Learn Something New Every Day –V7N's SEO Tip of the Day

[mjtaylor]

I’ve read more than one thread lately on “advanced” seo – mostly looking for the latest techniques or tips beyond the basics. But what does "advanced SEO" mean? A SEOmoz post and survey explores possible answers: Does it mean “SEO secrets,” or “technical” SEO … does it mean new methods or techniques that are simply new to you?

I suppose I fall into the “technical” camp, as I think using an .htaccess file to make a 301 redirect is more advanced, say, than adding alt tags to images, using an h1 tag for headings, crafting a good title tag, and other “basics” of SEO. I also fall into the cutting edge, camp – as the use of rich snippets to ask Google to display reviews in SERPs seems to me to be advanced, but perhaps it’s just the latest trend.

Give it some thought and add your opinion to the survey.

[juliensimon]

Faster is better, for both users and search engines.
Make sure your website, your IP and DNS are configured correctly so that it loads in a timely manner.
Here are some tools you can use:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/
http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

That is more than enough to get all the information you need to fasten your website loading time.
In a nutshell, Try to limit the size of pictures and the number of files one page is loading as most servers only load 4 files at a time.

I just did a client's website and all his images were between 200KB to 300KB. The client was loading almost 2MB of files just from the home page. After compressing the pictures and reducing the amount of files, we went down to 500KB per load and his website went from loading all the files in 3 seconds to less than 1.

Time to get to work and make your website faster. It will be a good thing all around as your visitors will thank you for it.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Before going crazy using the HTML title attribute on your pages consider how useful it is to everyone. Providing accessibility can also improve the search engine optimization of your page. This article covers the HTML title attribute.

The HTML title attribute is problematic. It is problematic because it is not well supported in some crucial respects, even though it has been with us for over 13 years. With the rise of touch screen interfaces, the usefulness of this attribute has decreased. The accessibility of the title attribute has fallen victim to a unfortunate combination of poor browser support, poor screen reader support and poor authoring practices.

Situations in which the the title attribute is not useful due to lack of support:

•Displaying information for web content viewed on mobile phone browsers. Typically in desktop browsers title attribute content is displayed as a tooltip. From what I could find, tooltip display is not supported in any mobile browser and alternative visual methods of accessing title attribute content are not supported.
•Providing information for people who cannot use a mouse. Typically in desktop browsers, title attribute content is displayed as a tooltip. Although the tooltip behaviour has been supported for 10+ years, no browser as yet has implemented a practical method to display title attribute content using the keyboard.
•Using it on most HTML elements to provide information for users of a variety of assistive technologies. Access to title attribute information is not supported uniformly by screen readers.

Using the HTML title attribute

The title attribute
Link titles
Supplementing link text with the title attribute

Some times making your site accessible has SEO benefits to :
Link Title Attribute and its SEO Benefit
Image Alt Text Vs. Image Title : What’s the Difference?

[juliensimon]

It's common knowledge that unique content is a must for SEO. You knew that and spent the time to write unique valuable content. Great. It has been a few weeks/months since you wrote that content and you want to see if you content is still unique. If your content is valuable, it is possible that somebody copied and pasted your content on their site.

Is this a big deal?
Most likely not - Google has probably indexed your site with the content and determined that you were the original source for that content.

Should you be concerned about it?
My answer is yes, for three reasons:

• It is possible that a popular site becomes the original source of content in Google's eye, especially if they scrape the content soon after you released it
• They may rank higher than you for the same content search
• It is annoying as hell that you spent the time to write quality unique content and somebody is just piggy backing your work

How can I check?
The simple way is to copy some of your content on Google and see what websites show up
You can use some tools such as:

• http://www.copyscape.com (this will check dup content for your entire website)
• http://www.articlechecker.com/
• http://training.seobook.com/duplicate-content-checker

If you find a website that has copied your content, what can you do about it?
The frank answer is: not much.
However, there are things you can do and if you bug them enough, they might remove it:

• File a DCMA complaint with Google**
• If somebody copied your content on a Blogger website, use this link instead: http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html
• If it is on a wordpress platform: http://en.wordpress.com/complaints/
• on a squidoo page: http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo/66785671-Report-Spam
• report it to Yahoo: http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/us/details.html

My advice would be: contact the webmaster first and try to deal with it on a personal basis. You can bring duplicate content all the way to court but you don't want to, unless it is a vital problem for your company.

**When filing a DMCA claim, you'll need to include some details such as:

What part of your content has been duplicated.
URL of the dup content
Your name, address, telephone number, and email address
A statement that says that "you believe in good faith that the use of the content that you claim to infringe your copyright is not authorized by law, or by the copyright owner or such owner’s agent" and that "under penalty of perjury, that all of the information contained in your Infringement Notice is accurate, and that you are either the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf."
An electronic signature

[DocC]

This tip isn't really SEO related, but it's something that everyone should think about every time they go online.

There are many risks involved in online surfing. Malware, such as viruses, trojans or spyware, is one consideration that most of us are familiar with. But there is another, very prevalent threat... theft of information:



During the second World War, the phrase "Loose lips sink ships" became well known, as a campaign to prevent people from talking about the departure date, ship's name or destination, which could put information in the hands of the enemy. What most of the public didn't realize is that most of the enemy's intelligence actually came from far more innocuous items.


A comment about a sailor having to work late the night before departure, loading eleven truckloads of foodstuffs, coupled with a complaint from someone else about the fairness of only 50 men being tasked with that job, when there were 2,000 others that got to be home with their loved ones their last night ashore, could readily bracket the size of the vessel, the departure date and the number of troops aboard... perhaps even the probable destination.



Neither comment, by itself, disclosed anything of value, but in combination, could result in many deaths at sea.

The same is true of internet security. When one party requests a lot of personal information, it may raise a flag of suspicion, whereas a name and paypal account (which is, after all, just an email address), combined with a wealth of information that can often be unearthed via some aggressive search engine use, can put together a lot of information. That could allow identity theft, the cleaning out of an account or two or worse.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Just look around any forum and when people ask about improving the SEO of their blog there is a whole band wagon of people that answer "Install All in One SEO plugin" or some other plugin as if all your SEO problems will be solved.

The sad truth is this plugin (or any other you install) is not beneficial to your blog unless you know how to use it properly, understand how it works and determine if the added processing time of loading the blog is worth it.

First of all, if you theme is not coded well to start with no plugin is going to help you. Not just talking about using valid coding here, I'm talking about bloated coding, a bunch of external source files, calling up too much stuff before the page can be rendered in the browser etc..

Do you really require all those gizmos (plugins)?

Social networking connect icons.
Do you really need every single social networking site icon? Does your target audience even use Twitter? Facebook? MySpace?

Feeds from other sites.
Scared to outlink because of the old fear of loosing the visitor to the other site so you include feeds from other sites to entertain your visitors? a) If the feed is down and the coding is not done correctly your site is going to stall on loading. b) Linking out is a good thing! Especially to a related theme site or a reliable source of information.

Fancy Picture Galleries or Slideshows
If you don't optimize the pictures before uploading them to the web server you create a slow loading site.

Could go on and on but the point is: Before you install and use one or more plugin on your blog really consider if you know how to use it properly and will it truly be beneficial to your site.

Tip inspired by: Why Plugins Can’t Help You to Rank Better and What You Can Do About It

[mjtaylor]

If you’re reading this column to learn more before you hire an SEO, you may find this post, How To Avoid SEO Snake Oil, of interest. Internet marketer Dan Joubert warns against some common tactics of the less than ethical SEOs:

• Watch Out For Guaranteed Ranking
• Bait And Switch
• Promising Results in Thirty Days Or Less
• Poor Keyword Selections
• They Know Most Businesses Don’t Track Sales

Read the entire post: http://danjoubert.com/index.php/arti...-seo-snake-oil

__________________

[mjtaylor]

How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?

Domain age. It’s not when you bought your domain but when Google first saw it. Even a registrar can’t always see whois data, Google Matt Cutts says in this video. It’s much “easier” for Google to ask “when did we first see a website, when did we first crawl it?" Cutts said.

Google's Spam Fighting Chief doesn’t think you should obsess about a domain’s age, but Cutts does recommend that you buy a domain, and immediately create a placeholder page. When your site is launched, Google will have already indexed your domain for a couple of months.

Watch the video:

+ YouTube Video

[mjtaylor]

SEOs have long wondered whether social networking links influence SERPs. Now we know. Twitter and Facebook may not pass PageRank in their links, per se, but they do have an influence on SEO, according to Google and Bing interviews with Danny Sullivan published this week.

For example, if you are an authority on Twitter or your Tweets are often retweeted, Google is using that as a ranking signal. Facebook Page links may also carry some ranking weight with Google.

"Who You Are On Twitter Counts," Sullivan says.

Both Google and Bing tell me that who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet.

Anyone who is using social networking as part of their marketing strategy will probably want to read the full post to learn what is really working: http://searchengineland.com/what-soc...ly-count-55389. And anyone who isn’t using Twitter and FB will definitely want to wake up and smell the SMOffee.

We have a discussion thread on it here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/...uence-seo.html

[Eponymous]

Your success in the search engines depends on picking the proper keywords. Picking words that are too broad will not bring you quality traffic. Picking broad words will be hard to win. Picking phrases that are too specific will not bring you a lot of traffic. The secret is to pick words that are not too competitive, have a good deal of traffic, and right for your website.

When to Research Keywords
Keywords need to be picked before you build your website. This allows you to incorporate them into your website structure, links, file names without having to rebuild everything.

Where to Research Keywords
The best free tool for this is Google Keyword tool. You can learn about competitiveness, traffic, seasonality of term. To get started with your keyword research visit https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool will show you one hundred phrases, but you can improve on this by filtering out words and sorting by competition or traffic.

Evaluating Keywords
Keywords need to be researched and evaluated before your site is built. Things that you want to look ate are the competitiveness, seasonality, and search volume. You might also want to look at the average CPC when evaluating terms that are similar. Using the above tool you might find that the terms that you would have used are very low traffic or they are very competitive and will take a long time to get traffic. You might find that your keyword only pulls traffic for a couple months a year. Learning about your keywords before you build is important. Keywords must fit the purpose of your website to be of any value to you. If you are selling something you want to use words that people who are looking to buy will use.

Applying Keywords
Finally when applying the keywords to your content, limit the keywords per page to two, and use synonyms of your keywords. The more focused the page, the better it will rank.

In Sum
The purpose of your website needs to be taken in consideration when picking your keywords. Also you need to look at the competitiveness, seasonality, and search volume of the phrases. Limit phrases to two per page and use synonmys of your keywords Pick words/ phrases that are low to moderate in competitiveness and have a fair amount of traffic. Avoid overly broad and competive terms.

[snakeair]

I don't know if anyone has read about this one yet but Google is dumbing things down for us a little. Take a look at this blog post for our Tip of the day on this COLD saturday afternoon.

Google Lets You Dumb Down Your Search Results With “Reading Level” Filter

Google has added a new advanced search filter named “reading level” to the advanced search page. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable after spotting a thread at the Google Web Search Help forum where a Google Web Search product manager somewhat announced this feature.

The feature lets you filter or annotate the search results by reading level. The reading levels include basic, intermediate and advanced. You can either have Google label or annotate the results with those labels, only show basic results, only show intermediate results or only show advanced results.

For a searcher, this will allow them to find more tailored content for their research level. For example, if you are in an introductory course on biology, you may want to select basic or intermediate results for your specific query. But if you are a professor in biology, you may want to select advanced results.

For a webmaster, it might be fun to see how advanced or basic your....

Continued at: Googles Search Results Filter

If you have any comments, please post them on the blog itself or create a fresh thread here on V7N so we can discuss this.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

When someone asks about building backlinks on forums there is a bunch of replies go for dofollow links! (BTW: there is no such thing as dofollow, a link either has the nofollow attribute or not)

You are cutting off a whole lot of potential traffic if you do this. Readers of the nofollow links blog/article probably don't even know what nofollow is. Just those who are into SEO do. Those that don't know the difference are going to click your link if you wrote something interesting in the comment, tweeted something interesting or left a review. They want to know who is behind that comment.

You all are doing link building to push yourself up in the search results. If you have a backlink profile of just sites that do not use the nofollow attribute don't you think Google is going to figure this out?

But thinking about how link profiles are built up, something you might think is the perfect link profile, Google may consider to be unnatural. So in theory, building high-quality links which boost your website’s credibility, should help to build Google’s trust in you – and let’s face it, it’s not a bad start! But if you’re competing at the top end of Google for competitive keywords and you’re looking for that extra 2% or so to push you forward, perhaps the fact that you have very few nofollow links will appear unnatural to Google and could be the difference between being first and second or third.

Does a Perfect Link Profile Look Too Perfect? Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Nofollow Links!

Diversify your back links. If you are going to leave a comment, review or request a link back, be more concerned about how that link relates to your own site and what kind of targetted traffic it can bring.

[mjtaylor]

Now that we know Twitter and Facebook directly affect SEO, it’s time to ramp up your sphere of influence. How do you get more followers and fans?

My approach to Facebook is to build my personal contacts and then to invite my new friends to like a Page. Here’s what I do. I search for “new friends” among my existing friends or among Groups and Pages that I belong to. If we have more than a few friends in common, I know there’s a good chance they will accept my friendship. But to be sure, I include a personal message that says briefly what we have in common and why I think we might want to be in touch. For someone in my business, I might say, since we’re both SEOs I thought we should be connected. Later I can invite them to join my Page (if I ever get around to creating one!) or that of a client.

It’s also important to categorize people as you add them. Facebook allows you to organize your friends into lists. I treat my lists as categories – one for friends and family, one for dance buddies, one for SEO and network, and so on. For dancers, I even have separate lists by geography. After all, I don’t want to bother an Atlanta dancer with a last minute invitation to an Asheville event. Lists allow you to send invitations to a large number of friends at once, which is much more efficient than sending individually.

You can build followers on Twitter by following people whom you would like to have as followers. Many will add you when they see you’re following them.

And of course, it’s more important than ever to have icons on your website that invite people to follow you on Twitter and join your Facebook Page.

[mjtaylor]

Content is king on social media, too. If you want to attract and keep followers, your Tweets must be of interest. Even better than offering them a link to an article or blog post: engage your followers as Jill Whelan does with a weekly question. SEO expert Whelan asks a Twitter Question of the week.

Today’s question is: Which SEO recommendations also make a website more usable to people? You can see the answers and add your own here: #TQW) More than 7,000 people follow Whelan. I’m one of the crowd now. Follow her and find out how she does it. If you haven't got a great Tweet for today, you can retweet a great tip from an authority. Just as it's important to follow authority bloggers, it can be very helpful to follow and emulate authority Twits, I mean, Twitter users.

If you have tips on how to increase your contacts on Twitter and Facebook, please pop over to this thread: Friends, Followers and Fans, and add how you expand your circle of influence.

[mjtaylor]

Great Example of Link Bait – Choose Your Flavor And Make It Different

Coke does it, Seagram's does it. You should, too, says ToiletPaperEntreprenuer Mike Michalowicz. Some may consider the message of this video to be more marketing than SEO, per se, but the same principle applies to link bait – no one’s going to bite the same old same old stale bait – you have to be different if you want to reel in quality links.

In this Video, Choose The Flavor of Your Business, Michalowicz certainly demonstrates that his flavor is rather different, to say the least. Quirky to the point of embarrassment – mine not his – his style, message and burps got my attention and some links from this thread.

His entire site is an inspiration, but you want to check out the articles and blog.

[mjtaylor]

If you've strayed from Bing's Webmaster Tools because they dropped the link reports, then you will be happy to know they've added it back in, Barry Schwartz reports:

To access it, you need Siliverlight and to login to Bing Webmaster Tools. Then you have to verify your site, then click on Index and then on Links on the left.

In July Bing revamped their webmaster tools and dropped the link reports. Then in October they demoed the new link reports but didn't say when it would go live. About two and a half months later, we got them!

Read the rest of the post for full information and a graphic walkthrough of the new link tools: Links Now In Bing Webmaster Tools.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Before you run away because this tip involves including accessibility in your website/blog's design and setup, have a read of this article. You will be amazed how accessiblity, usability and search engine optimization are all interlinked.

...First of all, you may be surprised to learn that web accessibility and SEO are linked. Although web accessibility is primarily focused on supporting your disabled site visitors, an accessible site also gains distinct additional benefits — including opening up the site to those accessing the web using portable devices (PDAs) and mobile phones; those using different software, hardware, platforms, or low speed connections. To understand why this is and how it affects SEO, we need to look at one of the basic principles of accessible web design - namely that an accessible site is designed to be machine-readable. Since accessible designers do not make any assumptions about what devices will be used to access the site, they will create an underlying page structure that works as well in a text-only browser as it does within a screen reader or a cutting edge graphical browser.

Search engine spiders are also software and share fundamental similarities to browser rendering engines or any software which first parses markup and then renders, or analyses, the resultant data, according to its own internal rules. So it follows that accessible sites have SEO benefits built in right from the start...

Nine Accessible Steps To Search Engine Optimisation

For how usability comes into the mix: Why You Should Never Forget About Web Usability (SEO Related)

[snakeair]

Here is todays tip. Sorry it's a little late but i was xmas shopping earlier.

It is common knowledge for many search engine optimizers to put keywords in text links, because, quite simply, search engine representatives have made this recommendation for many years. However, many search engine optimization (SEO) professionals go overboard and put too many keywords in site navigation, making site navigation too difficult to use or scan. And, on the flip side, many professionals outside of the search industry remove important keywords from navigation, frustrating SEO professionals.

What inspired my article today was Julie Joyce’s Should We Stop Focusing On Keyword Driven Anchors article on Search Engine Land. In her article, she stated:

I understand that her article was referring to external links—links from objective, third party websites to your website. As I read her article, I realized that...

Continued at: Keywords, Text Links & Navigation Design

[snakeair]

This type may get you a little confused but i think it's explained well in the blog post with some screenshots. Are you organized when you start doing keyword researching? Check out this blog post for some tips using Excel.

Creating Keyword Opportunity Lists with Excel Custom Sort

Using Find & Select and Custom Sort in excel for keyword research helps a simple list of keywords turn into an organized cluster, and everyone likes organized clusters right?

I use this method to show clients new blog post ideas, landing pages they could create and a smarter way to organize their site based on keyword research.

Ready? Let’s do research for a recipe blog. The holidays are around the corner and it’s time to start preparing, but what should we write about? Can we create any posts that will help for after the holidays?

Continued at: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/creating-k...el-custom-sort

Any questions that you have about this, please post a comment on the blog post or create a thread on V7N forum.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

It's that time of year! Time to set aside some time and perform a SEO site audit to see what improvements you need to tackle next year. This isn't actually a yearly thing, you should be doing this every few months, but seeing the new year is just around the corner how about making a New Year's resolution to do an audit of your website or blog before January 1st so you can started at the first of the year.

If you don't know what is included in a SEO site audit, Search Engine Watch has posted an article: The Art and Science of SEO Site Audits

Make your list and check it twice, just like Santa does.