SEO Tips & Information

One way of building backlinks to your website is by making press releases. When you make a press release, you aren’t writing an announcement for publication in real newspapers, instead you are writing text containing good keywords making an announcement related to your site or the products your company sells. You submit your text to a press release site like http://www.free-press-release.com or http://www.prweb.com and you end up with a whole page dedicated to your release with a link back to your site.

Submitting press releases is in similar in some ways to article submission or directory submission.

The advantage of press releases over article submissions are that it’s often easier to write a press release than an article since you can simply write about events happening on your site or the launch of a new product. Press releases can often be shorter (300 words or so) compared to an article. Another advantage is that you can submit your own press releases with links back to your own site. Article directories often require articles to be submitted by a third party.

The disadvantages of press releases compared to article submissions are that it’s usually free to submit an article and you can also include links with anchor text in the signature paragraph of the article. With press release sites you usually have to pay a dollar upwards to include a link with anchor text.

The advantage over directory submission is that you can make multiple submissions to a press release site whereas with directories you can usually just get one link with one set of anchor text back to your site.

In my experience, submitting to press release sites is pretty successful. Your release will be linked from the press release site’s homepage and will be indexed very quickly. Often the homepage will have a high PR - 7 or 8 in some cases - and your article will usually do pretty well in SERPs for the day or so that the article remains linked on the homepage. Some of the press release sites also provide easy social bookmarking options allowing you to build a few extra links to your press release, giving a slightly longer term SEO benefit.

For more link-building tips, see: Building links by commenting on blogs and Building links using forums.

Link-building

I recently came across someone who was really chuffed he’d achieved #1 position on a major search engine (MSN) for the phrase Search Engine Optimisation. He got short shrift from some members of the webmaster community when the search volumes for the keyword were pointed out. There really weren’t a huge number of searches for the keyword since “search engine optimisation” is the British English spelling whereas most of the English-speaking world use “search engine optimization“, i.e. they spell optimization with a z.

Using Google’s keyword tool to look for monthly search volumes ..

search engine optimization - 300,000 searches
search engine optimisation - 18,000 searches

This means that, on Google at least, less than 5% of the searches are for the UK-specific spelling.

Now, you could assume the guy was a bit foolish to publicise his supposed success on a forum with an international group of members. The more knowledgeable members soon pointed out he was top of a very small heap.

On the other hand, you could think that the guy was being very astute. He was at least ruling the #1 position for a good keyword, even if the number of searches isn’t huge. If you aren’t on page 1 for a keyword then really you aren’t going to get much traffic. It’s better to concentrate on being on page 1 for a pretty good keyword than be on page 10 for a superb keyword with 20 times the search volume.

Making searches localised is a good way of reducing the pool of competitors - so “search engine optimisation” is easier than “search engine optimization” and “adsense optimisation” is easier to rule than “adsense optimization”. Of course, localising results doesn’t just involve choosing locale-specific spellings. For example, you might choose to concentrate on the keyword “web design london” rather than the ultra-competitive “web design”. Think carefully when choosing keywords for a website and, with young websites at least, start optimising for less competitive phrases first.

General SEO

Lately it’s been highlighted to me what the difference is between internet marketing and SEO or search engine optimization. It all started as I’ve got a lot of work piling up for the next two or three months so I contacted an SEO company to see if they could build a few links for one of my sites.

In the past couple of months, the SERPs performance of one of my sites has been dropping slightly, mainly because a lot of the links are from forums and blogs. Over time these kinds of links tend to be devalued so you need a regular top-up of links. Continually adding links can be time-consuming so I wanted to subcontract the effort.

I guess I should have expected a big sell in response to what I though was a simple request - just build me some links please! However, the guy I contacted gave me a useful kick with respect to the way I’ve been looking at my website and sales strategy. His advice highlighted the difference between internet marketing and SEO to me.

I’ve come across people who sold themselves as SEO experts before. Most of the SEO people I’ve dealt with have been highly professional but a small number are somewhat unscrupulous. With some SEO people, a client consultation usually starts with “what keywords do you want us to aim at?”. A price is then quoted, say $300 a month, and away the SEO people go doing what they do. I’m betting a lot of the time, the keywords people choose in such a consultation are so easy to rank for the SEO involved is non-existent. All the SEO people need to do is put the phrase in the homepage title tag, mention the phrase a couple of times in the web copy and hey presto the site is on page 1. After that they get $300 a month for doing nothing but playing on the client’s paranoia about losing rank if the SEO stops.

The internet marketing consultant I’m dealing with now though is taking a longer look at the whole way I’m tryng to sell products via my website. Here are the key points he looking into …

Improved, Extra Keywords

He’s choosing new, extra keywords and agreeing them with me. The keywords aren’t easy either - 30,000,000 or more results. Then he’s coming up an appropriate set of web pages and optimised web copy. 301 redirects are being planned where URLs need to be changed to improve medium to long term performance.

Writing Web Copy that Sells

He’s looking at the selling aspects of my existing web copy. Am I highlighting in the text the key selling features I talk about when he quizzes me? If not, let’s plan a change. As it turns out, I’m not highlighting the key selling features. I’ve fallen into the trap of achieving a certain level of performance with my site then leaving the site alone instead of continuing to add and tweak the content.

Improved Product Pricing Strategy

He’s looking at the sales and pricing strategy for my products. Am I charging the right price? Unexpectedly perhaps, he’s saying I should raise prices to avoid an association between low cost and low quality. This increases my paranoia about increased price = reduced sales, so he’s showing balls in giving me the advice.

Strategies for Adding Content

He’s coming up with good tips about how to keep the site growing, e.g. by adding a section to which I can periodically post articles or through my customer testimonials page. As people write testimonials, I get good, indexable content for free so why not make the most of it, perhaps by adding testimonials to the home page.

These and other tips I’m being given highlight that SEO is just one of many marketing tools that can be used for an online business. You can optimise all you like but your overall marketing and sales strategy need to be clear before you begin so that you are optimising the right content in the first place.

General SEO

If you browse webmaster forums like DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll sooner or later come across people stating that “web copy must be semantically balanced” or “web copy must bear in mind latent semantic indexing” principles if you want to do well in SERPs. The reality is that using the word “semantic” just makes things sound more scientific and complicated than they need to be.

To strip “latent semantic indexing” back to something simple and understandable, the first thing to do is note that the word “semantic” has the meaning “meaning“. So when an SEO expert says web copy should semantically flow, he really means you write about a single topic on a web page. For example, if you are writing a paragraph about expensive italian leather shoes, don’t put in a little story about how your dog was sick on the carpet this morning: keep the theme consistent.

The second thing to note about the need for decent semantic balancing or flow is that in a lot of ways it boils down to the old advice about not indulging in keyword stuffing. When you write web page copy, don’t keep repeating your chosen keywords so many times that the copy reads unnaturally. If the text reads OK to you and your friends it’s going to be OK to the search engines.

The whole idea behind the major search engines like Google moving towards a latent semantic indexing alogrithm was to improve the quality and accuracy of the search results. For example, if someone searches for “cuddly toy animals”, Google might also include pages about “cuddly toy gorilla” in the results since the phrases have similar meanings. I could have said that “cuddly toy animals” and “cuddly toy gorilla” were semantically related but that would have just have sounded too complicated.

Of course when optimising a web page for keywords - either in the on-page web copy or in the off-page links and anchor text - it doesn’t hurt to give the search engines a helping hand, so build a few links on “cuddly toy animal”, a few for “cuddly toy gorilla” and a few for “cuddly teddybear” if you have a page about cuddly toy animals.

Ultimately, search engines like Google want to give the best results they can to searchers so write web pages with a decent amount of textual content and a decent number of variations of your chosen keywords. Remember to keep your web copy reading naturally and take the opportunity of using alt tags for images to provide variations. Apart from the advice on alt tags, you’d get the same advice if you took an evening class in essay writing or creative writing: like human readers, the search engines like well written text.

General SEO, Keywords

Earlier this month Google announced a beta rollout of some changes in Adsense. From April 2009, some Adsense-enabled websites will be taking part in a new interest-based Adsense allowing ads to be more targetted to the user/ browser. As the year progresses, if the beta is successful, interest-based advertising will be applied to more websites. As yet there’s no list of which websites are being included in the beta. I know a friend who has a high-traffic site, with several thousand page views a day, has been emailed by Google asking him to update his privacy policy, so perhaps Google is only including high-traffic/ high-earning sites in the beta.

The way interest-based advertising work will work is that if a browser visits sports websites for example, then when a shopping site is visited, any Adsense on the site might be geared towards sales of sports clothes and shoes. If users are seeing ads more closely aligned with their interests then they might be more tempted to click on the ads so both Google and the site owner get more advertising income. The internet user also gets to see more of the things he likes.

The downside of interest-based advertising is a small loss of privacy. To make interest-based advertising work, Google needs to track the sites you visit and store this information in cookies on your PC. All browsers provide options to delete cookies and browsing history. When this happens, the interest-based advertising will be back to square one until a sufficient browsing history can be built up again. Most users however, simply don’t delete cookies so Google will have a good opportunity to build up a record of a lot of people’s browsing history. For those of us who want to delete the trail of where we’ve been with our browsers but still take advantage of interest-based advertising, we can install a special plug-in that prevents the Google cookie from being deleted as well as letting you control the kinds of data Google tracks.

Some people will no doubt be paranoid about Google collecting data. The reality is that this kind of data has probably been available to Google for a long time. More and more people now have a iGoogle login or have the Google toolbar installed giving Google the opportunity to log browsing data every time a site is visited. This latest interest-based advertising simply shifts the game from an opt-in scenario to an opt-out scenario, i.e. you’re going to get tracked unless you decide to turn the feature off using Google’s preferences manager plug-in.

As an opt-out scheme, interest-based advertising might sound a bit scary but the reality is that the non-internet world has been running an opt-out trend tracking scheme since credit cards were introduced. Every time you shop at Sainsbury’s or order stuff online, the seller and credit card company get access to a ton of data covering what you purchased and where you purchased all nicely tied up with your name and home address. Google are unlikely to gain access to anything like such a rich pool of data and will only be able to tie up browsing trends with browsers and not specific people. Hopefully, with interest-based advertising Adsense users can look forward to better ads and increased income.

For tips on making the most of Adsense, see Adsense Optimisation.

Adsense Optimisation

One of the often repeated myths about Google PageRank is that these days it has no effect on the performance of a website in the SERPs. Today Google is supposed to treat content as king and in some ways this is true. Type a search phrase into Google and look at the results. As you go down from position 1 to 10 you’ll find that the PR of the sites in the better positions isn’t always higher than the PR of sites in the lower positions. Sometimes sites with a PR of 0 will outperform pages with PR 5 for a particular keyword. If you write a program to analyse the top 50 results though you’ll usually see a general trend towards lower PageRank values as you go further down the results.

With a little thought it should be pretty obvious that PageRank alone can’t determine the position of a website in the SERPs. Simply because two pages contain the same keywords and have the same pagerank doesn’t mean they’ll appear next to each other in the search results. Read my top 10 SEO factors post for more information on how non-PageRank factors affect the performance of a page in SERPs.

There is one way in which PageRank can have a BIG effect on the performance of a website though. Pages in the supplemental index are unlikely to turn up in the SERPs except for very obscure keywords. The best - if not the only - way of pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get backlinks from pages with decent PR. The higher the PR of the pages you can get links from the better. With smaller websites that have only 10 or 20 pages, a home page with a PR of 2 or 3 and a half-decent internal linking strategy, most of the site’s pages will be in Google’s main index.

However, with large database-driven sites that have thousands of pages, usually the only way of improving the performance of the site and pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get some high PR links to the homepage and to node pages within the site. Node pages are pages which link to lots of other pages in the site. In a site like a web directory, an example of a node page is a category page. For large sites, getting links from pages with PR 6 and above are ideal.

You can find the supplemental index ratio for a site using the site: command. First type the following into the Google search box to find the number of pages in Google’s main index for a website (replace www.dowebseo.com by the URL of the domain you want to examine). Note the number of results returned.

site:/www.dowebseo.com

Then type in:

site:www.dowebseo.com

and again note the number of results returned. The ratio of these numbers gives the supplemental index ratio for a site. For a large site with 30,000 pages and a homepage PR of 3 or less it’s fairly common to get a ratio of 0.075 meaning that less than 1% of the pages on the site regularly turn up in the SERPS. Getting some good links from high PR pages should pull more pages out of the supplemental index within a few weeks. For tips on link-building and ideas on where to find high PR pages, see link-building using dofollow blogs and link-building using dofollow forums.

General SEO, Google PageRank, Link-building

A couple of database-generated sites I own have in excess of 50,000 pages each. Building links for these sites requires a different strategy to link-building for my smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages.

With smaller sites you can quite easily build deep links to the inner pages of the site as well as links to the website’s home page. After building links to the main pages on a small site for a few months, you should end up with a good number of landing pages that do well in SERPs.

With larger sites though like PHPLd-based directories or PADKit-enabled software archives, it isn’t practical to build external links to all the pages on the site. The internal linking within larger sites is critical to the website’s performance in SERPs. Ideally, each page should get a decent number of links from some of the other pages within the site. As with all link-building, the best links are those from pages on a similar topic.

Link Back To Category Pages

Almost all large websites have a tree-like structure. The homepage links to category pages, the category pages to sub-categories and then finally, in the case of a software archive, to details pages. In the case of a software archive, each details page will show information about a single software package. The main link juice or PageRank for the site is likely to be provided by the external links to the site’s homepage. The PR will then flow like water through to the category and subcategory pages to the details pages. The link juice can be better distributed around the site by linking back from the deeper pages to the higher level pages as shown in this picture.

Link Related Pages

If the internal linking strategy ends here though, each details page is getting only a small share of the available link juice. By the time the link juice gets to the details pages it’s been divided up many times so that there’s little left. More work must be done to maximise the link juice to the details pages. The details pages are the real content of the site and the pages you really want to do well in SERPs.

A really good way of improving the performance of details pages is to link related details pages together. For example, on a software archive, if a text editor program is listed on one details page, the page could also link to 10 other text editor details pages on the same site. Luckily, when software is submitted to a PAD-enabled software archive, the PAD file lists keywords for the software so with a bit of programming you should be able to quite easily match programs based on keywords.

Link-building, Uncategorized

Google provides a really handy keyword tool to help find search volumes each month for specific keywords. The most obvious use of the tool is to find the best keywords to optimise your website for. All you need do is type in a possible keyword, e.g. “small business software” that you think people will search for then press the Get Keyword Ideas button to get a list of volumes for your keyword plus similar variations. Often you’ll find that the variations will have higher traffic volumes than the one you originally entered.

By picking keywords with higher traffic volumes, the theory is that you will get more visitors to your sites. In practice though, high volume keywords often have a lot of competition and getting your site into the coveted Google page one of SERPs can be difficult. The trick is to pick keywords which have a reasonable balance between search volumes and competitiveness so that you can get a decent amount of traffic without doing too much optimisation such as link-building. Finding this balance between search engine traffic and competitiveness is quite a difficult exercise. Although the Google Adwords Keyword Tool gives good figures for search volumes, it only gives a very rough guide to the level of competition. See the picture below: you get a nice number for the number of searches but only a roughly-scaled green bar for competitiveness.

A second use of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is as a research tool when thinking of a new market or product to attack. For example if you were thinking of designing a new fishing float and wanted to see how big the potential market was, you could look at the search volumes for words like “fishing float”. If the search volumes are low this can tell you either that the market is very small or that running a business selling ONLY fishing floats will be very difficult. Only recently, I’ve been asked for advice on internet marketing by a company who had invested thousands in developing a product for which there was no significant market. The product is excellent and worth patenting but with a little research it’s obvious that they need to develop a whole range of matching products to have a viable business.

Keywords

In my link building tips post about dofollow blog commenting, I forgot to mention one other thing to look for when commenting on a blog post - the Top Commentators Widget. If a Wordpress blog has this widget installed then the blog will show a sitewide list of the top commenters with links back to their sites. This means if you are in the top 3 to 5 commentators you get a free sitewide link to your website. Obviously, if you want to be in the top commenters list you need to get your comments approved so spamming is definitely a no-no.

If a Wordpress blog has the Top Commentators Widget installed, it’ll have a “Top Commentators” title on each page. If you make good comments on the blog then you are more likely to able to go back and make more since the blog owner obviously likes getting comments the widget is installed. Revisiting the blog regularly and making comments should allow to get a nice site-wide link from a blog with good PageRank if you’re lucky.

Link-building, Wordpress SEO Tips