SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips Beyond the Basics…04.21.09

Since there is such a huge interest in this subject, here is a list of recent SEO tips from Gabriel Weinberg who’s start-up search engine is DuckDuckGo which I featured recently:

“…I’m talking about Google here (and by extension Yahoo, Live, etc.) and not Duck Duck Go (my search engine), which has different optimization parameters…

If you don’t know the basics, read Google’s SEO Starter Guide first.

External link (anchor) text is the most important factor…In my experience, external link text matters way more than anything else.  That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.

If you get link text right, link back sites’ pagerank matter way less. Usual SEO advice is to contentrate on link backs from high pagerank sources…However, higher pagerank links are much harder to get than lower pagerank links.  And what is often missed is that if you can get even a few lower pageank sites to link back to you using the key phrases you want to rank for, you can rank highly on those search terms even with little or no high pagerank link backs.

Widgets are great strategies…they help you get link-backs from a variety of sites, often on their front pages and often on multiple pages within the sites…it doesn’t matter if they are all low pagerank sites because you can control the link text…If you do a widget, don’t forget you need that static link in it.  That is, it can’t all be JavaScript.

Don’t guess search term volume. Use Google’s Keyword & Trends tools.

Select terms that convert… Ideally, don’t guess here either…

Don’t bother if you can’t get in the top 10…A good thing to do is to add one more word to the general term, so if you end up ranking well for the specific term you are helping your rankings for the more general one as well. Then if it turns out the specific one was easy (you quickly become #1), you’ve already gone part way on the general one.

Don’t pay any for any general SEO service…Note I’m not saying don’t pay anyone for SEO, because if you need basic help, a consult from someone in the know might be helpful to, for example, tell you how to re-layout your site and to explain this post to you .

Beware of nofollow links. Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them.  To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it… Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.

Don’t waste your time with Google Sitemaps...

Don’t ignore the long-tail…First, make sure you have a static site… Second, look at all the content you can produce or have produced.  Can you combine it in interesting ways that people would find useful?  For example, at Duck Duck Go we have category pages.

Make as flat a site hierarchy as possible. Pagerank seems to flow logarithmicly from a homepage to its internal pages.  So if you have pages you want ranked highly, either you need links back to them directly or have them linked directly from your homepage…

Use directories instead of subdomains. For example, domain/blog instead of blog.domain.

Less is more. Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.

Don’t do anything black hat. You will get caught, you will not pass go, etc.”

SEO [Search Engine Optimization] Tools 101, Part 1…04.20.09

Ron Jones of SearchEngineWatch has started a series of posts including today’s SEO Tools 101, Part 1 which begins:

“Those new to the world of SEO may feel a little overwhelmed with all of the tactics that are needed to achieve higher rankings. A good starting place for newbies is Mark Jackson’s search engine optimization column here at Search Engine Watch.

My purpose in this two-part column is to arm you with some good tools to get you started. There are too many tools to list them all here, so I’ll only cover a few.

To make things simple, I’ll break them down into categories: keyword tools; SEO site grader tools; linking tools; browser toolbars; and other SEO tools. Many of these tools have a free or limited version with the option to upgrade to a premium version for a fee…”

Essentials of Combining Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing Tactics…04.15.09

This is an excerpt from a good posting today on Mashable! titled Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success by Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor at Online Marketing Blog:

“…Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a road map that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach (and can measure) as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan…

SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media road map:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers…

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search…

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share…

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content…Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results…marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts…”

“Search Cloudlet” to Complement Search Engine Optimization…03.05.09

This is a short but potentially useful tool about SEO (search engine optimization) from Kimberlee Ferrell’s post Search Cloudlet Provides Tags for Search Results  today on SEO Shootout:

“Search Cloudlet is a new tool for analyzing search terms quickly and easily. This Firefox add-on provides a tag cloud for search results on Yahoo and Google, with different tabs offering different tag information. You can set your tags to display for related keywords, domain names, or authors.

This can help analyze the competition’s possible keywords, as well as the context that your brand name is being refered to. While not a replacement for traditional SEO analysis of a website, this tool can complement your search for the best keywords.”

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What Would Make People Switch Search Engines?…01.10.09

TechCrunch post TechCrunch Poll: What Would Make You Switch Search Engines? shows interesting results as seen from this excerpt:

“Although Google keeps gaining search engine market share, people’s loyalties are far from locked in. J.P. Morgan Internet analyst Imran Khan recently conducted a survey to see if Web consumers would be willing to switch search engines. He found that 62 percent would. The biggest reason that would cause them to change? Better search results (45 percent of all respondents said this would make them switch, and 48 percent of respondents who use Google as their main engine).

The responses, in order of popularity:

Better results (45 percent).
Nothing would make me change (38 percent).
Faster response speeds to search (28 percent).
Less cluttered results (27 percent).
The ability to preview Web content (23 percent).
Less clutter on search sites (27 percent)
Results that include video, web, and music (12 percent)
Other (1 percent)…”

Why is Search Engine Optimization Important to Librarians?…12.15.08

Lorcan Dempsey‘s post from Thursday “SEO” [http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001836.html] which is excerpted here draws attention to the increasing importance of search engine optimization for libraries and librarians:

“…I have mentioned SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a few times as an increasingly important area of interest for librarians. However, as I have suggested, I come across resistance on the grounds that this is some sort of base or mendacious activity. We are very interested in interoperability, however, and for this reason it may be that Search Engine Interoperability is a more palatable expression. In this case interoperability means managing resources in ways which promote effective crawling, indexing and ranking by search engines. A reasonable goal, given the importance of search engines in the lives of library users.

Anyway, I repeat these points prompted by a post by Tony Hirst on the topic.

What does information literacy mean in the age of web search engines? I’ve been arguing for some time (e.g. in The Library Flip) that one of the core skills going forward for those information professionals who “help people find stuff” is going to be SEO – search engine optimisation. Why? Because increasingly people are attuned to searching for “stuff” using a web search engine (you know who I’m talking about…;-); and if your “stuff” doesn’t appear near the top of the organic results listing (or in the paid for links) for a particular query, it might as well not exist… [Revisiting the Library Flip - Why Librarians Need to Know About SEO « OUseful.Info, the blog…]

It is useful to think about the library website in this context. It is also important for materials which are unique to an institution/library: archival collections, institutional repositories, etc. It is also interesting to think about subject or other liaisons, or specialist library services, or advisory/reference materials…”

More on Search Engine Optimization…11.18.08

Here is an upcoming article that “covers the origins of SEO, strategies and tactics, history and trends, and the evolution of user behavior in online searching…”

“Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior” [http://www.hastingsresearch.com/net/09-SEO-ELIS-encyclopedia-article.html] by Nicholas Carroll will appear in the 2009 Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences [http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Library-Information-Sciences-Third/dp/084939712X] which is listed for pre-sale at $3000.00! The article contains much useful information. 

Here is an interesting “fair use” excerpt but you can read it online, of course:

“While some organizations have only one easily described product or agenda, for most organizations SEO can be too successful when it targets particular search terms so tightly that their web pages can be found by little else. When virtually all traffic to a website comes from a small number of terms, analyzing incoming search terms becomes an exercise in analyzing what one already knows. Ideally, improvements in SEO create an increase in targeted traffic along with an increase in unanticipated but relevant searches. While this can be analyzed in terms of Zipfian distributions, in proactive marketing it is better represented by the APUPA (Alien-Penumbral-Umbral-Penumbral-Alien) bell curve.

 

Fig. 2. APUPA curve as applied to SEO. 

SEO can also be too successful when a web page captures a high SERP position on a major search engine for an extremely broad term like health. Where this might be satisfactory to a large organization like the U.S. National Institutes of Health, an organization focusing on a particular niche of health could be swamped with masses of unwanted website visitors and email.(30) Websites deluged by unwanted traffic sometimes convert a liability to an asset by “reselling” the traffic or the entire website…”

Copyright © 2008, Nicholas Carroll and Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

Search Engine Optimization Guide from Google…11.17.08

Stephen Abram’s post on Google’s Search Optimization Post  [http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/11/search_engine_o.html] contained the following useful information which can help anyone:

“Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, ‘What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?’ There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, ‘I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?’, we can say, ‘Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.’

Since libraries don’t serve their customers by allowing and encouraging manipulation of the search rankings by advertisers, politicians and other special interest groups, we need to understand how the performance and positioning of our OPACs, databases and licensed resources differ from public search engines with revenue models designed to serve their primary customers – the folks paying the bills.

OF COURSE, That shouldn’t stop you from optimizing your library websites to get higher local rankings!!”