SEO TIPS for Sites and Blogs

If you read SEO forums often you hear many posts about a San Diego real estate agent no longer ranking for a generic term such as real estate. Since the term is too generic for most of his target market (and his service would not be fitting for most people searching for that term) it makes sense that the search engines would not want to show his site in those search results. As search continues to evolve, it will get better at filtering out untargeted or inappropriate sites.

I spoke with a search engine product manager who stated that misspellings can flag pages for relevancy reviews and usually misspellings for SEO are not recommended for most websites.

You also can further target your competition estimation by searching Google for allintitle: keyword allinanchor: keyword. Pages which have your keyword phrases in their title may be optimized, and pages which have them in their inbound links stand a good chance of being fairly well optimized.

The Meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the Meta keywords tag itself is not used by many top SEO experts. If you have products in different sizes and colors then other than small differences it is likely you could generate lots of duplicate content which will prevent search engines from wanting to fully index your sites.

Each page should have its own title. Since different algorithms match for different things there is no such thing as a perfect title. Your target keyword phrase should be at or near the beginning of your page title.

Most major search algorithms place far greater weight on the page title than on page content.
Adding unique page titles to a site that did not have them can easily double search traffic.Some directory editors will run a link checker on your site in the background while they review the content. The internet is dynamic and ever changing, and some of your links may break from month to month. I recommend checking your site for broken links before submitting it to any of the major directories.

Place Your Keywords! Where it Makes Sense:

• Place keywords in the paragraphs.
• Place keywords in the heading tags.
• Place keywords in img alt tags.
• When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point, you may bold it or italicize it.
• You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted lists.
• When possible place the keywords in links, and don’t forget navigation.
• The key focus of the page should be on readability. If the page does not make sense to human eyes then it is no good for a search engine and it will not make sales. You want to use keywords often, but not to the point

Where to Get Links:

Creating an extremely useful web based tool or paying a programmer to create one for you is one of the most effective ways to build content which will help you build a linking campaign. Writing articles will also help you build up your link popularity.

Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other websites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites you may also want to have a longer or slightly different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. You can participate in forums which provide signature links.
Participate in communities and leave relevant useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you. Since forums change rapidly they often get indexed frequently. This will help your site get indexed quickly if you ask a few questions at a few of the various SEO forums.

Google Sandbox:

Many new sites or sites which have not been significantly developed have a hard time ranking right away on Google. Many well known SEOs have stated that a good way to get around this problem is to place a site on a sub domain of a developed site and after the site is developed and well indexed 301 redirect the site to the new location

Anchor text: (inbound link text) is the single most important element in Google’s current algorithm and is worth far more than Page Rank alone. Good anchor text combined with on topic links will eventually yield strong search engine rankings.

Since Google began delaying the effect of inbound links to new sites it can take up to 3 months from when your inbound links begin to age for it to pay off in the Google search results for competitive terms. With Google you want to build linkage data over time to minimize the chances of it appearing unnatural. If Google believes your site to be a trusted authority the delay time is not as noticeable and may not even exist.

Yahoo! usually lists a site within about a month. The best way to get your site submitted is by building a strong linking campaign. If you need to get your site indexed quickly Yahoo! does have a paid inclusion program which I generally do not recommend using for most websites.

Page Optimization

• Use your keywords in your page title. Place the most important keyword phrase at the beginning of the page title. Do not put your site title on every page of your site unless you are really trying to brand that name. In that scenario it still is usually best to place the site name at the end of the pages.
• Shorter site titles are usually better than really long ones. Often times I overlap keyword phrases in the page title.
• Overlapping keyword phrases in the page title can help you pick up multiple search phrases. For example, “Professional search engine marketing services” helps me obtain good rankings for:
  • search engine marketing
  • professional search engine marketing
  • search engine marketing services
  • & professional search engine marketing services
• Meta tags are not extremely important but they can help some. The Meta description should be a few sentences to a paragraph describing the page contents. The Meta description tag can be seen in some search results so you want to write it for human eyes. The Meta keywords tag should contain misspellings and synonyms. Each keyword phrase in the keywords tag should be comma separated.
• Target your most competitive keyword phrase with the home page.
• Link to your home page from every page of your site. Include your home page’s primary keyword phrase in the text links pointing at it.
• Link to the major theme pages from your home page.

Link Building

• Link building is the single most important part of achieving a high ranking website.
• When possible try to get your keywords in the links pointing at your pages.
• Trade links with topical hubs and related sites.
• Look for free links from related sites and directories.
• If you have some good internal content try to get direct links to your inner pages.
• Write articles and get them syndicated at other sites.
• Participate in forums which provide signature text links with your posts. If you are knowledgeable enough and a good communicator you can make many friends in the forums who will link to you free.
• Issue press releases with links into your site.
• Leave super glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Often times when they post them they will include a link back to your site.
• Leave relevant comments in blogs that do not send their comments through redirects.
• Sponsor charities, blogs, or websites related to your site.
• Consider renting links through a link broker if you are in an extremely competitive industry. Adult, gaming, credit, or pharmacy categories will likely require link rentals and / or building topical link networks.
• Mix your link text up. Adding words like “buy” or “store” to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.

When Changes Occur

Your rankings will improve. They will also get worse. Many people rush off to change things right away when the algorithms change. Sometimes they role in new algorithms more aggressively than they need to and then later roll them back.

If you are unsure of what just happened then you may not want to start changing things until you have analyzed what happened. Sometimes when algorithms are rolled back or made less aggressive many sites still do not rank well because their webmasters changed things that were helping them. Nobody is owed a good rank, and just because a ranking temporarily changes it does not mean that a site has been penalized. It is far more likely that the ranking criteria have shifted and the site may not match the new ranking criteria as well as it matched the old ranking criteria.

Online Advertising In Europe…

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe is currently holding its annual Interact Congress, an event that brings together the main protagonists of the European digital industry here in Brussels. For the occasion, IAB Europe in conjunction with PriceWaterhouseCoopers today released the findings of its annual advertising expenditure survey for the year ending December 2008. The gist: growth in digital advertising significantly slowed down last year, especially in more mature markets, and the outlook for this year is grim.

In 2008 the total European online advertising market, or at least the 19 markets analyzed by IAB Europe and PwC, was worth €12.9 billion (approx. $18 billion) with a like-for-like growth rate compared to 2007 of 20%. For comparison, online advertising grew 10.6% in the United States in 2008 (outpacing TV) and was worth €16.6 billion ($23.4 billion). However, the 20% growth figure paints a better-looking picture than the harsh reality, which is that it is far below previously stated expectations, of course caused by the crumbling of the global economy and the huge strain it has put on digital advertising spending worldwide.

If you look at the top 10 markets in Europe, year-on-year growth rates were under 20% more often than not. Considering the fact that these markets account for about 93% of the total value of the market, the following chart doesn’t accurately reflect the slowed growth because it over-accentuates the massive growth in Slovenia, Poland and Austria.

Broken down by formats, search remains the leading format in Europe with the strongest year-on-year growth rate (26%), accounting for 43% of online ad expenditure in the countries measured and a value of €5.6 billion. After search come classifieds, with growth rates of 17.4% bringing it to 26% share of total ad spend and a market value of €3.8 billion.

Alain Heureux, President and CEO of IAB Europe, acknowledges that while the overall picture in Europe is one of growth, what is clear from these figures is that 2008 was a tough year for online advertising. And if you thought that trend was going to reverse this year, Eva Berg-Winters, Senior Manager at PwC, is here to put you back with your feet on the ground:

“2009 is set to be a difficult year for online advertising. Decline is likely in a number of mature markets and, where there is still growth, we expect it to be much lower than previously.”

In the U.S., IAB as recently as last week reported that online advertising declined 5% in the first quarter of 2009 to $5.5 billion, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Industry revenues were down an even steeper 9.8 percent sequentially from the fourth quarter’s $6.1 billion.

Google Apps Press Event !

Google has gathered tech press at the Clift hotel for a press event around Google Apps. At the ridiculous time of 9:30 in the morning. Meaning (1) I had to get up at 7 to get ready and battle traffic, and (2) I’m therefore not in a very good mood. Nothing like talking enterprise stuff at the crack of dawn. With that in mind, here are my real time notes. There are definitely some new customer and product announcements. One thing Google isn’t announcing yet is any removal of the beta logos from Google Apps services.

Background: Google Apps, a suite of productivity services first launched in 2006, and has evolved from there. Today more than 1 million businesses use Google apps and “hundreds of millions of dollars” is generated in revenue.

Real Time Notes:

Dave Girouard, President Google Enterprise, says that we’re in an economic downturn, but that great companies thrive in downturns.

He’s talking about the history of Google Apps, which launched in 2004 with Gmail (see image below). Premier Edition launched in 2007 and Postini was acquired later that year. 500,000 businesses were announced in 2008 and Genentech deployed on Google Apps. The chart also shows the headcount dedicated to enterprise efforts at Google, rising from zero in 2004 to over 1,000 today.

New stats Dave is announcing today: Google has more than 1.75 million businesses and 15 million users. More than 4,000 TB of mail is managed for Google Apps customers.

Dave says companies move to Google for three reasons: lower cost, constant innovation, happy end users. Google Apps costs companies $8.47 per user per month (Forrester). Microsoft Exchange online is $20.32. He’s also talking about reliability and uptime and the recently launched Google Dashboard. He says that Google is focused on transparency on any issues. And that Google is getting better at managing enterprise customers so that they have less downtime.

New Product: Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook – “Let users choose their interface: a plug-in that syncs Outlook with Apps just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange.” See image below.

Product Manager Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager for enterprise, is talking about the new sync product. Users need to move from Exchange to Google seemelessly, he says. Calendar, contacts, etc. The product will launch this afternoon.

This effectively lets Google Apps users use Outlook as the interface to Google Apps. For users who don’t want to only use the browser to access email, calendar, contacts, etc., this is an awesome feature.

Google Apps Sync works only with Windows machines for now. No Entourage on the Mac.

Dave fielded a question about Google Wave and how it might integrate with Google Apps. Dave says “it’s gonna get into Enterprise’s hands as fast as we can.” He says traditionally products are baked on the user side and then moved to enterprise, but, Dave says, he wants to move things along more quickly.

If you are an individual user who wants to use this syncing product, you have to sign up for Google Apps Premier. You can then sync Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts with Outlook. This is only Google Apps premier, so the free product won’t work.

Google Takes Another Swipe At Microsoft

Google’s small but growing enterprise app business is now going for Microsoft’s jugular. At a press conference today (see Mike’s real-time notes), Google announced a new plug-in that will sync Google’s enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar with Microsoft’s Outlook. In the enterprise, Outlook is still king and not everyone is ready to switch just yet to browser-based email, calendars and contact management.

So employees can continue to use Outlook if that is what they are comfortable with, and Google Apps will run on the backend. Google is claiming that its enterprise apps cost less than half of Microsoft Exchange (the server software that is paired with Outlook, where all the money is). The new syncing tool, Google App Sync, works only on Windows at this point and is only available for (paying) enterprise customers.

Google Releases A Search App That You Can Tweet From

A hot area of development right now is in the field of desktop Twitter clients. Some like Tweetie, are Twitter-only, while others like Seesmic Desktop, handle a few different services with a focus on Twitter. The area is apparently so hot that Google is now even getting involved.

While technically, its Google Quick Search Box (QSB) is a Mac desktop application meant to make searching the web and your desktop a breeze, you’ll notice that it comes with exactly one additional account type (beyond Google) built in: Twitter. Yes, aside from typing queries into the QSB and getting results, you can also use it as a Twitter status updater.

Google isn’t the first of the big boys to get involved with Twitter on the desktop side of things, Yahoo recently launched Sideline, which is a much more full-fledged client. Unfortunately, QSB doesn’t allow you to see your Twitter follower stream, it just allows you to update your status right now.

There is a Quick Search Box built-in to the Windows version of Google Desktop as well, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t promote this Twitter functionality in the same way, if it offers it at all.

Actually tweeting from QSB it is a bit tricky at first, so I’ll copy Google’s directions below:

1. The secret of creating a “text” item: Text items are queries that start with a space (e.g. hit the space bar and then start typing). To tweet, activate the QSB, hit the space bar (creating a text item), and type in the text you want to tweet – remember Twitter has a 140 character limit! The selected result should be a “text” item. Hit the tab key to show the available actions on the item. Select the “Send Twitter Status” action for the account you wish to tweet with and hit the return key.
2. Pivoting on the search result: If the text item thing confuses you, just pull up the QSB, type your query, and pivot (hit tab) on the search result. Select the “Send Twitter Status” action for the account you wish to tweet with and hit the return key.

It’s a pretty quick way to tweet something, actually. And it does a very nice job for searches as well, obviously. But one thing it doesn’t do that would make perfect sense, is search Twitter. Come on Google, get on that. What I want to know is, does anyone still really believe that Google has no interest in Twitter?

As many commenters are noting, this can basically replace Quicksilver for the Mac, and shares one of the same developers.

Google Translator Kit ! Translation Meets Crowdsourcing

Only a handful of blogs picked up on Google’s fresh Translator Toolkit, which the company launched yesterday by means of a blog post, but this new service really deserves a second look, if only because Wikimedia apparently sees the tool as something that could “change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages”.

You can read an extensive review of the product over at Google Blogoscoped, but here’s the gist:

Google Translator Kit enables anyone to upload documents for a variety of formats (HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text, OpenDocument Text and Plain Text), enter the URL for a file on the web or input a direct link to a Wikipedia article or Knol entry. After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.

Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. Color-coded segments will depict ‘exact’ matches and ‘partial’ matches, so you can edit the text based on the memory as well as previous, human translations. In addition, you can use the computer-generated translation in the Computer Translation tab to jump-start the translation of your current segment. When available, the toolkit will also search Google’s multilingual glossaries to help you translate specific terminology for your language, or you could use the Dictionary tab to do custom searches on Google’s multilingual dictionaries.

Besides the self-learning ability of the toolkit, the service also makes it incredibly easy for people to collaborate on translations, bringing a human, crowd-sourced touch to the automated process of Google’s Translate service

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W2NJFdoIg]

Seeqpod Starts Shopping Domain Name

It’s been a tumultous few months for Seeqpod, the powerful music search engine that skimmed the web for music files hosted on other servers. In March the site finally cracked under the weight of multiple lawsuits brought on by the major record companies and filed for bankruptcy protection. Then came word that it may-or-may-not have been acquired by Microsoft, though the deal still has yet to be confirmed.

Today we’re hearing that Seeqpod has started looking to sell off its seeqpod.com domain name, pending an acquisition deal that is about to close. We got in touch with CEO Kasian Franks, who refused to confirm the rumors, saying that a deal has “not officially closed” and that a decision to unload the domain is still “up in the air”. It may not be official yet, but given that the company has apparently begun prodding for buyers for the domain, it sounds like it’s nearly finalized.

Franks was willing to talk vaguely about the pending deal, saying that multiple major suitors are involved. He also noted that any acquisition would be about the company’s technology, and not necessarily the Seeqpod brand. While Franks still won’t name the companies involved, he says that they have no issues with acquiring more traffic, which is why the company may wind up selling Seeqpod.com.

Update: As commentor Spencer Schoeben points out below, visiting Seeqpod.com and clicking the site’s logo will take you to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. So, yeah — it’ll be very surprising if Microsoft isn’t ultimately named as one of the companies involved with the acquisition.