Build Me A Fab Website » SEO

Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization

RSSFeed — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:01:57 +0000

by Stoney deGeyter

I’m not trying to coin a new phrase here, just looking at SEO from a different perspective. See, I never really liked the term Search Engine Optimization. That seems like the job of the math geeks behind the search engine algorithms. Its their job to optimize the search engine, not mine.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

Back when the term Search Engine Optimization was coined, we were optimizing for the search engines. Rankings was the goal. Very few in the SEO industry cared much about what happened to the site beyond that. If they could achieve top rankings on Excite and AltaVista, their job was done and they were a success.

But today’s SEO goes so far beyond optimizing for the search engines. Rankings matter, but so does site performance, visitor engagement and conversions.

Instead of optimizing the site for the search engines, we are really optimizing it for the search person. let’s look at what SPO (Search Person Optimization) means.

Search Person Optimization = Rankings

Yes, rankings are important to the searcher. The searcher has gone to the search engine first because they are seeking information. If you provide information want then you want you also want to be at the top of the search results so they can find you. The more relevant your site is to their query, the more the searcher will be served by your site being there.

Search Person Optimization = Click-thrus

It’s not enough to be at or near the top of the search results. A top ranking is just another car on the showroom floor. You have to make the searcher want you; you need to entice them to click on the search result link into your site. Throwing keywords in a title tag can help get you rankings, but that’s not enough to get the click-thru. You need to optimize your title tag to be compelling enough to make the visitor click your over someone else’s.

Search Person Optimization = Visitor Engagement

Once the visitor lands on your site you need to keep them there until they take the action(s) that you desire. Not every user will, of course, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot make improvements. Tweak your site so that you provide more of what more visitors want and need, or ensure they are more likely to take the action you’re looking for.

Search Person Optimization = More business

As you improve the SEO aspects of your site, thereby increasing rankings, you will in turn, increase the traffic to your site. Traffic alone can increase the amount of business you get, but improving the site itself you are able to get more conversions without ANY increase in traffic. Add traffic increases to that and your sales go up exponentially.

The thing to keep in mind is that search engines don’t buy your product or services, people do. You’re not optimizing your site solely for the search engines, or at least you shouldn’t be. You need to start optimizing the site for the people who come to your site through the search engines.

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Quick Tip for Frustrated Newbies

RSSFeed — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:59:25 +0000

You’ve had your blog for a few months now. You’ve chosen a topic you love and have great information. But you have very little traffic and no sales.

So what’s wrong?

Often times it’s nothing but your impatience and lack of consistency.

A few months is hardly enough time to give a new business. So if you went into this with unrealistic expectations, you will be disappointed.

I get an amazing number of emails from people who claim “affiliate marketing doesn’t work.” And when I ask them how long they’ve been at it, the answer is often two months or less.

Are you kidding me?

It took me months before any worthwhile money started to roll in. And even when my income didn’t equate to the hours I was spending online, I never stopped writing and strategizing.

If you haven’t generated a steady stream of traffic yet, one thing you have to work on is building momentum with consistency.

If you’re a new blogger, you need to establish a rhythm. Posting once a month is probably not going to cut it. This is a business so you must commit to it and take it seriously.

There are so many blogs and websites out there with great potential, but they’ve been abandoned by impatient owners looking for too much too soon.

I know it’s frustrating when you feel no one is reading your content. But if you have a solid concept and believe in your site, you will be amazed at what will happen if you just stick with it and produce solid content on a consistent basis.

Set goals for content and video production. Make your presence known. It’s time for you to get serious. Let’s make 2010 a great one!

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Search Engine Optimization In A Nutshell

RSSFeed — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:15:35 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important tool that allows your website to achieve top rankings in search engines. Most websites even find it important to employ the services of a search engine optimization (SEO) company in order for them to rank high in major search engines, such as Google. There are two kinds of SEO: on site and off site.

On site SEO is about making sure you have the right keywords on your page, a proper header, proper h1 and h2 tags, an easy to crawl page, and proper alt image tags.

Off site SEO is really what will get your ranked high in search engines. This is about building links to your website letting search engines know what your site is about. You want links from other relevant sites pointing to you saying “hey, this website is a great resource for this topic.” The most important factor for enhancing your search engine optimization classes is the popularity and quality of the links that point to and from your website. Your main focus should be on getting inbound links from authentic and related sites that have quality content.

On site SEO is important but to really rank high in search engines you need good quality links. This means links from websites that are relevant to your site, have a high PR, and are in content.

This website, like many of the other sites giving out SEO tips, will go through a lot of the basics of SEO to help you rank higher in google. Without SEO, you won’t stand a chance.

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Free SEO Toolkit From Microsoft

RSSFeed — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:55:53 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is a free tool from Microsoft for improving a website’s relevance in search results.

It simply analyzes a website & recommends how to make your new or existing site content/structure more search engine-friendly.

Some features of SEO Toolkit:

full-featured crawler engine
query builder interface that allows you to build custom reports
display of detailed information for each UR
ability to manage robots.txt file
ability to manage sitemap.xml file

It requires an IIS7 enabled computer to run which is basically Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008. After that it can analyze any local or remote website.

P.S. Besides standard installation, SEO Toolkit can be installed easily using the Microsoft Web Platform.

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Backlinks- all you ever need to know about SEO

RSSFeed — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:19:27 +0000

In a previous post, we discussed why links are important- they get you ranked. Now, lets take that a next step further: what kind of links do you want?

The perfect link. So what is the perfect link?

Well, the perfect link is a link that has the exact keyword you want, coming from a high PR page, on a high PR site, in a niche relevant to your site, in the middle of content.

All you ever need to know about offsite SEO is that backlinks count. Backlinks from good PR sites and lots and lots of backlinks. If you want to beat out the top spot on your keyword and you figure out that site has 50 pr3 backlinks, you need 51 pr3 backlinks to beat them. You also need all of those links to say the keyword you want to rank for (but not every link you have- more on that in a bit!)

That’s all you need. Get links, get links from sites with a high PR, get them in content if you can, and get as many as you can.

Remember, google is a popularity contest. If all your links say “popularity contest,” google is going to assume that you are the authority for that term and rank you for that term. If you have lots of links with that term from very high PR sites, Google will really assume that and rank you very high, if not number one.

But don’t have all your anchor text (the phrase of the link) say “popularity contest.” If you have thousands of links and they only say that one phrase, then it looks a little funny- like you are manipulating the results and google will penalize your for that. It doesn’t look natural. If thousands of people link to you, there has to be variation. So make sure you get variations in your links. 50% of the time the main keyword, the rest other variations of that keyword. Keep it natural.

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Why Links are Important?

RSSFeed — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:17:36 +0000

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from SEO Advice For You

Finding quality links to your website is the most important job for something doing SEO. Without quality backlinks, you will not rank high in any search engine. They simply won’t know if you are important or what your website is about.

Think of search engines like high school. The most popular people always had a lot of friends. The top websites on the web have a lot of links pointing to them.

This is also like social proof. Social proof is the idea that if everyone else is doing it, it must be good. If all the girls are talking to one guy at a bar, he must be worth talking to. If everyone is drinking coke, it must be worth drinking. If all the websites are pointing to one website, it must be worth ranking.

Search engines determine how to rank people by the number and quality of the links that point to you. It’s based on an idea similar to academic papers. If everyone is citing “Mary’s Book on History” in their reference section, Mary’s Books must be the authoritative source on history. If 99% of people site John’s Book on History, it must be the 2nd most authoritative source on history and so forth down the line.

That’s how Google ranks you. If everyone points a link towards me for SEO, then I must be the best place for SEO on the web. There is a bit more too it in terms of keywords and quality of the links. It’s not a simple numbers game- if I have better links that you, I can have less links and rank higher than you. We’ll get into more detail later about this but the point here is that links count. Without links, search engines won’t find you on the web, they won’t index your pages, and they’ll think your that loser band kid from school and won’t associate with you.

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The Future of SEO

RSSFeed — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:32:08 +0000

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from SEO Advice For You

There is always a lot of talk on SEO websites about the future of SEO and how will changes in the Google algorithm affect this or that. Everyone is always trying to stay a few steps ahead of Google. I don’t really think you are going to out think a billion dollar company whose goal is to make sure you don’t do anything sneaky. And in the end, I don’t care about Google’s next big thing. I don’t really follow much of this for one reason: No matter what happens with search, Google will always value links the most. Search is based on links. There’s no other real method to determine which site is the best for a given keyword. You know who is popular and the best resource by looking at links. Eventually Google will begin to look at social media links as a way to see what’s popular and what sites are hot but in the end, getting links will be the most important part of SEO. But the real future of SEO….the real way to take it to the next level is by blogging.

People who do SEO are really engaging in a form of internet marketing. You want websites to rank high in search engines so you can make money from them. Internet marketing people go out and find links using the variety of SEO tools I have talked about in the past. Links rank them high and ranking high makes them money.

When I first decided that I wanted to do this as a job, I went out and got websites on everything from corn to dogs to trailer homes. Why? Because they all had good Adsense revenue potential. I went and used the SEO tools to get links to these websites and get them to rank high in Google. Some never worked out, some where a surprising success.

But the biggest success is always travel. Why? Because I run a very popular travel site and have lots of friends who run travel websites and travel blogs. I can ask them for a link. They will give me one simply because I asked. They help me and, when they need help, I help them. We’re all part of a community and we all look out for each other.

The biggest people in SEO and Internet Marketing are those with big flagship blogs- Lissie from Passive Income, The Griz and his many sites on how to make money online, Mark and Court from the The Keyword Academy, Justin from SEO Zombie, and Vic from Blogger Unleashed.

All of these people have widely read blogs where they give SEO and internet marketing advise out for free. But more than that, they build a network of friends who will help them with their new sites and with links when they need it. They use their knowledge to help others and those people then in turn help them out. I would never say no to anyone on that list.

After a conversation with Mark from The Keyword Academy, I realized I wasn’t doing it right. I have a big community of travel friends and I have deep knowledge on travel. Branching out was just a waste of time. I no longer find other niches to create websites for, I work on travel websites. I know so many travel website owners that it’s not very hard for me to get links from a wide range of travel websites simply by asking. They know me, they know I produce legit sites and are willing to help me out.

Not all the people who try SEO can say that. They have to use these other artificial links building tools to compensate for the lack of responses to link inquires. “Cold emailing” another website owner for a link producing a very low success rate. That low success rate and the time consuming process that it is makes lots of people fall out of this field and give up. SEO isn’t hard, it’s just time consuming and the returns don’t happen for a long time.

I don’t know the future of Google but if you want to be a successful internet marketer and SEO guru then you are going to want to create a blog. The rules of internet marketing and blogging is different but I think if you want to be successful online, you want to know how to do both. A blog will allow you to form relationships and friendships with people in your chosen niche. If you are not part of the community that surrounds your topic, then you are losing out and far behind those who are.

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SEO Tools

RSSFeed — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:26:28 +0000

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from SEO Advice For You

A lot of people try their hand at SEO and look around sites like digital point to find out how they should go about doing it. I did. Invariably, they come to some of the many, many websites out there that promise #1 rankings, auto publishers, and tools that will allow you to build tons of backlinks, spin your content, create thousands of fresh articles daily, and overall, just make you the most kick ass SEO guy out there.

However, I think there are some great tools out there for SEO, ones that can help you get links and rank higher legitimately. All SEO marketers buy and try products. Most of us buy tons of products that turn out to be useless but you live in learn. I use a bunch. If you are out there looking for SEO products and services that actually work, here’s my product history:

Jetsubmitter- This program promised to take a parsed article (i.e. an article you did this to: I {like|love|hate} {purple|yellow|green} {dog|cats|rabbits}) and then submit that article to hundreds upon hundreds of article directories, ensuring you get lots of links in return. The only problem is that their article summary tool doesn’t work and half of their directories don’t approve articles. It cost me $40 dollars to figure it out. The program is a waste for those interested in article marketing. However, they offer a free spinner that is useful.

SEO Elite- This tool is great. It’s built by Brad Callen who is well known for his SEO tools and programs. This checks keywords for top sites and who links to them, you can find out where you rank for a number of keywords, and, most importantly, it allows you to find out who links to your competitors. I’ve used this program to find tons of links in niches that are hard to get into. I found that if you have a good site, people will link to it. I’ve gotten pr6 links I would not have known existed otherwise. I don’t use this as much as I used to but I think it is a powerful tool and I recommend it. It’s $167 dollars.

Article Submitter- This product is also by Brad Callen. Article submission is a great way to build links. After the jetsubmitter fiasco, I bought this, another tool that promised to auto submit your article to over 300 directories. Turns out 1/2 the directories don’t work and neither do they auto submit. I got the directory list down to about 120 that were still active and only about half actually proved articles. This cost me $120 dollars and was a complete waste. It sits unused on my desktop.

Unique Article Wizard- This article program is 67 per month and I love it. I was skeptical to use it at first because you have to pay monthly but it is totally worth it. You submit three versions of one article and they send it out to 700-1000 directories. It’s totally worth it and has gotten be links and pushed my rankings in Google up. Most SEO people I know use this service and all rave about it. It is worth the money.

Linkvana- This network of websites allows you to post content on websites that are pr2-5. It’s a network of thousands of blogs and gives you a chance to earn a ton of backlinks. The service is $147 dollars per month! It’s very pricey but that keeps out the spammers. A few respect internet marketers I know use the site so I think its credible. You can post as many posts as you want and have as many websites as you want. I think it only has value if you make as much per month as it costs and have multiple websites. It shouldn’t be your only linking strategy but, if you can afford it, get it.

Connect Content- Connect Content is a creation of blogger RT Cunningham. It’s designed to bring together other marketers and let them swap links on their blogs. It’s a good faith system. You put the links you want up and someone throws them on their site when they talk about it. I do the same. Everyone wins. It’s all clean, whitehat, and legit. It’s no different than me linking to a friend’s post in a blog because I like it. I’ve gotten 25 links from it so far. For $120 dollars a year, it is worth signing up.

Article Marketing Automation- This is like Unique Article Wizard excepts it posts to blogs. You also have to spin your content and most blog owners auto set this so that they won’t put your article up if it is not over 90% spun. This means you spend a lot of time making sentences over and over again. I found that the network for this site is small and while you get in post links (the best kind), you only got about 60 links from each article. Most weren’t even indexed by google. In the end, I couldn’t justify the monthly $47 dollars when there are better tools out there.

Bookmarking Demon- This tool autosubmits your pages to 101 bookmarking sites. You can create multiple accounts and go to town. I found only about 70 of the sites worked but with the 3 accounts I have, I build links pretty quickly. They are low quality links but it’s better than nothing. This program is $147 dollars. It is well worth it and a great buy, especially when your SEO client buys it for you! I run it everyday.

So I have tried many products and most of them are very bad for your SEO needs. However, there are many tools out there that will help you find and build links to rank high in google and make money only. I suggest putting some money into your SEO efforts if you want to get a better return and make it go quicker.

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Quality vs Quantity Links

RSSFeed — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:24:18 +0000

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from SEO Advice For You

Link building is the most important thing you can do in SEO. Without links, your website will never gain authority and thus never move up in the search rankings. When people go out and get links, they just go get links. They think the more the better. But that is not really true. Yes, you want a lot of links to your site but you also want quality links to your site. For example,

If Site A links to Site B, Site B will out rank Site C. (Site B has 1 link while Site C has 0)

If Site A links to both sites, then a number of other factors like pagerank, domain age, content, and relevancy determine who ranks higher.

If Site A links to Site B and Site D links to Site C, who ranks higher when all links are equal? Whichever linking site has more links to it. If Site A has 2 links to it and Site D has 10, D is a stronger site so passes more authority to Site C which will rank higher.

Additionally, (stick with me here!) if Site B and Site C both have one link, the quality of that link then determines who ranks higher. Site B is linked to by the NYTs and Site C by me. Obviously the NYT is a higher quality site so its link “counts” more.

So not only does quantity matter but so does quality. So what makes a quality link? Here are important factors to consider when getting links.

Anchor Text of Links- When a web page gets linked with anchor text they are trying to rank for, it will help them to move up in Google’s rankings. However, you always want to vary your links. Why variation? Because if you have 100 links and all of them say the same thing, it looks like you are manipulating the search engines. Logic would say that an infinite number of unconnected people would use a variety of different anchor texts to link to your site.

Location on the Page- A contextual link in a post on the topic your link points is worth a lot more than a blogroll, sidebar, or footer link.

Topic Relevance of Linking Sites/Pages- If you’re trying to rank for “red widgets”, the ideal links from other sites that also talk about “red widgets” or “widgets” in general. Links from sites in your niche or the overall niche (i.e. travel) are what you want to go find. Links from non related sites don’t count nearly as much and have a lot weaker value. The further from your niche, the less the link will help you.
This rule also applies to pages linking to you.

Size of Your Site- Bigger sites are better resources. Would a site about travel with two pages cover as much as a site with 200 pages? Probably not. So the more pages you have on your site, the easier it will be to get pages to rank high on Google.

Domain Name Registration Length- This isn’t a big factor but it still is important. Google hates spammers. A spammer just wants to rank high quickly, make quick money, and then run. They don’t want to register domains for a long time because they know their sites will get banned so why waste the money? A legitimate site owner is in for the long haul. If you register your domains for 2 or more years, you’ll see a slight benefit.

Links aren’t always about quantity. Getting one quality link can be worth it’s weight in gold and sometimes enough to move you further up the rankings than a bunch of smaller links.

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Internal SEO

RSSFeed — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:19:21 +0000

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from SEO Advice For You

Internal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about making your website fully optimized for Google. This is about proper design, proper image usage, proper internal linking, and proper keywords. Onsite SEO consists of the following factors:

Keywords in Your Domain Name- Get the right keywords in your domain name. If you already have a domain name, I hope there are keywords in there. Putting keywords in your domain name helps you rank higher much much quicker.

Keywords in Your Website Title- Again, get your keywords in your title. Notice the title of this site is SEO Advice. Not Matt’s Theory. Not Matt likes Pink Bunnies. Getting your keywords in your website title allows google to know what your website is about and helps you move up in the rankings. The site or page name should always include the keywords you are targeting.

Keywords in Content- Put your keywords and variations of that keyword in your content. Don’t use it too much because remember- if it sounds funny to people, it sounds funny to Google. Putting variations of your main keyword in their will help you rank for smaller, less difficult words while adding authority to your main keyword. Also, remember that the longer a post is the more long tail keywords you are likely to rank for.

Internal Linking – Interlink your site as much as possible. This helps build links to your posts, helps spread pagerank among your sites, and allows Google to crawl through your site easier.

Keyword the URL- Put your keywords in the url of your post. This will help you target that keyword easier.

Use H1 tags- For titles and important words, use the H1 title tag. This tells the search engines which words are important to the page.

Use Meta Tags- These don’t help you rank but a meta description is seen by a person and if you make it interesting, it will increase clicks to your site.

Use ALT tags- Always put a long and descriptive alt tags on your images. This helps make your site more SEO friendly and helps your images get ranked.

That is the essential of on site SEO. If you do this, you will help make your site very search engine friendly and help rank it naturally rank in the search results for a number of keywords. Next time, we’ll talk about how external SEO can help you rank #1 in the search engines.

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