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I was over at SEO Book, reading Aaron Wall’s post from June 16, entitled “Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless,” and was surprised to learn that rel=”nofollow” no longer works. Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson, admitted that was true at the recent SMX Conference.

So, Wall linked to Danny Sullivan’s post “Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting,” which made me curious. So I went over to Danny’s blog, which explains the situation in much clearer detail.

Page rank sculpting is the practice of adding “no follow” to links going to your overhead pages, like your privacy page, your terms of service, or other pages that you don’t want ranked in the search results. It used to be that if you had 10 units of page rank and each link on your page was worth 1, when you added “no follow” to 5 of those links, they would transfer their page rank to the remaining links, right? So, then, each of the bare links would be worth 2.

What Matt Cutts is telling everyone now is that “no follow” no longer transfers page rank to the bare links. So, basically, by using no follow, you’re merely wasting PR. The “no follow” links will be worth zero, but the bare links will still only be worth 1.

I should say, “Is,” because apparently, this has been true for about a year and nobody noticed.

Great.

If you’re using “no follow,” don’t run around trying to change the links back to bare links. It’s not worth the time and effort. Just understand that you don’t need to do that anymore. It’s a waste of time.

Why did Google decide to institute the practice in the first place? Basically, to stop blog comment spamming, and yet, it didn’t really stop anything, so it “no follow” means “bupkiss.” It’s like the keywords META tag. Another useless convention.

Put your time into more important things like developing good, unique content and solid keyword research. Those should always pay off. I say, “should,” because there’s just no accounting for the whim of the Google ghods.

Keep your eyes and ears open to what’s happening, and try not to get caught up in the fads or fancies. Nobody truly knows the algorithm but Google, and they’re changing it all the time. Even the few people who claim to know it probably have no 100% clear idea.

I have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:

• It provides not just Google Page Rank, like the Google Toolbar does, but Alexa ranking of any page you land on as well. And these ranks sit in your lower toolbar and you can see it automatically. You can also see a compete rank and an mozRank, which measures the link juice coming into that site, as well.

When you right click on the Search Status symbol (an @, but with a q in the middle), it will show you the following about any site you visit:

• Highlights “no follow” links. Want to see if a blog is allowing spiders to follow links? Turn this option on and all “no follow” links appear in little pink boxes. You may want to use this when considering the site’s link potential.

• Gives you a link report on. How many are coming in/going out? How many of them are follow links?

• Shows the META tags and description

• Shows what the site looked like historically.

• Gives you robots.txt, whois, and sitemap

• Provides the keyword density and highlights any keyword you choose

• Shows all pages indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now bing.com)

• Shows the sites linking back in Google, Yahoo, and MSN

So, you can learn much of the SEO data just from this little plugin. Of course, some of it overlaps with the data you get from SEO Quake, but I think you really need both plugins to have a fully functional SEO browser. I mean, there are other SEO add-ons for Firefox, but these are 2 I couldn’t do without.

And if you want a firm foundation in SEO, visit http://SpiderLanguage.com

Have you been to Google lately? (Who hasn’t, right?) Everyone seems to be talking about the new search item they call the “Wonder Wheel.” It puts me in mind of a couple of tools online. One is Personal Brain, which is mind-mapping software, and the other is Visual Thesaurus that will help you to brainstorm keywords or really just find synonyms if you’re a writer. Pretty neat, both have limited free versions that are worth checking out.

But what does Wonder Wheel do? It helps you to expand your horizons. When you do any search in Google, you’ll see a link above the horizontal paid ads, just under the Google search box, on the left-hand side of the screen that says “Show Options.” When you click on that, a right-hand sidebar opens.

You’ll notice that you can choose videos search, forum posts, or reviews. You can also decide how old you want the listings to be.

But the links at the bottom are the ones you want to pay closest attention to. The first link is for related searches, but the second is for the Google Wonder Wheel, which when clicked, opens just to the right beside the search results. You’ll see that circling the center search (what you typed into the search box,) are related terms.

For example, if you search for “search engine optimization,” you’ll see terms like “search engine submission,” “meta tags,” “search engine optimization pricing,” and so on for other terms related to SEO. When you click on “search engine optimization for dummies,” another wheel opens that’s linked to the original wheel, and you get new stuff to think about, like “google universal search,” “major search engines,” and “xml sitemaps.”

Pretty sweet. This can help you develop a pretty broad keyword base for any niche that you’re pursuing. That’s great for SEOs and Internet marketers, but it’s great for just plain searchers because it helps them to really get where they want to go. For example, if you click on XML Sitemaps, it takes you to places where you can learn what they are and to generators that will prepare them for you.

Anyway, it’s a cool new tool and you should check it out. It can be very valuable for your business or help you to search a whole lot smarter.

Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed.  But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?

A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.

Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.

The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.

Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.

Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website.  Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.

To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set.  XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.

I can tell you what the wrong choice in terms of SEO is and that’s keeping the “http://yourblogdomain.com/?postnumber” that is the WordPress default. It doesn’t tell folks or search spiders anything about the post, except what number the post is.

Your SEO-friendly permalink will include your keyword rich title as well as the post number, and it should look like this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

You can add the category (/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/) in addition to or instead of the post ID #, but you should only do that if your categories are set up as your main keywords. A “General” category, for example, won’t help at all.

To change your permalink from your WordPress dashboard, you simply go to Settings, then Permalink.

You’ll see them right at the top of the page. Click on “Custom Setting,” and either fill in what you want or copy and paste the above.

However, this is something that should be considered when you start your blog. Do NOT alter your permalink structure if your blog is old or you’ll lose all SEO goodness that you have built up for ALL of your previous posts.

If your blog is new and you don’t have too many posts, change it now. It will be well worth the effort and help your SEO efforts.

To assure that your permalinks will be crawled and indexed, you should also have an XML Sitemap in place. You can get the XML Sitemaps plugin at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins.

Do you love social media as much as I do? I mean, you have to know I enjoy Twitter. I write about it often enough. But I also love Ning, where I have set up various sites, HubPages, and MyBlogLog, just to name a few. Why do I love them? Primarily because to me, they’re the FUN part of the Web. The friend making, and content adding and finding out what people like instead of just what search bots find interesting is really important to me, and I love it.

You may love it, too. Or, you may be one of those Luddite types who see social media as a waste of time. I got that comment about Twitter once. The person who commented on one of my status updates about Twitter said that it was nothing more than a time waster.

Duh.

I agree that playing around with social media CAN be a time sink, but not if you’re doing it properly.

Everyone who wants to be noticed online needs to remember something very, very important… it’s ALL about the keywords. The more you use keywords associated with your niche, whether that niche be ROI- or personal-centric, the more people will find you online. It’s just that simple.

Go to a keyword discovery tool like SEOBook or WordTracker and do some frickin’ research, dammit! People usually skip this step and don’t even realize how vitally important to online success using the right keywords in everything you do is. They think it’s boring. Or, they think it’s hard. But it’s not! And worst, they may think they don’t have to do it at all. That’s really dopey thinking.

If you don’t use the right keywords in everything you do, you’re destined to be just another 1 of the 8 gazillion pages online and NOBODY will ever find you. You’re a cyber-ghost. POOF!

So, find the keywords that apply to your niche and use them in every social site you use. Eventually, the search engines will put it all together and say, hey! This guy is a writer or hey! This gal is a super-smart SEO or whatever…

Otherwise, get out the sheet… You’re just another grain of sand in the Sahara.

Wow! I just found an incredibly awesome and potentially valuable site today called “eKstreme.com” that has a whole section of SEO tools.

One of them is called, “What’s the Buzz?” and when you a keyword into the search box, it comes back with:

• popularity of the term on Technorati
• a Google Trends report
• blog posts tagged with the term
• blog posts with the term in their titles
• bookmarks for the term.

Just for the heck of it, I typed in “Twitter,” and was amazed to find that the popularity at Technorati has dipped dramatically over the past month. Not as many posts about Twitter as there once was.

Yet Google Trends says it’s more popular than ever.  But here’s news… it’s most popular in Ireland! Who knew?

Anyway, this is a quick and easy way to figure out whether there’s any interest in a niche, or just a good way to get more information from all the blog posts this returns. And if you read my blog, you’ll know it’s also a great way to get ideas about what to write.

Cool,  non?

SEO is a huge consideration in everything you do for your business. Using a blog? Obviously, SEO is important. Creating a squeeze page? SEO… Writing a sales letter… SEO… Twitter… SEO. Everything you do online is about you and your keywords.

And yes, even Twitter.

I’m all about blogging and SEO and people are beginning to know that because of all the stuff I have out there in regard to blogging and SEO. As a joke, I bought the domain BlogQueenoftheUniverse.com, which redirects to this blog. It was a joke, and my friends thought it was pretty funny. But…

I actually saw someone refer to me that way on Twitter the other day. How cool is that? I obviously know that I’m NOT the be all and end all of blogging. Nobody is, but becoming a presence and “branding” yourself as one thing or another is a huge part of making yourself successful.

So, who do you want to be? What’s your niche? Are you the “Hunting King?” or how about “The JV Queen,” like Gina Gaudio-Graves? Or the “Niche Prof,” like Ron Capps? Try to position yourself as the expert in whatever field you want to conquer and then, back it up.

If I knew nothing about blogging or SEO, it would be stupid for me to try and be the queen of those fields. People would guffaw, and I’m certain that the people who DO know more than me in those areas most certainly are already.

But I don’t care.

Those aren’t the people I’m trying to impress and help along the way. My target audience are new bloggers and people who are new to SEO and this whole Internet marketing world. To them, I am the Blogging Queen of the Universe because I totally know a LOT! Certainly not everything, but enough that I do seem like an expert to people learning this whole confusing world of IM.

So, who are you? Who’s your target audience and who do you want to be to them? That’s what you should be striving to establish. Learn all you can about your niche topic and then, use the appropriate keywords surrounding that area in everything you do.

You’ll be amazed at how people respond to your expertise. It won’t happen overnight. I’ve been at this 5+ years and only now are people starting to know who I am and what I do, and it’s pretty sweet. I love working with folks, and so coming to them with some credibility is very, very important. I never want to disappoint them — evah.

Have you ever sat back and wondered how your site was faring in several of the Google Data Centers? Or what about how many links you have coming back to your site from outside? What about mod rewrites… any good at creating those? META tags?

And on and on…

There are metrics that we all like to check out occasionally when it comes to our site. Where do we rank? How do we stack up to the competition?

Of course, if you’re ranking #1 for several keyword phrases at Google, it’s not such a big deal, right? Your SEO plan is working.

But what if you’re not ranking that high or ranking at all? What if your site’s been up a while, but you’re still not seeing your site in the SERPs (search engine results pages)? Where do you need to tweak things to make a difference?

I have a great SEO tools site for you that I just stumbled upon! It’s called “Link Vendor,” and you can visit at: http://linkvendor.com

The Searchmetrics Report there is fascinating. You plug in your URL and it tells you how you’re doing in terms of simple SEO, META data, technoology, social bookmarking, and more. Very cool.

Anyway, if you’re a stats loving strange person like me, this site will totally turn you on. Check it out!

“SEO is [not] a set-it-and-forget-it item you tick off a to-do list,” remarked author Rebecca Lieb. In an article by David Berkowitz in Media Post’s Search Insider, entitled “You Can Still Handle These SEO Truths,” Lieb answered a few questions about SEO and her new book.

Whoa. What she said is so totally true, and I say the same all the time. To me, SEO is like a living, breathing matrix that constantly has to be monitored and adjusted with the changes in the environment. Search is always changing, and so, SEOs and anyone who wants good search engine ranking has to change with it.

Lieb is a woman after my own heart, and I plan to check out her new book,  The Truth about Search Engine Optimization, for sure. I’m guessing there will be many more, “Right on sistah!s” in there, too.

Here’s another quote from the article: “And if you’ll indulge me a second, there’s another myth I’d like to bust: that search is for geeks and techno-nerds. I’m not a developer; I’m a writer and editor, but search turns me on.”  Whoa. She could BE me. LOL

What about search turns me on? The fact that it’s an inexact science. It is never static (as aforementioned) and it’s totally exciting. What new curve will the Google ghods throw at us today, folks? And about that, here’s something I never understood. Google does the “dance,” but they should revise that term. We’re the ones whose feet are being shot at all the time!

And that keeps it really exciting. Are you up on the latest stuff? How valid is what you learned last year? What changes have to be made because of this zig or that zag? Are you sick of constantly having to learn new stuff? Oh, man… That’s what turns me on! I love learning!

And SEO always keeps you guessing.

And why many of the top gurus, including my own boss, don’t see extremely high value in SEO.

Of course, they’re wrrr… wrrrong. Eh!

What’s better than getting streams of traffic you never have to pay for?  Not much. And the funny part for me is that I study it all the time, but rarely get to put this stuff into practice. There’s never enough time at Overcome Everything, and because I’m working for that company, my own company is like the shoemaker’s children. It never has shoes.

Ah well…

In a perfect world, Google wouldn’t make us crazy by trying to outsmart us outsmarters, and I’d have time to prove that SEO is the most important (not the least important) part of your business.

If you don’t have time for all the ins and outs of SEO, just take enough time to do proper keyword research, and use keywords in everything you do. That’s the least you can do, and over time, it will help your business. You may not get to the top of Google for a keyword like “golf,” but you might be surprised at terms you are ranking for and getting some of that cool search engine goodness after all.

So, thanks to Rebecca Lieb and people like here that are out there laying down interesting stuff about SEO. To me, it’s the best!

I have spent the past couple of years touting the coolness of the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This one lets you add a title and description to every post you make, which is super important for SEO. As I’ve mentioned here before, the title and description are the most important parts of any web page, and the benefit of being able to add these to every post you make is HUGE!

Then today, I was reading an article in SiteProNews, “Blogs, WordPress and Google,” by Scott Van Achte and I was curious. So… I headed over to Urban Giraffe, and watched the video:

So, I’m thinking I’ll give it a try. I installed it and then went in to tweak the settings. Wow! You can give a title and description to every KIND of page in your blog: categories, tags, about, even 404. Making each one individual is a great help for your SEO advantage.

And, as you see in the video, it will suggest tags and keywords for you from the post. Pretty cool, I’d say.

I’m going to try it for a few days and see how I like it. If it’s as good as it looks, it could be my new recommendation. So far, I like it!

After you make a post, you go down to the HeadSpace area, and click on Page Title. Your title automatically populates. It creates a description for you that you can easily edit. AND, it suggests tags from what you’ve written, too.

I think I’m in love.

When you ask a group what a landing page is, you might come back with many different ideas. Some will say it’s a squeeze page. Some, a sales letter, while others have no freakin’ clue whatsoever and are still scratching their heads.

It’s simple…

A landing page is where you LAND after clicking on a link. It can be any of the above, or it can be totally unrelated to commercial enterprise. It’s just where you end up, no matter what the link says or what the page includes.

You can make mistakes when setting up a landing page, though, so you should keep some things in mind:

• The anchor text in your link must match the page. If you hyperlink the phrase “dog training,” then the page that people land on when they click that link best be about training your dog.

• The keywords on your page must  match your link.  When you’re link says, “used golf balls,” your page should have words like “used golf balls,” “used bridgestone golf balls,” or “cheap used golf balls.” The page should be not just about “golf,” but indeed, “used golf balls.”

• If you have an online store, and you’re selling video cameras, when your anchor text says, “Mino Flip video Camera,” then that specific product had better appear on the page after a person clicks on that link. It’s best when it’s the only thing on the page, but worst when it’s not on the page at all.

There are a couple of reasons that you want to be heed these warnings.

First, especially if you’re using pay-per-click to advertise your link, you’ll have a huge tiff with the Google ghods. Your page quality will be “poor” unless your link actually matches what’s on your page.

Secondly, have you ever gone shopping online and clicked a link and didn’t find what you thought you would when you got to the landing page? Did it tick you off? How likely are you to go back to that page or even that company again?

Remember that anchor text delivers page reputation.  Don’t advertise what you don’t intend to deliver.

It’s like a chihuahua growling at a pit bull. Could mean trouble.

So, I’m over with the Hexa Track guys checking out their new product Google Goggles. No, you can’t get it yet, but if you’re an AdWords buff like me… You’ll enjoy watching their video.

Go to

http://www.putonyourgoggles.com/

and opt in.

This new software will analyze your page and tell you what your quality scores will be at Google. Not only that, but it will show you what’s working and what’s not.

I’m interested because it will take the guesswork out of the whole time-consuming process. And, it’s a slow process, if you’re not a guru at this, which I’m certainly not. But it totally interests me and so, I’m still studying the art of AdWords.

I worked on “list building” for a while before we got all those keywords to have a “Great” quality score and for Google to give us cheap clicks because the lower your quality score, the more you’ll pay for them. So, it’s a lot of tweaking and testing until it suits the Google ghods’ fancy.

If you’re really smart at AdWords, you can do it much more quickly than me, but like I said, I ain’t no guru. I just think AdWords is totally fascinating and something that you really need to study to get it right.

We’ll see how expensive Google Goggles is and if I can afford it. But I totally want it already and they’ve only put one video out. I’m excited!  I was lucky enough to get in on Hexa Track before they shut down memberships, and it’s totally cool. So, I’m thinking this has to be awesome, as well.

And be sure to pick up the free .pdf. I’m off to read mine now. Ciao!

So, today, I had the first two hours of Squeezathon on the phone and the lines were lit up. I didn’t stop talking for two hours! It was awesome! Over the past couple of days we helped 250+ people to get their squeeze pages up and running. (That we know about.) Feels very good, indeed.

But I had one call that disturbed me, and thought I’d blog about it so that maybe it can help someone else.

One man had a page that is #1 on Google, and he was hesitant to put a squeeze page on his website as the front door. Now, any smart marketer knows that the squeeze page always, always, always goes first, right? Well, that’s a little hidden secret that a lot of people just don’t understand. Every single thing you do online should be geared toward list building.

So, I asked how much traffic he was getting from Google. He told me 30K hits in the past three months. Not too shabby, not at all.

But I looked at his stats. He had a 4 million + Alexa ranking. Hmm… That didn’t compute. I think his stats were pretty far off.

Knowing that, I asked what his keyword was. I won’t type it in here because I don’t want anyone to realize who this person was. My intention isn’t to embarrass anyone. So, let’s just say it was a really obscure keyword. In fact, when I checked it on SEOBook, there were NO results whatsoever for it.

What’s the big lesson?

You can have a No. 1 ranking in Google, but if nobody is searching for that keyword, it DOESN’T MATTER. I mean, I can have the #1 spot for “raccoon clothes,” but it’s not going to bring my little tailor shop any hits, you know? People have to be actively searching for your keywords or your ranking, no matter how high it is just doesn’t matter. Not a hoot.

Do some keyword research before deciding what keywords to target. If the keyword has been searched for at least 10,000 times in a month, it’s probably a pretty good keyword. I mean, you might have stronger keywords in the list that pops up, but you also have to determine how competitive they are. You don’t want to try to compete for a keyword like “pets” for example because the competition is too high. Find something lower on the list, and something pretty specific, too.

Here’s an example:

If you search chairs, you’re going to have tons of competition.

If you look further down the list, you might find “office chairs.” Well, that might still be too competitive.

But what about “leather office chairs”? That’s a bit narrower.

But what if you used “black leather office chairs”? That’s a long-tail keyword that might get some very targeted traffic to your website and if you’re selling black leather office chairs, your chance of converting your visitor, who is looking for such a specific item, to a sale just  skyrocket.

So, two things to take away:

1. If you’re using a keyword nobody is searching for, you can be #1 on the page at Google, but it won’t do you any good.

2. Never try to compete for the most competitive keywords. Choose specific long-tail phrases and not only get more traffic, make more sales, as well.

How ’bout that?

I often go to sites like 103 Bees and HitTail to figure out what the heck people are searching for, and how they got to my blog. One of the most searched keywords in my list happens to be http://inventory.overture.com, a site that used to give you a pretty good rule of thumb when it came to keywords.

But stop looking at that folks! It’s either totally dead or it just won’t give you updated information. The last time the list of keywords was updated was in January 2007, and you don’t want to base your SEO on outdated search stats.

Here are a few places you can go, if you want some great keywords:

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book: http://SEOBook.com

I totally like this one. Aaron Wall is a respected SEO, and his tool is pretty comprehensive. You get stats from the big three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), but a whole lot more, like links to Google Trends, Google Keyword Selection Tool, Quintura, and more. Pretty cool.

WordTracker’s Free Tool: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

This is a pretty basic search, and if you loved Overture, you’ll like this one, just as well. It’s a bare bones keyword search.

Good Keywords: http://goodkeywords.com

This is a bit of free software you can download. Good Keywords is a great way to get suggestions and it combines words to give you long-tail phrase ideas, as well.

Those are three good suggestions for you to replace Overture. If SEOBook’s keyword discovery tool is too complicated for you, try one of the other options. I’m sure you’ll find that one works quite nicely for you.

If you’re into stats and analytics, like I can be, you probably should know about Hit Tail.

You can get some pretty cool long-tail ideas from it to use in posts, web pages, articles, whatever. My most searched phrase happens to be “how to embed video” in various combinations, like “on Blogger,” “on My Space,” and in “WordPress,” of course. That’s pretty neat to know.

So, how can I use that?

I’m going to produce a video soon to go along with the article that I wrote here a few months back: “How to Embed Video in a WordPress Blog,” and I’m going to put it up in all the usual places. I mean, it’s so simple to do, it’s ridiculous, but people who don’t know how to do it are obviously looking for the “how-to.” Cool. Hit Tail told me so.

It also tells me what keywords people searched for to get to my blog today, like “netslingers,” “seo matrix,” and “scribd ban.” Hmm… other people must be pissed about that, too. But I know what they’re interested in learning more about. Also cool.

Sub-domains, Ross Goldberg Call, StomperNet videos, and How to Blog course are my “suggestions.” Great. I have a How to blog course at http://Blogging4Boomers.com. Check that out.

But you see how valuable knowing this kind of stuff is? I look at it periodically to see what interests people most. I can use the information in so many different ways that it really makes sense to have such an account, right?

The basic account at Hit Tail is free but for an upgrade, it’s only $9.95 a month. Check it out, and I’m sure you’ll see the possibilities in having this very cool and basic information.