Search Optimization School

Firefox SEO extensions can help you dramatically if you do SEO on a regular basis. For years many of us have been manually doing research by hand for the details we can gather on competing sites in SERP’s. You go to yahoo to check backlinks, you check indexed pages in google, you check Alexa ranking, you check domain age. You might even snoop around to see if the site has a sitemap or robots.txt file. It’s a time consuming ordeal – isn’t it?

Believe it or not, there’s a free extension for firefox that can do all these thing and more! It’s called “SEO Quake”. Once you install it, it has 2 “modes”. One is “toolbar” mode, and it can display all the SEO attributes about a site in a toolbar at the top of Firefox. The other is a “SERP” mode, where it can append the google results and tell you all the SEO attributes of search results as you research your competitors like this:

See how it appends each search result with pagerank, backlinks, alexa ranking, etc? You just have to be careful when you setup this plugin to have it get results “on demand” (only when you tell it to), or you can get your IP banned from search engines for too many lookups.

If you don’t want something that heavy duty, I’ll give an honorable mention to the SEO Firefox extension Search Status. It puts a very simple tool in the status bar of firefox which shows the pagerank and alexa rankings of sites you browse. This is very handy as well.

What Firefox SEO extensions do you use?

It’s been a hot debate for a really, really long time now, does image alt text count for SEO in web pages? I’ve probably seen this argued as many times as whether or not the meta keywords tag really matters for search indexing and SEO. After some research and trial and error over the years, I have to say that it does, but only for long tail keywords. If you’re targeting some broad search terms like “ipod nano” – sorry, the image alt text isn’t really going to help you against the stiff competition. However, if you’re targeting long tail keywords like “fix broken ipod nano” then alt text in images can really help you!

You see, broad terms are usually one or two words that get tens of thousands (or more) searches per day. Long tail keywords are 3+ works that are very targeted and usually get 5,000 or less searches per day. If you add your keywords into the alt text of an image on a page you’re trying to get ranked, I’m pretty certain that in most case it will boost you up there in the SERPs. Read my other post about it Image Alt Text: SEO or No SEO?, and I think you’ll agree.

Are you using keyword laden alt text on your sites now?

I think that too many people forget how good internal inks are for SEO. If you want to increase your rankings in the search engines start linking your own posts on your blog! It will increase your listings in the Serps, but it will also be better for your blog because you will be highlighting and bringing up your old posts all the time.

When you write on a topic – link your previous posts about similar topics. In fact, think about installing a plugin like Aizatto’s Related Posts. You can create specific pages rounding up posts into a “series”. You can feature certain posts on your home page. All these are great ways to build internal links. There’s even a plugin called RB Internal Links that helps you browse for and find previous posts to link to using Wordpress short codes.

Build internal links and watch your search rankings increase!

Targeting keywords for better SERP rankings is a really good strategy for building incremental and additional traffic in your blog.

I’m going to give you an example scenario of how to rank well for a completely new set of keywords, meaning your blog URL, title, description, and keywords you’re using now are something different. For instance – let’s say your domain name is “cookinghealthy dot com”, but you want to start coming up for the phrase “free recipes”. You found that keyword phrase gets 20,000 searches a month and you want to grab some of that exposure (without diluting the SERP’s you already position well on).

It’s very important that you understand what you are doing here, and why you are doing it. If you have a brand new blog (under 100 posts) – continue to hammer away at your main keywords used in your home page title, description, and domain name until you get good search results for it. Then, slowly develop a list of additional keyword phrases to work on over time. The theory of “not putting all your eggs in one basket” is why it’s best to do this. Just like having multiple blogs and multiple monetization streams, multiple keyword phrases (for one blog) generating traffic will make sure that your always getting traffic, and over time these keyword phrases are like sowing seeds in a garden. With care, some will grow beyond your wildest imagination.

So, in this scenario I want to come up as high as possible for “free recipes”, but the competition is pretty stiff. I would come up with a game plan to change that, and this is what I would do:

10 Step Keyword Ranking Process

1. Write a recipe post and make the title “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here”
2. In the first 15-20 words of the post say something like “My collection of <b>free recipes</b>: Recipe-Name-Here is so delicious you’ll want to make it again and again” (use different description phrase each time)
3. Write a post 5 days a week for a month using the same “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here” title and intro sentence strategy
4. After the first post create a Wordpress “page” simply titled “Free Recipes” with 1-2 paragraphs of original content (100-200 words), and create a linked list of the recipes posts – adding them as you go
5. Add a “related posts” block to the bottom of posts, so all the free recipe posts show other ones
6. In other posts (that aren’t about free recipes), add a sentence somewhere in there like “I’ve been addiing a lot of <b>free recipes</b> to the site lately (and link the full URL to your free recipes page like cooking healthy dot com slash free recipes
7. Comment on other food blogs, and use “Free Recipes” as your name and the URL to the free recipes page on your blog as the link
8. Comment in lots of forums, and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page
9. Submit every single recipe you wrote (with the first paragraph of text change a bit) to an article directory and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page as the signature / byline / footer, etc.
10. Post additional free recipes at least 1-2 times per month for 6-12 months for outstanding results!

The 10 step process I outlined is nothing more than basic SEO and linkbuilding. Notice in the intro sentence of the blog I put the keyword phrase in bold tags. This is an old SEO trick (that may not work as well anymore). You could use this process with any web site or blog, but my version assumes a few things.

Assumptions:

* You’re using blogging software, such as Wordpress, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Geeklog, Xoops, etc.
* You have an SEO plugin installed that automatically uses the first xx words in a post as your meta description (like All in one SEO pack)
* You’re using a “related posts” plugin
* You know how to do linkbuilding
* You know how to do article marketing

Ranking well for keywords is like cooking a good pot of soup. The individual ingredients aren’t nearly as good until you put them all together. And over time the longer you let them cook in the pot – the better the blend together and taste! Also, as I mentioned earlier – doing this with a domain that has at least 100 posts and good indexing (and some kind of pagerank) will yield the best results.

John Pratt writes how-to articles and tutorials for bloggers striving to build monthly income online. Read his blog: JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes

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!