Search Optimization School

I’ve found some really great SEO tools the last few months and neglected to post many of them - so I’m going to post them here in a new feature I’m calling “30 days of SEO Tools”! The first tool in my series is dnScoop.com. dnScoop is probably the first place I go when I want to get quick in-depth details about a domain. All you have to do is type in the URL of the site and you get all kinds of handy details really quick:

• Domain Age
• Pagerank
• inbound links
• Alexa Rank
• ip Neighbors
• Link Value
• Site Value Report

I think that the Site Value Report is really cool, because it estimates in $$ how much that web site could be worth if sold. Like I said, this is one of the first sites I go to when I want some quick stats on a domain. Do you have an SEO tool you’d like to share? Just comment know to let everyone know!

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it - I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post - I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen - but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this - and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site - it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress - leave them now below!

Wow, I’m reading over at the Dfinitive Blog how google has removed the supplemental index tag, and that’s just amazing to me! The Google Webmaster Blog talks about it in the post “Supplemental Goes Mainstream. On the one hand you might think ‘wow this is good’. But as Dfinitive points out - this is really bad. Think about it. When you found your results in the Supplemental Index in Google -you KNEW something was wrong with those pages (duplicate content, too many links, bad links, spam). As a results - most of us (that didn’t want to seem them there) strived to FIX them and get them back in the regular index.

Matt Cutts said:

“I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO….”

While a really worthy statement - it is very telling, isn’t it? It’s almost a slap in the face in a way - like saying ‘hey, those pages were put there because they deserved to be…and we’re not going to point them out anymore. You should know better and do good seo anway…’. So what does this mean? Now, everything is in the main index and if you have bad pages they’ll just go to the ass end? Or, will the ’supplemental index’ still exist - but just not be publicly identified? As with most google changes, we’ll have to do some investigation and reading to figure the impact of this one…

Your thoughts? Comment now below!

On my personal blogging site JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes, I just wrote a post about setting up 301 redirects. If you don’t already know how to setup 301 directs, what they are, or how to use them - you should read that article. I never really had to think about them before, but I recently moved one of my sites from Drupal to Wordpress, and I didn’t want to lose the page rank or link juice on a lot of my older articles. I had heard about redirects before, but had no idea how to set them up. After a little research I figured out what I believe to be the easiest way to do them…read the article to learn more!

I haven’t written a lot the last couple of months on this blog, but it turns out I should’ve been, since I’ve learned a lot about link building lately. The single most important thing you need to do to drive traffic to your blog or web site is building links, er, rather - quality links. First, let’s talk about ‘bad links’. Are you doing harm to your blog? Are you linking to things that can hurt your web site’s reputation? Maybe you are and you don’t even know about it. I encourage you to use a tool I found, the bad neighborhood link checker. I’ve also placed the link in the SEO Tools portion of the sidebar. Run your URL through this tool and see what you come up with. You may be surprised at what you find - I sure was. It made me remove some links, do a bunch of no-follow’s (for affillate links), and even think about what kinds of links I should be adding.

Now that you see where your site stands, you can more clearly think about building quality links to your site.

Top Ways to Build Quality Links to your web site

I’ve read just ungodly amounts of information lately on building links and these are the things that stick out in my mind as most important:

• Write Pillar Articles: This is something that I’d been doing and didn’t even know it. A pillar article is a page or post that you write that is very informative, and may take some time to research and write (but it will be worth it). You want to write about something that you either know a lot about, or can get a lot of information about. It can be based on opinion, personal experience, research on the web, viewing media (print or televised), interviews, statistical data, or a combination. A pillar article will contain information that you think a lot of people need, and that you either can’t currently find on the web, or the info is scattered about - and a page ’rounding everything up’ (I call these ’roundup’ pages) would be well visited. You might even want to do some keyword research to find out what best attract people to the article before you write it. Do some planning before you write a single word. Find out who your competition would be. And most importantly, make sure that your post is completely relevant to your web site’s current content and viewers.

  Now it’s time to write. Organize your article in logical sections, and plan out the headers of each section. Make sure any links you give are appropriate and will help your web site reputation - else ‘nofollow’ them. If you add any affiliate links, be sure to nofollow them as well. Be direct and informative and give as much information as possible. If you article is too lengthy, consider making it a series (Part I, Part II, Part III), or at least breaking it up into multiple pages. I’ll give you an example of one of the first pillar articles I ever wrote. I had obtained a new cell phone (about a year ago), and it was supposed to do everything except slice bread. It was an mp3 player, a modem for my laptop, it played video, it took flash memory cards, and on and on and on. When I was trying to figure out the best ways to store media on it, how to setup the modem part, and how to make my own ringtones and backgrounds the manual that came with it was obviously not the best way to learn. I did however find tons of useful tips and tricks in user-based cell phone forums. I like the phone so much, that I decided to write a page about it on one of my web sites and review it. After the review, I posted all the tips and tricks that I could find specific to that model phone. Last, I added in affiliate links to phone accessories with a little info about each one (especially the ones that I personally purchased).

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had written what would become my first ‘pillar aritlce’! Why? Because it became one of the top 5 visited pages of all time on my web site! It drove people to create bookmarks, and visit other sections of my site. That page got it’s own google pagerank (5), and increased the PR of my homepage and reputation of my site overall. Writing pillar articles is work, and definitely completely different than a 5-10 minute blog post. But they are worth the effort, and every web site should have some. Maybe your pillar articles could be the homepages of different sections of the site? Oh, one last thing about pillar pages. If you have the ability, make sure you have comments turned on, because the more frequently it’s updated and the more it grows - the more important it become to you! Hopefully whatever tool you use to publish your site has a good mechanism to control comment spam, because if you get a lot, it will completely diminish all the hard work you’ve done.

• List your site in quality directories: There are tons of “me too” directories you can list your web site in, but focus on the ones that are reputable and that have great page rank. They will do you the most good. Again - it’s all about reputation online. I read a post on dailyblogtips.com about “5 Effective ways to build links to your blog, and it really got me thinking. He had some great links (to directories to submit to), and even better advice. Give it a read, and pay attention when your surfing online to the chiclets on other blogs and who they’re listing (and linking back) to. More reputable sites will probably be linking back to more reputable directories. I like the link in daily blog tips to the “blog carnival” site. This is a site where you basically “author” a roundup type page on a particular subject. Another site like this is squidoo. It’s a trade-off really, but a good one. You author the page on a subject your familiar with (and have web pages about), and you provide the site and it’s users with some great content. But, in the process - you are linking back (hopefully) to your pillar pages that fit the mold of that subject. Find quality directories and ’roundup’ sites to submit (and write about) your content - it’s worth the time!
• Article Directories: I’ll be honest, I don’t have much personal experience with this one. Back in 98-99 I used to write articles for a few of these sites, but not to drive traffic to my site. It was because it was fun, and they paid me $5-$10 per page. It was good for a little extra spending money. Nowadays - google is trying really hard to remove all the garbage content to display only original and relevant content as often as possible. That means the old article directories that went out of vogue in 2000-2001 are suddenly a diamond in the rough. If you write original content and submit it to these article directories, you are instantly building links back to your site (usually at the end or in the bio). I’ve read a lot on this subject, and I’ll definitely be writing some content to submit myself. My only words of caution would be - make sure you do your homework and submit to the article directories with the best reputation (and pagerank) you can find. Be sure to only submit to the select few you find that are the best (don’t spam your article into every single site you can find, or use article submission software). Also, use the same guidelines for writing I used above for ‘pillar articles’. If I have good (or bad) luck with article directories and submission - I’ll be sure to write it up in a future post.

There are tons of ways to build quality links to your site and many I left off in this short list. I wanted to concentrate on three big ones for you to try, and honestly you can spend a great deal of time with only the few tips I gave. As always, please, if you have relevant comments, questions, or quality link-building practices you’d like to share - please comment now by using the form below!

You know, I planned on writing a lot of articles for this site to help webmasters get better and higher web page rankings in the search engines. However, the whole reason a webmaster wants better rankings is to get more traffic. And 98% of web site owners want to monetize that traffic and turn it into money. One of the most common ways to turn that traffic into money is by using google adsense. Back in the early days of the web, putting ads on your site - like banner ads or popups, was seen as “selling out”. Nowadays - everybody wants to sell out, and find and exploit the easiest ways to make money online. Unfortunately this has led to many web sites being setup with mostly ads and little content. These are MFA or “Made for Adsense” sites, or a web site with little or no other purpose than to make money from adsense. Sometimes you will see what I call DCA sites, or “Daisy Chain Adsense” sites. This is where you search for something in google, and click on a result and go to an MFA site with mostly ads. Clicking on one of those ads leads you to another MFA, and another, and another, etc. The site owner loves this because you have click on multiple ads multiple times paying him each time through adsense revenue. The user hates this, because it’s just more and more wasted time online trying to find what you’re looking for.

Web site owners have complained for a very long time that google has done nothing about this, and in fact encouraged by allowing it to occur. Many have speculated that google doesn’t mind since every click (of an adsense ad) just makes them more money - so they turn a blind eye. Well, no more - because google has finally decided to put an end to shady web site owners profiting off of their back. In the last few weeks hundreds, if not thousands, of “low value content” web sites have had their accounts cancelled because “they were not a good fit for the adsense program”. This is great news for search engine users, google is actually trying to improve it’s results.

Google has also cancelled many adsense (and adwords) accounts for using “arbitrage” for profit. Arbitrage is the practice of buying keywords through a google adwords account to target and send traffic to your web site, and then having adsense ads on your web pages for people to click on once they get there. Basically, these site owners are betting that by doing a little research - they can buy really cheap keywords through adwords, and then make more money (than they spent) by users clicking on adsense ads once they get there. Essentially “arbitrage” or “buying your own traffic” just seems ethically wrong, and google must think so as well since they’ve been actively shutting down both adsense and adwords accounts of people suspected of doing this.

It’s good that google is valuing quality search results over profit, and this would go hand in hand with their “don’t be evil” policy. Even though google is the dominant search engine, with as much of a stranglehold on search as Microsoft has on the desktop, I think they are looking ahead to the future. They want to retain that position, and they know that keeping the search results as pure as possible keeps them competitive.

Google has also been cracking down on other web sites lately that are in violation with their TOS (Terms of Service). I was personally caught up in this myself, as one of my sites received a warning email from google stating that I violated the adsense TOS because my website contained “adult or mature” content. At first I was pretty pissed of - because this site as in excess of 30,000 pages. And a lot of the content is derived from current headlines and popular news stories. I have a block in one of the margins on this site that lists the top 20 (accessed) stories for that day. I forget sometimes the real nature of people. Take a look sometimes at the top searched keywords for different search engines. Inevitably, the top 20 always have something to do with sex or adult themes. Time after time, these are the most popular things that people search for. Out of the 30,000 pages my web site has less than 300 with stories about or related to sex and adult themes. That’s about 1% of my content. However, out of the “top 20 accessed” block on my site - probably 15 are adult themed or sex related. By sheer human nature, they just always seem to end up the most popular. Google has determined that because of this that they don’t want (adsense) to be associated with this web site.

Ironically, many of the ads that appeared through adsense were adult related - from people buying adult keywords through google adwords. So one argument is that they should control the purchase of certain keywords in adwords in addition to closing adsense accounts on adult related sites. Also - google has begun attacking “duplicate content”. Duplicate content is just what you think it is - the same content on 2 different web sites, or 2 different pages on the same web site. With so many blogs and aggregators, news headlines sites, etc., it is very important that the originator of a story get much higher preference in search results vs. the “duplicate content” sites.

Google isn’t killing the adsense accounts for sites with duplicate content - but they are giving preference to the originating sites, and sending the duplicate content URL’s to a “supplemental index”. So, it’s more important now than ever write original content in your web sites. Google has recently applied for 2 patents that accomplish this. The first is for LSI or “Latent Semantic Indexing”. The second is for “Phrase Matching”. These patents, along with a 600,000 keyword index will drastically change which web site pages are indexed and where they come up in the search results. You can tell that in may ways, this goes hand in hand with google’s removing of “low value content” web sites. Sites with “duplicate content” are pretty much low value too aren’t they? And by removing all but the original to a “supplemental index”, aren’t you making your search results even more pure?

So be aware of these new google rules, and how they might affect both your web site, and your adsense and adwords accounts. Content is king!? You can read about google’s new actions in many webmaster forums, like these postings over at Webmaster World.

JenSense had a post linking to 25 Tips to Optimize Your Blog for Readers and Search Engines over at Search Engine Land.

There were some great tips in that article, like using feedbutton for your rss widget, and using feedblitz.com to allow users to subscribe to rss posts via email. I hadn’t previously known about either service. Read the entire article for all 25 tips. Sometimes the best tips come after the article - in the comments that readers post. One reader added a link to his own 25 tips for blog marketing, a short list - but a worthy read. Another posted about a service for users to get blog posts via text message through open.4info.net, something I hadn’t considered before.

Also, quite a few comments talk about the value of participating in comments after posts. As I already said, sometimes I find the most valuable information in these comments, and I add something worthwhile whenever I can. But even if you only thank the author, if you leave your web site address you just created a link back to your site. This alone helps search engine rankings, but if you have an insightful comment with valuable information, users are likely to follow that link back to your site. Actually, in one of the comments I found a link to this blog posts about never blogging alone - or the ‘long tail’ of comments. This guy went through his logs and found that 26% of his blog traffic was directly from posting comments on other sites.

Read up and implement some of these great tips, and integrate them into the regular postings in your blog or site. A little hard work every day will blossom into a well known authoritative blog in no time!

When someone goes to the search engine and types in keywords the most important thing to that user is to get the most relevant results they can. Nothing is more frustrating than searching for hours for information you need and not being able to find it. Google has the corner on the market when it comes to relevancy. The reason that they are top dog in the search market is because they seem to be able to consistently be able to deliver the most relevant results in the sea of crap on the web. They have top secret algorithms that determine what web site content is quality and what is crap. One of the most important factors for google (and the other search engines) is “reputation”.
What are Backlinks?
It’s just like when you ask your friends and family where to go to get the best deal on a car, or what restaurant has the best food. If half a dozen of your friends told you a certain bar and grill was spectacular - you would just have to go and check it out. But if your friends and your boss at work, your doctor, and your parents told you it was an awesome place to eat as well - you would most certainly be expecting top notch dining wouldn’t you? That’s because it was recommended not only by good references, but also by important and respected ones.
How Pagerank Works
That’s how google operates too. Using it’s “Page Ranking” system google ranks web sites on a scale from 0 to 10. That Page Rank or “PR”. Zero is assigned to web sites that are brand new or aren’t well known. Ten is reserved for sites like google.com or whitehouse.gov. CNN has a PR of 9. To put it in perspective, in the bar and grill example your parents would probably have a page rank of 8 and your friends a PR of 2, 3, or 4 depending on how well you knew them and respected their opinion(s).
<>Why Link Reputation Counts
In contrast to the end user wanting to have the most relevant results, you as a web site or blog owner want to come up as high as possible in those search results. The higher you come up in search results, the more traffic you’ll get to your web site. To come up highest in the search engine result pages you have to prove that you are a “trusted” source of information - an expert of sorts. The measure the search engines use for this is how many other web sites link to yours. The quantity of links surely counts, but even moreso is the quality. It would be much better to have 3 pagerank 6 sites linking to you than 20 page rank 2.
Building Backlinks for Your Web Site
Now we’re going to talk about how to build back links for your site. If you want to keep your site indexed with google the only way to do this is the honest way. DO NOT buy backlinks, do not use link exchange services, web sites, or software. Do not send out link exchange requests in bulk….and MOST importantly - MAKE SURE that all the sites you link are directly relevant (content wise) to yours. The better the quality of sites you link - the better off you are.

Scrutinize every web site offering you something to help build up your backlinks or link exchanges. Everybody has some kind of ulterior motive. Sometimes it’s exposure, sometimes it’s money. What you want to stay from are sites that will bring your reputation down. Your web site reputation that is. If you have a lot of unsavory web sites linking to your that can actually hurt your search engine rankings if you aren’t careful. For example, google doesn’t like sites that are link farms (more links than actual content, basically a spam site). Google also doesn’t like sites with pop-ups, sites that redirect users from one domain or one page to another, or sites with illegal content.
Examples of Link Exchange and Backlink building Web Sites
I’ll give you an example of a site I thought was good, but after I used it for awhile turned out to be not so good. Take a look at www.linkmetro.com. This is a link exchange web site. Membership and use of the site is free, but you’ll notice that the home page advertises an advanced membership. I exchanged links using this site and was penalized by google. Google tells you in their webmaster quality guidelines not to use services like this, so to stay in best standing for their search index - don’t!

My main web site is getting almost 10,000 unique pageviews per day.? The homepage of that site has a PR of 3….well sometimes.? And other times it has a PR of 4.? The PR flips and flops back and forth between 3 and 4.? Sometimes for a day - and sometimes for only a portion of the day.? But what I have noticed is that when the page is PR 4 I always make more money in adsense.? Of course my google adsense terms and conditions don’t allow me to reveal exactly what I make, but I can tell you that usually when my PR is 4 for a day or more I make about 45-50% more.

What this tells me is….when you have a higher pagerank - you get more money per click.? I mean, if the pageviews and number of clicks are comparable and the only variable is the PR - you are getting more money per click.? I am not a user of adwords - and what I wonder about is when advertisers are targeting my site, do they know my PR?? Are they paying more because of it?? Or is it simply an adsense algorithm that knows when to funnel higher paying ads to my site, and when not to?? Add some comments if you have them - I’m interested in what others out there have to say…

If you have a blog, then every time you post something - the software your blog is managed in “pings” (sends out a notice) services, letting them know that you now have new content available. This is usually automatic. Some blogs (like Wordpress) allow you to update the list of ping “servers”.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the more people that know about your blog - the more it gets visited, indexed, and searched!! That’s why! This blog uses Wordpress, and I was able to increase the list of “ping servers” from the default of one to over forty using the list of ping servers on Elliot Back’s blog.