It is worth the watching as a basic refresher. It covers 5 things:

1. Words in page
2. Titles
3. Links
4. Words in links
5. Reputation

Numbers 1 through 4 are quite easy to understand and grasp, but number 5 is a little different. Why? Well, its not actually a technical aspect of SEO in that, you cant really code something or develop a solution that makes it “work”. Its the single factor that attempts to account for the human touch in SEO and it incorporates social media and your offline and online networks in order to create something valuable that it applies to the search algorithm.

I would go so far to say that if you worry about reputation more than the other 4 aspects, then they will be forced to fall into line and will work naturally for you regardless of site code and structure.

Believe it or not, that’s what I have experienced in the past. Havent you alwasy wondered how “that site” is at number one when its obviosuly coded to the same level of quality as the site at, say, number 6 on the search results page? That is because its affected by the things you cant see in code, and that’s the “reputation” that’s referred to in the video above. Lots of SEO geeks dont like this as it removes the power they believe they have in making web pages rank well but manipulating code. Go figure.

I’m not saying you should ignore the way your site is built and how it has been coded to meet search engine criteria, but I wouldn’t get hung up on it when it can be over shadowed by forces above and beyond its reach and outside factors pointing into your site. Focus on what’s important people!

1. RSS Combiners (or Mixers)

There are many different sites that will take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into a single XML feed. The benefit of this is you can combine your RSS feed with other related RSS feeds and promote that RSS feed somewhere (blog, twitter, RSS feed engines, etc) and it will be a totally unique feed. My favorite RSS Mixer is RSSMix.com.

2. RSS to Twitter

Whether you have one RSS feed or 100, you can use different services to post your RSS feed updates to Twitter. This in turns will create a link back to your site. The amount of traffic you generate will depend on your Twitter account as well as your posting frequency. I’ve found that posting updates every 10 minutes doesn’t get much traffic and will cause you to lose followers. Posting 10-20 times per day seems to be the sweet spot for generating quality traffic from people interested in your link. My favorite RSS to Twitter site is Rss2Twitter.com. The site works great, but their traffic stats are WAY off.

3. RSS to WordPress

If you want to syndicate an RSS feed to your WordPress blog, then you’ll need a special plugin. There are a couple different plugins that I’ve tried, but one stands out clearly as the best, WP-O-Matic. It hasn’t been updated in nearly two years, but it still works great. This plugin will take an RSS feed and create a post (or draft) out of each item it pulls from the RSS feed. Duplicate content doesn’t usually rank well in the search engines, but if the info is relevent it can be of benefit to your readers it is worth considering.

4. Getting Links Indexed

One of the most difficult thing you’ll do as a webmaster is building links. After you start building links, you’ll realize that unless search engines know about those links, they’re useless for anything but direct traffic. One of the ways you can help search engines find your links is to bookmark them, and use that RSS feed.

Delicious offers RSS feeds for your bookmarks, so just start building your links, bookmark them at Delicious and send that RSS feed to a blog or Twitter. That’s thinking outside of the box! Here is an example feed of Delicious’ last 15 hot bookmarks. I use this method to get deep links from high PR sites indexed. Works especially well with sites like Ezilon and BOTW since the root domain is an authority, but some of the inner pages need to be indexed.

While link building is still #1 on my list of priorities, the way link building happens is beginning to change, and it’s getting easier!

Brandon Hopkins is a professional link builder who works with small and large sites to achieve #1 rankings. If you want to rank #1, contact Brandon today!

Most of us in the industry knew this was coming and there was speculation as to the effect it will have on the results in both relevancy and of course with Search Engine Optimisation. Many people joined the initial google testing experiment that allowed them to gather data on social search and allowed us to see what the results where of doing various searches under different conditions, such as when your logged into your google account and when your not, different geographical locations and of course trying to account for your particular social network and the influence it will have on the results but from the information in the post I think Google have went even further. (I can see some SEO’s starting to scratch their heads right now).

Google Social Search

According to Google (and aside from suffering a minor baby boom in their offices) they have been enjoying the creation and integration of social search as they see it as a major way to increase the accuracy of results for individuals due to the trust factor involved with a social network.  For example, when you perform a search, traditionally you count on Google to return the most relevant results for that search but once that process is complete, you are basically at the “mercy” (for lack of a better way of putting it) of the resulting website, its information, content and brand.

Once you establish that the website is authentic, something we do very quickly if the brand is recognisable such as Amazon, E-Bay or similar, we continue the decision making process about the host site and whether we wish to continue the transaction, book the flight, make the enquiry or contact them by phone etc. and now social search brings a whole new aspect to this process.

Social Search Consequence

By including your own social network in the results, effectively Google are increasing the need for a good quality brand, integrity and high level of service from businesses as we can see references to the products, the recommendations, the complaints or the company name from a group of people that are on line, connected to you and whom you already know and consequently trust (to varying degrees of course) and the experiences that they have had with the subject you are searching for.

Having found someone who has already experienced something first hand, and whom you have a relationship with, you cna then gather feedback and information about the matter at hand directly and on a much more honest and reliable level.

Basically, companies (and indeed individuals) need to be on their toes now if they want to maintain standards in their every day business practices and this will mean offering much more personal, polite and direct customer service.  Not a bad thing in my opinion!

Social Search Setup

Their is no Opt in or opt out of social search it seems and Google have said that results will appear whether you are signed in with your Google account or not.  This in itself has annoyed some people as it means the standardisation of results, where the number 1 result for “Product A” is he same for both you and me, has effectively been disrupted (but not removed yet) as depending on the size of the searches social network and their activity, the social part of search will serve to produce different results for each and every individual and this cannot be managed or manipulated by any third parties in the same capacity as a website can be created and coded or grown to place for specific search terms in results.

This will in itself make for a very interesting year ahead and a very different view of search engines.

Anyway, have a watch at the video below to see what other features social search will include and if you feel like it, don’t be scared to pipe up and leave your opinions on social search and what it means in the comments below.  I would be very interested to hear another point of view.

Have a look and enjoy (sorry @mattcutts, but its bloody funny and I need a laugh, been a long week).

Backlinks Pagerank and Serps – Google Matt Cutts SEO fun video

(im still laughing).

Well its not hard to say really, Google has a nice bunch of pages telling you all about links and what they mean and explaining the do’s and dont’s of it all in nice webmaster speak so everyone can understand it… or not.

The only people who will have read those pages are web developers and SEO’s who need to understand the linking policy of Google in order to make educated decisions on where, how and when to link out and get links in without breaking the Google Terms of Service or getting what is affectionately known as a “Google Slap” (rankings on search results suffer) or even an outright ban.

Lets try and break it down here and remember, this is from the horses mouth so not point crying about it.

Link Schemes according to Google

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

So back links and links are what helps determine your position in Google based on the site that the link is coming from. Basically if BBC or CNN link to you its happy days and if the link comes from a related issue or matter its even better.  In other words if you write about cars you want the BBC to link to you from their car section not the cuisine section. Right that makes sense, sounds good, like it.

However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

* Links intended to manipulate PageRank
* Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
* Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
* Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

This is the bad bit. Basically it says “Don’t create links artificially”, in other words, don’t try and game the system we have or we will do you in (its not like a horses head in the bed but relatively speaking, to some who suffer, its  the same thing). Lets have a look at each bullet point.

*Links intended to manipulate PageRank

All links affect your site but if you go out and create 50 sites and then link them all back to your main site that’s artificial.  Not really a problem for legitimate business or people as they don’t have the time, budget, resources or expertise to instigate this type of “link farm” but there are people who can and do.  Are they caught?  Not always.  Do they care?  Nope they dont. Does it work for them? Probably (until it stops working).

* Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

Ok, dont put links on your site that point at, recommend or lead people to sites that are bad.  What are bad sites?  Sites that promote things like hacking, spamming or such and basically break the rules or laws. The issue is here, that Google has one view of what a “bad” site is and we have another. Many of these types of sites can be disguised very well and arguments still exist in regards the meaning and use of spamming, but it still exists, can be very hard to spot and people are still making money from it.

* Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

This type of linking used to work but means nothing now. A few years ago there existed a massive amount of FREE directories that listed businesses or services and you simply added in the listing details and then they gave you some code that you inserted on your site creating a free link back to them. This is a load of crap now and honestly was really ugly even then.

The thing is, you can swap links with close associates and friends but not in excess.  Whats excessive?  No idea, I don’t have that many friends I guess so I cant say but google do have “secret” filters in place to catch websites that have 5 links one day and 5000 the next.  What the specifics of that filter are are always being tested by someone somewhere but its a given that its a very complicated process to work out considering all the types of linking that can be done.

* Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

This one point is the real smacker. There are various types of links and according to this statement Google do not mind you advertising someone else’s website on your own and vice versa provided that the intent is not to pass PageRank and benefit the receiving site in terms of organic listings as a consequence, in other words they don’t want you to receive money for adding link benefit to another site and helping it obtain better organic or natural search results.

Which conveniently leads me onto the next point where Google explain when Paid Links are OK.

When Paid links are OK

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.

Yada yada yada. Kinda regurgitating the same message here as we saw before.  It does expand a little on why Google don’t want paid links and how they recognise that advertising is a legitimate form of economy, most specifically the last paragraph and heres where we see how they want these types of advertising handled.

Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag

Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Right.  So if I mention someone on my site, who have paid me to be there, then I should follow these instructions in order to deny them the benefit of my sites PageRank and helping them to move higher for their own target keywords.

That’s all well and good, but just how many people actually know how to do this properly?  Its coding after all and the aforementioned SEOs and Webmasters are the guys who handle the websites. Internet surfers, amateur (and sometimes pro) bloggers and business people will have no idea what any of this means never mind how to do it (that being said there are a few webmasters and SEOs who don’t either but that’s another story :S)

Why this puts us in a difficult position

The glaring fact is though, people often advertise and perceive the LINK itself as half, if not more, of the overall value because people want to rank their sites for their specific target keywords and because links are now considered to have such importance in helping sites to climb the organic listings they are seen as a normal and included added value in any website advertising.

If you run a website which includes advertising, how much business are you loosing or would you loose if you announced that all the adverts on the site do NOT include a beneficial link to the advertisers site?  A Little?  Or Lots? Or would you be laughed out of the park?

Funnily enough, most people just assume that this link exists and don’t realise that the advertising they purchase will not include a backlink and this in itself has caused some unscrupulous people to hint that the links are included by in the fine print make it quite clear that they most certainly are not out of self interest for self guarding their own PageRank and allowing it to sep through to another site. Again, that’s a separate issue itself.

So the difficulty for a lot of us is how do we get these links.  We cant buy them, we cant reciprocate as its useless and we can’t sell them. The answer apparently is to get them for free by writing and producing good quality content and advice. But anyone who wants to kid themselves that something like good quality content is free needs their head examined and even then, there is no guarantee that it will be of enough interest to people who do see it to give you that all important link.

Copywriting (see my last post if you want a good copywriter, but get the pasta ready in advance) is an art on its own and whether your doing it yourself, which is a time and learning investment or you hire a professional, its gonna cost you in some form or fashion.

The consequence of following Googles rules

The consequences of following these rules are pretty obvious to most.  While legitimate (or white hat) sites struggle to be seen and heard and cherish every visit and link there is always someone else whos gaming the system, working it to the limit, or basically being a complete bastard (black hat).  But who can blame them?

Google have basically forced this position upon us all and while some are willing to take the risks and reap the rewards they rarely worry about the results if the site dies or gets banned, they start again with a new project and repeat the process where as other businesses who value their brand, customer base and service or product fight the hard fight for legitimate recognition.

So what happens when you buy links?

Google have of course got ways and means of reporting directly to them sites which are suspicious or which infringe the Terms of Service, and while it has improved greatly over recent years they still have a hard job managing it all such as separating legitimate reports from the malicious reports of over zealous competitors.

The methods for reporting to google are all listed here but be warned, dont be expecting the reprot to be addressed anytime soon!

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93713&ctx=sibling

Your opinions

I have ranted on long enough now, and if your not bored by this stage I would love to hear your opinions and views on this and the experience you may have had regarding this back links, black and white hat or in any of its forms. Do you agree with me or am I a misguided fool? Up to you now to have your say.

Just make sure you have FireFox installed first!

SEO for Firefox

Get this Firefox Addon

A useful tool that pulls data research right into Yahoo’s and Google’s search results and includes some of the following features:

• Page links – Shows estimated total number of links pointing to pages in Yahoo
• Cached – Shows how many sites in Google are indexed
• Provides Alexa site rankings
• Gives PR stats (Google PageRank)
• Bloglines – check out how many people are subscribed to certain blogs

SeoQuake

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• Allows users/web developers to view large number of SE parameters on the internet
• SEO Toolbar – Parameters shown in separate toolbar in browser
• SEObar – Shows values of parameters of web pages currently opened in browser
• Inclusion of parameters in SERPs (customized by users)

Firebug

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• Includes web development tools
• Allows you to inspect and edit HTML
• Monitor and debug CSS and Javascript in live web pages
• Find and edit DOM (Direct Object Model) quickly

Page Speed

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Never underestimate how important it is to have a fast and responsive site or blog.  This plugin is essential in helping to display problems that need ot be addressed so visitors don’t have ot wait for what they want.  There is more detailed information on this plugin in the post, WordPress load time – how to speed up your blog loading time.

• Used to evaluate web page performance
• Web sites run faster – runs diagnostic tests
• Reduces hosting costs and bandwidth
• Performs tests on front-end code and web server configuration

SearchStatus 1.30

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• Displays Google PageRank, Compete Ranking, Alexa Rank and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank in browser
• Includes backward/related links
• Fast keyword density analyser

SEOpen

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• Yahoo and Google backlinks
• Alexa traffic and backlinks
• Page size and PR checker
• HTML validator

yExplore

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• Quickly accesses Yahoo Site explorer

Niche Watch Tool 1.0

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• Analyze niche keyword competition
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• Builds high PR links – gain better search engine placement

X-Ray 0.9

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• View tags on web pages without seeing source codes
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Web Developer 1.1.8

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User Agent Switch 0.7.2

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Alexa Sparky

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• Find out what sites are more popular than others
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LinkChecker 0.6.3

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• Checks validity of site links
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While companies that perform search engine optimisation would know the rules and guidelines for SEO by simply reading and following the official google SEO handbook, this simply covers the technical aspects of approaching website optimisation according to Googles (and most other Search Engines) requirements.

Adopting the correct mentality

Most people I speak to are under the impression that with search engine optimisation there is some secret technique or method by which you can guarantee reaching that number 1 position on the search results and the benefits of traffic associated with it and they view this aim with a very selfish attitude, an attitude of “I deserve to be there because I have a great product/service/idea so I should have no problems making it work for me”.  This is absolutely and completely the wrong mentality to adopt.

Google’s perspective – its a business

Here are the facts.

Yes its true, Google is a business and a damn successful one. The majority of us however forget this and see it as something that’s free, and here to cater to our needs (search), and herein lies my point. Googles business is essentially as a service provider and its main focus is to provide results to searches, but not just any old result plucked out of thin air. Imagine you performed a search and the results did not satisfy.  Would you stick around and continue to use that service?

No, you wouldn’t, you would change and use a service that provides RESULTS that are relevant to you and the search you are performing. Google realise this, but businesses tend to forget this when they approach the market via search engine optimisation. Remember Google owes you nothing. It owes its users something very specific however and that is quality results.

Mental Shift towards Quality Content

Its time for businesses to make a mental shift when its comes to SEO.  Google will list you, and rank you for any given keyword or phrase at different levels but its all based around one thing.  Quality. There is absolutely no point in a business (or  individual) posting content and trying desperately to rank it when it simply cannot compete with other content of a higher quality.

What is quality content then?

This is the ultimate question.  Who or how is it  decided what is quality content and what makes information more valuable or of a higher quality than another? For me it is dictated by a specific set of factors but in reality it could be range of different aspects that are decided by YOU not by Google. Quality content cannot really be defined unless you are aware of who you are and what people want and the relationship between these two variables. I believe that Google are continually adapting to meet this need. The algorithm created by Google, at this time, relies heavily on backlinks to decide where and what quality content is.

Google looks at the amount of backlinks that a set of information has as a vote of confidence, a thumbs up or a recommendation from readers and visitors and ranks that information accordingly. They hate it when people pay for these recommendations and that means allowing money to influence decision makers and provide backlinks for financial gain as their point of view is that the backlink should be freely given due to the quality of the content or the level of satisfaction the viewer has gained from reading or watching the information provided.

Of course, people do pay for links and sites charge for giving them. My advice?  Dont, its simply not worth getting penalised or removed completely from the rankings for the “quick” method of generating backlinks with money.  You and your visitors are much better served by spending that same money, time, effort or expertise by creating strong content people will enjoy.

So what is the point of Search Engine optimisation then?

This doesn’t mean that search engine optimisation (SEO) is not without merit, its a matter of deciding the context and merit of focusing your efforts and achieving goals. SEO is continually taken out of context, at least in my experience, and people are continually under the expectation that by performing it then they are guaranteeing results.  Any SEO preformed is only as good as the website it is performed upon so what makes people think that slapping together a basic site with little valuable assets and then performing SEO will get them anywhere.  I’m afraid it simply doesn’t work like this.

Dont try and outsmart Google, work with it.

The whole point of SEO is to make your website match the criteria set out by Google and ensure your site is meeting these requirements to the maximum effect, that’s what optimisation means.  Basically you want to follow the rules as closely as possible so when you publish information Google is happy to list and rank it.  But that’s the first step in getting rankings, it wont necessarily produce these backlinks you need to help increase the importance of the information itself.  That can only be given by the people who want to read it and give value to it freely, and you cannot always influence that decision, unless your content is top quality. (Again that word quality).

The point is, don’t try and make Google make you number 1,  make Google want you to be number 1.

The more useful, helpful or quality your content is to your target audience the more it will rank, its really that simple and churning out repetative, meaningless information will not endear you to search egnines or users alike.  It is pretty obvious you cant beat it with under hand tricks or ways and means of rewriting the same old stuff again and again.  No one will want to read it, and why would they. Get creative, get relevent, get real.

His session focused on optimising your wordpress blogs and a prominent part was ensuring that it was able to load quickly for visitors but also factors such as SOE, maintenance and analytics.

Slow loading sites can serious reduce your visitors experience as patience is definitely not a virtue online and its about time I addressed the points he raised. The other tips are definitely worth reviewing and applying although all the recommendations might not be applicable to your own blog depending on what your coding ability is or what plugins and features you may already have implemented.

If its easier, here’s the list of recommend pages and plugins included on the slide show to help make sure your wordpress blog is running at full capacity.

Making your WordPress Blog FAST

Slide 19: Install WP Super Cache with Gzip enabled

Slide 20: Move .htaccess directives to your server config (if possible) and disable .htaccess parsing. (what the hell is this? dont ask me how to do it, pay someone who knows.)

Slide 21: Combine CSS files into one big CSS file, same goes for Javascript which should be loaded in the footer.

Slide 22: Use CSS Sprites (see your developer if you dont know what this is).

Slide 23: Add a PHP opcode Cahce – pick one, all are better than having none. (see slide 20 for instructions in how to deal with this)

Slide 24: Kill some plugins…and try and replace them with similar ones, some plugins are god awful.

Slide 25: Still slow?  Switch to better hosting: http://www.westhost.com/blog-yoast.html (that’s an affiliate link for Joost, so if your gonna purchase hosting use it, I’m sure he would appreciate it and he kinda deserves it even though he owes me a beer).

Adding SEO to your WordPress Blog

Slide 27: Set Pretty Permalinks – Why do people still forget this?

Slide 28: Switch Blog name and Post Title – the format should be post title – blog name

Slide 29: Give Robots Directions – Noindex wp-admin, login and register pages etc. Try Joosts Meta Robots Plugin.

Slide 30: Write better Titles – Use HeadSpace2 or even All in one SEO.

Slide 31: Write Good Meta Descriptions – If you don’t, do NOT auto generate them.

Slide 32: Create Proper Pagination using wp-pagenavi by Lester Chan, f/i

Slide 33: Diasbale paged Comments… they suck.

Slide 34: Read and Implement everything in my (Joost’s) WordPress SEO Guide

Maintaining your WordPress Blog

Slide 36: Backup your database every few hours. Use Lester Chans WP-DBManager plugin.

Slide 37: Optimise your database every day using the same plugin.

Slide 38: Backup your files every day. Use WordPress Backup.

Slide 39: Check your queries. Use the debug queries plugin to check for plugins gone mad.

Slide 40: Run Askimet. Kill those spam comments.

Slide 41: Check the referrers for comments.  (Click the WP plugins Tab)

Slide 42: Remove those nonsense widgets. Technocrati rank? Well…OK. Blog Value Widget: = Nonsense.

Slide 43: Track your uptime. Use pingdom, or another tool. But be the first to know when your blog is down. (and address it immediately)

Slide 44: Check 404′s. Use the 404 notifier plugin and fix them using the redirection plugin.

Slide 45: Remove unnecessary META info.

eg:

// Remove Really simple discovery link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’ );
// Remove Windows Live Writer Link
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’ );
// Remove  the version number
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp-generator’ );

Making your WordPress Blog Social

Slide 47: Allow and encourage people to submit (share) your content. Use socialable, dammit :)

Slide 48: Doing newsletters? Add a refer to a friend button the the Thank You page.

Slide 49: Or use my(Joost’s) Comment Redirect plugin, and add the refer a friend there!  ^^

Slide 50: Use WP Greet Box, even useful on “normal” sites.

Slide 51: Make sure your comments are gravatar enabled.

Slide 52: Do the Twitter thing. Its an absurd traffic driver.

WordPress Blog Analytics

Slide 54: Use Google Analytic’s (and my*Joosts* Google Analytics plugin for it)

Slide 55: Use RSS link tagger

Slide 56: Track Twitter Traffic with Twitter Traffic Plugin

Slide 57: Install Canonical URL’s so your analytics does’nt interfere wiuth your SEO.

Slide 58: Use comment redirect to track first time commenter’s

Slide 59: Track Comments as a goal! Use an onclick Javascript with a minor delay.

Slide 60: Track RSS subscribers the same way.

Slide 61: Start optimising: Which traffic leads to more subscribers? (and yes that means forgetting about Digg).

Slide 62: Use my(Joost’s) blog metrics plugin. Improve yourself each month!

And to round it all of, heres the actual presentation itself.
*Joost, next time, make it 20 tips will you?  This took me bloody ages.

In order to check your pages against keywords go to www.google.com and in the search bar add this search query:

KEYWORDS site:(Yourwebsite address)

so for example if I wanted to see what my most important page is for “twitter” I would do a search for:

twitter site:www.justinparks.com

I get this  results page with all the pages on my site that use the word twitter and their order of relevancy. (Dont forget keywords are not necessarily singular, they can be terms and phrases as well).

What do these results mean?

The results allow me to see what google considers to be my most important page on my blog for the specific keyword on a single page. The great thing about this is that it allows me analyse these pages to understand the reasons why they are more important than the pages below them.

But theres more.

Compare the competition.

What this also allows is a powerful way to compare pages across different sites and specifically the competition pages for the same keyword to understand where I am and what needs to be done to aim for target rankings.

Here’s an example with the keyword “twitter” on Mashable.com:

twitter site:mashable.com

(** you will note that in the search above mashable.com has no www. This is because the root of the site is http://mashable.com/ NOT www.mashable.com, so thats worth bearing in mind if you get a strange set of results back)

And the results page shows they have 92k pages listed with the word twitter and the most important page is an article called Twares: United Airlines Offers Special Fares to Twitter Users .

Out of interest, if I jump into Google and search for the keyword twitter as normal, this very same article appears in the SERPs at number 7. (At least it does for me, I wouldn’t count on it being the same for everyone!) This reinforces the information for me that this is the most important twitter related page on their site, is ranking highly and is meeting certain requirements to be in that position, figuring out what those requirements are though, is the fun part!

This is a pretty extreme example, but at least I now know I will have to work pretty damn hard to knock Mashable of the top spot for that particular keyword! (yeah right, dream on Justin).

* Thanks to Conor O’Conor for pointing that little titbit out on twitter today.

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