ovblogger : SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog

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.

So many folks are unaware of how devastating a domain name change can be… if it’s not handled properly. The search robots will freak out when they go looking for your website or blog and POOF! It’s gone. (At least to them.)

There is a way to handle a domain name change so that it doesn’t affect your rankings, and it’s known as a “Mod Rewrite.” For example, if you change the permalink structure in your WordPress blog, the blog automatically writes a small file to explain to robots what happened and where they can find the content presently.

This concept isn’t an easy one, but I found a great description and “how to” today in the Search Engine Journal blog by Sherice Jacob, entitled appropriately, “How to Change Your Domain While Keeping Your Search Engine Ranking.” This article explains .htaccess and what you need to do to appease the spiders. Very good explanation that is bound to help you if you’re planning to take this step.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I think Jeff Johnson is a pretty smart guy. He’s got some smooth tactics going with SEO, selling affiliate products from Amazon, and using blogs to run the whole shebang. I know. I’ve been through just about all of his free videos, and let me tell you… they’re KILLER.

But there are pieces missing. Jeff ascribes to the old Jimmy D. Brown adage: “Give them incomplete information,” apparently, and good advice that is. Jeff really knows how to whet your appetite for learning his systems. I wouldn’t say they’re for newbies, but…

I think that with his help, people could get this all together pretty quickly, even if they knew very little of Internet marketing and how it all fits. Don’t get me wrong. Jeff’s stuff is advanced strategies, but as a member of his Underground Lab, I’m sure anyone could pick it up and run with it.

You may want to check it out: http://easyseotricks.com/jj.

There’s lots of money to be made.

I won’t kid you, the price tag isn’t puny, but the potential is HUGE.

Wow! Amazing the things you find when you go looking for them.

Andy Bland did a pretty sweet review of my new SEO product “Spider Language” at http://r.ecommended.com/product/10193/spider-language

Thanks, Andy!

Only problem… your price is right, but only for 1 month. It’s introduced to you at $4.95, but to continue monthly lessons it’s $47 a month.

Otherwise, thanks for the 4 stars. What could have made it a 5-Star product for you? Just wondering. Always looking to make things better.

We’re working behind the scenes to improve some things at Spider Language, so sign up now while the first month is so inexpensive. You’ll be glad you did!

One of the ways that SEOs stop page rank bleed from one page to another is by using the “no follow” tag in URLs.

For example, on your home page, it does you no good whatsoever to have search engine spiders follow links to your terms of service or privacy policy pages. Do you really want those ranked in Google? No. So, rather than allow your home page to distribute some of its page rank to those pages, you add a “no follow” tag to the URLs, like this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>Privacy Policy</a>

This way, the spider sees the nofollow and stops right there and your home page PR is more concentrated. That means that important links to other pages in your site get greater benefit.

No follow is also used on websites to prevent spiders from following the links to other websites. For example, if you look at Wikipedia, all of the outbound links from there are “no follow” links. They pass no PR goodness on, and so, it prevents spammers from bothering with the site. Good idea, right?

Yes and no.

“No follow” also prevents comments on your blog. If you use the standard WordPress configuration, it makes every comment link no follow by default. You need a plugin like “Do Follow” to change that. I have “Do Follow” because I think that anyone who comments should get the benefit of that comment, and have good spam checkers in place so that I don’t get spammed too radically.

So, it’s up to you. My advice is to definitely use no follow tags for any pages on your home page that you don’t want indexed in the search engines, and to leave all others alone. Unless you get as big as Wikipedia, anyway.

Sounds weird, huh? Are you valid? Well, of course, I’m not talking about YOU, you… I’m talking about your web pages.

What is validation?

There are several places where you can go to have the code on your web page validated. The one I use, and the standard is http://validator.w3.org/

When you run your code through there, using your URL, via file upload, or by direct input, you’ll be amazed to find all the things that can make a spider stop or run.

Just for the heck of it, I ran http://EasyBlogTricks.com through and came back with 72 errors! Hmm… I might be fixing code this weekend.

Here are some of the issues:

• there is no attribute “name”
• there is no attribute “src”
• there is no attribute “width”
• there is no attribute “height”

And so on… I won’t bore you with all of them. But you can see how little things like leaving off a tag can make your HTML invalid.  Crap. This is a mess!

And why is that important? Well… the cleaner your code is, the easier it is for the spiders to navigate. Still, it’s not critical. Search engines really care that you have good, unique content, and though they may not get through every bit of your page, they’re pretty smart. They can figure out what the page is about and index and rank it, anyway.

Yet, if you really want the spiders to crawl all the way to the bottom… Let’s say you have important stuff after all the messy code, then, you may want to rethink and retool. Use W3C to see what your errors are and whether or not they’re important enough to spend time fixing.

Just don’t lose any sleep over it.

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.

Well, there are no free passes are there? I mean, yesterday (or at least I first heard of it yesterday), the major search engines came up with this cool link tag, called a “canonical tag,” which tells the spiders not to worry about duplicate content and points them to the proper page, or the canonical, where the original content sits, right?

I thought, Wow! That will solve a lot of problems. You just add this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

to the <head> section of your page and it tells the search engine what the preferred URL is. Here’s what Google said:

“Now, you can simply add this
tag to specify your preferred version:

inside the section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.”

(Read the full article at: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html)

So before I got too excited about the possibility, I found that this tag only applies in connection with dupe content on the same website. Oh, sure. They couldn’t possibly make it easy for us original content providers, now could they?

I mean, think about how that works. You write an article and put it into a directory. Lots of folks post it to their sites, newsletters, what have you. Does your original article get the credit? Maybe, maybe not. I’d love for there to be a way that I could tag my content as original, wouldn’t you? But I have no clue how they could make it happen. Anyone could tag a piece of content, original or not. Still, would be nice to be able to brand your work, eh?

So, this canonical tag is good for what it does, but it only applies to dupe content within a single website. If you’re an e-commerce site, it’s quite probable that you have duplicate content on your site, so this new tag will be a good thing for you. All of the search engines are supposed to recognize it.

For the rest of us… There may be applications, but it’s not as cool as I had hoped. Oh, I dared to dream, anyway.

So, I’ve mentioned this before. The title and description are the most important parts of any web page when it comes to SEO.

They’re also the most important part of any blog post, if you want to get your posts ranked in the search engines. But did you know that there are two different ways you need to think about this when blogging?

When we’re talking about your blog as a whole, the title should be your keywords, linked together by dashes. This is how you want your general blog title to be, which you set up in the “Settings” tab.

You’ll notice that my blog title is “OVBlogger: SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog” These are the three keywords I’m working on getting ranked for now, and the title is 48 characters in length.

Did you know that search engine spiders will only read 65 characters of your title? Yep. Be sure that you’re using your three most important keyword phrases in your blog’s title and that they don’t go over the 65 character limit. Use your most important keyword first, the second most important keyword second, and so on.

Then also in the settings tab, write a good keyword rich description (tagline) for your blog. What’s it about? Write it naturally, but try to avoid using stop words like a, the, an, for, etc.  Mine is: “SEO news, WordPress, marketing blog from Pat Marcello” I’m the least important part of that description, but I want me to show up on the front of my blog, right? The spiders are seeing what I want them to see but people know what my blog is about and that I’m the one writing it.

But with a blog, you also need to think about the title of every post.

Each post is like a page in your site. (Not to be confused with blog pages, which are also pages in your site, but have a different purpose from posts.) But, you also want people to be interested enough in your title to want to read them, so linked keyword phrases won’t work.

What I do is to put the most relevant keyword into my title first.  In this case, it’s SEO because my post is about having a search engine friendly title and description. But, I follow that keyword with a title that might entice readers.

As with any web page, the title and description are crucial to search engine ranking for your posts.  Be sure to use the plugin All-in-One SEO Pack so that you can add specific title and description to every post you make and then, write post titles and descriptions that are keyword rich and will work for spiders and people alike.

When in doubt, always please your reader first. If folks don’t enjoy reading what you write, no ranking in the search engines will help you.

I just got done watching the video for PPC Web Spy, and downloaded the free version immediately. You can get it here:

http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv

It’s a Firefox plugin that allows you to see the keywords for any AdWords advertiser. You can also have extra keywords suggested, and it’s totally awesome. I went through the whole video, expecting to pay. I mean, Brad Callen is the SEO Elite guy, right? It’s a great tool and I’ve used it a lot.

But I get to the end of the video, wondering how much it was, and it’s FREE!

You really should watch this video: http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv

Then, you get inside, and of course, there’s an OTO (one-time offer for the newest marketers). So, I’m thinking, hmm… how can this be better?

How would you like your Clickbank, Amazon, or PayDotCom IDs showing up whenever your referrals search for something and ultimately buy the product? I thought that was pretty sweet, so now, Joel Comm made some money from sending me to the site. You go, Joel.

Go download the free version and see how awesome it is, or at least watch the video. Rocks!

Wow! Have we finally made it to the Big Leagues? Well… maybe the minors, anyway, which is pretty cool.

Houston Baptist University is offering a new course: Internet Marketing and SEO.

Yep.

Being taught by two “Noted Website Marketing Executives,” whom I’ve not heard of, but hey. Brian Edmonson says I have my head… you don’t want to know. Trust me on that.

Anyway, they’re teaching, “… internet marketing skills, Search Engine Optimization, including domain name considerations, hosting strategies, keyword research, HTML tagging, header utilization, URL extensions, content development and website submission to search engines. Additionally, this course provides a review of Google tools such as iGoogle accounts, AdWords, Analytics, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools,” according to an article at MSNBC.com (”Internet Marketing SEO Course Offered at Houston Baptist University, ” Jan. 20, 2009)

Interesting. Wonder if they have any other degrees or they’ve just made a ton of money online.  And I’m wondering if they are truly SEOs. I mean, any SEO worth his/her salt knows that submissions to search engines are a waste of time. Spiders find sites anyway. Duh.

But I’m just pleased that people are finally taking us seriously, I guess.

I had a comment today on my last Ferrari post that we were all scammer and spammers, basically, and I think that’s the attitude that mainstream Internet users have of us. We’re the dark side of the Internet force.

I applaud Houston Baptist for taking this business to heart, and hope that the trend grows. In time, I see more business done online than off. I mean, retail probably will still exist, but I think that Internet business is going to be predominant.

But that’s me. My husband says that people won’t buy cars online, and I say, “They’re already doing it.”

I just read a good article by Chris Crum over at WebPro News, entitled “The Blogger SEO Burden,” (Friday, Jan. 9, 2009)

In it, he includes a video with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts, who says that Blogger isn’t the way to go. Go over and watch the video.  But here’s the thing…

If you have a Blogger blog, you’re building a blog that you can’t control! If you’re in business, that’s just plain dumb. Sorry. I had to say it.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to newbies. I started with a Blogger blog, way back when, too, and that was even before I knew what SEO was!  I think Blogger had just opened. In fact, I know I learned some of the PHP stuff at Blogger. It was a good “trainer blog” for me, and it can be for you.

But when you get serious about your business, it’s time to move to a blog on your own hosting account. WordPress is more user-friendly than ever now, and Google loves the platform. It’s not quite SEO ready when you get it. You need to add “All in One SEO,” “DoFollow,” and “Google Sitemaps” for example. But really, unless you want to get super SEO, you’re probaly pretty good to go right there. I mean, you want to go with Analyticator, and some other stuff when you get into the stats. But if you’re just learning, the three plugins above are crucial.

Installing plugins in WordPress 2.7 is a breeze, and installing WordPress 2.7 is push-button when you use cPanel with Fantastico installer, or Elephante installer works the same way. These are services that just do all the work for you.

But if you don’t have cPanel or any of the installer programs, and you have MySQL databases available in your hosting plan, it’s really not all that difficult to install a WordPress blog from scratch. If you need help with that, it’s all laid out in step-by-step video over at my WordPress tech site: EasyBlogTricks.com. All you need do is register. (A Fantastico installation video is there, as well.)

Anyway, back to the article.

Chris goes on to muse that if Blogger is owned by Google, why isn’t Blogger like… the best?

So, he contacted Spencer who said, “”Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO.  They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. that search engines don’t understand SEO.”

Interesting. I mean, Spenser is at a much higher level of SEO experience than I am, so it’s probably true. But, I can’t imagine that Google doesn’t have some of its own SEOs on board. I mean, like a casino hires cheats to watch the floor, right? Why wouldn’t Google hire SEOs? Just makes sense.

But regardless of whether this is the case, I hate to break it to all you blogspot.com people out there, but for SEO, getting page rank, and for rising in the SERPs and getting all that cool free organic traffic, Blogger sucks.

Why build your business on a platform you can’t control? Makes no sense to me. Spend the $10 a month on hosting over at Host Gator and throw up a blog in 5 minutes. Be the commander of your own destiny. I mean, if you can’t afford the $10 for hosting, you’re just playing at business, you aren’t a serious business person. Stop thinking that “free” will accomplish anything.

It totally won’t.

I’ve mentioned SEODigger.com in this blog before, and I always thought it was a totally cool site. I had a free account, and even at that got some totally cool information. It was that you just plugged in the URL and SEODigger would show you wherever you ranked for search terms. Granted, some of them were totally bizarre and not traffic heavy terms, but it was neat to see where your page was appearing in Google.

So, now we have SEMRush.com to replace SEODigger. Same company, and some other cool stats.

In this version, you plug in your domain and find “Organic Keywords,” “Competitors in Organic Search,” “Potential Ad/Traffic Buyers,” AdWords Keywords,” “Competitors in AdWords,” and “Potential Ad/Traffic Sellers.” All valuable information.

You can’t get the AdWords information without becoming a paying member, and you get far more results with a membership, which is only like $19.80 to $38.80/mo. for a professional account.

If you’re heavily into AdWords, it might be a smart investment. But then, I’m a stats and info junkie. I like to know as much as I can about my visitors and what they like/don’t like on my site.

But even if you’re just the curious type, check this site out.  It’s worth the time and effort.

So, I’m reading the Alexa newsletter today, which I enjoy every week. They make IBP (IBusiness Promoter), which is an SEO tool that’s pretty powerful.

Anyway, there was an article about how to get high rankings from Google.

It’s pretty simple, really.

1. They want great content. And, they want you to use appropriate keywords so that the spiders can tell what your site is about. This is first and foremost. If you’re not giving great content, don’t even bother to think that Google will ever be impressed because it won’t.

1. Google also wants links from other websites in the same niche as your website or blog. This also helps them to see what your website/blog is about and rather gives it validation. And they want the links to be “natural,” not all occurring at a certain point in time, as in miraculously overnight. This happens when you buy site-wide links from a link broker. Very bad idea. So, don’t ever do that.

Simple, eh?

Don’t try to fool Google. Keep your site clean. Keep its history clean, and provide great stuff.  When you do that, you have a much better chance of ranking than with tactics like paid links. Google doesn’t like to think that you’re trying to scam the system.

It’s more work, no? Why bother?

I hope everyone is in the midst of a wonderful holiday week. Though today was “back to work” for me, I was actually anxious to get back to it. I can’t take more than 5 days away from the action!

So, what did I do? I spent the entire day after Christmas listening to SEO stuff. Exciting for me, boring for some, but I really enjoy learning and knowing more about search every day.

One thing that I realized is that I’ve never written about in this blog is proper linking. Oh, we talk about the incoming links or backlinks plenty, but did you ever consider the links pointing out to other places on your page and what about the pages you choose to link to? Are they worth bothering with or just a waste of your time?

One big no-no is to have unrelated links on your website. So, if you’re in the golfing niche, your links should be all about golf, and you shouldn’t include a link about knitting for a friend. It’s bad Internet business.

And did you also know that you’re passing some page rank to all of those pages? Let’s say you have 5 links on your page, each of them gets 1/5 the page rank link juice that your page has. So, the more links on a page, the less likely it should be for you to want to link there.

Think about it: If a page has 200 links, and you’re one of them, 1/200th is a lot smaller than 1/5, not to mention that the page is a probable link farm, which Google disallows. This could put you into a “bad” neighborhood, and will not help your page rank or your reputation with the grand Pooh-Bah search giant.

So, be careful when choosing links, and when choosing pages to link to. It’s just good SEO and good business.

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.

Today, I got an email from one of my customers, who wanted a refund. No problem. That happens.

He bought my writing book, and said it was about writing, that he was more interested in tagging and article marketing and stuff like that. OK, I do have a free report that gives my exact article marketing strategy for getting to the top of the search engines at Pats7Secrets.com. But it really doesn’t say much about tagging because when I wrote it, the social bookmarking sites or folksonomies (which means collections of tags), as they’re sometimes called, were just beginning to take off.

Amazing how things change so fast in cyberworld, isn’t it?

Anyway, people don’t seem to get two concepts that are very, very simple. Yet, not many of us “specialists” talk about these terms. Let me ease your pain.

First, tagging is nothing more than creating categories for whatever it is you’re tagging — articles, blog posts, videos, press releases, etc.

Tags are created by you. The search engines pick up on the terms if you use them in your work all the time.  Yet, they are simply words that people might search for, specifically in Web 2.0 sites that have something to do with your work.

For example, I’ll tag this post, “seo, search engine optimization, tagging, pinging, Web 2.0, folksonomies, Pat Marcello” and maybe a few more in a second or two. I’m interested in classifying my post for anyone who cares to search for it, no matter what they type in to find it. I’m also promoting me. I want people to find me, so I’ve decided to create a “Pat Marcello” category.

Someone can go into my Delicious account and find that my biggest tags are internet-marketing and ADHD. I studied that a lot when I was writing about it for Tellman. Very interesting stuff, but you can see what my major interests are when you look at my tag cloud.

That’s another way that you can help people to find you. People click on a cloud and find everything you or anyone else has written on the topic. Of course, if you own the cloud, like some people have tag clouds on their blogs, you’ll get back all the work that you have tagged with that word.

Tag wisely. Just decide all the categories that your work falls under, and tag it!

But let’s dive right into pinging. All that means is you’re nudging the blog search engines and telling them that you’ve made a new post and that they should go to your blog and find out what it’s all about.

You can ping manually by going to sites like Pingoat.com or Ping-o-matic.com and just plug in some information and BANG! You’ve pinged!

Or… if you’re smart like me and you have a WordPress blog, WordPress can do it for you. Just plug in the services you want to ping.  Here are mine:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

All you need do is copy and paste that list into your WordPress blog under “Settings” (on the right) and then, “Write.” Then, scroll all the way at the bottom of the page. Select the pingomatic URL because it’s already in the list. And paste the ping list above right into the blank. Save.

Then, you write a post and sit back and put your feet up. WordPress does the work for you.

Tagging and pinging are pretty easy, eh? Well… now you know.

So, a friend of mine told me to try out Market Samurai, and gave me the link: http://www.marketsamurai.com/

Well, let me tell you, it’s a very powerful SEO tool, indeed. You can try it free for 40 days. After that it’s $149, which is pretty reasonable, and I’ll tell you why…

You can do some pretty intensive keyword research, which is cool, but really not better than SEOBook.com, at least in my opinion. SEOBook is free, so that’s not what would attract me at all.

But you get some pretty interesting and dynamic stats on your competition. I liked this very much, but it put me in mind of another program I have — WebCEO. But that cost me like $249 for the full version. Yet, it has reporting capability, so if you have SEO clients, that’s pretty cool, and I’ve used it quite a lot.

What Market Samurai has that WebCEO doesn’t is an ability to find content from all over the Web that includes your keyword. I searched for “how to blog,” a pretty generic term, not long-tail at all, but just messing with this software, right? So, it comes back with 10 Google blog articles, 9 Technorati items, 10 Videos on Google, 10 on Scribd, and 50 on Yahoo Answers, among other sites.

Now, this is cool. I can go and comment on the blogs that are worth looking at because Marketing Samurai also gives me the down and dirty SEO — page rank, age, backlinks and more. Very, very cool. I’m liking this more and more, right?

So, then I got to the “Promotion” tab and I can find backlinks! It checks Web 2.0 sites, Google sites, and even forums, and it analyzes them, as well. I don’t have to waste my time going to pages that don’t have much clout, and you know how important backlinks are to SEO, right? Very cool.

But in the future, Market Samurai will allow you to publish articles using the software, show you how to monetize your keywords, and even help with AdWords campaigns.

I’m liking it a LOT, and think that when my 40 day trial is up, I’ll be $149 poorer, but a whole lot richer!

Check it out: http://marketsamurai.com

Sweet.

OK… here’s another great question from the SEOmoz.org SEO test:

“What’s the best way to maximize the frequency with which your site/page is crawled by the search engines?”

No brainer, right?

Or, is it?

Your choices included two that might be correct, but there is only ONE right answer.

All good SEOs know that the BEST #1 Way to get the spiders to come more often is by adding new content frequently. What does “frequently” mean? Well… it can mean every day.

I’ve written here before that the best thing to do with a blog is to write in it every single day, which is tough. But you have to remember that not every post has to be written. You can post audio, video, articles, reviews, pictures, and whatever is relevent to your niche, and it doesn’t always have to be yours.  Relevence is very, very important, and using other people’s material from the public domain, YouTube, or even article directories is OK, if you do it the right way.

One of the other answers to the test was to turn up the crawl frequency in Google Webmaster tools. Well… it seems right, huh? But when you think about it, that will only help you to get the spiders to your site quicker, if they feel like abiding by your wishes. I guarantee that if you don’t provide fresh spider food often, they won’t.

Content.

Content.

More content.

It’s always about the content online, so if you’re in business, that’s what you need to remember. It’s all about what you create (or have others create for you) that really matters. Get your stuff out there, get noticed by the spiders, and keep doing more of it.

Search engines love NOTHING more than fresh content for their searchers.

And your business needs all the traffic those little buggers can provide.

So, I was over at SEOmoz.org today, which is a very cool site. There are tutorials and tools out the ying-yang, which is sweet. But the one thing that took up about twenty minutes of my lunchtime today was the SEO test. How cool is that? You can measure your understanding of SEO.

I did well, though not as well as I’d have liked. I’m always leery of tests, you know. I always assume that what I’m seeing is a trick question, and pick the wrong answer instead of an obvious one. Testers are a sneaky bunch, you know?

But here was the question:

“What of the following is the WORST criterion for estimating the value of a link to your page/site?”

Hmm… there were about 5 choices, but what stuck out at me right away was “Alexa.” I was ready to click that radio button, when I saw Google toolbar page rank.

Toss up?

The Alexa ranking is so nebulous. It means bupkiss, really. Here’s what SEOmoz.org had to say about it:

Since Alexa data is typically less useful (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-blog-stats) than monkey’s throwing darts at a laptop, that’s the obvious choice for worst metric. The others can all contribute at least some valuable insight into the value a link might pass.

OK, totally true, except… Google toolbar. Brad Fallon told me personally that it means very little because it’s never current. Your page rank changes constantly, but they only update the toolbar about once a quarter.

So, that to me means that PR is also questionable, but it’s obvious where I went wrong. It’s not the WORST indicator of a valuable link. Duh. It’s not a clean estimate, but in the ballpark. Duh again.

Course that’s SEO. Not everyone agrees with everyone else. Want to know what’s right? What works through testing, testing, testing.

Anyway, it was a trick question. LOL

Shouda picked the obvious… Alexa.

Not as many people know about Jeff Johnson as should. He says he doesn’t advertise all that much (though he seems to be everywhere), and I believe that’s true. One of my Facebook friends introduced me to his stuff, and whoo-hoo. Very, very interesting.

Then, I saw him present at JVAlert in Philly and I was fascinated. His systems are totally cool. Just really smart, common sensical information about using feeds, My Space, You Tube, etc. His SEO systems use Web 2.0 sites, and oh, yeah. I’m all over that.

So, I got access to Jeff’s videos through StomperNet (though I’m on his list and watch whatever he puts out), which was pretty sweet. I’ve been watching them one by one, and his systems are so right in tune with what I’m doing right now… so, yeah, Jeff. I’m hooked. I’m putting your stuff into action, too.

That in combo with Matt Bacak’s system should be extremely powerful. It’s just adding the extra oomph.

Stay tuned. I’ll report results. Just give me a bit of time to let this all work itself out.

Love it!

Had a call last night with Nancy Hults. She grilled me about blogging, and I told her tons of great stuff.

I love to do calls because I can interact with people. We don’t often get to do that. We sit in our offices (actually, mine is a corner of my bedroom, which is pretty big, but still… I digress.) and we type away or code away or video away or whatever. And NOBODY is there to connect with.

Anyway, I spilled my guts–again. If you enjoyed the call I did with Erik Stafford last month, this one may be even better. I encourage you to go and listen to the replay:

The replay details…

Bridgeline: 712-432-6190

Passcode: 58643#

recording code: 114#

You won’t regret listening. If you’re interested in ways to make your blog better, in ways to make it profitable, and ways to make it search engine friendly, grab a pen and some paper and dial in.

And enjoy!

There’s a pretty cool offer at the end of the call, too. Worth $100 to you. So… check it out.

clipped from www.searchnewz.com Why is this change going to be so different? In the past, the search engines have incrementally updated certain aspects of their algorithms to improve the quality of their SERPs, for example, eliminating the positive effect of Meta tag keyword stuffing which was being abused by spammers. Anyone who has been in the SEO industry for more than a few years probably remembers the chaos and panic when the major search engines stopped ranking websites based on this approach. This time around though, were looking at something much more significant than simply updating an algorithm to favor particular factors or discount others. We are looking at not only a completely new way for search engines to assign value to web pages, but more importantly, a new way for search engines to function.

Scary? Shouldn’t be, if you’re not using Black Hat techniques. Wall sees Google penalizing for paid linking on both sides of the equation and duplicate content becoming invisible. He also goes on to say that local search will become more important as will plain old quality, unique content.

So, is SEO dead? Wall doesn’t think so, and neither do I. Just as with any other change that Google has made, we’ll have to learn to adapt.

This shouldn’t be too tough, if you’ve been putting the good silver out, instead of the every day flatware. Serving our clients and readers well is what it will probably be all about, according to Wall.

And shouldn’t it be, after all? Who wants to search for something and find the same damned thing over and over again on the page? The more I thought about the Howie Schwartz method of just blasting things out into Web 2.0, the more I realized that it’s a huge time sink. It may work now, but I wonder how long the effects will last?  If you’re doing throw-away campaigns, I guess it works in the short-run. But…

I encourage you to read the full article to see what Wall sees as Google’s next evolution.

If you’re new to marketing, like most of my clients are, when somene mentions “keyword density,” you may freeze like a squirrel in the headlights. It’s kind of scary. I mean what the hell is it? Right?

OK…

Here’s the deal…

Keyword density means how many words are your keywords when compared to all the words on the page, in the article, the press release, etc.

If I wrote an article that was 100 words, (yes, pretty crappy article, but stick with me here), and two of the words in that article were my keyword, then there would be a 2% density because 2 ÷ 100 = .02, which is 2%. Right?

Easy.

But what if you have 725 words and 14 of those words are your keyword but some of them are keyword phrases, and you aren’t sure how that works out. Well, there’s a place you can go to make it easy!

Live Keyword Analysis.com (http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/). It’s totally one of the best sites online, and not even monetized. There are no pop-ups, no banner ads, just a great tool. Here’s how it works:

You wrote an article in a text editor like WordPad or TextPad (my particular favorite), and you used your keywords, hopefully to just the right amount. What is that? Oh, around 2% is optimal.

So, you select the article, including the title, and you go over to Live Keyword Analysis, where you can plug that baby into the text box. Above that, you can type in the keyword phrase or phrases and BAM! You get the keyword density instantly.

How cool is that?

If you find your density is too low, see if you can add a keyword to make the density better. If you find that your density is at 3% or above, remove a keyword or however many you need to to make the density more reasonable. Search engine spiders will think a very high density is spamming.

On the other hand, you have to keep your readers in mind. Don’t sacrifice readability for keyword density. Nobody wants to read anything that repeats the same words over and over where they don’t belong. That just sucks.

Anyway, as you’re making these changes, Live Keyword Analysis will give you the results instantly. That’s darned cool. And it’s free.

Yep. It’s a great site and one you should use. Well… Unless you just like doing the math.

Google seems to want to take over the world, and sometimes their ubiquity scares me.They’re into everything, including browsers, as of  last week.

But I have to say that what they give us for zip, zilch, zero is truly impressive. I love most of the stuff that Google puts out, and I’ve been using their search engine since 1998. Ten years, and I rarely use anything else. Gotta love Google.

One of their tools is extremely powerful, and really important if you want to know how to improve your site for search. It’s called Google Webmaster Tools and you can get a free account at http://google.com/webmasters. I signed up early on and have been checking in weekly or so to find out what’s going on with my blog and my websites.

First, you get crawl stats. What pages are working? What pages aren’t? And you get the results for web search and mobile search. Plus, you get information on your pages. Where might you have dupe title tags or descriptions that are too long or too short?

Then, you get some down and dirty stats. What are the top search terms that people plug into Google to find you? How many subscribers do you have? How often does Google crawl, and more. In the Index tab, you can see who links to your homepage, how many pages of your site Google has indexed and other cool stuff.

I like the Links tab because you can see just who links to pages in your site. For a blog, that’s important. You’ll see what posts people like enough to link back to you. Great info to have, eh? I mean, when you know what people like and want, give them more of it!

Just be sure that your site has a sitemap. They’re not hard to make, and if you search, you can find tools that will build one for you. WordPress has a plugin called Google Sitemaps that works great for a blog. You can get it here. (It’s a big ugly link you don’t want to type in; trust me.)

And then, there are tools. You can set your crawl rate (if you want the spiders to use less of your precious bandwidth), they will help you to generate a robots.txt. This is especially important if you have pages in your site that you don’t want spidered. You can stop them from spidering whole directories or single pages.

But I encourage you to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a wealth of information inside, and if you give Google what it wants, guess what? You’ll do better in the search results, too.

And Webmaster Tools is definitely the right price. Can’t do better than free.