Archive for July, 2007
published by Dan in SEO Basics
The popularity of the linking site is obviously one of the major factors search engines take into account when determining the quality of an inbound link. There are two specific aspects of website popularity that search engines consider though - the website’s global popularity and it’s popularity in relevant communities.
Global Popularity - The overall popularity of a website contributes a lot to a link’s value. Between a link from a popular basketball fan site and a website like NBA.com it is very obvious that links from NBA.com, being the top basketball website, will have a higher value. One way to determine a website’s overall popularity is simply by looking at its page rank or searching for site specific terms and seeing how well they place in SERPs.
Community-based Popularity - Some websites might not be as popular as NBA.com or say a news website like CNN.com but will still give you high value links due to their popularity in their niche. The importance of a website’s popularity in niche or topical communities will increase even more in the future as search engines improve their analysis of link data. After all those who search for information need to know specific info and the reputation of a site within the circle concerned with the specific topic should carry more weight that its reputation among the general public whose knowledge of that certain topic is not as in-depth. Hence, it is important that the site linking to your website does not only have a lot of inbound links but relevant inbound links. This should also be the same thing you should do for your website. Try to et inbound links that are related to your website’s theme instead of just random links.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
Time and again you will come across the words “quality links”. It is always stressed that for a link building campaign to be effective you will not only need to garner a lot of inbound links but need to make sure that those links are quality links as well. This advice is really sound. However, many who are new to SEO often end up puzzled with the pretty vague term. After all those who give advice often neglect to mention just how exactly you can determine a link’s quality. This is what I’ll be discussing in my next two posts.
When trying to determine whether an inbound link is of good quality or not you would do well to remember that the reason why you are concerned with its quality is to score well with the search engines. This means that the quality of the link will depend on factors that the search engines look at. Contrary to what you might think link quality does not always depend solely on the actual website/page that is linking back to your site. By this I mean the site’s page rank or popularity. Of course those are major factors but you might be surprised at what other factors, which previously you probably didn’t even pay attention to, actually influence the value of a link.
Stay tuned for my next post wherein I will tackle each factor that search engines take into account when evaluating your links.
Popularity: 9% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Last time I mentioned some “problem pages” that search engines spiders won’t be able to view. The pages/documents listed in the previous post are impossible for search engine spiders to access so that it cannot get the information they contain.
Today I’ll be listing some other factors that makes web pages “spider-unfriendly”. Though these web pages are accessible to search engine spiders the way they are not that easy for spiders to “discover” so that more often that not they will be overlooked. Of course once overlooked it yields the same results as be entirely inaccessible - not being indexed and no additional info added to the search engines’ database about your site.
- URLs that make use of two or more dynamic parameters - Spiders avoid crawling web pages with such kinds of URLs since it often causes errors in programs.
- Pages that contains more than a hundred unique internal links - Though the spider will crawl this page you can almost be certain that it won’t be crawling all the other links. To make all the other pages discoverable it is better to make use of less than a hundred internal links.
- Pages that are more than three clicks/links away the home page of a website - While it is a good idea to keep the number of internal links per page to a certain level and just rely on the next pages to link to other more specialized pages make sure that no pages are too buried. Deep linking doesn’t work well in SEO since spiders tend to not visit pages that are too buried.
- Pages that require a “Session ID” or Cookie for navigation - The information stored in cookies are not always stored by spiders.
- Pages that are split into “frames” - Frames hamper the crawling process as well as result in confusion in the page rankings.
Resource: Seomoz Beginner’s Guide
Popularity: 9% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Hyperlinks are essential for search engine spiders to be able to crawl your webpages. Without hyperlinks no one can visit your web pages unless they type in the exact URL of that page. Of course, I haven’t really seen anyone make the mistake (duh?) of not linking to the other pages within their website. However, even though you do have internal links there are times that due to the architecture or structure of the links/pages within your website the spiders are unable to crawl certain pages or at least specific parts of the pages containing important information (or even not too important ones). For your website to qualify as “spider-friendly” you need to make sure that all the data within your webpages can be reached by search engine spiders otherwise you will have lost an opportunity to add vital information in the search engines’ database that would help define what exactly can be found in your site. Remember the less info the search engines have the less chances you have of rating well.
Listed below are some “problematic” pages in terms of “spider-friendliness”.
- Pages that can be accessed only by using a select form and submit button
- Pages that can only be accessed through a drop down menu (HTML attribute)
- Documents that can only be accessed using a search box
- Documents that are blocked one purpose (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file)
- Pages that require a login
- Pages that are re-direct before showing content - This is actually a black hat method called cloaking. Although are a few legitimate reasons for using this method your website will most probably be banned by search engines if caught doing this.
Resource: Seomoz Beginner’s Guide
Popularity: 14% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Header Tag
The Header Tag appears on a very prominent part of the web page and is seen as visitors as the header or title of the page. Because of this fact headers are always placed on the top of the page. What is sometimes missing though is the Header Tag (H1 tag). What many neglect to do is separate the header from the main body of the content and simply highlight the header in some way like using capital letters or boldfacing it. Make sure to use H1 tags and to choose a header that it consistent with the title you place inside the Title Tags.
Content
Make sure keywords that are related to the main keywords used in the title and header tags pepper the main body of the webpage. As always avoid keyword stuffing but try to get in as much important terms as possible.
Links
Use the same keywords used in the title tags and header as the anchor text on the link(s) that point to the specific pages where you use the same keywords.
As you can see from this post and the previous one, consistency is the key in order to maximize the potential of your keywords. Always remember that search engines have a bias for thematic websites so that the more coherent and “well-cross-referenced� your pages are the better. Just make sure that you don’t get too focused on very few keywords and miss out on the other relevant keywords. Make use of the other keywords by adding more pages with content focused on those keywords or link to external pages and use the infrequently used keywords as anchor text.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Choosing where to put the right keywords is actually very simple if you know the basics of SEO. All you need to do is think of the key components of SEO and place keywords in them or to accompany them. By this, I mean using keywords in/as part of the Title Tag, URL, Header Tag, Content, Internal Links, and External Links.
Keywords in the Title Tag
The Title Tag, though one of the most essential parts of a webpage in terms of SEO, happens to be one of the most overlooked parts as well. It is not uncommon to chance upon websites that don’t display any specific page title (page title is located at the very top of your browser). This is simply because the title tag was overlooked. This is actually a pet peeve of mine (though not for SEO reasons) because I hate subscribing to pages that come up in my Google Reader as “Untitled� or that gives me a generic company/website title, which often happens when subscribing to a particular portion of the website (like the blog).
Make sure you incorporate the most important of your keywords in the Title Tag. Do not make it too long though (advised maximum character length is 68). A concise yet descriptive title works best.
Keywords in the URL
The URL is also scrutinized by search engines. It is funny how some good websites waste the potential of their URLs by using obscure URL names that make use of codes, abbreviations and numbers. What you can do is use the same phrase in the Title Tag and separating each word with a hyphen.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in Keyword Research
Using the right keywords is a very important component of any successful SEO campaign. However, it is not just the use of the right keywords but HOW you use the keywords that makes an even bigger impact. You might have done your keyword research and come up with a pretty good set of terms but if you don’t put them into proper use then those keywords wouldn’t be as effective.
To optimize the use of keywords you should make sure that the keywords are used in concert. This means that you should have a clear idea of what each page in your website is about and how to use keywords in each page so as to reflect the overall theme of your site. You would want to use keywords that are inter-related to be able to build a more solid theme.
If your website covers a pretty broad topic(s) then you can at least make sure that each portion/section of the website uses keywords that will enforce the specific theme of each section. Aside from this you should of course also use the most important keywords of each section in the main page so as to link the individual sections to the main page giving the search engines (and your visitors) a good overall look of the website’s entire scope.
In my next post I will go over the different components in your website where you should make sure the proper keywords appear.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
While SEO is what will get your website listed on the top of SERPs, and thus give you plenty and consistent traffic, you do need to promote your content in other ways. Sometimes all you need is one article or one portion of your site to get plenty of notice for the entire site to take off. To do this you will need to promote your content and get noticed outside the world of search. When this happens the links will come pouring in helping your SEO campaign and ultimately making your website even more popular. In the meantime though here are some suggestions to help make this happen for you.
1.   Hire a popular consultant – It goes without saying that the skills of a consultant are a must. However, a popular consultant will also do you good because they will write your website as part of their resume and being popular chances are that more people will hear about your website too. Aside from this your website’s credibility will also be given a boost by being linked to popular and respected consultants.
2.   Make use of mailing lists – Whether through email or direct mail, send your subscribers regular news about the latest developments in your website. It would be a good idea to add coupons along with the mailing list to encourage people to actually look up your new content as well as make use of the discount.
3.   Sponsor something you believe in – Not only will it be good for your reputation but it will also get your inbound links if whatever you’re sponsoring has a website. If you will be sponsoring a charity you can even benefit from this financially by having the donation deducted from your taxes. This is always a winner. Publicity, link love, and tax break all in one.
4.   Get media coverage – If you have news worthy content submit press releases about it or better yet try to get a journalist to write or interview you about it.
Popularity: 10% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
As promised in my previous post this entry will discuss some of the metrics that can be used to assess the overall performance of your online videos. Note that the usual metrics used in assessing websites with non-video content still apply to a video website.
1. Time spent on the entire site and watching each individual video - While the time spent on the entire site is a common factor the uniqueness of the medium allows you to assess how interesting your video is since you can see whether the viewers actually finish the videos and if not, how long they stay to watch each video.
2. Most popular videos - The video with most hits are of course the most popular ones. Capitalize on these videos and try to figure out what makes the videos popular so that you can try to produce or at least find existing videos that can replicate their success.
3. Conversion rates - Find out which videos have the most conversion rates and which one have the highest abandonment rates to be able to either remove or tweak undesirable videos while again trying to replicate the success of those with better conversion rates.
4. Failure rate - Keep track of the number of people that could not open the videos in their browser. If the number is significant (or even if not) figure out why this is happening. You might need to offer your videos using a different file format, in (more) compressed versions, or at least provide a link for them to download needed plug-ins.
Popularity: 9% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
1. Use paid search for video - Like with ordinary web content using paid search will help you get traffic a whole lot faster. After your SEO efforts has kicked and you get more traffic from organic ways then you can pull out your ads anytime. But again, as I said in my post on paid search listings, it is a good idea to keep on using paid search for certain terms that you are not placing so well in yet are really relevant to your video.
2. Create a video sitemap - Sitemaps are important in any website but it is even more so in one with video content. This is because the sitemap will point to the crawler and reinforce the context of the video(s). Since crawlers have no idea what the video in itself is all about the different links pointing to and away from the page that contains the video can be used to give it clearer idea of the video(s) contents.
3. Make sure you monitor regularly how well the video site is doing - Monitoring of a site with video content is almost just the same as monitoring one with the usual text as content. However, there are some important metrics that you should not overlook when monitoring your video site. I will discuss the metrics in my next post.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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