Improve Search Rankings with Internal SEO

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the stimulus package that passed Congress in February. I titled the post Government Stimulus Package because I thought the only thing it was stimulating was government. I got lucky with this, because apparently a lot of people searched for the phrase “government stimulus package” to learn about what was in it.

The post did ok on Digg and Reddit, nothing spectacular but it brought in some traffic. It may have gotten a few other links, but not a ton. A few days after the post was published, I noticed that I was getting some traffic the search engines. The post was on the front page of Google, around 6 or so for the keyword phrase “government stimulus package.” This is the first step in improving your SERPs.

1. Look at Your Stats

Find out which pages you are getting traffic to from the search engines and what keywords are being used to get there. This is where we need to focus. Improving your ranking for a term from 7429 to 43 takes your traffic from 0 to 0. If you can improve from 9 to 1, you will see a huge increase in traffic if it is a phrase that people are searching for.

Now that we have a few pages that are getting some traffic and the keywords they are getting it from, we have to do a little keyword research.

2. Keyword Research

The first step is to find out which phrases we want to target. Look at the keywords that are getting the most traffic and find out where you currently rank. You could use your web analytics program for this, and then check the rankings on Google.

At this point, you can also use a keyword search tool to find out how much traffic each of these phrases gets.

Now we want to focus our efforts on the terms we rank the highest for that get the most search traffic.

3. Internal SEO

Have you ever written anything similar to this before? Go through your archives and find where you have mentioned this topic before. Update the old article with a link to the new one using the keywords you are trying to rank for.

If this is a topic that people want to know more about, consider writing another post or two expanding on the first one. In each new post, link to the original article with one of the keyword phrases you are targeting.

Next, go back to the post you are hoping to rank higher. Is the keyword already in the article? Consider making it bold. Is there a section where the phrase would make a good header? Consider adding it. Don’t stuff the article full of keywords as you still want the people that come to enjoy your writing. However, if these changes can be made without affecting the quality, they may help improve your ranking a little bit.

These things do two things. They show the search engines what your pages are about (hopefully the keywords you are targeting) and they show them that they are important pages. The more links you have pointing to the page, the more important you are making it in Google’s eyes.

4. Watch your Rankings and Traffic Surge

I went back to my post and made the keyword bold when I used it. Then I went through the archives and found another post that talked about the stimulus package and added a link to the new post. I also wrote a few more articles in the following weeks that talked about the stimulus package, so I linked back in each of those as well. The result? I moved up to #1 in Google for the phrase “government stimulus package” before it passed. It brought thousands of visitors to my blog, and the week that the bill passed is my highest traffic week ever.

The part of this that is really powerful is that all of this was done several days after the article was posted. The regular readers had read it already, and anyone who was going to link to it already had. I was then able to move from #6 to #1 in Google simply by telling Google what the page was about and that I thought it was important. Never underestimate the power of linking to yourself internally.

I have since dropped behind irs.gov and recovery.gov, but that post has been viewed more times than any other. It also gave me a valuable lesson in SEO that has helped increase my search traffic to many other posts as well.

Source: Dailyblogtips.com

Guide to Meta Tags

Although off-site optimization is generally considered to be more important, ignoring on-site search engine ranking factors can be costly. Things like solid internal linking and keyword-rich titles can have a very significant impact (as I’ve said before). Meta tags, while they’ve fallen out of vogue as the on-site optimization method of choice, can also play an important role in your site’s search engine rankings.

What are meta tags?

For those who don’t know, a meta tag is an HTML tag that resides in the section of a web page. Unlike other HTML tags, meta tags do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so most visitors never see them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are generally used to provide additional information about the page. The meta description tag, for example, provides a brief summary of the page’s content. How this information gets used varies from tag to tag.

Examples of meta tags:

Which meta tags are worthwhile?

There are a lot of meta tags out there, but very few of them are useful. In fact, chances are good that a site that doesn’t use any meta tags at all will function just as well as a site that does. Some have their uses, however, particularly when communicating with search engine spiders. Here’s the breakdown of every meta tag you’re likely to come across:

Abstract - Use the meta description tag instead.

Author - Sure, it’s nice to plaster your name all over your content. However, the best place to do that is somewhere in the content itself to avoid confusion.

Cache-Control - It’s historical use has been to keep users from seeing outdated versions of your website. Since this is rarely an issue nowadays, it’s no longer as useful. Note, also, that it will do next to nothing to prevent your site from being cached by search engines; you should use the robots meta tag for that purpose.

Classification - Considering how badly spammed the keywords meta tag has been, I can’t see such an arbitrary tag doing any better.

Content-Language - This one’s iffy. Ascertaining the language of the content on a site is rarely a big issue. Use it only if you need to clarify from one page to the next, such as if you have multiple translations of the same page.

Content-Type - This one’s actually important. You can assign the character set of a page using one of several methods, including the content-type meta tag. Make sure you do so in some way on every page.

Copyright - Like the author meta tag, you probably should add the copyright notice directly to the body of your website.

Description - Although its no longer useful for ranking purposes, the description tag is often still used in generating snippets (the text that appears beneath the title in the search engine result pages). It is, therefore, a very powerful tool for drawing in potential visitors. Never underestimate the power of controlling each page’s marketing message to the world.

Designer - The same as author and copyright tags, insert this on the website itself.

Distribution - If a page is meant for internal distribution only, it should be properly blocked using robots.txt or the robots meta tag (below). This tag is completely unnecessary.

Expires - If you have content that shouldn’t be crawled or indexed after a certain period of time, it might be useful. For bloggers, the occasion will probably never arise.

Generator - This one is only used by automated web authoring software, so there’s no point to input it by hand.

GoogleBot - If you have some dire need to instruct one search engine spider differently than another, go ahead.

Keywords - Once upon a time, this might have been useful. Since it was so frequently spammed, however, it no longer carries any ranking benefit. It’s still commonly used, however, and it might even be worthwhile in second-rate search engines, but it won’t get you anywhere with the big boys. If you choose to use it, do not, but do not stuff it!

MSNBot - See the note about the googlebot meta tag.

Owner - See the note about the author meta tag.

PICS-Label - See the note about the rating meta tag.

Pragma - Telling browsers whether or not to cache your page could be handy for usability depending on your site. However, I’ve heard that it doesn’t enjoy a lot of support.

Publisher - See the note about the generator meta tag.

Rating - Like so many web standards, it would be great if it were actually used. However, the sites that deserve a rating of “Mature” or “Restricted” rarely broadcast it. Don’t bother with it; let the rating of your content speak for itself.

Refresh - If you’re redirecting one page to another, use a 301 redirect. Meta refreshes are generally regarded as spam.

Reply-To - See the note about the author meta tag.

Revisit-After - Even if getting frequent visits from search engine spiders offered any competitive advantage (it doesn’t), they aren’t going to visit your site more frequently just because you ask them to. This one’s only useful for limiting the frequency of spidering, not increasing it.

Robots - Although you can use the robots.txt file to issue site-wide directives to search engines, the robots meta tag is very handy for controlling spidering on a page-by-page basis. You can tell search engines whether a page should be indexed, whether it should be archived, whether or not its links should be followed, and even how to generate its search result snippet.

Subject - Your title tag should communicate your subject; using a meta tag to do so is unnecessary.

Title - Don’t bother with the meta title tag when your ordinary title tag does the job much better.

Unavailable-After - Believe it or not, this one’s brand new and supported by Google. Why they didn’t just go with the expires meta tag is anyone’s guess. At any rate, like it’s identical twin, it will rarely if ever be useful for bloggers.

There are literally dozens more meta tags out there, few of which enjoy any widespread use. When in doubt about whether a meta tag is worthwhile or not, it’s probably best to assume it isn’t. Otherwise, you’ll just end up cluttering your page headers with a lot of useless junk.

If anyone has any additional meta tags or insights to add, please share them in a comment and I’ll update the original post as needed.

Increase Page Rank..Trackers can increase your PR

Getting backlinks (links to your site from others) is necessary to increase your Page Rank in the long term.

Google bots are quite busy. So it is useful to have a page listing all your backlinks to tell them what pages they should analyse. That's why I recommend to dedicate one page of your site to list the pages linking to your page - I say page and not website in purpose-.

But if you're using spamming on blogs, forums and other websites to get backlinks, it would be better to keep track of those backlinks elsewhere than on your website.
Because if your website is linking to too many sites that are not related you may suffer from a downgrade backlash from Google.

So the best tool to keep track of those backlinks (the referrers) to my viewpoint is

Have a look to the tracker created for this blog: My Tracker

All my referrers are listed. When Google bots analyse this page they collect the links. And when they crawl (analyse) them later, they will find links to my blog. For a website it would be better to have a tracker for every page, but for a blog it's easier with only one.

NB: not many backlinks on my tracker because I'm not actively promoting my blog, this blog is indeed a kind of non-lucrative initiative. ;-p

Extreme Tracking has some credit with Google bots, because it's an old domain (the older your domain the better). So the tracker you set up may get a good PR with time (so put the keywords you are competing in the tracker's name when you create it !).

Other aspects of trackers:

Trackers also allow a better understanding of your visitors: you may know the referring link, the keyword used in the search engine and much more.
Data-mining may help to improve your website.

To keep track of your visitors, here below a list of free trackers (but not for SEO):

StatCounter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Activemeter Invisible, no Ads :-)

Motigo Webstats Logo + PopUnder Ads :-(

I strongly recommend the invisible counters. Unfortunately even if Motigo is user-friendly it cannot compete because of those 'damned shit' PopUnder ads.

Top 10 SEO Tips

The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors

It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information

Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:

Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.

SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.

SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title

There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.

Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:

This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. description
2. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:

SEO Tip #5: Use Headings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.

Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:

SEO Software

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.

SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:

SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

 

    http://www.example.com/

    2005-01-01

    monthly

    0.8

 

The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:

SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.

One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.

Other SEO Tips

If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.

Google Knol will Help You Make Money Online

Google officially launched a new web authoring tool called Knol on Jul 23. Google Knol is free and opened to everyone. It is a content sharing network where you can write and publish articles in most of the topics. Each article page or content page you created is called a Knol.

Publishing a Knol is quite similar to publishing a blog post except the tone is more formal. You can insert related picture or image to your Knol and once your Knol created, readers are allowed to comment and rate your article in the Knol.

What Benefits You'll Gain from Publishing Google Knols?

AdSense Ads is Allowed in Knols
Google said that the authors can choose to include AdSense ads in all their Knols. So, each of your Knols that attract traffic may earn you some AdSense ad revenue. But, if you are actively creating Knols that share useful content, it is possible to earn a nice AdSense income every month as you will have more Knols gaining traffic.

Get Free Google Traffic
The Google knol homepage http://knol.google.com gained thousands of quality backlinks in less than a week. It is expected that it will gain decent of backlinks just like the other two content sharing networks, Hubpages and Squidoo. Because of the huge amount of backlinks Hubpages and Squidoo have gained, they are now getting million of visitors from search engines like Google and Yahoo every month (I believe most are from Google).

This will happen to Google Knol as well. Google Knol will soon gain huge amount of backlinks and many of the Knols created by different authors will start ranking high on Google search engine and enjoy free Google traffic. Those who manage to get their knols ranked on a competitive keyword will receive steady traffic. They can include links in their Knols to direct these Google traffic to their website or blog or choose to monetize their Knols with AdSense ads so that these Google traffic can be converted into AdSense revenue.

Google Knol has their own content policy and term of service. You should read and understand them before creating a Knol to publishing your content. Google doesn’t allow spamming, any Knol that against their policy will be deleted.

Using Blogs for Social Media Optimization

Blogs are one of six broad types of social media. This post will discuss how PR and marketing professionals can use blogs (even if you don't write your own) to increase brand awareness and credibility; the next will discuss all of the other tools of social media.

Blogs are a big deal; they are mainstream and competing with traditional media. There are a lot of them—Technorati tracks more than 15 million active blogs, and although the rate of growth has slowed, there are still thousands of new blogs started each day. Blogs help with SEO, whether you have your own or are generating links to your website from others. More than 60% of U.S. Internet users, and more 70% globally, have read a blog within the past 12 months. And blogs have become a key source of information for executive decision makers.

The first step in developing a blog strategy is understanding the landscape of blogs in your industry. You can search for relevant blogs using keywords pertaining to your business as well as searching for competitor names. While regular search engines can be used, that's a tedious process; it's much more efficient to use blog-specific search tools such as Google blog search, Technorati, BlogMarks, Blogarama and/or Blog Catalog. In addition, check out the blogrolls of the most relevant blogs you find.

The next step is to monitor blogs to discover what's being written about your company, product or other specific topic of interest. You can set up Google Alerts for free, although these won't catch everything (they're likely to miss quite a bit actually). Bloglines is a helpful free tool for monitoring blogs you've already identified; you can add their RSS feeds and monitor posts from one spot. If you have a modest budget (hundreds of dollars per month) for monitoring, try a service like WebClipping or CyberAlert. If you've got a bigger budget (thousands of dollars per month), you can step up to a professional-strength PR monitoring and current awareness tool such as Vocus, Moreover or YellowBrix.

Once you have a feel for the blog ecosystem in your industry, you can begin blogger outreach:

Commenting is a great way to start. Make sure your comments add something to the conversation and aren't simply self-promotional.

Contact the blogger as the next step. Contact should be personal (use the blogger's name, refer to the blog directly, act like you've been there before), compelling (tell a great story) and of course relevant to topics the blogger normally writes about.

Provide assets the blogger can use to enhance the post, such as original research results, images, video, or the offer of an interview with a key executive or other expert.

Writing a guest post is an excellent next step once you have a relationship of trust established with a blogger.

Promote posts when you get coverage. Increasing their exposure (and traffic) is a key incentive in getting bloggers to write about your topic.

And finally, follow up with key bloggers on your list. If they write about you, THANK THEM. If not, ask if it's okay for you to send them an occasional update on your firm/product/service and any interesting developments.

If you have your own blog, you can use many of these tactics to increase your audience through exposure on and links from other blogs. But even if you don't have your own, you can use these practices to increase exposure and build credibility for your company or product in relevant industry blogs.