Thursday 15 March 2012

3 SEO Traps to Avoid During Your Redesign

I receive a lot of SEO questions from business owners who want to spruce up their aging websites, but are dead afraid of losing their existing search engine traffic. And for good reason. Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. It's hard to make money while stuck in a trap!Photo Credit: Waltimo

With that in mind, here are a 3 SEO traps to avoid before, during and after you develop your website:

SEO Trap #1: Your Content Management System

If you are switching to a different content management system (CMS) it often means that the URLs from your current site will have to change to something that fits with the new system. It's likely that the new URL naming convention will not match your old one.

The Escape: If this is the case with your new back end, then 301-permanent redirect all of the old URLs to their new counterparts if you can. If this is a practical impossibility, then review your analytics to find the landing page URLs within your website that receive direct search engine visitors, and redirect those. Also redirect any URLs that have links pointing to them from other sites. While it's best practice to redirect all URLs, those that don't receive any direct search engine traffic and don't have any external links are less important.

SEO Trap #2: Your Site Architecture

Your new website is likely to be sporting a brand new navigational scheme as well as an overall change of its site architecture (how each page links to each other). This is a key element in determining whether pages from your website will show up in the search results. For instance, if you take a page from your website that is currently featured in the main navigation (meaning that every page of the site links to it) and you feature it less prominently within your new website, don't be surprised if it doesn't show up in the search results for its targeted keyword phrases as it used to.

The Escape: You can tell the search engines which pages are the most important ones on your site by how you link to them. Be sure that the pages you are optimizing are linked from your main navigation so that they will receive the internal link popularity they deserve. They'll stand a much better chance at bringing you targeted visitors than those that are deeply buried.

SEO Trap #3: Your Content

If you hadn't previously optimized the content of your old site, I highly suggest doing so with your new site. This means that you research the keywords that people use at the search engines to find products or services like yours, and then use them strategically within each page of the website. Doing so will likely increase the targeted visitors to your site fairly quickly after going live.

On the other hand, if your existing site was fairly well optimized and already bringing targeted visitors, you'll need to be careful about the content that you change. While you shouldn't be afraid to make your content better, it may not be a good idea to completely rewrite old content that was working for you. You'd be surprised how many marketers decide to change their website messaging without even realizing that it was previously optimized to bring in targeted visitors.

Still, your website redesign is a good time to work on increasing your website conversions. All the targeted visitors in the world are of no use to you if they don't take any of the actions you'd like them to take. Rewriting some of your content to convert more visitors into buyers is a good thing as long as it doesn't decrease the number of those visitors. Again – this is where you'll need to review your analytics reports to determine which pages were your best performers.

The Escape: If you find that your existing page content was bringing in search engine traffic and conversions, think 10 times before changing it! If you're certain that your new content is much better and more in tune with your company's message, then try testing it against the old copy through a tool such as Google’s Website Optimizer. You may be right, but you'll never know for sure unless you test it.

The Booby Trap!

Don't forget that title tags are an important part of your content as well. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes during a redesign is to inadvertently lose all the previous title tags.

The Escape: Don't go live with your new site without proper (unique, relevant and keyword-rich) title tags in place on every page. You will absolutely take a huge traffic hit if you do. Make sure that your new CMS allows you to customize the title tags of every page as needed. If it doesn't, then find a new CMS that does. I can't stress this enough because title tags are so important to SEO. It's fine to dynamically generate them based on specific rules, but some pages may need their titles to be customized for best results.


These 3 traps are just a few of many you may face as you redesign your website. Don't be one of the many who wait to go live with their site and THEN call an SEO consultant for help. Bake your SEO into the new site from the start to avoid any loss of search engine visitors, while ideally increasing them. There's no reason why your visitor count should take a hit with a new design--but only if you are prepared to avoid the traps!

Google Sucks All the Way to the Bank!

Most of the time when I have a bit of a rant in the newsletter or elsewhere it's because I've seen or heard things that bug me or are just plain wrong. Writing about it gets it off my chest and that's usually the end of it. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case with the Dear Google rant I had back in Sept.Photo Credit: Saucy Salad

It's not out of my system in the least.

In fact, the feelings I had in that "letter" are growing stronger every day. Most often I notice it when I analyze why certain pages show up highly in Google. It enrages me when I see many pages in the top 10 results that appear to have gotten there through anchor text comment spam. So I think to myself, "Write about it, you'll feel better." Then I remember that I already did write about it and I still don't feel better.

So I tweet snarky comments to Matt Cutts, as well as leave them on Sphinn , but it only makes me feel worse for being mean to Matt, who is a nice guy.

Then I remember what I wrote many years ago in issue 038 of the High Rankings Advisor

"If Google goes public in 2003...we will see it start to suck by 2004. By 'suck,' I mean 'become like all the other engines.'"
I was wrong, in that it took a whole lot longer than one year to really start sucking, but suck it does.

We did see this coming.

Interestingly enough, the sucky results were foreshadowed toward the end of 2003 with what was dubbed the "Florida Google Update"  and the one soon after in January 2004 dubbed "Austin" by WebmasterWorld (we called it "Gladys" at the High Rankings Forum).

Those major algorithm changes by Google created chaos in the search marketing world because Google stopped showing many perfectly good websites for certain search queries, substituting them for what seemed to be much lower-quality sites such as online directory pages. (Causing an unfortunate boom in the crappy directory market.)

What struck me the most about the new search results at the time was that they were heavily biased toward informational pages, rather than commercial ones. Searches for products would yield product review pages or directories of sites that sold those products, but rarely company websites where one could purchase the products directly.

Why go all informational?

Because Google doesn't make money off of their organic search results.
My theory was that if Google could make the main search results "just relevant enough," but not quite provide what the searcher was looking for, the searcher would be more likely to click the sponsored results (ads) that are highly relevant and have exactly what the searcher wants. The searcher is happy, and Google makes money.

Still, back in 2003–2004, the new "informational" type results were not what the average searcher was used to, forcing Google to ratchet down the algorithm to provide more of a mix of informational and commercial sites. But I always felt that we had been given a glimpse of Google's future algorithm.

Which brings us back to today's sucky Google results.

It was done gradually over many years, but Google now provides organic search results that often look relevant on the surface, but either lead to made-for-AdSense content pages or somewhat sketchy companies who are great at article spinning and comment spamming.

Matt Cutts even admitted at a recent conference that Google web spam resources had been moved away from his team.  While I doubt Matt himself was happy about this, those whose bright idea it was are likely laughing all the way to the bank.

But have they gone too far?

Since their poor results are being talked about with more fervor outside of the search marketing industry, it's possible that they have indeed crossed the line. Numerous mainstream publications and highly regarded bloggers have taken notice and written about the putrid results. While Google is used to negative press, the current wave of stories hits them at their core -- or at least what most people believe to be their core -- their search results.

Even though today Google is technically just an advertising platform that happens to offer Internet search, they built their reputation on providing superior results. Because fixing what's broken in the current algorithm can't be very difficult for the brilliant minds that work at Google (Hint: ignore all anchor text links in blog comments, for one thing), we can only assume that they don't want to fix them -- at least not yet.

Most likely the fixes will only be forthcoming if and when they start to lose searchers and/or people stop clicking on the ads. Which doesn't seem to be happening. According to a Media Post article this week on U.S. paid search budgets (which was quoting from the "Efficient Frontier Q4 2010 U.S. Digital Marketing Performance Report"), paid clicks on Google rose 8% year-on-year.

What's an SEO to do?

None of this bodes very well for SEOs. (Which also suits Google just fine.) It seems that as an SEO, your choice is to help ruin the Internet by performing spammy SEO for your clients -- or to heavily invest in Google AdWords -- which of course plays right into Google's hands. [sigh]

I can't bring myself to do anything spammy, so the best I can do is keep preaching best SEO practices, with the caveat that the spammers are likely to win at the moment. But that's obviously not a great business model!

So…anyone in need of a highly jaded, formerly naïve person who knows exactly how search engines *should* work? ;)

Why SEO in All the Right Places Doesn't Cut It Anymore

When I teach my "how to" SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn't. I've always felt that it was important because they're often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn't they, with all themyths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn't, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is:

Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors.
Image Credit: renaissancechambara
Unfortunately, that doesn't do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it's an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it's the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of how to SEO has always been based on that principle, more people are coming around to it in the wake ofGoogle's Panda Algorithm.

Pre-Panda, many people built thriving businesses using the following basic how to SEO process:

  • Buy a keyword-rich domain name that encompasses the products you want to sell.
  • Build a templated website around it.
  • Link internally to the product pages with descriptive anchor text.
  • Use those same keyword phrases in the Title and H tags.
  • Submit the website URL to lots of directories.
  • Drop links to the website in other people's blogs and forums.
Voila! Instant Google success!

They'd repeat the process hundreds of times with different types of products, and then run on autopilot. While it might not have worked on every site they created, the sheer volume of websites they ran would be enough to make them a decent living.

So maybe there was a secret formula after all?

Perhaps, but after Google's Panda Algorithm was implemented, many (but not all) who followed and succeeded with that formula for years suddenly lost a good chunk of their revenue.

What changed?

My own speculation, based on numerous websites that I've reviewed where this happened, is that Google finally decided that there needed to be more to a website than having "SEO in all the right places." And it makes sense. Why should one site do better than another just because they read up on how to SEO and knew the best places to stick their keywords? It shouldn't. And by allowing exactly that to happen, Google was enabling sites with old-fashioned, by-the-book SEO to beat out potentially higher quality websites.

The result was that Google not always giving their own users (the searchers) the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally blaming Google here. It has to be a daunting task for a machine to know the difference between an okay (but great with SEO) site and a great (but perhaps not so great with SEO) one. Especially when so much of how Google tried to determine relevancy and quality was based on links – and even more on anchor text. It simply became too easy to game that system.

Giving Google What They Wanted

I certainly understand and even empathize with those site owners who've lost a significant portion of their income. They were just giving Google what it wanted. And because it worked so well, they had no reason to go above and beyond their basic formula. Why build a brand for your company when a keyword-rich domain would provide a better return on investment? Why spend time becoming an expert in your industry and educating your target market on the intricacies of your products when you could hire someone to write low-quality "SEO articles" and submit them to article directory sites instead?

Interestingly enough, many of the business owners I've talked to who have been getting by with formula SEO all these years have told me that they have tons of happy customers. Yet there are no obvious signs of this online, such as glowing reviews on Google Places or other online review sites (there aren't bad ones either). How are customers even supposed to remember the name of a company called something like WoodAndMetalDiningRoomChairs.com? (I just made that one up.)

Mainly, customers found these websites through Google, made their purchase and received their merchandise. There's nothing wrong with that, but there was also no personal connection made. This is further illustrated by the fact that if you look at social media sites, you won't see much chatter about these companies. In fact, many of them don't even use social media, or simply have cursory accounts. Again, they didn't need to.

No Marketing Budget

A marketing person, plan, or budget was never necessary nor even a consideration. Sadly, for those companies, they don't have much choice anymore if they want to stay in business. But ironically, now that they really need a marketing budget, there's no money in the till to go toward it.

If I've just described your business and websites – even if you haven't lost a portion of your revenue (yet), you may have thought you could hire a new SEO company to mix in a little extra SEO mojo and fix up your Google problems. But while they might find some on-page or off-page things you could be doing better, I wouldn't count on that to bring back your lost traffic and sales.

So what should you do?

You need to seriously rethink your online strategy. You need to stop saying, "Well, it always worked for me in the past." You need to build a brand and you need to market the heck out of it. You may even need to consolidate all your related keyword-rich domain websites into one big brand website. (Don't do that last one without consulting a professional.) You need to learn everything you can aboutsocial media marketing and start doing it. You need to get in contact with your happy customers and ask them to write reviews online as well as to evangelize about you to everyone they come in contact with. You need to also keep in contact with them in a variety of ways.

All of those things are going to make a much bigger difference over the long haul than rewriting your title tags or adjusting your keyword density. The big takeaway here is that while your website may already be the best it can be technically for search engines, it's time to make it the best it can be for your users. Both parts of that equation are equally important. It's not going to be quick or easy, but if you want to stay in business, it's probably going to be necessary.

Google (and Bing) Love Anchor Text Link Spam

While many bloggers and the media are calling Google's search results out lately, most of Photo Credit: Elsie Esq.the focus has been on the somewhat low-quality pages that show up for informational long-tail searches. My concern for Google's search results is different, however. As I touched upon in the last newsletter, I'm tired of Google (and Bing) returning sites that use anchor text link spam to get on the first page of results.

For those who don't know what anchor text is, here's a quick explanation:

Anchor text is the words in the clickable part of any link. For instance, when someone links to my site, they typically use either my name or my company name in the anchor text, which looks like this:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Or...

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

But those links are nojavascript:t all that valuable in SEO terms. What would be better (for search engines) is for the links to be more like these:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

...with the keywords that people might type into Google (or Bing) as the clickable anchor text link.

Search engines assign a lot of weight to the words that are in that clickable link. It does make sense because you're telling both people and search engines what they'll get when they click the link.

The problem is that it's not a natural way for people to link unless they know a bit about how search engines work. It's more natural to link using the company name, even through links that just say "click here" or "more information."

Part of what I do as an SEO consultant is to train clients to think like a search engine. I teach clients to link more descriptively on their own sites via "internal" links as well as linking to other "external" sites. But to get honest-to-goodness natural links – that is, links from others just because they really like you or your company – it's unlikely that the link will have the best anchor text for search engines. And yet, natural links are exactly what Google claims to value. It's what their PageRank algorithm was originally based on.

But today, natural links and true citations are nearly useless in helping search engines show the best sites for the search query at hand.

For instance, this past Sunday I was quoted in a Washington Post story aboutGoogle's less-than-stellar search results.

I spoke with the reporter for quite some time and also emailed him numerous examples of how some companies easily manipulate Google. He was kind enough to mention me and my company (on page 2) in the article, which was great -- but there was no link. I don't know if it is the Washington Post's policy not to link, or if they just don't think about it, or if they have never been taught to link. It seems to me that a mention in the Washington Post in this context provides me and my company some credibility, because the WP is a mainstream news outlet. Yet any credibility I may have gained with the people reading the article is completely lost on Google because there's not only no descriptive anchor text link, there's no link at all!

Instead, the links that Google (and Bing) end up valuing the most are those where people control the anchor text. Unfortunately, when anchor text can be controlled, it often means that the link:

  • was purchased
  • was traded for
  • was added to a site that is controlled by the owner
  • was added to a site in a network controlled by multiple stakeholders (like a link farm)
  • was added into an article or bio of an article and posted to an article directory or similar
  • was used in a blog comment
  • was part of a forum signature
  • was obtained naturally, but the linker had to be asked to edit the anchor text.
Only the last one of those is truly in line with what search engines want to value, and even that one is sketchy because it becomes somewhat unnatural by virtue of requesting different anchor text.

May the Biggest Spammer Win

Most reasonable people would agree that it doesn't make sense that the companies who own or take part in a network of interlinked websites should rank higher than those who don't. And why should the websites that have people "writing" boatloads of blog comments outrank their competitors who have no desire to spam others' blogs? If you're commenting because you'll possibly get some link value rather than because you feel the need to add to the conversation, it adds unnecessary clutter and should be considered spam by the search engines (in my opinion). I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of blog and forum comments fall into that category, as do most articles submitted to article directories.

Here's the Rub

All of the above types of links still count very highly in Google (and Bing). While links and their anchor text are by no means the only ranking factor for how sites show up in the search engines, they are a very large one at the moment. And surprisingly, neither the relevance nor the quality of those links appears to play as big a role as search engines would like you to believe.

You can take any product search query (both highly competitive and somewhat competitive) and review the backlinks of the sites that show up in Google's (or Bing's) top 10 to 20 results and see what I'm talking about.

Random Example

Let's look at the search query "baby furniture," which I just randomly thought of as I was writing this. I'm not going to call out any of the sites by name, and your results may differ slightly from mine, but you should get the picture.

The first site to show up in Google is a big brand, which makes sense. In fact, I wasn't even going to check the backlinks because I figured they likely deserve to be there based on their brand. But then I noticed it's just a random catalog page from their site. So I looked at their backlinks, and sure enough, there are 357 links pointing to that one page, most from completely irrelevant sites. Some are even hacked sites and porn sites. But they've got keyword-rich anchors that Google (and Bing) love. Many of the links are in blog comments and others in "partner site" areas (paid links). Wonderful.

Let's check the #2 site that shows up in Google (which for me was the #1 site in Bing). Looks like there's a whole network of interlinked baby-related sites that use keyword-rich anchor text links to get all the various sites to rank well for those words. While it's possible that all those sites have different owners and they really just want to recommend (using juicy anchor text) all those other baby product sites, it sure smells fishy to me! At least in this case they seem to be on relevant sites, unlike the big-brand one above.

The #3 site that I see on Google is also a big brand, and it looks as if many of their links are purchased from mommy blogger-type sites, based on my random clickthroughs of their backlinks. While they at least seem relevant, most are anything but natural. I would consider them akin to ads, aka paid links. Nothing wrong with them purchasing ads on relevant sites, but it's Google's job not to count paid links, and yet they do.

The #4 site is owned by a big brand, but is separate from the brand's main website. It looks as if this one may not be spamming...yay! They seem to do well based on links from their parent company site and actual recommendations from other sites. I am basing that assertion on the fact that the links are mainly the website name, not a keyword phrase. So Google may have gotten that one right! (That site doesn't show up in Bing's top 10 for me, however.)

Spammers Rule - Google (and Bing) Drool

I think I'll end my backlink checking here because it upsets me to see how easy it is for link spammers to get pages ranked for highly competitive phrases. Remember, this was just ONE random phrase I checked. I have no clients in the baby furniture space or anything like that. You can type in any type of product search for yourself and see similar results. Seriously, I'd be shocked if you could find a Page 1 general product SERP in Google (or Bing) where most of the sites WEREN'T link spamming their way there.

The conundrum for Google (and Bing), as I mentioned in my Google Sucks article, is not that the pages or websites that show up in the results for these searches are necessarily bad or irrelevant. Those top 4 results for baby furniture all seem like good choices at first glance -- which is what makes it so sickening that someone felt the need to link spam on their behalf. On the other hand, can we fault them for using techniques that work?

My Question Is, Why?

Why would Google (and Bing) allow companies who spam to show up anywhere in their search results, never mind in the top slots? I can spot the spam quickly and easily in just a few minutes; surely with Google's fancy tools they could do the same. Are there really not enough sites that don't link spam that are worthy?

I'm not saying that the search engines should penalize the sites in question. That would leave things open to rogue competitors who might spam on their behalf. But why doesn't Google stop counting the spammy links? And why not stop counting anchor text so heavily, since it's nearly always contrived? I have a feeling that Matt Cutts from Google may tell me that they aren't counting those links already, but I just don't believe it. In most of the results I looked at, there were not enough other factors to explain the Page 1 rankings.

I'll leave you with one additional thought...

If Google doesn't want to (or doesn't know how to) not count spammy links, perhaps this is an opportunity for Bing to set itself apart and become the better search engine. I can't help but think that completely discounting unnatural links and anchor text could only be a good thing for the search engine that eventually implements it.

Who Keeps Spreading Silly SEO Stupidity, and Why?

Not a week goes by where a reader or a client doesn't ask me a question based on some bad SEO advice they heard or read somewhere. Most of the time they don't know it's bad advice. They assume that if they read it in a blog, went to a seminar, listened to a webinar or even discussed it with a company that provides SEO as a service, the advice must be solid. Sometimes (usually if they're a long-term HRA reader ;) they may think it sounds a bit fishy, and smartly ask for my opinion.Photo Credit: sinisterbluebox

While it's true that among SEO industry veterans there can be disagreement about what works and what doesn't, there are some SEO tactics that have been known by all who have even the slightest bit of intelligence to be useless. And yet they still crop up as SEO advice -- all the time!

Just last week I got an email from a longtime HRA subscriber who told me that his friend had attended a seminar where the speaker told them they should submit their website to search engines on a monthly basis, and proceeded to provide them with the name of a tool that would do so for only $99 per month!

And just yesterday, someone emailed me for my opinion when she read in another email newsletter that Google only indexed the first 100 words on a page!

When I hear this sort of irresponsible and incorrect information being spread to impressionable Internet marketers in the making, I get irate. In fact, here's what I said in response to the question about submitting sites to the search engines:

"I honestly can't believe that there could still be, in 2011, someone who would speak to an audience on any form of Internet marketing who would recommend submitting to search engines, let alone one that would recommend spending $99 (or even 10 cents) a month to do so. In fact, it enrages me. That person who spoke must be a sales rep for that [submission tool] company, and he or she should be thrown out of the business and not allowed to speak on the topic ever again."
While it is likely that the speaker was a paid sponsor there to peddle his putrid website submission tool to clueless newbies, I started to wonder about others who spread this sort of silly SEO stupidity, and why.

Here's what I came up with:

It's easy to implement. This is likely the main reason that SEO stupidity spreads like wildfire, and the reason that is the basis for all the other reasons. SEO -- that is, real SEO -- is hard. Stupid SEO is easy. (So what if it doesn't work? That's just a small inconvenience!)

Incompetent SEOs have a vested interest in perpetuating silly SEO. The more people who think that SEO is about submitting to search engines or about meta keywords, the more people will sign up for their boondoggle services and the more ill-gained money they'll have lining their pockets.

Old articles get recirculated. There are more than 15 years' worth of old, out-of-date SEO articles from a variety of sources that may look credible on the surface (and perhaps were at one time), but that provide advice that has nothing to do with SEO in the 21st century. Just do a Google search for "Should I submit to search engines?" and you'll see all sorts of fun stuff. Even Google's Webmaster Guidelines point to their Add-URL page, which is all but worthless.

Designers and developers know just enough SEO to be dangerous.
 I'll just point you to my "85 Reasons Why Website Designers / Developers Keep SEOs in Business" article to explain this one.

Forum circle jerks. There are, surprisingly, still a lot of SEO forums in the online world, most of them full of newbies. While it's great that new people in our industry want to learn SEO, they need some professional and competent SEOs there to guide them. Yet on many forums it's a case of the blind leading the blind. A newbie thinks some silly SEO technique works and spreads it to the other newbies. Eventually one of the more enterprising young SEOs writes the "Newbie Bible to Stupid SEO" and at that point what is said must be true (cuz it's in the bible!).

Believing what you read or hear instead of figuring it out for yourself. This truly irks me to no end and is definitely one of the major causes for the spread of many a silly SEO idea. If something you read sounds credible, then by all means give it a try. But unless you see proof of it working with your own eyes, then don't believe it...even if the most credible person in the SEO world wrote or said it.

Mixing up cause and effect. Another one of my pet peeves that has been common since the beginning of SEO time. Just because you changed the positioning of a word in your title tag and the next day you ranked one place higher in Google doesn't mean that your change is what caused it. It may have, but it may not have. We used to joke on theHigh Rankings Forum that if you keep a cabbage on your monitor it will increase your rankings. Why not? It's as likely as some of the silly SEO theories that are based on poorly drawn conclusions that mix up cause and effect.

They're set in their ways. We all know that people hate change. Many SEOs are no different. But just because a 1990s search engine could only index a certain number of kilobytes of information on a page (likely due to bandwidth constraints) doesn't mean that today's Google works that way. The search engines themselves have made huge strides over the years, and while the basics of making a great site will always remain the same, the mechanics of how to do that change often. So to the person who recently asked me if hand-coded HTML pages will rank better than dynamically generated ones, the answer is a definitive NO, even if it may have been true in 1996!

Coincidentally, just as I finished writing all of the above, I received an email from my friend and colleague Karon Thackston, who has a new client who was previously told by one of those silly SEOs, "You need a THOUSAND words of copy on your eCommerce Home Page, and cram it full of keywords"! She was also told by another silly SEO, "You need to rewrite ALL the copy on your entire site because it's no longer 'fresh.'" Apparently, he qualified "fresh" as anything over 60 days old. Sigh.

With SEO stupidity such as that being spouted to unsuspecting website owners each and every day, as well as for the reasons stated above, I fear it's going to be many more years before most people can sort out the facts from the SEO fiction.

16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

n my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it. Photo Credit: Bitterjug

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can remove from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

  1. Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it's easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.
  2. XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn't going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won't help your pages to rank better in Google either!).
  3. Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your "click here" link's title attribute? (For example: <a href="page1.html" title="Spammy Keywords Here">Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee's knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that's great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.
  4. Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time in, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren't, and they aren't. They're simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it's always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it's wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.
  5. Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn't going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it's especially not going to be helpful if that's the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)
  6. Keyword-stuffed Content: While it's never been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today's competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you're having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you've used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
  7. Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You're not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You're just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, andfind the phrases that answer the searcher's question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren't putting the one word "lawyer" into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word "lawyer" all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you're providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don't even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do "just in case" someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they offer. You won't rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won't make you any sales.
  8. Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you're offering there.
  9. Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use this form of marketing – just don't be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.
  10. Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may offer lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it's not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it's a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, I do sometimes still see this technique work, but it's still not advisable to do it.)
  11. Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It's the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you're linking out to. 'Nuff said.
  12. Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can't provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) is never seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there were something magical about doing this, again, you're only talking about one keyword phrase.
  13. Republishing Only Others' Stuff: While it's fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that's all your blog consists of, it's not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your own posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what's good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It's all about adding value.
  14. Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.
  15. Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you're not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That's all well and good, but don't fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won't.
  16. Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn't. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don't do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they're in the category sections themselves.

The Meta Description Tag

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page's ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

It's a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.

The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

If you're using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that's called Meta Description, or possibly just "Description."

Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal.

In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine results will not be affected. So in terms of rankings, you could easily leave it out altogether.

But should you?

There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:

  1. They can be used as the description (or part of the description) of your page if it shows up in the search results.
  2. They are often used as part of the descriptive information for your pages when Google shows "extended sitelinks" for your site.
  3. They are often used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.
Let's look at each of these in more detail.

1. Meta Descriptions in the Search Results

People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it's not always the case.

Currently, if you're searching for a site by its URL (for example www.highrankings.com) Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the "noodp" tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)

Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don't always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. A search for www.highrankings.com at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of my Meta description tag.

Of course, real people aren't typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don't get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you're doing a "site:command" search to see how they're indexing your pages.

Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.

And surprise! What you'll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:
  • Your entire Meta description tag text as the complete description (typically if it's highly relevant and contains no more than 25 words).
  • A full sentence pulled from your Meta description tag, but not the entire Meta description (if it contains more than one sentence).
  • Text from one part of your Meta description mashed together with text from another part of it (if it's more than 25 words long).
  • Some text from your Meta description mashed together with some text from the page.
  • Some text from your page mashed together from some other text from your page (nothing from the Meta description).
Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:
  • The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
  • The search query used some words that were not in the Meta description, but those words (or some of them) were used in the page content. This includes words that Google considers somewhat synonymous, such as "copy" and "copywriting" or "SEO" and "search engine optimization."
But even the above are not hard and fast rules. Google doesn't always use all or part of the Meta description even when the exact search phrase was contained within it – especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Suffice it to say that there are no hard and fast rules for when Google will show it and when they won't.

My recommendation is to always use description tags on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they're on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.

Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you're not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway.

For instance, if you're optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you're a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.

2. Meta Descriptions and Extended Sitelinks

These days, Google often uses the first few words from your Meta description tag when they create the "extended sitelinks" for your website. But this too is not set in stone and is highly keyword dependent. You'll see different sitelinks and different descriptions showing up depending on the words a searcher used at Google.

As an example, if you do a search for "High Rankings" at Google, you'll see my sitelinks for that search query.

Google Sitelinks for High Rankings

At this moment, Google is showing my home page as the top result with 6 inner pages beneath:
  • Forum home page: Description is from DMOZ/ODP. This page has the generic Meta description that is on every page of the forum.
  • Link building forum home page: Description is content pulled from the page that uses the words "High Rankings" in it.
  • SEO articles page: First part of Meta description.
  • Newsletter home page: First part of Meta description.
  • SEO/SEM resources page: First part of Meta description.
  • SEO classes page: First part of Meta description.
For the most part, they're using the first part of the Meta description as the sitelink snippet, but not always. You may have noticed that I optimized those Meta description sitelink snippets that are showing by front loading them so that the first 5-7 words or so are a short description of what the page is all about.

But here's the rub. Do a Google search for "Jill Whalen SEO." You should still see sitelinks, and you'll even see some of the same ones as with the previous query, but some of the descriptions are different:

While the forum home page shows in both, this time Google has pulled text from the page rather than using the DMOZ/ODP description. This is likely because this search query had the word "SEO" in it while the other one didn't. The SEO articles page also shows up here, and it is using the same Meta description snippet as the High Rankings query. The other sitelinks are different from before, with 3 out of 4 using the Meta description.

As you can see, while you do have some control over your sitelink descriptions via your Meta description tag, Google might not always use them (just as Google does with their regular search results). Your best chance of having them show is to use, close to the beginning of your description tags, the words that you know pull up sitelinks. Also, be as descriptive as possible within the first 5 to 7 words.

3. Meta Descriptions and Social Media Marketing

Ever wonder why some Facebook links have great descriptions and others don't seem to make any sense? It's because some site owners have taken the time to write a summary of the article and place it into their Meta description tag, and some have not. If your article has a Meta description, Facebook and Google+ will default to that when you share a link on your profile or "Page." If there's no Meta description, you'll usually see the first sentence or so from the page being used as the default.

While anyone can edit the description that Facebook defaults to, most people don't. And at this time on Google+ you can't even edit the default description. You can either leave it as is or delete it all together. Let's face it -- most of the time the first sentence of an article is not a good description of the rest of it. It's not supposed to be, because that's not what a first sentence is for!

Therefore, I strongly advise you to always write a compelling 1- or 2-sentence description for all of your articles and blog content that may be shared via social media, and place it into your Meta description tag. This will give you a big jump on your competitors who haven't figured this out yet, making your social media content much more clickable because people will know what the article is actually about before they click on it.

Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it's certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!

Top 10 Bad SEO Ideas

The world of Search Engine Optimization is complicated for many reasons. For example, it is well known that the Google algorithm takes into account more than 200 factors in ranking a web page. In addition, search engines treat their algorithms as highly proprietary for two main reasons: (1) they don't want their competition to know what they are doing, and: (2) they don't want web spammers to design sites to get rankings that they don't deserve.
Another reason the SEO world is so complicated is that it has changed dramatically over the past few years. What worked in 2007 stopped working in 2008. What worked in 2008 stopped working in 2009. The complexity of this environment, and the rapid changes, have led to many SEO myths. This article identifies the top 10 worst SEO ideas, and provides an explanation as to why they don't work. Here is our top 10 list:

  1. Relying on keyword metatags: Deserves the number 1 spot, simply because this stopped working 3 years ago. Search engines rely almost solely on user visible text on your site in order to determine its ranking. Text that is not user visible, such as the keyword metatags, stopped being significant years ago, because the Spammers made them abused them so badly. So take the top few keywords that your page is focused on, plug them in here, and then forget about it.

    Do implement a title metatag though, because it is user visible, and one of the most important things you can do on your page to improve its ranking. Do implement a description metatag, not because it will influence rankings (because it doesn't), but because some search engines (such as Yahoo) may use it as the description it shows in your search results under some circumstances.
  2. Stuff keywords in invisible text: Definitely deserves the number 2 spot, because it can and will get your site banned. This includes text written in the same color as the background, or that is drawn way off the user visible page. These schemes are trivially recognized by search engines, and are treated as the act of a blatant Spammer. Don't do it. Ever. Learn The Art of Keyword Selection.
  3. Purchase Links: This practice is still incredibly popular, largely because there are many people who get away with doing it, and it helps them with their rankings. The problem is that the it is in the strategic interest of the search engines to defeat this practice, and they are working hard to do so. Google uses three techniques to detect purchased links:

    • Algorithms look for obvious patterns, such as the presence of words such as "Advertisers" or "Sponsors" near the link. Another thing they can look for is a grouping of unrelated links that don't fit the topic matter of the page where the links are found.
    • Google has thousands of editors in Asia whose sole purpose is to review search results for quality purposes. Part of what they are trained to do is detect purchased links and flag them.
    • Google also accepts reports of purchased links and will send these for review by their team in Asia.

    So what does Google do when a purchased link is detected? They flag it and make it useless from a site ranking perspective. In addition, if they detect flagrant link buying for ranking practicespurposes, they can, and do, ban sites. Use the time more wisely. Take the same time you might have invested in finding links to buy, and find a link you deserve instead. It's much safer, and it will build your business for the long term.
  4. Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. Page rank is a minute factor in ranking these days. Establishing, and reinforcing, site relevance is a huge factor in your rankings. You can do this by linking to pages and sites that are relevant to yours. Do link to relevant content.
  5. Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time. However, do swap links with sites that are highly relevant to your business, if these sites would be valuable to your users. Building your relevance in ways that are good for visitors to your site is always good. Of course, if you can get these relevant sites to link to you without linking back, this is better still.

    Read these articles for a Linking Overview and for Link Building Strategies.
  6. Implement duplicate content: There are many different ways that this can happen, but here are two of the most popular scenarios:

    • Many businesses operate many 2 or more sites that contain similar, or even identical content. These different doorways may have been implemented as different business fronts to enable the business to pursue different methods for marketing their products or services.
    • Many sites have multiple ways of navigating to the same content, yet the content is delivered on a different URL in each case. Usually the URL is a simple manifestation of the path the user used to get there. The site owner has no bad intent and views each URL as being the "same page".

    The trouble with duplicate content is that search engines want to rank the same content only once. So if you have multiple URLs on one site with the same content, one of these is just a waste of the search engine's time. Here is a real case where you are "leaking page rank" - you are sending your own precious page rank to pages that will never rank.

    You also need to think about your crawl budget. If the search engine comes to your site and is going to crawl 1000 pages today, and 400 of these are duplicate pages that will never rank, you wasted a significant percentage of your opportunity for the search engine to find good unique content and rank it.

    And if you have implemented "doorway sites" you could be in bigger trouble. Search engines see this as Spamming, and you could get banned.
  7. Use Session IDs on your URLs: Search engines makeing indexing decisions over a time period of many months. Getting a new site to rank is a lengthy process. Because of this, search engines look for static pages. When they see parameters at the end of a URL, the search engine treats them as part of the URL.

    If a search engine sees one Session ID when it crawls a page on your site today, and a different one when it crawls the same page next week, it thinks it has found two different pages. Neither version of the page will get ranked, and the search engine will view your site as unstable. Session IDs will kill your rankings. Put your parameters in a cookie. Live with the fact that 2% of the surfing public disables cookies.
  8. Implement your site in Flash: Probably very pretty. But probably very useless from a search engine ranking perspective. Search engines can read and index Flash (try the following search: "cooking schools filetype:swf"), but you will not find any sites that rank high on competitive terms implemented in Flash. One basic reason for this is that search engines love text, and if you plan to implement a site with lots of text, Flash just does not make sense as the medium to use (movies are visual experiences, not reading experiences). You can read more about search engines and Flash here
  9. Use lots of Javascript: Javascript can be used effectively in many ways in web site design. The trouble is that search engines don't know how to read it. This will likely change at some time in the future. But even when it does, it will still be an inefficient means for communicating to a search engine what your site is about.

    The best thing to do is to use it sparingly, and when you do use Javascript, use include files and/or CSS to move it out of the way of the headers and text on your web pages. Let the search engine find the unique content on each page first, and everyone will be happier.
  10. Cloaking: This is the practice of showing different content to the crawlers thaen you show to the user. It's really easy to come up with legitimate ideas as to why you might want to do this. But it does not matter. It's an emotional issue with the search engines, and they do not accept responsibility for determining your intent. It's emotional because it was a very popular technique with the Spammers in years gone by.

    Search engines periodically implement new bots that they send out for the explicit purpose of detecting cloaking. There is no known technique for cloaking a bot whose name you do not yet know, coming from an IP address you currently don't know. These new bots easily detect a cloaking implementation.

    When a search engine detects a site that is cloaking, there is an excellent chance that it will lead to the site being banned. Your intent in implementing cloaking does not matter. So don't do it. Solve your problem by another means.
So what's the bottom line? There are really two major things you need to do:
  • Learn how to communicate to the search engine what your site is about. Many of the problems listed above relate to common practices that make the search engine's job harder, or even impossible. Learning how to build your site so that the search engine can easily determine the unique value of your site is an outstanding idea.
  • Don't spend your time figuring out how to beat the search engine. It's just not a good place to be. You may even succeed in the short term. But if you do succeed in tricking them in the short term, the day will come when you wake up in the morning and a significant piece of your business has disappeared overnight. Not a good feeling at all.

    Take the same energy you would have invested in the tricks and invest it in great content for your site, and in the type of marketing programs you would have implemented if the search engines did not exist.
This is how you can grow your business for the long term.

It’s time to stop PROTECT IP


SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon. We might need to rally again in the near future, but we can do that. The internet learns fast.
Now it’s time to rally and get loud. It’s time to call your Senators. Heck, it’s time to ask your parents to call their Senators. If you think the internet is something different, something special, then take a few minutes to protect it. Groups that support SOPA have contributed nine times more money in Washington D.C. than our side. We need to drown out that money with the sound of our voices. I’d like to flood every Senator’s phone, email, and office with messages right up until January 24th.
If you need a quick refresher about why the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are horrible ideas, Google did a blog post talking about how SOPA and PIPA will censor the web and won’t stop actual pirates. Or read about how capricious takedowns can cause serious collateral damage. Find out how real, legitimate companies can be run out of business.
What you can do?
It’s time for action. Call your Senator right now. Spread the word to your friends and family. Promise not to vote for politicians who support SOPA. Print out some PDFs and post them at work or on your campus. There’s also protests and meetups happening today in New York, the Bay Area of California, and Seattle. Don’t live in the United States? You can still petition the State Department at americancensorship.org.
This is it. You want to look back months from now and know that you did everything you could to protect the internet. Call your Senators, educate your friends and family, and please spread the word about PROTECT IP and SOPA as widely as you can.
But if you can only spare five or six minutes, please call both of your senators below:

Thank you!

Monday 12 March 2012

Give Your Blog a Fighting Chance

With so many blogs on the Internet competing for attention, what can you do to make sure that yours stand out? At the very least, you can try to avoid making mistakes. Better, you can take the tips that tell you what NOT to do and turn them around into things you SHOULD do.


Recently I read Neil Patel's piece on mistakes that will bury your blog posts. It occurred to me that warnings like “don't forget” do not get remembered well. So let's look at his list of mistakes, and turn them around so you know what you should be doing to avoid those mistakes.

Patel starts with the first thing most readers of your blog posts will see – your headline. They'll see this long before they arrive at your website. It's picked up and displayed on the search engine results page, in feed readers, subject lines, and even links included on social media sites, if you've structured your URLs and permalinks correctly.

Since it's the first thing potential readers will see, your headline needs to draw them in. You can find plenty of articles on writing good headlines. Patel recommends that you write with “u” in mind: write “headlines that are unique, ultra-specific, useful or urgent.” You can even use more than one “u” quality. “Five Things You Must Do Right Now if You Want More Conversions” is both ultra-specific and urgent, for example.

Patel's second point concerns old posts. Don't write them and forget about them; link to them when you can. They give your posts new life, and they show your readers that there's more content on your website in which they might be interested. When you can use a link to further explain a point you're trying to make, you give your reader the option of delving deeper if they're so inclined. You also point search engine spiders to related material, including keywords you want them to notice.

But you shouldn't just link to your own earlier blog posts. As Patel points out, when you link to posts by other bloggers writing on similar topics, you're inviting them into the conversation. They can come back and leave comments to which you can reply, starting a dialogue or even a relationship. These comments deeply enrich the blog post for anyone who reads it. I can't tell you how often I've read a blog post and found more gems of wisdom in the comments – some of which have directed my own thinking on the topic, or even inspired me to write separate articles.

Linking to posts by other bloggers also gives you a chance to give credit where it's due, which is simply “proper manners on the web,” as Patel notes. That's especially true if that other post inspired your blog post in the first place. Readers will notice if you got the idea elsewhere but didn't link, as many with a particular interest will read several blogs on the same topic. Outbound links also, as it turns out, have a good effect on your rankings if you're linking to authority sites, according to Patel.

So far I've focused on what may appear to be little details, but they're far from being the only ones you need to get right to get your blog posts noticed. What about your meta data? Some meta data may not be important because the search engines don't look at it anymore (you can thank keyword stuffing practices for some of that), but there are a few items that still matter. At the very least, you should fill in your page title field; filling in your description field is also a good idea. These fields can help the search engines figure out where your page belongs in the results. They can also help social sites pull the right information when someone is posting a link to your blog.

Patel recommends making this easy on yourself if you use the WordPress platform by taking advantage of a plug-in. The All-in-One SEO pack can make your life easier by including fields for the page title and description at the bottom of your post. Fill those out, and you're good to go.

Now I'd like to come back to the subject of URLs. I've already hinted at it once or twice. You need to make sure the permanent URLs for your blog posts are user-friendly. If you check the URLs on any post here on SEO Chat, you'll notice that they all include real words; usually, you'll see the title of the article. You should shoot for this on your own site.

This point mattered even before social networking sites grew popular, because a good URL helps the search engines to understand what the page is about. It also helps searchers who see your URL in the search results. Now it's more important than ever, because readers who like your article will post a link to it on social sites. That means people who might never have searched for your article may come across a link for it, recommended by a friend – and if what they see in the link looks interesting, they might actually click and read. Including real words in your link gives you a better chance to entice them.

I'll wrap this piece up with a less technical, though no less important, point: like anything, blogging requires persistence if you want to get noticed for it. By this, I mean consistent effort. Attention spans run short on the Internet, so if you're not blogging frequently, readers will forget about you. As Patel observes, “the more frequently you post, the more traffic you are going to get. That traffic eventually slows and then dies when you stop posting.” Not only will your human visitors stop showing up, but Google will stop showing up to index your site if you don't keep putting up new content. Patel recommends an absolute minimum of once a month, but you're much better off if you can manage once a week or more.

That's all I have room for today. Follow these tips, and you'll be on your way to giving your blog a fighting chance to capture an audience. And really, isn't that what your content deserves?

Internet Marketing Strategy: Going Inbound


There is a lot of talk around the major blogs about inbound marketing. As a strategy, inbound marketing plain and simply rocks. It’s easily the most superior method of marketing your business there is. The problem is that few people are bothering to explain what inbound mrketing is or giving you any sort of primer on how to do it -- so that’s what I’m going to do now.

First, a definition: Inbound Marketing is the convergence of content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (from my article What Is Inbound Marketing).
Going one step farther, inbound marketing is all about turning yourself into the undisputed authority in your market. It’s about becoming so overwhelmingly recognized in your market that people will literally line up to do business with you over and above anyone else, at the same time that you’re charging many times more than anyone else.
Outbound marketing is about advertising. The problem is that anyone can advertise anything they want and say nearly anything they want as long as they have the money.
However, in Gaining Attention In An ADD World I show how (and why) it is that people don’t trust advertisers or advertising. I also talk about how little attention there is. Outbound marketing is about trying to stand in a crowd and scream at people, “pay attention to me,” and they really don’t want to do anything of the sort.
It’s like trying to convince someone that says they hate green eggs and ham to try just one bite. While doing that might work in a children’s story, in real life it requires immense effort and spending -- and many times it isn’t worth it.
The benefit to outbound marketing, however, is that you can place your advertising order, and that’s it.  It’ll run on its own without your having to put forth any more effort.
Let's flip that around. Inbound marketing is about deserving attention. It’s about you becoming an undisputed authority in your market. People listen to what you have to say and buy what you have to sell, because they want to, not because you’re convincing them they should.
Inbound marketing will get you many more customers, and they'll spend much more -- at the same time, you aren’t really spending any money at all on your marketing efforts.
Begin by creating great content that is of help to your market, posting it to your blog, and then sharing it out through every social network that you can (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, and so on).However, marketing this way does come with its own price. Marketing this way takes time and effort, and more than a little of each. Becoming an authority in your market means doing what it takes to demonstrate your expertise every day. It means putting yourself out there and helping your market.  It means explaining the differences between one product and another, explaining how to best use things or do them. Like I said, it means that you helpHowever, it’s not simply the creation of content; it’s the creation of great content. It means creating text blog posts and videos that are put up on YouTube and put onto your blog as well.
Now, what “great content” means varies somewhat from one market to the next. In a nutshell, however, it means answering every question a customer has ever asked and placing that on your blog for your customers and potential customers. It means teaching your market about things they should know (but don’t know to ask), and pitfalls to avoid.
Again, you need to create this content as text and as video.
In many markets, Google and Bing will see your constant postings to your blog as the creation of an authority site for your market, helping you to generate overwhelming top search rankings. That will further establish your position as the top expert in your market. It will also give you the lion's share of the traffic, and therefore sales.
The reason this is the case is that most purchases start with research. The person helping to answer questions and make it easy for a customer to make buying decisions will find that they are overwhelmingly also the person from whom people will buy.
You can see your profits climb thanks to a "perfect storm:" at the same time you're increasing your profits, you're reducing advertising expenditures and getting more customers and greater respect from other players in your market.