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!

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

Get this FireFox Addon

• 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

Get this FireFox Addon

• 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

Get this FireFox Addon

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

Get this Firefox addon

• 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
• Gives backlink numbers, indexed pages, all in anchor, and page ranks
• Builds high PR links – gain better search engine placement

X-Ray 0.9

• Allows you to easily see how site was created
• View tags on web pages without seeing source codes
• Displays class and ID names

Web Developer 1.1.8

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• Includes many web developer tools
• Adds toolbars and menu to browser

User Agent Switch 0.7.2

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• Adds toolbar and menu buttons to switch user agent of browser
• Allows access to sites that restrict access

Google Global

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Has over 20 features – views paid and organic searches from any location across the globe:

• Cities
• Regions
• IP addresses
• US zip codes
• Different languages

Alexa Sparky

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• Shows Alexa information in your status bar
• Provides Reach and Rank data about the sites you surf
• Users can view web traffic metrics
• Find out what sites are more popular than others
• Allows you to web surf more efficiently – finds related links/sites
• Won’t interrupt your web browsing

LinkChecker 0.6.3

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• Checks validity of site links
• Tool button can be added on browser for easier access
• Uses color coding to highlight bad versus good links

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.

Lets define a keyword.

A keyword or more commonly a key phrase is a particular set of words a searcher will type into a search engine to find a specific result. While referred to as a keyword in general it is generally accepted that this is actually more than one word.  For more detail on keywords and the process behind choosing them you can see my other post Keyword targeting for Businesses explained.

Understanding keywords

Keywords are not generally set in stone, they are not permanent and they can be affected by a variety of external elements.Trends and trending circumstances can serve to create new keyword combinations, things such as breaking news, a new development or a political crisis for example.

Time is also a major factor in marketing to a keyword, for example, do more searches occur for Golf in the Spring and Summer than the winter months.  All these aspects are critical in adapting to current market gaps and its demand, all generated by searches from individuals.

Taking it a step further even a mood can affect a keyword.  Think about the economic crisis, downturns in the market and the credit crunch, these search terms where basically non existent 3 years ago but today they are being dictated by the mood of the economy and the people, a completely new set of important terms.

Business and the keywords they need

In the business world you will have heard the term “keyword” brandied about quite a bit when it comes to marketing and specifically when it comes to search engine rankings and marketing. But do you really understand the significance of a keyword and more importantly does the person who has broached the subject understand what a keyword is?  Many can talk about it with convincing authority but in  fact they fail to take into account various other factors.

Many of the businesses I speak to will have an idea of what keyword they want to be number 1 for when they are marketing a website or service. It inevitably turns out that this is not where they should be aiming for however after some research and analysis is performed and on occasion some quite surprising results can be produced.

Taking into account the points above, small variations in even the simplest of terms can have massive changes in results, for example if you happen to be searching for a job the tendency would be to assume that searchers will type something like jobs in New York. Analysis could show that simply changing the word jobs to work or employment can have incredible differences in returns and traffic but also competition. Moving forward in keyword marketing without proper research is like sending a blind man into a forest and asking him to find the only apple tree.

Preparing your keyword research

There are a variety of methods to establish the correct keywords any individual or business should be targeting and these are serviced on three different levels by:

• Keyword research tools
• Website analytics’s software
• Search Engines

Keyword research tools can include WordTracker (probably the most accurate) and Googles Keyword Tool to help display approximate searches by day, month and also the advertisers currently paying for top ranking privileges. These results are external reports showing the use of search engines by location from anywhere on the net.

Website Analytic tools, such as the free Google Analyitics can report back on what keywords are generating traffic to your site currently and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this can provide valuable data in conjunction to an external tool in regards making decisions and creating strategies for meeting ranking targets.

Finally there are the search engines themselves and performing a normal search will allow you to see the competition for your industry, and this has only recently become more complicated. If you do a search on google you should also be aware these important points:

• The results in google.es will be different than the results for google.com
• The results for a search FROM the UK in google.com will not necessarily return the same results for a search performed in San Francisco on google.com even if the search term is exactly the same
• The implementation of personalised search results (when you are logged into your gmail account) can cause a totally different set of results if the results have been manipulated by the user previously.

Thus as you can see the selection of specific keywords and phrases is far from an exact science.

Keywords searches and language

This speaks for itself really. A search for job in English will obviously be a search for trabajo in Spanish but lets not dwell on multi lingual search criteria. Lets focus instead on keyword formation.

To illustrate, an English person from the UK may search for “new employment opportunity” but an English speaking person in New York may search for “new opportunity in employment”. This single change in the structure of the keyphrase can also prove (although not always) to produce another completely different set of results!

The need for keyword analysis and research

As you can see the variations and intricate knowledge and awareness required to effectively meet keyword requirements is extreme and is only one small part of the overall SEO strategy. In some cases people have even said to me”why bother if its impossible to target?”.

The point is that its not impossible to target keywords, its just damn difficult. After all would you prefer to place your business in a totally useless position on an assumption or would you prefer to have an educated idea of where you could and should be, no matter the inaccuracies involved?

You decide.

It was made clear at the recent a4uexpo I attend that gaining backlinks is the key to success and indeed Covaris have agreed with this stating:

The number one page feature that determines rank continues to be the number of external inbound links. “It’s about how many backlinks does this page have and are they also authoritative? If you’re trying to get a good ranking, the goal is to build out links.”

Craig Mcdonald realises that the ever changing methods of ranking by search engines needs to be monitered, reported on, assessed and acted upon continually to help marketeers establish the best course of action to take when pushing for higher rankings and the emphasis that search engine spiders have on different factors both on site and off site.

It seems however that in order to try this software, see its price, or understand more about the product you have to contact a sales agent directly and I found myself moving in circles trying to find this simple information and getting no where.

I wonder if I could find a product for them that helps turn someone like me into a sale, then again with no mention of price anywhere I am lead to assume that I wouldnt be able to afford it anyway!

I will Submit your Site to 1 BILLION Search Engines for 5 dollars!
It will make you millions and get you loads of visitors in minutes!
Do NOT Delay – one off payment ONLY €49

This technique is so old I don’t even know why I have mentioned it, maybe because you still see it used (unbelievably).

Save your money and go have a good party, buy the girlfriend a present (definatley much more value there) or just give it to charity.

You do not need to submit your site to a search engine.

(at least not the ones that matter)

You CAN if you wish, but even then once is enough and only to Google it is more than enough.  A link from a site already established or a good press release to a popular article website will also allow the search engines to detect you. You will be detected and picked up, sooner or later.

Don’t waste your money on services offering this, its pointless, and frankly makes me feckin angry when I see it and see people paying for it.

Here, submit your site now, it takes 3 seconds:

Submit your site to Google

But dont just take my word for it:

References:
http://www.seobook.com/best-search-engine-submission-programs
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ridding-the-world-of-search-engine-submission

Search Engines (at the time) could not read them but also people could not read them either, they seem to be complete jargon to the untrained eye and coupled with the fact that no one would ever remember or recollect them they where something that most of us tried to avoid.

SEO Friendly URLs

If for example your website address was:

http://www.mywebbie.com/search?q=sdf&sourceid=75856=navclient-ff&ie

It was much more preferable to have:

http://www.mywebbie.com/search/catagory/webstuff/item1

It is still important to have a clean URL such as the second example.  It helps to create relevance to the content and to be honest is much more pleasing to the eye. You can read a good detailed description of clean URLs (or Permalinks) on Wikipedia.

If your using a blog, specifically WordPress its always a good idea to set up your Permalinks correctly as soon as you do a fresh install. The benfits in regards SEO and gaining listings in the SERPS is extreme in combination with a raft of other plugins you can add toaid in creating exposure.

For an exaplantion of Permalinks check out homebizpal.com and for a guide on setting your permalinks in WordPress try bloggingbits.com.

It stands for World Wide Web Consortium (see the connection?  3 W’s, for W3. smart eh?) and basically is an effort to standardise the way pages on the internet are created to make them universally accessible for as many people as possible.

It tries to ensure that pages don’t take forever to load, use the CSS and XHTML language and this in turns allows browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome to display them all in the same way with fewer problems or errors.

At least that’s the aim.

Many agree that having this validation “certificate” allows search engines to read your site in a much more efficient manner thus the site is more friendly.

It is NOT essential to have on your site but should be remembered.  As the sites are now so dynamic, simple changes can cause errors that, should you wish to maintain this validation, must be fixed and a lot of energy can be wasted on maintaining its integrity.

Until it becomes an absolute necessity the best thing is to try and maintain it but not become unhinged if it is not applicable. Otherwise it just might drive you insane.  One thing I have terrible headaches with is apply a new plugin to my blog and it might just cause a W3C validation error.  Its impossible to tell until you try it.

There is a handy little plugin which allows you to check your W3C Validation on WordPress called “Validation” surprisingly enough. This plugin adds the error list to the admin of your blog allowing you to drill down to specific errors and correct them.

Millions of errors what do I do!?

Don’t be surprised the first time you run it if you get what seems like millions of errors.  This isn’t actually the case so don’t panic!  The errors are usually held within the template files of your site so by fixing one set of errors it will fix all the errors site wide reducing the total number rather quickly.  It all boils down to the amount of time and effort you have in making it happen.

Hint… Spend the time, make it happen!

How to check W3C validation online.

Checking your sites validation couldn’t be easier.  There are two main files that most people will ensure are validated. These are the XHTML files and the CSS files.

To check how valid your sites XHTML is go to:
http://validator.w3.org/

and to validate your CSS check out:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

On the W3c homepage there is a range of other checking tools to review, all available at http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/

For some further reading on the ins and outs of W3C Validation and the effect and benefits it can have check out Web Pro News.