The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

Unless you’ve had your head in the SEO sand, you know that there’s a new search engine to reckon with. It’s not really new. Bing is just MSN Live revamped in a very good way. And the new kid on the block is getting market share. Will it usurp Google’s top spot? Not likely, at least for a very long time, but you just never know. Who ever heard of Google before 1998, right?

So, Bing released a new article in its Community: Link Building for Smart Webmasters which talks about natural, organic link building. Hmm… they actually could be Google clones.

We know the right ways: article marketing, blog commenting (not spamming), press releases, yadda, yadda. But they also mention that reciprocal linking is cool… IF you’re linking to sites in your niche. Linking to sites with no relation to what you’re doing won’t help you and in some instances can actually hurt.

So, let’s focus on stuff that will cause you harm: continue reading »

As online marketers, the most important job we have is building our lists. To do that, the generally accepted tool is the squeeze page, which is nothing more than a headline, a few benefit-laden bullet points, and an optin box. Some squeeze pages might be fancier (as Frank Kern would say), and some are just really simple and still get the job done. But even if you have video, two optin boxes, and a really snazzy looking page, it’s still a squeeze page.

To search engines, it’s that proverbial sow’s ear.

Search engines live or die based on the quality of content it delivers. So, that’s what they’re most interested in seeing — good, quality content that enhances their users’ experience.

So, how can you turn your squeeze sow into an elegant purse? continue reading »

Just when we get used to WordPress 2.8, the developers over at WordPress are already working to release WP 2.9. I think that’s neat-o, but for the casual blog user, it may mean upgrades they don’t want to make and plugins that aren’t compatible. These changes often put normal folks into a tizzy.

But, I’m not normal. I was excited when I saw that they were working on a new version! They made some stellar changes in the past two major upgrades, and so, I can’t wait to see the newest release, though I can’t say when that will happen.

Here are some of the new features coming:

Trash Status: You can move pages and other stuff to a trash bin, much like the recycle before permanently deleting. Interesting, but not killer.

rel=canonical for single pages (the page you get to when you click on the title or your “permalink” page): Cool… Gives the search spiders a clear view of what’s going on.

The ability to select “Allow My Blog to Appear in Search Engines” during installation. Well… who wouldn’t want their blog in the SERPs? Some, I’m guessing, and for those folks this is cool. This will block all your pages from spider view. continue reading »

You’d think that “perfect” things would be valued, right? But news flash! None of us is perfect, no matter how hard we try. Really.

And spiders know that about us wily humans. They have a filter in their algorithm that says… “Hey wait! This is too perfect and humans are nowhere near as smart as us, so Ehhh!!! This page is being manipulated to make us think humans can be perfect.  As if that would ever happen.”

What classifies as over-optimization?

One thing that’s a dead giveaway is keyword stuffing. If your keyword density is unusually high, that’s just a red flag. Don’t let it get over about 2%, three at the very highest.

Something else that will get your site dropping like a stone in the results is duplicate content. If you put an article on the front of your site, and the same thing hidden somewhere inside and you see that your site took a nosedive in the SERPs (search engine results pages)… that’s the problem! Spiders sniff that stuff out like bad Limburger cheese — easily.

And never use hidden text to get every one of your 500 keywords into the page. Dumb move! Spiders can’t see color. They see your text that isn’t hidden to them  and they’ll know that you just added a list of keywords that have no value. Duh.

Here’s the thing… continue reading »

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.

If you’ve been into this online marketing world of ours for a while, you probably understand the difference between “white hat” techniques as opposed to “black hat” SEO. If not, let me explain a bit.

White hat techniques are tried and true. They’re about doing everything “naturally”—adding great content to your site and others; creating links back from article directories, human edited directories, and social media sites; optimizing your pages with great titles and descriptions, and so on. All of these methods will accumulate and get you great rankings in the search engines… over time.

Black hat techniques are more immediate. They’re things you can do right now that will make your search engine rankings soar, and they absolutely do work… until you get caught. Then, your pages could be banned from the search engines entirely, if the things you’re doing are enough to really piss the powers off. Then, when these activites stop working, the black hatters just devise some new scheme that they put all their efforts into until the search engines catch on and the whole cycle begins again.

Is black hat bad? I mean morally wrong? Well… it’s kind of a grey area, but probably not. Search engines aren’t people. But here’s where the grey comes in… Black hatters make it bad for search engine users because all that they might see on a search results page is one website. So, in a way, I guess it’s not a good thing, right? I mean, it seems pretty unethical to me.

But that’s not why I advise against it. I wouldn’t waste my time with black hat stuff. If you plan to be in business online for a long time, why tarnish your reputation with the search engines? I mean, they really do matter to you as a businessperson. You want them to send you targeted, free traffic forever, right?

So, why waste time doing stuff that will not only get you into trouble, but be worthless eventually? I’d rather put my efforts into the tried and true—stuff that will last forever. My road to the pot of gold might be longer, but it won’t turn to mud under my feet.

When I tell people to do that, I can usually hear the gears turning in their brain… EVERY DAY!?!

Well… yeah. Every single day.

The more you blog, the more subscribers you’ll get, the more traction you’ll have with the search engines and the benefits are HUGE.  That’s to get your blog started. After you’ve built an audience, you can cut back to three times a week and then, maybe once a week. It’s all in what your niche is and what your readers expect from you. But here’s the deal…

If you blog once a month or even once a week or you’re inconsistent with your posts, you’re training an audience to ignore you. People want fresh content, and if they like what you provide in your blog, they’ll come back regularly to read your stuff, if YOU are regular about getting it up there.

In terms of search engines, pages equal page rank. Since each post you make has its own separate page, you’re adding pages to your site. (This isn’t to confuse you with the “Page” feature in WordPress. Those are pages, too, but they’re more like static information, like “About,” calendars, and such. Posts are continually updating content.) Plus, you’re updating content often, and the spiders just eat that up.

So, how can you post every day and not feel like a gerbil on a constantly spinning wheel?

Simple.

Make videos. They’re easy to do. You can make them with Flip Cams, Camcorders, or cheap old webcams like mine and put them up on YouTube or Seesmic and then, just embed them in your blog. They can teach people something or you can just talk into the camera. Have you checked out “Dear Tellman” lately? All video.

Make voice recordings and post those to your blog. Podcasting blogs are great, and if you’ve ever been to Stephen Pierce’s blog DTAlpha Talkback, you’ll see how easy they can be to do. His stuff is killer! But then, he’s Stephen Pierce, right?

You don’t have to write every day.

But you can get people to write for you. Hire folks at Elance.com and have them write for a small fee.

Or, here’s one I like a lot… get guest bloggers. You don’t have to pay for them, and it’s a win-win situation. They get exposure on a different venue and YOU get a blog post. Sweet! You link to their site from your blog and the guest blogger has a backlink, too. Nice! Plus, their working with a new audience to get readers for their own blogs. It’s great!

You don’t have to make videos, either. You can grab videos from YouTube or another directory and just post them.

The caveats are:

1. Be sure that the content is is consistently about the niche your blog lives in. Don’t have a fishing buddy post something about fishing to your Internet marketing blog. Bad, bad, bad.

2. Don’t use other people’s stuff ALL the time. Just now and then to take the load off. People are coming to your blog to learn about YOU and what you have to say. Don’t always be leaning on others.

3. Mix things up. Unless you’re going to have a pure video blog or a pure podcast blog, then try adding different types of content at reasonable intervals. You’ll notice that most of my posts are written because well… I’m a writer. But I do add videos now and again. When I’m really busy, those are a godsend.

So, see? When you think of blogging every day in those terms… it’s not so overwhelming, is it?

So, I’m working on a top secret project that I’m very excited about. As part of it, I took on the onus of defining what a search engine spider does.

People who aren’t into SEO probably don’t really know. They probably have a general idea, but it may not be what you think.

Spiders don’t decide where your page will rank in Google, the algorithm does that.

Spiders don’t need to be alerted, they’ll just show up.

Spiders aren’t always good spiders.

Spiders do crawl the web. They go into every nook and cranny where they’re allowed and they gather pages. They take the data on those pages and condense it, then send it back to the search engine so that the algorithm can be applied. That’s what determines where your page will show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

You don’t need to do anything special for them to show up. Submitting your website to all the search engines is a waste of time, and paying a service to do that for you is a waste of money. Spiders will come.

How well you prepare your pages by having the right META tags and keywords on your page, and perhaps a robots.txt, to tell them which pages to notice and which to ignore, will help you when it comes time for the algorithm to be applied.

But that’s if the spider is sending your page to a search engine. Some spiders are black widows. Some of them go around gathering pages that have email addresses so that creepy spammers can harvest those addresses and spam you with abandon.

Yet, most of the spiders that frequent your page are the good kind, and without them, there would be no search engines.

The nicest thing you can do for a spider, kind of like leaving cookies out for Santa, is to give them the information they need to send to the search engine. It’s the nicest thing for you, too, because unlike Santa, they are real, and they mean the difference between you showing up in the search indexes or being an orphan.

If you do nothing else, learn what META tags are and include a title and description for every page. Remember, too, that each page is different and requires a different title and description. And don’t be lazy!

Remember, search engine traffic is free. The better you prepare your pages for the spiders, the better your website will do.

Today, one of my workmates needed to know page rank of blogs for a project she’s working on, but had no Google Toolbar or anything that would show it to her. Immediately, I asked her what browser she was using  and she told me Firefox. Yes!

Do you know how many very cool add-ons for Firefox there are? I mean, wow! You can go nuts. Here’s my list of must-have add-ons for SEO and social marketing in alphabetical order:

• Bending the Web Toolbar: I’ve told you about this one before, but it’s awesome! One toolbar gives you access to all the important Web 2.0 networking, bookmarking, content, and video sites. It also has a built-in radio. Pretty sweet. Love it, especially since it allowed me to add a calculator to my browser. I’m forever using those. Read more about Bending the Web from social marketing experts Jack Humphrey and Howie Schwartz here: http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/make-money-while-bending-the-web/

• Bookmark Duplicate Detector: Oh, yeah… We’ve all done it, right? We think we need to save a site, and end up with a hundred bookmarks that we just keep adding. Nope! Not with this tool. It keeps my bookmarks unique and I love it.

• Clipmarks: Save the stuff you enjoy and add it to your online account. Clip it! Or, add it to your blog or whatever. Neat.

• ColorZilla: click the icon and get the hexcodes for any color you rest your mouse on. I also like a little program called “Pixie” for this, which you can get at http://nattyware.com free. It’s great for getting matching color codes when you’re not using a browser.

• Fast Dial: Allows you to add icons for all the sites you visit regularly. No more searching, even in neat bookmarks. Just click and you’re there.

• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: This is awesome if you have more than one computer. Foxmarks stores all your bookmarks and when you log in to your other computer with Foxmarks installed, you’re golden. All your bookmarks are always up-to-date.

• IE Tab: Switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer interfaces with the click of a mouse. This is great if you need to see web pages in both browsers or if a site just doesn’t work with Firefox. You don’t have to open the other browser, just click!

• Rank Checker from SEOBook.com Let’s say it’s SEOElite lite. You can check the rank of any site in Google, Yahoo, and Live right from your browser.

• Amason S3Fox: It’s like .ftp for Amazon S3. All you have to do to access all your S3 files is click on the icon in your browser.

• Search Status: Give you Google Page Rank and Alexa Ranking plus a bunch of other stuff. Let’s you see keyword density of pages, highlight no follow links, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

• SEOQuake: I love this one. You get this tiny toolbar that appears every time you open a web page. It’s transparent and really unobtrusive, until you open it. BAM! You have Google page rank, the number of pages indexed, the number of backlinks, and similar info for Yahoo and Live. You can also access Whois, SEODigger, and a whole load of info in a heartbeat. This is totally cool.

• Tab Mix Plus: Lets you reorder your tabs, have tabs open when you click on links, rather than leaving pages, and you can really customize this one any way you want. It’s really great, too. Worth the effort to get it and plug it in.

• TwitterFox: I know, I know… You can really customize TweetDeck so much better, but TwitterFox just sits open on my browser all day. I can see when tweets come in immediately and whether or not it’s something I might want to check out or reply to. I mean, I’m so busy that I really don’t have much time for Twitter. If I had to use Tweet Deck or another stand alone program, I doubt that I’d be able to bother with it at all. If you’re as busy as me, you might enjoy this add-on.

I have a few others that aren’t worth mentioning, but these are my absolute faves. Try them. You’ll be amazed at what you can get one free and very cool browser to do for you.

So, I get all kinds of interesting SEO stuff in my inbox every day, and read all of it with great interest. But one of my favorite digests is the one I get from the people at Axandra.com, the people who make IBP (IBusinessPromoter)

Today, they had an article about Cuil (pronounced “cool,” BTW), a new search engine that just opened its doors… yesterday! You can see it at http://cuil.com

It’s run by people with some pretty impressive credentials. Tom Costello, its CEO and founder, who was an important figure at IBM; Anna Patterson, President and founder, formerly in charge of GoogleBase; and a host of other IBM, Alta Vista and Google folks. Just go over and check out their About Us, Management page. You’ll be impressed.

They’re claiming that their engine is better than Google, according to Axandra. Well, time will tell, but I totally like what I see from a searcher standpoint. From a marketing standpoint, I’m not sure.  Where I managed to get a #1 listing that has kept on keepin’ on for more than a year so far in Google, the site doesn’t even show up on page 1 at Cuil. In fact, I went through a couple of pages and nada.

To me, that says they have a totally different algorithm and the same things we do to rank with Google will hold no weight with Cuil. Should we worry? Hmm… Not yet. I think it will take any search engine to bump Google off the map—not that it can’t be done, but it will take a while, if that happens. We’ll have time to figure things out.

But the coolest thing about Cuil is how it returns your results. Rather than the listings that we’re so used to seeing in Google and Live Search, Cuil gives you a thumbnail and a description, followed by the URL. It’s cool looking, and makes images much more important. And beside the results, you get categories, like Yahoo, but in brief. Neato.

Since this just came out yesterday, I can’t give you an opinion of whether it’s better or not. I have no idea. I don’t know if it will take the Internet by storm or whether it will be just another good search engine that nobody uses. I hope that’s not the case. I think it’s pretty sweet.

Now, it will be my job to figure out how it works and whether it’s worth optimizing for. Time will tell. Keep ya posted.