Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design » Search Engine Optimization

SEO For Long Term Success – Just Because It’s New Doesn’t Mean It’s Better

CVOS — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:24:54 +0000

Below are some good nuggets about online business building and search engine optimization from Fantomaster.

This is no “secret sauce” use common sense by giving people what they need or enjoy or even get worked up about.

If I was going to produce a course about SEO in 10 minutes a day or SEO for dummies, this is some of the basic information I would include. There is no need for cloaking as long as you are doing your job in making your website the best it can be.

The good old classic SEO rules still apply and have actually never stopped:

build web sites with good, useful information or content
make your pages light, usetight code and fast to load
use keywords in your title tags and text heading tags
use meta tags sparingly but intelligently
attend to usability as much for your human visitors as for the search engine spiders
optimize on site navigation and internal linking structure.
use secondary content features such as RSS, bookmarking and images

Adamantly watch your internal link structure and reduce orphan pages. Old pages should not be indiscriminately discarded.

whenever we conduct an on site link analysis of any large corporate site, there’ll always thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of pages that are either entirely orphaned or bleeding link juice the wrong way.
In some cases we’ve detected that up to 25% of a site’s pages weren’t linked to from anywhere at all

Want users to come back to your site? Use subtle persuasion and make meaning.

publishing our SEO cartoons consistently week by week has proven a prime traffic magnet as well. Those cartoons are arguably one of the best investments we’ve ever made in terms of keeping the buzz level up.

External links are important, but only a portion of site ranking factors. The larger the website, the less effort should be spent on manual link building.

if all you can think of in terms of organic SEO is “links, links, links”, you’re missing out on about 90% of all those other possibilities and traffic conduits available

Cloaking is one of the most discussed and least understood tool of information delivery. It is one of the only ways to reliably rank for ultra competitive niches.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has publicly admitted that there are industries where you don’t stand a chance in hell if you don’t adopt hard core black hat SEO techniques including PPC: pills, porn, casinos. (This is not something we do, and have never engaged in cloaking)

Yahoo! or Google may roll out 800 new spiders within a couple of hours. there’s no reliable way of automating a list of spider IP addresses. “Poor man’s cloaking” such as delivery by UserAgent, free IP bot lists or JavaScript based operations are simply too risky to be worth the effort at all. Only use software that offers genuine IP delivery because there’s no other reliable approach.

An online business is very similar to a traditional brick and mortar business. There is a historical success rate of only 10%. Advice for starting a new online venture:

It’s also governed by the very same economic laws:

don’t spend more than you have

buy low, sell high

listen to your customers

watch out for your competition

don’t give in to smug routines

None of this has fundamentally changed because it’s the way the world of commerce (or, if you like, capitalism) works.
Some ventures may prove to be a roaring success in no time (which, incidentally, tends to happen in the “real world” as well), most all operations will have to practice relentless perseverance before turning a profit.

There’s no easy way out and no guarantees of internet success, no matter what some over hyped marketing “gurus” may claim when trying to pitch you on their overpriced stuff.

Read the full interview with Ralph Tegtmeier.

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Large Corporate Websites Leading The Charge to SEO

CVOS — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:19:11 +0000

A large domain name registrar has been an innovator of low cost domain name registration and web hosting services for over a decade, and they are always hunting for business.

How do they want to grow in the competitive web hosting marketplace? By using search engine optimization of course!

Unfortunately this SEO experience is not seamless, and is as inconspicuous as a vegan driving a Hummer.

This is my favorite part. If you look at the source code, this is in the footer.

table id=”divSEOContainer”

If you are trying to trick Google, at least try to make them work. Real search engine optimization is not adding 5 paragraphs of keyword laden text to the footer of your website.

Real SEO is adding valuable information that is designed to help your users make an informed decision.

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Hilarious Search Engine Optimization “Technique”

CVOS — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:12:14 +0000

I love seeing what other webmasters do to try to improve their rankings. This SEO technique (used extremely loosely here) demonstrates why SEO’s have such a bad reputation in the online marketing industry.

This webmaster makes no effort to hide the keyword stuffed text, and trys to direct search engine spiders to his special content.

I give this is a search engine optimization blooper a 10.

Please excuse me while I increase our chances of getting to the top of the engines. I will repeat myself.

see this in action (warning do not try this SEO technique on your own website)

http://www.bajabigfish.com/

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The True Long Term Viability of SEO

CVOS — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:05:52 +0000

Many people like to predict the end of search engine optimization and online marketing as we know it. SEO will change and evolve as the web becomes more advanced and desktop oriented but it will not disappear.

As Mark Twain would say, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Here is a quote from a popular web forum

“SEO as we know it will be dead within the next 2 years – true or false? With the wealth of info at their fingertips combined with localized, customized search to name but a few Google will no longer need to do what it does now to determine rankings?”

Google and the search engines that follow their lead will adapt and change, morph and mature while the engineers create new a variety of metrics in order to determine relevance. SEOs will adapt and change, trying to work out what these metrics are.

To succeed in merit based SERPs you must use a holistic strategy. The goal is to provide something of quality to humans: an opinion, service, information, product, or tool. Getting traffic will result from having a solid website with good content, an aesthetic design, usable navigation, solid site structure, and relevant content. If you solve problems in an elegant way people will love you and reward you for it.

All SEO efforts must resulting in an improvement of your website and directly increase the financial position of your company. Quality sells and people will always pay for quality.

Anyone can be successful at online marketing, traffic generation and search engine placement specifically, if they stop looking for ways to trick search engine spiders and focus on connecting with real users.

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How Hearst Magazines Increased Website Traffic By 150%

CVOS — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:00:25 +0000

Using good keyword research and educating editors on proper search engine optimization techniques helped the Hearst publishing empire increase traffic to their web properties by 150%.

Hearst publishes 15 of the world’s most popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Oprah’s O Magazine, and Good Housekeeping as well as 5 web only magazines. Their Senior SEO Analyst for the Digital Media team overcame the challenges of introducing SEO to management, staff writers and editors.

Choosing the right keywords is essential. An online writer must adapt to the online world, which means using different words than for a print publication. Below is an example of using keyword research to write title tags that will reach the largest audience:

When writing for women’s fashion: titles are big part of what they do, so early on we made the decision that we’d instruct them to run some comparatives on the keywords ‘fashion’ and ‘style’. In the print context they like to use the word style, but I stressed to them that style is somewhat nebulous in that it can mean a number of things. People’s behavior online is different because when they are looking for content they tend to be much more literal, because they have to be. The Wordtracker keyword research data showed us that 7:1 people were more likely to use ‘fashion’ than ‘style’ when looking for the kind of content we were promoting.

Here is a great tip on assisting editors with search engine optimization, and coding the keyword research tools into the web based publishing platform.

We have incorporated a link to the Wordtracker keyword tool directly into our CMS (content management system) so that when someone is entering a critical field, like the meta-title, right next to it there’s a link to Wordtracker, which acts as a ‘call to action.’ They can at least check to see if the keywords they have chosen are a solid choice, or if there’s something better out there.

Hearst probably uses a custom CMS, but this could easily be added to the ‘write’ page in wordpress.

Read the full article on how Dan Roberts helped increase Hearst Publication’s online traffic. This is a good thing, because the Hearst.com design looks like it was last updated in 1996.

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/hearst-magazines-seo

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Newsday Penalized For Selling Links

CVOS — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:05:33 +0000

The popular Long Island New York newspaper Newsday was penalized by Google for selling text links that pass pagerank.

Here is a screenshot of the crazy amount of nofollow tags used by Newsday.com

There are nearly 100 no followed links, but it’s quite curious to see which links are still passing PR. Semi related links to small local destination sites are still getting a link boost from this PageRank 8 site including a wedding, travel, health and shopping site.

Links that are directly related to this large print publication including the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and other huge newspapers are nofollowed.

The archive shows a section labeled ‘ Featured Links’ which carry sites such as :

Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer
Personal Injury Law Firm
Buy Mets Tickets
Buy Yankees Tickets
Wicked Tickets
Hamptons Travel

So Newsday.com can boost its fledgling sites while trying to negate the association of major newspapers, and the Hamptons Travel site is still linking with full credit. Hey newsday, i’ll sell you one of my content sites so your PR8 site can link to it and we can dominate the SERP’s.

Google has always been inconsistent in dealing with link sellers. There seems to be no complete method to find out which sites will receive a penalty for selling links that pass page rank. Google has not algorithmically solved the problem of link brokering and must rely on a semi accurate computer model with heavy human intervention.

Loren, WPN, Barry posted about this interesting case.

*update*

The SEO Manager, who was hired after the link selling program was implemented, posted a request in Google Groups and apparently got the problem resolved within 1 week. Newsday.com instantly jumped from a toolbar PR 5 to 8.

Google Engineer Reid

Thanks for your post. I’m glad you’re posting here in the Webmaster
Help Group, because the discussions here help educate webmasters
around the globe. I just checked over newsday.com and compared it to
the most recent version of newsday.com that was indexed by
Archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070829225145/http://www.newsday.com/

Scrolling near the bottom of what your site used to look like, I see
the following “Featured Links”:
Mesothelioma Lawyer Lung Cancer Personal Injury Law Firm
Buy Mets Tickets Buy Yankees Tickets Wicked Tickets
Hamptons Travel

Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to
manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links
that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and
may impact your site’s standing in Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356

If you believe your site was at one point in violation of the
Webmaster Guidelines, and you have since made changes to your site so
that it fits within the guidelines, you can request reconsideration of
your site by following the steps here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

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