Zach Daniel at Dallas Internet Marketing has published 17 Motivations for Linking, the second in a series about finding the “Linkerati”.
Interestingly Zach has looked at studies behind the giving of citations in academic books and compared the motivation there with website linking.
Aaron Wall who runs SEO Book recently announced he was going to increase the price from $100 to $150 a month for the private SEO forum.
Those that register before August 2009 will keep the $100 month rate so if you’ve been considering joining do so now!
The membership includes use of the forum, access to members only tools and a complete SEO training modules covering everything from on-page, link building to PPC and much more.
I’ve been a full paying member since day one back in November 2007. It’s actually been the best $2000 I’ve ever spent on SEO, SEM, Social Media and general business information.
The other thing I would add is the nature of the forum – being a begin dictatorship – and I mean that in the best possible way. Aaron spends an incredible amount of time on the site, so far contributing over 14 thousand posts. However, this isn’t a self appointed SEO rock star preaching to the converted. There’s significant and vital material from a host of moderators and members. No fan-boys here either, some are well known SEOs in their own right, other’s are business experts or link builders. All have very meaningful online success in difficult niches. These personalties combine to produce quite frankly a vital resource to all serious online businesses.
Frankly at $150 a month it’s still a steal and if you apply half of what you learn and are advised by the community then you’ll make that back many fold.
Smashing Magazine published a nice piece on conversion optimisation Use Conversions To Generate More Conversions
William Slawski SEO by the Sea produced the excellent Writing Content for Small Businesses Online.
Peter Da Vanzo followed up at SEO Book with The Search Taxonomy: Getting Inside the Mind of the Searcher.
Google are beginning to actually index and count Javascript links as Vanessa Fox discusses in this
Search Engine Land column, Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?
Lyndon Antcliff has been promoting his Magnetic Web Content newsletter and shared 101 Blogging Headlines.
You’ll find these fine people well worth following on Twitter too:
Here are a small few of the exceptional posts I have seen this week.
Andy Beard just published a great article: Does Your Premium WordPress Theme Help You Rank For “Home”?.
Augusto Ellacuriaga at Spanish SEO put together a great post Effective Link Building Strategies for Successful Link Acquisition.
Over on SEO Book, Aaron Wall published Who Advertises on Google AdWords? and Peter Da Vanzo authored The Next Big Shift In Web Marketing.
Naturally all these good people are over on twitter and well worth following if you don’t already.
As a follow up to GoCompare No Longer Ranking for their Brand Name I decided to have a quick look at the SERPs and see that GoCompare rank #1 again in Google.co.uk for their brand.
When looking at some of the terms they target they’ve improved a little, but are still ranking badly.
Continue reading “GoCompare Ranking for their Brand Name Again”
This morning I saw that Patrick Altoft on his search engine optimisation site had mentioned that GoCompare had been penalised again.
Patrick had previously mentioned a penalty after he looked at paid links in the car insurance vertical.
The latest article points to an email published on Red Cardinal showing how GoCompare requested some of their links.
Continue reading “GoCompare No Longer Ranking for their Brand Name. Again.”
Occasionally I hear of sites being penalised by Google and quickly dropping out of the SERPs. This can often be the result of spammy links being injected into the site’s template.
Often the links are hidden from everyone apart from the search engine spiders, so a quick normal visual check won’t reveal the problem.
In those cases a site search at Google for the domain name + a spammy term can show the infected articles.
The following bookmarklet will take the domain you are currently visiting and search Google for site:domain and add four common spam terms. Each Google search is opened in a new window giving you the original site plus four new tabs for each of the searches.
javascript:(function(){ window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' viagra'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' payday+loans'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' cialis'); window.open('http://www.google.com/search?pws=0&num=100&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname)+' ringtones'); })();
To install the bookmarklet, just drag the button below to the bookmarks bar in your browser. To use, click it when you are visiting a domain you want to check for spam. It’s that easy!
When I shared this bookmarklet on the SEO Book community forum, Aaron Wall mentioned the Blogstorm post, “How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked” as an alternative for constantly checking your own sites.
UPDATE 2016-06-16
I’ve developed a new version of the bookmarklet, which is now over here. The new version uses the Bootstrap theme for a contemporary look and feel. It also has a useful textarea box so you can quickly copy and paste the on-page seo elements into another document.
You’ll also get a preview of the site’s new theme!
Install the SEO bookmarklet tool following the instructions on that page – you just have to drag the big link there to your bookmarks toolbar.
To use it just click the bookmarklet when you are visiting a page.
This is the first in a few of SEO and bookmarklet tools, this version works entirely from javascript, your complete privacy is assured as no information is sent to our server other than the delivery from the server of the CSS & images to appropriately format the results and mimic a Google SERPs result.
Here you can see an example of what the page’s Google serps would be and following that a breakdown on several of the on page factors for SEO and conversion.
Consider the expected result from Google
Use the tool to test various title and description options to tailor the result to best reflect your page to a potential visitor whilst still maintaining the appropriate keywords in the title for ranking benefits. The SERP should encourage clickthrough, whilst the landing page will be tailored to getting the necessary conversion.
Look at the list of heading tags knowing that visitors often skim the text on the page and only see the headings:
Following the work on headlines do the same with any emboldened words, do they provide enough key information on the pages content for readers skimming through your page?
If you can, please take a few minutes to leave your comments or ideas on the SEO Bookmarklet below so we can continue to improve this tool.
Status Code OK – The file request was successful. For example, a document or file was successfully found by a spider or browser
The 301 is a status code meaning Moved Permanently. 301 is often used as a term by SEOs such as “301 the page”, meaning to add a code such as to an Apache web servers htaccess file to redirect a URI to another location.
Found however the requested resource has temporarily moved to a different URI. Due to the mechanism in which search engines index the Internet, it was possible to hijack another sites’ search engine results for a page though providing a redirect to the proper source.
Not Modified
Not found.
In addition to Attention, Interest, Desire and Action, Satisfy has been added to the traditional acronym meaning that the action perform must satisfy, the click must work, error messages shouldn’t blame the user, searches produce relevant results and products match the promises.
Apache is the server software that runs the majority of web sites. Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996.
A browser is typically the software that the visitor uses to interact with your website though it can also refer to the visitor themselves.
Popular web browsers are:
Usually PPC adverts that appear on websites and search engines closely related to either the search performed or the content of the page.
The Cost Per Click of PPC advert.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions is an advertising pricing model that pays the publisher for the amount of impressions received. It’s commonly used on high volume sites that may receive a lot of traffic from social bookmarking sites whose users commonly don’t click on PPC adverts.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is a comparatively recent discipline that analyses user behaviour and through testing and result measurement will raise the number of visitors that reach the goal of the website owner. This goal is normally a sale on an e-commerce site, but some pages the goal may be to get more visitors to interact in certain ways, such as to click a particular link or make a comment.
Click Through Rate is normally expressed as a percentage of the clicks on an advert compared to impressions. It can be expressed for the individual adverts or keywords.
CTR % = (Clicks / Impressions) X 100
When two pages for the same site would be listed on the same page of results Google indent the lower ranking page beneath the higher one.
The indented listing will appear just below the old higher position. If you had a listing at position three and twelve, if you displayed twenty results at once you’d see the twelfth result move up to fourth.
Similarly if you improved the second listing up to tenth, then it would display at three and four even when displaying just the standard ten results.
User Generated Content is elements of content that is input by users of the site, this can be from blog comments, annotations on photograph such as on Flickr.com through to entire sites being built on UCG such as wikipedia and 43things. In a wider sense the entire content of blog networks like blogspot, video upload sites or social book are also User Generated Content.
Opportunity Cost is the value that can be placed on the next best decision for a business. If decision A would reap X amount and decision B would reap Y, then the opportunity cost of making decision B is the difference between X and Y.
During conversion optimisation the opportunity cost is the difference to the value attributed prior to the test to the current versions. In testing you may create versions of pages or advertisements that perform worse and it can be said that the cost of testing is the difference, however as as we continue to test hypothesis and produce better performing pages and advertisements then the opportunity cost is a benefit to the company. We often prefer to refer to this as the opportunity value.
Generally refers to link building techniques to improve the popularity of the target site.
A set of modifications made to the page to improve its performance in the search engines. This will include focusing the title, headings and body copy to a small set of keywords.
Page Rank is a logarithmic value given by Google broadly indicating a site’s / page’s value based on incoming links. The page rank as reported by the tool bar lags behind the “real” internal Google value. Many PR values are either hand or algorithmically changed by Google, especially if the site sells links.
Pay Per Click – a/k/a CPC. Pay Per Click is a common term for contextual advertising for example Google’s AdWords system where the advertiser is only charged when the advert is clicked and and not for the advert’s display.
The robots.txt file provides instructions to spiders about the website and which pages or folders they may not visit. This is called the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The directive is to disallow pages rather than allow. “Badbots” tend to ignore the robots.txt.
Search Engine Optimisation – is the term given to a variety of tasks and procedures undertaken with the goal of increasing a site or pages ranking in search engines. It’s closely related to Search Marketing which may include advertising elements, and Social Media Marketing.
The Search Engine Result Page. Can also be used to refer to the positioning of a result within a search engines results.
Social Media Marketing is the process of marketing a site through various social bookmarking and social networking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.Icio.Is, Reddit etc.
A spider is both the process of the indexing pages from sites & discovering new sites via links as well as the program that retreives this information. Ex. Googlebot is a spider.
Spidering or crawling the web is the action of indexing it.
These “Bots” should follow the robots.txt instructions.
Each request to your website such as visiting a page or downloading an image returns a HTTP status code. These are typically 200 (ok), 304 (not modified) or an error status such as 404 (not found).
Tool Bar Page Rank – refers to the page rank of a given page or web site as reported by the Google Tool Bar.
See browsers.
