SEO Tips & Information

By default, a Wordpress installation is nofollow, i.e. any comments on the blog will have the rel=”external nofollow” attribute applied. There are a number of reasons for going dofollow and rewarding people who make a good comment with a decent backlink. One easy way to make a Wordpress blog dofollow is to install the Do Follow Plugin by Semiologic. Follow these instructions:-

1. Go to http://www.semiologic.com/software/dofollow/ and download the sem-dofollow.zip plugin.
2. Unzip the plugin to a folder on your hard drive.
3. Upload the unzipped plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder for your Wordpress blog.
4. Log in to the admin section of your blog and activate the Do Follow plugin

Your blog is now dofollow!

Take advantage of your new dofollow status and add your blog to one of the many dofollow directories. Hopefully you’ll soon start getting decent comments. Your life will be made a lot easier though if you also activte the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress too.

admin Wordpress SEO Tips

Whenever you ask for advice on SEO for a website, the main advice you get given on webmaster and SEO forums is to keep building links. This is usually closely followed by advice to keep adding fresh content. Link building is an essential part of SEO - having great content is good but nothing beats a nice set of links from high PR pages.

As far as adding new content regularly, if your site ISN’T a blog, I’ve never found that adding lots of fresh content has significantly improved the site’s ultimate performance in SERPs.

What I mean is that if your site is selling a particular product or service it’s usually optimised for a specific set of keywords. If I have a page optimised for a specific keyword then the performance of that page in SERPs doesn’t seem to improve a great deal just because I add extra pages to my site on a similar topic. The extra pages might start to do well for the keywords they target but the older pages on my site remain pretty static in SERPs unless I go and get more incoming backlinks. The hard part about adding new pages is to make the pages work as well as your existing pages. After all there’s likely to only be a smallish set of keywords that are worth attacking in SERPs.

I’ve come across some people who were a bit overkeen on adding new content to their websites. I’ve seen sites almost turned into article directories where they add a new page containing a short article every couple of days. As more and more articles get added, the article contents gets increasingly irrelevant to the main topic of the site. The articles will pick up long-tail traffic but the traffic will be mainly junk as the visitors will land on a page with little relation to the main purpose of the site. Some people put in more effort and try to write more and more  landing pages for different keywords. Often they end up falling into the same trap as the pseudo-article directory approach, the keywords on each page get less and less relevant and although the number of visitors increases, the visitors are less and less likely to stay on the site and buy the goods on offer.

Some tactics for adding fresh content can have a negative effect on SEO and should be avoided. Never be tempted to add a directory (like a PHPLd directory) to your site expecting that as people submit listings your content will grow and improve your SERPs performance. Directories are unlikely to be looked on favourably by Google.

In most of my site’s niches my main competitors have very static sites with homepages that change very infrequently - sometimes not for months. This doesn’t seem to harm them and their position in SERPs is very stable.

Of course, regularly adding fresh content (new pages or additional or altered text on existing pages) does have advantages. If your site is updated often, Google will reindex your site more often, meaning that any changes you make will be reflected in the SERPS more quickly. For example, if Google reindexes your homepage every day, you can try out a new title tag with new keywords one day and see how you do in the search results the day after. If Google only reindexes your site every couple of weeks, you’ll only be able to see the effect on SERPs of a change once every two weeks.

So, does adding fresh content improve SERPs performance? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and “maybe”. Yes, fresh content helps if you have a blog and you just want to attract visitors and readers - who might be tempted to click on some nicely placed Adsense. If your site is selling a product, if the new content is highly relevant to the product and written to encourages sales, fresh content is very useful. It can be a lot of effort to come up with great new content though. Don’t worry though if you can’t keep coming up with new content, your old content will still keep on working for you.

admin General SEO, Keywords, Link-building

Since making this blog dofollow 3 months ago, I’ve experienced a big rise in spam comments with over 2000 total spam comments being posted. Luckily Askimet seems very good at spotting spam so all I have to do is periodically press the Delete button to remove the scores of comments I seem to get every day. Still, it’s a monotonous job filtering out the good from the bad and I’ve considered going nofollow to discourage the spammers.

However, on balance, I think the reasons for being dofollow still stand. There are two main purposes:-

1. It encourages people to make comments. In exchange for a decent comment, people get a good backlink. I’m only OKing good comments though and any comment where the author name is a keyword I delete straight away.
2. People keep posting lists of dofollow blogs in various places - forums and other blogs for example - so from time to time I pick up backlinks. This is a pretty easy way of building links.

Having said that neither of these reasons for being dofollow are pretty strong. I’m still not getting many decent comments and the rate of link-building is low. If my PR drops in the next toolbar export or the rate of spam increases significantly in the next couple of months, I’ll probably go nofollow and hope the spam dies away.

admin General SEO

Back on my dofollow blog commenting tips post I gave some ideas on how to find dofollow blogs. One of the ideas I talked about was to simply search on Google for “list of dofollow blogs” to find lists of blogs other people had already put together. You can also use a dofollow blog search engine to search for blogs on particular topics.

Recently though I came across another way of finding dofollow blogs. There is a dofollow blog community called U COMMENT I FOLLOW. These blogs have dofollow comments and also display the following image on their website.

An easy way to blogs with this image is simply to search on Google for the words “u comment i follow”. Usually the blogs will have these words mentioned somewhere, often in the alt tag for the “u comment i follow” image. You can experiment by searching on the usual www.google.com search engine and on the images search engine http://images.google.com/.

Remember when commenting on blogs that links to your site from pages on relevant themes are likely to be worth more than those from irrelevant pages. To try and find dofollow blogs with relevant posts, you can experiment with combining search phrases, e.g. to find dofollow blogs related to software development, try searching for:

“u comment i follow” “software development”

This is an easy method of finding dofollow blogs. When you do find a dofollow blog, it will also be quite likely to link to other blogs that are dofollow so spend some time looking at the sites linked in the blogroll.

Remember though that any blog that is deliberately dofollow will also have an owner that is carefully vetting and moderating any comments. If you want your comment to be approved, make a quality comment rather than a short and spammy “Great post! Thanks for the info” type of comment. In my experience, comments where the author’s name is obviously a keyword, e.g. “seo tips” instead of “Dave” are very unlikely to be approved.

admin General SEO, Link-building

When I initially began optimising my main web site to improve the performance in SERPS I treated the exercise a bit like software engineering. I researched some keywords, mainly by looking at competitor sites, then wrote my web copy to include the main keywords plus a few long-tail variations. However, by no stretch of the imagination am I a salesman. I guess I wrote the web copy to include the keywords in various orders BUT I didn’t write copy that sells. I ran the text past a few people, including my wife, but these people weren’t marketing/ sales oriented either. Recently it’s been brought to my attention that my websites need rewriting to make them better selling tools. Here are the main tips I’ve been given:

Emphasise the Benefits

In order to get lots of keywords into a page, I tended to talk about features. Features are OK, but showing the benefits is really important. OK, so you can save a document to PDF but what really matters is that you can email your invoice, saving paper and postage and getting paid more quickly.

Build a Trustworthy Image

As my customer base grew I collected testimonials every now and again. I’d post the testimonials onto a page on my site but I could have made more use of them. For example, I could have placed testimonials directly onto the homepage so that new visitors would know they wouldn’t be alone in buying my products. The other thing I could have done is put the logos of larger, more well-known customers onto my homepage. These would be a quick visual cue to visitors that other big companies trusted me.

Have a Range of Products

The last major tip I was given was to increase the number of products on offer. With one, small product I could look like a bit of a hobbyist. With two, three or a complete range of products, I’d look more substantial and better able to give things like support and ongoing development.

Conclusion

When performing SEO, it needs to be part of an overall sales strategy. Not only do you need to get people to find your site, when they land there you need to be able to make a sale. You need to write Web copy that isn’t purely optimised for SEO. Your web copy needs to be clearly written, simple to follow and, most importantly, your copy needs  to sell benefits to your customers.

admin General SEO

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.

admin 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.

admin 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.

admin 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.

admin 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.

admin Adsense Optimisation