search results. Really understanding the algorithm behind your site's PR will likely have you reaching for a bottle of aspirin. In the beginning, just concentrate on understanding the basics and how they relate to your efforts to promote your site.

How Is PR Defined?

Google says PR is all about the "uniquely democratic nature of the web" and "using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value." Basically, a link from one page to another is a vote for that page. However, not all votes in this democracy are equal. Some votes come from higher-quality pages and are weighed more heavily. (Other factors in determining PR include the relevance of search phrases on a page and actual traffic to the page.)

How Is PageRank Expressed?

PR values are expressed on a scale of 0 to 10. Sites from 0 to 2 are probably pretty new to the Web and have few incoming links. Sites that have made it to PR3 to PR5 are fairly well established; PR6 and above are really popular and have a lot of high-quality links. There are very few sites that make it to the PR7 to PR10 range.

The ones that are ranked that high are usually owned by big corporations or major media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (PR8). Improving your site's PR by getting relevant, high-quality, incoming links is one of the most affordable SEO methods at your disposal. Rather than trying to get to a specific number, just concentrate on improving your number.

Is My Site's Homepage The Only Page With PR?

No, each page in your site will be assigned a PR, something that is emphasized in marketing coaching as a valuable tool. You can use relevant interlinking to distribute PR throughout all your pages.

Huh? Well, just hang on to that thought for a minute. For right now, just understand the concept that some pages in your site may earn a higher PR than others, and that you can use that to your advantage.

PageRank Passes From One Page To Another

Here's how it works. A page with a high PR passes some of its value to a low PR page over a link. You can use this to promote your site in a couple of ways. When your site's pages are interlinked in a relevant way, PR gets distributed more evenly throughout the site. Also, you can "court" relevant sites that belong to other people through your link-building campaign. This is really how your site starts to gain "authority."

Start By Building Your Index Page's PR

Generally, marketing coaches will tell you to begin by working on your home page's PR. This can be time-consuming, and not just because you'll be building relationships with other site owners. You have to do your time in what's popularly called the Google "sandbox." This just means that new sites like yours probably won't get any PR at all for the first few months you're on the Web.

How Do I Check My PR?

There are a number of free, online tools for checking PR including PRChecker and SearchStatus. At PRChecker you type in a page's URL to see its PR. SearchStatus is a FireFox extension that shows a site's PR at the bottom of your browser. (It also shows your site's Alexa rating, another method to measure online "importance.") You can also install the Google Toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer and enable the PageRank function.

Is Building My PR All I Need To Do?

A marketing coach will tell you that having a strong PR is only one part of your SEO campaign. For instance, say you're looking around for a site to link to yours. You find one with a high PR, but it's a site that sells links. Move on. Their high PR number doesn't do you any good because a link from that site to yours will have a lower quality and will pass less authority to you.

Understanding the basics of PageRank is essential in putting together a high-quality link-building campaign for your site, but don't get fixated on the PR number and ignore other important facts. Just gain a basic understanding of what PR is and how it functions and use that to your advantage in building a reputation of authority for your site.

Find Relevant Blogs (and Link Building Opportunities) with Xmarks

2010-03-10T17:48:00.000+05:30

Xmarks is one of those FireFox plugins that I’ve been using for ages. I mentioned it in my one of the first FireFox tool overviews and I still find it awesome.

With some (arguably) great “social” features added Xmarks has turned a cool search engine as well. I find it quite relevant and precise. Sure, the database is not as huge as Google’s but what it currently has is the best of the best.

Xmarks search feature is based on its users’ preferences:

The rank of each site is defined by how many people bookmarked the page;
The topic if the site is defined by the tags a surfer used to save the page.

Additionally, with the most recent update, Xmarks developers have introduced extra ratings and reviews from the FireFox status bar.

Thus, run by people, the tool is still amazingly precise.

Here’s how you can use it to locate relevant blogs in your niche (and possibly consider them as link targets);

Find more “similar” sites

Most of us are aware of most popular blogs in each niche. But to find more blogs on the same topic is not that easy.

Well, Xmarks gives you such a possibility: just go to the site and search for the blog domain.

If you are using the addon, you can see similar sites right from the status bar icon (just right-click it):

The report will load quietly in the foreground and will look like this:

By clicking “Get info” tab you’ll be taken to the full report online.

Search by tags

The detailed site report will also include all the tags people were using to organize the bookmark. You will also be able to see where the current site ranks for each tag.

The next thing you can do is to browse those tags to see more sites (and more tags!):

Enjoy enhanced Google search results

Xmarks search integration also looks cool to me (much better than any other “social” help to SERPs I would say).

All it does basically is integrating its icon within Google SERPs for you to see that site rankings in Xmarks system and its main tag:

You can thus start your link-building research right from regular Google search.

Facebook Searches Grow by 10% in February

2010-03-10T17:41:00.000+05:30

ComScore has just released its February search engine rankings data. And while there’s nothing new in terms of who is on top, who gained and who lost, what’s surprising about it is that among all the online properties where searches are conducted other than the five major search engines, Facebook gained a significant amount of searches in February.

Yes, it seems that more search activities are happening on Facebook lately. Facebook’s total search queries may not be that significant compared to the top search engines, but then it was only the online property which registered search query growth in February – amounting to 10% increase from its January search market share. Total searches conducted on Facebook was 436 million while Google got 13.5 billion search queries, Yahoo got 2.5 billion and Microsoft sites got 1.7 billion searches.

In terms of Core Searches though, Facebook is nowhere near the top five search engines where Google stays on top of the pact with 65.5% of searches, Yahoo with 16.8% and Microsoft Sites with 11.5%. Both Google and Microsoft had a slight increase in search market share in February with 0.1% and 0.2% respectively.

Total searches in the U.S. amounted to 14.5 billion which is a slight 5% decrease compare with data in January. Google Sites got 9.5 billion of these searches, Yahoo got 2.5 billion and Microsoft 1.7 billion.

71 Technical Factors For Backlink Analysis (From 30 Link Building Experts) – Part 2

2010-03-10T17:32:00.000+05:30

Welcome to part 2 of our 3-part group interview series on backlink profile analysis. Part 1 covered backlink analysis for link building campaign design. Part 2 covers the more technical aspects of analysis, and what elements that link building experts look at to gauge the overall strength of a backlink profile.

14 URL factors in backlink profile analysis

The URLs of linking pages can tell you a great deal about a given site’s backlink profile. The URLs themselves can shed some light too when evaluating the quality of a given link prospect. Some of the link builders interviewed didn’t place value in URL analysis when investigating backlink profiles. Some did. Often, this comes down to differences in style and process.

TLD (if .govs or .edus have been linking it can indicate high-trust, high-value content)
Target keywords in the URL
Target keywords in the hostname
Number of URL parameters
Depth of the page on the site (as measured by /’s)
Iterations of ? and other extraneous characters
Excessive hyphens in a URL can indicate over-SEO’d content
URLS on blogspot or wordpress
Avoid https:// and ftp://
“links4free,” “getfreelinks,” etc…
The words “review” or “advertorial” (can indicate paid posts)
The linked-to site mentioned by name in the URL (can indicate a paid review)
Words that indicate content types (ie: “blog,” “news,” “forum,” etc…)
Excessive amounts of links.html and links.php indicates a weak profile

Key comments on URL factors

“Anything that indicates a news and information site is high on my list.” -Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

“I’ll look for footprints that can help me find more link sources similar to that one.” -Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI

“It is not something I spend time on. It is nice if their URL has keywords in it, but the link is valuable with or without that being the case. Other factors matter much, much more.” -Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

“When reviewing URLs, one strict but useful criteria is to scrutinize any website that uses hyphens in conjunction with keyword phrases in their domain name. A little SEO knowledge can sometimes be like a sharp stick in the hands of a child. Hyphenated domain names can be an indicator that a webmaster is running around with a sharp stick.” -Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

“I’m looking for the presence of target keywords in file paths and names and at TLDs. I’m also looking to see if there’s an opportunity to purchase a similar domain name (in the case of exact match), with an alternate TLD.” -Ken Lyons, of Wordstream

“Even an ugly URL can get indexed, but you want to make sure that it’s the canonical URL for that page and that your link didn’t wind up on some duplicate page. It’s also preferable when the URL structure is clean and uses descriptive phrases.” -Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

“To me, if a page is quality (i.e. relevant, has PR, dofollow, ranks well etc), then I don’t really care what the URL is.” -Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

“It’s more of what I DON’T look at. A URL itself can be an amazing source of signals, but more often, I look at URLs as a means to steer away from the junk.” -Eric Ward, EricWard.com

“If you see a lot of gardening-resources-7 or links.html near the top of their backlinks you know their profile is pretty weak.” -Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

“I look for things like keywords in the URL (more is good), URL parameters (fewer is good), and the depth of the directory (fewer slashes is good).” -Jeremy Bencken, of WebSimple

29 on-page factors in backlink profile analysis

When investigating backlink profiles, it’s vital to look at the pages that contain (or will contain) the link. Link builders consistently cited on-page analysis as a crucial element of backlink profile analysis.

Link embedded within relevant content that discusses link target
Title, headers, and content to see if the theme of the page is on topic
Text surrounding the link
Does the link appear paid or given freely, by editorial choice?
Does the page rank for its title?
Spam content in comments
The anchor text of the link
Page linked from other external websites
Proximity of the page to the root location
How well the page is linked to from within the website
The URL being Linked To (home page or deep)
Location of the link (on the page)
Number of outbound links on the page
Page Content (topic and amount)
Page back links
Page cache date
Pagerank
Quality of outbound links
Logical, appealing page layout
Page is bot-readable
Title and HX tags present?
Content buried under CSS and javascript?
Important page on the site vs. a “throw-away” blog post
Can you add directly to the discussion
Excessive advertising
Intent
Excessive links from link directories or blogrolls
Excessive links from links.php pages
Duplicate links on the same page (what is the first link’s anchor text?)

Key thoughts regarding on-page factors

“On page criteria is integral to the backlink analysis process. Outbound links are critical. It’s important to do a double backlink analysis. Analyze the backlinks of the sites your link candidate is linking to. This will help determine exactly what kind of link clique you are going to be associated with. Building a link clique independent from established link cliques is a way of combatting the established 800 pound gorillas that are entrenched in the top three. When you study the backlink of established sites you will generally see a relevancy pattern. Poaching from their backlinks only makes you a part of their sphere of influence. In my way of doing things, I aim to establish my own, and it has worked in overtaking websites that are a part of multi-million dollar networks for important two word keyword phrases. On page criteria is a key part of this process.

The ideal web page, in terms of on page factors, is a web page that has zero SEO fingerprints. Zero.”
-Roger Montti

“In general, I prefer to see a fairly decent pagerank (1-3 depending on how far down the page is in the site architecture) with a good amount of both external and internal links (can’t stress this point enough). Obviously relevancy is a must, but a more telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.” -Paul Teitelman, of Search Engine People

“The page must be closely geared towards my client’s target term or I don’t even bother. I want prospects where I don’t have to convince them to link; they just do it because it’s a logical fit. ” -Melanie Nathan

“A neat tool for quickly analyzing the value of getting a link once you’re on a page is Foxy Rank” -Tom Demers, of WordStream

“Is the link in the middle of content on the middle of the page, if not, take that into account. What other links are around it? Where do all the external links point out to on the page as a whole, are they relevant destinations to your site? Was this link added to the page after the fact or did it show up when the page was created?” -Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

28 on-site or sitewide factors in backlink profile analysis

When analyzing a potential link prospect (or a key competitor) there are a number of sitewide inbound link factors to analyze.

Site type distribution of inbound linking sites (Blog, Directory, Social Media, Press Release, Website, ETC)
Domain age
Toolbar PageRank (both domain and linking page)
MozRank
Recency of the latest post or other newest content
Estimated traffic
Presence of social network widgets
Unique linking IPs
Unique IP blocks
Does the site rank for its domain name?
Does the site rank for its target terms?
Which pages of the site are getting the most links (helps to determine what has worked as link bait)
Unique link distribution (Unique IP Adresses, Unique IP Blocks)
PageRank distribution across site
Link Type Distribution (No-follow, Do-follow, Missing, Broken)
Reciprocal links
Number of indexed pages (gauges how SEO friendly their site architecture is)
Link accumulation speed
RSS subscribers
Human comments
Does the site have a logical structure and hierarchy?
Is it easy for a human and bot to navigate?
Hosting Location Distribution
The sites’ relevance to and focus on subject matter
Site using KWD rich internal anchor text
The total link count.
Does the site come up for country-specific searches in Google
Anchor text distribution

Key insights regarding on-site factors

“I look for evidence of human activity. I’ll want to see who writes the content and how dedicated to the task they are. I’ll also look at evidence of audience participation – do people leaves comments on articles for example. Once I’ve established in my head that it’s a quality site, I’ll look for opportunities such as ‘write for us’, ’submit an article’, ‘editorial guidelines’, etc. I’ll also look for partnership opportunities with sites I’m really taken with.” -Ken McGaffin

“We look at the website’s linking profile and overall strength of backlinks. Specifically, we look at deep links within a website we’re trying to acquire a link from for our client. If the homepage is very strong and the site has no deep links, then the value is typically lessened. The structure of the website and how strongly focused it is to the client’s business is the next best indicator for us. Is it easily spidered and indexed by Google. A quick way to see this would be to type in “site:widgetsite.com,” then look at not only the pages indexed, but also pay attention to the diversity of the title tags, descriptions, and URLs being indexed in Google. Stronger websites nearly always have a wider and more clear diversity while previewing the indexed pages from the website.” -Brian Gilley, of Social SEO

“A lot of the link stuff is recursive. So when you look at an individual page or site that someone is getting a link from sometimes you can also see where that site is getting links from and come up with new link building ideas based on that.” -Aaron Wall

Link Week 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1

2010-03-10T17:02:00.000+05:30

We asked 30 link building experts 9 questions about backlink analysis… and got 20,000 words of response. This article is part 1 of a 3 part group interview series on backlink analysis. Part 1 covers how backlink analysis – of your site and your competitors’ sites, as it applies to link building campaign design.

You’ll find each expert’s answer grouped by question. You’ll have to assemble the “big picture” takeaways yourself by reading through all the responses. I’ve read through this at least three times now, and each time I come away with new ideas. There is repetition, but there’s enough difference that I believe even the most experienced link builder will have a moment or two of discovery-induced excitement.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the contributors. I can’t wait to put what you’ve taught me to work! And we’ll see you again in part 2, which looks at the technical aspects of what exactly gets analyzed, and in part 3, we’ll gather up all the loose ends.

Here are the 3 questions covering backlink analysis in campaign design:

When and why do you perform backlink analysis?
How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?
What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

When and why do you perform backlink analysis?

To warm up my experts, and provide a framework for the overall discussion, I asked about when and why they perform backlink analysis. By and large, backlink analysis is a first and foremost step in designing a link building campaign.

Julie Joyce, of Link Fish Media

I perform backlink analysis when I begin a new link building campaign and periodically throughout it, especially when something’s not quite right and I need to investigate to see what’s going on behind the scenes. In our agency, backlink analysis is almost always done by myself and other senior staff who have years of SEO experience, so we’ll typically formulate a plan with the clients, then pass on our plan to the link building team. The reason that we do this is to get a good outline of the site’s link profile. Are there link spikes over the past few months or years? If so, why? Analysis helps us to identify issues that we think could potentially become problematic, and to figure out why they occurred and what to do for the future. Without checking the past, it’s hard to know how to move forward properly.

Eric Ward, Search Engine Land link columnist

I do backlink analysis for any number of reasons, but there are two primary motivations. First, I do them for specific client work. Second, and far more often than the first reason, I do them as part of my own efforts to understand the types of things that affect link seeking success, rank, publicity, and tendencies across a wide variety of verticals.

Debra Mastaler, of Alliance Link

When doing custom, competitor outreach and content generation programs.

Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

The why is simple: the value of a website is as good as its backlinks. Content is great, but in terms of link building content takes a secondorary role for determining the value. The backlinks, ideally, are a reflection of the quality of the content.

Webmasters rely too much on the Google toolbar and on third party link analysis tools for metrics. Fact is, nothing is better than eyeballing the backlinks oneself in order to determine the value of a site. There are many poor practices that are commonly accepted as being useful. Eyeballing the backlinks, taking a moment to see why sites are linking to it and how they are linking to it will help determine whether a site is going to help your link building efforts.

Some of these bad practices arise from misinterpreted observations that are subsequently perceived as loopholes to be exploited. For instance, one of these poor practices started from the observation that nofollowed links showed up in the Google’s backlink reports, including Webmaster Tools. That’s the observation. The mistake is to be ignorant of the fact that Google only shows a sampling of backlinks and that this sampling has never differentiated backlinks that helped a site rank and backlinks that do not help a site rank. The observation of nofollow links in WMT has led to the erroneous conclusion that nofollowed links have value and has led to a resurgence of blog comment spam. Eyeballing the whys and hows of a backlink will help in the determination of whether the thousands of backlinks a site has are useful or not.

Where most backlink analyses falter however, is focusing on quantity while discarding otherwise quality backlink candidates, particularly those with low PageRank. This is a case of webmasters relying on the toolbar without realizing they are relying on the toolbar. Google is known to rank web pages in the top five regardless of a lack of backlinks. This is what some might call the mom and pop boost, elevating a quality site that lacks inbound links. But you have to think about why? Is it the content? That certainly has a role. It’s clear that simply counting the backlinks of a site and making the one with the most link the winner doesn’t work. The search engines are more sophisticated than that it’s not uncommon to see low pagerank pages ranking at the top. So something is going on here that needs investigation.

The search engines are analyzing link graphs to determine the relevance of a site to a particular query, and part of that analysis is to throw out sets of sites that raise certain flags. This process is generally referred to as earning trust, but I’ve been coming around to seeing it more as part of the process of identifying what niche bucket a site belongs in, with the spam bucket being one of several. Imagine these buckets as clouds of sites that are relevant for particular topics. Now here is the question that webmasters aren’t considering. Is it possible to rank a site according to the relevancy cloud that a site belongs in? If it’s possible to extract meaning from the clouds of “meaning” a site belongs to, then it’s possible that a relevant site with low to zero PR regains importance as part of a link building project. This is something I refer to as determining the link clique.

An important role of backlink analysis is culling out the bad link candidates in order to speed up the process of finding the best ones, to cut down on wasted time. For example, you can make your criteria strict in order to bypass sites that have the possibility of using questionable SEO tactics. One rule, a strict rule, is to remove from consideration any website that has an overwhelming amount of links from no-followed comments. There are other more specific rules I use, but I don’t want to single out specific groups.

Jeremy Bencken, of Web Simple

There are three reasons I perform backlink analysis (on sites other than my own):

1. Website acquisition. Is an acquisitions candidate’s backlinks paid – are they likely to disappear, or likely to be discounted by Google? Are they hard to replicate? For sites with mostly-organic traffic, backlinks are their core competitive advantage

2. Link prospecting. Do my competitors have links my site should have. Unfortunately, if you rely on this alone, you’re by definition trailing competitors. A better strategy is to ask, “what audiences are organically linking to my competitors and how can I use those ideas to generate my own focused link building campaigns?” What other adjacent markets might also be interested in my site’s story? The key is finding inspiration, ideas, and improving upon inbound linking trends you discover from competitors.

3. Link policing. Are my competitors participating in shady link schemes? I know this is controversial, but I’m of the opinion that link purchases that can be discovered is just poor SEO, and reporting them to Google (in hopes they will be penalized) is a service to the SEO industry.

Michael Gray, Search Engine Land columnist & Wolf-Howl.com

A backlink analysis is one of the key aspects of any site’s SEO profile. You should always address any on site issues first, such as canonical, site architecture, page templates, but backlinks are the first step when you start looking at offsite SEO. It can be your site, a clients site, or a competitors site, backlinks are really critical.

Shaun Anderson

I’ll carry out some simple backlink research at the beginning of any project to identify any obvious link hubs in the vertical, and/or any obvious quality link sources, or to just examine the types of link opportunities available in this sector. Once I get the team of flying monkeys out of keyword research and into deployment (via article submissions and dropping semi-quality links on sources I know change positions) I’ll revise my linkbuilding analysis and further target the next wave of links to try and acquire / emulate. So, in effect, I’m constantly analysising links month on month, but I never just rely on the links others have already got.

Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

There are two reasons for performing backlink analyses of your competitors and major players in your market space:

1. To identify the most important links that those sites have, so you can request links from them.

2. To learn what their link building strategies they have been using.

It is the latter point that is actually the more important point of the two. Once you understand your competitor’s strategies, and/or where they are obtaining quality links, it becomes much easier to decide on what your strategy will be.

We like to do backlinking of competitors very early in our engagements. Link building, and more broadly “promoting your web site” remains the most important thing you can do in an SEO effort. Yet there are so many different choices for link building campaigns that any given publisher can pursue, yet the return on each campaign can also vary significantly. For that reason it is critical that you put careful thought into deciding your strategy. Seeing what has helped major competitors thrive is invaluable.

Wiep Knol

I always do a quick backlink check before I take on a new client. Just to check what kind of link building they are doing, or have been in the past. If the client has high expectations, but also has a very polluted link profile, I might choose not to take on that client. A combination like that can only turn out the wrong way. When I start a campaign, I dig in a little deeper and take a look at the competition as well. This can give me an overview of the industry and competitors in general, but it could also give me inspiration for what websites to target or what kind of content to create.

Brian Gilley of Social SEO

We primarily use backlink analysis reports to dissect the backlink profiles of our client’s competitors. Running a thorough backlink analysis of between 4 and 7 competitors and then meshing those similar or unique backlink details together gives us a strong roadmap to help our initial link building efforts for the client. We don’t just look at domain and page authority or getting links from the aggregated backlink data we’ve collected. Instead, we use the data to really educate the client on the types of backlinks we should be focusing on within our link building campaign — whether that be industry-specific, local, social media, link bait creation, or another types of link that we can identify that’s paying off well for competitors.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

I always perform a back link analysis at the beginning of an SEO campaign. I feel like it’s important to understanding a website’s history. Sort of like cutting down a tree and examining the rings, you can uncover vital information about a website’s past and use that information to plan for the future. I also like to perform a back link analysis periodically throughout a campaign, just to look for surprises either good or bad, and to gauge the success of any particular link building effort.

Then of course, there are good reasons to perform an analysis when a sudden problem arises, like a loss of rankings. I always check the back links to see if the answer is there. You might discover the site has some how got tied into a bad neighborhood. Maybe the site got lost, driving around downtown Compton in a Lexus at midnight… If that’s the case you wanna know about it, and a back link analysis will tell you if that is the case.

And sometimes, when you’ve hit a wall brainstorming new ideas, a back link analysis can provide inspiration.

Paul Teitelman of Search Engine People

Backlink analysis is absolutely crucial to get a solid insight into what previous efforts have been done for a client or for a potential client. Before starting on any SEO campaign for a client (or even when pitching clients) I do a complete, exhaustive backlink analysis to see both the amount of links, and the different types of links (articles, directories, blogs, social media sites) that have been built already. Even more importantly is to thoroughly analyze the anchor texts used in order to give you a complete insight into their current “link profile”. This helps determine what kind of link building strategy I need to execute both in terms of link velocity and link variation.

Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

I do backlink analysis mainly when starting work for a new client so I can get an idea as to their profile (number of links, strongest links, anchor text etc). I also mine the backlinks of competitors while looking for suitable prospects. Even if I find a 404 error on a competitor’s site, I’ll do a quick backlink check on that particular page, to see if the links have value and if there are any opportunities to scoop them.

Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

Backlink analysis occurs typically when reviewing new niches for me lately. Or analyzing a clients site for potential answers into ranking falicies, good or bad. Links to me tell a story, so its very important to understand the age, location and anchor text of a sites links.

Wil Reynolds, of Seer Interactive

Now I do it at the onset of a campaign, sometimes you get beat on anchor text, sometimes its authority, sometimes it is just raw number of links. But you won’t know what you are up against unless you do a competitive backlink analysis up front.

Tom Demers, of Wordstream

When I consult, I do a lot of site audits, and a major piece of these is backlink analysis (for clients and competitors.) I also conduct a similar analysis upon taking on a new project, even if they haven’t ordered a site audit. This is basically a deep dive look at the types, quantity and quality of links in the client profile, and a slightly higher-level analysis of some of their competitors. On an ongoing basis, I’ll periodically audit a client’s backlink profile, and I’ll frequently look at backlink profiles of competitors or interesting sites to mine them for links I can either get or generate a link building idea from.

Ken Lyons, also from Wordstream

There are four distinct reasons I perform backlink analysis.

1. SERP appraisal: when targeting verticals for new clients, I evaluate the link profiles of the big dogs that dominate the page one SERPs. I want to know why they’re top ten. Usually, I can grab a lot of intelligence sifting through their links profile, both domain and page level. I’m looking for weakness and opportunity, something I can exploit or duplicate.

2. Competitor evaluation: when I see anyone else outranking my established sites for target keywords, I want to know why they’re ahead of my site in the SERPs. Typically, that boils down to some link advantage: more links, better links, superior relevance of links.

3. Internal link audits: I feel it’s critical to analyze my own site’s link profile to determine why certain pages perform better than others. Is it based on level of competition in the SERPs, or is it the result of certain links in my own profile that are passing equity and relevance to these top performers. If it’s the latter, I want to try to replicate these quality links to as many of the other “money” pages on my site.

4. Link discovery: most SEOs use keyword tools for keyword discovery. They should also be analyzing link profiles to discover new link opportunities. I’ve stumbled on some prime link partners sifting through a competitor’s backlinks. In fact, when I see spammy, low value sites outranking mine in the SERPs, I get giddy because I know if I rummage through their garbage link profiles, I’ll find gold. It’s evident that there’s some juicy link pushing them ahead of me. I just need to roll up my sleeves and find it.

I have to add that a backlink analysis is only a part of a link building campaign. In some cases, it’s a very small part, in other cases it may be a bit more, but only looking at your competitors or your own history will never get you optimal results.

Gab Goldenberg, Search Engine Land columnist & SEO ROI

I perform backlink analysis when I need to have an idea how challenging and time-intensive it’ll be to rank a prospective client. This also gives me an idea as to whether I should even take them on or whether their needs are beyond what I can provide. I’ll also do backlink analysis if I’m considering a few different affiliate niches and I want to see what’s easiest to rank on, relatively speaking.

Christoph Cemper

Whenever doing competitve analysis, going after competitors links, buying an existing domain, out of curiosity for good rankings

David Harry

Three main reasons are:

1. Competitive analysis: whenever we’re getting into a new query space we use it to guage how tough the space may be by looking at some of the competitor link data.

2. Client analysis: obviously when we get a new client, we’d be looking at the profile to get a feel for where they are at the moment.

3. Content programs: obviously when we’re looking at content placement and other strategic alliances we’ll look at link profiles for prospects.

Arnie Kuenn, of Vertical Measures

We perform backlink analysis whenever we are either performing an SEO review or trying to obtain links from pages linking to our clients’ competitors. It’s a very efficient and effective way for finding relevant pages and is a comparatively easy method to discover high quality links. This works especially well if you can discover a path that the competition has taken with respect to attracting links.

Dixon Jones, of Receptional

Whenever a client specifically approaches us for this, but also, we work on this with retained clients after we have sorted out their site architecture. No point in developing links unless and until the client understands that changing url structures has consequences! Typically, we carry out an analysis before starting ANY campaign, as our quickest wins are typically found during this exercise. We even, these days, conduct a very brief analysis free for the client for our own benefit in reply to their initial inquiry.

Ann Smarty

Backlink research has been a great way to do the following:
See the competitors’ strengths.
Learn the competitors’ friends and promoters. As well as their tactics to promote themselves.
Learn the clients’ past link building tactics (to diagnose the penalty for example).

Bill Hartzer, of Vizion Interactive

We have a very specific process for link building. We usually review the links to the site when we first hear of a domain name (like during the initial sales process or when talking to a potential client) so we can get a good idea of what would be involved in promoting that domain name/the site. We then perform an initial, detailed backlink analysis of the target domain, but also of many online keyword competitors so that we fully understand the market and the competition.

Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

I’ll do informal and formal backlink analysis. Informal will just be a quick look to check out the quality of a site.

I’ll do formal analysis when I start on a new project. I’ll look in-depth at each of the major players. I want to assess what their linking strategies are and how well they’re implementing them. As well as that, I’ll be looking for influential blogs and the people behind them, community sites, news and information sites and particularly journalists who are writing about the topic I’m promoting.

David Lewallen, Cybernaut SEO

I perform a backlink analysis at the beginning of a new engagement with a client in order to get a feel for their backlink profile. This allows me to gauge the sophistication of their link building initiatives to date as well as to determine what is working for them or has worked in the past. I also like to see if the client has been up to risky business (buying links, bad neighborhoods ETC…) and to determine what needs to happen in order to mitigate that risk.

Ryan Clark, LinkBuildr

Backlink analysis is one of the most important aspects of any link building campaign, aside from the links themselves. You should be on top of your backlink analysis before, during and until you forget about the certain campaign. The first place you’ll need to look to is of course the top 10 websites ranking for your keyword. Without an idea of what the competitor has hidden behind the mask of their SEO efforts, you’re going to be building links in the dark…not something I’d recommend you should do. I always make sure to look at the sites ranking for the top 20 results. Eric Ward recently wrote about even checking past 40 -50-60 etc

(http://searchengineland.com/linking-food-for-thought-34113). There’s no harm in seeing what you can leverage for your own profile, and you’d most likely save yourself some time in the long run.

Ben Wills

Most often, I perform backlink analysis for two reasons: 1) to identify sites with multiple citations to competitors for link opportunities, and 2) as a method for identifying the competitiveness of a keyword space. The more competitive the backlink profiles, the more competitive that keyword space will be.

Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

Mostly I do it at the beginning of entering new markets…and mainly when trying to decide an entry point to the market. If you try to compete head on with limited resources that makes winning harder, but if you find an area where the competition is weak or you have a strong competitive advantage you give yourself a much better chance to succeed. Most of the backlink analysis I do is just an overview look at the market using SEO for Firefox.

How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?

With this question, I hoped to hear more about how link builders moved from the backlink profiles of clients and competitors to actually designing a campaign.
Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster:

Link analysis is the backbone of all my link building campaigns. Let’s talk about a double backlink analysis. Eyeballing who links to a site is the first step. The second step is to review who they link to, and then doing a backlink analysis of those sites they are linking to. The other day, I found a PR 6 site that was linking out to what looked like decent websites but a backlink analysis showed that those sites had backlinks from sites that linked out to self-described black hat websites. None of those sites rank well, either. So the double backlink analysis is a good one to use. Most people would take the PR 6 but for me that site is a loser. A strong case for not trusting the toolbar for making link building decisions. Link analysis done by your eyeballs, without the use of a third party tool, is the way to go. It’s fundamental.

Jeremy Bencken:

It’s a huge source of ideas for finding audiences who’d be interested in a site and worth approaching with promotion opportunities. For example, if my client is a pizza restaurant and I realize some Pop Warner football team is linking to their competitor, then you can bet I’m going to look into why they’re linking. Once I figure it out, I’m going to try to improve upon the idea and pitch every kids sports team I can find to link to my client. This is the fun creative part of link building: reverse-engineering why people link, then creating new opportunities that take advantage of the same dynamic.

Michael Gray:

You want to look at who is linking to the competition, are they getting mostly low quality high volume links, or are they getting mentioned and linked to from authority sites. If a site is getting links from well known, and trusted online resources, you modify your strategy accordingly.

Ken McGaffin:

Backlink analysis is crucial to a campaign. But I’m not looking to chase up links to competitors, I’m looking to build up a sense of the important influencing or information sites in the market I’m researching. Once I’ve got that list, I move on to thinking about what type of outstanding content can I create.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

A back link analysis creates a baseline for any link building campaign, by posing and helping to answer these questions:
Are there problems which need to be rectified?
Have there been bad linking choices?
What existing success can be capitalized on?
What strategies have been used in the past that could be expanded or replicated in the future?
Are the back links too one note?
Is there a need for diversification?
All of these questions need to be answered in order to design the most effective campaign possible and can be answered at least in part, through a back link analysis. Also, existing back links can help create ideas for how to build new ones.

Dixon Jones:

The analysis helps to quantify and demonstrate the scale of the task at hand. In some instances, the website in question is underdeveloped by a massive factor compared to their competitors. This usually reflects relative differences in brand building on and offline in the past – but if a local paper hopes to compete with the BBC, they had better reframe their objectives to think around local terms, for example.

Julie Joyce:

We don’t get into the nitty-gritty of saying “well this backlink profile has 455 mentions of the keyword fashion and only 427 for clothing, so let’s attack clothing!” We use it to formulate a general outline. We want to know what the most commonly used anchor text was so that we can discuss plans with the client. We want to identify opportunities to make things better, so if we see an inbound link that points to a less-than-optimal page, we might want to contact the webmaster and point out a better bit of content. Basically, the analysis that we do gives us the information that we need to lay out our plan for the next few months. Without the analysis, I don’t see how we’d have a good idea of where to move next.

Bill Hartzer:

A thorough backlink analysis tells us where we are now, how many links we need to get, and where the competition is right now. Then, depending on our analysis, we will put a certain amount link building resources towards the project depending on how competitive the market is. We also continue to perform our link building analysis process on a regular basis to make sure that we’re keeping up with the competition.

David Lewallen:

I like to see what types of sites have linked to the client in the past and determine what specific strategies and techniques have worked for them. This gives me a starting point, if a client has not done any link building I start with the basics, but if they have a well versed link building then I will employ more advanced strategies to boost their profile. I also like to see if their business partners are linking to them and in what fashion. I check to see if there are links going to 404 pages, broken or missing pages.

Shaun Anderson:

It helps me see the linking habits in that vertical and the types of links that have secured sites top ranking already, and the types of links I may find available for me. For instance, Im currently looking at a vertical where the number 1 position has links that are all kind of spammy. But they’re working…. so I can assume there’s not a lot of domain authority in play in that vertical, and can assume if I throw a bucket load of low quality links at the site over a short time (months) I can hide the odd real quality link in there that will get me at least into the top few results.

Brian Gilley:

It affects our link campaigns heavily since we look at the overall compilation of link data from multiple sources and then determine our focus after we have fully examined the data. If it looks like a piece of content has gotten the majority of its ranking strength from industry-specific channels, then we know that following the same direction will likely be more costly. If the backlink data has a good percentage of article/contributor based websites, local links, and it heavily focused on driving linkable content from social media sources, then we can gear our campaigns and budgets accordingly.

Paul Teitelman:

Backlink analysis has huge implications on any link building campaign. As I mentioned, by analyzing the current amount of backlinks you can then set your campaign strategy both in terms of link velocity and link variation. For example, if a client had very few backlinks, you know that you need to take your time and only use the absolute safest link building practices with lots of anchor text variation. On the other hand, if the client has a massive amount of backlinks with lots of link and anchor variation already then it’s a completely different story. In this case, you know that you don’t need to be as concerned with the speed at which you build links, but need to concentrate on higher end link building strategies with focused anchor texts as the basics have already been mostly covered.

Brian Chappell:

At surface level, it tells you who’s linking to you, and who possibly you should go to for new prospects. But if you really dig deep you can gain intelligence required by competitive terms that require an understanding of the cost/benefit relationship to actually ranking higher organically. Aaron Wall has always nailed this home and I feel its right on point when thinking about time invested and link analysis.

Tom Demers:

It greatly impacts the quality and quantity of links I’ll target for a client or a project. Determining the competitiveness of a query space is pivotal in attempting to rank a keyword(s) efficiently. See this post on competitive query analysis.

Wiep Knol:

It can provide some basic historic and competitive insights, but it can also be used for identifying new potential link targets.

Gab Goldenberg:

It allows me to identify patterns as to the most valuable links in a particular niche, and perhaps come up with link sources I would never have thought of. For example, I found out that for a hotel I worked with, a local escort review board was a good source of links! By patterns, I should clarify that I mean what sorts of hubs you see in a niche. Escort review forums aren’t a pattern in the hotel space, but you can find things like Hamlet Batista did in promoting RankSense. I’ve done SEO for a mass-market piece of software too, and so I can confirm that PAD files are a source links.

Ryan Clark:

I’m a firm believer of building quality links over quantity, so I’m always looking to see how you’re doing on your end in that department. Let’s say someone ranking in the top 5 for your target keyword has 500 links, 75 of them are of medium to high quality. I can tell from that just what kind of links I’ll need to catch up to them and take over. If you’re specing things out for a client then you’ll also be able to have a sense of the cost for them. It’s really hard to measure a cost with ranking success from a link building campaign. A competitor’s backlink profile might reveal that they’ve paid to be in Business.com and the Yahoo Directory. Little tips like that can start to put a dollar value on your campaign costs which helps keep things in perspective. * keep notes/journal on how many links it took to rank for said keyword

Christoph Cemper:

By looking at what the competition has, or has not you get an idea of the playing field that you’re in. thats especially important if you work in so many different industries and niches as we do for our clients

David Harry:

I’d say many times one of the more important aspects of link profile analysis is finding new opportunities. Many times, unless one specializes in a market, it isn’t obvious which routes to take with link building. I find that the process of reverse engineering during the competitive analysis can help find approaches we may not have had in mind originally. This has a huge affect. Where are they strong? Where are they weak? How balanced is the profile? Much of this affects the actual campaign to be implemented.

Arnie Kuenn:

It gives us a lot of information if we do a deep analysis. We can certainly discover what is working to help other sites get ranked and as I mentioned in #1, sometime we discover a whole method of obtaining links, not just a list of domains and pages to target in our link building efforts. For example, did the competition have an angle to attract .edu links? Did they distribute any free products or tools to attract links?

Ann Smarty:

The best thing about the backlink research is that it inspires me: this way I can see which direction I can go, how creative I can get and which site types will work best.

Debra Mastaler:

Any information found is strategically used in our decision making process. We don’t necessarily use the same link sources in our linking efforts but knowing where and how a competitor links helps us plan a smarter strategy.

Dennis Hettema and Elias Kai:

When I identify an interesting source through backlinks I try to get a picture of the keywords that this source is strong in and target their competitors. ie. If I find a camping site linking to my website for (biking shoes) I figure out the keywords that this camping site is trying to rank on. These keywords I cluster and I identify the top ranking players in the SERPs for that cluster. These are the guys I would initially target for link building.

Ben Wills:

Backlink analysis is used mostly as seed data for identifying potential link prospects. As mentioned above, it might also be used for competitive analysis or multiple citation analysis.

Aaron Wall:

Mainly it determines if we decide to enter the market or not, and what piece of it to enter. Sometimes co-citation tools like Hub Finder and clever search queries can help you find particular competitive strategies which you can try to duplicate or at least learn from.

What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?
In this question, I hoped to draw out what’s most important to look at in the competition’s backlinks.
Julie Joyce:

This is a great question for discussion, because I think that we could get into the art vs. science thing here. Basically, I feel like a bit of a link analysis hippie. I see the general pattern, get an idea about the overall aspects of the backlinks without needing to tie it down into discrete bits. Therefore, all of it matters to me in terms of importance, but I honestly do not look at my site vs. yours and pick out why one is better. I think a lot of it is very relative, and I realize that I’m sounding too New Age-y here, but there’s a lot more to why someone does better than you than that they have 5000 more backlinks or that their anchor text variance is much nicer than yours. I’d look at everything. I’d look at variety of anchor text, deep linking, authority site links, sitewides, contextual links, types of sites linking, and of course the simple amounts of everything, but I couldn’t pick out any as being that much more critical to me than the others.

Ken McGaffin:

I really want to cherry pick the best targets and then concentrate on those. So I’m not concerned at all with numbers but with quality. I want only the best targets; links from them will be difficult to get, but they’ll be worth the effort many times over.

Roger Monti:

The most telling is how natural the links are and how relevant they are. I will not consider any site that has irrelevant backlinks that are a result of a link bait campaign. Google analyzes the relevance of a backlink. They have been doing this since at least 2003. Part of that analysis is to deprecate the PageRank of irrelevant backlinks. This is a fact. Link bait campaigns are about quantity. But quantity is only a part of the backlink equation. The lack of control over relevance and quality is where link baiting as a link building technique fails and becomes a dead end. This kind of analysis reveals things about a site that the toolbar will not.

Jeremy Bencken:

Time. If you have a link building tool that identifies when links first appeared, then you may be able to identify spikes around particular campaigns or link purchases. Then you can get clues to why the links were created by looking at them.

Shaun Anderson:

The actual sites the links are on. I use to find out if I am up against link farms, blog article syndication, properly marketed content, viral success, small business or big brand…. or indeed SEOs lol

Eric Enge:

We do still look at metrics such as PageRank (or mozRank) and mozTrust. A highly trusted site with high PageRank is not guaranteed to represent a killer link, but there is still a correlation there. I am sure we would all agree that MIT, or USA.gov, or the NY Times are all probably highy trusted by the search engines, and are cetainly perceived as authorities. They also happen to have a PR9 of PR10 Google Toolbar PageRank. That does not mean that there are no clunkers with high Toolbar PageRank – there are. But, the sites you are looking for most likely have high Toolbar PageRank as well.

However, you do want to look at other metrics as well. Gather the founders of the company together and simply ask them who the leaders in the field are. That data will also help you identify sites that are likely to be seen as trusted and authoritative by the search engines. Taking the authority aspect a bit further, sites that have lots of links from other authority and non-authorty sites in the space are more likely to be seen as authoritative, and a backlink profile can help you get a sense of that.

One component that people often overlook, is that it is not just about the authority and trust that a domain has, but it is also about the page which the link can be found on. The classic example is a student page on a major university web site. The student does not speak for the university, and it is not likely that the search engines credit much of the domain’s authority or trust in such a page. So you need to look at that as well.

You also don’t want to overthink theses analyses. If I have identifed 10 sites that based on their PageRank and mozTrust levels that might be authoritative, I could spend two hours per site trying to determine how authoritative they are. However, in 30 minutes I can analyze their site content and organization objectives, have determined who to contact, how to contact them, and written them a highly personalized email.

Wiep Knol:

It’s the overall picture that can tell the most. A backlink profile with a relatively high amount of links from home pages does not have to be bad. But if this website has an over optimized anchor text portfolio as well, and tends to get most of their links from navigational website elements such as footers or sidebars, some things may be wrong.

In general, you can tell if a website has been building links by their anchor text portfolio.

Paul Teitelman:

Great question, after a while all the different factors kind of blend together to tell a story when comparing one site vs the competition, but for those starting out I’d definitely say to first focus on looking at the anchor texts in each backlink profile. You obviously want to see a focus on your targeted keywords but want to ensure that good link variation was properly utilized.
Although the number of backlinks is obviously important, the link variation used is actually a more telling sign of the power of that link profile. Ideally you want to see a variation of link building strategies (articles, directories, blogs, social media, etc. etc.) as well as authoritative mentions (.org, .edu, online newspapers, clubs and business associations). The overall number of links can easily be inflated: whereas getting high authority mentions online cannot, so really can’t stress this point enough.

Brian Gilley:

The age and number of backlinks at the page level of a backlink analysis is the most helpful for us. If we see that a specific page of a link prospect’s website is 4 or more years old and has a solid backlink profile of tens or hundreds of links, then it will provide us with a solid and valuable link. The most informative backlink data we’ve used over the past few years is looking at how deep and diversified the backlink profile is for any given competitor’s website. That means examining the most linked-to pages and determining how we can create content that achieves the same greatness.

Tom Demers:

For me it’s (in no particular order):
Domain Page Rank
Links
Unique Linking Domains
Difficulty of Link Acquisition
Distribution of Link Types
These give me a nice baseline for how competitive a term may be to rank for, and can help me to generate ideas around which specific tricks I might replicate, and what my link profile will need to look like in terms of link quality distribution.

Ken Lyons:

These aren’t listed in any specific hierarchy of importance, but some of the critical link signals I look at in competitive analysis are:
Link quantity
Link quality
Page level vs. domain level links
Unique linking domains
Domain age
Top-level TLDs: .edu, .gov
Quality directory presence: DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo!
Social media mentions: Diggs, Delicious bookmarks, Twitter citations, etc

David Harry:

Certainly the old standard, toolbar PR is useless by and large. Consider a page that has plenty of links, but they were obtained after the most recent export? Just because a page has no toolbar PR, doesn’t mean it isn’t garnering actual PageRank.
So we need to look at:
Total links
Status (nofollowed?)
Anchor text
Linking page TITLE
Link types (editorial, forum, social etc..)
Diversity (overview of link types analysis)
Link age (ie; link decay potential)
Velocity (rate of link growth)

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

In a competitive analysis, I’m looking for quality but I’m more interested in discerning strategy. Trying to determine how this site has gone about getting links. That means looking for patterns and commonalities. Is there one particular page that has a lot of back links? What’s on it? Is there a predominance of one kind of link? Do the links appear (or could they be) paid?
I like to ask questions during a competitive analysis. Answering those questions is the most important part of identifying patterns and discerning the competitor’s strategy. Only when you have identified a pattern can you attempt to replicate it.

Bill Hartzer:

I’m more concerned about getting a lot of links from a lot of different domain names. I’d rather have 100 links on 80 different domains than 1100 links on 20 different domain names. A good mix of all types of links is helpful, as well, not just directory links or blog comments or article links or press release links, but a good mix of all of those. Even having some nofollow links may play into it, as well.

Melanie Nathan:

It really depends on the purpose of the analysis, but most often, sheer volume of links, backlink quality and targeted anchor text are what I scrutinize.

Knowing the sheer number of links my clients have vs. what their top competitors have, helps me determine how far I’ll have to climb to get them to (and beyond) that level. And knowing the quality of their links and what they’re heavily targeting helps me determine how fast I’ll be able to get them there.

Brian Chappell:

Age and anchor text as well as the rate of link growth over time.

Michael Gray:

Looking at the domains and URL’s can tell a lot, I’ve looked at so many backlinks now that I know example.com/keyword/page1.htm is almost certainly a link directory. Links from radio stations and local TV stations are also highly suspect since that industry is overflowing with link buying/selling.

Wil Reynolds:

Anchor text distribution for the top 10-20 sites vs. my site for a given keyword, this will let you know if you are in a dogfight for anchor text links.

Authority links that are not buried more than 3 clicks from the homepage – a lot of authority links get archived deep in a site, so its not enough just to look at if they have links from authority sites but to also evaluate how far from the homepage that link is, if that page with my link has any internal links pointing to it, and if I have targeted anchor text. Analyzing this on the top 10-20 will show you your highest value targets.

Christoph Cemper:

Each datapoint is valuable – we look at over 40 different parameters for each link! the most popular that you want to check for each link are obviously Domain Age, Backlinks to the page, Juice/Rankings for the page, if/when it was last changed, when the page was created, etc.

Arnie Kuenn:

I would have to say this starts to become some what subjective. Some of it you can only gain from experience, looking at hundreds of sites over time. You can get pretty good at spotting paid links, paid blog posts, free directory spam, etc. When that doesn’t jump out at you, you start looking deeper for “paths” as we call them here. What content are people linking to? Does this site work for coupon offers? Did they create some really cool research that people linked to? Is their blog attracting lots of links? And so on. If you can discover these “paths” then we try to create something similar on our client’s site to attract similar links.

Ann Smarty:

Of course, the answer may vary from niche to niche but most often these are links from blogosphere. Bloggers will tell a lot. How useful is the tool / service? How do they promote themselves (paid posts are usually either obvious or disclaimed). Do they have anything of value to offer? Were they ever engaged in some link bait / viral campaigns?

Dixon Jones:

We map the relative ACRanks of competing sites’ referring domains, creating normalized graphs that help to show the relative link “qualities”. This shows some interesting redflags in the competitor strategies.

Eric Ward:

Aside from the low hanging fruit of target site identification, what I find most useful is being able to look across a large sea of URLs pointing at any given site/URL, and based on experience, I can tell who is using what tactics, and whether or not they are going to work short and long term. Call it live link forensics. The ability to see who is on the right path, and who is about to blow up.

Ben Wills:

The relevance (keywords in the title, h tags, etc) and value (PageRank, backlinks, authority, etc) of the sites and URLs linking to those pages

Next time in this series…

URL assessment
On page & on-site factors

Advanced Search Engine Rankings Tracker

2010-03-10T16:58:00.000+05:30

One of the most advanced and usable features inside SEJ tools is its SERP tracker. The benefits of the tool include:
(!) The tool is easy to use and configure;
(!) The tool is organically integrated with all other tools inside which makes adding terms to tracker simple and fun;
(!) The tool generates pretty and well-organized reports; etc.

Step 1: Set up your search engines

Go: SERP tracker -> Search engines
From there you’ll get access to plenty of search engines (including various local versions): choose all you want to monitor your progress in:

Step 2: Add keywords to tracker

I did a post last week on how to add keywords to tracker: there are actually 7 ways to do that: you can add words in bulk or one by one, you can select and add words from various third-party tools like WordTracker and SEMRush.
You thus have many options to create a complete list of words you want to keep an eye on.

Step 3: Manage your keywords

Go: Dashboard -> Keyword Manager
After you have your list of keywords to track, you should see a pretty table containing all your words and some important data:

Local search volume (source: Google Adwords Tools): the search volume for your keywords from the last available month, factoring in your country, language, and match-type preferences.
Global monthly search volume (source: Google Adwords Tools);
Advertisers’ competition (source: Google Adwords Tools);
Links: this column shows the number of links you managed to get for this specific keyword (grabbed from your site Link Manager);
Research: this link enables you to run additional keyword research via Google Adwords tool to find more terms to track.

You can also stop tracking any word right from this table.

Step 4: Tag keywords

Tagging allows you to better separate, filter and manage your keywords. For example, if you wanted to prioritize your keywords, you could apply a tag like “High Priority” to them. Tags allow you to filter the view in the SERP Tracker and can also be used when creating custom reports.
You can tag the words right from the keyword manager (see above).

Step 5: Monitor your progress

Every keyword that you have entered into the SERP Tracker will, over time, accumulate keyword history. the software represents the changes on the Keyword History page with a trending graph and a historical results table.
To access the graph, click on a keyword on the main SERP Tracker results page which will take you to it’s Keyword History page. The Keyword History page displays a trending graph:

Step 6: Create a keyword ranking report

SEJ tools allow you to either export all monitored keywords together with their ranking to a CSV file or create a pretty PDF report where you (or your client) will be able to see:

Current search engine position;
The change (positive or negative);
How change value (how many points lost/gained).

Targeting Multiple Keywords vs. Singular Keyword Focus

2010-03-09T16:41:00.000+05:30

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There's a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you'll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).

NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL's data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.

For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you're deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I've taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:

NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer's Backlink Analysis

If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It's also likely that you'll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don't have that singular, pinpoint focus.

7 Google Chrome Extensions To Make You A More Efficient SEO

2010-03-09T16:30:00.000+05:30

Google announced extensions with its latest Chrome release on 21st January this year – implemented to slow down improve the features of the browser and give Firefox a run for its money. Now Google Chrome for me is the super-fast, shiny browser used occassionally that resolves pages in an instant, handling as many tabs as you can throw at it (and periodically having a meltdown). However, when the real work needs to be done, it’s back to the trusty old Firefox.

So six weeks since the launch of the extensions, we had a browse around the library to see which ones could tempt us into using Chrome as a daily browser.

Ultimate Chrome Flag is a nifty little extension that sits in the end of the address bar. You can quickly diagnose any geolocation issues as this tool displays the relevant flag for your website location and- importantly- no flag when the location can not be determined. Click on the flag and a box pops up showing the country or region name as well as the Domain name and IP address, Google and Alexa rank as well as the Web of Trust ratings.

Firebug Lite is the Chrome version of the fabulous Firebug add on that is a staple for any SEO using firefox. Whilst it seems the main significance of the world ‘lite’ equates to lack of javascript debugger, it still retains most of the features that have kept SEOs entertained whilst chopping and changing a client’s website.

Chrome SEO aims to be an all-in-one SEO extension. Whilst you’ll certainly need the help of some other extensions, Chrome SEO is great for some quick analysis of a website. The button sits in the top right corner of your Chrome page next to the address bar and clicking it opens up a scrollable frame containing lots of SEO-worthy metrics. The extension pulls in data from the search engines as well as popular tools such as Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO if you’re logged in. Combined with the robot.txt and sitemap detector, this is an extension that can save an SEO bags of time.

Meta SEO Inspector allows quick analysis of the meta tags of the page you are viewing. As well as the usual HTML meta tags you can see XFN tags, no-follow links and canonical tags. The box, which sits in the bottom right corner of your Chrome window, also displays warnings when tags are missing or wrong (ie. too short or too long).

SEO Site Tools is a great all round SEO tool which is talked about in much more detail over on SEOmoz. Using the free Linkscape API, this extension focuses on all aspects of SEO with the end result being a well-rounded SEO extension. With this tool you can measure external page data, social media stats, view your page terms such as meta and header tags, check your server and domain info and much, much more. If for some reason, you’re bound to installing just one Chrome extension – choose this one!

SEO Quake is based on the Firefox plugin of the same name. It displays key SEO parameters at the top of any webpage as well as highlighting no-follow links.

The extension also appends these SEO parameters to your SERPs, allowing for a quick, basic analysis of competitors and the ability to re-organise the results by the metric of your choice.

Link Grabber extracts all the links from the current webpage and throws them into a list on another tab, all in a split-second. I like this tool as it’s a great way to (very) quickly get a quick overview of the amount of links on any given page. Whilst it doesn’t throw any SEO-specific metrics into the mix (anyone fancy taking up the mantle), I installed it and have found myself using it more than I would have expected. Did I mention how fast it is?

So here are seven Chrome extensions we have found pretty useful for SEO. Which ones do you recommend? If you haven’t been too freaked out by the numerous screenshots of a close up Fabio Capello adjusting his glasses, then let us know which extensions are tempting you away from Firefox to the Google Chrome browser. For current Chrome users, what are you experiences using extensions with Google Chrome, does it actually slow down the browser?

Top 5 elements that you need for high rankings on Google

2010-03-09T16:17:00.000+05:30

Getting listed on Google's first result page is the goal of many webmasters. Unfortunately, many webmasters still do the wrong things to improve their rankings.

It's not possible to get top 10 rankings on Google by focusing on a single strategy. Getting listed on Google requires you to work on all elements of your website. Here are the top 5 factors that influence the position of your website in Google's search results:

Ranking factor 1: website accessibility

It doesn't make sense to optimize your web pages if search engines cannot access your web pages:
Your robots.txt file should allow search engines to visit your web pages. If your robots.txt file contains errors then many search engines won't list your website.

The HTML code of your web pages should be error-free and your web server should return the correct response code. The contents of your web pages should be readable to search engine spiders.
Before you start to optimize your web pages, check if search engines can read your web page content. You can do this with IBP's spider simulator. Double-check your robots.txt.

Ranking factor 2: site architecture

Google wants to show relevant websites in the search results. Your website shouldn't be a collection of random web pages. If you want to get top 10 rankings on Google, the pages of your website should be related.

Your web pages should show Google that your website is relevant to a certain topic. All pages of your website should be linked. If possible, web surfers should reach any page of your website with a maximum of three clicks.

The links and the directory structure of your website should make it easy to search engines to categorize the contents of your website.

Ranking factor 3: keywords

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. If you choose the wrong keywords, you won't succeed with your campaign.
Optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.

Start with very targeted keyphrases that consists of many words, for example "find inexpensive hotels in brussels".

When you have top rankings for these targeted keyphrases, proceed with more general keywords such as "hotels in brussels".

When you have top rankings for these keyphrases, you can proceed with very general keywords such as "hotels".
In general, targeted keywords have a much higher conversion rate than general keywords, i.e. you will get more sales per visitor with "find inexpensive hotels in brussels" than with "hotels".
Also think about the type of visitor that you attract with a keyword. Are these people interested in information or do they want to buy?

Use IBP's comprehensive keyword tools to find the keywords that will work best with your site. You can find further information on how to find the correct keyword type in the IBP manual (PDF).

Ranking factor 4: content

Your website won't get high rankings on Google if it only offers articles and affiliate links that can be found on dozens of other websites.
Separate your website from the rest by creating unique and trustworthy content. Write your own articles about the topic of your website, publish them on your own website and make your website a useful resource.

Ranking factor 5: links from other websites

It is not possible to get high rankings on Google without having links from other websites.
The more links point to your website, the more likely it is that your website gets good positions in Google's search results. The links to your website should be from trusted websites.
If a web page that links to you is related to your own website then the effect of that link on the search engine rankings of your website is higher than the effect of an unrelated link.
It also helps if social bookmark websites link to your website. If many people bookmark your website on social bookmark sites, then this is a sign that your website might deserve high rankings.

A small error in one element can destroy your effects in all other ranking elements. For that reason, it is important to use the right strategy when optimizing your website.

AlertRank: Google Alerts on Steroids

2010-03-08T16:05:00.000+05:30

It is not really often that I am actually impressed by the tool (this is because I come across 2-3 new ones weekly so it is not really easy to surprise me already). But today’s one is truly awesome.

AlertRank is a free web-based tool that helps to make sense of your Google alerts.

Most of us use Google Alerts to keep an eye on our keyword or brand mentions but few of us are actually satisfied with the tool… Until you try AlertRank.

Benefits of the tool

Manage and analyze multiple Google Alerts through an online dashboard
Get more control over your email inbox: you may for example choose to block email alerts and only access results via online dashboard;
See the SEO rank of each result in your alerts;
Select alerts from sites that allow comments, trackbacks, DO FOLLOW, or display Adsense;
View over a dozen detailed ranking values for each alert to prioritize the ones you must act on;
Automatically post of alerts to Twitter or Delicious;
Create custom reports on your alerts in Excel or PDF formats;
View detailed and visualized analytics to identify the most influential sources for your keywords;
View daily, weekly, and monthly trends for any search term, and even compare trends between terms
Tag alerts by sentiment to analyze your brand feedback over time.

The process

Step 1: Tell Google to send alerts to your AlertRank address

Go to the Google account creation page and fill in your AlertRank email address, (which for me was seosmarty@alertrank.com);

Verify your new Google account;

Step 2: While signed-in to this new account, go to Google Alerts and start creating alerts to track your keywords and brand name:

Once you have created as many alerts as you need, let the tool collect and analyze the data.

This is where all the fun starts

Google Alerts on Steroids
From now on, all Google alerts sent to you will contain “Alert Rank” – each site in the alert will be rated based on the internal algorithm that takes into account:

Google pagerank;
Alexa rank;
Inbound links;
Page features (number of comments, AdSense, etc);
Delicious bookmarks, etc.

Enhanced alert statistics:
All the results sent by Google are compiled in a handy table containing the following columns:

The exact page based on your alert settings;
Search terms used to find that page;
The sentiment (you should change it yourself);
AlertRank;
Type of the alert (news, blogs, etc);
Date of the alert:

You can customize the columns to hide any of them or add new ones (like comments, nofollow links on the page, trackbacks, top level domains, Delicious bookmarks of the page, etc):

You can also click through SOURCES tab to see domain stats that got into your alerts:

Alert Analytics
This section displays handy charts that sum up the following:

Alert frequency over time;
Sentiment analysis;
Average AlertRank of each alert;
Percentage of total alerts:

Daily Email Reports (Excel and/or PDF)
These are actually ready-made reputation management report for your client!

Google Adds Public Data Search Tool To Labs

2010-03-08T15:51:00.000+05:30

Google has announced a new tool called Google Public Data Explorer that’s now available in Google Labs. The tool is a follow-up of sorts to last year’s announcement that a limited amount of public data would be used in response to certain Google.com search results.

The Data Explorer tool includes data from the original three sources Google announced last year — the US Census Bureau, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the World Bank — as well as five new data providers:

Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)
California Department of Education
Eurostat
US Center for Disease Control
US Bureau of Economic Analysis

The gee-whiz element in all this is the Data Explorer’s use of animated charts and graphs that let users see changes over time. The charts are also embeddable on any web site; here’s one that shows population growth rates in a few countries since 1960, and how the numbers compare to world population growth rate.

75 PR/Article Submission Sites to Generate Inbound Links

2010-03-07T15:58:00.000+05:30

Article submission sites do not have as much authority and link value as they used to, but they can still help build your link portfolio and give a temporary boost in rankings.

Certain sites like EzineArticles and PRweb tend to rank better organically which can help increase traffic, while other article sites are better for gaining high PR links.

A Few Quick Optimization Tips

You want to be careful with submitting the same article to multiple submission sites because you could potentially receive duplicate content penalties. If you do decide to submit the same article to multiple sites, take the time to change the article title, along with a few sentences in each paragraph to make it unique enough for the search engines.

Make sure you use SEO best practices. Use keywords in the article title, use different variations of the keyword/phrase throughout the content, optimize the url (if possible), deep link to inner pages on your site (if possible).

Now to the list…

75 PR/Article Submission Sites

Here is a complete list of PR and article sites that allow you to submit content. Certain sites require a fee to submit an article and usually provide a syndication service.

URL	Pagerank
http://Prnewswire.com	7
http://Allbusiness.com	7
http://Prweb.com	7
http://Ryze.com	7
http://www.Bpubs.com	7
http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/	7
http://www.marketwire.com/	7
http://www.sitepoint.com/	7
http://Advisor.com	6
http://contentdig.com/	6
http://ezinearticles.com/	6
http://isnare.com/	6
http://Sbinformation.about.com	6
http://thewhir.com/	6
http://www.goarticles.com/	6
http://www.isnare.com/	6
http://www.prlog.org/	6
http://www.PromotionWorld.com	6
http://resources.powweb.com/	6
http://www.articlesbase.com/	6
http://www.pr.com/	6
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/	6
http://news.thomasnet.com/submitpr.html	6
http://www.nanotech-now.com/submit-press.cgi	6
http://www.newswiretoday.com/	6
http://www.pr-inside.com/	6
http://www.articlebiz.com/	5
http://www.new-list.com/	5
http://Activeauthors.com	5
http://E-zinez.com	5
http://new-list.com/	5
http://Pressbox.co.uk	5
http://webdesign.ittoolbox.com/	5
http://Webreference.com	5
http://Weeno.com	5
http://www.1888pressrelease.com/	5
http://www.a1articles.com/	5
http://www.articlealley.com/	5
http://www.articlecity.com/	5
http://www.articledashboard.com/	5
http://www.Bharatbhasha.com	5
http://www.brint.com/write.html	5
http://www.Buzzle.com	5
http://www.Constant-Content.com	5
http://www.FreeSticky.com	5
http://www.PowerHomeBiz.com	5
http://www.prleap.com/	5
http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/	5
http://www.SearchWarp.com	5
http://www.Site-Reference.com	5
http://www.webproworld.com/	5
http://www.work911.com/	5
http://presszoom.com/	5
http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/	5
http://www.bignews.biz/	5
http://www.openpr.com/	5
http://bestezines.com/	4
http://Ezinefinder.com	4
http://free-press-release.com/	4
http://guidemegreen.com/	4
http://www.articleclick.com/	4
http://www.bestezines.com/	4
http://www.free-press-release.com/	4
http://Article-emporium.com	4
http://www.prfocus.com/	4
http://www.prurgent.com/	4
http://www.pressexposure.com/	4
http://www.pr9.net/	4
http://ecommwire.com/	4
http://express-press-release.net/	4
http://www.pressmethod.com/	4
http://www.i-newswire.com/	3
http://www.freepressindex.com/	3
http://www.pressabout.com/	3

Facebook Guide: Facebook tips, tricks and help using the social network

2010-03-07T15:41:00.000+05:30

Facebook has become synonymous with social networking over the past few years, shooting past popular networks like MySpace and Hi5 to become the home away from home on the web. This collection of Facebook tips should help everyone from those new to social networking to those looking to find solid strategies to improve business using Facebook.

Facebook Help: What is Facebook

For many people, Facebook came out of no where to dominate their digital lives. With a sort of viral growth, Facebook tends to consume families and groups of friends by latching on to a single member who then spreads it to the rest. "You've got to be on Facebook!" and "Check out my Facebook page!" are the digital equivalents of a sneeze spreading Facebook to the rest of the group. So what is Facebook? Where did it come from? Why use it? Before we get into the Facebook tips, we should look at what Facebook can is and what it can do.

What is Facebook?
Why Should You Start Using Facebook?
The History of Facebook
What is Facebook Connect?

Facebook Tips and Tricks

Facebook help can be hard to come by if you are looking to accomplish a specific task. There are many different things you can do on Facebook, like connecting it to your blog or linking it to Twitter. But how do you accomplish these tasks? These Facebook tips will show you how to perform some of the cool Facebook tricks.

How to Organize Facebook Friends
How to Connect Twitter to Facebook
How to Set Up an RSS Feed on Facebook
How to Find Old Friends Using Facebook
How to Chat on Facebook
How to Use Facebook Chat's Emoticons
How To Create a Facebook Group
How to Unblock Facebook

Facebook and Family

Is your family on Facebook? Do you worry about how your family might interact on Facebook and what dangers might present themselves to your kids? Facebook is a great way to connect with your kids and an excellent resource for social activities on the web, but every parent should know a little about the social network.

Does Your Facebook Profile Reveal Too Much?
5 Things You Shouldn't Share Online
Five Facebook Dangers That Have Nothing to do With Internet Predators
10 Ways to Protect Your Children from Cyberbullying
Keeping in Touch via Facebook, Skype and Web Cams

Facebook and Business

Facebook has grown beyond popular to become the de facto standard for social networking in the new millennium. As such, Facebook presents a great business opportunity for marketing your products or your brand. With Facebook fan pages presenting the ability to quickly (and cheaply) communicate with thousands of potential customers, the only question is how to get started. These Facebook tips will help steer you in the right direction.

Should Your Business Be on Facebook?
Create a Professional Facebook Profile
How to Market Your Business on Facebook
Facebook Tips for Nonprofits
How Journalists Use Facebook
How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Book
Add a Facebook Fan Box to Your Website

Facebook Games

The popularity of the Facebook developer's network has turned the social network into a platform for social games. And because of the social integration, these games can be quite fun and addicting. Who wouldn't want to find that old boyfriend from high school and sick a gang of thugs on them or find an ex-girlfriend and turn them into a vampire? These Facebook tips include some cheats to popular games so that you won't have to hear your best friend brag about how much better their farms are doing in Farmville.

Mafia Wars vs. Gangster City
14 Scrabulous Alternatives on Facebook
How To Play FarmVille Outside of Facebook
3 Ways To Gamble on Facebook
6 Popular Board Games on Facebook
Farmville Cheats
More Game Cheats

Facebook Bewares

It's not all fun and games on Facebook. As with any social website, the popularity has led to a new market for digital criminals, and Facebook helps them by providing a new audience. It is always important to safeguard yourself when on the web, and these quick tips should help you navigate potential issues.

The Dangers of Facebook
Facebook Do's and Don'ts
5 Facebook Schemes That Threaten Your Privacy
The 'I Need Money' Scam
4 Privacy Tips for Using Facebook Money Apps
Beware of Phishing Scams

Facebook Hoaxes

Another facet of popularity is the amount of misinformation that springs up about the subject, and Facebook is no different. There have been a number of myths and hoaxes about the social network. So what is true and what is a hoax?

Facebook Is Overpopulated
Facebook to Charge $4.99 per Month in 2010
Haiti Relief Hoaxes

Microsoft to Run a Massive Bing TV Campaign in the UK

2010-03-06T16:14:00.000+05:30

The Guardian UK is reporting that Microsoft Bing is preparing to launch a massive TV ad campaign aimed at challenging Google’s dominance in the UK search market. According to the report, the series of Bing promotional TV ads is set to begin airing this week and will be promoting Bing as a “decision engine.”
Microsoft has contracted the services of ad agency JWT. It aims to show how Bing simplifies the “information overload” that accompanies the results of other search engines – obviously hitting on Google.

Microsoft’s UK managing director Ashley Highfield said that people worldwide may have forgotten that there is an alternative search engine.

“People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching,” said Highfield.

The said TV ad campaign feature ordinary people asking for information and getting their answers from Bing, will run for a month and then on a two-week bursts until Mid-June. Backing up the Bing TV ad campaign is an equally massive digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and other media including social networking sites.

It looks like Microsoft is on the final stretch of its promotional campaign for Bing and is now desperate to gain more users even if it cost the company around $2 billion.

This is clearly stated by Mr. Highfield with the following statement:

“It is a battle not just of mind but of heart as well. We are wanting to make an emotional connection – we are ploughing a different furrow here.”

Google Buys Online Collaboration Operator DocVerse

2010-03-06T15:16:00.000+05:30

Google seems to be prepping up its online collaboration and cloud computing tools – Google Docs for the big league. Just recently, Google Docs supported uploading fo files from your computer and sharing that files with people you collaborate with via Google Docs. Now, something good is about to happen with Google’s cloud computing service – that is interoperability with Microsoft Office files. To make this happen, Google just bought DocVerse.

DocVerse has allowed true collaboration feature right within Microsoft Office and by purchasing this company, Google wants to bring in DocVerse’s technology. This is of course to encourage more people to use cloud computing rather than the old desktop application settings.

DocVerse will be bringing in plug-ins that will add standard Microsoft Office operation including real-time editing and online saving.

As for other good things that DocVerse is bringing into Google Docs, that is yet to be known as even Google has not yet announced this acquisition. But according to the WSJ, Google paid a handsome amount of $25 million to DocVerse aside from other perks.

List Building - Is It Still Relevant On Today's Web?

2010-03-05T15:32:00.000+05:30

Years ago, when I first started in online marketing, all the rage was something called "list building". I immediately jumped on this subject and started gathering every list building technique one could possibly imagine. It very quickly became one of my most favorite areas of Internet marketing to explore; so much so, that when I reached my first goal of getting 1000 subscribers, I was so pleased with myself, I even wrote an ebook on list building.

But that was then, this is now.

Since that time, online marketing and even the web itself, has changed tremendously. And we are not talking about small changes or minor adjustments here - the web has fundamentally changed from the core up. People simply use the web in a different way than they used it 10 years ago. It has become so much more of a user-friendly place, so much so, that marketing on this friendlier web has become a whole new ballgame.

The question remains: is list building still relevant on today's web?

The answer is still a solid "YES", but the "WAY" lists are built have almost changed completely. Not too long ago, traditional list building meant you slapped some sign-ups forms (provided by your webhost or an autoresponder service) onto your web pages and you were in business. Subscribers who signed up to your list or newsletter, would receive follow-up emails from you or your site.

Anyone could do it since it was so straightforward and so simple, almost to the point of being idiot-proof. However, the underlying key to building a successful list was gaining loyalty and forming a lasting relationship with your subscriber. Successful online marketers and list builders will tell you, this was really the hardest part. Communicating effectively with your subscribers over a long period of time is extremely difficult to do and does require gaining some skills, especially in the copy writing area.

So what has changed the list building process?

In a couple of words, three to be precise: social networking sites. These social networking programs and sites have completely changed how lists are built on the web. Actually, these social network sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube... have made list building as easy as taking your next breath. List building is integrated into these programs so seamlessly, many users are unaware they are actually building a list.

Simply by using these social networking sites any webmaster or marketer can build a list of contacts or subscribers. Call them friends, fans or followers - they are your subscribers and you can easily reach them with your next posting, tweet or video. There are countless teenagers on many of these social networks who have subscribers that number in the 100's of thousands, even in the millions. And the rate at which they build their list of subscribers, would put many a seasoned marketer to shame.

There are several reasons why this new way of list building is much more effective than traditional list building methods. First, building your list of contacts is fully integrated into these network programs, often it is the main goal or purpose of the program. Seeing how many followers you can get on Twitter has become a world-wide sport - just go ask Ashton Kutcher!

However, from a marketing perspective, using these programs eliminates one of the major drawbacks of marketing on the web - spam. Actually, contacting your list by email is becoming troublesome, even with double opt-in, many of your emails never get through to your legit subscribers because they are blocked by spam-filters and Internet service providers. Using these social programs is a way of contacting your subscribers without the whole issue of spam being considered at all.

Perhaps, an even more important reason to use these social media sites to build your list, has to do with the tricky problem of establishing relationships with your subscribers. These sites make it much more easier to build that long-lasting relationship with your contacts. In the case of YouTube, it can simply mean making a video and talking directly to your subscribers. Communication is direct and immediate. In most cases, there's no need to acquire additional skills or techniques. Besides, in most of these social network sites, the communication is often more effective because it's just not one-way, your subscribers can easily communicate back with you.

Same goes for Twitter, which has become the list building tool of choice for many webmasters and online marketers. Twitter is an excellent medium for building your list. It can be used effectively to get your message out to thousands of like-minded followers and have that message spread rapidly around the web. Marketers are now taking advantage of such a system to market online, but be aware abusing this program will get you banned especially if you just use it to send spam. Like any type of marketing on the web, you shouldn't have any problems if you keep all your communications/interactions real and human.

Another element of these programs which can't be denied, they are all free. Anyone can use these social network sites to quickly build their list or lists without having to worry about paying for it. Actually, in the case of YouTube, you can become a partner and earn revenue from Google Adsense while building your list.

There's also no denying these social network sites have changed not only list building, but how we use the web. These programs have a "pooling effect" on all web activity, gathering like-minded individuals into or around certain "pools" on the Internet. These concentrated pools of people can be formed around a certain topic or even around a certain person. These are excellent areas in which to carry out your list-building activities and your online marketing efforts since they provide very targeted prospects. Ones you can easily contact and communicate with by using these social networking sites.

While the old traditional email list should not be forgotten, list building, as we know it, has been changed forever by the introduction of these social networking programs. And as these network sites become more and more popular, they will play an even greater role in all your list building efforts. A role that can't be ignored or dismissed, especially if you want your list building to be truly effective.

Omniture Now Offers Enhanced Facebook Marketing Analytics

2010-03-05T15:11:00.000+05:30

With the ever emerging and evolving world of web 2.0. marketers no more can afford to neglect social media, and with Facebook becoming the second most visited website online after Google … and THE INTERNET (thinking back AOL circa 1998) to the bulk of its users … analytical tracking and gauging user action, interest and return on investment is crucial to an online marketing campaign. By engaging in social media networking, marketers get an awesome opportunity to join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers.
Focusing forces on social media web, a marketer gets a unique chance to:

More effectively reach highly targeted and active web users;
Better understand the needs and interests of their potential customers;
Get instant feedback on new products and offers, etc.

Yesterday Omniture, an Adobe company and a leading provider of online business optimization & target marketing software, and Facebook announced that they signed a deal to provide online marketers with solutions to better understand and optimize the impact and ROI of their Facebook investments.

The new Omniture feature provided in collaboration with Facebook will enable marketers to automate Facebook ad buying and access analytics to

help companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in order to connect to and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million active users.

For Omniture users this alliance will basically mean the ability to access a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns. From one dashboard, the users will be able to:

Effectively manage their ad spend on Facebook;
Easily compare Facebook ad campaign metrics with other media channels;
Generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages and applications.

Omniture and Facebook will continue to expand this partnership as marketers increasingly utilize this channel to optimize visitor acquisition, conversion and retention. For more information, please contact your Omniture account manager.

Six Types of Social Spammers

2010-03-05T15:06:00.000+05:30

I hate spammers, and I’m 100% certain other people do too. Everyone at some point in time has had some type of experience with spammers. But you almost have to admire these individuals, almost. The techniques used are as varied as the outlets in which they are unleashed. During my thirteen years of internet exposure, I’ve had the displeasure of running into six types of spammers. The first of which I call the Sniper Spammer.

1. Sniper Spammer

A military sniper is one who remains in the shadows, lying in wait until the prime target comes by. Pretty intimidating, but the spammer in this category is anything but. This spammer lies in wait until the “next big thing” comes by. For instance, even before Apple announced the release of the iPad, hundreds if not thousands of spammers were out proclaiming “You could win an iPad!”.

These spammers can be found just about everywhere. I’ve seen them in ads, Facebook, Twitter and even blogs. Luckily once these spammers give away their position, it’s not hard to figure out what they are, pathetic. This next spammer actually has somewhat of a spine, or lack of brains, depending on how you look at him. I give you, the Suicide Spammer.

2. Suicide Spammer

The Suicide Spammer was actually my very first encounter with spam. I was thirteen, in my first chat room and this private message popped up, “Hey you seem like a really cool guy. I’m gonna give you a secret link to the lowest electronics available online!”. I thought, “Hey cool!” Ah to be young and ignorant. Before I could even click the link a moderator booted this guest for the reason, “No Spammers or Bots Allowed!”

Even after the encounter I still saw on several occasions spammers joining chat rooms or forums that had explicit warnings about spam getting removed as soon as a comment was posted. It’s because of this I call this type “Suicide Spammers”. They know full well, even before completing the registration form, they will be removed shortly. Very few people who see the spammy comment would click on the link included with serious interest.

So why even bother? I’d venture to say whatever it is being ‘presented’ is worth the risk to the spammer. The next spammer takes things a little slow and attempts to pull ‘friends’ in. This one is called, the Sociable Spammer.

3. Sociable Spammer

The Sociable Spammer is pretty closely related to the sleeping spammer (listed last). These individuals often are new to social networking sites. These spammers actually take the time to read the rules and regulations while abiding by them for a period of time.

Then when a sort of “level of trust” is established the spamming begins, in my experience after a month or so. I don’t mean like a flood of links or content, I mean messages/posts like, “Hey Guys, I just wanted to let you all know my company is having a contest. Whoever is the 500th person at our site to fill out a survey gets his/her name placed in a raffle for a chance to win a 2011 Camaro! The contest is only up for a short amount of time so go now! Thanks guys!”

This is usually followed up by a warning or automatic ban. The spammer then moves on to the next forum to begin again. I’ve only seen this type three times, Xanga (remember that?!), MSN Chat Room, and Facebook. These three were memorable enough for a mention here. Speaking of Xanga, this next spammer is infamous for ruining perfectly good blogs with spam. I present to you, the Splogging Spammer.

4. Splogging Spammer

Splogging is a term I recently heard about in March of 2009. Perfect! I thought, this is exactly what I’ve been coming across on Wordpress and what my wife dealt with on Xanga at one point (she still uses her account from 5 years ago) last year. These spammers can be more sophisticated, but seldom are. Typically a splogger will comment like, “Hey nice post check this site out if you want some cool stuff!” or a variation thereof.

On my personal blog I write about my current weight loss goals and exercise methods, so naturally I looked on Wordpress to see if I could find any. The first three I found were literally written, “WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS WEIGHT LOSS”, an entire page dedicated to that! I did manage to find one that seemed okay, however further reading revealed it was for moms who had just given birth and were losing pregnancy weight.

Being a man, clearly this was not for me. Back to splogging, rarely have I seen a well written post of these types. If I have, they fooled me. Usually the splogs will consist of post after post after post of the same product with little variation in the wording. Our next spammer, the Synthetic Spammer doesn’t have a mind of its own and in my opinion is a dying breed.

5. Synthetic Spammer

Probably the most utilized method in the early beginning, synthetic spamming is essentially a program that scans for sites to submit information to. However, with functions such as ‘Captcha’ it is becoming increasing difficult for these programs to work efficiently. Unfortunately once the registration is completed the program can run the way it is meant to. The most recent social outlet I’ve seen to be infected with these spammers is Twitter.

Automated tweeting can be great for those with multiple accounts and a busy schedule, but with the advancement in technology comes the abuse of that technology. Thankfully our last spammer is a little slow to start as this type is, the ‘Sleeping Spammer’.

6. Sleeping Spammer

The Sleeping Spammer is the newest one I’ve come across, seeing my first one in December of last year. Around that time I had a “person” start following me, so with every notification I checked out the profile. 200 following – 120 followers – 0 tweets. I had a gut feeling something wasn’t right, but I was curious to see what would happen. Close to the end of January I decided to check back on this account (since I didn’t follow back) to discover the stats were now, 2500 following – 1300 followers – 1000 tweets.

Stunned I began to read the tweets, “By MaryK Products now #lipbalm#makeup#lipgloss#..etc” Now seeing as how tweets can be automated, and there is a way to automatically follow people, I’m making the assumption this spammer set up his/her account to begin to tweet spam once a certain amount of followers was reached to ensure that when the spam began it would hit the most people in the shortest amount of time before the account was abandoned or suspended. Its for this reason I call this spammer a sleeper.

Some may read this and think, “Hey! I have a blog for my business! I post on my stuff on twitter and facebook! I’m not a spammer!” To those I say, “If you abide by all rules and regulations set forth by the forums/chat-rooms you are not a spammer. If you have a blog that doesn’t go overboard on self-promotion and post senseless comments on other blogs you are not a spammer.” What it boils down to is ethics and more importantly common sense.

Let’s be honest, a spammer is a spammer. Regardless of technique or medium used the end result is the same. Luckily with so many new methods of catching spammers such as ‘Captcha’ and even moderator approval for blogs and forums, its getting harder for spammers to infiltrate. But rest assured, as soon as a spammer is blocked he/she will find a way around it. If you have a story about a spammer listed here, or maybe one that isn’t I’d love to hear about it. Thanks for reading.

I’ve complied a list useful articles that provide information on avoiding spamming techniques:

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing
Finding Success in Social Media
How to Monetize Social Media: The Right Way
Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem
Google Warns About Social Media “Schemes” in SEO Guide

If you have a story about a spammer listed here, or maybe one that isn’t I’d love to hear about it. Thanks for reading.

Easy On-Page Diagnosis with SenSEO (FireFox)

2010-03-05T15:03:00.000+05:30

SenSEO is a Firebug FireFox addon (this means you have to install FireBug to use it) checking important on-page-SEO criteria and calculating a grade of how good the current site fulfills these criteria.

The tool adds one extra tab to FireBug window which allows to inspect the current page.

The first thing to do is to identify a keyword (or a key phrase) to inspect the page against it. Just type in the search box and click “Inspect SEO Criteria.”

The tool will run an analysis and return a generalized report where

A green color of the label means your page passed the test;
An orange color means there is a waning;
A red color indicates a failed test;
A grey color shows the element wasn’t checked.

The tool checks the following page elements:

Title Tag

The general recommendations:

Use this tag only one time.
Title should include all keywords.
No more than 65 characters in it.
Title should not contain more than 15 words.

Meta Description

General recommendations:

Use this tag only one time.
Meta Description should include all keywords.
No more than than 150 characters.
Meta-Description should not contain more than 30 words.

Meta Keywords

Use this tag only one time.
Use only relevant keywords which can be found in the content.
No more than 10 keywords.
Keywords should be comma separated.

Headline Tags

General recommendations:

Use headlines to structure your content.
Use H1 only one time.
H1 should include all keywords.
Use H2 and H3 tags.

Page Content

Suggested recommendations:

Images should always have alternative texts.
Keyword density for visible content should be 5%-7%.
Keep the links to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Offer unique content on your page.
Make sure your code is semantic and valid.
Optimize page load time of your site.

Path

Recommended:

Try to keep the path short.
Don’t use dynamic parameters.
Use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words.
Words in the path should be lowercase.
Path should not go deeper than 3 levels (I’d say this one is questionable).

I’d say there are few questionable recommendations but this is what the machine can do: for example, the tool won’t be able to evaluate how “catchy” your title is but it will be able to identify how many keywords you used in it.
You can also click through to “Show components” tab to see the list of all SEO-relevant elements of the page:

8 Marketing Twitter Chats to Check Out

2010-03-05T14:57:00.001+05:30

A Twitter chat is a scheduled “group chat” on a specific topic, where Twitter users interact and engage with one another at a certain time by adding a trackable hashtag to the end of all their tweets. Twitter chats are a great way to meet other marketers interested in the same area as you, learn about a topic of interest, as well as build your following. Here is a list of 8 upcoming marketing Twitter chats to check out.

1. Social Media Collaboration

Discuss the evolution of social media and how social media technology is transforming collaboration. Every Wednesday from 1-3, #smchat

2. Discussing Blogs & Best Practices
The business of blogging: get advice and chat about best practices. Every Sunday from 9-10 PM, #blogchat

3. Integrated Marketing Communications

Co-moderated by Beth Harte of MarketingProfs and Anna Barcelo, chat about integrated marketing communications and how to get all the forms of marcom to “work together” effectively. Every Wednesday from 8-9 PM ET, #imcchat

4. Personal Branding

You are your own brand! Chat about building your own brand (and actually build it at the same time). Every Wednesday from 11-12 PM ET, #brandchat

5. Using the Kaizen Method in Social Media

Chat about using the Kaizen Method to improve social media marketing. Not familiar with Kaizen for social? Neither am I, so I’ll be there next Friday. Every Friday from 12-1 PM ET, #kaizenblog

6. Conversion Rate Optimization

Full disclosure: this is my company’s chat. But it’s worth listing. The first conversion chat of its kind, CROchat will discuss the best ways to improve online conversions. Every Thursday from 1-2 PM ET, #crochat

7. Journalists, Bloggers, and PR Pros

Rub elbows with newbie and veteran journalists, bloggers, and PR pros. Every Monday from 8-11 PM ET, #journchat

8. Healthcare Marketing

Chat with other marketers in the healthcare industry. Every Friday from 1 PM-2 PM ET, #hcmktg

Bing & Yahoo Soon To Support Canonical Tag

2010-03-05T14:53:00.000+05:30

More than a year since the three major search engines united to announce the canonical tag, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

Back in October, Google went a step further and announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains. On Thursday, Parthasarathy said Bing has no current plans to follow suit, while Bhattacharjee said Yahoo is exploring the possibility of cross-domain canonical tag support.

Solving Website Indexing Problems

2010-03-05T14:51:00.000+05:30

Crawling and indexing issues can really put a damper on your efforts to rank well for a variety of competitive and non-competitive terms. Solving indexing issues is definitely an important step towards increasing your keyword ranking footprint. And, the more real estate you own by solving those issues, means you’re taking the next steps in realizing your long-tail efforts.

Before I start with a problem site, I take a few measurements. Whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, you need to figure out where you’re starting from to make sure you’re helping and not hurting your efforts. I start by pulling a variety of data:

Note the number of submitted and indexed pages from Google Webmaster Central. Generally, you need to submit a sitemap to get this data, and if you’re having indexing problems, this can really help. That being said, I don’t always submit an XML sitemap to Google. There are times to do it, and times to not worry about it. If I haven’t submitted a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, I do a site:domain.com query in Google and look at the number of pages listed initially. By paging through all of the results of the site: query, you’ll see that number reduce as you get to the “end.” This is the true number of pages Google has in the index showing as query results.
Run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings I have.
Use a crawling program to pull a realistic page list from my site. Once I have this list I move through and eliminate any pages I don’t want in the index and figure out how I have or should have eliminated them, either by no index tags, roboots.txt exclusion, or parameter exclusion in Webmaster Tools (see more about parameter exclusion below).

NOTE: If my number of indexed pages matches my total page count pretty closely, I’m not really looking at a problem. The reality is – the larger the site, the more problems I generally find.

After I’ve pulled the baseline data, I look at all of my URLs and start comparing them to the list of indexed pages, and note the ones that are not indexed. Once I have a true grasp on the pages that are not in the index, I start navigating the site to those pages. I move through the site to the un-indexed pages and try to determine why they’re not being crawled. As you perform this step on your own site, look at the links, the navigation, urls, and navigation as you go through.

Generally speaking, I can solve the problems with indexing by finding remedies for at least one of the following problems:

Robots.txt file excludes that page/folder by mistake. For whatever reason, you may haveexcluded a folder or section of the site during design or testing, and forgot to remove that restriction in your robots.txt file. This is probably the easiest thing to check and fix, and if you’re really lucky, that’s all it takes.
URLs contain excluded parameters. As with the robots.txt file, you can tell Google to ignore specific parameters if those parameters contain duplicate content. One indexing issue may be3 caused by asking Google to exclude a parameter you actually wanted included. Check your webmaster tools account under site configuration, settings, Parameter Handling.
Content that is inadequate or duplicate of other pages. Many sites contain duplicate content. In some cases, this is inevitable and even okay. The key to controlling duplicate content issues is to tell Google which page you want them to read, and how to get there. Use your robots.txt and parameter handling to tell Google which pages to ignore, and make sure the bots can get into the page you want them to index easily. Not all pages with content problems are duplicate; sometimes the content is just inadequate for ranking. The goal of content is to tell the user and the search engine what that page is about. If there’s no text on the page, or very little, the search engines don’t know how to rank that page. Having a page title and a meta description isn’t enough; the content on the page has to support the keywords in your titles and descriptions or you might as well not even have them.
Not enough inbound links to trickle interest deep into the site. Links are the bread and butter of search engine rankings. If you don’t have a healthy number of links coming into your site, there’s not enough link “juice” to trickle down into those interior pages. Ideally, you’ve build a good number of quality links into interior pages of the site to help push that juice deep into the site. Keep in mind, the larger the site, the more quality links you need to support high rankings. While bringing links into a site is important, being careful not to bleed a ton of page rank with off-site links is also important. Consider your website to be like a kitchen colander, the more holes it has (outbound links) the faster the juice drains out.
No link to that page exists on an indexed/cached page. Having either a good contextual link or navigational link to those deep pages is key to getting the search engine boxes in there. Believe it or not, sometimes links gong to deep pages are graphical or buttons, and in many cases those are not being followed by the bots. Although this sounds like a simple thing to check, depending upon the number of un-indexed URLs you’re digging through it can take a lot of time to review.
Navigation that cannot be indexed. Every once in awhile I run across navigation that is built in flash or other solutions that don’t provide indexable links to interior pages. Honestly, you can solve this by building contextual links to your interior pages, but I would probably look at an overhaul off the site to help with this problem. Good websites have indexable and contextual navigation links, in my opinion.

Figuring out and fixing your indexing issues is definitely worth the time you invest into it, but it also takes a variety of approaches. Start with the easy steps, and progress into the hardest ones to complete. I listed the steps above in order of effort involved to check and solve, so start at the top and work your way down. Once you’ve found your issue, start watching for improvement in the metrics you baselined at the beginning of your efforts.

Yahoo Updates Desktop Search Marketing Tool

2010-03-05T14:49:00.000+05:30

During SMX West this week, Yahoo announced an update to its Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop tool for managing PPC campaigns. If you weren’t at the show to see it yourself, this Yahoo blog post details some of the upgrades that are now available:

Bulk editing: Easily make mass changes to settings such as status, match types and budgets within an intuitive interface; increase or decrease multiple keyword bids; and export your view of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into Excel for use however you wish.
Campaign transfer: Import your third-party campaign data in one easy step.
Keyword research: Use our keyword suggestion engine to find and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns; get URL-based keyword suggestions to increase your keyword relevance and improve your performance; and export the keyword suggestions into Excel to share this information or to add tracking URLs.
Find, replace and search: Find and replace text in ads, keywords, ad groups and campaigns; search for specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords in your account; or search for information in any of the account tabs.
Account performance statistics: Retrieve status and statistics for your account’s impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, ad quality scores and other information.

Bing, Yahoo Discussing Future Of Yahoo Site Explorer

2010-03-05T14:46:00.000+05:30

One more piece of news from the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday: Yahoo and Bing are in the midst of discussions to decide the future of Yahoo’s popular Site Explorer SEO tool.

Yahoo’s Arnab Bhattacharjee told conference attendees that the two companies are now going through discussions on how to transition from being competitors to the new situation where Bing will power Yahoo’s algorithmic search results, and that Site Explorer is part of those discussions.

Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing perhaps offered some reassurance when he said that users come first — what is most important to users will determine what products stay.

Parthasarathy said they hope to have an announcement soon.

Bing Maps Rolls Out Its Largest Image Update

2010-03-05T14:38:00.001+05:30

Bing Maps has rolled out what Microsoft is calling its “largest amount of new imagery ever in terms of square kilometers.” Apparently that represents 6.7 million square kilometers.

There’s new aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery across many countries on several continents. The full list is below.

The Bing Maps World Tour shows the updates on the map.

How to Avoid Basic SEO and Internet Marketing Mistakes

2010-03-04T21:05:00.000+05:30

Frankly, the biggest search engine optimization mistake you can make is not doing any SEO at all. It's amazíng how many people believe "if you build it, they will come." Marketing coaching makes one thing clear. Just putting a site up on the Internet won't get you the traffic you want or need. By the same token, building a site and then thinking about SEO after the fact is a bad plan too. SEO needs to be at the heart of your Web plans from day one, and it's a job that isn't ever "finished."

Learn What's Bad For SEO And Don't Do It

If you take a drawing class, one of the first things you'll learn is that it's easier to look at the negative space than at the object itself. That means that as a beginner, you have a better shot at recreating the funky-looking space between the apple and the pear than drawing the fruit the first time you pick up a pencil. And you don't get so discouraged when your results aren't perfect. That's a good concept to carry into online marketing.

Sometimes learning everything that can go wrong is a better place to start than trying to do everything right. Do-it-yourself, affordable SEO is too expensive at any cost if you're constantly shooting yourself in the foot. Some of the biggest mistakes novices make are really the easiest ones to avoid!

Bad Navigation And No Sitemap

It doesn't take a marketing coach to know that the entire point of "search engine optimization" on a site is to get that site crawled by the search engines. If you use images -- or worse -- Flash or javascript to design your navigation, the search engines will ignore you. (Also, any page that doesn't have an incoming link won't be crawled.)

Not having a sitemap is just as bad. Many website owners don't think they need a sitemap because people don't use them. It's not about people! Search engines love sitemaps. They literally crawl all over sitemaps. Even if you have to maintain the sitemap manually, have one and link to it on every page of your site.

Poorly Constructed Title Tags And URLs

There's nothing wrong with building your website, but pay attention to what your software is doing. Many site building packages and content management systems repeat the same title tag on every single page. Good programs of marketing coaching teach you that the title tag is probably the single most-important SEO element of any page. The title tag must fit the content of the page itself.

But, don't pay attention to the title tag and ignore the URL. This is especially a problem in content management systems and shopping carts. The URLs are full of numbers and letters. You need to be including your keywords in your URLs so the search engines pick up on them. Don't waste the invaluable potential in either the title tag or the URL.

Banning A Search Engine By Accident

It's not unusual for a novice site owner to mess up their robots.txt file. The file exists in your site's root directory to talk to search engine spiders. You can tell them not to crawl pages or sections or send other individual instructions. Since the file is just plain text and is so easy to create, site owners wade in without really understanding what they're doing. If you're not careful, you can ban the search engines from your site altogether. Use Yahoo SiteExplorer or Google SiteMaps to make sure that your site can indeed be crawled.

Vague Anchor Text For Links

Using anchor text like "click here" or "next" is a waste. When you are cultivating incoming links or creating links inside your site, use useful, descriptive anchor text. You don't want to repeat the same phrase over and over again. Get two or three relevant, keyword-rich pieces of anchor text and also use your company name. Empty phrases are just that -- empty.

Doing accurate keyword research is fundamental to successful marketing. It's a huge topic in its own right, but you basically want to concentrate on phrases that are not overly general or that have too much competition. Good marketing coaches will spend a lot of time on keyword selection and you should too. Put that chore right up at the top of your SEO "to do" list.

In reading all the tips available on marketing coaching, you'll find that most articles and courses focus on the things website owners should do. It's also important to look at what you shouldn't do. A poorly constructed site that fails to make good use of readable navigation, workable behind-the-scenes code, solid naming structures, and relevant anchor text will have a tough time online. Consider the fundamentals of basic SEO from the planning stage of your site to maximize your results and get the traffic you want.

Test and Analyze On-Page Links with LinkSidebar

2010-03-03T21:01:00.000+05:30

LinkSidebar is a useful FireFox addon that allows to view, search and test hyperlinks in a web page.
Let’s give it a test drive, shall we?

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to actually open the sidebar after the installation. It turned out I should have used the shortcut key [Ctrl+Shift+L] or the view menu (View->Sidebar->Links).

LinkSidebar allows the user to:

See all hyperlinks in the current web page, including any hyperlinks inside frames;
See the total number of hyperlinks in the current webpage.

Clicking on each link in the sidebar will open the page in a new tab.

You can customize the columns to show the anchor text of each link, its URL and domain:

You can search a handy SEARCH option to filter on-page links by a keyword:

Two handy advanced search operators are supported:

You can use quotes to find the exact phrase.
You can use a minus (-) sign before any word to exclude links containing that word from the results.

For example, to search for all the links to youtube videos except videos of cats, type “youtube -cats” in the search box.

Further on, you can select links in the list (to select many links hold CTRL and click the links you want to select) to be able to:

Highlight them on the page;
Test them:

To summarize, the addon allows to:

Search the links in the current webpage (to find / filter links by a keyword in the URL path and anchor text);
Select multiple links to open in tabs or copy locations for all selected links;
Test links in the webpage, filtering out unwanted links with quick and easy searches;
Highlight selected link on a page.

Penalties, Bans, and Paid Search

2010-03-03T20:54:00.000+05:30

There are numerous posts on PPC vs SEO, who gets more money, and all that mumbo jumbo. To me, it’s right up there with “SEO is dead” type posts, good for attention, but there should not be any versus in that relationship. (Note: Most of the more recent posts point out that both are beneficial) The two have more in common than both sides would care to admit sometimes.

One thing that they do have in common is the infamous and often feared Google ban/penalty. Yes, if you haven’t heard yet, you can get penalties and banned from AdWords. The new Quality Score system has penalties built in that reflect in your quality score for a keyword. The lower your quality score, the more potential there is for higher costs and lower placements. That is the equivalent of a sudden drop in rankings.

When it comes to bans, it is actually harder to return from a ban in AdWords than being de-indexed on the organic side. This could change but for now if your account is banned, you cannot just make a new one, and there is no form to ask for re-inclusion after the issues are fixed. There are ways around this of course, but just like making a new website, on a new domain, on a new host using new information and all, it takes time to get the historical wonderfulness that might have existed before.

There has been nothing “official” on the AdWords Blog that I can see, but a WebmasterWorld thread did feature a response from AdWords Advisor – a long time Google AdWords employee and generally helpful person to the forum members at WebmasterWorld. The AdWords team acknowledged that bans were being put in place for those advertisers that were seemingly deceiving the end user.

How to Not Get Banned in AdWords

This is simple; follow the Quality Guidelines for account setup, ads, destination URLs, and landing pages. PPC Blog covers this as well. You want your quality score to be as high as possible for the best CPC and placement right? The same things apply here. Make sure you are providing quality and you will be fine.

This round of bans was seemingly targeted at affiliates. This does not mean that you cannot buy ads from Google as an affiliate. If you build a site that adds something for the end user to consume that is of value that the original seller does not provide, you are fine. However, if you build landing pages solely for the purpose of PPC and only action a user can take is to click through to the original seller’s site via your affiliate link you are adding no additional benefit. Be a good affiliate and make your site something that people will want to return to.

What to do When You are Banned

If you think you have been unfairly banned from Google AdWords, your one option is to contact an AdWords Representative to request a review of your account.

My tip: You need to be sure you have done nothing wrong. Don’t use other people’s actions as a litmus test for your own actions. “But my competitor was doing it” is not a reason to give to Google when asking for re-inclusion on the organic side, and the same applies to asking for an account review on the AdWords side.

If you were cutting corners or violating the Quality Guidelines, cut your losses and find a new project. As of right now, you would have to start everything new, site, account, address, email, credit card, and more to get another account for the same project.

And if you go through all of that, pay attention to the quality guidelines, and add the AdWords blog to your RSS reader. Google changes their mind all the time, and it’s best to keep up so that this never happens to your business.

Google Search Results Get the Star Treatment

2010-03-03T20:52:00.000+05:30

Google’s long-standing effort on making its search engine results pages more personalized continue with the roll out of a new feature – marking search results with cutesy, yellow star icons.

Actually, Stars are replacing the SearchWiki, which according to the Official Google blog didn’t get to be appreciated by users especially since it changes the order of Google’s organic search results. So, as an alternative way of marking and rediscovering web content provided by Google search results – marking them with Stars is a more lighweight and flexible solution.

To mark a search result with the star icon, you simply need to click the star marker. Once marked, the next time you do a search, all your previous starred items related to your current search will appear in a special list at the top of your results.

The Star feature syncs with Google Bookmarks and Google Toolbar. And while you are browsing the web, you can quickly click on the star icon to favorite a webpage and place it on the list of items that you have starred.

Google is rolling out the Star feature in search globally in the next few days.

Google Launches Gesture Search for Android 2.0 Phones

2010-03-03T20:20:00.000+05:30

Google announced a pretty cool feature that most of us Android phone users would surely find useful and innovative – gesture search. Basically, what this does is to free you of the task of typing your search terms. With gesture search, all you have to do is to draw alphabet gestures on your Android phones homescreen. Gesture search will then suggest search terms based on what you’ve drawn.

Gesture Search is a Google Labs application supporting all Android phones with version 2.0 or above, in the U.S. only. It lets you quickly find contacts, installed apps, a bookmark or a music track.

The different gestures that you can draw on your Android phones’ touchscreen include – draw any letter, horizontal cross to erase a query, left to right for erasing an entire query and right to left for removing the last letter or space in the query.

In addition, Gesture Search also considers your search history and puts the last search query you’ve used to the top of the list the next time you perform another related gesture search.

To download Gesture Search, just visit the Android Market and search for it. But then again, it’s good for U.S. Android phone users only. Hopefully, Google will make it available to other users worldwide.

Google Grades Itself On SEO Best Practices

2010-03-03T20:10:00.000+05:30

Culminating an internal project that seems to have lasted for several months, Google has published a “Google SEO Report Card” showing the results of an internal SEO audit on the home pages of 100 different Google Products. The main verdict? Like many companies, Google’s web site is a mixed bag of good SEO tactics and missed opportunities.

The SEO information in the report is basic in nature, but it’s an interesting report that may serve to validate SEO itself to some people. The report cards runs nearly 50 pages and is available for download in PDF format.

Google says the report card was distributed internally in February and that some teams have already begun acting on the recommendations, with others planning to take action soon.

Google Simplifies Verification For Multiple Owners In Webmaster Tools

2010-03-03T20:06:00.000+05:30

Google has announced a new and easier way to share ownership of verified sites in Webmaster Tools.

Rather than having to upload multiple verification files or create multiple meta tags, there’s a new “Add a User” tool on the site verification page; it looks like this:

There’s no confirmation involved — the new owner has access as soon as this form is used. And these extra owners have the same level of access and power inside Webmaster Tools as the primary owner. As you can see on the image above, the new owners must also have a Google account.

14 Ways to Increase Online Profits

2010-03-03T19:56:00.000+05:30

The latest online marketing and publishing best practices.

At the Summit you will experience sessions that will teach you many ways of increasing your online profit.

Below is a list of just 14 of those ways. Don't miss your chance to experience top-notch training and networking with other successful content marketers, producers and publishers.

14 Ways to Increase Online Profits

1. SEO Campaign Management

2. Social Media Strategy

3. Building Online Partnerships

4. Email Copywriting

5. Managing Online Reputation

6. Building Email Circulation

7. SEO Copywriting

8. Digital Product Strategy

9. Homepage Website Design

10. Website Advertising

11. Keyword Research & Targeting

12. Evolving with Changes in the Digital Landscape

13. Understanding the Digital Future

14. Running Your Mequoda System

Ten Top Tips for Video Marketing Your Online Business

2010-03-03T19:43:00.000+05:30

Nearly all internet marketing professionals use video as one of the core methods for marketing their business. These ten tips aim to help you get started creating short, attractive, effective videos based on solid keywords that convert and that stand the test of time.

Video grabs people's attention far more quickly and effectively than text, audio or photographs. Making a short video can capture a thousand words and pictures and helps to get across your personal brand and lifestyle.

It's important to stand out in the crowd on video channels and search engines. Aim your headlines at capturing the imagination regarding your topic. So don't be dull - test out curiosity, shock or fun tactics for getting those download clícks.

First of all, get set up.

When you're starting out, it's ok to just use your webcam. It will give you the chance to practice while you're honing your presentation skills before you fork out for a camcorder. When you're ready, you can purchase an inexpensive digital video recorder, like say the Flip and a tripod.

Make sure you take your videos in well-lit conditions. Inside your office you'll need decent lighting, or you can whip out your camera when you're out and about. It makes for a much more interesting back drop.

OK. So now let's go through each of my TOP 10 TIPS for creating and using videos to market your business.

#1: Keep Your Videos Short

Whether you're loading videos on YouTube or just putting them up on your website or blog, it's really important to keep to just 5 or 6 minutes.

If needed, you can of course break longer topics up into a series of smaller videos, which you could market as a series (see tip 10).

#2: Post Videos on Your Sales PagesM

You can use video on your sales page to introduce the main benefits of your product or business opportuníty. How about placing a video on your sales page or sign up pages.

This helps to orientate visitors and to highlight the main points of your regular, written sales letter.

#3: Choose Your Keywords Carefully

This is really an important tip, because it will affect how your video gets picked up by the search engines and other internet 'bots' that seek out content.

Research your top keyword phrases. Pick keywords that will attract the right kind of traffic and leads - research like crazy to find out what your prospects are looking for - and be sure to include your keywords in headings and tags and description boxes.

Doing this research and tracking clíck thrus (CTR) and conversions will help you secure your most cost-effective keywords and keyword phrases.

#4: Have a Clear Purpose & Structure

Your keywords will help make sure you target your video on the right purpose before you start. Does your video answer the questions your visitors have in their heads when they're searching for solutions. Make things crystal clear.

Stay on topic and give added value - unique value if possible - and your videos will convert much better for you. Write down a structure - a set of headings - for what you're going to cover. Have a script if necessary.

You can mention any links that you have to another video specifically on that related topic.

#5: Look at the Camera

The aim here is to connect with your audience, both in the topic you choose and the content as well as in your communication style. Remember you are talking to people - real live people. What are their needs and wants, hopes and fears.

With regards to presentation, stick your líst of headings right next to the camera so you stay looking in the camera at all times, rather than looking away at a screen or down at your notes.

An authentic and honest video is far more valuable than a glossy TV like broadcast. So don't worry if you're not up to TV presenter standards. Just be yourself and enjoy the opportuníty to reach out to people in a different way than using text copy.

#6: Create a Clear Call to Action

You should create one very clear service and call to action. It's very important that people know exactly what to do as a result of watching your video.

What is your most wanted response (MWR)? Don't confuse visitors with lots of options and different offers. Focus on the single most wanted response.

Alternatively, you can put your video up next to a sign up box - linked to your emaíl marketing - and clearly ask them to opt ín, more than once. Provide an incentive, such as a free report or further video coaching resources.

#7: Encourage Comments on Your Video

One of the best things about video is that it's a very personal, social medium. The more people that are talking about your video and passing it on, the more buzz you'll create.

Visitors may return to your page to see who has commented since their last comment. There may accumulate a whole líst of tips that have been created by your niche community, prompted by your initial video post.

It’s Official: Google’s Proposal For Crawling AJAX URLs is Live

2010-03-03T14:36:00.000+05:30

Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall. The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned that the Google Web Toolkit team is eager to help with any implementation questions over at their community forums.

If your site uses AJAX and have uncrawlable URLs due to a hash mark (#) as part of the URL structure, this implementation is likely worth looking into.

AT&T Picks Yahoo Over Google To Provide Search On First Android Phone

2010-03-02T20:16:00.000+05:30

Yahoo has scored a spot as the default search engine on the new Motorola Backflip, AT&T’s first phone using the Android operating system. The web site Android and Me quotes this hands-on report from Engadget:

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It’s crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything’s been programmed to use Yahoo.

Indeed, a Yahoo spokesperson confirms for Search Engine Land that AT&T is using its search services on the Backflip:

We are happy that AT&T has chosen Yahoo! Search as the default mobile search service on the Motorola Backflip, AT&T’s first Android device. We have a long-standing relationship with AT&T and more than 80 carrier partnerships around the world for our award-winning mobile search experience. Mobile is a key corporate priority for Yahoo! and we are focused on making our personally relevant mobile Internet services, like search, available to the broadest audience possible on the widest range of devices.

There are a handful more Android-powered phones coming soon from AT&T, but it’s unknown if they’ll also use Yahoo as the default search provider.

Yahoo TimeSense: New Trends Tool Previewed At SMX West

2010-03-02T20:14:00.000+05:30

Today’s “Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines” session at SMX West took an interesting twist when Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev took the stage to discuss his company’s efforts in the real-time search space.

There was some quiet chuckling when Davtchev showed screenshots of a competitor’s tool, Google Trends, as a way of determining what queries deserve to get real-time results. But he did so only to contrast a new Yahoo tool called Yahoo TimeSense that, to my knowledge, has never been seen before.

Davtchev described Yahoo TimeSense as the company’s version of Google Trends, but (as you’d expect) says it’s better because

TimeSense uses language modeling to determine what queries are relevant to “right now”
TimeSense is better at identifying long-tail queries, whereas Google Trends is good at identifying “head” queries

Davtchev said Yahoo TimeSense is “not public yet,” and sounded as if he was hinting that the tool will be readily available at some point in the future. A Yahoo spokesperson tells us, “The screenshot Ivan shared is from an internal tool that we currently use within Yahoo! We will let you know if/when we make it publicly available. It’s certainly something we’re looking into.”

On a related note, Davtchev also indicated that Yahoo will soon introduce real-time search results beyond their current placement in Yahoo’s news shortcut.

Google To Increase Abuse Alerts To Webmasters

2010-03-02T19:54:00.000+05:30

Saying that web site hacking and other forms of abuse is on the rise, Google has announced plans to step up the notifications it sends to webmasters when the company finds these problems.

Beginning this month, Google will use the Message Center area in Google Webmaster Tools to notify site owners about

Spammy or abused user-generated content
Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
Suspected hacking

When possible, the alerts will include specific pages that Google believes have been compromised by a third party.

In order to receive the alerts, webmasters obviously need to be signed up and have verified their site(s) in Webmaster Tools. Site owners who haven’t done that yet will be able to retrieve messages from Google going back a year.

Happy Birthday, Yahoo: 15 Years Old Today

2010-03-02T19:49:00.000+05:30

Although its web site launched in 1994, Yahoo is celebrating its 15th birthday today — that’s in honor of the company being incorporated on March 1, 1995.

The story of Yahoo’s founding is well known: Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of web sites originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” and renamed “Yahoo” in 1994. Yang and Filo, in fact, reminisce about the company they created in a blog post tonight on the Yahoo corporate blog:

“After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.”

Google Chrome Rolls Out Translate Feature

2010-03-02T19:46:00.000+05:30

Google has just released a new beta feature for Chrome browser – a translation prompt that automatically appears whenever you are visiting a site which is in a language different from your preferred language setting. This is an instant feature that don’t require you to download any plug-ins or extensions.

Previously, you need to go to translate.google.com and then paste the url of the site that you want to translate into your own language. This becomes tedious especially if you are citing that page. Either you link to translated page with a different URL or to the original page with the foreign language. So that when you are browsing a translated page and you click a link, your browser would usually return an error. But now, when Google translate the page, the URL remains the same. So clicking on a link will bring you to the correct page.

In addition to this feature, Google is also introducing a new feature on privacy settings in addition to the existing incognito mode. This is one feature of Chrome browser which lets you browse the web without leaving a trace on your computer. The new privacy feature will let you manage your privacy settings in the new “Privacy” section of Chrome’s Options dialog. You can now control how cookies, images, JavaScripts, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis.

Get More Productive with ‘StayFocusd’ Google Chrome Plugin

2010-03-01T19:34:00.001+05:30

Saying hello to all Google Chrome users out there: today’s post is right for you. I am sharing a new (fun!) productivity addon for Google Chrome: “StayFocusd”. Now an introduction which I loved first of all:

You sit down at the computer, and you swear you’ll be productive. Next thing you know, it’s twelve hours later. You’ve checked your email, updated your Facebook status, browsed the trending topics on Twitter, read your RSS feeds, looked up your favorite band on Wikipedia, vanity googled yourself, cyber-stalked your ex, looked at all your high-school crushes’ Facebook photos, and lost a week’s pay playing online poker.

Sure, few of us won’t want to check the tool out after such an intro. So I did. After an instant installation (can’t get used so far, no need to restart!) you will notice the tool icon in the browser address bar. Click on it and you’ll be able to block/unblock the current site:

Here’s what it stands for:
1. Block this entire site: This will block you from browsing any page on the current site once time runs out.
2. Advanced options are the following:

Only block pages on the current subdomain;
Only allow pages on the current subdomain;
Enter a custom url: This will allow you to block or allow any specific page, path, or query.

The last one is cool: it allows you for example to block yourself from browsing Delicious come while still being able to access delicious.com/save to save important pages.

Naturally, you can configure the period of time after which the site gets blocked via settings which also list all the blocked and allowed sites (and allow to customize the list):

However the removal feature is somewhat wicked. Here’s what I got after I tried to unblock my test site:

Here’s the explanation:

Can I change the amount of time I’m allowed per day?
Sure, as long as your time for the day hasn’t run out yet. Just visit the Options page and enter the number of minutes per day you want to allow yourself. If your time has run out for the day, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow before you can update your settings.

Well, I guess it means I won’t be able to change the options until tomorrow. Farewell to Google for today.
And here’s what the blocked site looks like after the time runs out:

Now, all you have to do is to stay focused!

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

2010-03-01T19:28:00.000+05:30

Okay, I admit that at first light, social media marketing (SMM) may appear like child’s play. After all, what is there to it? Create a bunch of profiles, Digg a little, Stumble a bit and you are set, right? Wrong! That is the exact attitude that can kill your social media campaign (and dreams) before it can begin.

I don’t mean to suggest that it is beyond a social media novice to successfully carry out a marketing campaign. Armed with enough knowledge, I am fairly certain, even a novice will be able to pull it off. Nor am I making it out to be more complex than rocket science. However, approaching it with a complacent attitude definitely won’t be helpful. Social media, as much ‘fun’ as it is, is not without rules. And successful social media marketing is possible only if one, pro or novice, follows these rules.

Do’s!

1. Build a strong social network. So, you have a profile on Twitter, so, it has over thousands followers. You pat yourself on your back for building such a strong social network. Boy, are you ever so wrong? Have you taken care to ascertain how many of these thousands of followers are legit? And how often do you interact with your followers, respond to the tweets you receive? Less than positive answers to either of these questions mean that despite the impressive number of followers, your social network is as weak as it can get. Interact with your network, only that can ensure your network is as true to you as you want it to be and that your message is conveyed successfully.

2. Expend your effort building the trust quotient of your site. If yours is not a trusted site, set about working on improving the areas it is found lacking in. When you engage in SMM, you are inviting the entire world to scrutinize your site, if you think it won’t be able to stand up it, wait until you are ready to launch you campaign. You can start by ensuring your site is clean of harmful viruses and spammy links.

3. It’s simple, it may sound a little hackneyed, but it is also true – pretty impossible to drive a social media campaign without a blog. Bloggers pioneered and now sustain social media, without them, there would be nothing to Digg, or Like or Stumble. Social media would be reduced to a couple of social networks and unending streams of status updates. (All right, maybe a little more than that, but you get the picture). Integrate a blog (pretty easy to do with Wordpress) into your site and update it regularly with ‘good’ content!

4. This is a classic tip, works every time. You may remember a time when ‘List’ posts were all the rage (as a matter of fact, they are still very popular), how they could draw traffic to a blog like nothing else could. Well, now with the immense popularity that video sharing sites seem to enjoy, creating a video in the vein of a List post (for example, a ‘How To’ or an ‘x Best Tips’ video) and uploading it on sites like YouTube and Tubemogul is something that can really benefit your SMM efforts. Sure, you wouldn’t say no to instant exposure and the possibility of reaching millions of viewers. Apart from YouTube, you can promote the links to the videos on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and effortlessly double the exposure your brand stands to receive.

5. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your finger on the pulse. Bad anatomical idioms aside, being aware of all the changes happening around you on the web is important not just in social media marketing, but any kind of marketing on line. Subscribe to feeds from relevant sites, use an RSS reader (like, Zune or Feedreader) and be among the first to comment on posts you like or find particularly relevant. Commenting on posts is great way to get in to the thick of the social activity on a site, but being the first commenter will give you the opportunity to initiate a discussion and channel it in the direction you wish to.

6. Social media marketing can hardly be possible unless you are willing to be, you know, social. It’s a given that you should make your presence felt on all the major social sites, but what is equally important, but is often overlooked is being part of micro-communities – that are relevant to your business. While your message may get lost in the irrelevant ‘noise’ on established social sites, it has more probability of reaching the intended audience in a smaller, but niche, micro-community. If you have a site about pet grooming, joining a niche community for dog lovers like Dogster will greatly help your business.

7. Stick to your brand philosophy! Just because you are depending on a (relatively) modern approach to marketing doesn’t mean you have to abandon your brand’s basic ideology, which has hitherto guided you. Let your brand philosophy guide your SMM strategy, it will stop you from over-promising and help sustain your brand identity.

8. Be familiar with the social culture of the communities you frequent – very important, lest you commit a social faux pas and the other members banish you from the community. If you have ever participated in a forum discussion, you know what I mean. Like forums, social communities have a certain culture – certain jargons they favor, certain topics that are preferred. If you wish to be accepted as part of a community, be sure you are well-versed with its ways and are prepared to adapt. Though essentially they do the same thing, Digg and Reddit has different and distinct cultures; if you are found to be pro-Reddit on Digg, you’ll be buried even before you can say social!

DON’Ts!

9. Don’t ‘spam’ on social sites. A no-brainer, really. Everyone on the Internet knows that Spam = Evil, so if you are engaging in social spamming, you are clearly prepared to see your SMM campaign die an extremely quick death. But to those of you, who are yet to commit this cardinal of sins, let me say this: DON’T DO IT! Not only you lose your credibility, social or otherwise, but all your efforts will go to naught as well. Social spamming isn’t limited to offering unsolicited irrelevant links on social sites; posting promotional comments (with or without links), Digging or Stumbling posts on popular topics that are in no way related to your site, even sending automated Direct Messages on twitter are considered spammy practices.

10. Avoid blatant marketing tactics, be subtle. I know what you are thinking, “what’s the point of having a ‘subtle’ marketing campaign?” I am afraid that’s the way things work in social media. The ‘social’ element (a.k.a user/follower/fan) in social media apparently has little patience for overtly promotional and gimmicky marketing tactics. Give then fun contests, quizzes and games that don’t ‘corrupt’ the social space too much, and they’ll love you!

11. Don’t forget to keep your social profiles live and updated. One would think, this goes without saying, but there are enough ‘dead’ profiles out there to change one’s thinking. I don’t like following, friending or even ‘fanning’ inactive profiles, I can only imagine it is true of other social media users too. Freshness is of the essence in social media, if all a profile can provide is stale information, it is of little use to anyone.

12. Don’t forget about Online Reputation Management. A significant amount of signals monitored in ORM come from social sites. So, while you are engaged in SMM, it is of vital importance to gauge user reaction to your product and to take appropriate measures to counter any less-than favorable signal. If these negative signals point to an actual problem with your product, take them to heart and address the issue immediately. If they aren’t, work to rectify the wrong perception
.

13. Don’t drop search in favor of social. You SMM efforts should complement your SEO efforts. Choosing one over the other will turn out to be nothing so much as a mistake. Continue building links and optimizing your site while you build your presence in social media.

14. Don’t try to do too much too fast. Let your SMM take a natural course. Natural being the keyword here; just because you figured you got into the game a little too late, don’t try to make up for it by working over time. So, tweeting updates every half an hour – bad idea. Your followers want to receive useful tweets from you, even one tweet a day will very likely keep them happy. Try not to flood their streams with less-then-useful, overtly promotional tweets, this holds true for your activity on other social sites as well.

15. You social media activities should be primed to bring exposure to your site. They certainly should not be used to go on the offence and slander your competition. Battling it out with a competition can do more harm than good to your SMM efforts.

16. Don’t engage in social climbing – you can’t have a successful SMM campaign if you have only people with big, established profiles on your network. While seeking to climb the social ladder, arguably in an effort to boost the importance of your profile, you may lose out on many a potential customer.
Consider these rules while you are chalking out your SMM marketing plan and you can stop worrying about your efforts backfiring on you.

Google Buys Online Image Editor Picnik

2010-03-01T19:25:00.001+05:30

Google has just acquired another company as announced by the company’s official blog. It’s Picnik, a fun, online image editor that was founded in 2005 and since then become one of the most feature-rich online image editor partnering with various photo uploading sites including Flickr.

Picnik offers some easy-to-use tool that you can use to enhance, modify, and add more excitement to your photos. All done online at the Picnik site, I mean website.

Picnik claims of millions of visitors monthly, which is probably one of the reason why Google acquired it.

While Picasa Web Album is a pretty good photo uploading site, tying up with Picnik could add some luster to Google’s photo sharing site.

But of course it is still uncertain yet what Google will do with Picnik. Although the Picnik folks said that nothing is going to change right away. They are just moving to Google office as they continue to provide the same service, at the moment.

Knowing Google, it will just be a matter of time before it makes use of Picnik to advance a certain goal. In the meantime, congratulations to the Picnik team!

Bing Adds Search History to Search Autosuggest

2010-03-01T19:21:00.000+05:30

The Bing Search Blog has just announced that starting today, your query history will now be part of its search autosuggest feature. Meaning, Bing does not only analyze your usual search behavior based on previous searches but now will use your actual previous searches to suggest search terms for your current search.

This could be a helpful search feature if you use Bing often. For recurring searches you don’t have to retype the whole search strings anymore as Bing will pull out your previous searches and suggest them to you. To make the search suggestion based on your search history, Bing is even coloring them purple, similar to the standard color of visited links on webpages. The usual Bing autosuggest terms are still in blue colored text.

Of course, there’s a caveat here when it comes to user privacy. So to protect your privacy, Bing is suggesting that you turn History off any time that you feel you need to. You can even selectively remove any portion of your search history via the Manage History option of your browser’s Bing settings.

What Has Google Got Against You?

2010-03-01T11:28:00.000+05:30

Google is a search engine. Wrong. Google is a reputation management tool.

If asked anything, whether about a band, shop, company, name or place, what is the first thing you do? Google it. Even your grandma Googles it now. It officially became a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary 4 years ago. It is undeniable that information a Google search brings back can dramatically affect your opinion.

But have you thought about what happens when someone Googles you? Most people probably haven't tried (do it now, see what happens, I'll wait!). Chances are about 6 people you share your name with pop out of their respective social networking profiles, probably one or two of the results is yours. 123people.co.uk may well be there too, this is a site designed for searching out people and will bring together any profile you have on Facebook, MySpace, etc as well as any mentions of your name in the news (even if it not actually you), indeed that scathing review you left on Amazon 3 years ago, and the wish list you made when you where 15.

OK so that's me but none the less, many people don't think too much about the reputation trail there leaving online. This rings especially true when I tell you that recent research shows that 79% of surveyed hiring managers and job recruiters review online information about job applicants AND 70% had rejected candidates based on what they had found.

So is privacy dead? Not quite but, whether you're a Facebook addict, Tweetaholic or both there are a few things you need to keep in mind whilst updating your status or tagging those photos from last night.

Whilst being everywhere on the internet maximizes your chances of being seen (which could help you get a job), you need to think about your Personal Brand, in 2010 your CV is much more than a piece of paper!

A few hints and tips...

Keep it simple - Do you really need to be everywhere on the net, having profiles on just one or two social networking sites will make it far easier to keep track of your image.

In the with the new, out with the old - Still got that MySpace profile that you haven't used in years? Delete it, You never can be sure what will crop up on somebody's search for you.

Check your settings - Most social network's default settings are designed to make you as open as possible, think about what parts of your profile you want to be seen and by who.

Know who's following you - You need to think about who you're allowing into your network, how well do you really know that guy you met at the bus stop last week? Are you willing to have your colleagues or boss seeing what you got up to at the weekend? Either let them in and change your activity accordingly or decide to keep them out.

Be consistent - If you're trying to build a 'Personal Brand' it needs to be consistent, changing your picture and what your tweeting about daily will reduce the chances of you being recognized and make you appear scatty and unsure of yourself.

You're going to have a profile online whether you've made it yourself or not, so make sure your in control of it, get it to work for you rather than against you.

5 Ways to Increase Social Media Marketing Productivity

2010-02-27T11:25:00.000+05:30

As social media continues to grow at an exhilarating pace, it can become challenging for marketers to balance the time-consuming demands of today’s social media marketing landscape with their career’s core focus. Whether you’re a full-time social media marketer whose main responsibility is to manage social media campaigns, a brand-side marketer who dabbles in social media throughout the day, or a consultant who networks with others in the industry, it’s important to streamline your social media initiatives as much as possible, in order to save time & stay focused. Here are 5 musts for boosting the efficiency of social media marketing in the workplace.

1. Check in at increments

“Check in” at periodic increments throughout the day, but don’t let it consume your day. It’s easy for a one minute check-in to become 10 minutes of reading Tweets & links. If you’re not a full-time social marketer, schedule time in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day to “check in” on your favorite social networks. And if you are a full-time social marketer, check in at hourly increments. When you need to knock out a larger scale project, tune out the social chatter – except for any key, “emergency-scale” tweets. Those other tweets & updates can wait. Really.

2. Schedule tweets in advance

If you’re sharing content that’s not time-sensitive – i.e. articles, ideas, or commentary, schedule your Tweets in advance with a tool like SocialOomph. You can schedule Tweets once a day (or once a week), and then check in at a few increments throughout the day to engage with your following.

3. Focus on the most important tweets

If you’re a brand-side or full-time social media marketer, stay on top the most important & relevant Tweets by monitoring key phrases with RSS feeds. Tools like NewsFire can notify you in real time when someone Tweets about your brand. Obviously, if you’re @Starbucks, you’ll want to refine brand Tweets even further, or use an online reputation tool like Trackur.

4. Segment your social media universe

Thought leaders, real-life friends, and colleagues: there are many ways to segment your Twitter universe. By segmenting your list into different relationships, you can follow work or industry-related Twitter friends during working hours, and more “fun” Tweeps, like @aplusk & @theonion after hours. Twitter’s own list functionality & apps like Tweetdeck make it really easy to sort your relationships, and focus on the right ones at the right time.

5. Multi-task when you can, but don’t repeat updates

There are a lot of tools out there that can pull your Tweets and launch them to other networks. While those seem helpful on the surface, you have to remember your audience & the type of content & frequency that works on each network. While short, quick 140-character updates are welcome on Twitter, your Facebook fans can grow tired of those updates quickly, and would prefer less frequent updates of rich content, such as videos, contests, and photos. So instead of repeating the same exact updates on your different social networks, use a tool like HootSuite to launch network-specific updates from one master account.
While all the growth & potential surrounding social media marketing is certainly exciting, it can become a bottomless pit of wasted time. But by staying focused on the right audience and streamlining as much as possible, you can be sure ALL of your marketing initiatives get the love they deserve.

3 Best Ways to Test Your Website Design in FireFox

2010-02-27T11:17:00.000+05:30

I am no web designer (I have neither time nor talent to learn web design), however for SEOs it is essential to know some basic tools and tips to test a website design when it is delivered.
Thus this post is not intended to share some advanced tips for web developers: instead it lists three quick ways to test a web design in FireFox:

1. Check how a website looks in other browsers

There are a number of FireFox addons that allow to view the current page in an alternative browser:

Chrome View;
IE view (or this handy IE button);
Safari view;
Opera view

OR: install one combined addon: Browser view plus is an experimental addon that lets the user load Firefox links, bookmarks, or pages in Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Chrome Application Window, Safari, Opera, or any other external browser. It also allows to change context menu text, language, or selected browsers, at any time, without restarting Firefox.

2. Check how a website looks in different resolutions

Firesizer
This addon allows you to view and change the screen resolution from your browser status bar:

You can of course customize the set of available resolutions via a small handy dialog:

Yet Another Window Resizer
This is a similar to the above one but it allows to resize the browser window from the right-click context menu (so it’ just a matter of taste which one you prefer to use):

Its options also allow to customize the sets of available resolutions:

3. Check how a site works with CSS and JavaScript disabled

For this one you won’t need any extra addons: just the old good Web Developer plugin we all love:
You can disable JavaScript or CSS styles right from the toolbar options to make sure all elements of your page are easily accessed by all people and search engines.
Disable CSS:

Disable Javascript:

It’s A Fatal Mistake To Copy Successful Web Sites

2010-02-26T11:15:00.000+05:30

At a search engine marketing conference, several of us gave a session on website usability topics ranging from usability and SEO to site architecture and requirements gathering. Afterward, there was time for questions by the audience. Someone asked, “Why don’t we all just copy Amazon.com?” I replied, “Never, ever copy what Amazon does.” The audience responded with surprise, thinking I was not a fan of Amazon.

Not true. The reason you don’t want to copy a successful site like Amazon is that their website requirements are not likely to be the same as your site requirements. Their users may have different characteristics than your site visitors. Their customers’ needs may be completely different. You don’t have the user, traffic analysis and usability testing data they’ve collected over the years that they use as a base for their user interface, information architecture and content delivery.

Your website is unique

Today, with blog templates or content management system software being the design foundation for many sites, web page layouts are fairly consistent and come with no surprises. We’ll find two or three columns, a header, footer, sidebar navigation and a picture or two. The logo typically goes into the top upper left corner. It would be unusual to find a page beginning with a copyright year, privacy policy and company address. Arriving to a solo column page with no header would be odd.

One wonders what creativity we’ve lost out on because we’re afraid to change the status quo. Usability folks like to promote consistency and user habits for design considerations. This is because anytime we are forced to re-learn where items are customarily placed, it slows us down. There is a risk of user confusion. We’re told that it takes only a few seconds to lose your visitor, so why take any chances?

Many web designers have been creating product navigation menus the way Amazon has been doing it, believing that if Amazon’s way is making them a profit, it ought to do the same for their sites too. Why wouldn’t this work?

Understanding mental models

Amazon has expert knowledge of their customers’ mental model. This means they know how their visitors search and browse their site. They know what their users want to find, or learn, before they add an item to the cart. They know how what words are chosen most often to locate certain products, so their information architects can then create their entire information architecture based on user language, keyword choices, and traffic patterns.

When someone says they will make your website easier to use, ask them what mental model they are referring to. Are they going to make it easier for search engines to crawl and rank it? This is a searcher mental model and one an SEO is more likely to be focused on. An information architect wants to know the mental model of your target users. What are your customer needs? What types of behaviors can you expect from them? Many websites have different user paths on one website.

For example, colleges provide different types of information for students, parents, alumni, staff and teachers. Each type of person has a different mental model, with their own needs and expectations. A common mistake is to design identical user paths for everyone, ignoring the specific financial, emotional and practical needs of each user group. Remember that your website is unique. The better you understand what motivates and interests your site visitors, the more competitive your site will be.

Findability and manageability

Information architecture supports findability and usability. It can also support organic SEO practices related to on-page content and word usage. One area that Amazon has helped to pioneer is user management of information. Their customers are recognized by the use of cookies and purchase history. There are different user types for them to track. Some people are affiliates. Some arrive for the first time because they received a gift certificate. Others are regular customers, so Amazon has a chance to study the kinds of products they like. Amazon users can manage their own wish lists, accounts, leave book reviews, send gifts and follow author blogs. Do you know your site visitors this well?

Information architects use terms such as taxonomies and semantics to help describe what they do. Simply put, they organize categories of information into something that makes logical sense. A usability oriented person is interested in the same thing because words can create momentum or promote frustration.
For example, which one of these category links is the best choice to find online specials?

Closeout Sale
Gift Ideas
International
New Releases
Top Sellers
Today’s Sales

What if your customer wants to find sales or new releases by product category? Can they tell, by looking at these links, if they can sort by price? What types of products does this site offer? There are no clues offered in these link labels. By “today”, when is the cut-off time? What does “international” mean?

Interestingly, the website that uses these category links has all of its customer service information at the very bottom of the homepage, lumped into a box as if an afterthought. What message does this send to customers? Was any user testing performed? Apparently not. However, there was attention put on the searcher mental model as far as search engine queries go. Unfortunately, the site owner learned that search results did not equal conversions. In their case, they required both a rebuilt information architecture as well as usability adjustments to increase and support conversions.

A 360 degree team effort

Your website is and should be the manifestation of your own vision. Sure, it’s fun and helpful to study other websites. But those sites should inspire you to try new ideas or even have the courage to think outside the box. Surround yourself with those who have the technical skills to implement your vision. These people will be your project managers, search engine marketers, social media marketers, information architects, usability and user experience consultants, web designers and developers. Ask them questions about where they acquire their inspiration. Test site designs on people. Research, with and without search engines, the language and terms your site visitors use to find your products or services. Be sure to write out your specific site requirements and business goals. Write guidelines to be sure everyone on your team sticks to the game plan.
And know that nobody understands your customers better than you do. Not even Amazon.

Google Adds “Nearby” Local Search To Options Panel

2010-02-26T11:11:00.001+05:30

Google has expanded the choices in its Search Options panel with today’s announcement of a tool to refine searches by location.

After doing a search and opening the “Show Options” panel, you’ll see a new link labeled “nearby.”

Clicking that link leads to a few refinement options: You can use the default location Google has for you, or type in a custom location for your search. The other option is to select between City, Region, or State-level searches, as shown below.

In these images, I’ve already done a local search on the term “seattle restaurants.” This new search refinement doesn’t really do much in a situation like this. The businesses that are listed in the “7-pack” didn’t change in my testing; the only changes were to some of the organic listings when I switched from city to region to state.

n Google’s blog post, it uses examples such as “things to do on St. Patrick’s Day” and “food blogs” — more generic terms are clearly how this option is meant to be used.

Much like Google’s decision last year to show local results on non-local queries, this new search refinement could impact how people search. With several easily-clickable links on the screen, searchers could no longer need to repeat searches with new queries, such as going from “seattle luxury car dealer” to “bellevue luxury car dealer” to “tacoma luxury car dealer,” etc. One-word search queries are reportedly up by 17% in the past year, and this location refinement may reinforce that trend … if, in fact, people are actually using Google’s Search Options panel.

Google Advertises Chrome … On Bing!

2010-02-26T03:30:00.001+05:30

It’s not unusual for other search engines like Yahoo, Bing or Ask to advertise on Google. But I’ve never seen Google run an ad on another search engine until now.

I did a search this evening on Bing for Google Chrome. To my surprise, there was an ad right at the top of the page advertising Chrome, apparently from Google:

What’s that big box below the ad? That’s Bing doing a special “Best Match” unit. It’s completely editorial and not connected with the ad. But above it is definitely an ad — that’s why it says Sponsored Listing.
I also see the ads if I search for just chrome or browser
:

And at Yahoo, I’ve spotted an ad appearing for google chrome, though it’s for Google’s personalized home page, not for Chrome:

There’s a chance someone else might be running these ad, of course. But I don’t know of any Google Chrome affiliate programs out there, which means there’s little incentive for anyone else but Google to be doing this. But I’m checking with Google and will update, if it really isn’t from them.

Postscript: Google confirms that they are indeed placing these ads, that they’re always looking for ways to promote their products. Google also said they’ve run search-targeted ads on other search engines before this. As for Chrome, they’ve done ads in other places such on Hulu, for example.

Below, some examples of Bing advertising on Google, for bing and search engines:

Google Caffeine May Be Months Away & You Can’t See It

2010-02-26T03:29:00.000+05:30

While some webmasters anxiously wait for Google to roll out its Google Caffeine search infrastructure any day now, Google says it may not happen for “months.” What’s more, the IP address of the one data center where Caffeine was said to be available may have changed, and Google is no longer saying where users can see Caffeine search results. Here’s the latest on Google’s “next-generation architecture.”

When Will Caffeine Launch?

A Google spokesperson tells Search Engine Land that Caffeine is still live at only one data center, and says “we expect to roll it out to all data centers over the coming months.”

That’s a far different story than before. In early November, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote a blog post saying that “the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays.” It’s now two months since the holidays, and Google is talking about Caffeine’s launch in months, not days or even weeks.

What happened?

“We run lots of tests with this big a change to our infrastructure,” the Google spokesperson says. “We want the new system to meet or exceed the abilities of our current system, and it can take time to ensure that everything looks good.”

Here at Search Engine Land, it seems like we get emails every week from readers telling us they think Caffeine is live. And some recent Google news coverage seemed to suggest maybe it was. For example, in this week’s Wired magazine piece, author Steven Levy writes about Caffeine in the past tense, as if it’s already launched:

“The most recent major change, codenamed Caffeine, revamped the entire indexing system to make it even easier for engineers to add signals.”

It’s possible that something was lost in translation between the time Levy spoke with Google about Caffeine and the article was published. But even Matt Cutts himself spoke about Caffeine in the past tense when quoted last October in a BusinessWeek interview:

“Caffeine was primarily an infrastructural change. That was a huge undertaking over many months from the crawl and indexing team.”

Despite all that, Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center. But that doesn’t mean you can easily see it for yourself.

Where Can I See Caffeine Now?

You can’t. Or maybe you can. Google doesn’t seem to want anyone to know. Caffeine is still live at the same data center it’s always been, but that doesn’t mean you can see it.

“The data center remains the same,” Google tells us, “but different IP addresses can map to different data centers at different times due to how Google manages its traffic. Because of how Google employs custom load-balancing, there is not a single IP address that will always reach the Caffeine data center. For example, one IP address might still send half of its traffic to the Caffeine data center and half of its traffic to a different data center.”

In late November, Matt Cutts confirmed that Caffeine was available about 50% of the time at this IP address: 209.85.225.103. But that 50% figure may not necessarily be the case today. “It varies from day-to-day as the we push various binaries and data out,” Google says.

And when we asked if that same IP address currently points to the data center where Caffeine is live, Google’s spokesperson told us, “I don’t have a specific IP address I can share.”

Final Thoughts

This is quite a change from last August, when Google first announced Caffeine. Pre-announcing a change to its search infrastructure was newsworthy enough; the fact that Google also set up a developer sandbox at www2.sandbox.google.com and asked for user feedback was groundbreaking as a webmaster outreach measure.

By early November, Google had retired the sandbox where anyone could test the new results. And now Google doesn’t even want webmasters to know which IP points to the Caffeine date center as we all wait for Caffeine to roll out … which might not happen for months.

16 Free Online Link Building & Development Tools

2010-02-26T03:25:00.000+05:30

In order to rank #1 on major search engines such a Google, Yahoo! and Bing, a link builder needs to know the back link profiles of their competitors and industry allies. Having this kind of knowledge makes link building easier, more efficient and most all more effective.

The tools listed below will not only help you discover your competition's backlink profiles but will also provide ways to obtain relevant back links yourself.

TOOL #1 - Backlink Watch - The Backlink Watch Tool a very simple way to check a website's back link URL's, anchor text and total OBL's (outbound links) on the same page as that link.

TOOL #2 - Analyze Backlinks - Another gold mine for exploring a competitor's back links. This one provides more valuable options that allow you to filter out same domain URL's and to search for factors such as target keyword mentions surrounding the links.

TOOL #3 - Yahoo Site Explorer - Not really a linking tool, but you could quickly check a site's inlink count and it's top 10-1000 back links. Although this tool isn't much more better than the previous 2, it does show the title of the linking pages and allows you to track you own websites if signed in and verified ownership of site.

TOOL #4 - Google Search (link:yoursite.com) - No different than the one above except for the fact that the number of back links according to Google's search engine is ALWAYS considerably lower than Yahoo!'s results. But the links that made it to Google's results are assumingly affecting the search rankings.

TOOL #5 - Alexa Backlink Checker - You can see total domains linking to a website and which domains they are. This Alexa tool also provides other great website data.

TOOL #6 - Bad Neighborhood Text Link Tool - Great way to see what type of links a website accumulates, whether it be yours or a potential link partner.

TOOL #7 - SoloSEO Link Search Tool - Quite possibly the easiest way online to find relevant back links, that are fairly easy to obtain.

Web Confs Backlink Tools - Webconfs has over 20 SEO tools to offer. But these are their best link building tools.

TOOL #8 - Webconfs' Back link Anchor Text Analysis - Compare the top ranking site's text links to yours. Is there a difference?

TOOL #9 - Webconfs' Back link Builder - Enter a keyword. Copy whole list(s), paste into excel. Filter.., or, get to work.

TOOL #10 - Webconfs' Backlink Summary - A quick summary similar to the results delivered by Analyze Backlinks & Backlink Watch.

TOOL #11 - SEO for FireFox Plugin - Besides being able to provide you with on-demand access to data of the top ranking site's instantly, the SEO for Firefox Tool also provides a great feature that highlights nofollow links (in red), so it's easy to identify which inlinks count and which don't.

TOOL #12 - Google Webmaster Tools - Besides getting the best perspective of your website through the eyes of Google, the Google Webmaster Tools also tells you the links they've found, and their anchor text.

TOOL #13 - Link Harvester - This tool is toward the end of the list because it provides the type of data far beyond what the basic linker needs. Nonetheless, it's a oldie, but goodie.

TOOL #14 - Search Combination Tool by We Build Pages - Not really a link building too at all. But adding phrases like "resources", "links", "favorite sites", "suggest url", etc. could add some fun to it.

TOOL #15 - Recip Links - A tool that spiders a site (or list of sites) and checks to see if they are links to a specified domain.

TOOL #16 - Link Appeal Tool - Is a link from your website really worth it? Find out with this tool how valuable your website is based on several factors. Aim to get links from sites of higher value than yours.

Google Real Time Search Now Shows Updates From Facebook Fan Pages

2010-02-25T03:32:00.002+05:30

Google’s Real Time Search has gained a new data source, updates from Facebook fan pages. Google had announced a deal to list this information back in December, and now it’s finally being implemented. Google has tweeted the news.

See our detailed guide, Google Launches Real Time Search Results to understand how Google Real Time Search works, where it appears and how to use it. Facebook fan page updates now appear within those results, which include all of these sources:

Twitter tweets
Google News links
Google Blog Search links
Newly created web pages
Freshly updated web pages
FriendFeed updates
Jaiku updates
Identi.ca updates
TwitArmy updates
Google Buzz posts
MySpace updates
Facebook fan page updates

All but the last three were part of Google Real Time Search when it launched in December. MySpace material was added this month. So were Google Buzz posts. Our How To Search Google Buzz post provides detailed instructions on how to search on Google Real Time Search for just Buzz or Twitter information.

With Facebook, it’s important to note that it is only Facebook fan page updates that are included. Things that are shared on fan pages by fan page owners — such as links, status updates, photos and vidoes — can now be found in Google Real Time Search. However, comments made by non-owners on fan pages will not be included. Nor will updates that are made on personal pages. Our Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals article explains more about this. And while Bing is getting more data than Google, as covered in that article, it has yet to make any of it findable.

Want to see some of the Facebook content. Try this link. That configures Google Real Time Search to show only updates from Facebook, as you’ll see here:

From that link, you can add more words to narrow your search to particular topics that appear in Facebook fan page updates. For example, here’s a search for updates about the Olympics that come from Facebook fan pages:

You can see that the first update is from the Global Laugher Network fan page, as I’ve pointed at below:

This is also a good time for search marketers and marketers in general to think again about Facebook, if you haven’t already. More and more Facebook content has been made visible to search engines over the years. Also in that time, fan pages were added but still aren’t used by some. Google’s move makes having Facebook fan pages even more essential. Without one, you’re missing out on a chance to be found within yet another area, Google’s real time results.

And hey, speaking of fan pages, a reminder. You can follow Search Engine Land on its own Facebook fan page. I also maintain my own page here.

Postscript (4:45pm PT): I’ve been watching Google Real Time Search results closely since the launch. So far, I don’t see any Facebook fan page updates making it into Google’s real time box in its regular results. I’m sure they’ll come, however. They do show when you drill-down into real time results.
For example, consider this search for public schools:

After monitoring for a good 10 minutes, no Facebook updates appeared in the real time box. But if you click on the link above the box, the full results did have a Facebook update:

As I said, I’m sure Facebook visibility will improve as the launch matures. Ironically, despite us having posted this article to our our Facebook Fan Page:

You still can’t find that update in Google Real Time Search:

PPC Marketing vs Facebook Advertising

2010-02-25T03:24:00.000+05:30

Google is the Bad Egg of Internet Marketing & M-L-M. With so many accounts slapped and closed down for good, Top Gurus are turning to Facebook Advertising as a far superior option for cheap targeted traffíc.

Don't Put your Eggs in One Marketing Basket

Savvy Pro marketers like our members aren't panicking - we've always had a back up plan on the go. Our advice has been simple - don't put all your eggs in one basket - especially Google's! If you're using Pay Per Click Advertising, then make sure you also have some SEO going on - to generate organic traffic.

It takes a lot of hard work to get your site ranked through organic traffic - writing articles, forum posts, blogs, squidoo lenses, hub pages, video marketing - to build up your online presence and expertise for your chosen niche keywords.

Organic takes time. So if you don't have the patience and want to generate lots of traffic fast, PPC is a good to have as part of your marketing model.

But internet marketers and PPC experts are absolutely fed up with the arrogance of Google. So if we're not doing Google Adwords for our marketing, where do we get the masses of traffic we are still able to generate on a daily basis?

Adding Content Rich Social Marketing into the Mix

If you want free traffic, you usually have to spend masses of your time with manually writing copy and creating podcasts and video marketing. So really it's not free at all - time is money and all that. Hiring a copy writing group to create niche content can become quite expensive.

So all this organic SEO friendly traffic takes time to build up and requires consistent daily effort. This is good to add to your marketing mix but won't give you fast traffic.

What's super important too is that organic SEO content is ultimately still controlled by the search engines, so Google still has power over how you get seen by your prospects.

How hard is it these days to do enough clever keyword research to get your unique niche and rank on page one of Google. Almost impossible - especially if you're one newbie trying to compete with the big gurus in internet marketing or M-L-M network marketing arena.

What Marketing Strategies to Use that Beat Google Adwords Fair and Square?

What company is fair and sane, loves affiliates and direct marketers? What company attracts nearly 40 billion views a month and the traffic is uber quality and dirt cheap? Who is this company? Well, it's your friendly neighbourhood.... Facebook!

Facebook is the only company that Google actually acknowledges is a real competitor to them. Facebook is currently showing up as having four hundred million active members - that makes it 5 times the size of Google!!!

Yet Facebook ads represent just 5% of the advertising done on Google.

Now don't be thinking Facebook is just for youngsters! Insidefacebook.com published its statistics and show that only 11% of users are aged 13-17. While 33% are 18-25s, a whopping 18% are aged between 35 and 44. That's 100 million people! And a further 9% are aged 45-54 and 4% 55-65.

Don't spend another cent with Google till you've checked out Facebook Advertising.

Why Facebook is the New Face of Paid Advertising

Facebook is pretty much untapped compared to PPC advertising on Google, Yahoo or Bing.

It's truly a "sleeping giant", an ingenious source of traffic that is...

    • much bigger than PPC

    • less competitive than PPC

    • more targeted than PPC

    • less expensive than PPC

  And what's more, Facebook's integrated personal profiles mean you can hone in on exactly the demographic you are trying to target - not just on keyword phrases, you can also target only Facebook members who are in particular age groups, regions and/or have specifically stated certain interest areas - it's simply awesome how deep you can get into Facebook - giving you massive choice and combinations.

Because of this, Facebook allows you to use the same ad in many different ways so you can really hit the hot spots of your users and their interests. Imagine being able to target by age, gender, film interests, AND keywords... you can really hit your message home.

So what this means in practice is that the clicks you get on your Facebook ad are immensely more targeted and convert far better and cost far less than what you'd achieve on Google Adwords.

If all that targeting isn't enough to convince you, here are some more benefits of using Facebook advertising:

• Facebook is also great for newbies. It's really easy to use and to set up your campaigns. If you can send an email, you can do Facebook ads.

• Facebook ads work in any market and will give a far better ROI than PPC, even for affiliate marketing.

• Facebook advertiser competition is minimal right now, so now is the time to tap into this massive source of traffic.

• Your ad in Facebook can include not only titles and descriptions but also images, which you can't do with PPC ads.

• Facebook ads leave little wastage because you can seek out ultra targeted members who are likely to respond to your offer.

Following the Facebook Rules

There is a downside.

Facebook is hugely protective of its users. So you have to really study and follow their rules. And this will take you some time.

The general rule of thumb stems from what is called "permission marketing". So make sure you check this out so you don't get your account cancelled.

6 Ways to Extract All Links from the Current Page

2010-02-25T03:21:00.001+05:30

Seeing what a web page links out to is one of the major steps of SEO diagnostics process.
This way you can see which internal pages are given more emphasis to, which anchor texts are used for both internal and external links; you can identify some red flags of possibly paid links, research the site “neighborhood”, etc.

This post lists 6 tools to help you run the analysis of all links used on a page:

	Type	Internal vs External	Linked page info	Link details	Extract links
IWebTool Link Extractor	Web-based	no	Google PR	attributes (nofollow), title, anchor	no
Link Extractor	Web-based	no	no	Link anchor text	CSV
FireLink Report	FireFox (Firebug) addon	yes	no	Link anchor text	no
SEM tools	FireFox addon	no	no	Link position on a page	copy all / selected links
SEOquake	FireFox addon	yes	Google PR, incoming links, etc	nofollow	CSV
OutWit Hub	FireFox addon	yes	no	no	CSV

(Some details and screenshots can be found below)

1. IWebTool Link Extractor

(Web based)
Only 5 requests per hour are allowed for a free (and unregistered) user. The tool works pretty smoothly. The options include extracting links together with:

Title / anchor text of each one;
Full address;
All the attributes (including of course nofollow);
Google PageRank of the linked page (this one doesn’t seem to work properly):

2. Link Extractor

(Web based)
This is a basic but useful tool that extracts links from pages, displays them in a handy table including each link URL and link text (for image link it won’t show anything).
The best thing about it is that it allows to extract links to CSV file:

3. FireLink Report

(Firebug addon)
The addon generates the report containing all on-page links used on the current page grouped in 6 categories:

Internal and external
Internal only;
External only;
Absolute and relative;
Absolute only;
Relative only:

4. SEM tools link extractor

(FireFox addon)
This one extract links based on their position on a page.

5. SEOquake link extractor

(FireFox addon)
This one shows the wealth of linked page SEO stats:

Google PR;
# of results for SITE: search for the linked domain;
# of links to the page (via Yahoo! SiteExplorer);
Domain age (via Web Archive);
Delicious bookmarks of the URL; etc

6. OutWit Hub link extractor

(FireFox addon)
OutWit Hub is a powerful web page info extractor that can also extract links. It has many advanced abilities and can be configured in multiple ways (including support for the custom scraper). The basic default link scraper:

Extracts links;
Sorts internal links from external ones;
Offers quite a few various filtering options.

How to Use Google Analytics on Your Facebook Fan Page

2010-02-25T03:19:00.000+05:30

Looking to integrate your analytical data and tracking across your site, blog and now even your Facebook Fanpages? It appears that the UK’s WebDigi Dev team has figured out a pretty easy way to use Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page. With SEJ’s Facebook Page having over 4,000 users and lots of cool comments and voting going on, adding Google Analytics to track referrals or time on site will be quite awesome.

We launched our Facebook fan page earlier this month and as with all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

Google Starts Indexing Facebook Pages Updates

2010-02-25T03:16:00.000+05:30

Although both Facebook and Google has not yet announced this officially, some folks are reporting that status updates from Facebook pages will start showing up on Google search results today. Of course, this comes hot on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement of their content-sharing deal with Twittter.

And so the race to become a real-time search engine is starting to heat up. Google of course was ahead of the game as it incorporated Twitter updates to search results as early as December last year. While recently, it has also started incorporating MySpace status updates.

But while Google’s deal with Twitter and MySpace includes status updates of members, the deal with Facebook is limited only to status updates of Facebook pages. Of course this is understandable since Facebook has a much closer ties with Microsoft Bing.

And in case you’re not aware Facebook pages are basically accounts used for marketing and advertising purposes of consumer brands so, there’s really not much real-time in this regard since those Facebook pages are rarely updated after all.

Makes me wonder right now, as to when Google will incorporate updates coming from Google Buzz to search results. Although I’m not really hoping that they would.

Yahoo, Twitter Agree On Content Sharing Deal

2010-02-24T03:03:00.000+05:30

Twitter seems to be getting on every search engines lately. It has already struck deals with both Microsoft and Google whereby Twitter streams will be integrated into search result pages. And now, it just agreed on a content sharing deal with Yahoo.
According to Jim Stoneham, VP of communities for Yahoo via a report by LATimes, the deal will allow users to take material from both sites without having to leave either one. This means that Twitter feeds will be accessible on Yahoo’s various content sites. Users will also be able to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo in their Twitter feed. Of course, on the search side, public Twitter updates will be displayed as part of Yahoo search results.
Both Yahoo and Twitter are yet to announced the deal formally. So until then, enjoy the Yahoo tweet-less search results while the deal has not yet materialized.

How To Make Twitter a Top 10 Traffic Source

2010-02-23T03:01:00.000+05:30

Twitter is comprised of people who love to share information. If you can properly inform and engage this audience you'll be mastering word-of-mouth promotion and increasing traffic to your website.
For us, Twitter is our third largest source of website traffic, behind organic Google searches and direct website traffic.

Tips from an expert

Mequoda's own Amanda MacArthur will be hosting the upcoming Twitter for Publishers 2010 webinar on March 16^th. For all you Twitter users, plus those still considering it and wondering why it's important, she has some very useful information on how to make Twitter one of your top 10 traffic sources.

According to Amanda, if you want Twitter to be one of your top ten traffic sources, all you have to do is use Twitter, and use it effectively.

"Build your audience and followers on Twitter with relevant news and helpful anecdotes and it'll easily be your single largest source of traffic next to search engines. Create content, push content, and the traffic will come."
Start using the platform often and it's ability to generate traffic will happen.

Another Twitter tip

Amanda outlined ways of generating followers and thus, generating traffic. "In order to get people to follow you, you need to follow other people. Try going to Search.Twitter.com and looking up keywords relating to your business. Find people that are asking questions that you can answer, or saying something you can comment on."

Engaging and retaining followers on Twitter will increase your overall traffic and make Twitter one of your top 10 traffic sources. Learn more of these valuable secrets from Amanda on how smart publishers are using Twitter.

Follow these people and respond to them because about 40% of the people you follow will follow you back. Later on if you feel like un-following people that aren't following you back, you can use a tool like Refollow.com to do so.

Amanda stressed the need to be proactive. She stated, "The point behind Twitter is that you can't wait for people to come to you. You need to find people to follow and talk to them so that they'll follow you back."

Promote for your Twitter account and other social networks

Use your articles, email newsletters, and website space to build a base of followers that already like you.
The more people that follow you, the more people will click your links, and the more traffic will come from these sources.

For people who don't read email or RSS feeds, Twitter is the best way to reach them without being interruptive.

What you should do as a Twitter user in order to increase traffic

To fully take advantage of the communication lines Twitter has created, one must pay attention to the balance in tweets. Marketing through social media has to be carefully done since many users aren't looking for advertisements. As Amanda mentioned, begin following others and commenting on their tweets. As your list of followers grows, you can then focus more on the content you are tweeting.

How are you using Twitter?

As an admirer of the medium, I'd love to hear your strategies behind using Twitter. Post your response on our blog. The most creative response will get highlighted in a tweet to our followers.

What To Do If Your Facebook or Twitter Account is Hacked

2010-02-23T03:00:00.000+05:30

Unfortunately, this scenario is a reality for all of us who use social networking -- it's not a matter of IF your Twitter or Facebook account will be hacked, but simply WHEN. I've been on the receiving end of messages from my friends whose accounts have been hacked. The message typically compliments me on some body part or requests me to click on a link to view a video of myself. Also, there are usually a number of misspellings in the message.

Be very careful when you get those kinds of messages, even when they are coming from trusted friends who would normally not engage in this type of behavior. Many of the messages are linked to a virus or some type of malware that either infects your computer or will gain access to your account and send all of your friends and followers spammy messages. If you do slip and click on one of these links, pay attention to what your virus scanning software tells you, especially if you get a security warning about a site.

If your Twitter account is hacked:

1. Visit Twitter's information page for problem resolution.

2. Log out of Twitter

3. Clear your browser cache (your browsing history and cookies and private info) and close down your browser.

For Internet Explorer: Go to Tools -- Internet Options, and then click on the "Delete" button under Browsing History. Check all of the boxes (except InPrivate Filtering data) and click on the "Delete" button.

For Firefox: Go to Tools -- Clear Recent History, and then click on the down-arrow next to "Details", check all of the boxes, and select "Everything" for the time range to clear.

4. Open a new browser window, log into Twitter, and change your password. You can also use the Twitter password reset feature to set a new password before logging in again.

5. Visit your settings page and check your Connections. Revoke access for any third-party application that you don't recognize.

6. Submit a support request to let them know you have taken all of the proper steps to reset your account and to request that your direct messaging capability be restored. You can also include info on any statuses that weren't posted by you in the body of the request.

7. Update your password in all of your third party applications as well. If a third party application (like Facebook, Twitterrific, Twhirl, etc.) is trying to use your old password to access your tweets, it will lock you out of your account.

If your Facebook account is hacked:

1. Visit Facebook's information page for problem resolution.

2. If you are still able to access your login email address, then use the "Forgot your password" link to prompt an email from Facebook with a password reset code. If you can't access your account, then use the link above.

3. Clear your browser cache (your browsing history and cookies and private info) and close down your browser as described above.

4. Your account could also have been phished/hacked by a phishing web site, worm, or malicious software. To ensure that all is safe again, refer to the "Warnings" section on Facebook.

Take care when using Twitter and Facebook. Trust your intuition, and if something doesn't look or feel right, ignore it or delete it before clicking on it. You will have probably saved yourself hours or headache in trying to restore a hacked account.

Internet Marketing Automation Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create prosperous online businesses that make more profit in less time. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> http://www.TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

Reciprocal Linking. An Unbiased Analysis.

2010-02-22T02:54:00.000+05:30

Reciprocal linking is without doubt one of the most disputed subjects in the SEO community. The reason for this is because they simultaneously can greatly contribute to your link network and also damage it pretty seriously.

One thing is certain though, Google is getting better by the semester in finding and demoting low quality link exchanges to zero and even negative values.

Search engines have not declared war to link reciprocation but rather to the unnatural linking patterns meant solely to increase the number of links and consequently, enhance rankings.

There are 2 directions to follow

1. Build reciprocal links by going beyond you niche limits. This will benefit you short term but once practicing these obscure exchanges chances are you'll get penalized.

2. Staying in your field; although it takes more time to find and initiate quality link exchanges opportunities, keeping the relevancy level high will empower your sites position in that niche's organic listings.

Still, keep in mind that it takes time to build a presence online and brand yourself. The good news is you build a solid foundation for selling your product or service.

After securing a considerable number of quality links pointing to your site, it's advisable to diversify your linking sources and even include some low quality ones; and there is no easy alternative then reciprocal links.

This tactic it's beneficial as it enables you to build relevancy for your website by extensively using targeted keywords as anchor texts.

Junky back links are not a thing to worry about as long as you don't return the favor.

A white hat method for link exchange is reciprocal promotions, where each linking partner promotes content referencing the other party on their own website.

From a marketing perspective reciprocal links are especially valued for being an efficient medium for brand promotion. Still, if you can obtain a one way back link the better.

Then again, this statement is contradicted by our incorrigible human nature that constantly cries the "what's in it for me" exception.

To make this human behavior work for you, you must gratify them with some top-notch content that they feel they must reference and discuss and debate around it, on social platforms, with blog posts, etc.

Another, more subtle approach to promoting your content is to present it among other relevant resources. This gains you credibility and impels the recipient to take note of your suggestions.

As 99% of automated link requests are simply ignored resume using such link scouting tools only to researching. Once a link exchange opportunity is spotted address the webmaster in person.

When to Drop Reciprocal Links as a strategy

Once you start getting involved with the reciprocal linking networks, consider this:

1. The featured websites in these back link catalogues have at best 0 PageRank. Reciprocating with these low quality,( most importantly) irrelevant websites is easily spotted by Google.

2. At best, these sites reach 10 pages in length, giving them no chance of ranking even in markets with low to no competition at all.

3. Not only does their copy sounds as hype from a mile away but they're also built in the spam religion with keyword stuffing in the title and description tags, etc.

4. All things being said, common sense will tell you that you do not need these artificial linking schemes to get good rankings.

Reciprocal links are valuable, but not on their own. They must be included into a coherent link building campaign.

Off Page SEO Techniques

2010-02-18T03:53:00.000+05:30

Off page SEO Techniques are very important for any website, blog or otherwise that wants to harness the power of organic traffic from the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that includes a number of elements to insure a more favorable position for your website in search engine result pages like those of Google, Yahoo and Bing. The success of your online marketing is greatly enhanced when you can boost the ratio of your organic traffic to 80%. This traffic is free and very valuable.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page SEO techniques. We will only discus off page SEO techniques in this article. Off page SEO are the things you need to do to get a higher page rank (PR) and a good position in the search engines like Google for your website after you launch the website.

What are the off page SEO techniques? Off page SEO techniques are always connected to building your link popularity. Link popularity represents the number of back links or links back to your website from other websites. To check your website's current link popularity, go to Link Popularity and use the free tool to check your website's link popularity. The higher your link popularity, the higher your page rank (PR) will be. To build your link popularity you need to raise the number of websites that link back to your website.

There are a number of off page SEO techniques:

1. Email

Email webmasters that are responsible for websites similar to yours in content and ask them for a link that you will reciprocate. There are sites that have a page full of links and the links are not relevant to each other as far as content is concerned. Link Farms can damage the reputation of your website with Google instead of helping it. These link farms are easy to join and get links on but this is not advisable. Link schemes are not approved by Google and before you take what may appear to be an easy route for getting back links you should read information on Google's site about illegitimate linking methods, this will assure you of more success with Google. Some companies will create a number of bogus sites to get lots of reciprocal links but as Google changes their algorithms these sites will lose popularity and could even be blacklisted.

2. Content

The best way to conduct your off page SEO techniques then is to insure that you have unique, highly informative content. When you have great content other webmasters will want to link to your site. If they just copy and paste your content on their website that is a violation of intellectual property copyright laws. Make people want to link to your website. This is the best of all off page SEO techniques to grow the number of websites linking to yours.

3. Article Marketing

There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories on the Internet. You can submit articles to these sites and for every submission, you will be allotted a resource box in which you can introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours goes a long way in increasing your page rank. Additionally, if you will submít just one article to a thousand directoríes, you'd have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are services detailed on my blog that you can use for monthly fees or software that is automated.

4. Forum Marketing

There are online communities that are dedicated to the subject of your website. Find those forums, join them and become part of the community. It is important to become a part of the community and not just post something irrelevant to the topic. You will be seen as a spammer just there to post a link and you could be banned from that forum. In the forum you will be able to have a signature box that will accompany every post or comment that you make in the forum. In your signature box, you can have a link to your website. For every post you make, you will have a link to your website.

5. Craigslist

Craigslist is a well-known classifieds website with a PR7. A PR7 score is very high! Having a link on a website with a PR7 will give a boost to your website. To have a link on Craigslist go to the site, choose the category that is relevant to your website, post your advertisement with your link of course and see what happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads your ad. The object is to have a link to your website on Craigslist. Your ad will expire so you should have a way to remind yourself to post there on expiry to maintain a constant link.

6. Partners

Look for partners who are willing to include your site in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at Webconfs.

7. Triangular Linking

Google does not like reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of getting around this limitation. Look for webmasters who will work with you on this one. Webmaster A posts a link to Webmaster B's website. Webmaster B posts a link to Webmaster C's website. Webmaster C posts a link to Webmaster A's website. It is the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to identify this type of linking.

Organic Search & Paid Search: Are They Synergistic Or Cannibalistic?

2010-02-18T02:53:00.000+05:30

One aspect to search marketing that I feel doesn’t get enough attention and indeed is misunderstood by the SEO practitioner is the interaction between organic search and paid search.

For years when teaching SEO workshops, I touted the synergistic effect of being at the top of both organic and paid results. I would encourage attendees to invest in both SEO and PPC on the promise of symbiosis between the two marketing channels. I would cite research showing that you can increase the clickthrough rate of your #1 (organic) ranking if you also have a sponsored ad above it or in the right column, and that showing up twice on the same page in the results makes your #1 ranking get 20% more clicks.

I gave short shrift to the thought that engaging in both sides of search marketing could lead to an adverse effect, i.e. negative synergy — whereby your paid search program cannibalizes your organic search derived visits, or vice versa. That is, until just a couple weeks ago.

What shifted my thinking was a session at the recent Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable’s “Rockstar” conference (ironically named, given the “Covariopalooza” rock-themed customer conference that Covario put on earlier in the week!) Also ironic was the fact there was a presentation given by one of my company’s own “rock stars”, namely our Chief Analytics Officer Dr. Matthias Blume. The premise of the talk was how the organic and paid results interact and how flawed attribution modeling can misrepresent ROI, associating sales/conversions with the wrong marketing program (i.e. SEO when PPC should have gotten the credit, PPC when SEO should have gotten the credit).

The cannibalization of organic search by PPC is clearly demonstrated by the following (inadvertent) experiment where paid search was shut off completely for a time. As evidenced by the graph below, there’s an increase in organic traffic commensurate with the decrease in PPC derived traffic. (Note that measurement of this effect is confounded by other factors such as cyclical patterns, other marketing actions taken by both you and your competitors, the economy, the weather, and so on.)

How does this sort of thing happen? Consider a multi-touch situation where a first-time visitor enters via an organic listing but leaves without buying anything; the visitor returns days later via a paid listing, this time making a purchase. If your organization assigns 100% of the value of that transaction to the last click, then the paid listing gets the credit when in fact the organic listing did most of the heavy lifting. Conversely, if your organization’s policy is to recognize the first click, organic gets too much credit.

Consider also the opposite scenario where the paid click is the visitor’s first point of entry. Then later an organic click is what leads to the purchase. “Last click” would overstate the value attributable to SEO, “first click” would overstate the value attributable to PPC.

The best option would be to assign a portion of the value across all touchpoints, with greater emphasis on the first click.

The ROI of PPC is further exaggerated by the fact that URLs in paid ads are invariably tagged with tracking parameters, whereas organic listings are not. This is regardless of where in the buying cycle the user interacts with the paid listings. That’s because analytics packages tend to favor tracking parameters over the referrer (which is passed in the HTTP header) as an indicator of the lead source. Tracking parameters in organic URLs are, as you may already know, considered bad SEO practice: they lead to duplicate content and PageRank dilution.

Consequently, the SEO must rely on the referrer string to supply the visitor’s point of origin, despite the fact that it is the inferior measure. (Inferior for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that privacy/security tools installed on the user’s PC such as Norton Internet Security wipe the referring URL from user’s requests yet thankfully leave tracking parameters intact.)

These attribution inaccuracies obscure what’s really going on: the paid listing is cannibalizing the organic listing, i.e. drawing searchers away from the organic listing which would have otherwise been clicked on. This can happen, for instance, when you have a particularly effective paid ad creative, e.g. that calls out in the ad copy that it’s the “Official Site.”

Matthias also made the point that there’s a greater degree of cannibalization (negative synergy) when there is a combination of the following: a high organic ranking, a strong brand, and when the paid and organic listings are similar to one another but differentiated from competitors. But by the same token, the cost per click is the lowest for search terms that fit those criteria. Matthias’ advice to the PPC specialist (and this is particularly applicable if those who are budget-limited): reallocate your paid search spend to maximize true ROI.

If your SEO work is stealing clicks away from your paid counterpart, you may be inclined to think that is a good thing. It will, after all, save on some click charges. Actually, it’s a wash. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, Google will make up the lost revenue by charging a higher cost per click as a consequence of a lower clickthrough rate and thus a lower Quality Score. So in the end, Google still makes its money.
Given all this, what actions should you, the SEO practitioner, take?

For one, get a better handle on the true ROI of organic search, at the keyword level. That requires computing the synergy. How? You could pause your ads on certain queries and then analyze the resulting plots akin to the one above. Or use Covario’s paid/organic synergy score (POSS) methodology. In this case, you ask your PPC counterpart to reduce his/her actual CPCs on keywords with high organic conversion and high paid cost by 60% — no need to pause the ads. In the process, by looking at conversion and synergy at the search query level, the PPC advertiser will also hone in on the most effective terms through better use of negative keywords and greater use of exact match.

Then use 1+synergy as a multiplier on the value as determined by click-based attribution. ROI = ((1+POSS)*value – cost) / cost. This doesn’t go as far as Covario’s “True Value of Display” methodology, but it’s vastly better than ignoring paid/organic interaction. In our research we measured synergy from -95% to +25%. That’s quite a range. Obviously you’ll want to favor ads with positive synergy over those with negative synergy (all else being equal).

Another set of dials you can turn is what is displayed in your paid search ad. Test calls-to-action, mentioning specific product features, branding, “official site”, etc. and measure the impact on synergy.

The ultimate goal should be optimizing your ad creative and rebalancing your company’s paid search spend based on the true, adjusted ROAS where synergy is taken into account.

Google Integrates MySpace to Search, But Not Proud of it

2010-02-17T04:02:00.000+05:30

Google seemed to have quietly implemented MySpace Real-Time Search API just now. The announcement was actually made by MySpace so I checked out the Official Google Blog if there was any update about this but didn’t find any. Probably because it’s too early or maybe Google just don’t want to make a big fuzz about this?

Anyway, the MySpace folks are pretty much excited about it nonetheless. In fact, they claim that the integration is the first real-time integration of social networking platform to Google Search. Well perhaps they don’t consider Twitter as a social networking site so they might have missed the fact that Google has also integrated Twitter streams to search recently.

If you’re curious about it, you might want to try searching and find out if you will be getting live updates from MySpace users such as news, photos, and blog posts as part of the Google search results. MySpace streams will be displayed only if they were made public by MySpace members. MySpace contents that will be displayed as search results will be ranked based on the latest and of the highest relevancy to the subject of your searces.

Facebook is now the Second Most Popular Website in the U.S.

2010-02-17T04:00:00.000+05:30

Well, we knew this was going to happen. With a high user engagement and a massive userbase build up, Facebook has just slipped pass through Yahoo to become the no.2 most popular website in the U.S. Latest data from Compete.com shows that Facebook is not only raking up userbase but user engagement as well as it had 133 million unique visitors last month.

Yahoo’s unique visitors were pegged at 132 million, while Google still sit on top. The data don’t include visitors from Yahoo.com’s subdomains and sub-sites while this does not apply to Facebook since it only have one main domain.

Now here’s another interesting point. While Facebook continues to surge ahead in terms of popularity, it is also raking up some statistics when it comes to monthly user engagement or attention. In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook while only 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google.

Site eyeballs have been Google’s perennial problem since although it manages to get more site visits, user engagement on the site continuous to slide down through the years. But who knows, maybe with Buzz, Google may be getting those much needed user engagement/attention this month.

If not, then it will only be a matter of time before Facebook possibly steals the number one spot from Google in terms of site popularity in the U.S.

Global Vs. Local: How To Let Google Know How To Treat Your Site

2010-02-16T04:13:00.000+05:30

As the search engines rapidly move to offer more locally focused search results, those managing large global, single domain sites are facing more and more difficulties in getting them indexed, detected as local, then ranked in the local search results.

This is especially true with Google in English and Spanish speaking countries where it is getting difficult to find “global company” sites and products in the search results outside of the US.
I am seeing an increase in social media posts expressing frustration by searchers in markets like Australia, Singapore and India that they can’t locate companies outside of their markets unless they know the specific company or product name. A few even went as far to indicate they would stop using Google if this trend continued.

One of these comments was in response to a localization article I had written. An Australian posted that he was trying to use Google to find a high-end fly fishing rod from a specific US company, namely Orvis. He had read about their product in a magazine but could not remember the name of the company. No matter how he searched he could only locate Australian companies. He further indicated that this was becoming more common with many of the searches he had been doing. He was frustrated since global ecommerce had become the gateway to broader product choices not available in Australia.

On the other side are companies that had enjoyed being one click away from customers around the world. In the past few weeks I have received a number of questions from frustrated webmasters and desperate site owners about how to get their site back into Google local market search engines. With these questions often comes more confusion because of answers from “search experts” who are only guessing how to fix it or from engines and local agencies simply suggesting they use paid search.

I am less concerned about the companies that have a single language site who have the arrogance to believe that everyone in the world needs their products. It is the truly global companies like Apple, IBM and Nokia that sell in nearly every market around the world that are being hurt by this shift. These companies either have hundreds of sites or one very large site segmented to accommodate the multitudes of countries, languages and legal entities that represent the their multinational existence.

A typical local content detection filter hierarchy

Previously, local content detection was only a critical problem for queries in languages that were used by multiple countries such as English and Spanish. Recently, more problems are occurring with other languages like German, French and Arabic. For example, if you do a search in German, the primary result with be the best German language result that is also unique to the IP address of your location. If you enter a German language query in a German speaking IP address region like Germany, Austria or Switzerland you will see different results unique to your actual location. However, the same search done in the US or UK will simply result in the most relevant German language result regardless of location.

It seems to me that the most confusion is coming from search marketers struggling with understanding how Google’s local filters work. Let me try to clarify how they work and what companies should be doing to ensure they are getting the access to those markets they deserve.

Country code top level domain (ccTLD). The “cc” in “ccTLD” means country code and is based on the ISO 3166-1 standard which specifies a two letter code for every country in the world. If the site has a ccTLD like .co.nz then the engines will assume the content is for New Zealand. The same is true for someone using a .us domain. Content on this domain would be viewed as a United States centric site.

That is why most search experts will tell you to use the top-level domain for a particular country if you want to have a local site. Unfortunately, for both large and small companies, the expense and operational overhead is often cost-prohibitive to maintain multiple sites with unique ccTLDs.

Site server IP address location. When a site with a generic top level domain, such as .com, .net, etc., are not using a .ccTLD to associate to a country, the engines will use the IP address of the server hosting the site as a proxy for local designation.

This means someone with a .com address hosted in Germany would be considered primarily a German site. This is currently the main problem with multinational companies that use .com and then subdirectories for their country sites such as www.ibm.com/uk.

Note, that if you are using a ccTLD, Google does not factor in the server IP location as a secondary factor. This was recently confirmed in a Google Webmaster blog Q&A post on local site detection. The answer by the Google engineer caused a fair bit of confusion by those that did not read his response correctly. It is logical that if you are using a .fr domain the site content should be primarily associated with France and the location of the server would not be necessary.

The Google geographical targeting tool

A few years ago when Google launched this tool they saw a significant reduction in complaints from webmasters that they were not adequately represented in the local search engines—especially where they had a major market or physical presence. I have talked to a number of large and small companies in the past few months that either were not aware of this feature or had it set incorrectly.

To use it, simply create a Webmaster Tools account, then set up a sub account for each country. Go into the settings for each sub account and set the subdirectory location on the site to the appropriate country. For example, set .com/nz equal to New Zealand and everything in and under that /nz directory will be given the same weight as content hosted on a .co.nz domain.

Geographical proxy servers and local market links

I am seeing more chatter about using local market proxy servicing as an option for working around ccTLD and local hosting. This has been and option but it seems to be working less effectively in the past few months. Even with proxy servers you are still essentially hosting locally—but only a cached version of the site which is often not an option for an ecommerce company.

I have also seen an increase in promotion of link building services promising to get lots of links from ccTLD sites or sites hosted in a local market. The idea is to get the engines to think you must be locally relevant because local sites are linking to you. Be careful with this type of service since many of the links will not be from authoritative sites that are the only ones that seem to transfer local market link value.

How big is the potential problem?

Last year I reviewed the domain structures for the Global 1000 companies and found 85% are using .com/cc with a few even using cc.domain.com for their local sites. Further review of the IP locations found that many were hosted in the US or other central hubs with no company hosting 100 percent of their country sites in the local markets.

We have always thought of our websites as “global” since they are just a search result click away from a searcher in any country around the world. Unfortunately, that definition may not hold much longer since a multinational’s global site might actually be relegated to a single country without even knowing it.

I can only see this problem getting worse as the engines put greater emphasis on local content and the increasing demand of location-based results on mobile devices. I suspect the engines will start to do further refinements on what is truly local. If you have a global site or even a local site it would make sense to ensure you are monitoring the inclusion and ranking performance of your local content so you can take appropriate actions should Google not find your site globally relevant.

Link Week Blog Links That Bring Traffic, Not Trouble

2010-02-16T04:05:00.000+05:30

If you’re one of those people who is opposed to blog links, then you’re not thinking of inbound links as a potential to send qualified traffic to your site, and that’s a serious marketing mistake. Occasionally one of our clients will state that they’d no longer like us to pursue blog links, and we argue until we’re blue in the face. Some keywords happen to lend themselves to blogs more than proper sites anyway, especially the really narrow niche ones.

Ever seen an entire authority website that is strictly devoted to creating kid-friendly crafts using rubber animal stamps that are made from recycled and reclaimed materials? No, neither have I. However, the narrow niche categories that people create blogs around continually surprises and amazes me. Blogs are easy to build, and many non-technical people have been able to share their passions with the world simply by building a very simple Wordpress blog, for example. Why ignore that community?

There are many theories about the link juice passed by blogs, so I won’t go into that here. Besides, I’m talking about traffic here, not juice. I’d take a link on a fantastic PR 2 blog post before I’d take one on the homepage of a PR 5 site that’s totally irrelevant to my niche. Sure, I might get more link juice from the site, but the potential for quality traffic is more important in many cases, though not all, as some people just want better rankings.

7 ways to tell if a blog is a good linking partner

1. It has fresh, regularly updated, unique content. A blog that exists as nothing else except a rehashing of other blog posts, or one that simply runs a feed of other people’s work, is not a quality linking partner.

2. It links to other relevant sites that are of equal footing in the niche. Whether in the blogroll or in the blog posts themselves, outbound links should be the same types of links that you’d pursue yourself. If there are 50 links in the sidebar and they’re on every page, I’d certainly not ask for one of those kinds of links. If the only links that you can see are totally irrelevant and a bit misleading, you might be better off going elsewhere. If the blogroll contains a few links to sites/blogs that are also of an acceptable quality and the posts link to a few relevant pieces of content, you may have a winner.

3. It’s not overloaded with banners and ads. While I understand the need to make money, I also recognize that many people won’t stay on a site that looks as if it exists just to make money. You may have great content, but it might never get seen because people are so turned off.

4. Its posts are indexed and rank well for keywords. If there are no technical reasons for older posts to not be indexed and they’re missing in action, this might not be a good choice. We’ve recently come across a few blogs that are totally blocked by the robots.txt files, and since they don’t exactly rank well, I’d not bother with those. It’s hard to get traffic when you don’t have any rankings.

5. The backlinks are good. This doesn’t mean that there are a billion of them, but the ones there should be from respectable sites. Look for non-blog niche sites that link out to the blog, for example. If the majority of a blog’s backlinks are from irrelevant, spammy sites, I’d move on.

6. There’s a visible community there. People are commenting and the blog authors are responding. Comments are more than “great point! I’ll be back soon!” When there’s a great dialog going on somewhere, people return to it, and other people keep coming to it. Those people see your link, right?

7. The blog has a presence in social media. While certainly not a dealbreaker, having a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page means that the blogger understands the value of marketing in those mediums.

Google Changed How It Handles Nofollow:

2010-01-12T22:25:00.000+05:30

In reality this change happened over one year ago, but only recently it surfaced. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Web Spam team, talked about it in the latest SMX event, and soon afterward the whole SEO sphere was commenting. He also wrote a post explaining the whole issue, titled PageRank Sculpting.

Here is a quote from that post that summarizes the change:

So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn't count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

According to Matt Cutts, the change was implemented to discourage website owners who were using a technique called PageRank sculpting, which is the process of using the nofollow attribute internally to change the PageRank flow among different pages. The objective is to give more PageRank value to some pages (the ones that sell something, for example) at the expense of less important pages (the Privacy Policy or Terms of Service, for example).

If Google wants to discourage PageRank sculpting, I am fine with that. The problem that I see with the change is that it might affect other types of websites negatively, blogs above all.
Why?
Because now all the links on your comment section are reducing the PageRank that would otherwise flow to your internal pages.
Here is a numerical example to let you understand it. Suppose that you write a super cool post explaining "Why Obama really won the U.S. presidential election." The post gets some exposure on social media, and it ends up receiving 200 backlinks from other sites and blogs. Let's assume that, on average, each backlink was carrying 5 points of PageRank, so the total points of PageRank for that post would be 1,000.

Now let's suppose that you have 20 navigational links on your layout (e.g., the main menu, the categories and a section with popular posts). This means that each of those internal links would carry 50 points of PageRank to other internal pages on your site, which is good.

The problem comes when people start commenting on the post. Let's say that, given the popularity of the article, it ends up with 150 comments. Each of those comments carries a link to the site of the comment author. Despite being nofollowed, they would still be counted on the PageRank distribution of that page. Now we have 170 outgoing links, so each link receives only 5.9 points of PageRank. Each of your internal links will only pass 5.9 points of PageRank now, and the total points of PageRank that will remain inside your website are 118.
In other words, before Google changed how it handles the nofollow attribute you would have gained 1,000 points of PageRank with that post. With the change, this number is reduced to 118.

And that is just what would happen in one post. What if we consider a blog with 1,000 posts and tens of thousands of comments? Such a blog could be losing a huge amount of PageRank.

Google might do something to fix this problem, but we still got to hear about it.
Is there any solution? Yes, you can either close your comments completely (but I wouldn't recommend that), or use an iframe or Javascript to host your comments, so that the links to the comment authors won't be inside your pages. Andy Beard wrote a post on the topic titled Disqus - Why 95% Of Bloggers Should Switch.

If changing to an iframe or Javascript based solution could give a huge PageRank boost to my blog, I will seriously consider it. For the moment, though, I will wait a couple of weeks to see how the debate around the nofollow changes will evolve. I will keep you guys updated if anything new emerges.

How to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page & Get Lots of Fans

2010-01-09T03:13:00.002+05:30

The most effective, not really difficult to implement and quite obvious ways to promote your fan page:

Round 1: Create fresh content for people to want to join:

Aggregate your blog feed. Simply RSS allows to automatically update your fan page wall with your blog RSS. You may also want to import your blog feed to your fan page notes (for that go: “Edit page“, find “Notes” under “Application” and click “Edit“, then “Edit import settings” and at last provide your feed URL).

Try Static FBML is another app to keep in mind: it adds advanced functionality to your Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization.
Add a personal note: Add your personal photos, personal welcome-videos are also great (create a short video welcoming your fans and describing what they can do on your page);
Provide a place for interaction/self promotion: Start a thread on your Discussion Board that allows your fans to promote their sites or inviting to share Twitter IDs and to follow each other.

Round 2: Invite your friends to join

There’s no way to invite all your friends in bulk but you can spend a few minutes to select (all) your friends and send an invitation to them;

Now, once you are done, go ahead and ask your best friends to invite people as well

Round 3: Try social ads

The best thing about Facebook advertising (well actually there are two: one is that you can pay as little as $1 per day to test it and the second one…) is that it can be very well-targeted (still, it won’t work for all niches and campaign types but sometimes it works quite well). The Facebook ad campaign can be targeted to:

Location;
Age group;
Sex;
Education;
Keywords;
Work place;
Relationship status;
Language;
Connections (fan page, event or group) – this means you can for example target fans of your competitor;
Friends’ connections:

Round 4: Promote on Twitter

If you (or your friends) have solid following on Twitter, promote your Facebook fan page their.
Besides, you can link your page to your Twitter account by simply clicking this link:

There you can select to share status updates, links, photos, notes, and events with your followers on Twitter, directly from your Facebook Page thus promoting it to your Twitter followers:

Round 5: Leverage your email contacts

Doing business and networking on the Internet, you are likely to have a huge number of contacts in your email address book, so why not take advantage of that:

Include your page URL in your email signature for business correspondence;
Include your page URL in your email signature for Customer support, customer status updates and other automated messages;
Leverage Gtalk status: let your facebook fan page URL display whenever your IM contact hovers over your profile name:

Social Media Tips : Why Should I Help You?

2010-01-09T03:07:00.003+05:30

When the clock struck midnight on January 1st, I began running. It was a 5k run in Philadelphia, along the Schuylkill River, to be more specific.
During this run, I passed a homeless man. Rather than running past him, I stopped. I gave him $100.
Later that day, I stopped to think in greater detail about that incident.
What was it that compelled me to engage him?
I think the answer to that question, in this case, should be fairly obvious.
The night was cold and rainy. No person should be outside and homeless, regardless of how they got there.
How does this story relate to my thoughts on many folks on Twitter?
Before I continue, please understand I am in no way making light of the homeless. I’m simply offering background as to what inspired the following thought:
Many individuals all around the social media world are simply asking for handouts.
Think about that for a second.
How many people do their best to be placed prominently in front of you, but really do very little to offer a value proposition?
How many individuals clamor daily about social media strategies, and the need for engagement, yet fail to offer an answer to the simple question of why you should contribute to their success?
I find more and more redundancy invading my personal space.
Less substance, less value, less originality, more noise.
While there is overwhelming concern about those that are not participating in social media ‘correctly’, there is a disproportionate lack of concern for those that are considered social media ‘geniuses’ and really offer minimal value.
If you’re going to be successful long term using social media, you must be certain that your product can back up your mouth.
With that in mind, follow along and below you’ll find a small list with tips to help you, or your product, offer a compelling value proposition.

10 Ways to Translate Social Media Success into Real World Success

1. Represent yourself, or your product, honestly.
While you may be able to lure people to you by appearing to be something you’re not, it leaves a bad taste.
2. Impact people in real life.
Until you leave a tangible impression on someone, keep in mind that you very well may be an untrusted, tiny little avatar just like everyone else.
3. View yourself as others view you.
Try to understand that people who don’t know you will view you exactly how you represent yourself. It may not be who, or what, you actually are, but it’s the virtual reality you must understand.
4. Be respectful of others.
Being respectful of others does not mean being afraid to unleash an ‘f-bomb’, if that’s who you are. Attacking others publicly is unnecessary and cowardly. Expressing yourself, however you see fit, is human. As long as you understand how your emotional outbursts will impact how you are viewed, it’s ok to let them fly.
5. Be unique.
The world has enough of the same. Be yourself, and you’ll be unique. If being yourself is not a good option, consider that a much deeper problem.
6. Don’t follow the pack.
The pack is the epitome of mediocrity. Strive to lead them, not be one of them.
7. Embrace your competitive advantages.
Just as it’s acceptable to recognize flaws, don’t be afraid to celebrate your assets. There is nothing wrong with being objective about yourself when it may be positive.
8. Listen to feedback and improve.
Don’t view criticism as an attack. View it as an opportunity to improve, or at least something to consider.
9. Stand your ground.
If you believe you are right, and have valid reasons for believing it, don’t back down to opinions.
10. Stay consistent with whatever path you choose.
People will begin to know you for what you appear to be. Changing yourself mid-stream will cause them to feel deceived or tricked. This goes along with being yourself.
These are only 10 ways to help make yourself, or your product, more attractive to the social media community.