Search Engine Optimization: 2010

6 (common sense) things that you should know about SEO

Below are some of the points that I keep telling my clients about SEO over and over again, but unfortunately, many of them just don't get it. "Get me on the first page of search results, money is not a problem", is their favorite quote.

Only a fool would ever dream of fooling Google and its team of top-notch engineers. I have explained on too many countless occasions that there's no such thing as effective Black Hat SEO, no matter how much money you spent. But sure there is something called Blacklisting from Search Engines, so do yourself a favor, by saving your money and investing it on building an honest and down-to-earth SEO campaign, keeping always in mind the 6 common sense SEO facts listed below courtesy of Axandra.

* Please note that this article is about SEO, not about SEM.

1. SEO takes time

You cannot optimize your website today and expect results tomorrow or next week. Search engine optimization takes time. Search engines have to find your new optimized pages, they have to find the new links to your website, they have to update the index, etc.

2. You must change your web pages

If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords, then these keywords must appear on your web pages. It is possible to get high rankings for a keyword that is not listed on your website if lots of other websites link to your website with that keyword. That's the exception, though.
In general, the keywords for which you want to be found must appear on your web pages and they must appear in the right elements on your web pages. For that reason, you have to change the HTML code of your web pages to make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to parse your site.

3. You need links and you need the right links

Good backlinks are the key to high rankings on Google. Automatically created backlinks usually won't help your rankings and they even might get you banned from Google's index.
As a general rule, the easier it is to get a link, the less is its influence on the position of your website on Google. The links to your website should be from related websites and they should contain your keywords in the link text.
The more attractive your website is, the easier it will be to get good links. Your website should offer linkworthy content that other people can talk about.

4. It's crucial to choose the right keywords

If you optimize the website of a rock band than you might think that it would be cool if their site was found for the keyword "mp3". That might be cool but it does not make sense.
People searching for "mp3" can be interested in anything: mp3 players, mp3 decoders, the latest Justin Bieber song, general information about the file format, etc. If these people come to your rock band website, they won't find the information they are looking for.
Optimize your website for keywords that attract the right kind of people. For example "unsigned rock band" or "rock band london".

5. You must be realistic

Getting on the first result page for a highly competitive keyword such as "mp3" is possible but your competitors will be old and established websites with a lot of backlinks. It is very difficult to outrank these pages.
If you have a website with just a few pages and your competitors have large websites with forums, communities, blogs, etc. then you must improve your website if you want to compete. Search engines want to show the best sites on the result pages.
If you absolutely want to get high rankings for a term such as "mp3", start with less competitive keywords and then proceed to the more competitive terms. Search engines must trust your website before they give you high rankings for very competitive keywords.

6. You must set the right goals

Search engine optimization is not about getting a high Google PageRank (the green bar in Google's toolbar). It is about getting high listings for the right keywords so that the right people will come to your website. The goal of search engine optimization is to increase your sales.
You don't have to be listed for any possible keyword even if they are related to your business. You have to be listed for keywords that will bring buyers to your site. It usually takes some time to find the best keywords for your website. Running PPC ads and tracking their conversions will help you to find the best keywords.

The Importance of being Number One in Google

Chitika Research has recently revealed that the first search result in Google gets twice as much traffic as the second, and three times as much as the third.

“The Value of Google Result Positioning” looked at a sample of traffic coming into Chitika's advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.

Google Result	Impressions	Percentage
1	2,834,806	34.35%
2	1,399,502	16.96%
3	942,706	11.42%
4	638,106	7.73%
5	510,721	6.19%
6	416,887	5.05%
7	331,500	4.02%
8	286,118	3.47%
9	235,197	2.85%
10	223,320	2.71%
11	91,978	1.11%
12	69,778	0.85%
13	57,952	0.70%
14	46,822	0.57%
15	39,635	0.48%
16	32,168	0.39%
17	26,933	0.33%
18	23,131	0.28%
19	22,027	0.27%
20	23,953	0.29%

Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.

These results took by surprise even seasoned SEO experts such as the own Chitika's research director Daniel Ruby, who commented that:

“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”

But also remember that becoming number one is easier than remaining number one, and this is specially true for Google.

Headed up by research director Daniel Ruby, Chitika’s research department has its fingers firmly on the pulse of the Internet.

By analyzing data from Chitika's publisher network – over 80,000 sites and always growing – Ruby and his staff can spot trends ranging from operating systems to ad click rates.

More Info:
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com

Beyond SEO

I have recently written an article at EzineArticles.com, titled "SEO and Beyond", that has been accepted and published at:
http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-and-Beyond&id=4167766

That article has also earned me Expert Author status:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rafael_Minuesa

You can read it below:

A common story. The marketing team from Company A recognizes the need for an internet presence. They hire a web designer who creates an awesome (read Flash) website and a web developer (PHP-MySQL) to do the coding.

Marketing team is very impressed with the final product, and shortly after pushing it live they send a few e-mails out and place some submissions around. Then they sit back and wait. But weeks pass by, then months and no leads are generated.

The reason is very simple, the world in general does not know that their website exists. Although search engines may have indexed its pages, they don't show up when someone does relevant searches related to their business. Relevant in this context means keyword related. You can rest assured that if you own the domain mortgages.com and your website has been indexed, when someone searches for mortgages.com, they will find you in number one position. But, who does ever search for a domain name? Nobody, except perhaps someone trying really hard to find that specific website.

What Internet users really use when conducting a search are keywords, such as "mortgage broker", "interest rates", or "line of credit". And those are the searches where your awesome looking website ranks somewhere around page 500 of the search results.

Very few web designers and developers will ever tell you this. They only care about building web sites. They may make some remarks at some point about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and appoint themselves as specialists, but the truth of the matter is that very few of them have an idea of how to effectively optimize a website for search engines.

Search engines are getting smarter all the time. Nowadays, when you do a search for "video game" on Google, for example, you get more than just organic results from sites that mention that string of words. What you are now presented with is a broad range of relevant content that includes News, Pay Per Click (PPC), Product Feeds and results from Social Media outlets.

There are three key factors that must be addressed in order for any SEO campaign to be successful:

Search engine friendliness. This involves site structure components such as indexing friendliness, Flash vs. HTML, descriptive texts for images, etc.
Content. Content is king, repeat that fifty times everyday before you start work. Almost equally important is to have content with the proper keyword density placed in strategic semantic positions, such as titles or headings.
Link building. Having in-bound links adds PageRank and credibility to your site in the eyes of search engines. However, quality here primes over quantity and farm links are definitely a no-no.

Special mention deserves the realm of social media. Never underestimate the power of the likes of Facebook and Twitter. If properly addressed, they can provide a very important flow of visitors to your website. However, any social media marketing campaign needs to go beyond than simply starting a Twitter page and posting your random thoughts.

That's where Social Media Optimization (SMO), the methodization of social media activity, comes into place.
There are a plethora of social media extensions that can be used to our advantage, such as RSS feeds, social news, community images and videos. Other promotional activities in social media worth considering are networking, blogging, commenting, posting on forums and updating status profiles on social media sites.

Ideally, SEO marketing programs and social media promotions should work together to strengthen each other. A high-quality social media campaign that is interactive and engages audiences can increase in-bound links and improve search engine rankings. At the same time, applying smart SEO practices to social media content will increase the reach and visibility of your social media outreach.

The conclusion is that although basic SEO concepts still apply in today's world, if you want your SEO campaigns to be highly effective, you need to compliment it with smart marketing campaigns that targets the new players on the Internet from the so-called Web 2.0 era. As with any marketing campaign, it's very important to think about your target audience when you are doing a SEO campaign and how you can most effectively reach them with messages that appeal to them.

Rafael Minuesa is a Graphic Designer who evolved into a Web Designer and later into a Web Developer.
He uses keyword-enriched content combined with Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization techniques to drive his clients' websites to top positions.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rafael_Minuesa

Peter Norvig deems PageRank "over-hyped"

Google's Director of Research Peter Norvig says that the search engine's hallowed PageRank link-analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set, is overrated. And apparently, it has always been.

"One thing that I think is still over-hyped is PageRank,"

Norvig said last week during a question and answer keynote at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Santa Clara, California.

"People think we just do this computation on the web graph and order all the pages and that's it. That computation is important, but it's just one thing that we do.

People [webmasters and SEOs] always said, 'We're stuck if we don't have [a high PageRank].' But we never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor."

Google describes PageRank as:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".”

Late last year, Google added so-called "real-time search" to its engine - serving up links to fresh Tweets, news, and other recent web posts. When asked if this was a far more difficult undertaking, considering that PageRank doesn't work well with Web2.0rhea. Norvig was quick to say "no," explaining that even with core search, PageRank isn't as important as people think it is.

"[PageRank] has a catchy name and the name recognition. But we've always looked at all the things that are available [when ranking search results]. We look at where do things come from, what are the words used, how do they interact with each other, how do people interact with them,"

"[Real-time search] is more similar [to core search] than dissimilar, in that you're grabbing every available signal and trying to figure out the best way to combine them. The fact that there aren't legacy links from a long time ago - we don't think of that as that much different."

The key to real-time search, Norvig said, is Google's famously distributed back-end infrastructure, which is able to re-build its web index with relatively little delay. When Norvig first joined the company, the Google web index was built once a month. Then the company moved to once a day and then to once an hour. Now, its distributed infrastructure - using proprietary technologies like the Google File System and MapReduce - can update its index in "10 seconds," according to Norvig.

When the hourly index was rolled out, Norvig remembered, Larry Page insisted on calling it the "3600 second" index.

"If it was hourly, it was just going to stay like that," Norvig said. "But if you talk about it in seconds, people are going to push it down to 1000 seconds and eventually you get it down to 10. And that's where we are now. His vision has come true."

Blog comments on Do-Follow

Original Article written by indexed at Squidoo

Do-follow comment posting is an awesome technique to get high quality blog backlinks.

Steps:
1- Install firefox if you don't have it Firefox
2- Then install SeoQuake add-on
3- Then install NoDoFollow add-on
After installing each of the plug-ins, firefox will ask you to restart it for the plug-in to be enabled.
4- Visit Comment Hunt
5- Search for a general keyword example "Blog"
6- Now as you'll see there will be a long bar under each listing and that is SeoQuake the plug-in you Installed, it will show you the PR, Google Backlinks, Alexa Rank, and so on
7- Ok, pick one of the blogs
8- Click comments just like the images below

9- Now you go to tools and click on NoDoFollow

10 Scroll down to the comments that are already posted if the names are highlighted blue, the blog is a dofollow blog, if the names are highlighted pink, the blog is nofollow. If the names aren't highlighted at all that means the person who commented didn't submit a link along with the post you have to go to a different comment that has a link to check.
Example of a DoFollow blog:

Example of a NoFollow blog:

11- Final step, is to make the comment, be original or don't just make sure it's not that short, and don't copy the other comments, just write anything that has to do with the subject, because most of the dofollow blogs comments need approval, most of them will be approved. Do that over and over again to build a strong PR.

Things You Should Know
Should Know:
When you search for a keyword again on Commenthunt.com all links will be blue if you have the NoDoFollow plug-in on, but that doesn't mean the blog is dofollow it means that commenthunt.com is dofollow, you must go through 4,5,6 in the e-book because you can only tell if its dofollow by the names that have links under it, or by source code but that is for advanced people.

Good to know:
I've heard that some just some, I mean just a little bit of the blog owners change their blogs to nofollow after a while but I don't think a lot will change it because they want it to be dofollow, when its dofollow they get more webmaster visitors, and comments.

Can having dofollow comments on my blog affect its reputation?

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use Wordpress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

by Tad Chef

About SEOptimise

The company was founded in March 2006 by search engine expert Kevin Gibbons. His aim was to use the latest SEO techniques to help businesses maximize their website profiles in order to increase their online visibility and sales.

Operating from the Oxford Science Park, Oxford, UK, SEOptimise’s clients range in sector from biotechnology to travel and retail, and include Cellmark, Oxford University Press, Audley Travel, WRAP, Ecosecurities and Aptuit. SEOptimise is a ‘best practice approved’ member of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and is on the UK advisory committee of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation (SEMPO).

Supplemental Results Hell

What are supplemental results?
Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

How does a page go supplemental?
From my experiences pages have typically went supplemental when they became isolated doorway type pages (lost their inbound link popularity) or if they are deemed to be duplicate content. For example, if Google indexes the www. version of your site and the non www. version of your site then likely most of one of those will be in supplemental results.
If you put a ton of DMOZ content and Wikipedia content on your site that sort of stuff may go supplemental as well. If too much of your site is considered to be useless or duplicate junk then Google may start trusting other portions of your site less.

Negative side effects of supplemental:
Since supplemental results are not trusted much and rarely rank they are not crawled often either. Since they are generally not trusted much and rarely crawled odds are pretty good that links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much - if any - weight in Google.

How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
If you were recently thrown into them the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content management errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with Copyscape).
If you have pages that have been orphaned or if your site's authority has went down Google may not be crawling as deep through your site. If you have a section that needs more link popularity to get indexed don't be afraid to point link popularity at that section instead of trying to point more at the home page. If you add thousands and thousands of pages you may need more link popularity to get it all indexed.
After you solve the problem it still may take a while for many of the supplementals to go away. As long as the number of supplementals is not growing, your content is unique, and Google is ranking your site well across a broad set of keywords then supplementals are probably nothing big to worry about.

Note:
All of the text above has been copy&pasted from:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001545.shtml
so, if those points are correct this post should go Supplemental in no time, right?
Wrong. Wait and see ...

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, asked for feedback on the widespread supplemental indexing issue in this thread. As noted by Barry, in comment 195 Matt said:

Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I'm pretty sure what the issue is. I'll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don't need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.

In the video below Matt Cutts answers questions about Supplemental Results,

Should I worry about results estimates for:
1) supplemental results
2) using the site: operator
3) with negated terms and
4) special syntax such as intitle: ?

Answer: No. That's pretty far off the beaten path

Getting Out of Google Supplemental Results

Getting out of the Google Supplemental Results may be possible by improving your website navigation system. To get more pages fully Google indexed, the prominence of important website pages can often be boosted by linking to them from pages within your domain having the highest Page Rank, such as your homepage. The reason for this being that Page Rank is passed from one page to another by links and the most common cause of Supplemental results is lack of Page Rank.

Start by determining your most important web pages which have been made supplemental - for example those promoting lucrative products and services, and then improve your website internal linking by adding links to these pages from more prominent fully Google indexed pages of your site including your homepage. At the same time, ensure that your website navigation system is search engine friendly using a website link analyzer.


	Site Link Analyzer Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL Type of links to return: External (links going to outside web-sites) Internal (links inside the current web-site) Both types Additional Info Show nofollow links? Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

By improving website navigation and getting more inbound links from other Worldwide Web sites, you may be able to get more website pages fully Google indexed, solving the problem of partial Google indexing and Supplemental pages.

Where the Google Page Rank of your website homepage is PR4 or PR3, improving your website navigation system and in particular the prominence of internal pages may help to get out of supplemental results. This can be done by including static hyperlinks from the homepage to your 'problem supplemental result pages'.

However, where your homepage is PR3 or lower and you have a large website, internal navigation improvements alone may still not be enough when it comes to getting out of the Google Supplemental Results. At PR3 or lower, your homepage Page Rank is probably too low to pass on enough Page Rank to your internal pages to completely get out of Supplemental Results.

To fully solve the problem of partial Google indexing, get more one way links to your site from quality web directories and sites of a similar theme and wait patiently to become fully Google indexed. In addition, getting more quality one way links pointing to internal pages of your website (rather than just targeting your homepage) is another powerful way of boosting the ranking of those pages against specific keyword terms, and it will also assist in getting them out of supplemental results. This is often referred to as "deep linking".

Note:
Google states that they have now removed the label "Supplemental Result" from their search result pages:

"Supplemental Results once enabled users to find results for queries beyond our main index. Because they were "supplemental," however, these URLs were not crawled and updated as frequently as URLs in our main index.

Google's technology has improved over time, and now we're able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the "Supplemental Results" label outlived its usefulness."

Right, that is correct. It is called now "Omitted Results". Same thing really, and same side-effects, at least from this non-Google point of view.

More Info

Condemned to Google Hell"
What happened to Google's supplemental results? My pages no longer show this label. " on Google's help center for webmasters.
Google Hell? from Matt Cutts blog.
Supplemental Results? Still a problem?
Exploring Supplemental Indexing and website trust

Bookmark Oriented Social Media Websites

Social bookmarking sites can help creating inbound links.

Most of social bookmarking sites have the following steps:

1- Register an account.
2- Suggest a URL
3- Get bookmarked, (digged...)

Below a list of the most popular as per OnlyWire: