Internet Marketing & SEO

Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

…webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won’t use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a “nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike “cloaking” where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

It is not clear though whether slurp will follow the links within class=”robots-nocontent”.
Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag
and
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html

Onpage keyword mistakes, good, bad and ugly

Sunday, May 6th, 2007 | SEO, Search Industry | No Comments

Are you feeling a little overzealous about your use of keywords? If you have the nagging worry that you just might have used your chosen keywords a few too many times on your webpage, chances are good that your probably you did.

But how too many is really too many when it comes to search engine optimization? Well, you’d probably be surprised. There are plenty of “thou shall nots” that webmasters seem to break constantly, simply because they don’t realize that keyword spamming is an actual penalty that will cause their site to get booted right out of the Google index. Here are some of the things you can check and do to ensure your on-page keywords don’t trip the spam filter and are working most effectively for your site’s optimization.

Do the Control-A test
Go onto your homepage and hit control-A. Do any words – particularly your chosen keywords – suddenly appear when you hit control-A? If so, this is not so good and is definitely against the Google webmaster guidelines. This is otherwise known as hidden text and is definitely a big enough crime that could result in your site vanishing completely for those chosen keywords, if it doesn’t disappear completely.

Teeny, tiny keywords
No, I am not talking about keywords that happen to be only a few letters in length. What I mean are additional keywords – sometimes hidden but sometimes visible – that are usually placed at the very bottom of the page, most often under the footer copyright information… and sometimes only seen after you hit page down multiple times after the copyright information. And these keywords are often placed in text so tiny that it is sometimes barely even visible. And yes, keywords just barely visible used in this fashion, such as very light gray on a white background, are still considered hidden keywords.

Those little hidden divs
Do you have some juicy keywords on the page that you think are artfully hidden away in carefully selected hidden divs? Think again. Notice the hidden part in the term hidden divs? You guessed it, these are considered hidden keywords too,

Does it pass the sniff test?
Read your copy to yourself out loud. Does it sound good as if you were speaking in real life or does it sound fake? Hint: if you say your chosen keyword combination more than two times in a sentence or more than four times in a paragraph, you could be stuffing keywords into the content. For more on testing this, see Have you gone overboard with your keyword density.

Overboard on the similar keywords?
While it is useful to have other similar keywords worked into your content, such as both cars and autos, be aware of how you use them. Written into the content in a discrete matter works, listing them all in a row does not. For more on doing this correctly, see Targeting keyword variations for increased search engine & pay per click traffic.

Are your titles too keywordlicious?
Putting keywords multiple times into your title tags is so 1990s. Visitors – and the search engines – don’t need to know your page is about Sony HDTVs three times in your title alone. Position it correctly in your title tag once, and once will be more than enough. And along the same lines, they engines don’t need to know your page is about Sony HDTVs twenty-three times in the description meta tag either.

Don’t forget about the ings
If your keyword is “ski” don’t forget to use plurals, tenses and the “ings”. So you would want to weave “skis” “skied” and “skiing” into your content where it fits appropriately. Otherwise, this mistake can cause you to miss out on a whole lot of additional traffic because someone is searching for a “skiing holiday” rather than a “ski holiday”. End result is you end up not ranking well (if at all) for the search term because you somehow forgot to include the keyword skiing anywhere on the page.

Image happy?
If your titles, keywords or other crucial text is in images, not only will it not count for your keyword density, but search engines won’t be able to read it either. But if you must, make sure you take advantage of using the image alt tags and name the image the same thing as what the image is. So if it is a picture of a product you are selling, the name of the image should be productname.jpg with alt=”Product Name” as the alt tag.

Us and ours?
Don’t use “us” “we” or “ours” when you can add crucial keywords seamlessly into the text. Instead of “our skills” say “our link building skills” or “our optimization skills”. Too few people take advantage of this technique, especially on service oriented websites.

Single or double or triple it up?
Not everyone searches for that crucial single keyword you are putting all your optimization efforts on. So ensure you are targeting a two or three word phrase instead, and consider it gravy to the single keyword phrase.

It is pretty easy to go overboard with keyword density, especially when using some of the less-than-quality keyword tricks to insert keywords where you think the search engines will give it a boost. And it is just as easy to miss golden opportunities because you didn’t take advantage of legitimate ways to beef up your density and include additional related keywords on the page. Unfortunately, when it comes to keywords, many of these tricks are well known and can easily trip today’s spam filters.

Five dangerous SEO tools in the hands of the New optimizer

Monday, April 23rd, 2007 | Google, Internet Marketing, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Yahoo | No Comments

You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.

Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.

Alexa Ranking
Alexa ranking isn’t perfect. In fact, it is very far from it because of the way it measures a site’s traffic… by only counting those who are visiting the site with either an Alexa toolbar or an Alexa browser plugin. So numbers can be manipulated in so many ways to make the site’s Alexa rank seem better or worse than it should.

Google PageRank
What’s your PageRank? Unfortunately, while Google PR does have its uses, many people place too much importance on what number is in that little green bar, particularly when it goes up or down with those infrequent PageRank updates. And some site owners seem more obsessed with what their PR is rather than what their actual rankings are. Funny that, considering only one is usually related to ROI, unless you happen to be selling text links!

Automated Rank Checkers
A cringe worthy situation is when you are talking about the site’s rankings with your client and he says “Oh yes, I’ve been running a program to check our rankings every hour on our top list of fifty keywords so I can check how you are doing on an hourly basis.” So not only does your client feel the need to analyze how you are doing on an hourly basis, but also those automated queries are also one of the thou shalt not do commandments in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Oops.

Site:
When companies are paying top dollar for their search engine optimization, they can become a little bit obsessed with how many pages they have indexed, even when there are obvious problems with Google’s site search at the moment using site: such as the 260 error. And of course, there are fluctuations depending on what dataserver is hit or even the physical location of the surfer.

Link:
Which brings us to checking backlinks in Google (or Yahoo). Backlinks are notoriously slow at updating in Google using the link: command, and are even more notorious for being so incomplete… which is a good thing if you have snoopy competitors wanting to mimic your backlink campaigns for their own sites. But for a client wanting to see the fruits of your linking efforts (or to see what their link budget is paying for), it can definitely seem like things just aren’t happening.

These are definitely the tools that SEOs love to hate, although granted, each of them still offers at least a grain of usefulness even today. Yes, we all check PageRank, but just because a competitor has a PR6 site doesn’t mean they are ranking better than your PR4 or PR5 site. Likewise, a site with an Alexa ranking of 1000 may have far less traffic than an Alexa 10,000 or 100,000 site or may convert much worse. So while they have their uses, they should never be viewed as a be all, end all of search engine optimization.

At the end of the day, all that really matters is what position you are in the search engines for your chosen keywords and how much traffic is being driven to your site, not if you are in the Alexa top 1000 or if Google says you have 260 pages indexed. So when someone talks about how great (or poor) their Alexa, PageRank, backlink numbers or how many pages they have indexed, remind them that it is traffic that brings in the money at the end of the day and that is where the optimization focus should be.

How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Blogging, Link Building, SEO, Wordpress | No Comments

I think it makes sense to compile the very best in one handy location and share it, so here’s my entire collection. If I missed your link and traffic resource let me know and I’ll take a look.

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 | SEO Book

101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips | SEOpedia

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog | Online Marketing Blog

10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic | SEOMoz

8 Reasons Why Lists Are Good for Getting Traffic to Your Blog | Problogger

7 Ways to Get to the Top of the del.ico.us Popular Page | Problogger

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic | Performancing

How to Get Traffic For Your Blog | Seth Godin

The Art of Linkbaiting | Performancing

The Art of Blog | SEO Black Hat

What is Linkbaiting? | Modern Life is Rubbish

SEO Advice: Linkbait and Linkbaiting | Matt Cutts of Google

Problogger Link Baiting Series | Problogger

Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 Revealed | Link Building Blog

What Makes a Site Link-Worthy? | Eric Ward

Using Digg to Attract Hits | Slate

Using Digg and Netscape to Get Traffic | Pronet Advertising

Social Bookmarking for Traffic | SiteProNews

The Sandbox and Delicious | Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Unleashing the IdeaVirus | Seth Godin

Viral Copy | Copyblogger

Building Traffic to Build Your Fan Club | Copyblogger

Trust Rank and Your Domain | Link Building Blog

Generating Buzz With Link Baiting and Viral Campaigns | Search Engine Watch

Linkbaiting for Fun & Profit | Search Engine Journal

Link Building Guide | Jim Westergren

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building | Search Engine Journal

Link Baiting and Viral Search Success | Search Engine Roundtable

How Much is Link Bait Worth? | Cartoon Barry

Link Baiting (How Nick Wilson Created SEO Even Seth Godin Could Love) |
Stuntdubl

Link Baiting Case Study from Search Engine Journal | Search Engine Journal

Link Bait | SEO Book

The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do | Seth Godin at Squidoo

Building Traffic With Article Marketing | Copyblogger

Link Building Blog | Text Link Ads

Link Building Wiki | Text Link Brokers

Advanced Link Building Tactics | SEOMoz

I hope you Like it

Thanks

Do you gone overboard with your keyword density?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Issues, SEO, Search Industry | 2 Comments

At Seodays, we talked about keyword density and how important keyword density is when optimizing your content. However, not everyone understands how keyword density works… and how going overboard with keyword density can sink your entire page to the bottom of the search engine results, if it even ranks at all.

Keyword density is a tricky one because the percentage you should have can vary depending on the market area. In a non-competitive area, you don’t need to worry much about it too other than to make sure those keywords are on the page, preferably in the first half of the content rather than the second half. But if you are in a competitive area, you need to hit certain percentages of keyword density, and placing them at specific places within your content, without crossing that invisible line where your content becomes so keyword heavy that it becomes spammy.

So what exactly does keyword density mean? It refers to the number of times you use your keyword on the page when compared to the overall total number of words on the page. Keep in mind that it will include any text in the headers, footers and navigation. If you don’t want to figure it out yourself, there are many free keyword density checkers available on the net. Also keep in mind that it is useful to use it to check your competitor’s keyword density and the sites that are ranking at the top for your most important keywords.

After I have written carefully crafted content for SEO, the first thing I do is take a step back and look at the content. Then, I read it out loud. Don’t worry, you will only sound funny to anyone within earshot if you have gone overboard on your keyword density. When you read it out loud, does it sound natural or does it sound odd or fake? If it doesn’t sound natural, then chances are good that not only will readers think of it as spammy, but the search engines could too. So change up your keyword density a bit, or replace some keywords with similar related words instead, in order to get it sounding natural rather than spammy. Then read out loud and repeat the process.

Dave has another technique, although it might not quite catch the subtle nuances that reading out loud can bring to light. Dave prints the content, then takes a highlighter and highlights the keywords. If it looks like more highlighter than white, you need to tone those keywords down a bit too.

If you are hiring authors to create content for you on certain keywords, you will definitely need to pay attention to that density. Especially if you are picking up content for $5 an article, the keyword density will either be non-existent page or will be so high that it would trip even the most basic spam filter. It is definitely a case of getting what you pay for… content writers who can do this correctly are worth their weight in gold when it comes to writing quality content.

The most important thing to keep in mind when crafting content with appropriate keyword density is that while you need to have the bots in mind while creating it, the visitor who lands on your page is the one the content should be written to. If the content is over clocked with keywords, it is extremely easy for them to hit that back button and go to your competitor’s site instead. So pay attention to your density and use the ways listed above to check that it isn’t too spammy :).

Is link bait dying as a search engine optimization technique?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Google, Link Building, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

Link bait has two primary uses for webmasters looking to promote a site. First is the initial wave of traffic that a hot link baited article can bring. When people start linking and talking about your article, the traffic comes albeit through linkage from other blogs, through social media such as Digg and through blog search engines such as Technorati. However, within a day or two, this traffic trickles off to next to nothing.

Then comes the true SEO aspect of a successful link bait article… the boost that all those deep links give to the page and the site overall. This helps the blog rank higher in the search engines and contributes to increasing PageRank. It is an extremely useful technique… in fact, there are search engine optimization companies that only take on clients who have good link bait-ability.

But like any hot SEO technique, as soon as it starts getting done to death - as arguably link bait is now - the powers that be at Google simply turn one of those many shiny knobs and suddenly the technique starts to count less and less in the serps until those link bait links don’t seem to add anything at all. Or worse, sites utilizing it to an extreme level get penalized.

So is link bait as an SEO technique at the end of its days? Definitely. And the writing has been on the wall for several months now.

Remember the whole miserable failure Google bombing? With Google bombing, a large number of bloggers link to the same page with the identical anchor text so that the destination page will (hopefully) rank for their chosen phrase. Well, Google tweaked their algo so that Google bombing would no longer impact the search results (although Google bombing is ironically alive and well in Yahoo & MSN).

So if Google can combat Google bombing, which is a lot of bloggers linking to the same page within a short time frame, who is to say that they won’t apply the same thing to trip a filter or penalty when a blog has a large number of deep links coming into a single page in a short period of time? Link bait would still work well for the social aspect of it, but for Google at least, the ranking boost would no longer factor into it.

If link bait stopped working as a SEO technique, would people still do it? You bet. There is definitely the ego boost and the stardust factor people get when everyone is linking to them and talking about what they wrote. There will still be those who get their kicks from seeing how many times they can make the front page of Digg in a week or if they can be the first to blog about some exploit in Google or Yahoo that gets everyone saying how great they are. So from that perspective, link baiting will be around for a long time to come.

And my gut feeling? It is only a matter of time - if it hasn’t started already, that is. It could be a sudden thing that gets all the bloggers screaming at once, but I suspect it would be more of a gradual dampening, something that could easily be attributed to one of the few dozen other algo components that make up the Google secret sauce. But my guess is this time next year, link baiting will be dead as a search engine optimization technique.

Creating a navigation structure for both usability & SEO

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | SEO | No Comments

How many times have you seen a hot looking navigation structure, only to discover it is practically useless when you tried to actually use it? Or when you are trying to find a site in the search results, but the site’s entire Google snippet consists of nothing but the list of categories taken from the site’s navigation?

When designing a site’s navigation structure, it is one area where it is crucial to carefully balance the needs of usability with the needs of search engine optimization. And unfortunately, it is one area that non-SEO web designers tend to excel on one or the other, but rarely both. There are several things you need to consider when designing your site’s navigation structure, so that you don’t discover problems with it down the road when wondering why your bounce rate is so high or why your pages aren’t being indexed as well as they should.

So first, let’s look at the structure. Where is your navigation going to be on the page? Usability-wise, people look for the navigation on the left-hand side of the page, and it is the best placement. Along the same lines, because the left sidebar is a spot that attracts a lot of eyeballs looking for the navigation, it can also be a great place to place advertising, swapping a left sidebar navigation system for a right sidebar one.

Another popular placement is having a row of links across the top, underneath the logo and header, which works well for a small site but can be cumbersome for anything larger. If you have more than five or six categories or directories to link to, then unfortunately you need to start making rows of links or making drop down menus underneath each… both which are a bad idea.

Most drop down menus tend to be created in either javascript (bad) or flash (very bad). From a usability perspective, drop down menus can be very easy to use or they can be created in such a way that they are a usability nightmare, especially when extremely precise mouse movements are required to use it. And not everyone has the control – nor the desire – to do that. And if a user must navigate the drop down menu where a slider menu then pops out the side of each choice on the drop down menu, even worse. It is not to say that this cannot be done, however, it does take usability testing to ensure that it is being done correctly.

You also need to consider cross-browser compatibility when designing javascript navigation. Some web designers only test in one or two browsers, but there are other browsers out there that your navigation could break in, meaning all those visitors not using IE or Firefox are left floundering on your site without a way to get beyond the page they initially landed on.

Now, have you ever turned javascript off? Try it and then go to a site with javascript navigation and see what happens. It isn’t pretty. And not only can users not find their way deeper into your site other than what other text links you happen to have outside of navigation, but keep in mind that is also what the bots see.

The same thing applies to flash navigation. Uninstall flash and see what happens when you go to your favorite site with flash navigation. It isn’t pretty either! Either nothing shows up or the visitor starts getting warnings to either install flash or upgrade from their current version. And just like javascript, bots can’t read links imbedded in flash either.

From a search engine optimization view, drop down menus in flash or javascript can be a downfall of a site. The main index page of your site is the most important page on your entire site, and you want to ensure that the search engine bots can in fact parse all the deep links you have to your site. But if you are hiding them within javascript or flash, it is not giving those pages an added post in the search engine’s eyes.

And what is worse, Google, Yahoo or MSN might not even be able to find those pages if the only links to them are embedded within flash or javascript. And yes, there is evidence that Google is extracting URLs from javascript, it doesn’t seem to be using it for deep crawling a site. While some web designers can create javascript or flash menus with an alternate navigation system for the bots, use a lynx browser to double check that the URLs actually are accessible to the bots.

Using additional breadcrumbs is also a good idea to complement any navigation structure. Think of it as a “you are here” pointer on a map, which tells a user exactly which directory or subdirectory they are in, and includes breadcrumbs from each level up to the home page. So if a user lands on a page deep within the site from a search engine referrer, they can easily find similar articles by jumping up to the directory the original article was found in.

Are you fighting against a designer or company CEO who insists he or she wants the fancier, yet not search engine friendlier, javascript or flash navigation systems on the website? Ask them to name important sites on the web that are using these systems, ones that are performing well in the search engines. The big well-known brands on the internet are not using them. Just look at sites like Amazon, CNN and eBay for starters.

Still having trouble convincing… or being convinced yourself? Also look at the top competitors in your market area and unless you are in a completely non-competitive market area, you will likely find that none of them are using flash or javascript navigation either. And that can be a big motivator if you are trying to convince the powers-that-be that text navigation is the best solution.

Lastly, consider the placement of your navigation code within the HTML code. Placed at the beginning of the part of the HTML code that actually begins displaying text on the page, you will discover that the search engines will consider that content is the most important part of the page, giving a greater emphasis on those words. So be sure to use CSS so that your navigation HTML actually is at the end of the code, rather than the beginning, so that the actual content of the page appears higher up.

This will help place emphasis on the main content of the page rather than the keywords in your navigation structure. Using a lynx browser will also show you the text that is highest up in your document, so make sure it is the content and not the navigation. This will also help avoid the snippet problem where you see your navigation categories showing up as your site’s snippets in the search engine results, particularly when one of the keywords that was searched for happens to be one of those navigation categories.

Creating a navigation system that pleases both users and the bots can be a tricky balancing act, especially when so many prefer to go the “fancy” route. You can definitely run into problems when you create a navigation system without considering the impact and consequences of doing so, both from a search engine optimization viewpoint and also from a usability perspective.