Top 10 SEO Mistakes

Every search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is a double-edged sword. It’s like traveling in space: one wrong calculation here and one there and you can end up billions of light-years away from your destination. In this post I’m going to suggest 10 SEO mistakes that you should definitely avoid. There are 100s of things that can go wrong, but these top 10 SEO mistakes can cause you the most harm. Here they are:

1) Wrong title of the page
Your title is the first thing the search engine crawlers encounter when they visit your web page. Your title tells the search what your page is about. Even when your link appears in the search results page, it’s your title that attracts the users and makes them click the link. Avoid deceptive titles. Use keywords in your title and be as clear as possible. Another mistake regarding the titles is that sometimes all the pages belonging to a website have the same title: this is a big mistake. Every page of your website should have its own unique title.

2) Wrong selection of keywords
Almost every SEO effort revolves around the chosen keywords and lots of money and time is spent on obtaining a high ranking for the keywords. All the effort will go down the drain if you focus on the wrong keywords. Carefully study what keywords and key phrases your target market is using to find what you have to offer, and then optimise accordingly. Use the free and commercial keyword-analysis tools to zero-in on the precise keywords. Never assume on your own what keywords your target market is using.

3) Having no textual content
No matter how snazzy a website you have, if it doesn’t have enough text, the search engines will never find out what you represent and what product or service you intend to sell.

4) Having wrong content
It is as good as having no content because your bad content will give all the bad information to the search engines. This is partly related to selecting the wrong keywords because even by selecting the wrong keywords you can easily generate wrong content.

5) Choosing the wrong target market
You should know to whom you want to sell, and only then you can properly steer your SEO campaign. If the target market is wrong, how can optimise your website correctly. With wrong target market you’ll be choosing the wrong keywords and misplaced search engine campaigns. Always be sure of whom you want to target.

6) Indiscriminate use of graphics and animations
Graphics and animations look cool, but they only look cool once. They are like a movie: the more times you see them, the less attractive you find them. Unnecessary frills bloat your pages and push your real textual content downwards. Always remember that when the search engine crawlers visit your website they can make no sense of your graphics; they are only looking for the text content.

7) No use of header tags
Header tags —

,

, …, — are very important tags because they are supposed to highlight the gist of your web page. To create heading people often use bigger fonts for the

tag which is totally wrong. Search engines look for important keywords within your header tags so always use them to highlight the main points of your text, and if possible, use the keywords within the header tags.

Excessive use of keywords
People think the more keywords their pages have, the better is the chance of getting ranked hire; this is a complete misconception. Excessive use of keywords can get your website blacklisted on various search engines. Although you must have your keywords and their synonyms in your text they don’t have to appear in every sentence. Just have them in the beginning, within your title and other header tags possibly as anchor text.

9) Wrong linking policy
Linking is a very potent SEO methodology, but only if done properly. Indiscriminate incoming and outgoing links can severely harm your search engine rankings. Try getting inbound links from reputed websites and never link to websites that are considered “bad” (porn, spamming, scams, etc.) by the search engines.

10) Not blogging
Not blogging is a mistake because even if it directly may not affect your rankings (or it may), you can rest assured that your competitors are using it to boost their search engine rankings to get highly relevant traffic.

So avoid these top 10 SEO mistakes and gradually keep climbing up the ladder of higher rankings.

The SEO Christmas Alphabet: C for Content

This topic has been discussed way too many times by way too many people yet it is a bit discouraging how many website owners still do not really care to give emphasis on the development of their website’s actual content. For the most part I believe that it is because many wish to get as much money out of their sites while spending as little money and effort as they can. I guess this is true for many things, not just websites. If you look at the truly successful websites though you’ll see that the success really hinged on the content. SEO as I’ved said time and time again can only get you so far. It will help bring in traffic but it won’t guarantee success. So next time you take a look at your site or a client’s site be honest in your assessment of the content. Remember the website doesn’t need to have an astoundingly novel content but it does need to offer something of real value that will make it worth to visitors to not just visit once but to keep on returning.

As for the SEO aspect when it comes to content be sure to:

•use keywords as often as possible - Things to remember in placing keywords in your content would be: the importance of keyword selection, keyword density (don’t make it spammy!), and the placement of keywords.
•make it readable/viewable not only by humans but also by the search engine spiders.
•also take into account content other than text (images & multimedia content).
•hire an SEO copywriter to check if your content needs any editing or rewriting.

Increase Your Traffic By Focusing On Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail keywords aren’t actually your conventional keywords like “web designer” or “copywriter” or “pole dancer”, they are sometimes complete sentences. For instance, a lawyer looking for a web designer for his law firm may search for “web designer for law firm” instead of merely “web designer”, or someone looking for a pole dancer in New England will most likely search for “pole dancer in new england” rather than just “pole dancer”.

The fundamental focus behind Long Tail keywords is that instead of focusing on a few highly competitive keywords for your niche, you should also optimise for longer, less competitive phrases that can easily catapult your website to the first page of the SERPs. This I have noticed even while trying to optimise blog posts. I have often observed that it’s easier to rank higher for blog posts containing the entire search term expression. For instance, if you search for “tips to boost seo” on Google our post appears (at least as of now) on the first page. You can observe many similar expressions.

Why Long Tail Keywords Mean More Traffic
I’ll try to explain it with an example. Suppose you have optimised your website for “web designer” and you are getting, say 1000 hits per day because your link appears on the first page of the SERPs. Please keep in mind that “web designer” is a highly competitive word and you have to make a lot of effort first, to get there, and then, to remain there.

What if along with your primary keyword, you select 15 Long Tail keywords that will fetch very little traffic individually, but lots of traffic collectively? Since Long Tail keywords face little or no competition, it’s very easy to get a good ranking for them, and in fact, a lot easier than obtaining a good ranking for a highly competitive phrase like “web designer”. If you appear on the first page for almost all your Long Tail keywords and each Long Tail keyword fetches you say, 100 odd hits everyday, you’ll be getting 1500 hits all in all, and they will be more relevant because people are more likely to do business if they find a website for the exact phrase they are searching for. What if you can optimise for 30 Long Tail keywords? You can easily do the math.

Effective SEO Keyword Research Analysis

Every SEO campaign begins with well-thought-out keyword research analysis. Focus on wrong keywords and it may take several months to get back on track, leave alone the Herculean task of re-optimising hundreds of wrongly-optimised pages. So how do you zero-in on the right keywords or keyword-combinations?

Although there are lots of free keyword-research tools available on the Internet, they merely present the outline of what you are really looking for. If you don’t take your SEO efforts seriously, then you can use the free tools to research your keywords, and if you take your SEO efforts seriously you either use profession keyword-research tools, or you hire the experts.

But what if you really want to do your own keyword-research? They are definitely some good ways of doing it.

Target “Long Tail” keywords
“Long tail keywords” is the buzz word these days. It means instead of targeting specific keywords, you target group of words that your customers may use to look for your services on a search engine. So if you are a web designer, along with targeting this highly competitive word, you may also target long tail expressions like “web designer for hotel website” or “web designer for hospital website”. Getting on the first page of Google for “web designer” is extremely difficulty, but you can, with some effort, surely get good rankings for “web designer for hospital website” and “web designer for hotel website”.

Create different pages for different keywords
It seems more work but it has greater benefits. Optimising a page for say 10 keywords is a highly difficult task to achieve even for a veteran SEO expert. Let different pages focus on sets of 2-3 keywords; this not only narrows and focuses your efforts, it also helps you to re-orient the page in case by mistake you chose wrong keywords. It also sends a strong message to the search engines that you have targeted content pages on your website.

Do country-specific research
If you want to get business from various countries you’ll need to figure out what keywords they use and then optimise your website for those keywords. For instance, some people call a jam-filled doughnut “jellied doughnut” and some call it “jam buster”. Similarly, it’s garbage in Canada, trash in the USA and rubbish in the UK. People from different geographical regions use different terms and phrases to search for the same thing. Try to keep such things in mind while optimising for international visitors.

Double check the keywords by actually searching the phrases in the country-specific search engines just to make sure they bring up the right links.

Do your keyword research on an ongoing basis
Trends keep changing, and new competitor pop up almost everyday. Don’t feel smug and think your keyword SEO is over once you have reached the first page. You need to keep a constant vigil. Keep researching for new keywords and key expressions people are using to find your website, and then optimise your pages for those terms. Keep re-tweaking your pages to sustain your position.

Rand on Keyword Research Data

It is not often that I link to other posts, but today I cannot seem to help myself.

Rand has written “An Exhaustive List of Search Engine Based Keyword Research Data“, and fairly exhaustive it is. I read quite a few blogs on a daily basis and there very few post that have me searching for the print icon, this is one of them.

Keyword research is a subject close to my heart at the moment. Yesterday, along with two colleagues, I gave a presentation called “How to make search engines love your site” to an audience of Chartered Institute of Marketing members. I believe just over 60 people attended, each having paid a reasonable, fee the pressure was on. No guessing what my main subject was… yep, keyword research. If only I had read Rand’s post first.

I have been toying with signing up for the SEOmoz premium content, this finally convinced me that I should and I am now approx $400 lighter, but the content and tools are more than worth it.

Spam Scare: What to Do

What would you do if you suddenly get a massive amount of inbound links and find out its all spam?

If you know anything about SEO you know that we all loooove inbound links however we don’t want a whole slew of irrelevant links from who knows where. Of course if you are into paid links and invested in buying links then you wouldn’t be sad but we all know that there’s the danger of being flagged by Google because, as I have posted earlier, they frown on link schemes. So I ask again what will you do if this happens to you?

A SEOmoz member, Calamier, recently had to holler for help because this is exactly what happened to him. From 4000+ links his inbound link numbers soared to 24000+. Upon investigation of the inbound links he found out that they came from “a huge list of irrelevant sites” with every topic imaginable including “casinos, kosher meat, viagra, guns, link directories, and Nigerian SEO companies.”

In my opinion he did a good job of washing his hands by posting about his problem in YOUmoz since he can at least point to it and say he was horrified in case he gets penalised for the links. According to the helpful commenters though what he can do (and what we can do in case it happens to us) include:

•submitting a report to Google Webmasters Tools
•posting a thread at Webmasters Central
•create a redirect string using the browser referrer string to alert search bots of potential malicious activity - The problem with this is that it will be time consuming to do this for thousands of links!
•email the webmasters of referring sites one by one - Again not scalable.
•ask Rand for help - Rand actually offered to help in case the site got penalised! Nice. I guess this is one of the reasons why it pays to be a SEOmoz premium member and be an active YOUmoz contributor. ^_^
It was the people’s consensus that it is more likely that the site will not be penalised especially if it has no previous history of any black hat methods employed.

The Power of the Hash # in SEO

Early this month I promised a post detailing the uses of the # in SEO. Here it is.

As I have mentioned before the hash is often overlooked, if at all used, by SEOs. A very unfortunate thing because it can not only help solve duplicate content issues but help you consolidate the link juice from all the URLs with duplicate content. How is this possible?

According to Randfish’s whiteboard Friday videos “Complex Content Issues” and “Using the Hash” the power of the hash lies in the fact that search engines ignore anything in the URL after the hash sigh. For example if you have a URL such as www.example.com/#10, instead of indexing the contents of this specific URL it will instead point to and index the contents of www.example.com. This is a very useful thing in SEO because this way you can get search engines to ignore pages whose content you don’t want to be indexed such as those with duplicate content. This is especially important if you have massive duplicates because all the links pointing to URLs with hashes will instead pass the link juice to the main URL, which in our case is www.example.com.

As Rand said some applications of the hash include:

•canonicalization;
•management of affiliate links; and
•ability to show limited content.
Of course with every good thing comes a problem. One potential problem with the use of the # is that for single page version of content broken into sections/chapters using the # will result in suceeding sections not being indexed. For example if we have a tutorial on SEO you can expect that it will be long. To make it easy for those that prefer reading the tutorial as a single page we can chop down the tutorial into sections. Hence we can get the following URLs:

www.tutorial.com (This will probably contain the introduction)
www.tutorial.com/#topic1 (will contain the first topic)
www.tutorial.com/#topic2 (will contain the next topic and so on)

As you can see the good thing about this is that link juice from links to the other sections of the tutorial will instead be passed on to the main URL, www.tutorial.com. The problem with this is that since the search engines will ignore anything after the # it will NOT index the content of all the sections with the hash in their URLs. In essence only the introduction’s content (or whatever is in www.tutorial.com) will be indexed. As Rand pointed out though this shouldn’t be a real problem IF all your target keywords are already found in the introduction, which will of course require conciseness and good keyword selection on your part.

SEO for Twitter Search

Heads up SEOs. If you haven’t been factoring in Twitter in your client’s SEO campaign now is the time to stop and seriously consider upping your social media efforts.

Twitter has announced that it will be expanding its Twitter Search to include not only the text found in tweets in its index, which is what it currently does, but to crawl the links found in tweets and index the crawled pages. We all know how big Twitter is and how fast it’s getting even bigger so this is not the time to ignore this opportunity. You want your sites to be indexed in Twitter Search just as much as it is in Google right now. Of course this doesn’t mean that Twitter will be replacing Google anytime soon but Twitter Search’s power lies in having a real-time search engine that people CONSTANTLY use.

The only negative aspect I can see here is that we can expect spam to start flooding Twitter pretty soon, but then again that is inevitable and it’s Twitter’s problem. They’ll just have to find a way to minimise the noise. As for those who want to make the most of Twitter Search but don’t have any plans of spamming what you can do will be to:

•Start building your rep on Twitter – This is also very important because Twitter is planning on having a ranking system based on reputation soon.
•Widening your network – Of course this goes with building your rep.
•Link dropping – The key here as usual is to do it appropriately. Don’t spam! So start tweeting people and somehow steering the topic so you or they can drop desired link.
•Be current – Have something new on your site more regularly that is tweet worthy. You can link drop all you want but people won’t pass it on if there’s nothing new and noteworthy to pass on. Remember Twitter is all about the now.

Hacked site? Stop worrying and start working.

If you are worried about the consequences of having your site hacked here are some useful info that should put your mind at ease, knowing that you know what to do in case it happens.

•Google will delete you from their index but they will restore your URL in their index as soon as they confirm that your site is clean.
•Google will contact you to inform that your site has been removed from the index and will also give you the reason for removal (i.e. the fact that you’ve been hacked and they don’t want your site to appear in Google’s SERPs till it’s cleaned up).
•They’ll be nice about it. There’s no doubt about it Matt Cutts is really nice even to poor stressed out webmasters/website owners with hacked sites.
If being removed from the list worries you too much remember to focus on the positive part. Since Google will be contacting you, you can do something about it IMMEDIATELY. Note too that removal from the index is just a temporary thing so don’t sweat it. As Matt Cutts pointed out in his reply to Ryan Stewart, at least your prospective customers (users who click on the link from SERPs) won’t be turned off when they appear on a hacked page. Temporary removal would result in immediate loss/decrease of traffic but being retained in SERPs may result in long term loss of customers since word of your “insecure or low quality site” might get out. Remember SEO is not just about ranking well in SERPs but is also about reputation building so look at the bright side, stop worrying, and work on your site’s security. If you’ve been hacked then clean up your site at once…even before Google detects the problem and you receive notification that your site has been removed from the index.

According to Google Webmaster Central if your site has been hacked you should immediately:

1.get your site offline
2.assess the damage
3.re-install the OS and make sure you install all the latest patches for software you news
4.restore your site
5.change ALL your passwords
6.get the site back online

Getting Started in SEO

Since there is no thing as a certified SEO course as yet, most of the SEO experts have learned their SEO tricks by pouring over tons of SEO literature available on the Internet and by their own trial and error methods. And these people DO get results for themselves and their clients.

In order to optimise your website and appear higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs) you can do two things:

•Hire an SEO expert or an SEO company
•Do your own search engine optimisation
Both the options have their pros and cons. For instance, if you hire an SEO expert, you might end up spending lots of money and still be not happy with the results. On the other hand, if you do it on your own, you’ll spend lots of time learning a highly competitive skill and it may take you years before your website really begins drawing some quality traffic from the search engines. All that lots business can add up to be a huge cost.

Anyway, it’s up to you what course you want to take. In this post we’ll briefly discuss some ways you can improve your SEO skills and then kick start your own SEO campaign.

Interact on the SEO forums
SEO community is a very friendly community (although there is cut-throat competition). There are plenty of high-quality SEO forums on the Internet and a great amount of information-exchange happens in these forums. Some are free and some (especially that apply the black hat SEO tactics) charge a premium fee. It depends on what level of information you are currently seeking. My favourite forum is SEOchat.

Visit SEO blogs
Again, there are plenty of SEO blogs and many of them are run by highly successful SEO gurus. In fact, for learning better, even you should start an SEO blog. This way, you can organize everything you are learning, and discuss things with your blog readers. This not only helps you learn, but also helps you share your knowledge and hence, expand your circle of like-minded friends.For a good informative SEO blog try SEOmoz.

Write clean code for your website
This you can do even without learning SEO. If you keep your source code clean and follow the W3C recommendations half of your battle is already won. The search engines love websites that contain less code and more content. Talking of content…

Generate lots of relevant content
I can never stress enough the importance of relevant content in order to achieve higher rankings on the search engines. Your content gives you a head start when you start your SEO content because the search engines prefer websites containing valuable, relevant content.

Buy SEO books
Most of the SEO books are e-books and only one or two are the good ones. But you’ll have to use your own judgment before you purchase an SEO book. Do some research on the Internet and try to find out what experience people have had with various SEO books and e-books and only then make a purchase.

These are a few small, but significant steps towards your own SEO efforts. Apply them for, say, 5 months, and you’ll definitely see some good results.

SEO for the Yahoo!-MSN Search Hybrid

If (or when) MSN acquires Yahoo! it will surely affect the search scene. But by how much? We don’t really know, especially since even with their combined market share of 32.7 percent they still lag behind the Google’s market share (58.4 percent). For those of us in SEO though it is important that we already take steps to ensure we are able to adapt in case the buy out does happen and a new/hybrid search engine emerges. In case the buy out does not materialise learning more about Yahoo! and MSN Search will still be a good thing since those who have not been focusing their SEO campaign on these two search engines’ algorithms will be armed better for a more holistic (read: not just Google-centered) SEO campaign.

Aaron Wall has a great post on what the Yahoo! acquisition means for those in the search arena, from an analysis of Yahoo and MSN search’s present state in terms of organic search results, recommendations for SEO, and paid and contextual advertising. Some of the SEO recommendations include:

•Learning more about Microsoft’s algorithm.
•Continuing organic link building by have fresh content regularly.
•Submitting to the Yahoo! Directory.
•For those with a few large websites, start running more websites that cater to niche markets.
•For those who rely on Yahoo’s paid inclusion start beefing up on your organic search rank.
•Try to meet Yahoo News’ requirements so that your site can (if it is not yet) be included in the news search results.

Microsoft-Yahoo Tie Search Tie Up

Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as Nick Wingfield of Wall Street Journal put it, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

Search Engine Snippets

Yahoo’s at it again. Just a few days ago they announced that they’re implementing changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms so don’t be surprised if you see some changes in your Yahoo results rank. Hopefully the changes will be good for us. ^_^

On Google’s side things seem to be a bit quiet except that Gmail went down for several minutes. I was out watching a movie when it happened. Not much of a big deal but I’ve never encountered their Temporary Error (502) page before. Who saw it?

Anyone interested in geographic targeting should also watch the video on Webmaster’s Set Geographic Target tool featuring Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.

MSN Live is still alive and kicking and in fact has recently revamped their news search adding new features such as aggregated news, local news, multimedia content, and the ability to filter and sort articles by date in the results pages. The results pages also now suggests stories about similar topics (long been available in Google News) and also makes related video directly accessible.

Ok this last bit should have been under Yahoo but since it will affect the Microhoo deal or no deal thing I decided to leave the juiciest bit for the end (same thing I do with my food!). The sound of yahoos must be echoing through the halls of Yahoo! now that they finally have something solid to slap Ballmer’s face with. According to Wall Street Journal, Yahoo’s revenue increased 9% to $1.82 billion compared with a year earlier so now their shares are up from $19 to $28. Ballmer responded by saying that they are already “offering a lot of money” and that “If Yahoo’s shareholders like it, that’s great. We are prepared to go forward without a merger.” So I guess it’s a NO DEAL for Microhoo…unless Microsoft’s just thinking up a new strategy for the takeover.

Ranking in Google News

If you are aiming to rank in Google News but doing exactly the same thing you do in your ordinary websites then you are likely wasting your effort in link building. The reason for this is that for Google News there’s a different emphasis on the importance of factors.

One of the most significant difference in the ranking factors between Google News and Google Web is that pagerank is not as important in Google News. The reason for this is that due to the nature of news stories what is most important is of course the freshness and relevance of the content.

In Google News the robots crawl and find news articles in a matter of minutes and then comeback to check for updates approximately 12 hours later. What this means is that the number of back links is rightfully not deemed to be that important since there will be very few, if any, back links generated within that timeframe.

So what are the things you can do for your news articles to rank well in Google News?

1. Pick a story that you know is of interest to a wide audience. The reason for this is that Google News ranks news articles in two ways. First is the story ranking wherein they group together stories and figure out which stories are of greater interest. Obviously bigger stories will rank better than small stories (even if written and optimized well) since the articles belonging to the “big story cluster” will, along with the other articles on that cluster appear on the top of the Google News page. Second ranking method used is individual ranking of articles within each cluster. Note that bigger stories will mean more competition for the top spot in that story cluster. This is where the other ranking factors will kick in.

2. Make sure you pay attention to the top four factors Google News consider to be important.

a. Freshness – Articles should be recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. According to Google opinions, editorials,satire, press-releases and subscription s are not eligible to lead clusters so stay away from these type of articles(unless it’s is what you really do).

b. Citations – Get other news sites to cite your article. To get cited what you really need to do is be among the first to report breaking news. So be fast to publish stories. Remember though, links/citations matter but there’s no need to horde a huge number of links for Google News.

c. Local/personal relevancy – Local sources are given more credit/weight since their stories are more likely to be accurate (first-hand information is better than second-hand info) and published first (since other news sites will hear the news after they they’ve already published the story).

d. Trusted sources – No need to worry about having to be CNN in order to be considered a “trusted source” because Google news considers trusted sources for each edition and section. What that means is that while TMZ will not be a trusted source for business news it will definitely be a trusted source for entertainment news (gossip) and while WallStreetJournal may be a trusted source for business news in the US it will not weigh as much for the business news section in New Delhi, India. So what you need to do is become a trusted source in your niche, whether it be a topical news site or local news site.

Google News Rank Boosters

Last time I gave some tips on how to rank better in Google News. Today I’ll be giving some more tips that are still straight from Google Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye.

According to Ms Ohye some of the best practices you should adopt include:

Keeping the article body intact – Don’t break the article body. Place ads and other stuff on the sidebar or at the bottom of the article but not in between paragraphs!

Put dates between title and body – This makes it easier for Google to determine recentness of your articles. This is also really useful in terms of usability. One of my pet peeves is having to look for the date/time stamp when reading online articles/posts, especially when reading older articles because I want to be sure I know how old or new an article is when citing that article.

Smart Titles – Titles matter so think about your titles really hard. It matters in SEO so make sure you squeeze in your most important keyword(s) in there. It also matters to readers so make sure it is both informative and catchy.

Separate original content from press releases – As mentioned in my previous post, Ranking in Google News, “opinions, editorials, satire, press-releases and subscriptions are not eligible to lead [story] clusters” so make sure you separate them and give them their own section/page. Of course you should place the original articles on the main landing page and not the other way around.

Publish informative unique content – When it comes to publishing, whether internet publishing or in whatever form, we will never tire of reminding everybody – Content is still and always be king!

The use of unique permanent URLs with at least 3 digits - This helps Google determine that the page contains an article and is not a static HTML page. This has roots in the traditional way news sites/publishers choose their URLs. However, if your pages does not have this kind of URL you may skip this and simply do the next tip.

Submit a news sitemap – News sitemaps are beneficial because it will make it easier for the news crawler to find your article and re-crawl that same article to look for updates (re-crawl happens in 12 hours). Aside from this it contains the meta-data (i.e. keywords, publication date) needed by Google to help them determine not only relevancy of your article to their story clusters/categories but also determine the other ranking factors without having to rely on Google’s extractor.

Google Social Search

Google launched its Google Social Search this week. The new product is still in its experimental phase so you will need to log in to your Google account to sign up for the experiment as well as see the social search results.

So what is Google Social Search exactly and how does it work?

Google Social Search is simply a way to see “relevant web content written by people in your social circle”. You can view the content from people in your social circle by joining the experiment here and viewing the results listed under the new category, “Results from people in your social circle”, found at the bottom of Google’s SERPs.

There are three ways in which Google determines the people that belong to your social circle: your public Google profile, Google chat buddies, and Google Reader Subscriptions. If you haven’t tweaked your Google profile it would be a good idea to add all your other websites, blogs, and social site accounts in the profile so that Google can add your contacts in these site to your social circle. Note though that since Google includes both your implicit social circle (people directly connected to you) and your extended social circle (people connected to you via your contacts) you might see results from people you do not know or do not necessarily wish to follow.

When Google has determined the list of people in your social circle it then uses its regular search algorithm to fetch results for you whenever you search for anything via Google but this time adds results from your social circle WHEN RELEVANT. So do not expect to see the “Results from people in your social circle” each time you make a query.

PRIVACY AND CONTROL ISSUES

Not surprisingly one of the biggest issues people will be even more concerned about when it comes to social search engines (not just Google’s) is the privacy issue. The good thing about Google Social Search is that it will only index and list PUBLIC content. What this means is that you have control over what will appear in your friends search results. If you are not comfortable about your content appearing in social search results then make sure your social site account profile is not ticked as public. Furthermore if you don’t want friends of friends to see your online content then specify that you only want direct friends to be able to see your content. You can do this on facebook and most other social sites. As for your blog and other sites just make sure you don’t publish anything you don’t want to make public! And remember delete all links in your public Google profile that you don’t want to make public.

When it comes to screening the content YOU see you also have control. You can simply remove a “friend” if you are getting results from someone you do not know.

Another thing you should remember when it comes to the privacy issue is that people Googling will not automatically see your content they first have to be logged in to their Google account, be connected to you in some way for you to be included in their social circle, and they have to search for something relevant to your public content. Furthermore, your list of buddies/friends will NOT be listed publicly. You will only see results from these friends but even you will not see a complete list of their buddies.

PPC Management Software and Tips

One of the best ways to drive interested visitors to your site is through pay per click (PPC) advertising. It is common sense that if you provide someone who is looking for a specific product with a link to that product they will buy it instead of just getting more information about it.

Though, when you make a mistake with your PPC campaign it can cost you a great deal. If you are new to the game you may forget to do several important things. For one, you may not remember to place a cap on your daily bids. Even PPC veterans with high traffic campaigns sometimes have lapses in judgment that result in untargeted clicks which do not convert.

Monitoring your click-through-rates (CTR) and conversion data is a necessity once your campaign gets established, after which you can adjust your things accordingly. This is where PPC bid management comes into play.

If you use an automated bid management system which both analyzes your conversion data and CTR you can reduce the amount of time and effort you need to dedicate to your campaigns. This means that you can react much quicker to campaign fluctuations because they are identified sooner. But when looking for a good automated system you need to remember that often times you get what you pay for.

As a pay per click advertiser you need to consider four things when choosing a bid management system:

1.The number of keywords you are currently bidding on.
2.The size of your budget.
3.Is the system going to do a better job managing your budget across all your campaigns?
4.The number of campaign that are currently being managed.
If you take all these into consideration you can probably find a very good automated bid manager on the market. One such system is Acquisio Search. Acquisio Search is a custom pay per click software system that is capable of monitoring your keywords, flagging those that need to be paused, and automatically emailing you about keywords that have poor Quality Scores.

If you are still a PPC rookie then you probably have a much smaller number of active campaigns. Shoemoney Tools or BidMax offer more affordable solutions. Both of these tools are well suited for running a smaller campaign and are intuitive in how they function, making them perfect for someone new to PPC.

As much help as a PPC tool is they are still not as useful as regular, hands-on maintenance. Software can only interpret data in certain ways, requiring a human to properly understand the numbers and information. Constant scrutiny is required in order to get the best possible performance from your PPC campaign. Still, as your campaign becomes bigger and the scale or budgets increase, an automated bidding system becomes an invaluable tool for PPC advertisers.

Introducing Open Site Explorer

I attended SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) webinar last Thursday, January 28, and learned some things on how to make the most of the new link analysis tool.

If you’ve been using Linkscape as one of your search engine optimisation tools you’re probably pretty happy with the functionalities that the service brings. At first glance it might seem that another link analysis tool would just be redundant and, for the most part, that is actually true. However there are some things that Open Site Explorer can give that Linkscape doesn’t really do and vice versa. In the future though Rand said that OSE and Linkscape will probably become integrated with one becoming the premium version.

One of the major difference is the number of links available per report: shows up to 10,000 links in OSE and 3,000 links in Linkscape. Note though that unless you are a SEOmoz Pro member you will only be shown details of 5 links in OSE and none in Linkscape. However, you do see the other important metrics such as overall page authority, domain authority, number of linking root domains, and total number of links including those that are “no followed”. These data are things you need to know where you stand in your link building effort, but it’s really the other data that gives you more actionable items.

According to Rand some of the things you can do with the data given by OSE include finding the following:

•302 pages - What you can do is turn them into 301s
•404 pages - You have to options for these pages: either put content in those pages or redirect them.
•Inbound links with low quality anchor text - Contact the owner of the linking page and ask them to change the anchor text to something you prefer.
•Links to competitors’ error pages - Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ links. Do the same thing as #3 but make sure you explain to the person you are contacting to link to YOUR page, explain how linking to an error page can hurt them, and give your preferred anchor text. This isn’t really unethical since the link was pointing to an empty error page anyway.
•Links to old/poor pages - Redirect these links to newer pages that offer fresh and/or more relevant content.
One other thing that Rand suggested that stood out for me was in answer to a question by one of the participants. (Sorry I wasn’t able to take note of the person’s name. If you attended the same webinar and know, do let me know.) The question was: How can we use OSE to determine what to charge our clients?

Rand suggested that you simply check out the domain and page authority of your client’s page as well as the number of links. Then you check out your client’s competitors’ pages and compare the data, after which you can do a guestimate of how much effort you need to put into link building as well as how long it will take to creep up on the competitors in search rankings.

Tips for Creating Readership from the Geek Chick

One of my favorite bloggers, Sacha Chua, who has several hundred subscribers reading her personal blog regularly has this tips to offer if you want to grow you online network. The cool thing about the tips (which I’ll be listing below) is that they target your existing OFFLINE social network. The funny thing about us SEOs and bloggers is that we tend to get overly focused on getting traffic from search engines and other social networking sites that we neglect to tap the existing offline network we’ve worked hard all our life to build.

So anyway how can you get your offline friends and colleagues to read your blog and keep on coming back? Here’s what Sacha Chua said:

•Make sure people can find you - You can do this by giving away business cards and signing letters and emails with your website URL in it. To make sure your friends who choose to check out your site know that they arrived on the right one add your REAL bio on the abour section. Introduce yourself online!
•Give them something they’ll find immediately useful - Her tip on giving people the URL of a blog post (remember this means YOUR blog post) that solves a certain problem or gives specific information that they need instead of discussing the solution/info at length will definitely work since they would want to read the post because they NEED to. Additional tip (from me): Keep a pen and scratchpad near/on you so you can always scribble away and give the info even when not in front of a computer.
•Provide continuing value - Give them something useful again and again. You know what your colleages and friends will be interested in. Blog about it. And make sure it would also be easy for them to look for older posts containing the info they need!

Social Search and SEO

So how is the social search engine relevant to SEO?

It is obviously important because we see how more and more each day search is turning into something more personal as search engines seek ways to improve the relevance of search results. What this means is that we (SEOs) should encourage clients to improve their online network and to start seriously considering or putting more effort in the social media efforts.

Here are a few tips on what you should immediately do to get the most of Google Social Search (remember this may be in experimental mode now but you want to reap the benefits even before it’s fully released):

Get a Google Account and update your public Google profile – Add links to your facebook, twitter, myspace, jaiku, blog, flickr, and whatever other links you want to appear when contacts (hopefully your clients or the friends of your friends, who can turn into clients) search for terms that appear as content in those links.

Get more active in social network sites – Been neglecting your social site accounts? Start adding friends and posting updates WITH KEYWORDS. Don’t get spammy but think of real updates where you can insert a keyword or two. Oh and don’t forget to set your profile on public.

Get reviewed - Find ways to get reviewed by real people on industry-specific sites or even on their websites. Remember the real aim for many clients is conversion and not just traffic. For this word of mouth is still the best way to go. In search terms social search and reviews from people in your social circle is still equivalent to word of mouth. The more people review your site/product/service the more chances you get to appear on the social search results of their contacts.

Hope you find this helpful. Happy Halloween everyone!