The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

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Today, I was over at Digital Point, checking out what was going on and there’s a big discussion of a page rank update. People are complaining that their page ranks went up or down for no apparent reason, and it’s freaking them out.

But you know, … Does it really matter?

Here’s what matters: Your site showing up in the results pages. That’s what matters.

I’ve said this before: Page rank is a way for Google to play with your head.

If you have PR6, Google decides it hates paid linking and BOOM! PR0. Happened last year.

If you have a PR3, it’s better than a PR2… why? You have no more listings today than you did yesterday. Who cares?

What you should watch and care about are these things: continue reading »

I admit it… I made a foolish blunder.

I trusted my SEOQuake add-on for Firefox to tell me about Twitter. It was showing that I had links coming back from my profile and that they were “do follow” links, when ehhhhhhh….  (See http://ovblogger.com/1694/google-ranks-twitter-profiles/)

Someone questioned me on this, and so, I went into the page source for my Twitter profile page and there you see it  [rel="nofollow"] right in the code.

Somebody shoot me.

Everything I wrote in that Twitter post is wrong. Don’t use your Twitter page for sending links anywhere because the spiders can’t follow them. So, it really doesn’t matter if your page is a PR10, it doesn’t help.

But here’s the thing that will be cool: The most visitors you get to your Twitter profile and the higher your page rank goes, the higher your profile page will go int the SERPs. You ‘ll get traffic to your links just because people want to find out more about you. So…

Tweet away. Don’t go nuts thinking that you’ll get link juice from Twitter, though, because it just ain’t going to happen.

Grr… SEOQuake. I really like that add-on, but if I have to go back and double check everything it tells me… ppfffftttt!!!

Mea culpa.

What’s the first thing you think when you hear Web 2.0? I’ll bet I can guess… It’s one of two things — Facebook or Twitter, right?

Well, those two sites are definitely at the forefront when it comes to Web 2.0 properties, and they’re totally worth the effort of maintaining presence in both places. But I have a very POWERFUL weapon in the Web 2.0-verse that you may not be thinking about — social content sites.

These are great places to pop some content into for various reasons:

• Each place has a different audience of regulars, and so you’re meeting new people to further your  brand
• Each place provides a social element that the article directories just don’t have
• Each place will give you links back to your website, even if they’re only linking back from your profile

… and each place is really worth working into your traffic routine. Maybe you can’t afford to submit to them constantly, and that makes sense. It’s too hard to do everything at once. But what about adding one article a month to each place? That’s totally doable, and will definitely help you with SEO.

Here are the places I maintain some presence in: continue reading »

I’ve done some advertising with Google AdWords, but it usually ended up being more expensive than it was worth. Oh sure, I got optins and sales, but they were either break-even or only marginally profitable. I don’t have that “special code,” I’m afraid. It takes a lot of trial and error to make it work really well than I have to spend at this point. I mean, I know I can make it if I focus on it and nothing else. But remember, I work for Tellman.

But…

Working for him has its perks.  Well, lots of them actually, not to mention he’s a great guy. (In case you don’t know, he’s running across the country for Homeless Teens and well… in his bare feet. Pretty cool… go donate at http://RunTellmanRun.com. It’s a very worthy cause, and well… bare feet, people!)

Anyway… Tellman got me to go through Frank Kern and his cousin Trey’s “Screw Google” course, and I have to say that it’s great! It’s short enough to run through in a few hours, and the information inside is easy to follow and really spot on. It’s typical Frank Kern style,  of course, and he’s one of the LEAST boring people to watch no matter what he’s doing. He just has that kind of personality that makes you smile. (It’s a no-brainer that he and Trey are cousins, either. They even sound alike. Both of them are good at teaching and keeping things light.)

The course is based on PPC advertising with Yahoo, and I have to tell you that after having worked the AdWords stuff for OE and myself, I find Yahoo to be 1) less anal and 2) far less expensive. My most expensive click to date has been around 12 cents. Plus, I’m getting tons of optins and I don’t have a mega keyword list, either. I have a very select group of keyword phrases that I’ve tested and know work for my & Tellman’s product, Spider Language, which (in case you don’t hang here regularly) is a basic course on SEO. 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’m often asked, “Pat, what are the best article sites on the Web?” There are definitely some in the forefront, in my opinion.

You can’t go wrong posting to EzineArticles.com. They run a tight ship, the content has to be quality or their editors don’t take it and everyone knows EZA. It’s got tons of traffic coming to it every single day. That’s my #1 place, for sure.

GoArticles.com is good because they still allow you to add anchor text to your articles. (Hyperlinked keyword phrases.) This is great for SEO, and provides reputation for your site. The worse thing you can do is to link “Click Here,” as it gives you little SEO benefit at all. But having an anchor text link (as you see above with “keyword phrases”) from a good site is worth the effort of submitting at all.

ArticlesBase.com is making its way to the top. The site now sports a PR5 and an Alexa of 810. Very strong. (Lower is better with Alexa.com) So, adding articles here is also a good idea.

But also think about social content sites like Squidoo, HubPages.com, and Scribd.com, which are all great sites to submit your content pieces.

Don’t bother submitting to any site that has a high Alexa, say over 100,000. That’s pretty much a waste of time because those directories/sites get little traffic. Stick to submitting to places where people will see your stuff and click on your link to come to your website.

Also stay away from Google Knol. I read an article today saying that it may not make it to its 2nd birthday as traffic has dropped so dramatically. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but here’s the thing: Keep an eye on which sites are rising in popularity and which sites are waning. Things change over time, and you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and then, have the basket fall apart.

iSnare.com is another good option. For $2 U.S., they will distribute your content to 40,000 websites, newsletters, and ezines. That’s not to say you’ll be placed in all of them because it’s an editor’s decision whether or not to accept your piece, but for $2, you really can’t lose.

Article marketing is still extremely powerful. Using it for SEO purposes is critical, and the cool thing about it is that your articles will stay online, bringing traffic and boosting your reputation and SEO forever.

If you don’t like to write, get someone to do it for you. Just don’t underpay. Sure, you can get folks with little command of the language to write for $1, but the articles won’t be much good. You want someone who understands your niche and who can write in your language. The going rate for a good article? About $10 at least. If you want a solid SEO article, you may have to pay around $15. But it’s worth it to have an article that will keep your reputation strong. Put a bunch of garbage out there and you know what they say…

Garbage in; garbage out. Not very helpful to your online success. You want to build your reputation as an expert in your niche. Nobody will buy it if you’re putting out poorly written articles that make no sense.

For that reason, also stay away from article spinners, unless you review the articles and make proper changes to them before submitting. Don’t just let a site or software spin articles and pop ‘em out there. You’ll hate the results. Most spinners don’t work, but there are a few that might and they require rewriting of your article paragraph by paragraph. I’ve done that for Overcome Everything, and I can tell you, it’s a LOT of work.

Unless you plan to do nothing else, my advice is to write or buy two good, solid content pieces a week and submit them to one of the sites I mentioned above, and you’ll still achieve excellent results over time.

Remember a long time ago, I told you about a product that I created with Tellman, called Spider Language? Well, we’ve been working on it and tweaking it and making things all come together. It’s been a long five months as we went back and forth with the format and the set up and whatever…

We tried it a few weeks ago with a smaller list, and things have been going well, so we launched it to the whole list this weekend! I can’t tell you how excited I am that so many folks decided to take us up on the trial. (You can see what’s happening at http://SpiderLanguage.com)

I want to teach everyone that SEO isn’t as hard as they think. Oh sure, there are some very technical aspects that you can get into that are difficult to learn, but if you’re a webmaster and not a professional SEO that spends 24/7 on optimizing for the search engines, you really need the basics and you need them presented to you in a way that’s easy to grasp and retain. I think we’ve done that.

The course is presented in weekly installments with a video or two to back up the written learning. There are checklists that you can use to just fly through this stuff when you’re ready to pursue a task. And there’s homework. You need to learn this stuff with a hands-on mentality. I never learn something entirely until I do it myself, so I think that’s a very important component.

The other thing I want to teach folks is that SEO should permeate every single activity you do online–blogging, articles, press releases, videos, even Twitter… everything!

And so we’ll be talking about each of those areas, too, as the weeks roll on.

I’m really excited about this, and hope that everyone who signs up will be, too. SEO is something I totally love, and I don’t want folks to fear it because it’s too hard to learn. Come with me… I’ll make it easy for you, and you’ll be amazed at how you can really put this to work and get some of that free, targeted traffic that people are always talking about.  Isn’t that what you really want? I’ll show you how it’s done.

I was reading through my feeds today, and came upon a post from Marko Saric’s How to Make My Blog blog and he was talking about all the traffic he’d got from one post. Of course, it was about Twitter, and it outlined some of the great Twitter plugins available: Top 5 Twitter Plugins to Incorporate into Your Blog.

In it, Marko outlines WP Twitip ID, which allows you to add a field to your comment form for your commentors’ Twitter IDs.  This is cool for your commentor because it links their Twitter username to the comment and to their Twitter profile. Nice! So, I installed that one.

Another is Twittar, which allows the commentor’s Twitter Avatar to be shown next to his/her comment.  Kind of nice. And there’s TweetBacks, Tweet This, and Twitter Tools.

You can check them all out on Marko’s blog. But here’s the thing. They all do very cool things, but they’re not for blog beginners. Well… except for Twitter Tools. Anyone can use that one. It’s a pretty standard plugin.

But if you don’t know how to edit your theme files, the others are advanced. They’re not hard. You just need to put snippets of code where you want the items to appear, but one of them, TweetBacks, for example, takes a little more finesse.

Yet, I do have some advice.

If you’re not really into editing the PHP files, don’t be scared to get in and try it. That’s how I learn to do things. I just forge ahead, and do things because I know I can go back and fix them, if I screw up (and I have done that more times than I care to mention).

Save your theme. If you mess up one of the files, you can just go to your saved theme files and upload the clean file to your theme folder. For instance, if you screw up comments.php, just go to your saved theme and upload the original comments.php to the theme folder on your hosting account. Just like new!

Never be afraid to try things. That’s how you learn.

You may have been distraught to notice that I haven’t been as regular with posting for the past couple of weeks as I normally am. Or… You didn’t notice a hoot. Whichever is perfectly OK.

But…

The reason that I haven’t been as consistent as usual is because I’ve been working on a new product! It’s called “Spider Language,” and Tellman Knudson is my partner, mentor, boss, and really good friend.  We actually got the product into ClickBank last week, and already we’re making sales.  I’m thrilled!

Spider Language is for folks who want to begin to learn SEO, and for some folks maybe not so new to SEO, but want to learn more. We’ll talk about everything from how search engine spiders work to site construction to linking and the whole shebang… What I call the SEO “Matrix,” which inclues blogging, article marketing, press releases, video, and more.

The course will be presented weekly in Jimmy D. Brown “Membernaire” style, which is a totally awesome model, by the way. It will include a weekly .pdf, at least one video, and a homework assignment that you’ll need to complete to move on to the next lesson. (Just so you’re getting it.) Usually, it won’t take more than an hour to complete the whole deal, so you don’t have to worry about not having the time. We’re dishing it out in small bites to make it easy to learn.

Anyone who is already SEO savvy is welcome to promote this. It’s a great money maker and steady income for you. Just search “Spider Language” in the Marketplace, under the category Business to Business.

This is gonna rock!

Want to check it out? Go to http://SpiderLanguage.com We are going to rock your SEO world and your traffic!

“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!