One of the problems many people have with SEO is that they think that they will use SEO to get their site in front of thousands of relevant people, but that model only works if they are…

• using pay per click marketing (buying the traffic)
• using black hat SEO (which may provide only short term results
• using an old trusted domain that already has many signals of quality built up

Amongst the hundreds or thousands of participants in your market, some of them enjoy an older site, more social relationships, more links, a more well known brand, a larger traffic stream due to their site already being trusted, and other traffic streams like RSS readers and email list members, etc.

All of those advantages for existing webmasters act as headwinds for a new webmaster (at least until you get established). You typically have to create some number of social interactions to leave the trail of signals of quality to make Google want to trust a site enough to put it in front of a large traffic stream, especially if you are starting a brand new site and are trying to operate within Google’s guidelines.

Full article at SeoBook

Tags: optimization process, seo process

So which area of SEO will give you the most bang for your buck? Link building? On-page? Social media? Ask ten different SEOs, and you’ll likely get ten different answers.

Let’s take a step back and start with strategy.

1. Define Your Goals

Without clear goals, it’s difficult to know how to spend your time. Start by listing your goals.

Do you want to sell services or product? Do you want to increase traffic levels? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Knowing which SEO dial to twist depends very much on what goal you’re trying to achieve.

Once you have your list, create a set of KPIs. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. KPIs will give you a set of metrics to help you decide if you’re meeting, or missing, your goals.

Here are a few examples:

• Rank top ten for keyword term x in Google
• Increase traffic from search engines by *x* percent by *date*
• Get 1,000 new sign ups from search visitors in March
• Sell ten widgets per day to search visitors by next week

The most useful KPIs are specific. You either hit the target or you miss.

Your strategy will be defined by your goals. For example, if your goal is to sell ten widgets by next week using a new site, then your strategy might be to forget SEO for the meantime, and focus on PPC instead. If your goal is to get 1000 new subscribers by the end of the year, then you might spend a lot of time analyzing your demographic, determining where they hang out, and getting your name and content in front of them at every available opportunity. If your goal is to get #1 for term X, then you’ll be focusing a lot on link building, using keyword term X in the link.

And so on. Your goals define your tactics.

Once you have a list of clear objectives, and a clear list of KPIs, the next step is to consider the age of your site.

2. What Type Of Site Do You Have?

New Site

One of the most important task for new sites is link building. The sites with the highest quality linkage tend to trump sites with lower quality linkage when it comes to rank.

Until you build links, then tweaking on-page aspects of SEO on a new site won’t make a lot of difference in terms of rank. Get the basics right - keywords in the title tags, keyword focused content, strong internal linking, a shallow structure and good crawlability - but focus your efforts on attaining links. If that means establishing a large body of quality content first, then so be it. Others may choose to buy their way up the chain, or aggressively pursue social media opportunities.

Established Site

The opposite is true for an established site. Whilst links are always important, an established site can leverage on-page factors to a greater degree.

Once your site has built up sufficient link authority, then you may only need add a new page of content, and link it internally, in order to rank well. People running established sites may wish to focus more on producing quality, focused content, and let the linking look after itself.

3. The Five Most Important Areas Of SEO On Which To Spend Your Time

These are highly debatable, but here’s my ranking:

1. Produce Remarkable, Attention Grabbing Content

Everything starts with remarkable content i.e. content worth remarking on and linking to. Do you have unique, timely content? Does you content solve a problem? Does you content provide a new insight? Does you content spark controversy? Does you content start - or contribute to - a conversation?

2. Crawlability

If your content can’t be crawled, you won’t rank. Ensure your site is easily accessible to both humans and search engine spiders.

3. Build Links

Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted towards links. Beg, buy, or earn links, and rankings follow. Get your keywords into the link text. Building links also means building relationships with people. Spend a lot of time doing this, especially in the early stages.

4. Title Tag

It is debatable how much ranking value the title tag has, both it definitely has click-thru value. Your listing fights for attention with all the other links on page. What will make people click your link?
Learn the lessons of Adwords. Match your title tag to the keyword query. Solve a users problem. Arouse curiosity.

5. On-Page Content

Forget endless on-page tweaking. Largely a waste of time. Instead, keep a few keyword phrases in mind when writing. Use semantic variations of your terms in order to help catch long tail terms. Link your page to related pages, using keyword terms in the link.

This article at SeoBook

Tags: off-page, on-page, Optimization, SEO, tips

To encourage webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, each of the major search engines have built support and guidance-focused services. Each provides varying levels of value to search marketers, but all of them are worthy of understanding. These tools provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.

The sections below explain the common interactive elements that each of the major search engines support and identify why they are useful. There is enough details on each of these elements to warrant their own blog posts but for the purposes of this guide, only the most crucial and valuable components will be discussed.

Common Search Engine Protocols

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a formatted list of all of the pages on a given website. They are used to ensure that search engines can easily find the location of all of the webpages on a website and to assign each page a relative priority.

The sitemaps protocol (explained in detail at Sitemaps.org) is applicable to three different file formats.

XML - Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format)
Pros - This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. It is extremely easy for search engines to parse and can be produced by a plethora of sitemap generators. Additionally, it allows for the most granular control of page parameters.
Cons - Relatively large file sizes. Since XML requires an open tag and a close tag around each element, files sizes suffer.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary
Pros - Easy to maintain. RSS sitemaps can easily be coded to automatically update when new content is added.
Cons - Harder to manage. Although RSS is a dialect of XML, it is actually much harder to manage due to its updating properties.

Txt - Text File
Pros - Extremely easy.  The text sitemap format is one URL per line up to 50,000 lines.
Cons - Does not provide the ability to add meta data to pages.

Sitemaps can either be submitted directly to the major search engines or have their location specified in robots.txt.

Robots.txt
The robots.txt file (a product of the Robots Exclusion Protocol) should be stored at a website’s root directory (e.g. www.google.com/robots.txt). The file serves as an access guide for automated visitors (web robots). By using robots.txt, webmasters can indicate which areas of a site they would like to disallow bots from crawling as well as indicate the locations of sitemaps files (discussed below) and crawl-delay parameters. The following commands are available:

• Disallow - Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders
• Sitemap - Indicates the location of a websites sitemap or sitemaps
• Crawl Delay - Indicates the speed (in milliseconds) at which a robot can crawl a server.

Example of Robots.txt:

#Robots.txt www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow:  

# Don't allow spambot to crawl any pages
User-agent: spambot
Disallow: /

sitemap:www.example.com/sitemap.xml 

Warning: It is very important to realize that not all web robots follow robots.txt. People with bad intentions (e.g. e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don’t follow this protocol and in extreme cases can use it to identify the location of private information. For this reason, it is recommended that the location of administration sections and other private sections of publicly accessible websites not be included in the robots.txt. Instead these pages can utilize the meta robots tag (discussed next) to keep the major search engines from indexing their high risk content.

Meta Robots
The meta robots tag creates page level instructions for search engine bots that govern everything from page inclusion to snippet controls and more.

The meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the HTML document.

Example of Meta Robots:

 <html>
     <head>
         <title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>
         <meta name=”ROBOT NAME” content=”ARGUMENTS” />
     </head>
     <body>
         <h1>Hello World</h1>
     </body>
 </html
 

In this example, “ROBOT NAME” is the user-agent of a specific web robot (ex. Googlebot) or an asterix to identify all robots and “ARGUMENTS” is one of the meta/x-robots-tag below.

Use Case	Robots.txt	META/ X-Robots-Tag	Other	Supported By
Allow access to your content	Allow	FOLLOW INDEX		Google Yahoo Microsoft
Disallow access to your content	Disallow	NOINDEX NOFOLLOW		Google Yahoo Microsoft
Disallow access to index images on the page		NOIMAGEINDEX		Google
Disallow the display of a cached version of your content in the SERP		NOARCHIVE		Google Yahoo Microsoft
Disallow the creation of a description for this content in the SERP		NOSNIPPET		Google Yahoo Microsoft
Disallow the translation of your content into other languages		NOTRANSLATE		Google
Do not follow or give weight to links within this content		NOFOLLOW	a href attribute: rel=NOFOLLOW	Google Yahoo Microsoft
Do not use the Open Directory Project (ODP) to create descriptions for your content in the SERP		NOODP		Google Yahoo Microsoft
Do not use the Yahoo Directory to create descriptions for your content in the SERP		NOYDIR		Yahoo
Do not index this specific element within an HTML page			class=robots-nocontent	Yahoo
Stop indexing this content after a specific date		UNAVAILABLE_AFTER		Google
Specify a sitemap file or a sitemap index file	Sitemap			Google Yahoo Microsoft
Specify how frequently a crawler may access your website	Crawl-Delay		Google WMT	Yahoo Microsoft
Authenticate the identity of the crawler			Reverse DNS Lookup	Google Yahoo Microsoft
Request removal of your content from the engine’s index			Google WMT Yahoo SE Microsoft WMT	Google Yahoo Microsoft

Rel=”nofollow”
Nofollow is a common inline parameter that is adhered to by all of the major search engines. It is appended to links to prevent them from passing Link Juice (ranking power).

Example of nofollow:

 <a href=”http://www.example.com” title=”Example”
 rel=”nofollow”>Example Link</a>

An excellent, and more comprehensive resource on robots.txt can be found at Jane & Robot - Managing Robots’ Access to Your Website. Additionally, a printer friendly version of this information is available on The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.

Search Engine Tools
The following tools are provided free of charge by the major search engines and enable webmasters to have more control over how their content is indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Sign Up

Google Webmaster Tools Sign Up

Settings

Geographic target - If a given site targets users in a particular location, webmasters can provide Google with information that will help determine how that site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve Google search results for geographic queries.

Preferred Domain - The preferred domain is the one that a webmaster would like used to index their site’s pages. If a webmaster specifies a preferred domain as http://www.example.com and Google finds a link to that site that is formatted as http://example.com , Google will treat that link as if it was pointing at http://www.example.com.

Image Search - If a webmaster chooses to opt in to enhanced image search, Google may use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in their site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

Crawl Rate - The crawl rate affects the speed of Googlebot’s requests during the crawl process. It has no effect on how often Googlebot crawls a given site. Google determines the recommended rate based on the number of pages on a website.

Diagnostics

Web Crawl - Web Crawl identifies problems Googlebot encountered when it crawls a given website. Specifically, it lists Sitemap errors, HTTP errors, nofollowed URLs, URLs resitrcted by robots.txt and URLs that time out.

Mobile Crawl - Identifies problems with mobile versions of websites.

Content Analysis - This analysis identifies search engine unfriendly HTML elements. Specifically, it lists meta description issues, title tag issues and non-indexable content issues.

Statistics
These statistics are a window into how Google sees a given website. Specifically, it identifies top search queries, crawl stats, subscriber stats, “What Googlebot sees” and Index stats.

Link Data
This section provides details on links. Specifically, it outlines, external links, internal links and sitelinks. Sitelinks are section links that sometimes appear under websites when they are especially applicable to a given query.

Sitemaps
This is the interface for submitting and managing sitemaps directly with Google.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Sign Up

Yahoo! Site Explorer Sign Up

Features

Statistics - These statistics are very basic and include data like the title tag of a homepage and number of indexed pages for the given site.

Feeds - This interface provides a way to directly submit feeds to Yahoo! for inclusion into its index. This is mostly useful for websites with frequently updated blogs.

Actions - This simplistic interface allows webmasters to delete URLs from Yahoo’s index and to specify dynamic URLs. The latter is especially important because Yahoo! traditionally has a lot of difficulty differentiating dynamic URLs.

Live Webmaster Tools

Sign Up

Live Webmaster Center

Features

Profile - This interface provides a way for webmasters to specify the location of sitemaps and a form to provide contact information so Live can contact them if it encounters problems while crawling their website.

Crawl Issues - This helpful section identifies HTTP status code errors, Robots.txt problems, long dynamic URLs, unsupported content type and most importantly, pages infected with malware.

Backlinks - This section allows webmasters to find out which webpages (including their own) are linking to a given website.

Outbound Links - Similarly to the before-mentioned section, this interface allows webmasters to view all outbound pages on a given webpage.

Keywords - This section allows webmasters to discover which of their webpages are deemed relevant to specific queries.

Sitemaps - This is the interface for submitting and managing sitemaps directly to Microsoft.

It is a relatively recent occurrence that search engines have provided ways for webmasters to interact directly with crawlers. While this relationship is still not optimal, the search engines have made great strides toward opening their proprietary indices. This has been very helpful for webmasters who now rely so much on search driven traffic.

Tags: serach engine, services, Tools, webmasters

Whether you’re a marketer at a large Fortune 500 company or a small business, search engine optimization (SEO) can be one of the most cost-effective tools for reaching a broader audience and increasing online sales. A solid and persistent search engine optimization program can increase search visibility for many types of content affecting the bottom line:  sales, customer service, recruiting, public and investor relations.

These are challenging economic times calling for prudent marketing decisions.  Search industry, business and analyst publications agree: search marketing is recission proof, or at least recession resistant.  To make sure your SEO program investment yields effective and efficient marketing results, keep the following tips in mind:

• Planning: A solid plan of action is a necessary component to any successful SEO program. Before beginning an effort to optimize content for better search visibility, be sure you have clarified specific goals and expectations. This will help you to decide which SEO tactics will be most effective, what internal resources will be necessary and what metrics will be used to measure success.
• Resources: Assess your resources to ensure you can actually implement your SEO program. The most common reason for an unsuccessful SEO effort is failure of implementation. Take stock of available budget (yours or another department that will be affected) talent pool and any existing media assets that can be leveraged. You will need to determine if you have the resources to complete your ideal SEO plan on your own, or if you will need to enlist the services of a SEO agency (like CesarNunhez.com.
• Measurement: Organize a process to measure the results of your program. You will want to be able to tie your measurements of success directly back to your SEO tactics. If increasing leads was the initial goal for your program, this may mean using an analytics package to determine the origin of your online leads. If you choose to work with an agency, be sure to select one with a strong record of measurable SEO success.
• Promotion: A well-optimized website will increase your search engine rankings and help your target audience find your services over that of competitors. However, a solid SEO program does not end there. Make the most of search engine optimization by promoting useful content. Place your URL on your business card, in your email signature, and promote it online beyond the search engines in social networks, blogs, forums and anywhere that it can be useful.  It will be passed along and linked to, sending traffic and further increasing search visibility.
• Innovation: Don’t rely on what has always worked, or assume that your initial optimization will last forever. The online world is constantly changing, and this extends to optimization best practices. A solid SEO program is an ongoing investment that requires you to adapt and innovate to ensure your website stays at the top of the rankings and top of mind with your consumers.

With a solid search engine optimization plan, the right resources, measurements of success, promotion, and innovation, companies large and small can not only weather the current economic challenges, but achieve new growth and revenue goals.

This article at TopRankBlog.com

Tags: online marketing, SEO, seo investment, seo tips

The US (and global) economies are in sharp decline after a period of growth that was largely fueled by speculative (and fraudulent) loans that increased money supply way too quickly. While carnage is wide reaching offline, it is simply a phenomena that has not really touched our publishing business.

The Illusion of Safety

There is an illusion that if something is physical that it has a sense of permanence to it, but this year the US government has had to bail out banks, automakers, insurance companies, and credit cards. Residential real estate has dropped hard and commercial real estate is also in the hurt locker (if retail is off 10% in some areas then many businesses operating on a 5% margin will go bankrupt - leading to vacancies and lower prices).

Much of the residential real estate decline is simply due to excessive capacity and various flavors of mortgage fraud (appraisal fraud, loan application fraud, principal-agent problems, malfeasant regulation, etc.), but the commercial real estate slowdown is due to the residential slowdown, global economic slowdown, and the existence of better and cheaper alternatives - namely online retail.

Investing in Growth

The Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is reporting dropping ad revenues. Amongst the carnage Amazon.com reported record numbers. In a lot of ways some of the offline decay is just a shift toward more efficient online business models.

Fred Wilson highlighted how many publishing, finance, and retail business models are all being destroyed by the web

I had breakfast last week with a person who has been in retailing for more than 30 years and has been operating at the highest levels of the industry. He said that he expects every category to be winnowed down to one dominant retailer with all the others going by the wayside. This too has the internet as an underlying cause. comScore says that online holiday shopping this year has been flat with the year before and I’ve seen reports that offline retail is down 6-10pcnt. The fact is that consumers have finally come to the realization that shopping online is easier, cheaper, and often a better experience. Physical retail will survive, but it will be a smaller industry in the next decade and those that do survive will need to give consumers a very strong rationale to get in the car and come to their store.

The information age is killing many traditional arbitrage based business models (or thicker business models that are heavily reliant on local monopolies as a big part of their business). Companies that thrived when there was no competition are simply folding like Origami.

Search is the Primary Growth Engine of the Web

Most future economic growth will occur online or have online touch points. The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Not only is the web growing during the downturn, but much of the online growth is driven by marketing and search. SEO exist as the intersection of those two points, and SEOs that approach the topic from a holistic marketing standpoint have a significant advantage at building distribution and growing capital. Give me an average passionate player, add SEO, and I can help them rank #1 in most markets.

When you back out inflation and opportunity cost, professional investors are lucky to gain 5% a year. With smart market research and effective SEO implementation many businesses can outpace that by a factor of over 400! Being in SEO today would be like being in coal, oil, or railroads in years past…you help connect supply and demand.

Trimming Profit Margins

Outperforming the market by hundreds or thousands of percent presents an opportunity that will draw lots of competition - and one that will not last long if not evolved. Scraping raw data is getting easier. Why should people chose to work with you (and vote for you)?

If you get a #1 ranking which provides amazing profit margins it is best to look for ways to thicken out the site even if those strategies lower short-term profit margins. Search algorithms will change, and the thicker and more interactive your site is the more sustainable your rankings will be.

Thickening up may require giving away tools and software, public relations strategies, becoming the media, providing a platform for others to use, compiling data in a useful format and/or creating the community water cooler.

Additional expenses can be offset by refining conversion process to increase visitor value and lifetime customer value, and lower forward marketing costs as you leverage the additional earned exposure.

Another thing to consider is the use of advertising to build other quality signals. Awareness leads to conversion. And if you can get advertising to pay for itself and gain other signals of quality as a side effect of user interaction with your site then you will end out ahead in the long run. I love recycling dollars because it costs nothing, builds free credit card points, and builds up a website’s online footprint in a Google friendly way.

Making Online Businesses More Sustainable than Offline Businesses

If you are an online marketer and publisher then you become a market researcher, learn how to track trends, test what works, and change with the market.

If much of your online revenues revolve around a thin SEO centric approach then it helps to create at least 1 or 2 aggressively branded sites that hedge against the risks algorithm shifts present. The net effect of building a brand is that you are not overly-reliant on any search engine or any physical market. If people talk about you and recommend you then you win. This site has members from dozens of countries all over the world, so even if the US Dollar collapsed we would still have a diverse income stream.

Helping Others

Once you are doing really well you can give back in a variety of ways - donate money to charities, donate services to charities, and/or give income-producing websites to family members. You can give away featured content and tools that help others knowing that in the end it will also come back to help build your business. You can also pour thousands of dollars into building non-profit sites that may also be able to pay you back in exposure, credibility, and link equity.

This article on SeoBook

Tags: SEO