May 24, 2013

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What Are SEO Ranking Factors?

April 8, 2013 By 1 Comment

One of the handy things about networking is that you discover new sites and information, thanks to your contacts sharing them. This happened to me just today, when my friend Katherine Tyrell posted a link to a very useful site I had not heard of before: Search Engine Land.

If you have even wondered what factors contribute to good SEO as far as the Search Engines are concerned, then have a look at this post: The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors.

At first I thought copyright would prevent me showing the Graphic here, but the site has given permission to allow the graphic to be reproduced.

Periodic Table of SEO
CLICK HERE to be taken to a larger version of the table

To learn how each factor can contribute to a good (or bad) page rank, then read the accompanying guide:  Search Engine Land’s Guide to Good SEO.

The first Chapter of the Guide explains the four main types of Search Engine Ranking Factors, which are: On The Page Ranking Factors; Off The Page Ranking Factors; Violations; Blocking. The Guide then breaks these four types into subgroups.

It is crucial to understand that no single factor will determine how well our pages do. It is a COMBINATION of these factors that will determine whether our sites are successful or not.

Those of us who publish on Squidoo and who have been caught by the new policies with regard to our content on that platform, will not be surprised to learn that within the main section on Violations are six sub-factors, which are “thin”, “stuffing”, “cloaking”, “paid links”, “hidden” and “link spam”. Squidoo has certainly been working hard to remove thin content, keyword stuffing and link spam recently. I have also heard of warnings being sent to those involved in paid links.

However, whether you write on Squidoo, the other free publishing platforms or your own sites, it is crucial to pay attention to the whole range of SEO Factors, not just Violations. So go check those links, I think you will be glad you did.

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What You Need To Know to Get Your Site Indexed By Google

November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I subscribe to the Wordtracker Blog and every so often a post catches my eye and this week a link to an explanation on how to get your Site Indexed landed in my in-box and I went and had a look. I found the clearest outline of how to get indexed quickly, so I thought I would pass the link on to you.

The article explains in easy to understand terms all about Google, “Spiders”, Indexing, Cache and link building. It also tells you how having “clean code” on your sites, good navigation and site maps will help you get liked by Google even more.

You find out how to make sure Google knows that your site exists – because unless you shout “Hello Google, here’s a nice site for you to feature in the Search Returns”, then you are simply not going to get any traffic.

There’s also useful links in the article to even more helpful info. So go grab a tea/coffee/aqua, stop what you are doing for 10 minutes and have a read:

The Google spider & you: What you need to know to get your site indexed

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Using Analytics Data to Determine How to Tweak Your Site

October 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Once you have a published website, webpage or article, there are many ways that you can use the analytics data to help you determine ways to improve, tweak or add to your site.

How do people get to my site?

One of the most crucial pieces of data that you can examine is what search terms or keywords people are using to find your site.

Your traffic will increase if the search terms are a good match for your site, especially if they are the keywords that resonate with your topic.  You can use the actual search term information to analyze whether you should keep the site the way it is, or change or add to it to help your searchers find you.

One of the tricks to building a successful website, is to understand how people actually look for your topic.  There are regionalisms, and colloquialisms in how people may say the same thing, and the more you learn about how people search for your product or service, the more you can add those terms into your site.

Another issue is that there are many details people may search for that are subheadings or side issues related to your topic.  These terms are good into include in your site also.

Many of these types of terms are the ones that you can add to paragraph headings, module titles, or subtitles which are picked up by search engines.  This adds depth to your site, and does not create a false overblown keyword repetitive page.

What do people do once they get to my site?

Once people land on your website, you can take a look at the analytics data that shows what actions they take.  Analytics can show you what page they land on, and where they go from that page.  Do they linger on your site, or do they leave immediately?

What percentage of people that arrive convert into profits or sales for you?

While it is obvious that we want people to stay on our site, and buy from us, it is not necessarily so obvious how to get them to do this.  Much of tweaking is trial and error, using the patterns you can see from your data.

You can, however, stack the deck in your favor, by limiting the choices a reader has once they get to your site.  In essence, you can offer them choices that funnel them in the direction you want them to go.  You can’t force them to choose that path, but you can encourage them to do so.

Where do people come from who visit my site?

Depending on what you are selling or offering from your site, knowing where your demographic is coming from is also helpful.  If you are targeting Americans, then having most of your traffic from India is not beneficial to you.  Analytics data can give you a good idea of where people are from that land on your site, at least in what country their inquiry originates.

Data Not Assumptions

It is easy to make mistakes by omission or by ignorance when we rely on our own assumptions to create websites.  Using actual data is the best way to include what we need, and exclude what we don’t need.  We can also see changes in trends as they happen, and adjust our websites accordingly.

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Maximizing the Use of Keywords in Titles and Subtitles

September 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I am constantly finding that many online writers do not understand how people use search engines.  They may think they understand how keywords work in search, but they have not really internalized how best to use keywords in an article to pull in the maximum amount of searchers.

Keyword research will help you determine which phrases searchers use when looking for an item (product or information), however, it behooves the writer to add as many keywords as possible into the body of the article, including in subtitles and paragraph titles.

Here is an example which can illustrate what I am referring to.  Which of these phrases below is a better paragraph header for this product:

30″ Pre-Lit Seafoam Ashley Spruce Christmas Wreath – Frost & Teal Lights

Teal Christmas wreath

This example comes from an actual article.

OK, well, I hope you picked the first one.

So, why is the first detailed specific title much better than the second one?  This is very confusing to people, because they have been taught offline to search using generic terms first to find the fullest amount of answers.  However, this is not how it works for online searching.

The first title is better because online, people do not search with generic terms like “teal christmas wreath” and find what they are looking for.  They need to be as specific as possible to narrow down the thousands of answers that come back with every search inquiry.  Even with a color like teal, there are several words that describe it, and variations of the color, for instance, aqua, teal, seafoam, blue green, sky blue, and so on.  And in addition, if you are searching for a wreath for your door, you need to know the size, if it is lit or not lit, how it hangs, what it is made of–I think you get the idea.

When you write your article about Christmas wreaths, you should be researching all of the variations of words that people use when searching for teal, christmas wreaths, and associated searches.  Then spread the most used terms out in your article, in the titles, subtitles, text, images, and product headings.  You do not need to repeat the same keyword several times throughout the article.  Just include the keywords you want in your article.  As technology improves, search engines are becoming more and more capable of finding the use of matching words in sources on the internet.  We no longer need to hammer the obvious keywords over and over in our text.

I find that the more specific words I put in my article, in titles and subtitles, describing the items I list for sale, the more searchers and sales I get.  You will never have every term that people use for that item, but if you get a lot of them, that increases your chances to be found.

Mark Ewbie: Keyword Stuffing

Illustration by Mark Ewbie

You can overuse keywords, however.  This is called keyword stuffing.  It means that the author has repeated the same phrase or phrases unnaturally throughout their article way too many times.  This type of  keyword use is not necessary, in fact, can result negatively in search.  Google and other search engines are sophisticated enough now to pick up on the keywords without doing this type of blatant in your face keyword writing.

As you write your article, you should think about the real live readers.  What are they looking for, and what will they see when they get to your article?  You are better off, thinking of what the reader will see when they get to your page, and how they will respond to the way you have presented your idea or product.  But don’t waste your paragraph titles, and module titles on generic terms.  Use them to be specific, to tell the reader exactly what you have on that page.  That way when they get there, they will be thrilled to have found what they want, and they will be ready to buy.

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New SEO Tip: Add New Content

September 19, 2012 By 5 Comments

There is a lot of chatter across the web about new SEO tactics to use for your website or blog. The one tip that I keep seeing over and over is that the best thing you can do to optimize your site better is to add new content. “What?” you are probably already asking. “How can THAT help me to rank better?” Well, let’s talk about it.

Content has always been King on the internet. Sure, we have tried to help that content rank better in the SERPS (search engine result pages) by using backlinking strategies and making sure that we have great keywords incorporated within our content and that worked quite well for a long time. But, the rules have changed a bit. Google is not giving those backlinks much weight any longer. Trying to create links to our content and using our keywords in those links to help our ranking is not as effective as the naked link is now. Actually there should be a combination of types of links. But, I digress. Back to the adding new content.

From what I have gleaned from my reading on this topic the “experts” are all suggesting that the best thing we can do to help our blogs or sites to perform better in the search engine results is to add new content. Certainly the content should have viable keywords within it but we should not abuse that strategy either. Actually, it has never been a good idea to overdo our use of keywords. The difference is that now, you can be penalized and possibly deindexed if the search engine detects an overuse of any of the optimization tactics.

Our new content should be relevant to our blog and it should be consistently added. Why? Even though our older content is aging like a fine wine and giving us some traffic, the new content adds to the authority on the topic that we are trying to attain. It also gives us an opportunity to link to a relevant post that pertains to the new content. That link to the older content shows the search engine that the old content is still significant.

The search engines also like to see that the blog or site is still being maintained by seeing new additions. That adds to your credibility and gives you one more chance to attract new visitors. A site that is growing on a regular basis with content stands a better chance today of showing up on search results than a site that has been neglected for several months with no new fresh text inside it.

Your new SEO should include adding new content on a regular basis whether that is once per month, once per week, or once per day. Figure out what is sustainable for you. Just make sure that adding new posts or articles becomes the most important part of your strategy for success.

Image Credit: Pixabay Image by PublicDomainPictures

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Thoughts On The Naked Backlink

August 22, 2012 By 4 Comments

Let me start this post with the emphatic statement that I am not an expert on the best strategies of SEO. I have been doing some reading on the idea of naked backlinks vs anchor text links recently and I have formed a bit of an educated opinion on how I will go forward with my linking strategies since the Google Penguin updates.

The trouble with so much of what we see on the internet is that there are so many conflicting opinions about the right strategy to follow and then, of course, to determine if the guidelines are what should ethically be done or if it might be a bit of a way to cheat the system. I personally don’t want to fall into any black hat type practices but I do want to keep my good standing with Google for the pages of mine that they index. I want to place well in those SERPS when people are looking for the keywords that I have used in my content for a specific topic. Good backlinks with keyword rich anchor text used to be a pretty good strategy to use to help get a better ranking with Google to link relevant articles or blog posts together.

Google has said that backlinks are not going to carry the same weight that they used to in the ranking of a site in the SERPS. What has happened with Penguin is that some sites have been penalized for too many unnatural looking links to their sites. There are some reports of sites no longer showing in a SERP at all because their links were too heavily linked to the same keyword or phrase.

I recently read a report by one fairly well respected guru of SEO that gave an actual ratio of how many naked links, anchor text links, and generic links should be used to stay in good steed with Google. I’m not going to repeat the ratio here, because I don’t know for certain that it is good advice or not. The other reason is that we could spend a great deal of time trying to reach that ratio only to find that in a few short months the algorithmic formula  has changed  again and all the work caused more trouble than it helped. The other part of it is…we can’t control how someone else links to our sites so we could never truly achieve that “perfect ratio”.

I do feel like I have gleaned some useful advice from reading the conflicting strategies, though. My strategy for the future will be to mix up the way I now link to my other pages. I will start to use naked backlinks more. These are straight links to a domain with no anchor text. Example would be: http://writing-online.org. I will continue to use anchor text but try to mix up the keywords and not use my main keyword phrase as much. I will also begin to use the generic links that we all strayed away from years ago. A generic link would be “click here” to read my article on backlinks.  From what I have read in the last few weeks, the general consensus is that all three of these types of links matter and we should be using them. The differences seem to be in how many of each kind is going to bring the best results. I think if we try to keep a nice variety and not swing one way too far then we should be able to maintain a good relationship with Google.

The most important thing will still be…writing good content.

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SEO is Alive And Kicking!! Not Dead – Just Evolved

August 1, 2012 By 3 Comments

It is not often that I get wound up these days by anything that anyone says, but in the last week or so I have seen assertions that “SEO is Dead” and “Don’t worry about keywords”. I got just a tad irritated because some of the people who are absorbing this “advice” are new to writing online and I wanted to scream at them “Nooooooooooo!!!!”

OK, calming down now, so let’s look at why I don’t agree.

SEO is NOT dead. It has just evolved. Personally, I like the way SEO has evolved because it looks like what now matters to Google is what I enjoy doing and what doesn’t matter so much these days, or has at least changed, is what I don’t like doing.

Here’s a reminder of the key ingredients of your SEO Mix up until around a year ago:

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Quality, original content
  3. Backlinks – lots and lots

Today, this is what we are looking at:

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Quality, original content
  3. Backlinks – but not nearly so many and they need to be relevant

Yes, quality, original content is essential for a successful article, blog, webpage. But that on its own will NOT get you traffic. How are the search engines going to find and promote your pages if you are not using the language that your searchers are using when they go “Googling”?

You can write a brilliant article, full of quality original content but if no one finds it then you are wasting your time.

Yes, without keyword research you may get lucky and use some strong keywords by accident, but why take the chance? Especially when your strongest competitors WILL be doing keyword research.

As far as I am concerned the only thing about SEO has changed is backlinks. Thanks to all the link exchanges, bought links and spam links, Google has decided to do something about the fact that people are gaming the system and actively deceiving the Google Spiders into thinking that because their articles had lots of backlinks, they were quality.

Sites have been warned, sites have lost traffic, sites have been de-indexed. All to the good I say!

Now we are told that we should only bother to backlink through sites and pages where their content is relevant to ours. That is great news for those of us who hated backlinking anyway.

And I can cite examples where pages that have no backlinks have started getting Google traffic within hours of being published. I have also seen how people who realised what was coming have started publishing related content on different sites and on their own blogs and then interlinking that content with great results.

SEO dead? Nah! It has simply evolved and we need to evolve with it.

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How to Backlink After Penguin

June 8, 2012 By 3 Comments

Backlinking after Google PenguinIn the last few weeks, I have heard many arguments from various sources around the web saying that backlinking is dead, and backlink authority is dead.  People are saying that we should not waste our time creating backlinks.

In my opinion, these people do not understand what Google is trying to do with the Penguin filter, nor do they understand what a backlink is.  Essentially, Google is trying to shake off some of the pure crap that has attached itself to the Google search engine.  At least to make the crap have less influence on the search results.  Google has deindexed some websites that existed purely to create backlinks, and has demoted others that have a lot of duplicate content.  Knowledgeable SEO experts were able to create hundreds and thousands of backlinks to their content to get their content higher in search engines.  Many of their backlinks were to empty sites with very little real content, and the backlinks were very short blurbs using contextual links for specific keywords.

With the new Google reality, getting to the top of a keyword phrase is hard to determine because everyone gets personalized results.  In addition, empty backlinking is out, because Google is deindexing and demoting sites that do this.  So what is the solution?  Frankly, the solution is not much different than what we have stated before.

How to backlink after Penguin:

  1.  Articles that are used to backlink must have new original content, not just be a condensed version of the main article.
  2. Use a variety of sites to backlink from, preferably sites that have authority in the new Google universe.
  3. At least one of those sites should be your own website or blog.
  4. Instead of concentrating on contextual linking with one keyword phrase, use a variety of words, phrases, or images to link to your main content.
  5. Link related articles together–think of what actual people would be interested in reading if they landed on your article.  Real traffic flow is a definite plus in Google’s eyes. (This is true of not just google but any search engine.)
  6. Let some backlinks get created naturally, by people who are interested in your topic.
  7. Guest post on related sites and blogs for more exposure and natural linking.

Backlinks are still valuable, if the backlinks have an intrinsic value to them.  However, you also need to have content that has a real value that you are linking to.  In conclusion, backlinking for backlinking’s sake, not a good idea.  Backlinking to increase the value of your content, excellent idea.

Image source

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Backlinks after Panda and Penguin

May 25, 2012 By 2 Comments

MississippiRriver from spaceWe have discussed backlinks on Writing Online before, but I wanted to bring it up again to reconsider how to backlink content and if it is necessary after the changes on Google over the last year or so.  Many of you have heard of Panda and Penguin which are nicknames for the most recent ways that Google has been working to clean up their search engines.  I am not going to begin to debate whether those filters have been successful or not.  I would like to comment more on what we should be doing in the aftermath of the Google changes to help our content continue to be found on Google.

Google has specifically gone after spammers in the last year, which has included content farms, duplicate content, spun articles, and mechanical automatic backlinking.  But that doesn’t mean that you should immediately give up all the ways you have been taught to increase your visibility on search engines including Google.  Although we have seen the demise or downturn of many companies that spawned those practices, there are still valid reasons for creating content and backlinking.

Content is still important for people who search online.  It is important to help people find what they are looking for.  Often the end source does not do a good job of this, and if you create a curated list of items to help a searcher narrow down what they are searching for, this is very useful information.  Your content can provide a useful service to a reader whether it is educational, informational, or sales content.

Backlinks are also still very valuable, but they should not be manufactured backlinks to your content attached to shallow meaningless content.  This is exactly what Google is trying to eliminate.  Instead, create valuable related content which can be linked together to drive traffic to all of your related content.

Here is an example:

I have recently been creating content on famous rivers.  I have placed this content on several different sites, and linked them together because they are related to each other.  With some searching, you can probably find articles that I have about the Nile River, Amazon River, Yangtze River, and Mississippi River.  It is plausible that a person who searches for one of those topics might be interested in another one.  This is linking together quality content that will drive traffic.  Search engines can see that this content is related.  Each article can stand alone on its own, but together they are more powerful and will provide information for students, travelers, or people who just like to learn about rivers.

This is the type of backlinks that I recommend that you create with the opportunity we have to write articles on several sites including your own websites.  Manufactured backlinks are out, but relevant backlinks are in.

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Rethinking Backlinks

April 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

The way we look at Backlinks, their value in SEO and how to get them is having to change thanks to the Panda updates on Google. Like many people I am watching how the current issues regarding how backlinks are evolving and changing and this is a summary of what I think is currently happening.

First of all I want to say I am NOT setting myself up as an authority on Backlinks. All I can do is tell you how I work, what I have found works for me and what people who ARE regarded as authorities are saying about backlinks.

There’s just so many factors that contribute to a successful page and some of it is to do with having the right mindset. Yes, the current consensus seems to be to write about what you like, so you can write authoritatively and convincingly, but if you want sales then you also need to make sure that not only do you write about what you like – you need to be writing about what other people are looking for.

Also, as far as publishing on pages at Squidoo, Wizzley and Hubpages is concerned, I have found that, although I am English and resident in England, I need to be writing about what the American market is looking for not the British. Most of my sales come via Amazon.com and other US affiliates.

So as far as backlinks, traffic and sales are concerned, for the purpose of this article I am going to assume that you have a niche and that within that niche there’s real potential for traffic and sales.

I am also going to assume that you know about keyword reseach and that you write properly keyword optimized content.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, with regard to Keyword Research, then check out these articles:

Introduction to Keyword Research
How to do Keyword Research
Where to use your Keywords

But first, let’s just be clear about what are Backlinks exactly? Let’s look at defining backlinks just so we are all thinking the same way about what they are and why they are useful.

Backlinks are HTML links on other sites that point to your content. It is as simple as that. Any link, anywhere that points from one website to another is a backlink. The three links I have added to my articles about Keyword Research are Backlinks – they are pointing to 3 pages I have published on Wizzley.

But are all backlinks equal? No, not really.

Because when Google is assessing your page to see how good it is, it is looking for several things:

  • Unique content
  • Useful content
  • And something to convince its spiders that you really DO know what you are talking about

Since I started writing online, nearly 4 years ago, I have seen so much discussion about how many backlinks a page needs in order to rank high on Google. But these days it is generally accepted that it is not the quantity, but the quality that matters.

Google wants to know if you are an authority on your topic. So say you have a page about Bullying, then the theory is that ideally Google wants to see links from other bullying or family or child orientated websites that are pointing to your page. Websites that are pointing to your page BECAUSE IT THINKS YOUR PAGE IS A GOOD PAGE TO SEND ITS READERS TO.

However, although we have known for quite some time that Google is looking for quality backlinks, there’s been a huge number of people who have not listened. In the crusade to rank high on Google they have set about mustering as many backlinks as they possibly can.

And of course this takes time, which is why backlink creation services and blog networks have sprung up. Sites like BuildMyRank, Linxboss, BacklinksNinja. All blog networks offering a link building service – some even came recommended by quite a few names that you would probably recognise, including: Andrew Hansen.

Affilorama explains participating in Blog Networks very simply: you pay in some way to be part of this Blog Network, either through a monthly subscription or you add your own sites to the network and allow other people’s links to be added to your sites, giving them backlinks.

Basically what happens is that if your niche is SEO, then you could write and article: The 5 Best Online Marketing Secrets. This article would be spun and then autosubmitted to sites registered in the network that publish on “marketing”, “SEO” “linkbuilding” – any topics that have similar keywords.

The problem with these Blog Networks is that you would submit the spun articles to the Blog Network, so that there’s multiple versions of the same info and the articles would then be auto-submitted to a large number of sites in the Network. The problem is that although the content is not duplicate, it is not unique either, just the words moved around to say exactly the same thing. And it is this that Google is penalising by deindexing the Blog Networks.

On one forum I saw someone say they had 700 sites de-indexed just a couple of weeks ago – ouch! Because if a site gets de-indexed, then all the backlinks on that site are rendered invisible, therefore, useless.

So not only does the site that has been de-indexed suffer, then the knock on effect is losing the backlinks to other sites, which could then also be adversely affected.

Andrew Hansen is now recommending that if you subscribe to any of these services, stop now if you have not done so already and that if you are spinning your own stuff that you manually submit to sites or use automated software, then you should stop that too. Others are recommending wait and see.

At this point I want to emphasise that it is not your normal WordPress or Blogger blogs that will be affected, just these blog networks that were built to automate the backlinking services they offered. And if you don’t pay for backlinks and you don’t spin, then you need not be worried.

So it seems because of all the gaming that has been going on, that backlinks are losing their relevance and that it is keywords, content and personal recommendation that are going to gradually count for more.

Ed Dale has an entertaining blog post if you are a fan of Game of Thrones and he has kicked off a series of intended blog posts about how things are going to change called Winter is Coming and if you want to keep an eye open for more posts in this series it would be worthwhile subscribing.

In this post Ed Dale is suggesting that in the future Google +, Twitter, Facebook Likes and yes, Pins on Pinterest will count for a lot more than the traditional backlink, because this is all based on personal recommendations.

And I am already seeing that it is possible to get indexed, traffic and sales within 24 hours on Squidoo lenses that have no backlinks whatsoever. They were written using very thorough keyword research but the traffic and sales started arriving before I had done any backlinking.

I am still backlinking, but nowhere near as much as I used to. I am following Erica Stone’s advice from a Blog Talk Radio broadcast from a few weeks back, just establish 10 backlinks, leave it awhile, then check to see if you have made it to the first page of Google for your main keyword. If you HAVE made it to the first page, then you dont need to do anything, but if you have not, then get yourself some more backlinks. Try another 10.

And all we can do is watch and see how things develop, but I know Ron Passfield, another online write for whom I have great respect, predicted quite some time ago that Google+ is a site people should get involved with and it is something I keep saying I am going to do, but keep putting it off. I also need to get in the habit of liking stuff links on Facebook. Whether you will ever get me on Pinterest is another matter though :)

This is a summary of a broadcast I did on Giant Squid Open Mike on Blog Talk Radio on Tuesday April 03, 2012

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