The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

Are you a stats junkie? Well… I don’t have time to be much of one, but I do enjoy looking a good batch of stats and seeing progress, don’t you? Google Analytics has been very cool to me and it’s getting cooler.

There’s now an “Intelligence” segment to your reporting. It will alert you if something out of the ordinary happens at your website. For example, if you have an outrageous number of new visitors one day or if people stay on the page longer than normal, you’ll get an alert. Significant if you’re tracking a new form of traffic or if you want to see how an ad swap did for you, for example. Not earth shattering, but kind of neat.

But a better improvement is the fact that you can now add a whole bunch of new goals to your marketing funnel. You can now add 20 goals as opposed to the old 4, which told you some stuff, but well… twenty can tell you a whole LOT! As long as you have Analytics code on every page, it’s a pretty good indicator of how successful your marketing is overall. continue reading »

Here’s a video I made from an article I wrote, which you can find at Ezine Articles:

I’ve been saying this for a long time: Tried and true methods of SEO are eternal. Really. If you’re doing the most important things for good ranking, you’ll find that they’re easy to implement and really, the most important things you can do.

Oh sure, there are little tricks popping up all the time. And the black hat stuff, well… it just doesn’t last.

Here’s a post at Search Engine Land that proves my belief: http://searchengineland.com/search-ranking-factors-shows-how-little-seo-has-changed-24363

Anchor text is primary. You need to have good anchor text for the links pointing back to your site. This will be a keyword phrase, and you should vary the text often. A whole bunch of links pointing back to your fishing blog that say “bass fishing” and nothing else is a dead giveaway that you’re doing most of the posting of those links yourself. Google wants to see “natural,” and want to see other people posting links back to your site, too. They won’t be using the same anchor text all the time.

Keywords in your title tag are just common sense. You need to use your most important keyword up front for the sake of prominence. And you should use your title tag to sell the click on Google.

Link popularity: How many links are pointing back to your site? This is very important to search. The more links back, the more “popular” the search engines will think your site is with the general Web population.

Diversity of Linking Domains: All of your backlinks shouldn’t be from one site. So, for example, not all of your article backlinks should come from Ezine Articles, though it’s a very good place to start.

Keyword in Root Domain: Well… This blog is a cardinal sin. Of course, I started it way back in 2005 when I didn’t even fully understand what SEO was. Always use your main keyword in your root domain. Really important.

And that’s it. I mean, those are the basics that SEOs from all over the Internet voted as the most important elements of SEO, and the factors didn’t change much from one year to another.

One element that was in last year’s survey was “Age of Domain,” which is still pretty important in the scheme of things. Google likes stability, and so, the older your domain, the better for SEO. For this reason alone I never changed this domain. I have almost 4 years riding on it.

The deal is this: If you’re not going to pursue SEO as a science, do these simple things. You’ll be amazed at how well they work alone. Oh, and add a good keyword-rich, readable META description, and you’ll be in better shape than if you used no SEO at all.

You know, there is no better search engine spider bait than good content. It’s like their sustenance, their mana, their raison d’etre.

But I’m talking good, relevant content, not crap that you throw together, swipe elsewhere, or buy rights to. I mean good, unique content that teaches, explores, reviews, or entertains. You need to learn either how to make this or how to acquire it, if you want to rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Blogging is awesome, of course, or I wouldn’t do it almost every day. It’s a great way to communicate with the people in your niche. Hopefully, some of them are on your list or even better, if they aren’t, you have a lovely big optin box in the topmost widget of sidebar.

But there are other cool places to put content that can give you great spider juice because you’re making incoming links from high-ranking websites.

We all know about article directories, right? The premiere directories are, of course, Chris Knight’s Ezine Articles. It’s just the best. And then, there is Go Articles, also good, and if you want to distribute, just to get traffic (because dupe content won’t really help your SEO cause), there’s iSnare.com, where you can pay $2 and have your article distributed all over the Web.

But what about the Web 2.0 content sites? Do you know how many of them there are, and how awesome they can be?

We’re talking…

Scribd: With a page rank of 7, it’s a heavy hitter. Just never, ever put a link in there or your entire IP address will be banned. I’m back in their good graces as an author, and that pleases moi.

HubPages: What a cool site. You can be commercial there all you want, even add modules from Amazon and eBay.  Page rank: 5

Zimbio: You can upload your blog feed articles and have them distributed to different Wikis. I would allow the spiders to find the content on my blog first, though. You’re serving dupe content. So, check the cache date of your blog first, then Zimbio the stuff. Or, better, just write something new. Page rank: 6

PBWiki: Create your own Wiki free. You can add articles, videos, press releases, or whatever. You can link pages together. Like if you’re writing an article about Web 2.0 content sites, you could link the Zimbio and HubPages pages together. You can categorize posts. And anyone who want to can add to your wiki.

Ning: Create your own social network around your Niche. Very neat. You can add video, audio, pictures, make blog posts, and so on. Nifty.  Ning is a PR 7, but you’d have to build your own page rank there by building up your membership. Not hard to do when you’re offering cool, free information.

Tumblr: Much like Ning in its composition and what you can add. Yet, this is strictly NON-commercial. If you put a link to an affiliate site into Tumblr, they’ll just suspend your account without warning, and all your hard work will be for naught. So, instead, link to another of your Web 2.0 properties, right?

Squidoo: This was probably one of the first, if not THE first Web 2.0 content site. Squidoo is tons of fun and they have plenty of different modules you can add from RSS feeds to polls to pull quotes. It’s a blast.

Gather: This is a great site and it promotes the group atmosphere. Each time you submit something there’s the ability to send it to whatever groups you belong to. Pretty sweet. Of all the sites, this is definitely one of my favorites.

But there are many more content sites in the Web 2.0 arena, and they’re all great. The only thing you need to remember, if you’re a marketer, is to read the terms of service first and see what each site will and won’t allow. There’s nothing worse than having your site yanked from under you, especially when you’ve spent time building it up.

I try to add something to each of my content sites every week. Over time, you’re really building a body of work. If it’s good stuff, it’s not only the search engines that will notice, but people in your niche will notice, as well.  When they like your stuff, they’ll join your list and the bigger your list, the more you’ll make from it.

There are all kinds of reasons for wanting to put as much cool, unique content out there as possible.  The most important of them is that you’ll start to be noticed. With all of the gazillion bloggers, article writers, and Twitterers there are online, you need something solid to give you a leg up.