SEO Strategy

The emphasis placed on links by Google over the last few years seems to have led many people to assume that you can “buy” ranking by acquiring inbound links without having properly focused content on the actual web pages being ranked.

Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information - links or no links - and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name - which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.

Youtube is the king when it comes to online videos and so it is helpful to know some tricks and tips to get more exposure for your videos when you put them on Youtube. After all, that’s the point isn’t it? To get more people looking at your video.

 Joe Whyte created a Guide to Video Marketing on Youtube a couple of months ago and has some very good information. One of the things he focuses on is the importance of building your Youtube profile. As with all social sites, the more “friends” and followers you have, the more exposure your posts and comments are going to get - since there are ways of spreading the word to your little community (”sharing”) every time you add something to your profile.

He also suggest you use your friend and contact lists on other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter to notify them when you’ve posted a new video.

Joe has done at least two more posts on video marketing on Youtube…

Video Marketing on YouTube.com, and

How to Boost Your YouTube Subscribers : Power of Video Marketing

And this article by Grant Crowell,

Video SEO Expert Interview - Performics Jeremy Clem

You can find some more detailed information about video SEO in an article by Onil Gunawardana of Blinkx. The article is called “How to Maximize Search Engine Optimization for Web Video.”

The author puts particular emphasis on the importance of tags for optimization within specific sites - to take advantage of the natural traffic within the site. All sites categorize videos in a variety of ways, and you want to make sure your videos come up in the right lists. Videos also get grouped when they are viewed with others sharing similar subject matter. So there is a visual impetus to click on videos with similar content.

For instance, the author suggests using “category descriptor tags” such as “comedy”, “mystery”, “finance”, “health”, “business” so they come up in internal searches for videos in these areas.

Optimize videos uploaded to Youtube, Revver, Metacafe and other sites by using the best titles, tags and descriptions. Linknet Video.

Video: Dancing Monkeys and Video SEO

It is hard to know what to say about optimizing videos to get search engine exposure and traffic until you’ve actually posted a few videos and seen the result. Your first few video posts may be disappointing because they will probably not get much traffic. You may get lucky and hit on a topic and a presentation that gets some buzz, but for most marketing applications that seems unlikely. Continue Reading »

Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love. By some estimations Google drives more traffic to Wikipedia than to any other site. Just do some random searches in Google and see how many times a Wikipedia page comes up very high in the results.

So presumably we can learn something about SEO from Wikipedia. According to this article and discussion, What Wikipedia can teach us about SEO, there are a few important things that account for Wikipedia’s SEO success:

1. Wikipedia uses search engine friendly file names, title tags and page descriptions.

2. Wikipedia has a ton of text based content - and, of course, it is very keyword focused.

3. The internal linking between Wikipedia pages is very extensive and very thorough.

4. Wikipedia has more than 5 million inbound links, and many (if not most) to internal pages.

This should make Wikipedia a much-copied model for all websites looking for good Google rankings. But the fact is, many marketers - especially those running ecommerce sites - do not appreciate the importance of on-page optimization. They are content to show a picture of a product with a short description and price. But if they were to follow the Wikipedia model they would use keyword-rich titles for all product pages, along with optimized descriptions on every page. They would also inter-link internal  pages - not just from a common navigation bar, but from within the text of pages by using such devices as “Similar products you might be interested in…”

However, as many of us involved in providing SEO services know, many clients are not prepared to go that far. It would take much more than just tweaking their page titles and metatags. It would take a remake of their entire site, involving writing of a lot of text, and actually providing some useful information about the products.

Most prefer to just offload the problem to someone else and spend their money on things like link building. But that is only half the battle. Without decent content it is hard to win at the SEO game.

I’ve been wanting to delve a little more deeply into SEO for Wordpress, so I’ve compiled some Wordpress SEO tips from a few different sources. My sources are at the end of the article.

1. Put your primary keywords in your blog name, and make sure your blog name is wrapped in an h1 tag in your stylesheet. In Wordpress your blog name usually appears in the header on every page.

2. Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to allow you to make your page titles different from your post titles. Each post has its own page title which by default has the Blog Name first followed by the Post Title. But this is less than optimal on two counts. First, the page title should be more tightly focused for SEO purposes than the actual post title, and second, the Blog Name should not come first (if at all) in the page title. For a specific example of how you should fine tune your page and post titles, see Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs.

3. For each post put your target keyword phrase for that post in the post title - Remember that each post is considered a distinct page, so just as with web pages, a primary SEO strategy is to make sure you optimize the title. This, along with your page title is probably the most important thing you can do. Both titles (page title and post title) should contain the exact keyword phrase you are optimizing for.

4. Write your post title to attract readers. This is what will show up in the search engines and should be designed to get clicks.

4. Wrap your post titles in an h1 tag - Many themes are set up so that the blog name (e.g., SEO Strategy) has an h1 tag and the post title has an h2 tag. From the SEO point of view this is not correct. You want your post title to be recognized as the primary title for the page. Leave these titles as h2 on the index.php page, but change them to h1 on the “Single Post” page.

This will take some tweaking of your theme pages. Go to your Admin dashboard, then go to Theme Editor. Click on Single Post and find where it says

<h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Change the <h2>tag to an <h1>. Make sure you tweak your Stylesheet so the <h1>tag looks correct.

4. Use your target keyword in the text of the post - Optimize each post just like you would optimize a web page. Use your precise target keyword, especially in the first few sentences. Then use related keywords throughout the post.

5. Put your post names in your permalinks - If you have put your keywords in your post titles this will also put them in your permalinks. So instead of looking like this,

http://www.rickhendershot.com/?p=123

Your permalinks will look like this:

http://www.rickhendershot.com/article-marketing/article-marketing-insights-in-ebook/

For instructions on how to do this see Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings

6. Post links to your best posts in social networking sites - Be sure to use the appropriate tags. You’ll have to discover what are the most effective ways to get powerful links back to your posts from social bookmarking and social networking sites. This will get you backlinks, traffic, links from other bloggers interested in your posts, and reinforce your SEO focus. Some of my favourites are Digg, PlugIM, Clipmarks, Mister Wong, Propeller, StumbleUpon - there are really too many to mention.

7. Link to your best posts from other resources - Use articles, blog comments, and other blog posts to link back to your best posts.

Some of my sources for this post:

Top Wordpress SEO Tips for Top 10 Rankings, from The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

10 Ways To Optimize Wordpress For More Traffic , from BoydCreative

Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs, from Graywolf’s SEOBlog

Article marketing is generally assumed by almost everybody involved in internet marketing to be one of the best ways to build traffic, links, reputation, and even authority in your niche.

In its most simple form article marketing just involves writing something with links back to one of your websites, and then posting it on a few (or many) article sites. Here are some things worth remembering:

1. Write quality material. You are not just after links, but presumably people in your target niche will actually read your articles, come to recognize you name and judge the quality of your opinion and knowledge based on what they read in your articles.

2. Be sure to give your articles an effective title. For your human readers the title should be interesting and catchy - something to entice them to read it. For the search engines it should contain your target keyword phrase. It is usually the title that determines the SEO value of an article.

3. Be sure to distribute your articles to the most effective article directories. There are hundreds of article sites out there, but some are more influential than others. The most influential from the SEO point of view, and the ones that generally get the most traffic are the ones with the highest page rank. You might want to do a search for a variety of search terms and see which article sites come up the most.

Chances are you’ll see ezinearticles.com coming up a lot. After that some of the best are:
ideamarketers.com
articledashboard.com
buzzle.com
articlebiz.com
articlecity.com

All of these are included in the distribution list of Content Spooling - an article writing and distribution service which I highly recommend.

Here are some more articles about article marketing.

It is common practice to put the website navigation bar along the left side of each web page within a site. If you have done any web page building, and if you have reflected at all on the problems of SEO, you have probably recognized that a left nav bar may very well have a negative SEO impact.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

Continue Reading »

In his recently released report titled “Search Engine Myths Exposed” Jonathan Leger tackles some of the most basic assumptions most of us make about getting successful ranking in Google.

He presents case studies and actual research to show that most of these assumptions are nothing but “myths” propagated by “gurus” who are just repeating stuff they have heard elsewhere, usually to promote their own products.

Of course Jonathan himself is promoting a product - a link generating product called 3-Way Links - so we might wonder if that has influenced his emphasis in the report just a bit.

Personally I think not, since he has been consistently saying the same thing ever since I have been following him. He also provides some pretty convincing evidence that, Continue Reading »