Posts Tagged ‘Search Engines’

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded

Monday, July 5th, 2010

The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (”de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?

* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 8) and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).

* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.

* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

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SEO Content Writing Converting Artificial Keywords Into Natural Keywords.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

SEO Content Writing Converting Artificial Keywords Into Natural Keywords.

The Role Of Keywords Within SEO.

One of the major aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of keywords both in the Meta tags of a site and throughout the website content. In particular, the density, the placement and the actual keywords themselves are hotly debated topics. It is certainly no secret that keywords play a vital part to any good SEO program, but because search engines like Google and many others change their algorithms on such a regular basis it may seem difficult to keep up with the current best practice. However, there are some good general guidelines to follow that should always ring true regardless of how you personally approach SEO.

Keeping Abreast Of SEO Times.

It can be difficult to say at any given time what the keyword rules are when it comes to SEO content writing, but there are always common worst-practice factors that should be avoided completely. That is, search engines like Google will not only ignore your website content but they will actively penalize you for certain things.

Spam The Big NO!

Search engines do not take spam, or the sites that contain it, lightly. This is the most important thing you should remember. It used to be acceptable in the eyes of search engine robots for your content to be 100% keywords with absolutely no meaningful text. However, this practice of keyword cramming or keyword stuffing is now something that does not go unnoticed and you will face a penalty for using this technique. Yes, keywords are important but you also have to provide solid and informational text for your visitors.

So, What Is The Correct Keyword Density Then?

Of course, this leads to the question of how to determine what is considered spam and what is considered an acceptable level of keywords within your text and again this is a topic that leads to debate between SEO experts, webmasters and content writers alike. The general belief was that including a keyword within your text with a range of 5% to 10% was best practice. It certainly wouldnt get you penalized and it made it blatantly obvious that your site was relevant to that topic. However, some believed the figure could legitimately be taken as high as 20% without any negative search engine effects.

Err On The Side Of Caution.

While these high densities of around 20% may not have got you penalized at one time it is increasingly likely that they will be regarded as being geared primarily towards search engines. Search engines do not want to display sites that are created for this purpose; their aim is to display websites that are geared towards visitors. As such, sticking to a lower percentage is likely to produce better results for you.

Playing It By The Rules.

Keeping the keywords to this sort of level is an art, but it is not one that should elude most people. The art, of course, is to combine search engine optimization with informative content that will appeal to your visitors as well. In order to do this it is important that you use natural keywords.

What Are Natural Keywords And Artificial Keywords?

A natural keyword is one that you would use in everyday conversation relating to a given topic. In the case of your website, if you were to sit down and write 500 words of informative content you would find that certain words naturally creep into the article and appear several times. These are your natural keywords, but unfortunately natural keywords may not provide you with the results you require. For example, a little keyword research may prove that a natural keyword of divorce attorney is a very well searched phrase but there are also 2 million websites geared towards this key phrase. Further research may turn up the fact that Find Divorce Attorneys may be a little less popular with regards to searches but there are only 10,000 sites aiming for this keyword. This instantly improves your chances of being closer to the top of the search results and that coveted top spot.

Replacing Natural Keywords With Artificial Keywords.

So, you now need to go back over the content you have already written and see if the term Find Divorce Attorneys appears within your content. In all honesty, it is quite unlikely that it would appear more than once, if at all. You have to make it fit into your content and you have to make it appear to do so naturally. Find the areas where you specifically used the keyword Divorce Attorney and see if you can swap the phrases with just a little alteration of the surrounding text.

Start From Scratch With Your Artificial Natural Keywords.

Another method is to look for your artificial keywords before you begin and make sure you have them in the back (or the front) of your mind when you sit down to write your website content. Because you are already thinking of the phrase you want to use you will naturally include it within the content of your site. Its not a trick, although you may want to consider it a subliminal tactic if you wish, but it will work.

The Result Of Keyword Conversion.

By converting your artificial keywords into natural keywords you should be able to effectively optimize pages towards both search engines and your visitors and this will mean improved search engine rankings as well as improved conversion rates. Even a small increase in visitors combined with a small increase in conversion rates will show a good level of increase in your income so you should not overlook this technique.

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SEO Best Practice: Befriend The Directories

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Why Directories Are Important

Directories should play a major role in your SEO efforts, well, at least the big and important ones, for the following reasons:

- Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, blue cats).

- Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.

- Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.

- The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

Submitting to Directories

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

- Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your duty as a SEO worker and submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high, unfortunately.

- Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.

- Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

- You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if its worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if its at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it in the first case.

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SEO and Your Targeted Market

Monday, May 31st, 2010

SEO is a continuing process and one that should not be ignored. As you know, or will soon realize, is that the search engines are the main entry point at which your customers will find your website. But there are other issues you must be aware of to get the targeted customers that you want.

Keywords
You may have optimized your webpages and people are coming — but not many. Why? It could be the keywords you are choosing.

Choosing the right keywords take time and effort, and it is an important factor to consider. When choosing keywords you should be asking yourself -

1.) What are the exact words people are using to find the product or service that you are offering. For example: Is it refurbished tools, cheap tools, free tools, red, ugly tools — you get my meaning.

2.) Are my keywords too general, or overused. If the keywords are too general, you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just browsers. If the keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine rankings that your site will never be seen.

3.) Do you have your keywords or keyword phases in your “Title Tag”. Your keywords in the Title Page should be relevant to what your web copy relates too. If it doesn’t, you’ve just wasted an important keyword tool that the Search Engines utilize.

4. Meta Keywords Tag — Some people use the meta keywords Tag and others say that the search engines no longer use them. And still others, claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because I don’t believe all the search engines ignore this tag.

Finding the correct keywords is no easy task. However, did you think of asking the people around you what keywords or phases they would use to get to one of your web pages. You might be surprised — it may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered.

Popularity
Even though a keyword may be popular to the masses, you also must consider if it is targeting your specific market. Why? You may begin to get the traffic, but not the specific target market that will buy your products. And that is the bottom line, not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the traffic that the keyword brings.

And if the keyword is popular, you may find your web page competing with established websites — which translates into poor positioning. Thus, you could consider other smaller niche words, and still get the ranking you seek.

Experiment
You will have to experiment with the keywords that you use on your webpage/website, to determine if the keywords you are using is giving you the sales you want.

I have found testing, evaluating and re-evaluating is the name of the game of SEO. If you keep that in mind, you will begin to see the results you want.

However, once you are in the top ten of the search engines, do not think your job is done. You must continue to monitor — because the Internet is not a static environment — and people can come online that can slide your web page or website down the line in the search engines.

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SEO Tools Of The Trade

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when youre just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, and Agent Web Ranking.

WordTracker’s keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.

Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:

1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.

2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what theyre doing.

3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.

4. Helps to monitor sites youve exchanged links with, to ensure that theyre still linking to you.

Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site — by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself youll often find its not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once youve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.

Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but theyre wrong. You need to continuously check your site’s rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.

The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. Its not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.

If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can. By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade!

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SEO: Simulating Organic Growth On A Busy Schedule

Monday, April 5th, 2010

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.

Anyone involved in SEO can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: organic. What they see is successful long term strategy and search engine placement. And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth – the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is for real. Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

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SEO Leveraging Your Content On The Way to Google Heaven

Monday, March 8th, 2010

SEO Leveraging Your Content On The Way to Google Heaven

The Search Engine Optimization Quality guidelines have a direct impact on how search engines rank your website in search results and your websites page rank. While they are listed as suggestions wise people are advised to listen REAL CAREFULLY when Google talks search engine optimization guidelines. Failure to follow them may have their website from being removed from Google. Worse than death (at least you have a grave stone) banishment removes your site from Google’ and partner sites. Here are search engine optimization techniques to stay friends with Google and sleep soundly at night (while thousands of people visit your website)

Enhance Content

First of all, forget search engine ranking and website design and concentrate on website content. Create a enough web pages to give a sense of what visitors will experience on your site. Email pages to people for their comments and feedback on your subject. Soon youll have a sense of what you have to offer and how to design your website. With the emphasis on content useful information to people, website design is logical and quick.

Site Maps

How will people reach the pages on your website. A proven SEO approach is to provide a simple hierarchy and text links for your website along with a site map. If you dont have one, Google offers an online site map generator. It seems like an obvious search engine positioning technique, but worth repeating a visitor should be able to reach each page from a static text link. Your site map point to the right page and also boosts your search engine ranking not a bad deal. For large site maps over a hundred links, create smaller site maps.

Web Page Hierarchy
An important search engine marketing tool is the proper placement of titles on your web page H1, H2, H3, and so forth. These title tags guide the search engine though you page and help it determine what to read first, second and so on. The main subject of the page should be identified with an H1 title tags and secondary subject with an H2 tag and so forth. The proper use of titles benefits both the reader and search engine optimization.

Meta Tag Mania Search Engine Marketing

Do you just go nuts trying to write the perfect meta tags? Join the club! While whats in the meta tags are important.. how should we say, Its whats in the bun that counts! In other words, search engine positioning techniques such as meta tags are secondary to what written on the page. Create useful, useful, entertaining content and your meta tags will write themselves. Be sure that your pages have the words listed in the meta tags and display important names, content, or links in text not pictures. Got that? See you in Google Heaven!

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Keyword Density

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldnt be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
Go to the Edit menu and click Select All. Now go to the Tools menu and select Word Count. Write down the total number of words in the page.
Now select the Find function on the Edit menu. Go to the Replace tab and type in the keyword you want to find. Replace that word with the same word, so you dont change the text.
When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

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