Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category
Sunday, May 11th, 2008 |
While I’ve discussed why having quality writing is important for various reasons on our SEO Copywriting Blog, the following image shows why not only is writing quality content important, but paying attention to your meta descriptions can be equally important.
While the website bullysticks.com may be ranking in the top position for the keyword “bully sticks”, their meta description “boasts” that their “prices do not compare!” Clearly not the message they meant to send to potential customers. While bullysticks.com seems to be claiming that their prices are higher than their competition, our client, Best Bully Sticks, has a meta-description that clearly states how their high quality product, low prices, and customer service make the difference.
Meta descriptions do get read so make sure your’s says something useful. Amazing how four little words can make a difference.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in Meta-Descriptions, SEO Copywriting, SEO Mistakes, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 |
Keyword research tools may be in for another overhaul. Google’s algorithm now appears to be viewing the capitalized versions of keywords as separate from the lowercase versions. I came across this while searching for the lowercase and uppercase versions of the keyword “engagement rings.” Look at these screen shots from the 216.239.59.99 datacenter.
Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “e” in engagement rings. Click for larger image.
Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase”E” in Engagement rings. Click for larger image.
Searching with a capital “E” gives different results than searching with all lowercase letters, and I also noticed discrepancies between lowercase and uppercase letters with that keyword at the 64.233.183.107 datacenter.
Now, look at the differences in the SERPS at the 64.233.171.107 datacenter for the lower and uppercase version of the keyword “dog tags.” The results change after the second search result.
Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “d” in dog tags. Click for larger image.
Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase “D” in Dog tags. Click for larger image.
Assuming this isn’t a temporary glitch, the SEO landscape will undergo another transformation. If this reflects a real change in the algorithm, keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery will have to be adjusted to compensate. They currently don’t differentiate between searches with lowercase and capital letters. Since the Google search results were believed to be identical for each, they had no reason to.
We’ll have to wait for an official word from Google (if they give one), but right now this is looking at lot less like a glitch and a lot more like a real shift in the algorithm. And it would be a significant one. I would guess that people search with different forms of capitalization as often as they misspell words or use the plural form of words. But it’s just a guess, as there is no keyword research data to back that assumption up….yet.
We’ll have to keep our eyes on this one.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Posted in Google, Keyword Research, SEO Research, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 |
Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.
Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time.
If you’re paranoid that having your link appear on a black hat scraper site will hurt you from an SEO standpoint, don’t be. The odds are against that happening in this situation. Google should be able to figure out that the only reason your link was involved with a bad neighborhood was because it appeared in content scraped from Wikipedia.
The other common opinion is that if you manage to pickup an external link on a popular or semi-popular Wikipedia page, many people will see your link and naturally create backlinks to it. Wikipedia pages do tend to get loads of Google traffic. This isn’t April 2007, so Wikipedia doesn’t rank number 1 for everything anymore, but I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s still fairly popular in the Google SERPS. And by “fairly” I mean “extraordinarily.” I’m digressing, but Wikipedia is the classic example of a site who’s success was truly driven off the back of Google. In fact, I would venture to say that if it wasn’t for Google, Wikipedia never would have entered into the mainstream.
Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
- Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
- Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.
Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 |
When it comes to SEO, many small to medium players can get discouraged by the bigger players. They have more resources, so why should the smaller businesses even put forth the effort with SEO? Simple – because they can actually compete with the larger companies. Here’s why.
Brand Recognition
One thing to remember is that the big guys have resources, but because of that they often focus on the more traditional avenues for gaining traffic to their sites and stores. Take the diamond engagement ring business for instance. While any number of us can probably name a dozen national chains off the top of our heads (DeBeers, Zales, Kay Jewelers, and Jared to name a few), not a single one of them shows up in the top 50 for the term “diamond engagement rings”. In fact, only Kay is in the top 100 and Jared isn’t in the top 500. Why? Because they don’t have to be thanks to brand recognition. How does this help you?
Because they rely so much on brand recognition, most of your larger companies never bother to engage in SEO. For example, the #5 result for “diamond engagement rings” is Danforth Diamond, who’s home page title has the words “diamond engagement rings” in it, where as Jared and Zales both have only their company name in the title. Probably why Danforth Diamond is ranked #5 and Jared and Zales are both outside the top 50.
Red Tape
When it comes to writing copy for your website, you usually have one, maybe two writers, and yourself to answer to. When a big corporation decides to write copy for their website, they have to have one of their writers come up with copy that is SEO friendly, then that copy has to be worked over by the marketing people to make sure it works with the brand message, then it has to go to the legal department to make sure that they aren’t making any claims that can’t be substantiated, then it can go back to the writers for more edits, then back to…well I think you get the picture.
Smaller companies have the advantage of not having to deal with the same red tape that larger corporations do when deciding to make changes to their website. While you only answer to yourself, larger companies have to answer to their CEO’s, board of advisors, stockholders, and anybody else that has a corner office with a view.
Site Maintenance
SEO takes work, especially on your website. Between changing titles, adding products, adding content, installing a shopping cart, there’s a lot going on with your website. While smaller companies can handle having systems that are SEO friendly and perhaps take a little longer to make changes on, larger companies need changes made over night, and that typically means a content management system (CMS) that is less than SEO friendly.
Because the larger companies use CMS that aren’t SEO friendly, many of them don’t bother engaging in SEO and instead rely on brand awareness (which I mentioned earlier) to help drive traffic to their sites. Going hand in hand with this is the fact that since the larger companies don’t engage in SEO, when you do find them you’ll find their home page and have to search through their site for what you’re looking for, whereas with smaller sites you can have focus on internal pages to take customer to exactly what they’re looking for. This helps conversion rates, which ultimately means more profits for the little guy.
Reporting to Everybody
As I mentioned when talking about red tape, larger companies aren’t just answering to themselves. Zales might do a lot of business, but they have to report to their shareholders, board of trustees, and everybody else. When the little jewelry store down the street has a good quarter, the only person they’re answering to is themselves.
Because of having to answer to shareholders, larger companies need to be able to quantify their numbers into something that is easily understood, and that usually means time, energy, and resources channeled into producing these reports, as well as a system in place on the website that can easily produce the numbers needed. Those systems are often not SEO friendly. So while Zales might be able to tell their shareholders how much money they sold in the 3rd quarter of 2005, the small jewelry store down the street can figure out how much money they made, how many of each product they sold, and still rank in the top 10 for their big keywords.
Keep on Fighting
Sure, it can be discouraging to look at big companies and the money they can spend, but in this digital age with more and more people finding the products and services they want online through search engines, smaller companies can compete with larger ones through quality SEO and user-friendly websites. With a little work your company can get more internet exposure than those that spend millions of dollars on commercials, radio spots, and billboards. That’s the beauty of quality SEO.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 |
In 2007 I wrote a SEO tip every week. Okay, sometimes I was a little late but at the end of the year I had compiled 52 pretty good search engine optimization tips. A few are out of date, but I have listed which ones and given some information to explain why. Of course you can see all the tips in the 52 SEO tips category on this SEO blog, but to make things easier and to fulfill a few requests I have placed them all in a PDF.
Finding software that would build the PDF easily was not an easy task. In the end, the software did a credible job, but it isn’t exactly like I wanted it. But rather than tweak it endlessly I have decided to release it as is. The good news is it is free and I think most of those in the SEO industry can learn from it. I certainly learned something while putting it together.
So please visit the download page: 52 SEO Tips Download. Give a link back to us if you find it helpful.
Shell Harris
http://www.bigoakinc.com/
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 |
For the past few days, many people who create new Squidoo lenses have been met with an unpleasant surprise. All the links on the lenses have been turned to nofollow, as demonstrated in the screen shot on the right. Apparently, this is a bug that popped up after Squidoo changed servers. The lenses are jammed in WIP mode, and in this mode, all links (including internal Squidoo links) are nofollow. It normally only takes the daily lensrank update to break free from this mode and, in turn, have all the links transformed to dofollow. The bug can be traced all the way back to April 9th, so it seems a bit funny that it still hasn’t been resolved.
Hopefully, this bug isn’t a preview of things to come. Most people would flip if Squidoo actually added nofollow tags. Although, Jason Calacanis might be pleased since he views Squidoo as nothing more than an outlet for spammers.
We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. It seems like a long time for a bug to still be acting up.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 10 Comments »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008 |
I’m sure there are worse offenders but while researching competitors for a potential client I found this “gem” of a URL that is abusing the use of hyphens in a domain name. Unbelievable.
http://house-painter-interior-exterior-alexandria-arlington-fairfax-va.com/
Hmmm….I wonder what they are trying to rank for? Sadly, it is working somewhat. When searching for the term ‘house painter Alexandria’ they show up as the #3 result in Google (1/31/08).
I thought posting this was appropriate considering Will’s post about keyword stuffing domain names. So until Google quits ranking spammed domain names I guess it will be a viable option for ranking, although I’m doubtful the conversions are very high. I personally think this is a SEO mistake.
Anyone have anything to share concerning conversion with these types of domain names?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Website Conversion | 8 Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 |
I suppose I should preface this post by saying that spam is in the eye of the beholder. The people who add giant, bulky graphics as comments on Flickr.com certainly don’t view their contribution as spam, even if the graphic has no relevance to the picture. But these days, Flickr seems harder and harder to differentiate from MySpace. Take, for instance, this page:
A very attractive site
Some of the gargantuan comment graphics in that URL take up nearly half the page, but other Flickr users don’t seem to mind. In fact, they seem to be embracing it. This is good news for owners of these link-laundering websites from an SEO standpoint, provided that Flickr doesn’t add no-follow tags or disable external live links in comments altogether. They can seek out high PageRank Flickr pages and drop comments, and of course, the Flickr community builds their links for them. Indeed, Flickr is a link-launderers paradise.
But at what point will the users step back and say, “Where am I? MySpace or Flickr?”
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 |
I believed the world could be divided into two camps, “Star Wars People” and “Indiana Jones People”. Well, after the Lord of the Rings, I have now included “LOTR People”. Just about everyone has a favorite they rank over the other and so I have made classifications. I say this because I’m going to recommend a very clever blog post about SEO and Star Wars that I thought was humorous and educational. I’m recommending it even though I’m a “Indiana Jones Person”. 
The author mention Darth Sidious and Darth Vader as Blackhat masters and even classifies Luke Skywalker as a Greyhat proponent. All the other major characters are there as well, although Leia is missing. Real Star Wars’ fans will be chagrined to find Jar Jar Binks is also included. Take a moment and read the post, you’ll get a chuckle.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Out on a Limb, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
Any good SEO campaign will put the emphasis on ranking your site for the content of the site. But overlooking the images on the site can be a big mistake especially if your site is selling products which naturally use imagery as part of the sales pitch. So why not use those image to draw visitors through organic image search?
Your first step should be to set up a Google Account where you can use Webmaster Tools. Inside the Webmaster tools you will find an option under Tools named “Enable enhanced image search”. When this option is enabled Google will start cataloging your images for placement in the search engine results for images which can increase your traffic, especially if you can show in the search results that show images above the organic search results. (See example of Google search with images above organic results for the search term ‘oak tree’)
After you have instructed Google to look for your images, you want to be sure your images are telling Google and the other search engines exactly what they are about. How do you do this? Here are some things to pay attention to and think about when using images. I’ve listed them in order of “my importance”.
- Image Size Does Matter - Larger images tend to rank better. Most image results that show in the top three I have done test searches on have been over 280 pixels in both directions. Bigger images make sense to show first, all other things being equal. I would shoot for 300 x 300 to be safe.
- Image Close to Relevant Text - Keyword above or below the image in the same DIV -or- keyword in the same paragraph as the image, close to the image. Keyword should be in the same <td> (table cell) as the image.
- Page Title & Page Theme - The title, content and image should all be connected.
- File Name - It can be difficult to add the name of the image to the file name, especially if the shopping cart software doesn’t allow it, but when you can, be descriptive.
- Alt Tags - Alt tags are designed to provide alternative text when the images cannot be displayed. They should be descriptive of the image. Example: <img src=”oak-tree.jpg” width=”200″ height=”350″ alt=”Oak Tree”>
- Image Title Tags - This text shows up when you rollover the image in a popup. They should also describe image. Example: <img src=”oak-tree.jpg” width=”200″ height=”350″ alt=”Oak Tree” title=”Oak Tree”>
- Image Sitemap - Okay, this is an idea which may or may not be of any help, but it certainly can’t hurt and if you feel your images are important enough to help your rankings then creating a sitemap with descriptive links to your important images might be the extra boost to get your images to the top of the search engine results.
Alt/Title for images have been spammed too much (like Meta tags) so I don’t think they play much of a factor at all anymore in images search.Please share any successes you may have had with image search or ideas you have tried. I’m especially interested in anyone who has tried an image sitemap or what you think of this idea.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
Monday, October 22nd, 2007 |
Last week I was asked to consult with a design firm. One of our new clients was using a design firm to build their new site. I was asked to provide some advice when designing for search engine optimization. At Big Oak we are not SEO Nazis who insist everything must be HTML text and the site must be visually lifeless. Far from it. I was a web designer not to many years ago so I am very sensitive to outside influences giving direction to your design, especially when your artistic integrity is being put at risk. After all, most design shops are trying to build a impressive portfolio and “search engine people” appear to be the enemy of design to some.
With this in mind I submitted some things to be wary of, but didn’t need to be avoided. I explained that the idea is to let the search engines know what your page is about and you have to have some text for the spiders to read in order to do that. So these items can be added, with moderation and strategically, but remember to think like a spider when you do.
Graphical text: Spiders can’t read graphic text and and I would prefer to use HTML text for all text, but headlines can be enhanced through graphics so using graphic text is okay, but be sure you are using the title and alt tags with these images. Wrap it in a H1 tag if that is warranted for a heading.
Read more about this on my previous post: Graphic Headlines Can Work for SEO.
Images: Obviously spiders can’t read images whether they are text images or otherwise. Our main concern is an all image page. All images means no text, which means no traffic. Images are okay, even for navigation as long as you are using a sitemap and text navigation in the footer. Of course all images should have alt tags and title tags as referenced above in an earlier post.
Flash Animation: This may be news to some of you, but the spiders don’t read Flash and although you can add some context to your Flash through programming, I would never rely on that entirely. Instead use Flash as an enhancer and let the site speak through body text on the page.
If you do decide to create an entirely Flash site (may the SEO gods be with you) then be sure to create an alternate HTML version for the spiders and for those of us who prefer good ol’ HTML sites.
Read more about this in my earlier post: SEO and Flash
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Mistakes, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
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