SEO for Blogs

While there are many reasons to blog, there are two primary uses that are becoming more widespread with blogging: To game Google Adsense, and to also game the search engines for better rankings. Since Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results.

So from this, how do you optimize your blog?
Depending on the service you utilize, there are still some basics that you can apply. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. If you are looking for an advantage with SEO, you should use Blogger since they are owned by Google, and you’ll be indexed quicker.

Blogs aren’t all that much different than a site. The power of a blog is from the frequency of the posting. If the search engines see a pattern of 3 postings per day, they will be very active on spidering that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it’s related to a hot topic on the Internet.

Now, to the actual optimization. Since blogs are typically a few pages long, you only need to establish a few rules that will be applied sitewide:

Use an interesting title - Also known as linkbaiting - your title should captivate the user to read more
Try to use your blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant

Use the H1 tags - All blog editors allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags

Link to other blogs - Find other related blogs that your readers might find interesting, and ask for a link in return

Don’t forget about your archives - You may post a topic that isn’t hot at the moment, but comes up later - make sure your readers can find that posting

Creating Google Adsense Pages

First let me preface this article by stating that you should NOT create pages for the “gaming” of AdSense. Most companies who use AdWords are small to medium sized businesses trying to grow. With rampant click fraud, those advertisers won’t be able to advertise, and AdSense won’t pay out as well. That said, let’s begin the process.

For our example, our topic is that of “widgets”, so where do get started?
Create the page - Sounds simple enough, but there are some coding standards you should always use. They are:
Name of the page - Use the name of the keyword you are targeting. So, in this example it would be widget.htm. You can use your web server’s technology as well, but if in doubt, you can never go wrong with the .htm
Title the page - Use the keyword again for the title.
Meta Tags - Yes, they are still used. Make sure you include the keywords in your meta keyword list, and give a definition of the word in your meta description tag
H1 - Put your keyword in stylized H1 tags. Use CSS to make the tag look consistent to the rest of your site
Content - This is often the biggest obstacle non-writers have. Don’t worry, follow these steps and you’ll soon be on your way to original content.
Go to MSN, Yahoo and Google
Enter your keyword into the search box
Look at the top 5 sites listed from each search engine
Educate yourself on the topic from the content found on these sites

Page Copy

Now that you’ve absorbed more information, compose your own page of ORIGINAL content. You can take bits and pieces from the other pages, but be sure to inject your personality into your writing. That will make it uniquely yours.

Links

Don’t forget to link to authority sites about your subject. It’s very natural for web pages to have links to other sites, don’t forget about this key point. Take a moment to see why you need outbound links.

Traffic

The most obvious is getting traffic to your site. Your site will have higher paying ads if your page gets more traffic. If you need help with this, be sure to visit the SEO resources section.

Automatic SEO

Within 3 years, almost anyone will be able to perform search engine optimization (seo) to their site.It will all be done through a back-end content management system (CMS) - and it will be easy and fast working. But, it doesn’t mean it’t the end of the world for Optimization services. While a properly optimizd site is nice to have, if no one finds it, that won’t matter. Expect to see more companies offer Search Engine Marketing as the premiere service, as that is more time intense anyways.

How can this be? Let’s take a trip back to 1995.
You remember: blinking text, huge jpeg graphics, dial-up and AOL was all the rage. Back then, it was believed that all you needed was a website, and you could become an Internet millionaire. While that was true for a few lucky people, for the rest of us it was still the same old grind. But the, the emergence of template editors arrived. MicroSoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and others appeared making the creation of a website fairly easy.

Once the online world realized they could create their own sites, they next wanted the ability to edit their sites. Thus, the birth of CMS became a reality and many web design shops found themselves scrambling to offer thses back-end modules or services to their clients. Today, people expect to have a website that they can edit, which brings us to SEO. There are many properties within a site that can be generated with a CMS system. For example:
Meta Tags
Page Titles
Page Names
Site Maps
CSS Stylization
If the web administrator knows the simple basics of seo, they can easily apply those values to all the pages any CMS system creates.

I know this is coming because I’ve built these exact systems for clients. Once a client learns the importance of proper naming stuctures, and the best way to naturally place their keyphrases into all parts of their website, they are already two steps ahead of their competition. Search Engine Optimization is still a valuable way to earn money, but as more people integrate the Internet with their lives, they will become knowlegeable enough to perform those tasks on their own.

The next step will be the automation of SEM, which I still think is only about 5 years away…

The Evolution of a Search Marketer

As with anything you set out to learn in life, you don’t get from point A to point Z without touching upon all those letters in between. This is why every day for the past 7 or 8 years I see the same search engine optimization questions asked over and over again by people in the various stages of learning. The search engines may change through the years, but people just finding out about SEO all tend to go through a similar growth process.

The Submittal Stage
Generally you get interested in search engine marketing after you have a Website created; you’ve got something looking good and open for business. You pay your designer, and suddenly it hits you…now what? How do I get people to actually find and use my site? So you turn to your designer who directs you to your server control panel, which comes with an automated search engine submit button.

The Meta Tag Stage
The next day <grin> you wake up and still have no visitors. So you do some research and find out that you need to add keywords to something called Meta tags. You find some automated Meta tag generator online, add its output to your site, and then crank up the automated submissions.

Then you wait, and wait, and wait some more.
Hmm…you still have no hits to the ole hit counter (except the daily one from your checking it, and the one from when you sent your old college roommate to see what a great site you have), let alone any sales. So you email your designer again with more questions.

The “It’s Impossible” Stage
Now the designer starts to get all defensive and says, “Oh….you wanted high rankings in the search engines? Well sorry, that’s just impossible, and out of the scope of my services.”You are nearly ready to give up at that point, but you’re no quitter. You decide it can’t really be impossible since somebody’s gotta rank highly in the engines; so you begin your quest for more information. You look up “meta tags” and “submitting to search engines” at Google (because you figured you probably just did yours wrong), and find all kinds of articles that talk about something called “search engine optimization,” aka SEO.

The Confusion Stage
Problem is, you have no idea what these articles are telling you. One of them says you need to make sure you use Meta tags, and another one says that Meta tags are dead. You read that you need high-quality links to your site, but you don’t even know what that means or how you can get them. One article says you need keyword-rich content, but that means about as much to you as the linking thing. Some advice says you absolutely have to pay to be found in the engines, other stuff says it doesn’t cost a thing.

The Trick-the-search-engines Stage
The more you read, the more you start to think that there must be some sort of trick to this whole SEO thing. Somehow you have to force the search engines into pulling your site up. You have learned that you need to think about keyword phrases as opposed to keywords, but you’re still not clear about what to do with these phrases.You remember reading about “keyword-rich content” and suddenly it clicks that you need to actually put your phrases on the page somewhere. But you have found so many phrases that you want to rank highly for, and can’t quite figure out how you can get them all on your home page. You wonder if you should just list them somewhere. At the top? At the bottom? In a tiny font size, perhaps? Maybe you should make them blend in with the background of the site, because you really don’t like the way it looks with all those phrases listed like that.At this point, you’re starting to think you’re pretty smart for figuring that little trick out, and decide to tell some people you met on an SEO forum. Ouch! Apparently, you were not the first to think of this trick, and you got called all sorts of names, like “spammer”! You didn’t even know there was such a thing as search engine spam, but you know that spamming anything can’t be a very good thing to do!So you start thinking that maybe tricking the search engines isn’t the best way to attack things.

The Learning Stage
You decide to brave the forum again, to see if you can learn what other people do if they’re not tricking the engines. By now, you’ve become intimately familiar with many of the terms people use, and some of the stuff they tell you is beginning to actually make some sense.What you learn at this point is that you don’t need to put all 50 phrases on the home page, just two or three! Now that seems doable. You also learn that you should use your phrases “naturally” when writing about what you do on every page of your site. Slowly but surely, things start making more sense, and each new tidbit you learn builds on the last one. You learn that the Title tag is also a good place for keyword phrases, and are embarrassed when you look at yours and see that it says, “Welcome to Our Home Page.”

The Quick-fix Stage
You also learn that the search engines prefer to rank the most “popular” sites before the least popular ones, and you learn that they figure out which sites are the most popular by how many sites are linking to them. It makes perfect sense.You really have no idea how you will get other sites to want to link to yours in order for it to be popular, but you know you’re going to have to come up with some sort of a plan for this. You’re a bit disheartened to think about how much time and effort it’s going to take to become a popular site, so you ask your forum friends if there’s a way to speed things along a bit…like maybe you can all link to each other’s sites?Ackk…they yell at you again and call you a link farmer.

The Hard-work Phase
Eventually, you reconcile with the fact that you’re gonna have to work hard, just like you did when you first built your business offline. So off you go to make your site the best it can be for the search engines as well as your visitors, and a mature search engine marketer is born!

Building Link Bait

The purpose of link baiting is pretty obvious, to develop incoming links to your website. One thing that may not be clear however is how links to internal pages on your site helps you rank highly. The benefits are divided into two parts:

1. You will rank for more phrases. Building links to internal pages is a great way to get those pages ranking for related terms. For example, if you run a real estate site and you put out some great content on how to get a mortgage in yourtown, somestate and who your visitors should use and provide a few useful tools to help your visitors you can attract links to this page for mortgage-related phrases. This will then help you rank for phrases such as “mortgages yourtown somestate”, which in turn is going to drive traffic to your site.
2. You will boost the overall strength of your domain. Building links to internal pages helps build the link strength of your overall site. The internal links from the linked page to your other pages will be stronger and so, in turn, those pages become stronger. Stronger pages rank higher.

So we understand what link baiting is and what its purpose is however, how do you build it? This is a difficult question to answer as what makes good link bait can vary from site to site and industry to industry. In short though, you need to create something that others in your industry will find important, useful, or even humorous enough to link to.

Let’s use an example we all know, YouTube. If you view any given video on YouTube you’re going to find two ways to put that content on your site, link to it or embed it. The link provides the link bait benefits, embedding it provides the branding. They win either way. Now they have content to meet any persons’ needs/wants, but what do those of us with fairly fixed site topics do?

Here are the steps for building link bait:
Figure out what appeals to those you want linking to you. This is not necessarily the same as what might appeal to your target market. When you’re doing this try to think about the types of people they are (likely very similar to you). Are they funny? Do they just want quick solutions to their problems? What do the people who own websites related to your topic want to provide for their visitors?
Build it. If you want to provide a solution to an information gap, write up a great article. If you want to provide something humorous, do that. If you want to provide a useful tool on your site, write up your specs, hire a good developer and get it made.
Test it. If you’re unsure as to how your new link bait will be received, test it. If you’ve written a great article on a subject you know people are interested in, try visiting a few forums and posting a link to it and see what the reaction is. You can do the same for humorous content and tools as well. Find out how they’re going to be received by your site visitors and site owners you are hoping will link to it.
Launch it. Now it’s time to add it to your site. In the Testing stage we put it up on the site but didn’t link to it internally. Now it’s time to link to it from inside your site. If you feel your potential clients will enjoy it, why not add it to your navigation? If you feel it’s better for the people you want to link to you but not as useful for your potential clients then perhaps you’d be better of to build a resources page and link to it from there. Or, if you have a blog you can simply announce its launch on your blog.
Promote it. Now it’s time to get the word out. There are a wide variety of methods for doing so and the most effective will vary by site category and who you want to reach. Here are some of the methods we have found most effective across a wide array of subjects:
- promotion on your site: large buttons on the homepage, in the navigation or other prominent spots
- press releases: if it’s a service or information that a wide variety of people will be interested in a press release is a great way to get the news out quickly
- forum posts: if what you are offering will help then why not tell them about it in related forums. Chances are there are people looking for the solution you are providing - post a link to it for them, and others, to see. This will provide you with a link from the forum and potentially many more as people find the information and feel it may help their visitors too
- newsletters: take out an add in an industry newsletter
Monitor it. Now all that’s left is to watch your stats and backlink counts to monitor the success. If you find you’re getting solid traffic, or backlinks, or both it’s a sign you just might want to do more of the same. If the results aren’t as spectacular as you were hoping then you’d do well to consider how well you performed the five steps above, how they might be adjusted, and what else you can do.

It’s important to note that building link bait is not a “one off”. A successful site will continue to develop greater and greater numbers of incoming links through a variety of methods. Once you determine how to successfully link bait in your industry you’ll want to reproduce it periodically. Fortunately, with the results you’ll see if done properly - you’ll be happy to take the time to do so.

Google Trust Rank

There has been an ever increasing awareness to the value of Google’s “TrustRank” algorithm. While there are many factors that are “Off-page”, there are a number of simple actions you can take to make sure your site earns the trust from Google by employing these easy techniques.

The best way to think about Trustrank is to compare it to if you were to purchase a product or service in the real world. There are many built-in factors that we use to pre-qualify a business to see if we are willing to part with our cash for their goods or services. This is the same approach Google takes in order to measure the quality of a site, and doing this will get you out of the so-called “Sandbox” much faster than the typical 4-6 months.

While in no particular order, some are most costly than others, but all are worth doing.
Register your domain for 10 years. If you can’t afford the $70 it costs at GoDaddy then are you really serious about your site?
Buy a SSL certificate - this tells Google that you are a legit business since they know you have to have a verified checking account to get a SSL cert. (And buy it for as many years as you can at a time, at the very least for 2 years)
Have a privacy policy that tells in exact detail what happens to the information about the visitor that is collected from the site.
List a mailing address (no P.O. Boxes) - Just as in real life, you feel better purchasing a service or product from a place that has a physical location.
List your contact information - telephone, fax (if needed), email & name.
If you have a bigger budget, use any of the “Hacker Safe” services and place those icons on your site. Again, this tells Google that you are seriously committed to protecting your visitor’s experience on the site.
Those are simple techniques that you can directly apply to your site, and are signals to Google that you take your online presence seriously.

Link popularity checker

Submit to the major link directories
Google seems to add weight to the websites that are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directories. If your site will be accepted in DMOZ, soon it will appear in the Google directory and in hundreds of DMOZ clones out there. If you’ve got budget, submit your site to the Yahoo directory. If you don’t have the budget, try the free submission (don’t expect too much though). For non-commercial sites a submission to Zeal.com could be worth the time you need to understand their submission guidelines.

Free directories
Almost every topic has a directory that accept free submissions. Submit your site there. Do a search on your favorite search engine for “yourkeyword directory”, “yourkeyword links” etc.

Link exchanges
The link exchanges are not as effective as one way links to your website and pretty time consuming but still worth it sometimes. Look around in the Google directory for your keywords. You will find a lot of sites with link pages that do link exchanges with other sites. Simply ask for a link swap. A non-templated personal message can do wonders. A search for “yourkeyword add url”, “yourkeyword submit site” etc will pop up hundreds of websites to exchange links with.

Links Quality
Quality, on topic links work best. Don’t waste your time by submitting your site to FFA pages and by spamming guestbooks and forums - this is not a long term solution and those links seems to count less and less in the last time.

The secret to get a lot of good one-way links for free
Write quality content for your website. Provide some free services that everyone would love. Work really hard and with passion and you will wonder how many people will link to you. Not because of the link exchanges or PR, but because they like your website. At last, that is what the web is about - the links from some sites to other.

One Word Rankings

It’s common in seo to make suggestions to potential clients to not go after that elusive one word phrase. But by doing so, and with seemingly all seo professionals on board, has it gotten easier to get ranked for one-word phrases?
I’ve personally have been able to get some top rankings for clients of mine within the past year - I’m not saying this to brag, but if everyone’s drinking that kool-aid, how will anyone know how hard it is to go after one word?

Now, there are those that will tell you that a one-word phrase doesn’t convert. In my experience, these phrase drive a ton of traffic to the site (as much as up to 10k unique visitors a day) - of course not all of them convert.But about 20% do.Yes, 20% of all people coming in on a one-word phrase converts at that rate for something on the site. Maybe not for the phrase that brought them in, but that person converts on something.
Now, using WebTrends or Google Analytics will tell you the phrase on which the person came in from, but to get the granular level detail, the only system I’ve been able to come up with and rely on is a site database capturing system. It’s been custom created, but it can track all the pages visited and will tell you that if someone originally came to the site for the term “KVM” but ended up buying USB Cables, that data is retained.

Now, all of a sudden, those one-word phrases are looking pretty good. And, with soo many seo’s purposely not going after them, I think it presents an opportunity to grab those top rankings for those magical traffic drivers.

Search for More

when someone uses a search engine they are looking to find an answer to a question. Most times the search engines deliver a satisfactory result.

But then there are some searches in which there just isn’t enough information to satisfy the user in their quest.Google has tried to address this with the rolling out of “Universal Search”. This is an attempt to deliver the most relevant item about a search query, regardless of the format.In the past the typical top result was a web page. In Universal search, that top item can now be a podcast, a video on YouTube or even a simple image.

But, does this provide enough ? Recently, I was looking for Canadian web directories. My search started in Google Canada (google.ca) and while their were some good results in the first 5 pages, after that there was a bunch of unrelated sites that just happen to mention the words “Canadian”, “web” and “directories” on their site somewhere.

So, I ran the same term on Yahoo and Sympatico (the Canadian version of MSN), and I got the same results. So are there really only about 30 directories about Canada? I highly doubt it.
The point here is that while the search engines do a great job, they need to to better. And I have real concerns when Google no longer touts themselves as a search engine but as an Advertising Platform.I understand their perspective; it’s just good business, and a good business needs to continually evolve. But when the core service that made you the top dog starts to erode away from the mission of the company, that signals the beginning of the end.

Yes, it will take a lot to unseat Google from it’s search throne, but people said the same thing about Microsoft in the 90’s - and their position is not so solid anymore.

Ecommerce & SEO

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. This model has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take the visitor’s money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of the search engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they don’t sell online but at least they’re able to deliver their message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The key is in the shopping cart you select.

SEO & Shopping Carts

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they are created after the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva Merchant and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of creating pages that will be well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping cart systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even spiderable and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive shopping cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the entire site, which we have seen may times in the past.