The Link Popularity Blog is a forum for Webmasters, link exchange partners and search engine marketers who want to learn how to improve their Website rankings, to find link partner options and use link popularity and search engine optimization. With BigLinx, you also have the option of using our link exchange SEO tool and a whole arsenal of items that will drastically improve your page rankings.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Staying Current on SEO
The universe of search engine optimization is constantly changing. So, unless you are going to hire an SEO professional, it would be wise to stay abreast of the ongoing changes in the SEO community and the tools available to aid in your pursuit of rankings.
To that end, below is a list of useful search engine forums. It is a good idea to register for one or more of them, read regular updates and participate in the discussions.
SEO Chat - A free service with articles, news and tips for SEO.
This is a tale of two cities -- no make that universes. In one universe, you have traditional marketers, whose purpose in life it is to create content shaped to a customer's needs and behaviors. In the other universe, you have programmers, whose existence is dedicated to building efficient, flexible and reliable platforms for delivering that very content.
This is not a new tale. Anyone who has worked in a technology environment has probably observed the clash of marketing and product development. But today, the setting has changed. Today, the "rise of search" has compelled these two groups to cooperate at an ever-increasing depth and frequency. Search engine optimization or search marketing has become central to the success of both groups and, therefore, has become the a new fertile ground for breeding success (and waging war).
The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite a mystery to your average marketer. More often than not, search marketing consultants are vague about the techniques they employ. Often, this is for a good reason. After all, how many traditional marketers are equipped to understand the SEO implications of a simple website decision like using Flash or graphics.
And, while programmers have a deep understanding of the technology distinctions -- say, client-side versus server side scripting -- they are rarely concerned with the nature and quality of the content displayed.
Fortunately for both groups, the SEM community has a new bible of sorts at its disposal. Search Engine Optimization with PHP (and the soon to be released ASP version) is designed to be a bridge between these two communities. The book is a collaboration between Jaimie Sirovich, a search marketing consultant, and Christian Darie, a software engineer.
It seems unlikely that an experienced marketer will learn much about marketing. Nor will a good programmer learn much about programming. But with this book, each group has the opportunity to learn about the other's area of expertise.
So, who should read this book? Well, if you are a search marketing consultant, you probably (hopefully) are quite familiar with the concepts covered. You may benefit from the fairly comprehensive coverage of systems or foreign language SEO. But in general, if you've been at this for a while, you will most of this book to be light reading.
Overachieving programmers, will certainly have more to benefit here. This is especially true in areas such as site planning, content relocation and inadvertent black hat mishaps.
Marketers will benefit the most from this reading. This is true even if they avoid all the sample code and acronyms. Ultimately, marketers are responsible for the search-engine rankings of their sites. And therefore, having a solid, yet high-level, understanding of SEO is critical to their success. It also helps to ensure that there is less feuding and more collaboration.
In 2005, Google acquired Urchin's popular web analytics technology and has since re-branded as Google Analytics. The service has become a popular choice among search engine marketers (SEM) who want better insight in to the conversion rates of their various campaigns. Last week, Google released a new version of Analytics and it is worth using for two reasons. First, the service is pretty decent -- offering a slew of data views in a pretty user-friendly interface. Second, the service is free -- a price that is tough to beat.
While the interface remains boring, there have been some updates to the dashboard and some of the reporting features. Google has attempted to the interface more powerful for advanced users, yet simple to beginners. Unfortunately, while the service is pretty-looking and feature rich, in general the data views are about the same as you'd see in any other web stats service.
There are several new features that users will find useful, including:
Email reporting
Cleaner graphs
Customizable dashboards for each viewer type (e.g., marketer, webmaster, etc.)
Although this is not a revolution in the way users will see their website stats, it is an evolution. And, because it is free, it is solid choice that webmasters and web designers should consider using, if they prefer instead to invest directly in internet marketing and link popularity.
SEO - Do You Need Reciprocal Link Manager Software?
by Chris Angus
An examination of reciprocal links software and whether deploying such software on your website can be part of a good SEO strategy.
Reciprocal links are one of the most cost effective forms of web advertising. It is also cost effective because it you don’t have to pay a cent for it. However the problem is that checking to see whether or not all of your link exchange partners are still linked to you can become a very tedious chore. Reciprocal links may be free but the entire endeavor ends up costing you in the man-hours it takes to go through every single reciprocal link on your site to see if it is still working! This is time that could be spent promoting or developing your web site in other ways so reciprocal link manager software might just be a good idea.
There are almost a hundred practical benefits to using this link software to trade links and monitor their functionality. One drawback is that the best of these types of reciprocal manager links are written in PHP/MySQL which handle unlimited tasks and data to do with your traded links. Although it sounds complex, most web hosts provide PHP and MySQL and usually programs like this are easily downloaded and up and running within fifteen minutes.
A really good reciprocal manager program can organize the look of your links on your site by creating professional looking HTML pages that make it easier for search engines spiders to crawl your links and index them. The best programs will list the links in a neat arrangement. Really good reciprocal link manager programs can also make these pages match the design of your website as well as display the link's title in the browser bar thus once again making your pages more search engine friendly than ever.
Also if a partner decides to trade links with you this amazing software can run all of your link directories together so that he or she has the option of submitting links to your other sites as well which can be another great convenience for the busy webmaster.
Christopher Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at) Brilliantseo.com Copywriter
Perhaps, you are a small business owner using your website to sell products or find qualified leads. By nature, you are a do-it-yourself kind of person, so you are orchestrating your own search marketing campaign. The good news is with time and persistence your website should begin paying dividends shortly. The bad news, you've now got yet another full time job.
Yes, search marketing is a complex blend of art and science. Pushing your web site to the top rankings requires a lot of work. And, there is no easy road mpa to follow because every site represents a different set of opportunities and challenges.
Hopefully, you've done the basics:
You have spent a fair amount of time researching your "keyword cloud" - finding highly-relevant keywords with good search volume;
You've signed up for Google and Yahoo pay-per-click campaigns -- setting your bids low initially and tracking results;
You've initiated a link trading or link exchange strategy to help your site's link popularity develop;
You may have already integrated a blog or other content management system in to your site, so you can post your thoughts and articles from others on relevant topics; and
If you are really diligent, you may have already started posting articles for others to repurpose.
So, you are doing all this work. But how do you know whether you are getting good results? For that matter, how do you measure results?
The true measure of success is difficult to capture. Of course, you can check the search engines to see what rank your site is for a given keyword. While that is useful, it does little to give you a big picture view of whether your efforts have converted in to any progress.
So, here's a list of a few tools that I like to use to help track the big picture:
Google's Webmaster Tool provides status information of your site as it actually exists within the Google search engine. Information includes, a list of indexed pages, lists of external sites linking to individual pages on your site as well as a number of index, query and crawl stats.
Use this PageRank Checker to see what your site's PR is across a number of Google's servers.
urlTrends (http://www.urltrends.com/) offers a nice wide view of your web site through a variety of sources. In addition to providing all the basics like Google PageRank and inbound link information, urlTrends provides historical trand graphs of many key data points. The service is free and there is an upgrade option that will track your results more regularly and send you the results.
iWebTool's Backlink Checker (http://www.iwebtool.com/) lets you see which sites are linking to you and provides the PageRank information, as well. Total links are not provided, so you cannot gather any objective data here. But, you can visually glance at the quality of sites ranking to you pretty easily.
SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org/) has a handful of tools. But the best tool in the bunch is the Page Strength tool that displays some common results, but also includes links in Technorati, del.icio.us and other cool tools.
WebmasterEyes (http://www.webmastereyes.com/) lets you see your site as if you were wearing special "Google Vision" goggles. Go to the urlTrends homepage and type in URL, hit submit and suddenly you will see your site with Google PR built right into your site. In fact, every link within your website will display the corresponding PR for the destination page. This is a handy way to understand which pages on your site are actually beginning to develop search engine credibility. Do a "link:" search of your most popular pages and you might find that the link popularity of those pages just happens to b higher than the poorer performing pages.
iWebTools's (http://www.iwebtool.com/) tool for "predicting" your Google PageRank. The site expressly disclaims any accuracy. Nevertheless, it is another objective algorithm to monitor your sites momentum.
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire web page for so-called related search words, so a page with many different words matched more searches, and a web page containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, limited only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had crawled. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, some popular search engines began to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a friction between search engine and webmasters that continues to this day.
At first search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as category and keyword meta tags, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page's content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta tags, causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines abandoned their consideration of meta tags and instead developed more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that elevated a limited number of words (anti-dictionary) and were more diverse, including:
Pringle, et al. (Pringle et al., 1998) [1], also defined a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page which were often manipulated by web content providers attempting to rank well in search engines. But by relying so extensively on factors that were still within the webmasters' exclusive control, search engines continued to suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters using a bait-and-switch lure to display unrelated web pages. This led to the rise of a new kind of search engine.
Development of more sophisticated ranking algorithms
Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start [2]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.
With help from PageRank technology, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant search results. Google quickly became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.
However, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google's algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank's reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page's value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.
Further complicating the situation, the default search-bracket was still to scan an entire web page for so-called related search-words, and a web page containing a dictionary-type listing would still match almost all searches (except special names) at an even higher priority given by link-rank. Dictionary pages and link schemes could severely skew search results.
It was time for Google — and other search engines — to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms. Around the same time as the work that led to Google, IBM had begun work on the Clever Project [3], and Jon Kleinberg was developing the HITS algorithm.
A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, though the displayed value is rounded to be an integer, and the data updated infrequently, so it is likely to be outdated. For these reasons, and the fact that PageRank is only one of more than 100 "signals" that Google considers in ranking pages, experienced SEOs recommend ignoring the displayed PageRank.
Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to compete for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ widely: a web page that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization. Based on these experiments, often shared through online forums and blogs, professional SEOs form a consensus on what methods work best.
SEOs widely agree that the top signals that influence a page's rankings include:
It's very common for SEO's to focus too much on trying to figure out a search engines algorithm. They believe if they can crack the algo of Google for instance their page will be get a better rank.
Maybe, maybe not. But here's why I think this isn't the best mindset.
1. Things change. These algorithms are changed from time to time. They are maintained and managed by humans who will flip a switch eventually and your crack will no longer be effective. You're chasing smoke.
2. Search Engines aren't your customers. They aren't going to buy your products. Write your pages and content for the people whom you serve. People whom you want for customers.
3. Google has some number of factors that influence a sites rank, people usually think it's around 100. Spending a huge amount of time cracking the Algorithm is to focus on only one or two of a hundred factors. It's like going on a blind date, spending two hours picking out a pair of shoes meanwhile you have spinach in your teeth.
Take a different tack.
Isn't the real goal to achieve top rankings that remain high and translate into business and customers?
Don't lose the forest for the trees. If traffic doesn't turn into sales then what is the point? You're kissing your sister. You've spent all your time and energy making sure Google's algorithms like your site, and your users needs haven't been properly addressed.
5 ways to Achieve Top rankings without Chasing Algorithms.
1. Stop focusing on the Search engines. They aren't your audience. Write for your audience. In the longer term this will add value to your site that will translate to indelible traffic.
2. Remember the basics. Always use your main keyword phrase in your title tag. Use META description and keyword tags, link text, heading tags, and the like.
3. Each page should have it's own unique tags and be focused on a keyword. One per page.
4. Write your content well. Content and Context are crucial. Keep it new. Keep it coming. Always remember to be mindful of your keyword phrase, synonyms, related words and surrounding text. Try using ThemeMaster if you need help with this. It's a great program.
5. On Page and Off page factors are important. Focusing on one at the expense of the other will end up hurting you. Find the balance. On-page factors to consider are your tags, body text, prominence, relevance, and the like. Off-page factors include link popularity and link reputation (what those inbound links "say" about your Web page when they link to you).
Is search engine research important? Yes. It's critical. By way of an example: Earlier this year pages began falling in Gooogle's ranking and SEO's everywhere were trying to figure out how to preserve their hard won rankings.
Doing our research, we learned that it was a compliancy issue. With a pretty simple solution. Make sure you use a DOCTYPE tag and an ISO statement at the top of every Web page.
For example: If you didn't know about this compliancy issue you could have waste a lot of time trying to chase the algorithms and end up doing more harm than good.
Keep doing your research and stay current on the search industry.
In conclusion.
If you spend 100 hours cracking the Google's algorithm that may translate into x number of visitors per day. In those same 100 hours you could have written unique, high quality content for many sites that generates more overall traffic. Put people above search engines and you'll increase your traffic.
One question we get all the time is whether it is worth it to pay $300 to submit a website into the Yahoo Directory.
The answer is that it depends. If you have a very small e-commerce store, for example, with little margin for error in your marketing decisions, the $300 may not be worth it. Chances are you won't see a measurable impact in sales from the listing (even in terms of possible search engine ranking improvements).
If your online store or business website does enough business to allow some discretionary spending in marketing activities that don't have to provide immediate or measurable impact, I would pay the $300. It's just a good link. I would pay $25/month for a highly valued link. In this case, you are just paying that upfront.
Google has several trusted sources such as Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ (The Open Directory Project). Since these directories are edited by human editors, the descriptions, and more importantly, the keywords used in these descriptions, help Google decide what the relevant keywords are to your business. Of course, that has the potential to impact your rankings.
In a nutshell, figure out what your online marketing budget is and allocate some percentage of that towards long term search engine ranking improvements. If that number comes out to $500 or more, then start with a solid link exchange system and an express submission in the Yahoo directory. On top of that, spend an hour or two week adding new content to your website and another hour or two enhancing your link popularity with highly relevant websites. Over time, you will see siginificant imrpovements in your sites rankings.
