Yes, even the BBC is starting to adjust to the new wave of internet marketing. It appears that they’re starting to consider SEO when writing their news posts online. And keep in mind for the BBC, SEO stands for search engine optimisation, not the silly search engine optimization we talk about.
Enough of their traffic comes from the web and search engines, so they are making changes. It’s true! I read it on the Guardian.
So what SEO tools are out there, available online, to save you time and money? Are there any that are worthwhile? I actually think so. Some of the big ones that I use include Yahoo Site Explorer and the Google AdWords Tool. There are several other tools that people use, some of them cost to use, some of them are free. (The above tools are free.) So what’s worth using?
Well, Chris Boggs from Search Engine Watch has put together a really nice list of different quality SEO tools. For the most part, I think his list is solid. Not sure why he’s an IE man (I won’t question that too much, it can only lead to something bad), but his choice of tools for search engine optimization is solid.
One tip he mentioned that I think is worth saying again – make sure any of the methods in which the tools help you are things you already know how to do! It’s worth extra time to learn how to do it manually first. Then you can go on to find a tool to save your time and effort, and still have the skills that tool applies towards.
It looks like smaller cities are starting to see their businesses move more online with web sites, online marketing and social networking. This would not surprise me too much to see, as the demand here for Tulsa SEO has increased, as well as for Tulsa website design. I’m willing to bet it’s very similar in other cities.
In this case, it appears that Columbus is definitely on the list of cities rising in their online presence, and it’s showing for several different types of markets.
So it seems like some security guys have found a few new attacks, posted as image links on blogs. These posts are engineered to end up on high Google results, but point to malware sites. It apparently doesn’t work on up to date server software, so keeping your updates current is a good idea.
Canonicalization is a major part of SEO, but at the same time one that still gets missed by many web designers. Check out my guest post at Daily SEO Tip. I get into more detail on what it is and how to fix canonicalization there.
I still hear from a lot of SEOs that are convinced the keywords meta tag actually makes a difference. Well, I thought I’d run a full test to see how much attention the search engines pay to it.
The test was as follows: I put a random string of letters and numbers together and slapped it into my keywords meta tag.
Keywords Meta Tag Test
So there it is. And I let the engines go out and gobble up my site. After the robots had all crawled it, I did a check to see what each search engine found. And this might surprise you, but here you go:
Google Keywords Meta Tag Test Results
Yahoo Keywords Meta Tag Test Results
Bing Keywords Meta Tag Test Results
Ask.com Keywords Meta Tag Test Results
And as you can see for yourself – only Yahoo and Ask seem to pay any attention to the keywords meta tag. Not only that, but it was very recently revealed that Yahoo will no longer use the keywords meta tag.
So, as I’ve said before – the keywords meta tag is only used by people who have not done the research to realize that it doesn’t do anything. For SEO, keep your optimizing solid – use the primary elements, the title tag, the description tag, header tags where valid. But remember to target humans, not just the search engines. If you keep that in mind, you’ll likely find yourself in better positions on the search engine results pages.
So last month Matt Cutts posted a blog entry giving away some startling news. Apparently the “nofollow” tag makes a link still absorb PageRank, but not pass it on.
In the past, most (educated) SEOs used the nofollow tag to adjust PageRank flow. This was done because using the tag would completely block the link from passing PageRank, and that PageRank was passed on to the other valid links on the page. This is called PageRank Sculpting.
The way this works is like this: say I have 4 links from a page I run. The page has 60 “points” of PageRank. Well, by default, all 4 links each get 15 points. Before, if I wanted to make some of these links get more points (PageRank Sculpting), I’d add the nofollow tag to links. So if I nofollow’d one of my 4 links, then the resulting 3 links would now pass on 20 PageRank points, adding more “link juice” to the pages they were pointing to.
From the updates on Google (which, apparently, have been running for over a year), this now is a bit different. The link that I added the nofollow tag for still absorbs the 15 points, but does not pass this “link juice” on. So I now have a page with 60 points of PageRank, 3 links get 15 points, and 15 points are lost.
As you might believe, this made many SEOs rather unhappy. I myself am not thrilled with this news, this now makes me have to rethink/redefine PageRank Sculpting for my own SEO projects. I know this is going to affect how many SEO’s use their blog comments, as well. Before, defaulting the blog comments to nofollow meant that all links stayed intact, PageRank points stayed in the places the web developer wanted them to be. Now, any additional comment (even if they are nofollow) pulls PageRank away from the site page.
Because of this, I suspect many SEOs will now either make their comments in an iframe, or remove comments from their blogs entirely. I’m of the opinion Google actually gives PageRank to some sites based on links they have going out, not just links coming in. This is very hard to test thoroughly, but I’m starting to wonder if leaving comments in a blog as dofollow would be better than not.
Eh, I’m just trying to keep integrity and do white-hat SEO, so I’ll try to find the best way to do it all. We’ll see what comes of it.
Page Rank is a vital part to any SEO done for a website. Understanding how to increase Page Rank is a huge benefit to any SEOer, and can help make a difference between page 10 and page 1 on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
(For those that want to get picky, yes, Page Rank is actually spelled PageRank, but since a large number of people think of it as two separate words, I’ll refer to it that way in this post.)
To start – what is Page Rank? Page Rank is not named because it’s associated with web pages, it’s actually named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page. The true ranking structure is something that isn’t fully available to anyone outside of Google, although you can install the Google Toolbar (for IE or Firefox) to see the Page Rank Google has publicly posted for any given web page.
So what is Page Rank? Basically, it’s a score Google has given to a web page, between 0 and 10. Higher is better. It’s affected by a variety of things, although knowing how to increase Page Rank for your site will help much. This is because Google tends to post higher Page Ranked sites higher on the SERPs, for the keywords that they are optimized for. To Google, Page Rank is equivalent with a level of quality. If a site has a high Page Rank, it is likely a high quality page.
To get an idea of this – most pages when they start begin with PR (Page Rank) 0. From here, initially most sites are around 1, 2, or 3. To reach PR 4 or above requires some qualifications, which I’ll detail in a moment. Anything above PR 6 takes quite a bit to get to, and these are very well known, popular sites. For some examples, these are how the following sites are currently ranked:
How do you increase Page Rank? The primary means of increasing PR is determined by how Google scores PR: it’s all about who links to you. This ties heavily, very heavily into basic SEO. Off-page linking is how PR is built.
The basics of Page Rank come down to links. It’s like a popularity contest – the more links to a given page, the more votes that are cast to this page, the higher a Page Rank that page is given. The weight of each link is affected by the PR of the linking page. This is where things start getting a little trickier to understand, but we’ll start with the basic formula.
PR = 0.15 + (0.85 * (PR of linking page / number of links on page))
This starts with 0.15, which is the lowest possible PR any given page can have. If your page is crawled and has no links to it at all, that’s where you are. The next bit of math takes 0.85 and multiplies it times the PR of the page linking to you divided by the total links from that page. This does mean that the more links on the linking page, the more “washed out” the quality of link from the site is. Getting a link from a page that only has three links is far better than from a page with 230 links.
Adding up multiple links into the equation makes it get quite messy, but you can see pretty clearly how getting a high quality link from a high PR site will jump your PR rather quickly. Also realize that this equation applies to on-site linking, as well. So by simply linking to your own pages from within your site will help your page rank. Keep in mind that the more links you put, the less PR (the less “link juice” as it’s often termed) will be given the page being linked to.
To get to something like a PR 7 means you have to have many links, and many high quality links. Good SEO requires finding quality relevant links, and increasing Page Rank is one reason for this.
So to increase Page Rank, you can start with doing quality on-site linking, and then from there start getting links from other pages to jump your PR further. The higher PR the page linking to you, the higher PR you’ll get, and the better you’ll do in the search listings.
It still surprises me how many businesses are completely unaware of Google Local. The benefits of putting your business in Google Local are enormous, especially for businesses that run primarily a regional business.
To start – Google Local is essentially the cheap/easy way to do SEO. It’s not exactly doing any traditional SEO, but by doing this, you’re able to rank above the rest of the organic listings (in most cases), and for quality keywords. You can see an example of it any time you search for a business listing in a local area, or often you can simply enter a city or zip code plus a particular market keyword (such as dentist, or plumber). When you do this, Google Local entries will show up, next to a map.
To get your business listed in this way is fairly easy to do. Begin at http://www.google.com/local. From here, you’ll want to click on the link that says “Put your business on Google Maps”. This will take you to a page that lists all of the entries to put information down about your company, such as name, address, phone, and web site, plus a description.
At this point Google will search to see if you have any listings posted yet. If you haven’t done any entries into Google Local or Google Maps, then you shouldn’t find a match. Add the new entry, and go on.
This next page is crucial to take advantage of Google Local for the SEO benefits it has. You can show up in organic listings by putting proper keywords into the “Categories” section. You can have up to five categories here. By doing some good keyword research, you can determine which keyword phrases would be best to place here to ensure you get good, quality traffic from local searchers.
The other information is good to put if you can. In particular, placing a video or image will help you by distinguishing you from your local competitors, as these will often show up with your Local listing.
Once you’ve completed this information, you’ll have to confirm by entering a PIN code Google will give you, either by giving it to you online to enter it over the phone, or by sending it to you through mail to your business address to enter it online. Once you’ve done this, your Google Local business listing will go live.
For extra marketing push, you can choose to add coupons to your Google Maps listing. Simply go back to http://www.google.com/local/add, only select the “Coupons” tab at the top. Here you can add coupons of any kind to help bring customers in.
Now that you’re set up, your business name and link will show anytime anyone within the same area as your business types in the keywords you selected, or types in these keywords next to the name of your city or a close-by zip code. This can be very effective if you’ve selected good keywords, and even without full SEO, you’ll still appear at the top of the search results.
If you notice an increase in business from this, it may be wise to consider doing full SEO, as your customer base appears to be using the web to find business in your market. By increasing traffic through SEO, you’ll be increasing business further – and for national or international companies, this is a must for competing on a national/international scale. Even without SEO, this is a good start to get traffic to your business site, and to help increase profits!
So I was reading through some SEO material recently (as all good SEOs should do), and found a few interesting things out. I knew that in the past, when the keyword meta tag was first introduced, it was the authority for ranking pages in the SERPs (search engine result pages). You could just put your primary keyword into your keyword meta tag 300 times, and you’d rank at the top.
Of course, this is silly. And most of the search engines realized this before too long. The tag was introduced in 1996, and a lot of changes happened in 1998. One particularly major change – a company named Google. When they came into the game, they didn’t even support the tag. Why? Because of the blatant abuse people did with it. And even to this day, Google doesn’t even acknowledge it. I know this is surprising at least a few of you. So is it even worth using?
Well, although Google doesn’t notice anything you do with your keywords meta tag, there are still search engines that do. Primarily Yahoo and Ask.com. However, the content placed into this tag doesn’t help your rankings much at all. It has about as much SEO power as normal page content.
If I had to give any reason for still using the keywords meta tag, it’d be only to put words that you would never actually use in your content. Primarily common misspellings and phrases that are impossible to use in your normal content, but that people still type when they search. And you’ll only get potential results from those two search engines – not from Google.
So keep your SEO solid, and do some good on-site SEO with the appropriate adjustments, plus good off-site backlinking (which is really where most of the SEO power comes from). And make sure to research as necessary, to find out what really helps (or hurts) your rankings on the SERPs, if you want to be a good SEO.
