Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex. In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products. How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?
This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.
Google likes unique posts, good content
Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages
By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site. Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue. Focus on only these elements. Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.
By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it. In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages. For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”. There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue. By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.
Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help. Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions. For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
The search engines evolve, as does most modern technology. The latest revision in search engine result pages is the “universal search”. This is the displaying of results for searches in not just web site links, but images, maps, videos, blogs, and more.
The universal search allows a large breadth of information to be given that is relevant to any search done. For SEOs, this means adjusting approach on how to get relevant information out onto the web.
When trying to publicize information about something you want people to discover, to make sure you can be found by different areas within this universal search you’ll want to make sure you go across multiple areas with your information publication. This can be done through audio, video, blogging, social media – or getting creative and doing it in unique ways.
It all comes down to doing good marketing, just online. As the web evolves, so must our online marketing. For more good information on the universal search, check out this article by Ron Jones at Search Engine Watch.
It’s surprising what being snowed in can do for your productivity over a weekend. I’ve finished up with some changes to the site, finally added a Portfolio page and an About Us page (so you can see what my ugly mug looks like).
The iPad is the latest Apple news and it’s been getting a lot of attention. Considering this, some not-so-nice SEOs are using the fresh keywords to do black hat SEO to infect computers across the globe with malware. They’re targeting laterally related keywords such as “Apple Tablet” and “Apple iPad Rumor”.
Be cautious if you see some weird results when you do searches on these types of terms. The eWeek Security Watch has more info on this.
This isn’t directly internet marketing related, but it’s something I know a lot of people have been waiting for. The iPad (AKA the iTablet and other names). It looks to be a cross between the iPod/iPhone, a laptop, and a television. It’s thin, sits in your lap, and is full touch-sensitive. Plus compatible with your old systems, so you can copy apps from the iPhone to the iPad to have them full-screen.
It looks like it might have good potential for a portable movie player with a substantially larger screen, has better use for eBooks, and the higher resolution makes everything a little easier to see, such as maps, your calendar, YouTube, not to mention web browsing.
The full announcement came today from Apple, so if you’re curious to learn more about it (as I still am), you can check out the official iPad page.
Google just upped their record from the 4th quarter of 2008 by 17%. So how much is that, exactly? Revenues in the 2008 4th quarter: $5.70 billion. And they’re only improving. Revenues in the 2009 4th quarter: $6.67 billion.
The fact that this is only for one fourth of the year blows my mind. If that stays consistent, then that’s in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year. They’re doing okay.
If you want to get more of the details on these numbers, check out this article from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.
In SEO, many people often think of the different types of SEO tactics that are put into play without ever really putting together a solid strategy. Knowing how to distinguish which tactics should be used for which market is a great skill. It’s something that is not focused on by all SEOs, but it really should be.
Beyond that, after determining which tactics are best, one of the best abilities to have is efficiency at various tasks. Knowing how to balance your time for each need that your projects require is a very valuable asset. Stephan Spencer described it very well in his article on Search Engine Land, I highly recommend viewing his tips on all of these often missed elements of SEO.
It’s not always dead on accurate, but by using Google in the right way you can often figure out what your significant other is interested in. How? By using what’s known as “predictive text”. It’s the ability by Google (and Yahoo) to see what you’re typing in and try to predict what you might be looking for. By only entering a few words in, you can often glean a lot of very interesting information.
For example, you can type in “how can I get my girlfriend to” and then let Google roll, see what it comes up with. (Warning, even though it’s only text, it’s not all child-friendly content.) Replace “girlfriend” with “boyfriend”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. and you have a new research tool.
Mind you, in many cases these results may not match at all with your significant other’s thoughts and desires, but it can still be fun to explore. And for marketers, this is a gold mine. These are the hot buttons that are looked for to prompt action by many marketers, and Google is just giving it to you.
If you want to see more detail and screenshots of examples of these, check out Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land.
When a major magazine that focuses on large businesses and exchanges of huge numbers of money talks about how important SEO is, you know that it’s worth knowing about. Forbes put up an article about search engine optimization and gave a few really great tips.
The article mentions how there are over 12 billion searches each month and that most people never look past the first page on their searches. Because of this, being on the first page of results for your market is becoming more and more valued and valuable.
The tips they talk about are details such as content, keyword organization, and even speed of the site itself. The other element I was happy to see mentioned was the reminder to never forget the visitor directly. I’ve often told people – top listings don’t matter if no one wants to stick around when they visit your page. Because of this, good web design and focus on attractive details to the customer is important.
As posted in article by PC World, even Google can make errors on occasion. In this case, some statistics for users of Google Business Center were sent to incorrect Business Center users. This included information such as how often the business had appeared in listings, how many times the business was clicked and follow-through clicks on the business site itself.
This error was found to have been by human mistake, not an error directly with any of Google’s systems. Google was on top of it and corrected it quickly. They published a written statement to acknowledge the error and that when they discovered it, said they paused all emails to Business Center users until they could determine the cause of the issue.
The 80-20 rule is one that applies to several areas of business. This includes SEO. There are some elements in SEO that take a large amount of time and effort, especially in areas like building backlinks. In this case, deciding on which 20% of these can provide 80% of your SEO value can save lots of time while not cutting many results.
In addition to this, when you have hundreds (or thousands) of pages on your site, it’s important to try avoiding the duplicate content penalty where possible. To do this, each page must be unique and have valid content. With that many pages, even with a full staff it still takes a lot of time. In this case the 80-20 rule can be applied to choose the most important of your site’s pages and make sure they’re prepped to be crawled fully by the search engines. You can find more detail on how to apply the 80-20 rule to SEO from Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch.
Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had). This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.
Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9). That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).
The malady that Google Japan performed? They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget. This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.
It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
The news about Google’s real-time search has been out for a little while now, but many people are still wondering how this is affected by real-life situations. Well – Matt Cutts was gracious enough to show by example. He displays exactly how Google tracked a recent mild earthquake and how long it took to show results on Google.
It’s good to see that their real-time search update actually functions as intended, and I can see the potential for it to help in a variety of ways. Being the top search engine and a huge point where people check on things every day, getting your breaking news from Google (for info relevant to what you’re looking for) may get info to some people (who don’t check the news so often) faster. Whether or not Google should take this role is not something that’s universally agreed upon, but there are visible benefits.
Now I’m already an iPhone user, but I’ve heard plenty about Google’s Android. And while I’m not able to do a fair comparison, Danny Sullivan (SEO extraordinaire) is, and he did.
He does more of a businessman’s review, as to how each phone worked in an efficient manner (or not), and what his impressions were of each overall. Check it out if you’re trying to decide between the two.
SEO, by its very nature, requires changes to the construct of the web pages in the site being optimizated. Because of this it’s usually easier to integrate SEO with web design on the initial construction of the site.
By doing this in combination, the decisions of which pages to create can be more targeted from a marketing perspective, and this can make a well-ranked site look good instead of just “adjusted”.
The key to this is finding a web designer and an SEO expert that can work well together to make this process seamless. Or else to find an SEO expert that also does web design (as TMO does).
Attention to these details was pointed out by Last Click News.
Most companies perceive getting negative attention or negative reviews as a purely bad thing. However, any type of attention is good for SEO. It will build up links, it puts eyes on the company. And in the case that the bad review or bad attention is a minor part of what is overall a good reputation for the company, getting eyes on the company (even in this way) can be a very good thing.
Also, a balance of positive and negative attention tends to make a company look more legitimate, so this can also make this negative aspect bring positive points.
For SEO, any links that point back to the site (even if for negative reasons) will increase PageRank and sometimes may even affect keyword ranking in a good way. I wouldn’t recommend searching for negative attention, but getting some is not always a bad thing. SEO Consult in the UK has more details on why this is.
Usually in the SEO world, Google comes first. However, as Microsoft adjusts its approach, it seems that Bing is starting to get more ground. So how is Bing different than Google when it comes to SEO?
Michael Carden-Edwards from Coast Digital explained it well: Bing needs a lot of the same things Google does, but just focuses on some key elements more heavily. The primary areas that Bing checks are the following:
Domain age – Bing likes well-established sites, it shows that there’s some experience behind the site.
Quality links, both inbound and outbound – This is one area that differs from where most SEOs focus on, by looking at quality of outbound links as well as incoming links.
Substantial content on each page – At least 300 words for any page that you want ranked on Bing. It appears Microsoft is going to reduce ranking for shell pages that don’t offer much information.
Title tags – This is the one major element that fits for all SEO, and stays the same with Bing. Keep them relevant and with your keywords, it will help.
Even though Google is still king, Bing is starting to become a bigger source of traffic than before, and it’s worth knowing how to rank in their listings to keep traffic up.
As SEO becomes more prominent, more companies are turning to it to increase their rankings on the search engine results and to drive traffic to their site (to increase business). The choice for these companies is to either hire a qualified SEO company or to hire an in-house SEO guru.
Unfortunately many companies still don’t realize the amount of work involved when asking one person to handle all of the SEO work. Patricia Skinner from Search Engine Journal does an excellent job of outlining all of the responsibilities any in-house SEO will hold in this article. She clearly shows that it’s something that does take time, and covers details on what to do for a company that wants quick results when you have work that isn’t always quick to show results.
Google’s made a little tweak to AdWords, so now you can put an ad that will show on cell phones that lists a business number. If the owner of the phone calls that number, that counts as the click that is paid for.
The benefit of this is that it’s a very quick hot lead for anyone who advertises on the mobile network. And it’s easy to do, since it defaults to all devices in AdWords, anyway. To make sure you’re listed, check to see that mobile devices are checked in your settings in the campaign settings in AdWords.
Also, to have your phone number listed, you can either have the business information synched up with your business account or enter it manually, both done inside of the AdWords campaign settings. Make sure whichever you do that you include your phone number.
Then to see the results, just choose the “Filters and Views” drop-down list and choose “Segment by”->”Click Type”. This will show which clicks were URL clicks, and which were calls, from either the Ad Group or Keywords tabs.
It’s just an addition Google’s made to AdWords, and sent out an announcement through email to Google advertisers. This could be a good change for people who use AdWords for markets that actively use their cell phones.
Most people view PageRank as that value from 0 to 10 that’s in your Google Toolbar, showing how much reputation your site has on the internet. There are some details that you should know if you really want to understand PageRank. Read more »
Yes, Google will still show pages even if you have set them up to be blocked in your robots.txt file. Why exactly, you’re wondering, I’m sure.
Google is actually not crawling any of the URLs you have listed as blocked in your robots.txt file. What they are doing is displaying the page, just not showing your description meta tag or any information from inside that page. Matt Cutts gets into more detail about that here:
So to prevent Google from displaying your pages at all, you need to remove the page inside your Webmaster Tools or else use a robots meta tag with a noindex value in it for each page. Then your page will not show up in Google’s results at all.
You can get more details on this information from Quick Online Tips.
The tragic news of Brittany Murphy’s unexpected passing affected many. However, there are some to whom this news affected in a different way – they saw a way to make a buck.
Personally, I think it’s rather sick, but there are some individuals who have taken this opportunity to take a hot news item and push spam and malware. Quick dirty black-hat SEO methods can often get high results quickly, but then are found by Google and taken offline. The issue is that even the short amount of time listings like these stay online can be enough to infect several machines.
Newer black-hat SEO attacks use news events to get attention to sites that pose as news sites, but act only to infect machines with malware schemes. Be cautious when visiting unknown news sites that are “reporting” on hot news items.
The Tech Herald has more information on this particular attack, and F-Secure has more information on the specific malware details.
Just a quick post – try going to Google and hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button without entering a query. You’ll see a big number pop up. Google’s waiting for the new year! I do wonder what will happen when that number reaches zero and you’re on the page.
This is a question I’ve had for a while. I’ve gotten the impression that reciprocal linking doesn’t work at all anymore. However, there are some cases where it seems like the best way to get a link to a high PR site is by putting a link in place.
Just as an experiment, I’m going to go ahead and test a few places. The reciprocal links are here. We’ll see how well it works.
— Start of random code snippets —
The site is listed among seo resources in the directory of seo links.
Nothing really SEO related on this one. I stayed up to figure it out (and because my hosting apparently needed to reset the server, yay). It appears someone from Qatar of all places thought they needed to provoke my YARPP plugin with a bug. It kind of hosed my blog for a day. Sadly, I did not notice until tonight.
But now it is fixed. And with the magic of my web skills, any visits from that particular IP range will now be rejected. Hopefully not a lot of people in Qatar will really need my services urgently.
It did annoy me because I lost some sleep to fix it. But I am pleased because I am victorious over the silly attacker. I might need to contact the plugin designer to have him do an update to fix that bug. At any rate – blog, live ON!
