This is an extremely useful tool, which puts SEO data directly in your search results. Information provided includes page rank, domain age, links from Yahoo, del.icio.us, Technorati, Alexa rank, Cached, DMOZ, RSS subscribers, dir.yahoo.com listing, Whois. This is an extension for Firefox, so you’ll need the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Click to get it: SEO for Firefox
By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
User experience is becoming an integral part of SEO. Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo are continuously collecting data from users and about web pages and are getting better at interpreting it. Retaining users on your pages for a certain time period and click through rates (varies with industries) are now an important factor in SEO.
To establish a sites relevancy, search engines looks at behavioral factors in order to learn more about intent:
Search engine queries- Prior search queries
- Time interval between those queries
- Semantic relationships
- Click through rates for different listing. (If users click on a listing and then go back right away, they may remove that listing and artificially lower its position for one or more keywords.)
Links are the hub of search engine relevancy, because links are a leading quality indicator of site relevancy. Before search engines and web commercialization, it was tougher to find information and all surfers had to rely on was links.
Today Google looks at:
- Anchor text
- The page the link is on: title, authority
- The age of the link
- Location of the link on the page
- Google is biased toward .edu domains since they were the first on the scene, and usually contain quality content and resources
As the web became commercial, links became a form of advertising, where a link could be bought or artificially made by spammers. This is the reason that Google is biased toward older links and links from trusted domains.
~Chris Randall
Search engine analyze where terms are located on each web page to determine their relevancy to one another just as they do with keyword density. Terms which are physically closer are generally considered more relevant to each other and therefore the page is considered more relevant to the search. It is considered normal for keywords to appear separately throughout a page, just be sure to include your key terms together at least once in the title, heading or body.
Keyword density is an evaluation of how often a word is on a page in relation to other words. Although it was a key player in SEO ranking in the past, it is often over-hyped by many Search Engine Optimization Companies in order to keep revenue streams high. The better search engines use do use keyword density somewhat but also use the location of terms on a page, word proximity and are putting more and more weight on natural language processing (natural language patterns) for search engine rankings.
“Stop Words” are words found regularly in the English language. They are words used in every conversation, regardless of the topic like: a, the, all, but, etc. Search engines will usually ignore these words from searches automatically. For example if a user were to search for “bird and cat” then the search engine will exclude the “and.”
- Rewrite old content and link back to the original article
- Promote an older article with social media share buttons
- Write a follow-up story on a past article and link back to it
- Share your old content on social media
- Write the same article from a different point of view
- Write a post about your comments
Always keep in mind that fresh content promotes your in the SEO rankings
Excessively fast linking no longer hurts Search Engine Rankings
admin : March 23, 2010 9:21 pm : SEOQuick inbound link building or the rate at which your site acquires links is no longer considered to be a detriment to search engine rankings. With the amount of social bookmarking that occurs these days it isn’t unusual for a site to build an enormous amount of inbound links quickly. All of the major search engines understand this and excessive back linking penalties are no longer a threat.
For Search Engine Optimization or SEO, the proximity of your keywords a phrase is important to how you will rank in search engine results.
Keyword proximity (distance in space) refers to how close your keywords are and how they fit into the context of your writing. In general, closer keywords are better; of course they have to make sense (contextual relevance). You must avoid keyword stuffing and think about keyword order as well.
Keywords are important in all parts of your posts: titles, headers, paragraphs and page content.
Here is an example with the search “quality dog food”:
- Your dog kennel deserves our quality products and food services
- You deserve our high quality dog food in your kennel today
- This restaurant has no quality and their food isn’t fit for a dog
All of these have the key words with the exact same keyword density and they are roughly the same length. If everything else is equal a search will probably give the second one preferential search engine ranking.
Chris Randall
When you choose your overall theme for your site, it should be fairly narrow in focus. If you want to expand you are better off creating several mini-sites than trying to cover everything on one site.
A focused site is easier to develop and maintain and offers a clear signal to the your user about what you are about. Search engine consider a focused site on one topic as more valuable than a site that provides data on many random topics.
Broad sites lack focus, efficiency and clarity and users get mixed signals on their purpose. Everything you do on a single site should be focused on one topic area. From a user’s (your customer) point of view, talking about unrelated topics is best served by separate websites. Since search engines try their best to serve users, a tightly focused site will go a long way towards high search engine rankings as well.
For example: From a search engine’s (user’s) perspective, if every page on a web site is about gardening, then the site will be considered an authority on gardening and this will be reflected in search rankings.
If you keep your users in mind and design your site to give them a great experience, you will be light years ahead of most that rely on trying to get the perfect keyword density or meta tag descriptions in making your site search engine friendly.
~Chris Randall
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a web site to attract a high volume of quality traffic through high rankings by search engines. Quality Traffic being visitors who are specifically looking for what you are selling. Your opimal target is the right audience at the right time for why you are selling.
When a person types keyword into a search engine, those keywords are used to match the search against all of the sites that the search engine has indexed. The sites are indexed by a set of rules called a search engine algorithm.
A keyword is one or more words of interest that a user types into a search engine which looking up a topic. Most users type in between 2 and 5 words. Most users realize that single words are too general and the results will not be narrow or focused.
- FFA (Free For All) “promotion” sites: They have been around since the mid 90’s and exsist for the sole purpose of listing links. Almost anyone can post their “advertisment” on these pages for free. The owners of site doesn’t monitor the submissions and undesirable content can become easily associated with yours. With not scrutiny, these sites are junk and the Google, Bing and Yahoo see them as trash. Liks from here are useless.
- Guestbooks: This is where a site invites visitors to sign a guestbook. Many of these allow HTML code and allows you to create a link to your site. Spamming guestbooks is looked at as an unethical practice, so don’t.
- Link Farms: – Don’t even think about using one of these for inbound linking. Google, Yahoo and Bing are wise to them and using link farms could get your site banned.
- Auto linking software: – A complete waste of time, there is no magic black box. If someone tells you there is, then you better keep an eye on him.
~Chris Randall
FFA – “Free For All” promotion sites
These are related to the “We will submit your site to 10 trillion sites for only $19.99″ ads. If your ads even make it to the sites, they will soon be lost in the shuffle of the other people submitting and in either case Googls, Bing and Yahoo don’t care anyway. In fact they may penalize you.
So what is a FFA links site?
These sites have been around since the mid-90’s and their sole purpose is for listing links. Anyone can post to these pages for free and the owneres rarely monitor the submissions. Due to these practices, many shady submissions are made producing very undesirabel content.
The ad usually takes the form of a descriptive link and a one to two line description. These listings are usually limited to around 50 and constantly rotating. A once off submission will last anywhere from a few minutes to around a week, depending on how many people are submitting to that particular page.
If you choose to try one of these services, you will probably be bombarded with pop-ups, tojans and malware on your way in. Then you can count on your email to be put on a multitude of spam lists (sucker lists), finally count on recieving quite a bit of shady mail if you give them your mailing address. After you submit your 1-3 line ”advertisment” it will be posted to the sites and may last there anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 week. The sites only post so many ads on a rotating basis, so you won’t be on for long as new submission pour in. This may be a good thing for you though, since you don’t want Google cathing it anyway.
Search Engine Penalties
Most of these farms are removed from the major search engine indexes as soon as they go active. Although the major search engines deny that sites are penalized for being linked to from these link farms (you can’t control who links to you), the value of the links are zero anyway.
Most people don’t search these link farms for any valid content anyway, so I would suggest that you spend more effort building quality material that reputable site want to link to.
~ Chris Randall, Technical Director
“PPC is temporary, SEO if forever”
It is no secret that one of the most important items for high rankings is the number of inbound links a site has. However, if you have too many outbound links, it can be detrimental to your ranking especially if you link to what the search engines consider to be poor quality sites. If you leak to the unrepeatable sites you will be penalized, similar to being penalized for keeping poor company in real life. If you link to them, you are in a sense casting a vote for them and you will be punished
The bad sites have poor rankings for many reasons and often times for unscrupulous behaviors, such as link farms. These sites use tricks to manipulate search results, which hampers the integrity and intent of the World Wide Web. If search results are poor, then customers will use other search engines, so companies like Google live and breathe by providing their customers with top quality search results and casting out the bad sites
On the bright side, search engines are fair and don’t punish you for things out of your control. For instance, inbound links from unethical site do not penalize your SEO rankings, since you can’t stop other webmaster from linking to you. Inbound links can never harm you and can only provide no help or increase your ranking.
How many words should each of my pages have? There isn’t a magic number but too few words will not give the spider anything to index and too many may dilute your keywords. Remember that your users are the most important factor, but try to keep a page/post between 300 and 600 words of content. The first 100 words are the most important to your users, since that is what keeps their attention. This is the area is also what the user will see first without scrilling and so search engines target this area extesively. Be careful not to overuse your keywords in your content though. Search engines not only check for keyword density, but proximity as well. This will tell them if the keywords are used correctly in realtion to the rest of the content. Write for your readers and you should be safe. Today’s readers have a short attention span, so give them what they need without a lot of fluff.
You’ve heard the cliché that “Content is King”
Relevant and new information is what drives the internet. Good content attracts visitors and if you have content that is fresh every day, visitors will keep coming back. After all, people thirst for something new. Give it to them and they will reward you.
When you have new content often, other sites will want to link to you and when you increase the number of inbound links, you boost your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Google loathes stale sites and when they could figure out a way to completely ignore sites that never update their content, they probably will. Meanwhile, Google loves sites that are constantly changing. If your site looks even slightly different than the last time the Googlebot visited it, you’re going to get a ranking boost.
By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
www.presalepasswordticketcode.com
Ten Days to get to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 10
admin : September 13, 2009 9:27 am : SEO
Don’t worry too much about ranking and optimizing your keywords. If your site is good, then you will begin to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. Make your site a fan favorite by continuously updating it and adding new high quality content, but don’t simply add fluff just for the sake of adding something. It is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Back to VA & Marketing Services
www.presalepasswordticketcode.com
Ten Days to get to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 9
admin : September 12, 2009 8:24 am : SEO
Develop a link worthy site, as inbound, high quality links are crucial to successful search engine optimization. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? If your site is full of great information and resources then many sites will link to it without asking or trading. On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Back to VA & Marketing Services
www.presalepasswordticketcode.com
Ten Days to get to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 8
admin : September 11, 2009 8:47 am : SEO
Title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with every search engine. Be sure to incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff. Be sure to not stuff your title tag though, as this will cause you to receive a lower rank with most search engines (2 to 3 words max).
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Back to VA & Marketing Services
www.presalepasswordticketcode.com
Ten Days to get to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 7
admin : September 10, 2009 9:20 am : SEO
Search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site and the key pages need to meet your target market’s needs. Copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor (your target audience). There is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy as many SEO companies would have you believe. Use you keyword phrases, but only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason just looks silly and the search engine crawlers will ignore it.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Back to VA & Marketing Services
www.presalepasswordticketcode.com
Ten Days to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 6: Anchor Text
admin : September 9, 2009 8:19 am : SEOLabel your internal text links and clickable image attributes as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion (anchor text) of your links to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site, and be sure to use keywords in those descriptions.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Ten Days to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 5: Be Search Engine Friendly
admin : September 8, 2009 9:16 am : SEOProgram your site to be search engine friendly. Search engine spiders (crawlers) can’t do many of the things your human visitors can. Search engines can’t fill out forms, perform searches on your site, read JavaScript, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. You should still use these things to optimize your site for your audience, but you must provide alternate means of navigating your site. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You’ll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. You can also put these links in graphics.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
Ten Days to the Top of Search Engine Results – Day 4: Site Navigation
admin : September 7, 2009 8:24 am : SEOUse your keyword research to design and categorize your site architecture and navigation. For instance, let’s say your site sells baby products. There are many ways you could lay out your site so that people will find the baby products they are looking for. They may be looking for products that fit their child’s stage of development, or they may be looking for specific brands. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation helps visitors in their various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific product types, age ranges, etc.
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By: Chris Randall, Technical Director
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