There’s been some controversy in SEO land this week. Matt Cutts, Google’s mouthpiece for linking policies, stated publicly that websites heavily involved with paid links are considered high risk. Many of the SEO pros in the blogosphere took offense to this and feel that Google is profiling search engine optimized websites unfairly.

The issue of contention revolves around paid links – buying or selling links for money. Google often discredits these links because it does not see them as valuable or quality based. Anyone that has the money can buy links to their site, in the hopes that it will boost their rankings in Google searches. Google doesn’t want this, however, because this type of linking is not based on quality and occasionally pushes the envelope of black hat.

The paid linking penalty would probably be somewhat less offensive to SEO professionals if Google itself didn’t use paid linking strategies. Google does indeed use money and giveaways, such as free Android phones to bloggers, in an attempt to gather links and positive publicity.

They both have a point. Most of the paid link sites out there are shady in some way – their sites do not boast the highest content quality available. On the other side of the coin, Google is being hypocritical by punishing quality websites for using free product giveaways and surveys to get links when they do the same thing.

Google could probably do well to revisit how exactly it determines paid links. If a site is doing a free product giveaway and collecting reviews in the form of links or comments, that isn’t black hat SEO, that’s just traditional marketing. Relaxing the barriers slightly could help.

My solution to the problem is to stay classy. Unlike some of my more excitable blogging counterparts, I do not believe that Google is saying that any and all SEO efforts will be penalized. SEO in itself is not a dishonest activity. SEO is a way of improving your website to be more relevant and consumer friendly. As long as SEO companies stay focused on the client and stay away from questionable activities such as buying links from link farms, I don’t see why there should be a problem. Links collected to or from your website should be from credible sources, regardless of what Google is saying or doing.

-Rachel

Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are constantly evolving and adjusting their algorithms in order to stay ahead of the SEO professionals that doggedly strive to find the perfect SEO solution for their clients. There really is no way to know 100% for sure what will work and what won’t.

What about all those SEO companies guaranteeing results, you ask? Consider them either tragically misguided or scam artists. Whatever the reason, there are no absolute guarantees in SEO and anyone promising otherwise is probably not the best bet to hire.

While we SEO experts may not have the answers in stone, we’re a clever sort and there are a number of techniques that can be applied to a website to improve search engine rankings and increase site traffic.  We also know some of the mistakes that can be made resulting in an ineffective SEO campaign.

Focus – A successful SEO campaign needs a specific focus. Depending on the size of the campaign, the number of keywords should be limited to between approximately 8 and 20 phrases. Any more than that and you’ll have too much going on. One of my favorite phrases is keyword cannibalism, which is what occurs when the keyword focus is split on a page and the search engines don’t know how to index the page so they end up splitting the page value. You don’t want this because both keywords end up devalued and the page probably won’t rank well.

Duplication – One of the cardinal rules of SEO is no duplicate content. This includes titles and tags, multiple domains, having the same paragraph of text on every page, or copying and pasting your content from someone else (aka plagiarism).  Having duplicate content on your site, no matter how innocent your intentions may be, is considered spamming by search engines and will not help your rankings.

Antisocial Behavior – If you want more people to know about your website and to increase website visibility in the search engines, get out there and spread the word! Social media and linking have two distinct benefits you’ll be missing out on if you don’t join in. First, you have access to millions of people, allowing you opportunities to promote brand recognition. Social media sites were created for users to share cool websites. It’s always possible that your site will be discovered and become the next big thing (Hampster Dance, anyone?). Second, the number of links pointing to your site are monitored by the engine and are seen as a virtual thumbs up, making your site appear more attractive. More attractive = more likely to rank well.

The Big Picture – The last common reason (for today’s blog post at least) as to why SEO campaigns fail is called “forgetting the big picture.” What’s the big picture? The audience! The user, net surfer, web geek, online shopper, client, gamer, whoever. Above all else, if you want a successful website, you want a user-friendly website. It’s easy to become so caught up in search engine optimization and rankings that the big picture is forgotten. So, the next time you make a change to your website, pause for a moment first to contemplate your audience’s perspective.

-Rachel

More and more recently, we are seeing SEO clients who are utilizing non-SEO friendly menu systems for the primary navigation on their websites.  While the menu may perform great functions and/or be easy to create through Dreamweaver or some other website editing program, the effects of the menu on their organic search engine traffic could be devastating.  The worst part, is that the business/site owner has no idea that they are limiting their SEO capabilities by using the menu.

So how do you know if your menu is not search engine friendly?

Read more »

Google recently launched its own version of Digg called “What’s Popular”. This tool is an addon for your iGoogle page if you have one. Within What’s Popular, you can view the most recent, most popular or the most relevant stories, images or videos based on your preferences. Each link gives you the option to vote (called pops) for the site.  The more “Pops” a site gets, the higher it is on the list (much like Digg/Reddit). Submitting a link to What’s Popular could not be any easier put a link in and click add and you are done. Now you do have the option to change the title and the description if you would like but it is not a requirement. Google of course has an algorithm in place that decides what to display for you in your window which can be a good thing and a bad thing depending how they figure this out. Some say it is based off your search history which makes sense but that can be a bad thing depending on if you’re searching something different every day.

The few questions on everyone minds are:  Will most links fall by the waste side similar to Digg, Reddit, Mixx ect or will there be something special in place that may help a link get shown more even if it doesn’t have tons of “Pops”? The one thing that seems to frustrate many people is the fact that it is the same sites that are topping the “Popular” tab on Digg and half the time they don’t seem to belong up there but somehow get up there. Will everyone have a chance to be on the top of this list or will the same thing happen that happens on most social sites.  What does this “What’s Popular” mean for SEO… Well we do not really know yet. We do not know if it will provide a backlink or more importantly how much traffic it will generate for us and for our clients. Only time will tell.

It has been several months since the Search Engines collaborated and announced the “canonical” tag that you can add to your pages and help clean-up all the junk/duplicate pages out there.

While the canonical URL tag itself is very simple (see below), the evaluation of whether or not the tag is working or has an impact on search engine rankings (SERPs) is difficult.

Sample Canonical Tag:

<// link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourcanonicalurl.com/" />
(the two /’s at the beginning would need to be removed when implementing)

Read more »

After you have gone through the process of carefully selecting your keywords and optimizing your content, you can sit back and watch your rankings shoot through the roof, right? Not necessarily. Your content is optimized, but do the search engines have the proper tools to find and index your content? The following are some of the oft-overlooked items that prepare your site for optimal indexing by the search engines.

Optimized Internal Linking

This process is sometimes referred to as siloing and is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.  Optimized internal linking is important, not only from a search engine standpoint, but from a usability standpoint.  Internal linking is an important way of directing the search engines to your most important pages.  The pages that are linked to the most, the search engines deem as the most important.  Also, linking to relevant pages from within your content allows users to easily find the content that should naturally progress them through your site.

Make Unique Titles and Descriptions

The search engines are all about unique content.  They attempt to weed out duplicate pages in order to provide unique and relevant results.  As a result, if a search engine comes across two pages that have the same page title or META description, there is a good chance that one of the pages will get passed over by the search engines, despite the content that actually appears on the page.  Writing good HTML titles and META tags can not only improve your search engine rankings, but it can also increase the amount of clicks that your search result gets by enticing the potential visitor.  Making sure that your pages have unique titles and descriptions is a great way to improve your chances of getting all of your relevant pages indexed into the search engines.

Write Unique Page Content

As mentioned earlier, the search engines don’t like copied or duplicated content.  If there is a discrepancy between duplicate content, the search engines will almost always use the original source as their top result.  If your site uses product feeds for its descriptions or if you copied your content from another site, it will be extremely difficult to get that page indexed by the search engines, much less achieve a high ranking for that page.  The search engines understand that not every word or phrase is going to be unique, so they give a small amount of leeway, but not much.  As such, it is recommended that each page contain around 70% unique content.  This allows for a quote that appears elsewhere, or a list of product specs that cannot be changed or altered.  If these items must appear on your site, it is imperative that you balance the copied content out with around 70% unique content.

Clean up Your Site’s Coding

The content that the user sees visually is often entirely different than the content that the search engines see when they spider your site.  This means that the spiders must filter through all of the coding on your site including page styling, JavaScript, and image filenames.  Much of the information contained in your coding is irrelevant to the search engines and can serve as a major distraction to the spiders when they visit your site.  Fortunately, much of the coding that hinders the spiders can be referenced externally such as external JavaScript or containing your site’s styling in .CSS files.  This will allow the search engines to quickly access and index the keyword rich content that you really want them to find.

When using proper search engine optimization techniques in conjunction with preparing your site for the search engines, you will be able to see the maximum results for your effort.

2008 was a great year for SEO! More and more businesses showed an interest in search engine optimization and sought out specialists to help them fulfill their online marketing goals. Social linking, blogging, and other forms of SEO garnered more publicity and respect as legitimate ways to grow internet business.

Business owners in every industry worried as the economy declined and moved into a recession. I know my company, MorePro Marketing Inc., was concerned about the effect that the recession would have on our ability to land new clients interested in our SEO services. Yet despite the slowing economy, MorePro grew and expanded in 2008 and business was still going strong at the end of the year.

Smart businesses, when threatened, increase marketing and publicity expenditures and know how to adapt to a shifting market. Many of our clients did just that and turned to search engine optimization and PPC as ways to increase website traffic and boost online sales. These companies saw success even when many other businesses were going under.

Here’s hoping that 2009 brings SEO companies like us, our clients and everyone else continued success and prosperity! Hopefully the buzz around internet marketing and online business will continue to evolve into a new tech-savvy market all its own.

Happy New Year!

-Rachel

After explaining the concept of PageRank sculpting and nofollow links to a recent client, I realized that the concepts and strategies behind this SEO tactic are not very well known.  I hope that the following explanation of PageRank sculpting and nofollowing links will help you to understand the basics behind this strategy:

Nofollowing to Improve Keyword Rankings

The concept of nofollowing some of your internal links is often referred to as PageRank sculpting.  This is essentially helping improve the PageRank of certain pages through any of the following means:

• Nofollowing duplicate links (e.g. repeated links in different areas).
• Nofollowing non-keyword links (e.g. Contact Us, Home, About Us).
• Nofollowing pages w/ duplicate content or non-SEO friendly pages (e.g. popup image pages, Flash pages, etc.).

If you think of a page as passing 100% link value (as a whole) and let’s say for instance that this page has 10 links on it, each link would have 10% value that it would pass onto the destination URL.  So by using nofollow on duplicates and/or non-keyword links, we are helping increase the % of value that each link continues to pass to the desired pages.  In this same example, if we were to nofollow 5 of the links, then the remaining 5 links would now pass 20% SEO value vs. the original 10%.  When those 5 passing value are optimized and keyword-enriched, the % increase can help improve the rankings for the destination URLs in most cases.

One good example of where/why a nofollow would be used is to help improve the anchor text (link text) for the homepage.  In the case of your site, the links back to the homepage are simply “Home”, versus something like “cheap t-shirt printing”, which would be more optimal.  Having your page rank well for “home” is not ideal, but by optimizing the ALT tag on your logo (ALT tags are like anchor text) to include more relevant keywords and linking to the homepage, we help increase the page’s relevancy for those keywords.  And since the “Home” links carry no value, we choose to nofollow each occurrence.

This description and example just brush the surface of the PageRank sculpting topic and are in no way a complete strategy to improving Search Engine rankings.  Combined with solid web content, a diverse linking strategy and good overall site organization, these techniques can be utilized to help give you an advantage over your competitors.

For more information on this topic or to inquire about MorePro’s SEO services, please contact us.

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist

In reviewing some keywords today in Google, we stumbled upon a highly questionable website showing up in the #1 position for “business insurance“.  We check this keyword on a pretty regular basis and have slowly seen the following site creeping up over the past 2 months, but a #1 ranking is ridiculous - especially after we detail this website’s past.

You can view the results of the query for “business insurance” here or you can just check it yourself (And no, I won’t link to the site).

At the time of this writing, thecagetattoostudio.com was ranking #1 in Google for the keyword “business insurance”.  The domain has nothing to do with business or insurance as you can obviously see.

The results immediately puzzled us, especially considering that there are close to 10 million results for the keyword and it is in a highly competitive industry.  Of course, we had a few ideas in regards to how they were able to accomplish this and several of them were verified.

So how did they get this high profile ranking… let us take a look at some of the things we know:

• The domain had expired earlier this year and was purchased by an unknown owner.
  • The domain was actually used for a tattoo shop website until it expired.  The original site can still be viewed at archive.org.
• The domain has over 3,000 links reported from Yahoo Site Explorer.
  • An aggressive & questionable linking campaign was initiated almost immediately after purchase, including a lot of paid links.
  • Most of the incoming links appear to be from Russian (.ru extension domains) and appear to be of the paid variety.  The sites are entirely in Russian aside from the select few “paid links” in the sidebars.  The link to thecagetattoostudio.com are in English and utilize one of their primary keyword targets.
• The domain is also hosted on a server with 2 other domains that are similar - the topic of the website does not match with the domain name.
• The site is nothing more than an affiliate site to generate insurance leads for another site.
• The site is only made up of 2 “business insurance” related pages.  All others showing up in a “site:” search are leftover from the tattoo shop’s site.

It would appear from the outside that this is clearly a spamming attempt at Google, but you wonder if they know about it and/or if they can do anything.

So in summary, a 2-page, 3-month old, tattoo-based domain w/ a high percentage of paid links from Russian websites is ranked #1 for a super-competitive keyword in Google’s search results. 

Has anyone seen a similar situation as this?

PageRank has been pretty dependent on linking for a while now.  It’s well known that the more incoming links you have pointing to your website, the higher the authority Google assigns to it.  Linking has progressed to be more detail oriented in relation to Algorithms.  In fact most of your page’s ranking on Google is not just dependent on the amount of quality links pointing to your website, but how it is linked.

Google now takes into account several attributes which include, but are not limited to:

• Authority level
• PageRank
• IP class

In order to procure several good quality inbound links to pages on your website, it is imperative to have a dynamic strategy to your approach.

Blogs
Blogging is a very effective way to acquire quick links.  A good strategy is review related website blogs and comment to promote your own website.  There are several websites out there that offer professional blog reviewers for hire, or you yourself can commit your personal time to accomplish similar goals.

Search Engine Optimized Articles
Writing good quality articles with keywords strategically placed is another great way to get high quality inbound links.  Obviously you’ll want to stick with content related to your website. Submitting them to article directories provides a very speedy way of obtaining those links.  Adding these articles into your newsletters will add to the incoming links as well as keep your reader/client/customer involved with the presence of your services.  To top it off, it establishes you as an expert in your field.

Good Old Fashioned Reciprocal Linking
There is an ongoing debate whether or not reciprocal linking is as effective as it once was.  Obviously, a good, organic one way link from an authoritative site to your own is definitely the best link to procure, however just not easy in multiples.  In my own 4+ years of experience with-in the field, I have found that reciprocal links continue to offer great value.  Not only have I seen PageRank increase because of reciprocal linking, but it also introduces all kinds of other advertising opportunities.

(Reference: http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/07/29/top-3-google-seo-linking-strategies/)

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist