Latest Articles
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.
To Click or Not to Click: What Was the Question?
August 2, 2010 By Sue Spiker
How much information do you retain after reading online content? Not as much as you may think. Take a brief moment to read through each of these articles.
- When Linking Gets Out of Control (Version 1)
- When Linking Gets Out of Control (Version 2)
Done? Okay. Now let’s chat. How many of you clicked on the links in the second version AS you were reading? That didn’t happen with the first version, did it? That’s because Version 2 has hyperlinks within the body content while Version 1 doesn’t. And hyperlinks within body content are a leading reason for users not retaining as much information as they would if they were reading a continuous, flow of unlinked text.
Let’s be honest, we don’t ‘read’ so much as we ‘scan’ online content. Nor do we think twice about clicking link after link to go from page to page. And it’s hard to retain information when elements within the content are specifically designed to encourage navigation somewhere else. In fact, we quickly forget much of what we’ve just read the moment we move on.
As users, we’re hardwired to instantly evaluate the value of clicking a link versus the value of staying where we are. How much focus can you actually maintain as you move from page to page reading up on SEO, Information Architecture, the World Wide Web and the Twinkies 80th Anniversary Celebration? (Incidentally, Twinkies have a shelf life of 26 days – I looked.)
Yes, including links within the body content may be good for SEO, but too many links can be data overload for users.
|
Good SEO practitioners know that their efforts should not interfere with the user experience. |
Understanding how your current approach impacts user behavior can help you create a stronger, more effective linking strategy. Balancing the number and placement of links with the user experience can actually strengthen your linking strategy AND help readers retain the information that you’re offering.
Improving Link Popularity
May 27, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team
The stronger a webpage’s link popularity, the higher its page score and the higher it will rank in search results. Link popularity is the total number of links that a search engine finds for a webpage, and it’s the quality of these links that determines the page’s overall link popularity. But not all links are equally valuable.
Search engines can tell the difference between reciprocal links and one-way links, and one-way links are stronger when it comes to boosting link popularity. And when search engines index your website and the sites that your pages link to, they also take into account Rank, Relevancy and Authority.
Think about it – between CNN.com and a single-page hobby site, which has a higher page rank? How about content that’s relevant to yours? Which would search engines consider a more authoritative, established site? Create quality outbound links by pointing your visitors to sites with a respectable search ranking and content that complements your own.
True, you can’t always control who links to your pages, but a good way to attract quality inbound links is to give visitors a reason to bookmark your page and keep coming back. The better your content is and the more your overall website has to offer, the more likely other sites are to link to yours.
Check out our SEO 101 tutorial Building an Effective Linking Strategy to learn more about managing inbound and outbound link building. Make creating quality links part of your marketing plan, and it can ultimately make a difference in your webpage’s search rankings.
Depressed Server, Great 404 Link Bait / Viral Marketing Example
April 8, 2009 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
If you’ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or if you’ve seen the movie, you know that Marvin The Paranoid Android is funny in it’s own depressing way. What if your web server had the same dejected outlook? Check out this 404 error page. This is a great example of something that can go “viral” and add new visitors, links, and attention to a site.
Every time some one hits the wrong URL or mistypes when visiting the Wikimaniacs site, they come across a great 404 page. While it is probably a rare occurrence to hit this page, if the site lasts a few years, it wouldn’t surprise me to see their 404 page submitted to the various social bookmark sites over and over again as visitors re-”discover” this 404 page. This is one of the ways in which viral marketing works best… The reason why I found this page? It hit the front page of a social bookmark site called “Reddit“.
It could be that some one associated with Wikimaniacs submitted the page to Reddit, or that with their recent brush with popularity via social bookmark site Digg, a new visitor came across this error page, loved it, and subsequently decided to submit an error URL to Reddit (and perhaps other places as well). Either way, it helps them to gain more visibility and potentially improve their rankings. As I mentioned a few months ago, a 360 degree take on visitor experience and attention to little details like 404 pages can be quite positive toward marketing a site.
(Photo by Prince Heathen)
Update: Wikimaniacs is no longer available – check out these fun 404 error pages instead:
Best 404 Error Pages EVER: 17 Awesome ‘Page Not Found’ Messages
WDL – 404 error pages for your viewing pleasure
Viral Marketing With No Place To Go… A Quick Tip.
January 8, 2009 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
Reading through social bookmarking site Reddit, I found this great graphic that describes the “browser wars”. The graphic represents a great piece of viral marketing as well. There are a lot of tech, SEO, and others that will likely bookmark, blog about, or otherwise promote the site or graphic. However there is nothing else really on the site, it has no place to go…
As you consider adding some viral marketing on your site, such as some info graphics – like the “browser wars”, a small consideration to make…
Put your graphic on a specific web page and strategically link to other pages on your site. Submit the web page to social bookmarking sites, not the graphic. You do want to leverage any “Page Rank” gains on your viral page gains so that it can help uplift other pages on your site. When you submit only a graphic, your page rank starts and ends with that graphic. There is not “site rank”.
Social Marketing: Some Links Are Radioactive
November 6, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
When you look at the number of links pointing back to your site, it is usually good to see the total number increasing. This often means that you are doing something right. When dealing with client expectations, you may need to explain to a client that just because the number of links go up, this does not necessarily mean that all of their rankings will go up in turn. It may, in some ways, be helpful to explain to your client that links can often be radioactive in nature. They can provide a benefit today that energizes your rankings, helps it to gain traffic and conversions, to start a conversation about a product or service, and so on, but many links lose their strength to provide these actions over time.
Links that might be considered “radioactive” are those that have the potential to bring a lot of popularity to your site and provide some great uplift to your rankings but only for a limited time. After some time, they might be spent or depleted of their ability to help.
As one example, lets say that Google just so happened to visit Best Week Ever this morning. And it looks like they have…
One of the posts on their front page today, leads to a page that talks about a cat toilet. Not too exciting, I know. While the post on their main page talks about and links to the manufacturer, Google and other engines will see that link back to the manufacturer and they can associate a bit of the page’s popularity to that link. In this case, Cat Genie, has a PR7 page pointing back to it from BWE.
As the BWE home page adds newer posts, the Cat Genie post will be buried further (PR7), and further (PR 5), and further (PR 0) into BWE’s site structure. As the link moves deeper into the site, most of the benefit that Cat Genie’s rankings had gained from this link will decay or disappear.
While this is just one example, there are many hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, news aggregators, and other sites that have this same process at work. I know that PR is a lousy measure by most accounts, as it is not updated for updated for months at a time, and there are indeed many factors aside from PR that engines like Google use to rank a page. Understanding this concept of link radioactivity, depreciation or whatever you want to call it, may help you to explain to clients and others why link building is not a one time action. This understanding can also help when trying to explain why even with a huge number of links behind them, a site may still no do so well in the rankings. Even with a good volume of links behind them, sites can – seemingly out of nowhere – find that their rankings tank through no fault of their own.
Ranking Argument: Links Aren’t Everything…
March 28, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
There are a number of disagreements in the SEO industry about what is the most important thing in regards to improving search engine rankings. Some argue that content is the most important. Some argue that it is optimization that is the most important. Some think that links are the most important. While I think that all 3 are quite important, and while there are thousands of factors to consider, lets just look at links for a moment.
I have a web page that ranks well for the term “International SEO” in Google. This page was created and optimized back in 2006. I really haven’t promoted it across any social networks, I haven’t asked any industry heavy weights to link to it from their (much more popular) blogs, and I’ve only mentioned the page or linked back to it from my own site, once in a while.
When I speak to customers on the phone, describing the use of WebPosition, I point this ranking out as one example of why some keywords are easier to rank on than others. (Trying to rank on just “SEO” would be pretty daunting.) I suspect that many of these budding SEO/SEM shops have created their own pages on the topic, trying to see if they too could rank for the term. Depending on the day and mood of Google, I’ve seen that there are anywhere from 300,000 competitors for this term to 1.5 million.
When you look at some of the competitors for this phrase… wow. There are some heavy weight SEO players in this area. Why are they not ranking? Hats off to sites like: www.seochat.com, www.v7n.com, webmasterworld.com, www.zunch.com, www.johnon.com, among others…
If you look solely at links… there is no way that I should rank.
First, these other sites have more links back to their main URL. Thus, overall, more popular sites than MarketPosition.com. Second, the Johnon post seems to have many more links pointing back to it’s page (as evidenced by the seemingly more accurate Yahoo link check).
I’ve seen my page bounce around the first two pages of results over the past year. When I linked back to the 2006 post on International SEO in this February post, the ranking for my 2006 post shot to ranking 2 from hanging around rank 8-12 in December and January.
While this one example is not all conclusive, it may help to explain why rankings is about more than just “who has more links?”.
-> While all engines have access to virtually the same pool of back links that point to a site, they may not count all of them. At least not publicly, through their back link reporting tools. Privately, this may be a different matter. If they do have pretty similar lists of back links, wouldn’t SEOChat dominate many of these phrases with more than 553,185 back links in Yahoo? Or WebMasterWorld with 140,000 links in Google? By simply linking from their main page, they could pass a heavy load of popularity onto any page and have it rank fairly well.
-> Search engines have different tastes. This is one of the reasons why I do recommend that you create good, optimized, customer facing content pages for all engines.
->Not all links have equivalent weight. Looking at back links that point just to the pages that Google ranked for International SEO, Johnon’s page would rank higher than mine, across all 3 engines.
Being that I represent the WebPosition software, which has a link checking option, do not think that I’m saying that you shouldn’t check your links from time to time. It’s actually pretty important. If you are out there writing on a blog, posting videos on YouTube, if you are answering questions on Yahoo Answers, if you are marketing via FaceBook, if you are using twitter, or other services to promote your self or your site, it is one measurement of how people are talking about you, promoting your site, etc. In the real world, I would compare this to checking the newspaper to see if they wrote about you in the business section when you spoke or volunteered for organizations like the Kiwanis club, the scouts, etc. Are people talking about you, your business, your web site? If they are, you are doing something right. The more people talk , the better visibility you have, and the more likely you are to rank if you have other factors going in your favor as well (content and optimization for example). It is only one in a multitude of things that you can do to better understand the overall picture of how your activities are paying off.
Bootstrap SEO: How To Ride A Wave Of Popularity.
December 27, 2007 By Webposition SEO Team
by Scott Goodyear
As an internet marketer, it is often easier to look at some one else’s site and see opportunity than it is to see opportunities on your own site. In this post I want to give an example of what I would call “bootstrap” SEO. Essentially bootstrap SEO occurs when you see some one else’s success, think up ideas on how they might continue to build on their success, but you may instead find a way to build this content for your own site.
Internet marketers often focus on trends in order to divine which keywords and phrases should be the focus when buying pay per click advertisements or building new site content. If you’ve been around the web or if you’ve been watching TV, you’ve probably heard that the World of Warcraft video game is one of the biggest games online with an online tidal wave of approximately 9 million subscribers. While I’m a former player myself, news about the game still piques my interest from time to time.
9 million. It boggles the mind. Even a slice of such a large customer base would make the day of most internet companies. On December 11th, 2007 a Warcraft licensed third party site opened called Figureprints. This site essentially makes a mini-statue of a player’s character for about $115. I’m sure that if even a slice of the WOW customer base purchases a figure print, this site will be quite successful.
In relation to SEO, the Figureprints site had about 1,800 reported links in Yahoo Site Explorer when it launched. After 16 days, they now have over 3,000. (I’m not sure why Google still reports zero links. /sigh ) While I’m not in a related industry, my mind buzzes with related topics that various industries could write about.
I see a bootstrap opportunity here where sites related to 3D printers and printing, model making, custom action figures, character statues, games, comic book blogs, and many others can improve or create rankings. Two examples that come to mind:
Printing: While you may not be able to become a Warcraft licensee, you may be able to bootstrap your rankings by explaining how the 3D printing process works. If your company has a CAD/rapid prototype/3D printer you have just about all you need to create and print up a non-Warcraft monster or hero, but from the same fantasy genre of trolls, knights and goblins. While doing this you can take pictures, capture some video on a camera phone or camcorder, and write up some color commentary about the process. This has the potential to build out to several pages of interesting text and imagery that could rank quite well over time. If you don’t have access to this type of printer, now is a great time to grab the yellow pages or start searching for a company to partner with.
Action Figures and Collectibles: There were mass produced Warcraft action figures that came before and after Figureprints. While it has been written that Warcraft has brought many first timers to the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game genre, will this have a similar affect on the niche action figure industry? There have been several companies that have produced custom action figures before. Any speculation on how this might change their outlook? There are also thousands of hobby sites where they creatively mash up legs, arms, torsos, sculpty and bits of plastic, in order to create custom made action figures. (Also know as action figure mods.) Any connections to explore there?
The idea of bootstrapping your SEO effort by hitching onto a related site or company’s idea can be quite powerful. The social aspect of talking about the subject in various forums, answering questions, and encouraging discussion around your videos, can create a positive buzz and links to both your site and the sites you discuss. If you are knowledgeable it can create legitimacy and trust in your site or service as well. While creating content around Figureprints and Warcraft may not be everyone’s cup of tea, there are certainly opportunities in other industries and around other topics if you keep an open mind. Good luck in maximizing your online marketing efforts!