Latest Articles
On-page SEO + Off-page SEO = Wonder Twins!
August 9, 2011 By korbodo
I’m probably dating myself, but as a kid I remember watching the Super Friends fight crime on TV every Saturday morning. Of the various leotard-clad heroes, the Wonder Twins were among my favorites. With their wonder twin powers activated, one could change into anything water or mineral-based; the other could change into any animal or creature. Working together, they could keep any evil villain at bay.
It’s analogous to on-page and off-page SEO: they’re different, and they’re better together.
For non-branded keywords, particularly nouns, you’ll often see that sites like Wikipedia, IMDB and Amazon do really well. Not only do they have quality content, but lots of people agree and link to them. It’s not too surprising when they rank for searches where the match is a bit of a stretch.
For long-tail keywords, it’s even more critical to balance both on and off-page because the “big guys” aren’t a factor. Tools like PageCritic compare how the top ranked pages use a keyword phrase, often uncovering gaping holes (e.g. not using any part of the keyword phrase in the title) that will get you thinking “how the heck are they ranking?”
That’s where the off-page SEO analysis comes in. Chances are, once you run a report for that site that isn’t using the keyword phrase very well, you’ll uncover a mix of inbound links from relevant & reputable sites to the irrelevant & disreputable. You’ll also want to look at the internal link structure to see what their anchors are.
If the site is for a plumber, finding inbound links from relevant sites about home repair or local directories makes sense, whereas links from a cocktail mixology expert do not. Chances are the poor plumber has no idea those mixology links are there. So, you can do two things: 1) note all the relevant links as ones to go after and 2) if you’re an SEO Agency, use the sources of irrelevant links to find other potential “link building victims” to save! It’ll be your good deed of the day.
Next, look at the internal links for that site – in particular, look at what anchors or links they’re using when they refer to their own content. Those links are another signal to the search engines telling them what the content on the other end of the link is about. They may give you some ideas about what words you should be using on your own site’s links.
Of course I’ve been eating our own dogfood and using WebPosition’s InLinks Beta to do link analysis lately (and loving it!), but the tool is less important than taking the time to understand the competition’s strengths and weaknesses, both on-page and off.
PS, as a childhood Super Friends devotee, can someone please put together a nicely indexed list of all the things the Wonder Twins activated and turned themselves into? Please?
Explain SEO to your parents (and their friends)
July 29, 2011 By korbodo
Last weekend I had dinner with my folks and they had some friends over.
“What do you do?” they asked.
“I help people’s websites show up in Google and other search engines,” I said.
“So how do you make that happen?”
I’ll spare you what I ACTUALLY said, and instead give you this little deck to send family members and friends who are still trying to understand what the heck you do hunched in front of the glow of the monitor every day. Enjoy!
Can’t see the video? Try THIS.
PageCritic Beta Announcement
March 8, 2011 By Webposition SEO Team
We’re pretty excited to be bringing you news of the PageCritic Beta, and even more excited that all WebPosition Standard and Premium subscribers automatically have access to see it for themselves and to start kicking the tires.
PageCritic analyzes how the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for is used on your webpage. It finds the top competition for the keyword and looks at how the keyword phrase is being used on those pages, too. Better yet, you can use PageCritic to analyze pages you haven’t released yet and compare them to the competition they’ll have when they’re published. In the Slideshare presentation below, we use an example site to show you how to create a critique, and start seeing how to identify on-page optimization opportunities.
Enjoy! (Full-screen view recommended)
Googletestad: The Word. The Myth. The Reality.
October 11, 2010 By Scott Penrose
Several years ago, the keyword googletestad was rumored to be some sort of “SEO Gold” that everyone needed to replicate due to the volume of search activity it was seeing. And in 2006, WordTracker reported that the term was one of its most searched terms.
But let’s put the myth to rest. 
The term “googletestad” is simply a test term that Google and its partners use to verify feed availability and various other monitoring processes. Nothing more. Nothing less. An automated means sends the query “googletestad” through X number of times per hour, which is why the volume appears so high if you’re tracking it.
If you check out Dogpile SearchSpy, a live streaming feed of what users are looking for on Dogpile.com, you can still see the term every so often. If you enter “googletestad” in Google.com, you get a results page with a test ad (which is Google verifying its own ad system up time) and some organic listings about the “googletestad hoax”.
Consider this…“googletestad” is really just “Google Test Ad” without spaces in between the words, or capitalization. And sadly, although it sounds like one, “googletestad” isn’t a beer either.
Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
September 2, 2010 By Sue Spiker
Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) is an effective and often overlooked extension of SEO. But, it’s actually an opportunity to support the content you’ve (hopefully) already worked so hard to optimize. And even extend that content’s visibility.
According to comScore’s May 2010 figures, “U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos in May.” That makes VSEO a tremendous opportunity to:
- Drive web traffic
- Boost brand identity
- Add life to your web presence
- Connect with customers
- Showcase your expertise
- Build authority within your industry
And because YouTube “accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed”, creating your own YouTube Channel is an obvious place to begin your own VSEO efforts. YouTube tags and indexes posted videos to show up its own search results based on much the same information that search engines use to index webpages to show up in their results. Entering the right titles, tags and descriptions increases your video’s chance of being listed in the search results for YouTube and the major search engines.
Like every other aspect of your strategy, VSEO requires a carefully thought-out approach to effectively generate user interest, go viral and drive traffic to your website. And while your own Channel may not generate huge numbers, you can still increase your web presence simply by posting easily-searched 2- to 3-minute videos. So while you’re implementing general SEO strategies, consider video search optimization as a way to increase your web presence and web traffic.
Seed Sites are One of SEO’s Best Kept Secrets
August 20, 2010 By Sue Spiker
Part of a search engine’s secret formula is what domains it chooses to use as seed sites, the entry points through which it deploys its web crawlers to explore and index the Internet. Knowing exactly what domains it chooses as seed sites could tell us exactly where to make sure our websites are listed and where to focus our linking strategies.
Helpful information for those of us on an eternal quest for a higher page rank.
No such comprehensive list is publicly available, for two reasons. First, search providers use a multitude of seed sites, and they’re not committed to using the same sites each time. Domains such as Yahoo Directory and DMOZ are likely candidates, but using a variety of domains increases the chances of discovering new URLs and finding out which URLs have expired, which helps keep its search index up-to-date. Therefore, that list would constantly be in flux and not entirely accurate at any given date.
Second, search providers are historically (and understandably) protective of their trade secrets and are not expected to volunteer such key information any time soon. Basically, they could tell us, but then they’d have to…well…you know.
And we can’t really blame them. Imagine what would happen if such information fell into unscrupulous hands. Spammers and hackers the world over would start gaming the system before we could say “Let me look that up online.”
So give your website the best exposure you can by submitting it to as many appropriate directories and niche portals as possible. While you’re at it, use social media to get your site out there. Search engines will find your website if you just keep spreading the word by practicing solid, white hat SEO techniques. And when they do, make sure that you’ve done a thorough job of optimizing your content, coding and structure, including creating a sitemap.xml file to tell their web crawlers exactly where to go next.
YPO: The Original SEO
August 17, 2010 By Scott Penrose
You may not be familiar with the name YPO (Yellow Pages Optimization), but you’ve seen it in action.
Go grab your Yellow Pages directory. What is that you ask? It’s that big book full of ads sitting in the closet under the bread maker you always said you’d use. Thumb to a category like pest control and tell me what you see.
The concept of advertising optimization is nothing new. Long before search engines and secret algorithms, all a person needed to know to get a first page listing under their Yellow Pages category was the alphabet. Eventually, somebody figured out that all they had to do to make sure more eyeballs saw their company’s name was to stick some A’s at the beginning of it.
Now, if you want to rank on the first page of say, Google…the old formula was that the more links you had, the more popular you must be and so the higher you would rank. The concept is similar to “Alpha Loading” your company’s name with A’s. The more A’s (or links) you have, the closer to the top you ‘ll be.
So the next time you think SEO is something new, think back to your handy dandy Yellow Pages. As long as there are marketers trying to sell products, there will be marketers who try to game the system whether they be online OR offline.
Optimization: One Big Party On & Off the Page
August 9, 2010 By Sue Spiker
Their names imply that they’re completely separate approaches, but here’s the truth… good SEO integrates on-page and off-page optimization to grow web traffic and encourage a higher search ranking. Neglecting one in favor of the other can do your site a great disservice because ultimately, they work together.
On-Page Optimization is what’s done to a website’s content to offer a smartly designed user experience and make the site easily explored and indexed by search engines. Elements include title tags, meta tags, HTML tags, keywords, content, internal links, headings, images and Calls to Action (CTAs).
But after you optimize the content, coding and structure, you need to make it easy for people (and search engines) to find your site. Otherwise, it’s like getting your house ready for a party and not telling anyone. Sure, you may get the stray guest occasionally, but your traffic won’t be all that it can be and you won’t be listed on any Top 10 Parties lists. You need to spread the word – that’s where off-page optimization comes in.
Off-Page Optimization focuses on generating high quality inbound links to increase your site’s link popularity, which tells search engines that your site is important and authoritative. Remember that phrase “high quality” – it refers to the other site’s Google Page Rank, amount of web traffic and relevancy of its content. Start by submitting your site to appropriate web directory categories, which have a very broad scope, and niche portals, which are smaller but much more specialized listings.
When your off-page optimization starts generating interest, your on-page optimization (which should already be in place) encourages users to come back and gives other sites a reason to create backlinks. Basically, if you’re going to send out party invitations, your house must be ready to receive guests. Otherwise, most visitors won’t stay long, and even fewer will recommend you to friends and family.
There’s no single, universally accepted SEO checklist that addresses the best practices for optimization on all search engines, or even the top three. But here are some resources to help you get started:
- MarketPosition SEO 101: Takes you through some of the ins-&-outs of basic SEO.
- Google SEO Starter Guide (PDF): Explains some best practices for making your site user- and search engine-friendly.
- Google Webmaster Guidelines: Guidelines to best optimize your webpage and submit it to be included in Google’s search index.
- Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters White Paper: Includes SEO guidelines for ranking well on Bing’s search results.
