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Copyright © 2009 by Dan Thies Page 1
SEO Fast Start:
A Simple, Step by Step System
For Better Results
By Dan Thies
Brainstorm
Keywords/
Topics
Inviting:
Link Bait
& Targets
Promoting:
PR &
Content
Establish
Metrics
Set Up
Analytics
Measure
Results
Track
Resources
Refine
Keyword
Strategy
Inventory
Current
Assets
Vertical &
Directory
Links
Refine
Content
Strategy
Refine
Site
Structure
Refine
External
Strategy
Promotion &
Link Building
Campaign
Measure
Results &
Resources
Refine
Strategy &
Tactics
Develop &
Optimize
Web Pages
Optimize
Site Structure
And Link Text
Logical
Structure
(Humans)
Dynamic
Linking
(Spiders)
Improve
Index
Penetration
HEAD
Section:
Title/Meta
Headings
& Links
Anchor
Text &
Reputation
Body Text
& Modifiers
Content
Creation
Map Out
Keyword
Strategy
Discover
Core Terms
(Themes)
Expand
Keyword
Clusters
Map
Clusters
To Pages
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Preface:
A Word from the Author
It has been over seven years since I published the first edition of SEO Fast Start, in
November 2001. Since that time, we’ve all seen a lot of changes in the wide world of
search engines, but the core of the fast start system remains as useful today as it
was then.
Since I started offering SEO Fast Start as a free download in 2004, it’s been
downloaded and (I hope) read by more than 60,000 people. The 2007 edition
marked a return to annual updates, and more than 2/3 of my readers are “new” since
then.
Unlike the 2008 edition, where there just wasn’t much to change, we’ve actually got
some real changes to talk about in 2009 – although for those who implemented the
basics of the “fast start” system, these changes will usually be more “interesting”
than actionable.
If you are reading SEO Fast Start for the first time, welcome. As you read through
this book, I’m confident that you will notice a big difference between this book and
any others you may have seen.
Some highlights of the updated SEO Fast Start include:
A visual approach, with process maps to guide you every step of the way.
Every part the system is mapped out so you always know what to do next
The best practices, systems and processes I’ve discovered in more than 10
years of SEO are reflected in each update, along with any real changes that
may have happened in the search engines.
A companion site (www.seofaststart.com) and a free private membership
community (www.whitehatblackbelt.com) to keep you up to date and
answer your questions.
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SEO Fast Start Is Free
The first four editions of SEO Fast Start were sold for $29.95, and I’ve been advised
that I could sell this book for at least that much1. The conventional wisdom says that
a free book just isn’t taken seriously by its readers.
Well, screw the conventional wisdom. I am giving this book away, because I think
everyone should have this information… but you can do something for me in return.
Get on the companion site (www.seofaststart.com). Ask questions, give feedback.
Let me know what you think of this book. Let me know what you think of the system.
Let me know how it’s working for you. Tell your friends about it.
Most importantly, do us both a favor, by reading my book, using my system, and
growing your business. We’ve used this system over and over. It works.
SEO Fast Start Is Not “Just a Book”
What I’ve created here is more than just a book – it’s a framework for learning SEO.
In fact, it’s a framework for understanding SEO, for managing SEO projects, for
developing better methods, for teaching, for communicating with clients, and more.
One important goal is to teach beginners a simple process that consistently delivers
results. But this book isn’t just for beginners.
Even the most jaded veterans of the SEO wars can use this framework. If you don’t
like what we’re doing at any particular step in the “fast start” process, just plug in
your own process for that step.
The overall framework should make sense, no matter how experienced you are.
One of the major advantages of this approach is the ease of making updates – and
keeping you up to date on any changes that may happen in SEO.
Last year (2008) there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about, but this year, there are
changes in a couple key places, so if you’ve read the book before, can go straight to
chapters 3 & 4, and dig into the changes.
1 The consensus among marketers was $97 – that’s a dollar a page! No thanks.
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There Are Some Things I Can’t Fix
Some of you who are reading this may be depending on one “scheme” or another to
sustain your business. Maybe you’re running “made for Adsense” websites, with
automated content generation software. Maybe you’re using cloaking or JavaScript
hacks to hide your site’s true content from the search engines.
Here’s some bad news: one day, these schemes will stop working. I can’t fix that. I
can’t help you. If you’re trying to outrun the search engines, don’t come crying to me
if they catch up to you one day. Enjoy your run while it lasts… but you might want to
start thinking about a more sustainable business model for the long haul.
A Note about Hats
White hat… black hat… gray hat. People have been arguing for years about the
“right way” to do SEO.
“Right” might mean a couple of things. There’s “right” in terms of whether what
you’re doing gets results, and there’s “right and wrong,” in terms of ethics. Even
when you boil it down to getting results, you can argue about the importance of short
term vs. long term results.
I am a little tired of the conversation to be honest, but I can’t write an entire book
about SEO without at least talking about this stuff once.
I call what I do “white hat” because I would have no problem discussing every detail
of the SEO Fast Start system with anyone from any search engine, telling them the
URLs of every site I own, etc.
If you’re doing things that you wouldn’t want the search engines to know about, I’m
going to call you a “gray hat.”
To me, it’s really that simple. Either you’re doing things the search engines are
trying to detect and block, or you’re not. We can all use common sense to decide
what these things are.
I hope that this book will move a few more “gray hats” a little closer to the “white hat”
side, when they see how a “white hat black belt” like me gets things done.
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So what makes someone a black hat? If you’re trying to deceive people, “hijack”
websites, or “hack” a competitor out of search results, I’ll call that “black hat,”
because it’s truly evil.
If you don’t like these definitions, I am not going to argue with you, and I don’t want
to hear about it. I have books to write.
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Chapter 1:
Introduction: Start Here!
I know how tempting it is to skip the introduction, but please don’t.
In this chapter, I will explain how to use the rest of the book, and
hopefully convince you that you got on the right track (maybe for
the first time) when you decided to download it.
I will explain why this book is different and “better” than others you
may have seen… and how it fits into a bigger plan that will help you
with a lot more than search engine marketing.
No Dark Secrets - Just SEO, Simplified
Are you just a little confused about SEO right now?
If you are, that’s probably because so many people are trying to convince you that
there’s some “trick” to it, and you just don’t know that trick… that if you’ll just slap
your credit card down, they’ll clue you in.
The biggest secret in search engine optimization is that there really aren’t any
secrets – at least not the kind most of these folks want you to sell you. There is
a lot of technical detail, and I’ll do everything I can to help you with that in this book.
But real secrets are hard to come by.
The truth is, if you know what you’re doing, and don’t try to trick the search engines,
very little has really changed in SEO for at least five years. That still leaves plenty to
learn, but there is no magic silver bullet.
If you don’t believe me right now, that’s healthy skepticism. There’s hope for you. By
the time you’re finished with this book, you won’t have to believe it, because you’ll
know that it’s true.
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“But This Guy Told Me…”
Be careful where you get your advice: I met a guy at a conference a while back, who
thinks that he’s getting special treatment because he put a Google search box on his
web site. He was planning to publish an e-book, with all his “secrets.”
He has a great site with an active blog, which is always getting new links from other
web sites, but that was just an afterthought to him. It couldn’t be that simple, could
it? There just has to be some trick to it!
If you believe that there’s some secret that the “insiders” aren’t telling you, you’re
experiencing normal healthy paranoia. Good for you. Your ancestors were the same
way, and sometimes it helped them survive.
Back in the Stone Age, if one of your caveman buddies drank some yellow water
from the hot springs, and got sick, you all stayed away from it. The ability to learn is
a big part of why we’re all still here.
On the other hand, if you killed a gazelle with white spots on its tail, and then there
was an earthquake, you might have thought twice about killing another one like that.
Today, we know better… but we still have superstitions.
Don’t get me wrong. Some people really are better at SEO than others. Their
success, though, is mostly due to more experience and better processes. The
people who are exceptionally good at SEO also have a lot of knowledge about the
technical side of search engines and web sites.
I think I’ve proven over the years that I am one of those people… and I want to
help you.
To understand how this book is going to make you successful, let’s look at what
goes wrong for most people who try their hand at search engine optimization. I’ll bet
it’s not what you think.
Why Most SEO Efforts Fail
If you’ve tried to do your own SEO and failed, you’re in good company. It’s easy
once know what you’re doing, but it’s very hard to learn. There’s just so much bad
information out there, folks. It’s scary.
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Some people will tell you that there’s nothing you can’t learn about SEO just by
reading stuff on the web. That’s partly true, if you only knew which stuff you
could trust! Not so easy…
Most of what I know could be found somewhere on the web… if you can handle
math and read between the lines a bit. Too bad that most of what you will find on the
web is wrong, misleading, or so poorly written that it actually makes things worse.
Don’t worry, this book will help you cut through the noise… but knowledge is not the
biggest problem. The #1 reason why most people give up on SEO is that they
spend far too much time and money without getting the results they need.
Five Not-So-Easy Pieces
SEO is pretty simple, really. It boils down to doing five things right:
• Developing a keyword strategy to target the right searchers
(Chapter 3)
• Building a well-structured web site
(Chapter 4)
• Creating good content and doing basic “on page” optimization
(Chapter 5)
• Promoting your site to get links from the rest of the web
(Chapter 6)
• … and avoiding technical “gotchas”
(Chapter 9)
That last one hardly matters to most folks, but I’ve still woven information about it
through this book. Even if you find the right information and understand what all of
those things really mean, you’re still missing a very critical piece.
You need a step-by-step plan to put it all into practice. If you don’t have a good
road map, you get lost. You get frustrated, results aren’t happening fast enough, and
you start looking for shortcuts… in short, you probably end up doing something like
this:
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• You settle for a “thin” keyword strategy with a handful of phrases, or you run
in the opposite direction and target so-called “long tail” or “niche” phrases that
can never bring you enough traffic.
• You rewrite your content in “keywordspeak” to get more “keyword density”
instead of just writing naturally and placing your search terms in the few key
places on the page where they’ll actually help.
• You submit to a few directories, you spend some time trying to trade links,
and when that doesn’t get the job done, you try different automated linking
schemes, or start buying links, the “link rental” bill never stops growing, and
results are hard to find.
• If you’re really unlucky, some kind of simple, easy to fix technical problem
gets you. You panic, maybe you’ve been penalized. “Experts” on forums
confirm the diagnosis, and you start undoing all the good work you’ve done.
Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, then you know how painful it can be to
do this stuff without a good plan. If none of these things has happened to you, you’re
probably in great shape… but a good road map can still make you more effective.
No matter where you are in your efforts, the SEO Fast Start system will help you find
new opportunities, and give you the tools you need to take advantage.
How to Read This Book
While you may be tempted to jump around, I encourage you to read through this
book from start to finish at least once.
Process Diagrams
The illustration on the cover page is called a process diagram. I’ve created this to
help you understand the big picture, and to illustrate the entire SEO Fast Start
system at a glance.
The “big steps” of the SEO process are mapped out down the left hand side, and for
each of these, a more detailed process is shown from left to right. It’s all color coded,
so you can see how it all fits together.
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You will also notice that the chapters in this book are organized around these big
steps, and each chapter is built around the specific steps within that. For every step
in that process, I’ll explain what you need to do, and what you’re trying to achieve.
Read The Words!
If I did nothing but describe the process, this book would still be useful, but it
wouldn’t serve you very well. There are a lot of important concepts you need to
understand, and there’s more to it than just step by step.
You have to understand why you’re doing it, if you want to do it well. You need to be
aware of the exceptions and gotchas.
The only way to do that is to make sure you read every word.
So please, I’ve spent more than nine years writing it… and then I gave it to you for
free. You can spend a couple of hours reading it. It’s only about 100 pages
altogether, with lots of pictures and 12 point type.
“White Hat Black Belt” Techniques
I’ve got a huge archive of really cool strategies and tactics that my students and I
have come up with over the years. When the appropriate situation arises, I’ll pull one
of these ideas back off the shelf and use it to break into a difficult market or give my
students an edge on their competition.
I can’t share all of these techniques with you in this book. As I just said, it’s less than
100 pages (a key editorial decision) and some things just don’t fit. The actual
archive itself is several overstuffed 3 ring binders, nearly 20 gigabytes of video and
audio files, and thousands of pages of printouts.
What I can do, though, is sprinkle a few of these in throughout the book. Try to spot
them as you read. I’m not going to tell you where they are, because you might just
skip ahead, instead of reading the whole book.
Recommendations
Those who have been following me for a few years already know one thing about
me – I rarely recommend any products or services. I hesitate to recommend
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individual consultants, even my friends… because I feel personally responsible for
the outcome.
Others will happily recommend anything that will earn them a few dollars in
commissions. Not me.
So, when I recommend something to you, it’s because I really believe it’s worth the
price. You don’t have to buy anything based on my recommendation, but by the time
we’re through here, I hope you’ll understand that my endorsement is not given
lightly.
Why This System Doesn’t “Age”
I’ve been doing more or less the same things in SEO for years, and they still work.
Even today, when I start work on a new web site, I expect that we’ll be able to start
seeing significant traffic from search engines within the first month or so, and that
we’ll start seeing page one rankings for our key search terms within six months.
Why do I expect that to happen? Because it’s happened for me, over and over, for
years and years… and all we did was apply this system. I’ve seen competitors come
and go, in many markets – flying high in April, shot down in May, while my students
have continued to prosper.
Why have I been able to sit back and laugh while so many people have struggled
over the years? It’s simple.
I don’t try to fool the search engines.
Optimizing web pages, if you were doing it right, hasn’t really changed in years. A lot
of tricks (hidden text, keyword stuffing) have stopped working, but they were never
necessary to begin with.
Now, with the SEO Fast Start process as a framework, I don’t expect that this
system will ever go out of date. We may add a new wrinkle here, or change a thing
or two within a particular step, but for the most part, the system will remain the
same.
What will change? New strategies and tactics, new opportunities, and unless I miss
my guess, years of watching your risk-taking competitors fall by the wayside as the
search engines figure out their games.
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The Big Picture: Why I Am Doing This
These new editions of SEO Fast Start are the start of something much bigger.
Basic Knowledge Should Be Free
80% of SEO is the same for everyone… For the SEO industry to evolve, everyone
must be armed with the same basic facts. The only way to accomplish that is to
make the basic information available to all, for free.
Not just free, but well organized. The web is free, once you have access, and there’s
not much in this book that you couldn’t find on the web… But the web is not well
organized.
And let’s be honest, there’s no editorial filter on the web – lies look just as good as
the truth when you have a good designer, and mistakes and misinformation don’t
come with warning labels.
The web, by itself, is not a solution.
For information to be really useful, it has to be collected, reviewed, edited,
organized, and written by someone who knows their stuff.
Someone has to do it.
I can afford to do it.
So here we are.
SEO Is Just the Beginning - Five More “Not-So-Easy” Pieces
I came onto the web with a background in direct marketing and sales. The first book
I wrote was about email marketing, not SEO… but I never published it, because the
subscribers to my newsletter wanted to read a book about SEO.
So I wrote one. Thousands of people read it, and before you knew it, I was an “SEO
guy” as far as anyone was concerned. Now, I think I’ve done “OK” in SEO, but that’s
not all I do.
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I’ve been working with my students on a lot more than SEO, and doing a lot more
with my own sites. So it should come as no surprise that SEO isn’t the only area
where we’ve applied the “fast start” approach.
In fact, I have “fast start” process maps for a whole lot of subjects, and people
working on creating even more.
Once we shake out the bugs in the publishing process (another fast start process)
for these free “fast start” books, you can expect to see more of them.
Pay per Click Fast Start will be released next – July 18, 2009 (you will find it at
www.ppcfaststart.com). I’m not sure what the next one will be after that. Reader
feedback will have something to do with it, but email marketing and information
publishing are the two most likely topics.
As Niches Sub-Divide, Quality Suffers
One of the people I pay for coaching is Rich Schefren. His approach to growing a
sustainable business has worked wonders for me.
Rich has this theory about niche markets. Rich says that niches have a tendency to
sub-divide. If someone is already the “pay per click guru,” then someone who wants
to break in will pick a smaller niche, and become the “Adwords guru.”
It makes sense, I understand why it happens, but it sucks for beginners, especially
when nobody steps in to the big niches (like pay per click). When everyone is
trying to be a guru, nobody wants to teach the basics.
In the end, all this sub-dividing means that you can’t get the whole story, you have to
buy it in pieces, and every sub-guru has their own approach to the big picture, which
they never explicitly spell out.
One of my core beliefs is that niches don’t have to be sub-divided; that’s just what
everyone has been doing. Well, not me.
If I have the expertise to put something together on a topic, I will. If I don’t, I’ll work
with other people who can. We want to teach everyone the basics for free. That’s the
goal. Anything else comes after.
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How You Can Help
If you think this is a good thing… if you believe as I do that there’s a real benefit to
the world when the basic information is made available for free, then you’ll want to
help me out.
If SEO Fast Start helps you, then don’t keep it to yourself. Let others know about it.
Send them to the website (www.seofaststart.com) so they can register. Get on the
newsletter list yourself while you’re at it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you recommend SEO Fast Start to
anyone, please read it.
Watch the Portal, and Join the Conversation
If you’re on the mailing list, you’ll receive frequent invitations to join our free
community forum and portal – as of June 29, 2009 we’ve got over 2,750 members.
Please Register!
If you registered to download this book at www.seofaststart.com, as opposed to
receiving a copy from a friend, then you’re already subscribed to our free weekly
newsletter, which will alert you to all of the news from the portal.
If you haven’t registered, please take a moment to do so. I’m giving away some of
my best content, but it won’t all be found on the public site. You have to register for
the newsletter to get access to the private site and other bonuses.
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Chapter 2:
How Search Engines Work
Before we get into the “fast start” process itself, let’s take a look at
how search engines work – both from our perspective (crawling and
indexing) as well as from the searcher’s side of things.
The actual technical details are much less important than you’ve
probably been led to believe, so I’ll give you a quick walk-through of
what search engine spiders do, instead of beating you to death with
detail.
In reality, the search engines are more alike than they are different.
While there are still significant differences between them in some
areas, the methods you’ll learn in this book will help you stay on the
right side of those differences.
Why It Matters To You
There’s a lot of very bad advice out there on search engine positioning. A lot of this
bad advice is for sale, and this market has created a lot of self-reinforcing myths
about the subject.
Many of these myths are really just self-serving propaganda created by various
players in the search engine positioning industry, and repeated by well-meaning
writers in e-business publications and other media outlets.
Think about this for a moment. Where does “conventional wisdom” come from?
Well, it comes from various media outlets, such as television, radio, print, and the
Internet itself. But where does a writer from a business magazine find out about any
industry? They get their information from the “experts” in the industry itself.
Reporters don’t have a lot of time to do research, so a lot of what you see in print is
just repackaged press release material and the “industry line.”
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In reality, following “conventional wisdom” without thinking can sometimes do you a
lot of harm. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to make their pet schemes
sound like “standard practice.”
In the process of becoming search engine literate, you’ll learn that a lot of the things
you’ve been told are just plain wrong. In this book you’ll also discover that this
whole subject is much less intricate and mysterious than many “experts” want you to
believe.
My intent here is to share the knowledge I have, and let you make your own
informed decisions. Every chapter in this book was written with that goal in mind.
Why should you care about how search engines work? By investing the time it takes
to read this chapter, you’ll be better prepared to understand the rationale behind
everything we do throughout the rest of the book.
What a “Spider” Does
The first thing that you need to understand is what a search engine “spider” is, and
how it works. A "spider" (also known as a "robot" or "crawler") is a software program
that search engines use to find what’s out there on the ever-changing web.
There are many types of spider in use, but for now, we’re only interested in the one
that actually “crawls” the web finding pages. This is a somewhat oversimplified
picture, but basically this program starts at a website, loads the pages, and follows
the hyperlinks on each page.
In this way, the theory goes, everything on the web will eventually be found, as the
spider crawls from one website to another. Search engines may run thousands of
instances of their web-crawling spider programs simultaneously, on multiple servers.
When a "crawler" visits one of your web pages, it loads the page’s contents into a
database. Once a page has been fetched, the text of your page is loaded into the
search engine’s index, which is a massive database of words, and where they occur
on different web pages.
So there are really three steps. It starts with crawling (fetching pages), then indexing
(breaking them down into words for the index), and a final step where the links (web
page addresses / URLs) that are found get fed back into the crawling program to be
retrieved.
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When the spider (some of them will check later to verify that a page really is offline)
doesn't find a page, it will eventually be deleted from the index. This is one reason
why it’s important to use a reliable web hosting provider.
Robots.txt & SiteMaps.org
The first thing a spider is supposed to do when it visits your site is look for a file
called “robots.txt”. This file contains instructions for the spider on which parts of the
web site to index, and which to ignore. The only way to control what a search
engine spider sees on your site is by using a robots.txt file. Chapters 4 & 9 provide
information on how to control spiders, and why you’d want to do this.
All spiders are supposed to follow certain rules, and the major search engines do
follow these rules for the most part. We live in exciting times, though, and the major
search engines are finally working together on standards. The latest standard is the
XML Site Maps protocol, which I’ll discuss in Chapter 9.
How They Find You
The most common way that search engine spiders find a website is by following
hyperlinks from other sites. In search engine terminology, these are known as
“found pages.”
Some search engines also have a “submit URL” form, where you can request that
they add your web site to their index. Typically, you just give the primary URL for
your site (like http://www.seofaststart.com), and this address is added to their list of
links to crawl.
There are services (some paid, some free) that let you submit your site
“automatically.” This is not really a good deal, even if it’s free. At this point, there are
only four “major” search engines, and you can’t even submit to all of them.
The same applies to software that submits your site to “thousands” of search
engines. As I’ve just stated, only a few search engines actually matter. Using this
software is more likely to generate a flood of junk email than anything else.
If all of this sounds like I’m recommending you let the search engines find
you, rather than submitting your site, I am. I haven't submitted anything to the
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search engines in years, and it rarely takes more than a week or so for them to find
and crawl my new sites.
Read Chapter 6, and focus on getting links set up – this will not only improve your
rankings, it will ensure that the search engines can find you on their own.
Some search engines (like Yahoo) offer a “paid inclusion” program. Although you
get no special advantage from using it, in terms of your site’s ranking, it does ensure
that your site’s indexing is up to date. This isn’t necessarily a great deal, since it
usually involves paying by the click for traffic you may have gotten anyway.
What Gets Indexed
When a search engine indexes the pages on your site, they don’t actually store the
entire page. What they do instead is to store information about the text on your
pages. Which words appeared on the page, and where they occurred.
Images, scripts, and rich media may also be indexed and stored, but these are only
found through specialized searches. People still use words to search, so search
engines mainly care about the words that are on your pages.
In addition to the text of your site, some search engines also store the content of
your META tags. The “description” META tag is sometimes used to display a
description of your page when a web surfer sees the results of a search. There’s
more on META tags in Chapter 5.
Along with the textual content, search engines store information about the hyperlinks
on each page. This helps the search engine to determine what the page is about,
because the text in hyperlinks often reveals something about the subject matter of
the page.
This also enables them to determine the “link popularity” and relevance of the pages
each site links to. This is the main way that search engines find out about new
websites and pages.
There are a lot of differences between search engines in terms of what actually
counts as text content. Some search engines may index the content of the “ALT”
property in <IMG> (image) tags on the page, which is often erroneously referred to
as an “ALT tag.” Other odds and ends, such as file names in URLs, are sometimes
indexed as well.
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Even if a search engine finds your site right away, it may be several weeks before
anyone using the search engine will actually find you in search results. Typically, it
doesn’t take more than 1-2 weeks for the spiders to find you, the delay is caused by
the time it takes for them to find links and update their index.
Unfortunately, the only way around this is paid inclusion. Google doesn't have a
paid inclusion program, but they also do a very good job of keeping their index up to
date and accounting for new pages and links almost as quickly as they find them.
How Pages Are Ranked
Every search engine has its own algorithm, or process, for determining where your
pages rank for a particular search term. There are common elements to many of
them, but they all apply their rules a little differently. It’s probably not possible to
create a single web page that satisfies every major search engine completely, but
the system we use in this book has proven to be effective across all of the major
search engines.
There are two types of factors in play with search engine rankings2. What’s on the
page still matters, but “off the page” factors (like the text used in links that point to
the page) are becoming more important.
On page factors vary from engine to engine, so our system tries to position your
pages in the “common ground” between them. The position of keywords (where the
phrase appears) is the most important. If the phrase appears in headings, page
titles, and other key spots on the page, a search engine will see this as more
relevant than a page where the search term appears once in the middle of the page.
In addition to positioning, link popularity and other “off the page” factors contribute
significantly to your page’s ranking. This is because good web sites usually have
other sites linking to them. Since there will usually be a good number of pages that
have just the right mix of keywords and position, link popularity makes a good “tiebreaker”
for search engines to use when ranking pages.
2 User feedback and predictive models of satisfaction might be called a third factor, but why
complicate things?
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Closely related to link popularity is “link relevance” and weighting. This means that a
link to your "hamster food" page from a page that actually contains those words is
more relevant than a link from an unrelated page. The text used in the link itself is
especially important – this is known as “anchor text” or “link reputation.”
Google’s “PageRank” system is the best documented, and most discussed, of the
search engines’ link analysis methods. I’ll talk about it more in Chapters 4 and 6, but
for now, a simple explanation should suffice.
Essentially, PageRank is a quality of web pages. Every page has some, and it flows
from one page to another through links. The amount of PageRank that flows from a
page is divided between all the links on that page – the more links that point out of a
page, the less PageRank flows through each link.
PageRank comes to a page from incoming links. So the more links you have
pointing into your site, and the more popular (better linked) the sites linking to you
are, the better off you’ll be. The more pages you have in the index, the more
PageRank you have within your site.
As I’ll explain in Chapter 4, you can take some control of how PageRank flows within
your site, which can help you boost the profile of your most important pages.
How Important Is User Feedback?
Although none of the search engines will talk about it much, they all incorporate
some notion of “user experience” in their rankings. This may be as simple as
measuring whether a visitor who clicks a link on search results returns to look at
another result. It may be far more involved than that.
All of the search engines have ways of measuring or estimating the overall user
satisfaction with your web site. How much of a factor this is today, we don’t know,
but you can bet that it will become more important over time.
By designing our sites for human visitors, not spiders, we are protecting ourselves
against any negative impact from user feedback. This is an important part of the
“fast start” system, and always has been.
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How People Use Search Engines & Portals
One of the most often overlooked factors in search engine positioning is what the
people using the search engines are trying to accomplish, and how they go about it.
It’s an oversimplification to say that people get online to find “information,” but it’s a
useful starting point.
When a web surfer visits a search engine to find information, they type a keyword or
phrase in, and wait for the results to be displayed. There are 1000 ways to say ‘real
estate’ and 50 ways to spell it. What this means to you is that even if your website is
about “hamster food,” people will not always use that exact phrase when they’re
looking for what you offer. They misspell words, add words, put them in seemingly
random order, etc.
Typically, there are two main types of searching people do. “Drill-down” searches
are done by someone trying to research a subject. In this type of search, the surfer
usually finds a “hub” or “authority” on a particular topic, and doesn’t return to the
search engine for quite a while.
More often than not, this is the way I search – I use a search engine to find a few
authoritative sites, then they follow the links from those sites. The most popular
search terms are usually searched in this manner. If your site isn’t one of the top
authorities or hubs, you’d better try to get them to link to you.
The second type of search is what I call a targeted search. In this case, the surfer is
looking for a specific site, person, or product. It’s amazing how many people get
onto a search engine like MSN (which has a link to Hotmail right on the page), only
to type in “Hotmail” and click away to the Hotmail site. It’s almost as if they forgot
the address. In many cases, though, the searcher is trying to find the official website
for a particular product or company, and doesn’t know the URL.
Once presented with a listing of search results3, how do people decide which site to
visit? They’ll scan the listing looking for the first result that appears to meet their
need, by reading the title and description. Page titles like “UNTITLED” or “Home
3 Search Engine Results Pages are often abbreviated as SERPs by SEO people. We like to make our
own acronyms. That’s why we usually use TLA to mean “text link ad” and not “three letter acronym.”
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Page” are less likely to attract attention than “Wide World of Hamsters.” Likewise, a
page without a concise, attractive description is less likely to be visited.
Searchers working on a “drill-down” search will usually gravitate toward those
listings that offer a wealth of information and links. One of my websites saw more
than a 40% increase in search engine click-throughs after I added the words “links to
top website promotion resources” to the description. Searchers often want to get
away from the search engine, and onto an authoritative website, so give them what
they want.
If you are operating a web store, you’ll probably be more interested in targeted
searches. If you’re selling products that are available elsewhere, you can get a lot
more attention and traffic by providing such valuable resources as reviews,
independent testing, and side-by-side or feature comparisons.
Takeaways – what we've learned
Understanding key concepts in the search engine world was our primary goal in this
chapter, and I hope we’ve accomplished at least that much. The information I’ve
introduced to you will come into play throughout this book, as we work through the
step-by-step process of creating a search engine strategy for your website.
Although this fact is not emphasized to a significant degree here, a big part of the
puzzle is “off the page” and not under your direct control. Although we can tune up
your web pages to better fit what search engines like, your rankings depend on
what’s happening out there on the web at large.
In fact, the quality of the inbound links to your website, in most cases, will be more
influential with the search engines than the content of your website itself.
We’ve spent a little time inside the web surfer’s mind, and I hope you won’t forget
about that. Depending on the nature and character of your website, understanding
the anonymous person on the other side of the search engine could make all the
difference in the world. It’s not enough to have your site ranked well, if nobody clicks
on the link – you have a tremendous opportunity to increase traffic without even
changing the content of your site.
Finally, I hope I’ve gotten you to start thinking strategically about search engines,
and helped you understand a little bit about why they exist, what they do, and who
they serve. In the highly competitive world of web portals and search engines, traffic
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equals revenue. Whereas a small content site that gets a few hundred visitors a day
might provide a living for one or two people, a portal (like Yahoo!) that gets millions
of visits a day might employ thousands.
When someone comes up with a clever trick to fool a search engine into delivering
less relevant results then that search engine can lose customers. People can lose
their jobs. With so much at stake in this market, search engines are very active
about maintaining the integrity of their product.
Search engines don’t care about you, they don’t care about your website, but they
do care about their customers. If I get what I’m looking for when I use a search
engine, I’ll use it again. Search engines are trying to deliver the most relevant results
possible for every search.
When you understand this, you’ll have a leg up on everyone who’s trying to “fool” the
search engines. By working with the search engines, instead of against them,
you’ll win in the end.
Watch the Newsletter, and Join the Conversation
As we continue to develop the SEO Fast Start community portal, I’ll add case
studies and additional tutorials for every step in the fast start process. You can help
us develop that content by posting your comments and questions at our public site:
http://www.seofaststart.com/
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Chapter 3:
Developing Keyword Strategy (Step 1)
Brainstorm
Keywords/
Topics
Expand
Keyword
Clusters
Map
Clusters
To Pages
Discover
Core Terms
(Themes)
Important Note for 2009 Edition: There is a small but significant
change – Google’s new Adwords Keyword Tool (which has a free
“external” version) was released last July – I now recommend this
tool for estimating the search volume of a keyword.
In the first step of the “Fast Start” process, you will uncover the
most important search terms used by your target audience,
organize them into thematic “clusters,” and create a “keyword map”
for your web site.
Along the way, you will learn a number of important concepts and
principles, which you will apply often as you build an optimized web
site.
All of the tools we use in this process are free. For those who are
interested, I will also mention some other tools that are worth
buying. The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I use for keyword
maps will work just fine with the (free) OpenOffice Calc program.
The Purpose of Keyword Strategy
The goal of your keyword strategy is to get the best total
quality return on your investment. If that sounds like a
mouthful, it’s because there’s more involved here than just
how many people visit your site.
Map Out
Keyword
Strategy
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If someone finds your site in search results, but they’re looking for something else,
you didn’t do yourself any good. It’s far better to get 50 visitors who want what you
have, than to get 1000 people who leave before the first page finishes loading. What
your web site needs, more than anything, is targeted traffic.
Understanding keyword strategy begins with knowing how people search. For any
given topic, there are literally thousands of ways that people will select a keyword or
phrase when using a search engine. The more different keywords and phrases your
site “ranks” on (in the top 10 listings on the search results), the more often it will
show up when a member of your target audience conducts a search.
Every time your site appears in the search results, there’s a chance your site will be
visited. Obviously, the higher your site ranks, the better your chance for success.
Ranking is very important, especially when you’re in the top ten. But the difference
between #1 and #3 is not as significant. What matters most, once your site appears
in the search results, is whether your title and description match what that particular
web surfer is looking for.
The total formula, then, involves how many keyword phrases your site can rank well
on, how high your site ranks for each of those searches, combined with how relevant
and enticing your page titles and descriptions are. Obviously, then, increasing the
number of keyword phrases your site covers will often deliver far better results than
trying to rank well on one extremely competitive keyword.
The best part of this, from our perspective, is that increasing the number of
keywords actually helps you target the right audience. This only makes sense – a
#1 ranking for “real estate,” even if you could achieve it, only attracts a very general
audience. A #1 ranking for “Dallas TX condos” and related phrases is much easier
to attain, and far more targeted.
Keyword Terminology
Before we move on, let’s cover a few definitions, to make sure we’re speaking the
same language. A “keyword” in the fast start system is a single word. Phrases are
made up of one or more keywords. Search terms are the actual words that a
searcher types into a search engine.
In an effective search engine optimization campaign, you will be able to target a
broad spectrum of search terms. Keyword strategy in the fast start system is the
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effective combination of keywords into phrases, which results in you targeting the
right search terms, and ultimately bringing visitors to the right web page to satisfy
their goals.
Don’t worry if this sounds complicated. It can be very complex if you don’t know what
you’re doing, but the fast start process is designed to get you past that.
Brainstorming Keywords (Stage 1)
The first stage in the process of developing a keyword strategy
is brainstorming.
At this stage, you’re trying to come up with a list of “candidate”
search terms, without leaving a whole lot out. In the next step
(discovering core terms) we’ll prune the list down a bit by focusing on the most
relevant and popular search terms that people use to look for what you offer.
Major Search Terms (single keywords & short phrases)
One of the worst mistakes that novices make is trying to focus on a single word (like
‘books’) or phrase (like ‘real estate’), and attempt to build a website that will rank
well. Extremely general terms such as these are very competitive, difficult for search
engines to handle well (in terms of giving good results to searchers), and hardly
worth the trouble in the first place.
Let’s imagine that, after spending hundreds of hours tweaking, perfecting, and
promoting your site, you managed to get a #1 ranking for “real estate.” Unless you
sell real estate of all kinds in every part of the world, a substantial amount of the
traffic you’ll get will come from people who are looking for something you don’t have
to offer.
Although you may not optimize your site for such keywords, it’s very important that
you know what they are, as it applies to your site. As you work through this chapter,
make a list of the 5-10 “major” keywords that describe your website. These should
be mostly single words (like ‘homes’), with perhaps a couple of commonly-used
phrases (like ‘real estate’) mixed in.
These major keywords form the backbone of your site design effort, since they help
define the themes around which you will organize your content. Don’t worry too
Brainstorm
Keywords/
Topics
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much about them right now, because this is one of the many cases where you can
easily correct an omission at a later time. In other words, if you forget a major
keyword today, you can do something about it next month.
Core Terms (Themes)
The next level in the keyword hierarchy consists of the two and three word phrases
that will attract the bulk of your keyword traffic. While these may not fully
encompass even the majority of search phrases used, they should represent the
most popular phrases. As you work through this chapter, try to build a list of at least
10-20 core terms for your site. This list will continue to grow as long as your website
exists.
Whenever possible, try to keep these phrases organized under the major keywords
you’ve listed. The major keywords serve as a means of categorizing the vast
universe of keyword phrases. For example, if you’re working the real estate
category, under the major keyword “homes” you might list such phrases as “homes
for sale,” “beachfront homes,” etc.
Singular or Plural?
It would be great if every search engine knew that someone searching for "concert
ticket" is probably looking for the same thing as someone searching for "concert
tickets." Unfortunately, that's not the case – Google doesn't recognize them as the
same, so for every singular word we target, we also have to think about whether the
plural might be important, and vice versa.
Stemming & Misspellings
Now that you’ve found a bunch of keywords and phrases, it’s time to consider a
couple of real-world problems with them. Although most experts consider these two
concepts unrelated, the fact is that the practical problems (and opportunities) they
present are virtually identical. They’re also not nearly as important as the rest of our
keyword strategy.
Word stemming is the use of root words as synonyms for many other words. For
example, “boat” is the root of “boating.” This doesn’t mean you can get away with
using only one word, but that you should list each possibility, and identify the root
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words. Remember, the goal is to match the relevant search phrases that people
actually use – there’s no point trying to cover every version of “toast” if all you’re
selling are toasters.
Misspelling is a whole other problem, with the same basic outcome. The fact is, a lot
of us can’t spell to save our lives, and we still expect to get search results. By
incorporating common misspellings into your keyword list, you’ll be able to squeeze
a little extra traffic from the search engines. Focus on the most popular variations
only, and I don’t recommend using them in your content directly – more on this later.
All of the search engines do a pretty good job of helping searchers correct their
misspellings anyway, so if you choose to ignore misspellings, you aren’t missing
much. Try it – go to www.google.com, and search for "aito repair."
“Stop Words”
Some words are in such common usage (a, and, the) that they appear on almost
every web page. Some sources will advise you to avoid using “stop words” in your
pages, but don’t listen to them. As of late 2007, all of the major search engines
were indexing the full text of documents, so there’s really no such thing as a
“stop word” any more.
So, it really doesn’t help to try to eliminate stop words from your search term list. In
fact, since search engines consider word order and proximity when ranking pages,
you’ve actually got a better chance of showing up for “finding the truth” if you use the
words naturally, and write the phrase out.
Obvious Keywords
The process of researching keywords is still a bit difficult. Although there are tools
you can use to help the process, it’s still sometimes a bit more art than science. The
best place to start is with those keywords and phrases that are obvious to you.
Starting with a list of such words will make the rest of the process easier, so begin
by listing the most obvious keywords that describe your site, your products, the type
of information you have to offer, etc.
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Related Terms
The next important group of keywords is the set of related terms that are used to
describe things similar to whatever your site is about. The SEO Fast Start site is
about search engine optimization, but there are many related topics in search
marketing. In many cases these related terms will be in your main list, but if they’re
not, start making a list.
You’ll use these terms later as you work to strengthen your site’s “off the page”
factors like link popularity and link relevance. Related sites that aren't direct
competitors are great candidates for partnerships, such as content sharing crosspromotion.
A Handy Tool from Google
Google has created a nice keyword brainstorming tool, the “Adwords Keyword Tool,”
which will suggest related terms for a web site, or from a list of keywords that you
enter. You can find it online at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2009 Update – In July 2008, Google started showing actual search volume
counts, and seasonal trends, in this tool’s reports – making it nearly a onestop
shop for keyword research and discovery.
A Truly Nifty Tool From Microsoft
MSN’s Adcenter Labs has an “Online Commercial Intent” prediction tool – this can
help you assess whether people using a search term are trying to buy something, or
just doing research:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx
Discovering Core Terms (Stage 2)
While brainstorming can be done with pen and paper, the next
stage in the process will require you to use some online tools.
In this stage, we’ll work through the list of possible search terms
you came up with, and start mapping out the “core terms” that
Discover
Core Terms
(Themes)
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will form the basis of individual web pages.
When you were brainstorming keywords, you probably didn’t give much thought to
how relevant your web site might be to the searcher. At this stage, the idea of
relevance becomes critical, so let’s give you a working definition.
In the fast start system, the relevance of a search term is defined as the likelihood
that your web site will be of interest to the searcher. I like to express this as a
percentage – what percentage of searchers is likely to be interested in your site.
If the search term is “real estate,” and you only sell real estate in Boca Raton,
Florida, less than 1% of people searching for “real estate” would find your site of
interest, but 100% of those who searched for “boca raton realtor” would find your site
relevant.
There are ways to get a more precise number, but for now, I’d like you to use your
judgment, and my process, to narrow down your list of candidates.
To move on, you’ll need to use one of the online keyword databases. In addition to
the Google Keyword Tool mentioned above, there are two other noteworthy
databases that can help you identify lower-volume search terms not covered by
Google.
Keyword Tools: Keyword Discovery
Trellian’s Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) offers a free trial version
and a paid (subscription) service. If you have no budget, I recommend signing up for
the free trial, and using that for this stage of the process. The paid version will work
well for this stage (core terms) and the next stage (expanding clusters).
Keyword Tools: Wordtracker
The Wordtracker database (http://www.wordtracker.com) does have a free tool
(freekeywords.wordtracker.com) which you can use in the next stage (expanding
keyword clusters), but not in this stage. If you have the paid version of Wordtracker,
you can use it in this stage, because it offers far more data than the free version.
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Using the Tools to Discover Core Terms
For each of the candidate search terms in your list from the brainstorming stage, use
the keyword database (Keyword Discovery free or paid, Wordtracker paid) to
examine the top 10 variations, by typing the candidate term into the keyword
database’s search tool.
Assess the relevance of these variations. An easy way to do this is to just say “yes,
no, or maybe” to each variation. For example, if you sell red widgets, and the
candidate term is “red widgets,” you would probably say “yes” for “buy red widgets”
and “maybe” for “red widget” because that’s no more specific. “Free red widgets”
would get a big “no,” because you aren’t giving them away.
If you can say “yes” or “maybe” to at least 3 of the variations, then we’ll consider this
candidate a good core term. Make a list of core terms and their variations, along with
the search count provided by the keyword database.
These core terms and their variations are called “clusters” in the fast start system.
You should have at least 10-15 clusters, but there may be more.
Expanding Keyword Clusters (Stage 3)
At this stage, you should be ready to set some priorities for the first round of search
engine optimization. In the fast start process, we’ll revisit this step later on, as you
optimize more and more of your site.
Prioritizing & Targeting Core Terms
Now that you’ve got a good list of core search terms (clusters) it’s time to set some
priorities. If you’ve done your research well, you should have little trouble. High
traffic comes from a lot of searches, so your top priority should be those keywords or
phrases that show the greatest number of searches in the keyword database.
Before you instantly jump on the most popular search terms, take a moment to
consider how closely each will target your desired audience. A search term that gets
10,000 searches a month might look great at first, but is it really a good fit? If only
10% of those using it are actually looking for what you offer, the effective value is
really only 1,000 searches a month.
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I recommend that you decide on 10-15 top priority core terms at most, which will
become the primary keywords used in your site.
If you miss a few important search terms at this point, don’t worry, because we will
revisit your keyword strategy more than once. Now that you have a list of the most
important core terms (clusters), it’s time to expand those clusters.
Understanding Modifiers
For each of your clusters, you’ll also want to come up with a list of modifiers that will
frequently apply to these search terms, such as “free.” One of my old sites, Website
Promotion Central, for example, used modifiers such as “free,” “help,” “tips,” “info,”
etc. along with keyword phrases like “website promotion” and “email marketing.”
You can use the keyword databases to help you find these extra words. Using the
paid version of either database, or the Wordtracker free tool, examine the top 100
variations for each search term in your cluster. Pick out all of the extra words that
appear in the list, which aren’t part of one of your top 10 variations.
These are the modifiers for that cluster. We’ll use them later on, when you’re writing
optimized copy for your pages. In addition, there are a couple other types of modifier
you may want to consider using.
Localizing Words
Location is another important modifier. If your business is in any way local, don’t
forget to include a list of geographic names in your list of modifiers. City, state,
county, names used for the local region, etc. could be important modifiers.
Brand & Product Names
One of the most overlooked types of keyword is the brand name. One of the sites I
worked with was selling heavy equipment, but it never occurred to them that people
might look for "Komatsu" or "Caterpillar" equipment. Those keywords were worth far
more traffic than "backhoe" and "forklift."
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Mapping Clusters to Pages (Stage 4)
Once you have a good list of clusters that you’re going to target
in this round of SEO, it’s time to decide which pages you’re
going to position at the top of search results.
Because you can have more than one URL listed on the first
page of search results, I like to select at least two pages for each cluster. Choose
the best match for your first URL, and your next best match for the second URL.
You will have a hard time optimizing a single page for more than one cluster, so
keep that in mind, and understand that you may need to create new content to fully
target all of your important core terms.
If the cluster you’re looking at has several very popular variations, you may want to
create additional sub-pages to help broaden your site’s profile. I don’t recommend
doing this during the first round of SEO, but as you revisit your strategy (Step 6 of
the fast start process) it will usually make sense to expand your content for some
clusters.
In general, the best match is the page that most exactly fits the search term, and the
second best will be the page right above it in your site’s structure. If you have a
shopping catalog, for example, the “red widget” product page might be the best
match for “red widgets,” and the “colored widgets” category page might be the
second best. If you have many red widgets, you may even want to create a separate
“red widgets” category.
Most of your clusters will map out to internal pages… this leaves the home
page.
The most general and popular core terms, from your top 2-3 clusters, will be the
primary targets for your home page. As you move along through several rounds of
SEO, you’ll find that it’s possible to bring your home page up into the top rankings for
more core terms, but 2-3 is a good starting point.
Now that you have a “keyword map” for your web site, the keyword strategy step is
complete. It’s time to make sure that your site is structured to give you the best
chance of getting the rankings you want.
Map
Clusters
To Pages
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Join the Conversation
As we continue to develop the SEO Fast Start community portal, I’ll add case
studies and additional tutorials inside our private site. You can help us develop that
content by posting your comments and questions in the keyword strategy section of
the public site:
http://www.seofaststart.com/keywords
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Chapter 4:
Optimizing Site Structure (Step 2)
Logical
Structure
(Humans)
Dynamic
Linking
(Spiders)
Improve
Index
Penetration
Anchor
Text &
Reputation
Important Note for 2009 Edition: The second section of this
chapter (Dynamic Linking) has been rewritten to reflect some
changes made by Google.
In the second step of the “fast start” process, we’ll work on
improving the structure of your web site, to optimize its potential for
better search engine rankings.
If this is your first experience with the fast start system, then you’ll
have an easier time reading this chapter. If you’ve read one of the
older editions, please try to read through this with fresh eyes.
Why Site Structure Is Important
One of my students (she’s a little shy so I can’t use her
name) has been absolutely dominating the search results in
her industry for a couple years now.
When I tell this story to most SEO people I meet, they
immediately want to know what we’ve been doing to build links into her site, because
everyone seems to think that SEO is all about getting links.
Now I’m not saying that links aren’t important, but the “punch line” to this story is that
we haven’t done much link building work at all since I started working with this
student – the budget is close to zero for that.
Most of her successes, and the ability to improve her rankings, have come
from improvements we made in the structure of the web site itself.
Optimize
Site Structure
And Link Text
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Her story isn’t the only one like that. In fact, site structure is probably the most
overlooked and misunderstood aspect of SEO.
While most of your competitors are still trying to use a “sledgehammer” approach,
and overwhelming the search engines with massive quantities of inbound links, you
can gain a tremendous advantage by paying attention to how your site is linked
together.
There are four primary goals in structuring, or restructuring, a web site:
• Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher
conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If I ever have to choose between
creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, I will choose my site’s
visitors every time.
• Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (PageRank
at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most
important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results.
One method we use for this is called dynamic linking.
• Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and
“broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor
text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places,
we can boost our own search engine rankings.
• Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index
penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to
improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index
penetration.
It shouldn’t be terribly shocking that the four stages of the “site structure” step are
mapped against these four goals.
Designing the “Human” Structure (Stage 1)
Before I say another word about site structure, let me
emphasize that the point of building a web site is to create
a positive interaction with human visitors.
Logical
Structure
(Humans)
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If you do nothing but design a web site that is structured well for human
consumption, and don’t do any silly stuff with Javascript and image maps, you will
probably do very well with search engines, with no further effort.
When I first started talking about theme-based design seven years ago, I was
looking for a way to reconcile “search engine optimization” with user-centered
design. It worked, but only by accident, and only if you followed a fairly rigid
approach that didn’t work for every site.
As the system was developed further, we let some of those restrictions go, in favor
of a better user experience.
I can’t give you a complete lesson in how to design your web site to best serve your
visitors – that’s a whole other book at least4. Instead, I’ll demonstrate how you can
create a good user experience without hurting your search engine rankings.
For now, it’s all about our human visitors. To help with that, I’m going to walk you
through the structure of a typical web site.
The “Content Pyramid”
The best analogy I’ve seen to describe how themes work is to look at the website as
a pyramid – the capstone on top of the pyramid doesn’t support nearly as much
weight as the stones which make up the base.
The Sky Above: The World Wide Web
The sky above the pyramid is what I used to call the “network.” That created some
confusion - I don’t recommend that you attempt to create a network of sites, unless
there is some compelling business (human driven) need to do so. To simplify things,
we’ll call it the World Wide Web – since you’ve probably heard of that already.
4 I highly recommend reading Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” to start.
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You simply need to understand that what happens on the web matters, in terms of
how other sites talk about and link to your site. The relationship between inbound
links and SEO will be explored in Chapter 6.
From a human visitor’s perspective, the context of an inbound link “frames” the
user’s experience, along with the page to which the visitor is sent. When the page on
your site matches what the visitor expected when they clicked the link, you’re likely
to have a happy visitor.
First Tier: Your Home Page
The first tier of the pyramid, the homepage, is where most visitors enter most web
sites. This is the “home page” of your website. On your home page, you establish
what your site is about, what you offer, etc. – in many ways you frame the user
experience from this point.
If you do a good job of SEO, you might find that more visitors enter from other
pages, but no matter what you do, your home page is likely to be visited by more
people, more often, than any other page on your site.
If it’s easy for people to find what they’re looking for from the home page, you win. If
it’s not, you’ve got work to do. Using a site search and analytics tools can help you
improve this – see Chapter 7 (Measuring Results) for more.
If you’ve never really done usability testing or reviews of your site, it may be helpful
to write down a list of things that people will want to do on your site – the common
tasks and questions. As you look at your home page, ask yourself how many of
these critical things are easy to find.
Second Tier: Categories ("Roadmap Pages")
The second tier, from a human visitor’s perspective, is the set of category or
directory pages that lead them closer to their goal. In an e-commerce site selling
widgets, there might be categories for “colored widgets,” “large widgets,” “chrome
widgets,” etc.
Usability studies have shown that people don’t mind clicking their mouse a few times
to get to their goal, as long as they have a clear path to take.
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Dividing your navigation elements into chunks of 5-7 choices, and using standard
user interface conventions (e.g. blue underlined links in body text, tab navigation,
breadcrumbs, left hand navigation, etc.) will help your visitors find what they want.
The second tier, for most sites, will also include the ultimate roadmap, a site map
page (or pages). This is a page that simply carries a link (and brief description) to
many other pages on your site.
From an SEO perspective, the second tier of the site is really any page that’s linked
to from the home page (assuming that spiders can follow the link). You’ll learn more
about this when we get to the next stage.
Third Tier: Content ("Destination Pages")
The third tier is where most of your important content will reside, if you have a typical
web site. A visitor typically moves from the home page to a roadmap page, then to a
destination page. In some cases, where the destinations are very popular or
important, you may have direct links from the home page.
In an online shopping site, the third tier is usually where you’ll find the actual product
detail pages. For those selling software or services, this is where you see the
detailed descriptions of features and benefits, pricing, etc. For content sites, the third
tier usually contains the articles that make the site valuable.
From an SEO perspective, the third tier is anything that’s two clicks away from the
home page.
Tier Four: Deep Content
Creating a third tier may be all that is needed in many cases. You can have
thousands of pages within the first three tiers of content, so you may never have a
need for more. Even sites that are basically three-tier structures may have
supporting pages (shipping rates, product color charts, etc.) that make up a fourth
tier in the user’s experience.
From an SEO perspective, the fourth tier is three clicks (or more) away from the
home page, and special steps may have to be taken to get the search engines to
find this content – assuming that you even want them to index it.
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Don’t Be A Robot!
These tiers are defined to help you THINK about site structure from a human
perspective – you don’t literally have to divide your site into 4 levels. Some sites only
have two levels of content, and they work fine.
Designing the “Spider” Structure (Stage 2)
Let’s be honest for a moment. Most websites have a lot of
“content overhead” for human visitors, that we really don’t want
showing up in search results. Things like the privacy policy,
terms of use, contact forms, etc.
While these pages are extremely important from a human design perspective, they
don’t really do much for us in SEO. In fact, some SEO experts will tell you to keep
the spiders off those pages entirely. Throughout this section, I’ll refer to these as
“overhead pages.”
We could argue that there’s some small value in making it possible for people to find
your contact information with a search engine, but if you design your site well, they
should be able to find it just by looking at the page they’re on.
Google’s PageRank system makes us pay an even heavier price, because
every link we point to one of these “overhead” pages steals PageRank from
the pages that we’re trying to get ranked.
This was a major SEO problem until 2005, because the only way to “hide” these
links from the search engines was with JavaScript, Flash, or other not-so-userfriendly
methods, which I could never recommend.
Then Google came to the rescue in 2005, by introducing the “nofollow” attribute for
links. This allowed webmasters to control the flow of PageRank through their sites,
without having to make messy compromises between SEO and usability.
As a result, the past 2 editions of SEO Fast Start have recommended a simple
strategy for using nofollow on internal links – which, when followed on a basic level,
is still a net “win” for many sites today.
Dynamic
Linking
(Spiders)
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However, some things have changed, and it’s no longer as simple as it used to
be – so I no longer recommend the use of nofollow on internal links within
your site.
Unfortunately, in 2009, Google has again taken the “nofollow” tool
out of our hands – once again forcing SEOs to choose between
less-than-ideal “hacks” and usability.
Google’s Matt Cutts announced this at the SMX Advanced
conference in Seattle, in early June 2009. While many SEOs are
overreacting to this change, I prefer to see it for what it is, and react
accordingly.
Now, instead of conserving PageRank, using nofollow on internal
links allows nearly all of the PageRank you would have saved to
sort of “evaporate” – the story is actually somewhat more
complicated than that, but it doesn’t really matter.
If you want more information about this, read my posts on the
SEOFastStart.com blog, and get on my mailing list, since further
updates are sure to follow.
Because I just don’t like “hacks,” I will begin by explaining how you can avoid making
that choice in most situations. For those interested in more “advanced” (read:
experimental, undocumented, and difficult) methods, I would suggest that you get on
my mailing list, and check the SEOFastStart.com blog for further updates.
Basic Internal Linking
If you finished step one of the fast start process, you have a list of search terms and
web pages that you’re trying to get into the search results.
One important idea of internal linking is to focus more of your site’s PageRank onto
those pages. If this is your first time through the process, you’re probably talking
about “second tier” pages, and your home page, as the targets.
As I mentioned in Chapter Two, the amount of PageRank a page can give to other
pages is limited to the amount that it picks up from inbound links. The amount that it
gives to other pages is divided between all the links going out from the page.
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Therefore, we have a choice to make – we can reduce the number of links to less
important pages from a given web page, or we can increase the number of pages
linking to our more important pages.
In SEO Fast Start, we’ll do a little bit of both.
Before I begin with detailed instructions, let me introduce a little HTML into the mix,
in the form of “named anchors.” An anchor tag (<a>) links to a URL – we all got that,
right?
Named anchors allow you to link to a specific spot on a page. For example, if you
have a page (let’s say it’s called about.html) with your privacy policy, terms of use,
contact information, etc. you can add a named anchor to that page above each
section, like this:
<a name=”privacy”>Privacy Policy:</a>
Now, when we want to link to that page from elsewhere, and take visitors straight to
the privacy policy section, we link like this:
<a href=”about.html#privacy”>Privacy</a>
To a search engine spider, the named anchor part of that link is meaningless. When
we create several links on Page A, pointing to several named anchors on Page B,
this is effectively the same thing as having one link.
This allows us to reduce the number of links to overhead pages from a search
engine’s perspective, without changing the way the linking page appears to our
visitors.
Home Page Navigation
The home page is a special case in internal linking, because so much of the
PageRank in your site will flow into (and from) the home page.
For the basic dynamic linking approach, here’s what you want to do on the home
page:
• Remove any unnecessary links your “overhead” pages. Don’t do this at the
expense of usability – but it’s easy enough to combine multiple pages
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(privacy, terms of use, disclaimers, contact information) into a single page,
and provide just one link to that page using named anchors.
• Avoid linking out to other web sites from your home page, unless you have a
good reason to do so. Bloggers, keep in mind that one of the points of having
a blog is to link to other stuff – but you can control outbound links from your
home page by controlling the post summaries that are displayed there.
• If you have site map pages or “crawl pages,” (more on crawl pages below)
linking to them from your home page will help them get indexed.
In fact, if you only do these few things on your home page, you’ll probably improve
your situation considerably.
Global Navigation / Interior Pages
If your site has “global” navigation elements, do the following on all of the interior
pages throughout the site:
• As with the home page, reduce the number of unnecessary links.
Using Site Map and Crawl Pages
The site map should link to your second and third tier pages… if you can do so with
only 150 outbound links from the site map page. If you can’t do that, you can add
more site map pages, or make some strategic decisions about your most important
content, because you only have 150 outbound links to play with on a page.
Why 150 links? Because I have never been able to consistently get spiders to crawl
past the 150th link on a web page. Unless you have an absolutely terrible design (or
you’re running a portal like Yahoo), there’s no reason to have 150 links on any page.
In fact, reducing the number to 100 or so would be my best advice.
Although we know that site maps are rarely used by human visitors when the site is
well designed, the site map page adds an extra boost of PageRank to the pages you
link to from it. If you want to lose the site map altogether, I doubt that anyone would
complain to you, but it’s still useful for funneling PageRank and adding “link
reputation” (stage 3) to important pages on your site.
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This may be a little bit advanced, but I usually prefer to use the primary site map (the
one that’s linked from the home page) to focus links on the pages I’m trying to get
ranked, and then I’ll link from the primary site map to my second tier pages, and
overhead pages that might be important to human visitors.
What’s A Crawl Page, Then?
The “difference” between a site map and a crawl page is a matter of perspective. A
site map page looks like a site map – but a crawl page usually looks exactly like all
of the other “second tier” pages on your site. It’s simply an extra page that you add,
to channel more PageRank and anchor text toward the pages that it links to.
Advanced Dynamic Linking
WARNING: The SEO General has determined that this stuff is
very complicated. Do not attempt this stuff unless you’re actually
capable of understanding the math involved with PageRank –
including all of the changes recently announced by Google. This is
for the “advanced” SEOs. I can do the math in my sleep, and even I
don’t use this stuff all that often. You have been warned.
The Third Level Push – Dynamic Linking Style
In most sites, your global navigation links to the entire second tier from every page,
including the home page. This causes the second tier pages to accumulate a lot of
PageRank, at the expense of your third tier.
In the old version of the fast start system, I told people to avoid cross-linking their
second tier pages, or to mask those links with JavaScript. That’s because we
consistently got a measurable increase in traffic when we did this.
At the time we all assumed this had something to do with the topics of the pages not
being closely related, and keeping our “themes” confined to “silos,” but we were
wrong. What we were really doing was a “third level push.”
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I’d like to thank Leslie Rohde5 for giving it a better name, because “silos” sounds
stupid and sort of misses what’s really happening.
When Google had their big “Florida update” in late 2003, and nearly every SEO I
knew suffered huge losses in rankings and traffic, I saw huge gains in traffic on the
sites I worked with, even if they lost some “big keyword” rankings. I know now that
this was because the third level push drove us upward on the “long tail” searches.
So what’s a third level push? Well, it’s simply a matter of taking more of the
PageRank from your second tier, and pushing it down into the third tier, by doing this
to your second tier pages:
• On all second tier pages, you “mask” all links pointing to other second tier
pages – unless you’re trying to boost a specific page.
• Now that you can’t do this with nofollow, you do this by hiding those links with
Javascript tricks. Which, as I already said, I don’t like much…
That’s it. On a shopping cart site, this means that your “category pages” still link to
each other, but you use Javascript to hide the links between them. From the spider’s
perspective, your global navigation is different on the second tier.
More PageRank is pushed down into the third tier (products). In theory, if you don’t
screw up your major rankings, you get more traffic to product pages, and you sell
more stuff.
This stuff is complicated. It’s easy to screw it up. It’s easy to shoot yourself in the
foot. If you do screw it up, it can take weeks to notice and weeks to get out of it. So
be careful, and don’t do it just because you can. It’s rarely necessary.
Have a reason, and don’t forget that a third-level push might help in the short term
(driving more traffic to product pages) but hurt in the long run (making it harder to get
your second tier pages ranked).
5 Leslie is a well known SEO expert, who pioneered dynamic linking and developed most of these
techniques with a full understanding of why they worked… long before anyone else caught on.
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Third Level Push Alternative: Crawl Pages
The “third level push” is designed to solve one main problem – that it’s difficult to get
your deeper pages indexed, and ranked. It’s always solved the first problem better
than the second, in my opinion.
So, as an alternative, let’s consider another technique that I’ve been using and
teaching for many years: crawl pages.
First, let’s look at why you have a “PageRank problem” at the third tier of your site in
the first place.
As you will recall, the second tier pages are all getting a link from the home page –
in fact, this is what defines a second tier page. The third tier pages are not getting a
link from the home page – again, that’s just the definition.
So, as you move from the first tier to the second tier, all of the second tier pages are
getting an approximately equal amount of “link juice” or PageRank from inside the
site. I refer to this as “second tier equality” in my advanced classes.
As is often the case, an ecommerce shopping site is the clearest example. In such a
site, you would have “category” pages at the second tier, listing products that are
available for sale, and linking to third tier product pages.
If the category pages have equal amounts of PageRank, but some categories
contain more products, then some of the product pages (those in the smaller
categories) get more PageRank than others (those in the larger categories).
Now, you can “split” a category into smaller sub categories, and this is one option,
but it’s not always the best thing to do for your site’s conversion rate – which means
you could end up selling less stuff.
The idea of a crawl page, is to create these additional category pages, and link to
them from the home page – but not in the main navigation. For a crawl page, you
would use a link in the page’s footer, similar to how you are probably linking to your
site map pages.
Depending on the situation, creating sub categories and linking to them from the
parent category page can also help, but it doesn’t drive nearly as much juice as a
crawl page that’s got a link from the home page.
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Oh yeah – remember that second problem – getting your third tier pages ranked?
Crawl pages, like site map pages, can also send anchor text links into your third tier
pages, to help them get ranked, something that simply “sculpting” your site structure
(as with the third level push) doesn’t do.
Circular Navigation
Circular navigation is used on the third tier. Basically, if you have a category (second
tier) and a bunch of third-tier pages under that, you link the third tier pages together
in a circle.
If it’s (A, B, C, D, E, F) at the third tier, you link from A to B & F, B to A & C, etc. One
link points to the previous page, another points to the next page. Web rings (if
anyone remembers those) worked like that.
This just shares a little more PageRank between third level pages, and gives you
another place to add anchor text for to improve the link reputation of those pages.
The “Trapezoidal Silly Putty” Technique
OK, there’s no such thing as the Trapezoidal Linking Matriflux™ Technique. That
was a joke. What I’ve described here are the main structural devices that I’ve used,
but you can invent your own. From a spider’s view, the structure of your site can look
like just about anything you want, as long as you can do it by subtracting links.
Enough about dynamic linking and removing links; let’s talk about adding some links
back.
Using Anchor Text for Link Reputation (Stage 3)
Although I’ve touched on link reputation and anchor text a little
bit, I haven’t really delved deeply into the subject so far.
Those readers who have some SEO experience have probably
been waiting for it, but it doesn’t really come into play until
you’ve established a keyword strategy and made some decisions about how to
structure your site.
Anchor
Text &
Reputation
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Now that we’ve done all that, I can let you in on a little secret: Anchor text and
link reputation might be the most important part of SEO!
Sure, optimizing your page’s content (next chapter) is still important, but to today’s
search engine, the words that are used in links pointing to that page are extremely
important.
While you’re limited in what you can do on the page, there’s no real limit to the
number of links that can point to a page.
This will come into play again in Chapter 6 (Link Building), especially with your most
important search terms, because you’ll want to boost your pages reputation even
further with anchor text from other sites.
For now, let’s focus on what we can do within the site, and make sure you’re
covering your bases. The point of this exercise is to point links at the pages you’re
trying to get ranked, using all of the search terms that you want the page to rank for.
How Link Reputation & Anchor Text Work
The first time through, make sure that you cover your bases and have anchor text for
every variation of every search term for every page, at least once or twice. This
means cross linking from one page to another, using keywords in the text of the link.
If you’re trying to help page A get ranked for “purple monkey hats” then you
put a link from page B to A, with “purple monkey hats” in the text, like this:
We also offer a great selection of <a href=”a.html”>purple
monkey hats</a>.
Now page B has sent some link reputation to page A. Page A should rank just a little
higher, when people search for purple monkey hats.
For more competitive terms, you’ll probably need to go back and add more text links
to help improve your rankings. Internal linking like this will only get you so far, and
you will also want to spend some effort on bringing links in from the rest of the web
(Chapter 6).
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If you already know that a search term is going to be very competitive, go ahead and
add a few extra links at this stage. If you come up short this time around, you’ll be
able to catch that as you measure results and refine your strategy.
For this stage, I’ll consider two types of links that can point to a web page:
• Navigation links – those that are present in your global navigation or in the
navigation you’ve established for a section of your site. This could include
links that you add to the “footer” of your pages.
• Contextual links – those that are present in the text body of an individual web
page. These links can enhance usability and conversion, as well as boosting
the link reputation of the target page.
Global Navigation
For the most part, the amount of text that you can use in a navigational link is
limited, because the amount of space you have on the screen is limited. I don’t try to
fight against that, because usability is paramount.
One very important link that’s pretty much always going to be part of your global
navigation is a link to your site’s home page.
Because of the way that search engines handle link reputation (anchor text), I
recommend using a format that allows you to include some keywords in every
page’s FIRST link to the home page, but also having a “Home” link in your
navigation somewhere.
Your global navigation will normally contain text links to your second-tier pages. In
fact, if you haven’t got a text link to a page from your global navigation, you may as
well consider it a third-tier page from a user’s perspective.
For each of these second-tier pages, you probably have a core term and a cluster of
related terms, from step 1 (keyword strategy). In your global navigation, you would
normally use the core term as the text for that link.
This helps boost the page’s link reputation for that core term, by linking to it from a
lot of different pages. That takes care of the core term, but it doesn’t necessarily help
with the variations and modifiers that are important for that page’s overall profile.
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Section Navigation
Your second-tier pages, as roadmaps, probably contain links to third-tier pages. So,
you’ll use these second tier pages to boost the link reputation of your third tier pages
by using keywords in the text of the links, where it makes sense for users.
If you’re using breadcrumb style navigation on your internal pages, you could use
“home” as the text of your links to the home page, but you can also use the main
search term for your home page without confusing anyone – we’re all used to
breadcrumb trails and we all know that the link on the left side will take us back to
the top of the site.
You can take this a step further on your third-tier pages and use slightly different text
for the second-tier links in your breadcrumbs as well – just be careful with this.
Changing the text can become a usability issue if visitors don’t understand where a
link is supposed to take them, but slight variations (“baby gifts” vs. “gifts for babies”)
shouldn’t cause a problem.
Using Contextual Links
Besides the links that are present in your site’s navigation, you can also link from
one page to another, using keywords that appear in the body text of a page. If your
category page about colored widgets mentions that you also sell chrome widgets,
you can use that as an opportunity to link to the chrome widgets page.
Sometimes this is quite natural, as in the example above – why wouldn’t you give
your visitors a link there, so that they can go to the page you’re talking about, and
see the products you’re talking about?
Sometimes, we have to create content in order to link from it. This can take the form
of additional copy at the top or bottom of a page, or even additional content (third tier
pages) that offers specific information and also links out to a few other pages with
anchor text.
Make It Make Sense
One thing I hate to see is linking just to get anchor text stuffed in somewhere. If you
find that you’re doing this, either look for a more appropriate context for the link, or
think about adding new content.
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Chances are good that you already need to create some new content to cover your
keyword strategy – use this content wisely, and you’ll get a dual benefit. Not only will
you broaden the site’s profile by targeting more search terms, you can use these
additional pages to support the keyword strategy for other pages.
Is It Really Important?
I don’t know, why don’t you ask Amazon and Wikipedia? Do you think they get much
traffic from search engines? These two sites have a lot of incoming links, but the
main reason why they appear so often in search results is that their pages are
massively interlinked, with text links.
Try searching for the title of a book on any search engine, and chances are good
that you’ll find Amazon near the top of the search results. When you look at a
product page on Amazon, you see links to other products that are recommended.
People who bought this book also bought that book, with that title.
All those links mean that every page on Amazon contributes link reputation to many
other pages. The higher the sales volume for a title, the more links it gets, and the
more likely it is that Amazon will be #1 when you search for that book.
Try searching for any famous person, or any standard encyclopedia-type topic. Did
Wikipedia show up? Probably. If you use a tool like Yahoo Site Explorer6 to look at
the links pointing to any page on the Wikipedia site, you’ll discover that they have
several, and possibly hundreds, of keyword rich links pointing to that page, from
within the Wikipedia site itself.
Amazon’s strategy is deliberate, and although it helps with SEO, that’s not their main
motivation. All of those links help users find the right book for them, and this has
helped turn Amazon.com into an incredibly powerful selling machine. Wikipedia’s
interlinking has nothing to do with SEO. It’s done by editors for usability reasons.
These two examples should give you a better idea of how you can use anchor text
and internal linking for the dual benefits of SEO and usability. Now that I’ve
exhausted yet another topic, let’s move on to another important stage.
6 http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
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Improving Index Penetration (Stage 4)
Except in very unusual circumstances, most of us wouldn’t even
consider building a one-page web site, right?
The more pages you have, the more search terms you can
target, the more opportunities you have to appear in search
results, and the more “link juice” you have to throw around. More is better, right?
That much is obvious to us all. What isn’t immediately obvious is that the search
engines all have their own idea of how many pages are on your site. This is called
“index penetration” – how many and which pages are actually getting indexed by the
search engines.
To a search engine, a page that isn’t in their index may just as well not exist. If
you’re pointing links at pages that aren’t getting indexed, the PageRank (link juice,
whatever) is passing out through those links into the ether.
Therefore, it is important in the long run to know which pages are getting indexed,
which aren’t, and to take steps to improve. In the long run, you’d like to have your
entire site indexed. The first step is checking to see if you’re getting indexed at all.
How to Improve
As an exercise, take one of the pages from your site that’s not indexed at all, and
link to it from a couple pages that are in the index. Wait a couple weeks, and check
back to see if your page has moved into the index.
Did it move? If it did, you can repeat the process to bring more pages into the index.
If this isn’t working, then you probably need to work on getting more
PageRank into your site.
This could mean simply getting more links into the site in general (Chapter 6) or
getting links from other sites into the sections of your site that aren’t doing well
(ditto). For established sites, you can usually do a lot simply by using links from
within your site.
If this is your first time through with the fast start process, don’t get hung up on
indexing just yet. You’ll have plenty of chances to revisit this stage, after you’ve done
Improve
Index
Penetration
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some work to develop and optimize your content, build links, and started measuring
results.
Key Points For The “Advanced”
There are a few points that I want to drive home with full clarity, so I’m putting them
here all by themselves:
• When you decide to mask or remove the links from Page A to Page B, you
may as well remove ALL of them.
• If you are using multiple links from Page A to Page B, the only link that will
predictably become part of the anchor text / link reputation for Page B is the
link which appears first in the code.
• This means that you may wish to modify your site’s code, so that you can put
the keyword-rich contextual links into the code first. An SEO-friendly design
would use tables or CSS to make sure that the “content” section of your
pages appears first in the code, before your navigation elements.
• If you find that you can’t “grok” the dynamic linking concepts, or you are afraid
you’ll screw something up, then don’t do it! You can always get more links
from outside of the site to point into sections that need more link juice.
Join the Conversation
As we continue to develop the SEO Fast Start community portal, I’ll add case
studies and additional tutorials for every step in the fast start process. You can help
us develop that content by posting your comments and questions in the site
structure section at:
http://www.seofaststart.com/structure
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Chapter 5:
Optimizing Web Pages (Step 3)
HEAD
Section:
Title/Meta
Headings
& Links
Body Text
& Modifiers
Content
Creation
I don’t miss the “old days” of search engine positioning (circa 1998),
when optimizing pages was about “density,” page length, and other
hard to measure factors.
Everybody had their own formula, and most of them were wrong.
Technically speaking, we all had it wrong… but you don’t need to
worry about that.
These days, you really just need to know the basics of on page
optimization.
The system I use to optimize pages is really very simple, and the
work should proceed fairly quickly, if you’ve done a good job of
organizing your site and selecting keywords.
Note: this chapter requires a basic understanding of HTML – if you
need a refresher course, or an introduction, I recommend starting
here:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
How to Think About On Page SEO
Optimizing your pages is the easy part. If you get all worked
up about this stuff, you’ll never get any work done. I’m going
to give you a set of basic guidelines, but this isn’t some
special magic formula that you must follow to the letter.
Develop &
Optimize
Web Pages
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If you need to “break a rule” here and there to make your pages easier to read or
whatever, don’t worry. It’s easy enough to make up for it with anchor text.
If you hear people talking about “keyword density,” ignore it. There’s no such thing
as far as the search engine is concerned. Don’t feel badly if you didn’t know, we all
used to believe in it.
Anyway, this is a short chapter, and other than this paragraph, it’s identical to the
2007 edition.
What I’m going to do is walk you through the web page from top to bottom, and tell
you where your keywords will have the most impact.
Throughout this chapter, remember that a long phrase also includes individual
keywords. Using the phrase “large purple monkey hats” also covers you for “monkey
hats” and “purple monkey hats.”
The Head Section (Stage 1)
The HEAD section of your HTML code isn’t actually visible to
human visitors when they come to your site. Actually, the TITLE
tag will appear in the title bar of the browser window, but it’s not
visible on the page.
There are some important things you need to know about this section, and a lot of
this may be news to you.
Title, Keywords, & Description
Page Title: The page title should be 5-10 words long at most. It should contain the
2-3 primary keyword/phrases you’ve chosen, and little else. It’s sort of like an ad
headline, so it should be designed to attract clicks from those who find you in a
search. I like to vertical bars (right above the Enter key), dashes, or commas to
separate the different items:
<title>Free Search Engine Optimization Book - SEO Fast Start ebook</title>
What you may not know, although it’s pretty important, is that you can only expect
the first 65 characters of the TITLE to show up on a search result page – more than
that, and it will get cut off some of the time.
HEAD
Section:
Title/Meta
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Because the title is also the clickable link on search results, you would like to have
the actual search term appear in the first 65 characters, because the search engines
will display the matching keywords in bold, which will improve the click through rate
for your listing.
What’s better than being #1? Getting more clicks from your #1 listing!
When we already have a lot of top (#1) rankings for a site, I like to experiment with
title changes, to see if we can squeeze a little more traffic through. Believe it or not,
we’ve managed close to a 50% increase in search engine referrals for some
keywords, simply by writing better title tags – even though we were already #1.
Keywords META Tag: The keywords META tag is a waste of time in my opinion,
but if you want to, you can put your keywords for the page in here. You can put also
common misspelligns into the kewyords tag if you have a lot of spare time7.
Description META Tag: I highly recommend writing a separate description for every
page. Use the first 10 words or so to attract visitors, working in keywords where it
makes sense.
The description that’s displayed on search results also influences the click-through
rate for your listings – for longer search queries (4+ words) it’s usually more
important than the title tag.
Like the title tag, you only get so many characters to display. Right now, 155
characters is the cut-off; you can’t expect the full description to be displayed on
search results if you have more than that.
Robots META Tag: The robots META tag is important; because it lets you take
some control over what spiders do. Here are some examples:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
This tells the search engine spider not to index this page, and not to follow any links
on the page. Do this if you don’t want the page to be indexed. You don’t need to use
“index” or “follow” because that’s what spiders do.
7 You probably missed the joke here. Sorry.
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<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp, noarchive, noydir”>
NOODP tells the search engines that you don’t want them to use your Open
Directory description (DMOZ.org) on SERPs. NOARCHIVE says that you don’t want
them to keep a cached copy of the page. NOYDIR says that you don’t want Yahoo
to use your Yahoo directory description on SERPs.
As in these examples, you can combine different elements (noindex, nofollow,
noarchive, noodp, noydir, etc.) in your robots META tag. The search engines will all
observe noindex and nofollow, the rest are “extensions” that may not be supported
by everyone.
Other META Tags: The only other META tag that’s really relevant for SEO is the
“verification” META tag used by Google Webmaster Tools (Chapter 9).
Headings & Links (Stage 2)
If possible, you want to use the core terms and top variations in
headings and sub headings (H1, H2, H3…) on the page. It’s not
absolutely essential that the heading is the first thing on the
page.
Besides the headings, you should also try to work these same terms into the text of
links on the page. This is usually a logical thing anyway, because you should have
two URLs that you’re trying to get ranked for every search term (a first and second
choice) so you can take care of this just by linking them to each other using
keywords.
You may have already done this (or at least planned it out) in step 2 (site structure).
You do NOT need to work every keyword into links. Remember, the phrases you
use in your writing can contain more than one variation of a search term.
Body Text & Modifiers (Stage 3)
Writing the body text is usually pretty easy. Just write naturally,
and work your keywords (including variations) in where they
make sense.
Let me say that another way… Write to sell. Write to persuade.
Write to inform. Write words that make sense. Do not write in “keywordspeak.” If
Headings
& Links
Body Text
& Modifiers
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your copy doesn’t do its job with human visitors, then you have failed, no matter how
high your rankings may be.
You may get a very slight boost by using your most important search terms in the
first paragraph, but it’s not worth doing if you lose readability or fail to persuade your
visitors to keep reading. Make sense?
So… just fit the search terms in where they fit. OK? If you get all your variations in at
least once, you’re doing great. You probably don’t even need to go that far, as long
as all the individual keywords in your cluster get used somewhere.
More important than the exact placement of keywords in your copy is the use of the
modifiers you uncovered in step 1 (keyword strategy). Let me explain why:
About “The Long Tail” – You will often hear people talking
about “long tail searches,” the “head” and “tail” of search, and
that sort of stuff.
The basic idea here is simple.
The most popular search terms get a lot of traffic. They’re easy to
find out about by using keyword databases. They show up on the
radar when you do your research, because they are popular.
The truth is, though, that most real world search queries don’t fit
into this convenient set of search terms that we can see in the
databases. We add a word here; we change the order, etc.
In the real world, there are 1000 ways to say one thing, and people
use them all. In fact, the most popular terms probably make up less
than 20% of the overall searches.
The “long tail” refers to the other 80% of search queries, that don’t
show up in the keyword databases. We target these by using a lot
different variations of our core terms, along with modifiers, when we
write copy for our web pages.
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As you write your pages to fit the core terms and variations for a cluster, try to use
as many relevant modifiers as you can, because this will greatly increase your ability
to rank for “long tail” search terms.
Creating Content (Stage 4)
Most of us, when we map out a keyword strategy for the first
time, discover that our site doesn’t actually have enough
content to support our strategy. This also suggests that there’s
important content that’s missing for our visitors.
In fact, one of the most valuable things you’ll get out of developing a keyword
strategy is a sense of what kind of content your visitors need.
The most important thing about creating content for your site is to avoid
creating duplicate content. This means that you don’t just re-use the same
boilerplate text and change a few keywords to make a new page.
Whatever search terms you’re targeting on the page, write something original. If
you’re building your site with other people’s content (from article databases etc.)
you’ll do a lot better if you add a little of your own editorial content to it.
Tier 1 (Home Page)
It’s possible to get rankings without writing copy for your home page, if you’re willing
to pour a lot of resources into building links, but it’s very unusual to find a site that
can’t do better with some copy on the home page. Google’s done pretty well with
just a search box, but I can’t think of any other examples. Write copy. It’s easier.
Tier 2 (Roadmaps / Categories)
I see ‘em all the time. Shopping carts with great copy on the home page, and no
copy whatsoever on the category pages. Nothing but pictures and links… you know
what happens to these? The search engines spot these nearly empty pages as
duplicate content, and they crawl no further.
Can this be overcome with enough links? Sure. Is it worth the bother? No! You can
easily write a few paragraphs of unique text for these pages, and you can even use
Content
Creation
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that copy as a place to add some ”anchor text” links to other pages (Step 2, Site
Structure, Phase 3).
Tier 3 (Destination Pages)
Shopping cart product pages are yet another place where people seem to think,
quite often, that they don’t need to write copy. Not only is this crazy from a usability
and conversion standpoint, it’s a terrible idea for SEO.
If you do a good job of writing and expanding your content, the third-tier pages are
going to bring you a lot of traffic from the search engines.
User-Generated Content (Forums, Reviews, Feedback)
If you have discussion forums, allow comments on your blog, take user reviews, etc.
you are actually creating a lot of content. Not only is this great for the user
experience, it creates a great deal of keyword rich content. Content that you can use
to bring links into your site, send anchor text to your other pages, and which may
even bring visitors in from search results.
Blogging for Content
Writing a blog is an easy way to add content to your site. If the blog is any good, you
may even get some good interaction with your visitors, and attract a lot of links.
Writing a blog allows you to continually add fresh content to your site. That’s the
good news.
The bad news: unless your site is a blog, with no other purpose, you still need to
create optimized pages for your targeted search terms outside of the blog. Getting a
blog post ranked is nice, but not if the visitor is several clicks away from the page
you actually wanted them to find.
If you’re going to blog, as an “add-on” to an existing website, think about how you’re
going to funnel all the traffic and link juice into the rest of your site. I am NOT saying
that you shouldn’t blog, but it’s no substitute for creating the content that you need
elsewhere.
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Some Guidelines For Search Engine Friendly Design
Some basic rules apply to designing pages to be “search engine friendly.” Keep
them in mind as you build your site, or you could be in for a lot of headaches. These
all have to do with creating a site that search engine spiders can navigate and read.
If you have to “break” one of these rules, you’ll need to sort out the details of making
your content accessible to the engines.
Frames
Search engine spiders don’t handle frames very well, so you’re better off avoiding
the use of frames altogether. If you must use them, create a NOFRAMES version of
your site that links all of your content together. Better yet, don’t use frames.
Flash, QuickTime, Plug-Ins etc.
Search engines actually can read and index Flash web sites. The problem is that
they can’t really trust what they find in the Flash files, because there’s no easy way
to determine which text is visible.
Doing your entire web site in Flash is (in my opinion) crazy from a usability
standpoint, and although there are hacks to work around the SEO issues, we’ll have
to save those details for the support portal.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t use Flash, QuickTime, or other plug-ins selectively
on your HTML web pages. You can. There are a lot of cool things you can do with
embedded audio and video, or with the interactive elements that Flash can create.
Just because search engines don’t see it, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it.
JavaScript
Although some of the search engines have experimented with reading JavaScript,
you should assume that anything you do with JavaScript is basically invisible. This
doesn’t mean that you should try to get tricky, by doing “sneaky redirects” to take
people away from your search-engine-optimized pages to somewhere else.
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Image Maps
Image maps can be useful in design, but the search engines don’t all follow them,
and like images, there’s no way to include anchor text. You need an alternative form
of navigation if you use image maps.
HTML Validation
There’s a lot of debate about whether HTML validation is important. In my
experience, running your code through an HTML validator will almost always
generate a lot of “warnings” that don’t mean much in the real world.
When you see actual “errors,” this might mean that you’ve forgotten to close a tag or
something, and this can create issues with spidering and indexing. My rule of thumb
is to fix the errors and ignore the warnings.
You can check your HTML code at: http://validator.w3.org/
Watch the Portal, and Join the Conversation
As we continue to develop the SEO Fast Start community portal, I’ll add case
studies and additional tutorials for every step in the fast start process. You can help
us develop that content by posting your comments and questions in the Content
SEO section:
http://www.seofaststart.com/content
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Chapter 6:
Link Building & Promotion (Step 4)
Inviting:
Link Bait
& Targets
Promoting:
PR &
Content
Inventory
Current
Assets
Vertical &
Directory
Links
If you’ve read anything about SEO, you know by now that link
building is extremely important. In fact, link building is almost as old
as SEO, because search engines have been using link analysis for
a very long time.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s invention of PageRank ushered in a
new era for search engines. By late 2001, when I wrote the first
edition of SEO Fast Start, Google was well on their way to claiming
a dominant position in search, and everyone was looking for links.
Because of the “link building arms race” that Google started back
then, link building has changed a lot since 2001. Link building has
become a discipline unto itself, and one short chapter isn’t enough.
Watch the portal and read the newsletter for updates on this and
other premium content. For now, I’ll give you a high-speed run
through the link building landscape.
Link Building Concepts
The first step in understanding link building is getting a
sense of how the search engines see things. As explained in
Chapter 2, all of the search engines use link analysis to help
them determine their rankings.
There are only a few areas where the search engines are actively working to fight
what they call “spam” and link analysis is by far the most active subject. As a result,
Promotion &
Link Building
Campaign
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it’s very important for you to understand their position, and what they’re looking for, if
you want to create an intelligent link building strategy for your site.
There are a number of ways to look at any given link that you find on the web. From
your perspective as the person trying to get ranked, it might seem that the only
important questions are:
What page does this link point to?
What words are used in the text?
How much does this text count?
How much “link juice” (if any) am I going to get?
Is there any risk of being penalized?
Fair enough. I’ll teach you how to answer those questions, at least most of the time.
But in order to understand the answers, you need to understand the questions, and
that means starting with the search engines’ perspective.
What Search Engines Want
From the search engines’ perspective, they want to understand some other things
about a link, before they can decide the answers to your questions.
Why Does This Link Exist?
The primary question for search engines is why a given link exists at all. For your
internal links, those that they find in the body copy, with a visible (blue and
underlined) link, are most likely there to help your users.
What about links that are concealed (no visible indication that it’s a link), buried (tiny
text in the footer of the page), or both? Isn’t it likely that you only put those links
there to influence your rankings?
Which link do you think they trust more?
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Why Was This Link Given?
So it goes with links from other sites. At the core of any search engines efforts to
fight “link spam” will be an effort to determine the intent of each link. When it comes
to external links, the question is the same; it’s just asked a little differently.
When you find a link from one web site to another, there are only a few ways that it
got there. I break them into five main categories:
Stolen links exist because some web applications (blogs, directories, and
many insecure scripts) allow users to add links to a web page. For example,
when blogs were new and nofollow didn’t exist, spammers could easily create
links to a site simply by adding worthless comments to blog posts.
Bartered links are more of a gray area for search engines. Aside from link
exchanges, this category also includes signature links in forums, and those
found on social networking sites8 like Squidoo. Depending on the value of the
contribution to a forum or social network, these may be more like stolen links.
Bartered links aren’t necessarily endorsed by the site owner, but they’re
allowed because the site owner gets something in return – usually content or
a return link. When a link is given in return, search engines can detect this
relationship and discount the value of the link.
Manufactured links mostly exist because someone has gone out of their
way to create entire web sites and web pages so that they can use this
content for linking purposes. This is known as “link farming” and it’s difficult
for the search engines to detect.
Another type of manufactured link exists, though, because there’s a whole
class of web sites that are creating by “screen scraping” search results,
stealing content, modifying RSS feeds, and other nonsense. As a side effect,
websites that are present in search results usually pick up a slow but steady
stream of manufactured links that they didn’t really ask for.
8 Many social networking sites now add “rel=nofollow” to their links, to prevent abuse
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Purchased or rented links are not really a gray area for the search engines.
These links may be legitimate and profitable advertising for the buyer, or they
may be created solely for the purpose of influencing search engine rankings.
If search engines get better at detecting and filtering out these links, their
effectiveness will decline. SEO people are a resourceful bunch, so there will
always be new schemes designed to avoid detection. Personally, I buy links
when it makes sense because of branding or direct traffic value.
Given links or editorial links are what the search engines value the most. If
they could rank pages based on the natural links that are created because
one person actually likes and recommends another site, they’d be able to
deliver the best possible search results.
Within the last category, what search engines really want are the “natural links of
pure love,” as I described. But there are other types of editorial link.
Every time an online news story talks about Apple and the iPod, there’s a good
chance that those words will be linked to Apple’s website. This is just an editorial
reference, but it still sends a little link juice their way9.
If I link to the Microsoft web page with the words “evil empire” I am probably not
recommending Microsoft’s products10… but I would be sending them some
PageRank nonetheless.
Search engines would probably like to be able to tell the difference between these
types of links. They’d like to be able to break links down into even finer categories
than I have.
For most readers, your approach to building links will depend, to an extent, on what
you think search engines are capable of doing today, what they may become
capable of doing in the future, and how you expect them to respond to different
types of links.
9 As noted with respect to internal linking, links within the text area of a page might actually count for
more than any other type of link.
10 Actually, I recommend several Microsoft products, including Outlook, Word and OneNote. I don’t
think that any specific person at Microsoft is evil – they’re just doing their jobs.
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Authority and Trust… and an alternative approach
In today’s search engines, the value of a link from a web site depends on how much
authority (Google measures this with PageRank) and trust a site has. An
authoritative site may do very well in search results and have a very high PageRank
score, but still not be trusted because they sell text link ads to SEO people.
Links from such sites may be worth nothing to one search engine, and a lot to
another. In the end, it only matters to you if you’re spending money or time to get
that link, without getting anything else in return.
Because Google publishes an approximation of their PageRank score through the
Google Toolbar browser plug-in, you’ll see a lot of emphasis out there on “high-PR”
links and that sort of thing. There are only a few ways to get such links, and the
categories I listed above spell them all out.
For most of us, it comes down to buying, bartering, or actually earning an editorial
link. We know which ones are most valued by search engines. It’s not impossible to
get the best kind, but you do need to think a little.
My general approach to link building is based on the concepts of authority and trust,
like anyone’s would be. We want more links, from sites that are as authoritative and
trusted as possible.
But we can’t measure these things directly, so I prefer to use tactics that have the
potential to generate a profit on their own. That’s why I only buy links when there’s
some branding or direct traffic value – otherwise, it’s just another expense where I
can’t measure the return on investment.
Developing a Game Plan for Links
The “fast start” process for link building and promotion is broken up into four stages:
Inventory of Assets
Directories & Verticals
Link Targets & Link Bait
Website Promotion
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There’s a little bit of overlap between these stages, and it’s unavoidable. We’re not
really talking about a step by step process once you get into link building and
promotion activities. The step by step process is designed to help you create a
strategy.
Inventorying Your Assets (Stage 1)
Developing a link building program, even for new sites, begins
with an assessment of the current situation, not just of where
you stand, but where the competition is.
Even if you don’t currently have any links pointing to your site,
there are still some important steps you should take to identify strengths and
weaknesses before mapping out your initial link building campaign.
Measuring Incoming Links
One of the first things I do when I take on a new student is assess their current
incoming links. This means actually trying to find every page that’s linking to their
site, checking to see what kind of link it is, what text is used in the link, etc.
It’s difficult to come up with a complete picture, but there are several tools that make
the job a lot easier.
Google Webmaster Tools – when you sign up and verify your site, you get a
very complete look at all of the links that Google has found pointing to the
site. Fairly new, very cool. (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps)
Yahoo Site Explorer – allows you to explore the incoming links for a single
page or an entire web site. Comparing the number of links to a site vs. the
number of links to the home page gives you an idea of how many “deep links”
the site has. (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)
Backlink Analyzer– Backlink Analyzer (tools.seobook.com) is a free tool from
Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com site, and it does a very good job of analyzing the
links to find anchor text, but it doesn’t always perform perfectly. There are
other free and paid tools, including Tattler, Optilink, and SEO Elite.
Inventory
Current
Assets
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Although it can be a time consuming exercise, there is real value in actually looking
at the sites that are currently linking to you. Some of them may be willing to change
the text or context of the link, others may be interested in receiving some free
content (with a link to you of course), and you may also find affiliates or other
marketing partners.
You can also use the same tools to examine competitors – more on this in a
moment.
Identifying Link Targets
There are two sides to every link. Naturally, if you want to get pages ranked, you
would like to have people link to those pages, use your search terms in the anchor
text, etc. That’s your side of the story.
As you move through your SEO campaign, you will identify pages on your site that
could use a little link love from the web, and I’ll be happy to help you get that done.
For now, let’s look at the other side of the link… from the perspective of the person
who is giving you a link.
The real question you should be asking right now is what pages on your site people
would actually want to link to, and how you can improve in this area.
If your site has the definitive resource (or a very good resource) on a topic, people
will naturally want to link to it. Shelly Lowery of Web Source has a page full of HTML
character codes (http://www.web-source.net/symbols.htm) that I have used over and
over and linked to many times. The last time I checked, there were several hundred
links pointing to this page alone.
Even if you don’t have a resource like that, there are things you can do to improve
the prospects of winning natural links. If you have pages on your site now that make
good link targets, great. If not, think about how you can create some.
For example, let’s say you sell logo merchandise for some professional sports
league. People buy hats with the team logo, jerseys for their favorite players.
What if, instead of just a big catalog of merchandise, you had a page for each team
and player, with RSS news feeds, a place to sign up for email alerts, as well as (of
course) links to the merchandise. Are people likely to link to these pages? You bet
they are. Are people likely to find these pages when they search? Of course.
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If you do it right, your link targets aren’t just there to collect links. They collect visitors
too, and give those visitors a reason to stay and explore your site further.
Assessing Your Strengths & Weaknesses
We all went to school, and when we were in school, at some point they told us that
we were all unique and special individuals, with unique and special talents. Think for
a moment about how unique and special you are. How much you mean to the
people in your life.
Feel better? Good… now forget about that for a minute and think about your web
site.
How is it unique? How is it special? Is it unique, or is it just another “me too” in the
crowded world of the web? Be honest.
Whatever is unique and special is a strength for you. The more strengths you have,
the easier it is to build links, because you can leverage those strengths. If you have
a “me too” site, all is not lost, but it will affect your strategy.
If you have a “me too” site, but you have a good writer on your team, that’s a
strength. If someone on your team is a great researcher, that’s a strength. What are
you good at? What needs work?
This goes beyond link building, but it helps to know these things as you look at all
the possible strategies and tactics you can use to promote your site.
Evaluating Your Resources
In particular, evaluate the following question: do you have more money than time, or
more time than money?
If you have no money, no staff, and no time, then your strategy will be different from
someone who has a large and effective team, with a profitable business.
Assessing the Competition
There are a couple ways to assess the strength of your competition. In the long run,
you’ll want to run detailed link analysis on your major competitors to see who is
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linking to them, how they get their links, and what their strengths and weaknesses
might be.
In the long run, you’d like a lot of the sites that link to your competitors to link to you
as well. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. Which ones you pursue, and
how much effort you put into that, is a matter of balancing resources. It’s usually
easier to go find your own links, once you’ve exhausted the directories and verticals
that link to your competitors (Stage 2).
In the short term, you can at least identify the major competitors (the ones who keep
showing up on the search results where you want to be) and do one simple thing.
Go install the Google Toolbar if you haven’t already got it. Turn on the advanced
features to enable PageRank. Or, if you have Mozilla Firefox, get the SearchStatus
plugin. Once you’ve done that, go look at the “toolbar PageRank” of your main
competitors, and compare it to your own score.
The toolbar is a nifty tool that Google offers (go to http://toolbar.google.com) which
lets you perform Google searches directly from your browser. It also has a set of
"advanced features" which provide some information about any web page that you
view in your browser.
Among these is a graphical display of Google's "PageRank score" for that page,
represented as a number from 1-10. While this is not a perfect representation of the
exact value (the real number has a much larger range than 1-10), it does allow you
to quickly assess the strength of a competitor’s links.
If your major competitors are beating you in this area, you can still do a lot with
keyword strategy, site structure and optimized pages, but it’s a good indication of
where you stand.
Getting Listed In Directories & Verticals (Stage 2)
Submitting your site to web directories is one of the simplest
things you can do to boost your web site’s profile with search
engines.
Vertical &
Directory
Links
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If you do nothing more than submit to the top few general-purpose directories, the
additional search engine referrals and direct traffic should more than justify the
investment.
At this stage in the game, though, it’s worth expanding our definition to include
vertical (topical) directories, and topically related “resource listings” on other sites. In
almost any market, the potential for listings like this is huge.
Major Directories
At this point, there are really only two major directories: Yahoo.com and DMOZ.org.
The bad news is that Yahoo charges money, and DMOZ is badly in need of new
leadership. The good news is that they’re both worth the effort.
In spite of this, I don’t launch a web site without submitting to both of them.
Yahoo charges “commercial sites” $299 a year for a listing. Your site must pass an
editorial review, which they guarantee they will complete in 7 days. You just surf
through the Yahoo directory (dir.yahoo.com) to find the category where your site
belongs, and click the “Suggest a Site” link at the top of the page.
Follow the guidelines precisely. Your directory listing is not an ad – it’s a description
of your site. If you’re rejected, you get one chance to correct the problem.
Once you’ve secured your Yahoo listing, then go to dmoz.org and do the same
thing. Surf to the category, submit your site. I like to use the same basic language
(with a few edits) that the Yahoo editors used to describe my site. DMOZ editors, if
they see your submission at all, do not want to read an advertisement – using a well
written editorial description greatly increases your chances.
Why submit to Yahoo and DMOZ? Well, Yahoo is the directory behind the Yahoo
portal, and DMOZ is the directory that Google offers to visitors. Neither search
engine puts a lot of emphasis on the directory, but both directories do generate
some traffic.
More importantly, a Yahoo listing in particular tells search engines that your web site
is a serious, legitimate business, not just a fly-by-night operation. People who build
spam sites do not spend $299 to have an editor look at them, because they don’t
want anyone from the search engines taking a close look at their site.
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If you get into either directory, make sure that you add the corresponding entry
(NOYDIR and/or NOODP) to the “robots” META tag for the page they’ve listed.
Usually this only applies to the home page, because these directories rarely link to
internal pages. This will tell the search engines to use your own META description
on search result pages. See Chapter 5 for more on META tags.
Minor Directories
In addition to Yahoo and DMOZ, there are a few “second tier” directories that I
always consider for every site.
I wish I could tell you which are paid, which offer free listings, how much they
charge, etc. but it would be a waste of time because it could change by the time you
read this.
Best of The Web - http://www.botw.org
Gimpsy - http://www.gimpsy.com
GoGuides - http://www.goguides.org
Jayde - http://www.jayde.com
Skaffe – http://www.skaffe.com
Starting Point - http://www.stpt.com
Because these directories are rarely fully crawled and indexed, it’s worth
checking one thing before you submit.
Surf to the category where your link will reside, and check to see if that page is
actually in Google’s index, with the info:URL search I showed you in Chapter 4
(Stage 4, index penetration.
If the page is indexed, and not listed as a supplemental result, then go ahead
and submit.
If it’s listed as a Supplemental Result, but there are no sites listed on the page (an
empty category), then check other nearby categories that aren’t empty. If these other
categories are indexed (not supplemental) then it’s likely that you can move your
category out of the supplemental index by adding your site.
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If the page is not indexed by Google, I’d recommend giving it a pass for now, and
revisiting it later to see if things have changed.
There are many other directories out there. SEOPros maintains a list of reviewed
directories11, and it seems that everyone has a list nowadays. To me, directories are
going to have a point of diminishing returns, but as long as you can see that your
category page is being indexed by Google, the link is probably worth something.
Vertical Directories
Besides the general-purpose directories I just mentioned, there are many more
“vortals” or vertical directories for any topic or market. Sites like
SearchEngineGuide.com and the Internet Search Engine Database (ISEDB.com)
offer searchable listings of vertical directories.
You will also find a lot of vertical directories by searching for terms like “widget
directory” on search engines, and by examining the inbound links of your major
competitors. Finding a good vertical directory is great, because there’s a strong
chance of realizing a profit from the traffic that it generates.
Another tool you can use (though it’s not just point and click) is Hub Finder
(tools.seobook.com). What you’re trying to do with this tool is find sites that link to
multiple competitors, since these will often be vertical directories. Even if they aren’t
directories, they’re likely candidates to host a link to your site.
Blogs & Forums
If there are blogs and forums active in your market space (there probably are), you
may find a great opportunity exists, if you’re willing and able to spend the time to
develop good relationships within these communities.
By that, I mean that you should actually contribute something. Making pointless
posts and comments simply to get links is not a good use of your time. Building
relationships with a community of people is a great use of time.
11 http://www.seopros.org/search/dirlist.asp
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Even if you don’t invest a lot of time, knowing who is speaking to your target
audience, and linking to sites in your industry, is worthwhile. Blogs have blogrolls;
forums usually have FAQs and lists of recommended resources.
These are partly “friend lists,” and partly based on who has already established
themselves. If they link to someone else in your industry, there’s no reason why they
can’t link to you, if they have a good reason to do so.
I’ve personally spent a bit of time on SEO related forums, talking with bloggers, etc.
because it just makes sense for me to participate in the community. I didn’t do it to
get links, but if I asked all of the friends I have made to do me a favor, I could
probably generate a thousand links in a week to any kind of related site.
Building relationships isn’t easy and quick, but it can be fun and very rewarding on a
lot of levels.
Content Sites
In every market, you will find sites that are more focused on content than
ecommerce. News, articles, tutorials, reviews, whatever is applicable in your market
or industry. If you are capable of creating content, contributing content to these sites
can be a great way to get links and traffic.
Even if you don’t write, these sites are another potential rich source of links. How
you would approach them depends on the type of site, and how they operate. I wish
I could give you an easy step by step for this, but it’s not that simple. When you find
one, look for opportunities.
In general, any site that appears in the top few pages of search results for your most
important search terms is a place where you’d like to get a link.
Developing Link Targets (Stage 3)
So far, the methods I’ve outlined involve soliciting links from
other sites. The primary purpose of these activities was simply
to create links. In many markets, you’ll be pleasantly surprised
Inviting:
Link Bait
& Targets
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to discover that your reward for doing these activities12 is a lot of first-page rankings
and search engine traffic within a few months’ time.
Great… you’ve had a taste of success. But that’s really just the beginning. There will
still be plenty of room for improvement – search terms where you’re approaching the
top, search terms where you’re still buried on the second page or even deeper in the
search results.
Now it’s time to look at ways to create more links. Both this stage and the next
involve actively promoting your web site. The main difference is the underlying
approach.
In this stage, we’re looking for ways to “incite” or “invite” other web sites to link to
you, by creating compelling link targets on your site. This used to be seen as basic
website promotion, but thanks to the efforts of many people, “link baiting” has
become a subject worthy of separate consideration.
The core concept here is to create some reason for people to link to you. Rather
than attempt to write a comprehensive manual for this, I’ll use a few examples to get
your creative juices going.
Making News & Making Noise
If you’ve never heard of Jason Calacanis, you’re not alone… but a lot more people in
the SEO business know his name, because he used his “notable expert” status as
founder of Weblogs Inc. to say some pretty ignorant things about SEO13.
This created more than a little controversy. I have no idea how much this little
firestorm delivered to his blog, in terms of traffic and inbound links, but it would not
surprise me if it’s far more than he ever got by blogging about other topics.
So there’s one way to do it… just insult large groups of people who have blogs.
Remember “natural links of pure love?” These are natural links of pure hate, I guess.
12 Assuming that you’ve done Steps 1 & 2, to develop a well optimized and well structured site
13 Apparently pleased with the results, he’s gone on to insult other professionals as well.
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You can also do something positive to make news. In fact, that’s what I would
recommend. My point here is that anything noteworthy (even noteworthy ignorance)
is likely to get a lot of attention… and with that attention, traffic and links.
Giving Stuff Away
One of the easiest forms of link bait is to give stuff away. This might be free
software, for example. Many folks have invested time and/or money to develop addons
for Wordpress, extensions for Mozilla Firefox, and even standalone software.
Free software is great, especially if it fills a need.
If you can’t see yourself developing and supporting software, that’s no problem. If
you sell baby gifts, it could be a contest for the most adorable baby picture. The fact
is people love to get free stuff. Money is good, merchandise is good, and trips to
tropical islands are good.
The main thing here is to have a “reason why” that makes sense, and make some
noise about it.
If We Build It, They Will…
Actually, if we build it, nothing will happen until someone sees it. If you create a
great web site, people may occasionally mention it to their friends if they happen to
stumble across it. They might even link to it. If we add some “Digg This” and
“Del.ic.i.o.us” buttons to it, they might even help other people stumble across it too.
There is value in developing good content, good tools, and creating a good user
experience. Because it’s hard to quantify the natural links and goodwill that this
creates, people have a hard time accepting “great web site” as a link building
strategy, but it is.
Of course, it’s a more effective strategy if you don’t just take the “if we build it…”
approach. Make it easier for people to bookmark your link targets, add them to social
networks, and tell a friend about you. Ask them to do it, and give them a reason why.
Blogging for (Link) Love
It turns out that there is more to blogging than sharing your life story, spouting silly
opinions, and posting pictures of your cat. Who knew?
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In fact, simply creating a blog and writing on it regularly can generate a steady
stream of traffic and links, because of the nature of the “blogosphere” itself. Your
content goes out into an RSS feed, which will be picked up here and there.
When you blog about other blogs (it may sound silly) the “trackback” links and backand-
forth dialogue can generate a tremendous amount of links and traffic.
Participate in the conversation, have something to say… give and get back.
An added benefit of blogging on your own site, assuming your content is good
enough to get indexed and attract links, is that you can use the blog (judiciously) to
point some anchor text links back into the rest of your site.
Why Do We Love Lists So Much?
I don’t know what it is about lists. Back in the 70s, there was a best selling book
called simply “The Book of Lists.” It was nothing but a bunch of lists. Most famous
last words, most dangerous animals, stuff like that.
People still love lists. Simply creating a top ten list for anything, if you can make
even a little noise about it, is a great way to attract links for a blog, a web site, etc.
Presence Builds Presence
This sort of bleeds over into the next stage, but it’s also a simple truth. Presence
builds presence. If you’re found in paid search results, you’ll get some links just
because you were there. If you’re found in the organic search results, in a popular
magazine, on a billboard… you are likely to get some links as a result.
Promoting Your Site (Stage 4)
For me, the best type of link building campaign is one that isn’t
really about links at all. There are a large number of marketing
and promotion activities that generate profits, help with
branding in positive ways, and generally pay for themselves.
A lot of these activities (presence builds presence) also create links. The web, after
all, is built out of links. I call these activities “profitable promotions,” and if you can
use them to build links, you may not need to do anything else.
Promoting:
PR &
Content
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Content Promotion
Most commonly referred to as “article marketing,” the creation and distribution of
content to other web sites is one of the most powerful promotion and link building
tactics available. In fact, I dedicated an entire week to this subject in my link building
classes last year.
Although a lot of people “know about” content promotion, very few do a good job at
it. Like a lot of the “fast start” system, the basic idea here is pretty simple. The
greatest value is realized when you go a little bit past the basic idea.
Let’s just say, for example, that you write an article, and submit it to an article
directory like ezinearticles.com. You’ll get a link from that directory, and assuming
the search engines don’t ignore it, you get a little link juice for your site.
So, what does the average article marketer do? They “spin” that article into dozens
of variations, and submit it to dozens of article directories… and they get dozens of
links from article directories. Assuming the search engines don’t ignore those links,
they get a little more link juice.
Allow me to suggest an alternative, based on the idea that any fool can get a whole
bunch of links from article directories… so, if you want to do better than the
competition, you might want to get some links from other web sites besides the
article directories.
The topic of the article, and the quality of the writing, now comes into play. A well
written article on a topic of broad interest is much more likely to be picked up from
an article directory and placed on another site. So, don’t write articles about how to
buy your products. Don’t write advertisements. Write real articles.
Now, instead of the article directories as the primary source of links, you have “other
web sites” as the main source of links. We’re making progress.
But there’s a challenge here, and an opportunity. As you already know, search
engines don’t like duplicate content, so the same article placed on a dozen web sites
is likely to be ignored (along with the link) by at least some of the search engines, to
the extent that they can identify it as duplicate. In practice I’d bet that at least 20% of
the duplicates won’t get filtered out, at least not right away.
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Duplicate content is the reason why so many article marketers “spin” their articles
before submitting them to directories, replacing a word here and there, changing the
order of paragraphs, etc. This makes it even less likely that another site will pick up
their article, because spinning does not improve the quality and usually makes it
worse.
What if you could solve the duplicate content problem, and build strong relationships
with the owners of great content sites, by doing just one extra thing? Would you
consider it?
Here it is: go direct. Contact the web sites that pick up your article, and offer them a
unique article in its place. Offer them an updated or expanded version. Offer to
create content for them. Write actual unique content for them, or at least write a
different introduction for the article.
You can find out where your articles appear by running a Google Alert14
(www.google.com/alerts) with the author’s name and the title of the article.
Whenever your article is picked up by another site, you get an email alert, and you
can take a look at where your article has appeared.
You don’t have to contact everyone. You don’t have to offer everyone unique
content. But when you find a good quality site that wants guest articles on your topic,
it’s a small investment to make for a long term link.
Don’t feel like bothering with the article directories yourself? Not a problem, if there
are other writers covering the same topic! You can use searches and Google Alerts
to find out which web sites have picked up their articles, and contact these sites
directly.
I could (and just might) write an entire book about ways to leverage content into links
and traffic, but we don’t have that kind of space here. If you want the rest of this
story, please watch the link building videos I’ve provided as a companion for this
chapter.
14 If someone on your team isn’t running some kind of alert (news, web, blogs) on your business, you
really should think about it; it’s a great way to see what the web is saying about you
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Update for 2008 – Social Media Sites
This isn’t really a new thing, but after working with content sharing sites like Hub
Pages (www.hubpages.com) and others for the past year, I have developed a real
appreciation for those sites (like Hub Pages) that maintain quality standards.
What’s more, the search engines seem to share that appreciation. Don’t be a “toad”
and publish junk on these sites. Learn the rules and how they work. But it can be a
very worthwhile use of your time to publish good information through these
channels.
Public Relations
A couple years ago one of my students hired a PR agency to help him promote his
business. They managed to get his site a mention (via a photo credit) in a story in
the USA Today newspaper & web site. The story was about upside down Christmas
trees, which were invented so stores could sell more ornaments15, but people had
started buying them as a novelty.
This one story alone generated quite a bit of traffic and links, but it didn’t stop there.
Not even close. Over the next couple months, my student did radio & TV interviews
and the “upside down tree” was even featured on a major network morning show.
Wire services wrote stories. It was amazing. It was transforming.
It wasn’t that hard. All he did was write a check and have a few conversations with
the PR guys.
The next year, he didn’t hire a PR firm, and decided to do it all himself. When he saw
a news story on Christmas trees, he contacted the writer/reporter to offer some info
and of course his availability as a resource. One result of this was a link from the
Wall Street Journal web site.
Did he get a big boost in search engine rankings from all this? You bet. But it was a
very profitable activity, even without that extra benefit, because he got a lot of traffic,
sold a lot of trees, and built a very large email list of current and potential customers.
15 It’s easier to see the ornament when it’s hung upside down – branches don’t get in the way
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Viral Marketing & Affiliates
Viral marketing is sort of a vague topic, and I’ve lumped affiliate programs with it
here because that may be the easiest variation to understand. As a link building
tactic, any time you can give someone else HTML code, that they’re likely to copy
and paste into their web site, you have an opportunity to create links.
The link building videos will walk you through a couple of really cool promotions,
involving affiliate programs and “plug in tools.”
Some affiliate programs are more SEO friendly than others. The one I’m most
excited about right now is called Link Connector (www.linkconnector.com), because
they allow affiliates to give you a direct link and still earn commissions. This is
usually possible with most other programs16, but with Link Connector, there’s no
extra work involved.
You don’t see a lot of people doing plug in tools, because it involves work, but this is
another powerful viral marketing strategy.
As an example, let’s say that you’re involved with the real estate market in some
way, and you’ve developed a really cool mortgage calculator tool. If you offer that
tool to other sites, and the copy-and-paste code that you give them includes a link
back to your site, you’ll earn a little link love every time someone uses your tool on
their site.
Marketing & Advertising
If you haven’t picked up on it already, I’m going to make it very clear right now:
anything you do to advertise or market your business has the potential to
build links to your web site, especially if you think about links as a possible benefit
when you plan your activities.
I could tell you a thousand stories here. Trade show booth has a cool hologram
effect on it, people link to the site. Trade show booth at a fairly conservative event
has “boat show booth babes,” outraged and amused people link to the site. TV ad
16 This is very technical, for more details watch the link building course
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gives out www.example.com/tvoffer as a URL to track the ad’s performance, people
link to that.
What’s so cool about this? Plain old marketing and advertising activities also have
the potential to generate a profit on their own. If you can turn a profit and get some
links in the bargain, you’re miles ahead of any competitor who thinks that the
solution to SEO is to just go rent text links.
Go forth, and market your business. When it comes to link building, forgetting about
SEO altogether isn’t the end of the world. It might even be the start of something big.
Outbound Links & Link Exchanges
Once upon a time, you couldn’t find a book or website about SEO that didn’t talk
about reciprocal linking, or link exchanges, as a core strategy. In fact, a lot of people
still cling to the idea of link exchange as a great way to build links.
Forget about it. Unless there’s something more to the relationship than just “linking
for SEO,” you’re wasting your time with link exchanges. Search engines can see
both sites, they can identify the reciprocal links, and they can easily ignore these
links.
Beyond that, search engines can and do consider the quality of the sites you link to
when they evaluate the quality of your site. This means that you should evaluate the
sites and pages you point to, and determine whether they’re really worth linking to. If
you have to link to a site you don’t like, it’s easy enough to add “rel=nofollow” to the
link, so that search engines know you aren’t endorsing that site.
Reciprocation Is Not a Sin
Obviously, when you link to highly relevant resources, a link back to your site is
worth pursuing. There is no penalty for exchanging links, and if you can share a little
traffic with another site, it’s almost always a “win win” situation even if the search
engines completely ignore the link.
So the bottom line on outbound links and link swaps is simple: if you would link to
that site if search engines didn’t exist, then go ahead and link. Otherwise, think
about using a “link condom” (nofollow) or just skip it.
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Conclusion – Don't Ever Stop Working On Links!
In the short term, even 20-30 high-quality inbound links will improve your rankings a
great deal. It’s not unusual for us to enter a market with a brand new site, go through
the basic link building I’ve described, and see page one rankings within 3 months.
In the long run, your goal should be to have as many high-quality, relevant inbound
links as possible. It’s tempting to stop working on links when you reach the top of
the SERPs, but you shouldn’t rest on your laurels once you hit this target.
Keep an eye out at all times for new opportunities, and look for “profitable
promotions” that can make link building something that just happens in the course of
doing business.
You should never really stop working on inbound links. Websites come and go,
pages vanish, and the links they carry go with them. If you don't continually invest in
building up links, your rankings may begin to fade since it can take a month or two
for links to be properly indexed. By the time you notice things slipping, you're a good
month or more away from fixing the problem.
The importance of links is not a secret any more, even if everyone doesn't
understand it very well. Your competitors are probably not sitting still.
Need More?
As I’ve said several times, registered subscribers of “SEO Fast Start” can see all six
weeks of my 2006 link building course as streaming video. Those who participated in
this class have told me that it completely changed the way they look at link building.
Please bear in mind that these classes were recorded live, and the audio quality
occasionally drops from great to “crank up the speakers and listen carefully.”
I am currently running a completely updated link building class called Link Liberation
– although the class was a fast sellout, you can get on the waiting list for the next
one at www.linkliberation.com - and get some free information too.
Watch the Portal, and Join the Conversation
You can help by posting your comments and questions about link building at the
portal: http://www.seofaststart.com/linking
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Chapter 7:
Measuring Your Results (Step 5)
Establish
Metrics
Set Up
Analytics
Measure
Results
Track
Resources
This is a short chapter. I would love to give you a one size fits all
template for measuring your results, but it depends a lot on your
site, your business model, and your market.
In spite of this, some things are universal. Every web site should
have certain measurements of performance, every campaign (SEO
or otherwise) should include some way of measuring the outcome.
Seriously, if you aren’t measuring what’s happening you aren’t
really in the game at all. Wishful thinking is not a strategy.
Why We Measure
Even though search engine optimization generates “free
traffic,” we all know that it’s anything but free. It takes time, it
takes effort, and it costs money to do it right.
Since we are spending resources, we want to see a good
return on our investment. That’s why we measure… some of the things we do will
deliver a good return, and we’ll want to do more of those things. Others will fail to
deliver a return, and we’ll want to improve or remove those activities from our plan.
What we’re really in here is a planning cycle. You start by assessing the current
situation and setting some goals. You make a plan, you execute that plan, you
measure the results, and you go right back into another cycle.
It starts with deciding what to measure.
Measure
Results &
Resources
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Establish Metrics (Stage 1)
Before we can measure anything, we need to decide what
we’re going to measure. With a good analytics solution, you’ll
be able to capture a lot of data and ask questions about it later,
so at this stage we’re really just interested in what we expect to
monitor on an ongoing basis.
Here are the main categories where you may want to measure what’s happening
Rankings – For the main search terms you’re targeting in your keyword
strategy, it can be helpful to monitor changes in your rankings across the top
3 search engines… as long as you promise not to freak out when you move
from #55 to #82 for one search term. SEO is a long term process.
Referrals & Traffic – Outside of looking at your rankings for specific search
terms, you will want to measure the overall impact of your SEO campaign, in
terms of the total volume of traffic generated from organic search results. It
should be increasing over time, of course.
Links – If you’re actively engaged in link building and promotion activities,
you will naturally want to monitor your progress. Even if you can’t tie the
outcome to a specific activity every time, you should be able to determine
whether your efforts are effective.
Leads & Sales – I don’t know about you, but my most important goals are
usually based on specific business results, not rankings. With a good
analytics solution, you can measure these things as they relate to specific
keywords and marketing campaigns.
Costs (Money & Time) – You’re spending resources, remember? Keeping
track of what goes into each activity can help you decide where to spend
more the next time around, and where to spend less – especially if you can
relate the expenditure to specific results.
Personally, I would establish some metrics for all five of these categories. Once
you’ve decided what you want to measure, it’s a lot easier to look for solutions that
will let you do it.
Establish
Metrics
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Setting Up Analytics & Tracking (Stage 2)
In this section, I’m going to give you a few recommendations for
tools that have worked for me. There are, in every case, plenty
of solutions on the market. As we gather feedback and
questions on the portal, I’ll try to get you more information on
other solutions as requested.
Tracking Rankings
There are a couple tools I like for this. If you like a web-based solution, DigitalPoint
(www.digitalpoint.com) offers a free keyword ranking tool that works with all 3 of the
major search engines. I prefer to use an offline tool called Advanced Web Ranking
(www.advancedwebranking.com) because it generates nicely formatted reports.
Whatever you use, don’t go nuts – checking your rankings for the top 25-30 core
terms every week is more than enough. Remember, rankings don’t do any good
unless you’re getting targeted traffic that actually leads to something happening on
your site. I only run a report once a month for my sites.
Tracking Referrals & Traffic
To track referrals and traffic, I like two analytics solutions. Google Analytics
(www.google.com/analytics) is free, and extremely capable if you implement all the
features. If you’re paranoid about letting Google hold onto your data, my other
favorite is Clicktracks (www.clicktracks.com).
In fact, for high volume sites, I like to use both, because they let us do different types
of testing and comparisons. Either one will let you see where your traffic comes
from, down to the keyword level for search engines. Either one will allow you to track
other types of marketing campaigns.
Tracking Links
There are two tools I like to use for tracking inbound links. Yahoo Site Explorer
(siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) has been around for a while, and can be used
without giving Yahoo any information about your site. If you don’t mind registering
and verifying your site, Google Webmaster Tools
Set Up
Analytics
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(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps) gives you a very useful look at the
incoming links that Google has found, along with a lot of other information.
I like to look at the incoming links for my site every week, even if things don’t change
very quickly. If I am working on a campaign for a specific page, I like to monitor the
“before and after” link counts for that page.
Tracking Leads & Sales
I’ve already mentioned Google Analytics and Clicktracks, which I use to help track
traffic and referrals. Both of these solutions can also help you track conversions
(leads or sales), and even capture the actual value of ecommerce transactions. This
lets you associate individual search terms or marketing campaigns with a total value,
average $ value per visit, average time on site, etc.
Tracking Costs
How you track the time & money cost of your SEO activities is entirely up to you… if
you find a great solution, please visit the portal and let me know. I have never been
entirely happy with any of the solutions I’ve used.
Measuring Results (Stage 3)
Once you’ve established metrics and set up your analytics
solution, you’ll want to set up a regular schedule of reporting so
that you can look at the same reports at the same time each
week, month, etc.
Tracking Resources (Stage 4)
As I mentioned above, I am not thrilled with the way I’m tracking
my own use of resources right now. We all know we need to do
it, but the challenge is particularly acute when it comes to
tracking time spent. Even large organizations struggle with this.
At the very least, you would hope to have some overall measure of time and money
spent with your weekly or monthly reports.
Measure
Results
Track
Resources
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Chapter 8:
Refining Strategy & Tactics (Step 6)
Refine
Keyword
Strategy
Refine
Content
Strategy
Refine
Site
Structure
Refine
External
Strategy
The sixth and final step of the SEO Fast Start process is a time of
reflection, when you analyze the results and formulate a new plan
of action for the next cycle.
Planning Cycles in SEO
For the most part, we know what creates good rankings and
results from our SEO campaigns, when we begin. What we
don’t know is how much work to put into one thing or
another, how many links, etc.
I usually run my SEO campaigns on a 2 or 3 month “cadence,” that is, we take stock
of all our metrics and evaluate our strategy every 2 or 3 months. For a brand new
site, I like a 2 month cycle, but as a campaign matures, we might move to longer or
shorter cycles as circumstances change.
The length of your planning cycle will depend on how much work you have to do
after each cycle. If you find that you’re overloaded with changes after two months, it
makes sense to move to a monthly cycle for a while.
Assessing Your Keyword Strategy (Stage 1)
Unless you’re running pay-per-click campaigns, give it at least a
couple of months before taking stock of your keyword strategy.
Of course, your primary goal is to increase traffic, and within a
couple of months you should begin to see results, rankings
creeping up, etc.
Refine
Keyword
Strategy
Refine
Strategy &
Tactics
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As you move along through successive planning cycles, some patters will begin to
emerge. Some search terms will deliver more in terms of business results, and you’ll
want to put more effort into these terms that are delivering the highest quality of
targeted traffic. Some search terms will become lower priorities.
When you look at your analytics data, you’ll discover search terms that you hadn’t
even thought about, especially if you run pay-per-click campaigns with “broad
matching.” If you offer visitors a site search capability, check the logs for your site
search, to see what terms your visitors use after they reach your site.
Your goal at this stage is simply to determine what changes should be made to your
keyword strategy – are you targeting the right search terms, and are your visitors
coming to the right page.
Refining Content Strategy (Stage 2)
As you move through each planning cycle, keep an eye on your
analytics to identify where you need to develop new content,
which pages are not performing well (in terms of visitor
behavior), and where you may have missed a chance to boost
your rankings with good keyword placement.
Usually, we don’t need to “re-optimize” a page, but if the copy isn’t doing its job of
persuading, don’t be afraid to change it. If you’re getting visits for some “long tail”
search terms, but not ranking at the top, go ahead and let a few of your modifiers
have more prominent positions on the page.
If you’ve discovered any new search terms in stage 1, now is the time to plan out
what kind of content you will add.
Refining Site Structure (Stage 3)
If you need to add new content, it will of course have to fit into
your site structure. If your plan was good to begin with, this will
usually involve only minor changes.
More often, we revisit the site structure with an eye toward
sending more PageRank to specific pages, and increasing the amount of anchor text
we point to those pages, in order to improve our rankings on specific search terms.
Refine
Content
Strategy
Refine
Site
Structure
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If you need to boost a page’s ranking, you really have two choices17 – you can fire
more links at the page from inside your site, or you can get more links from off site,
with the keywords in the anchor text.
Refining Link Building & Promotion Strategy (Stage 4)
Links from inside of the site will get you so far (sometimes to
the top), but if internal linking isn’t getting you where you need
to go, then it’s time to bring in some help from outside of your
site. Over time, your link building efforts will increase your ability
to do things with internal links as well.
With each planning cycle, take stock of your links, and the effectiveness of your link
building activities. Activities that have been particularly successful are worth
pursuing further or expanding. Those that haven’t delivered need to be improved or
removed from your plan.
Because I put a strong emphasis on profitable promotions, I like to try something
new with every planning cycle. I always want to have at least one new type of
promotion going on, with the goal in mind of creating a profitable marketing activity
that will create links as a side benefit.
If you have paid for advertising from vertical directories, take a look at the traffic
these links are bringing in, and how well it converts into leads and sales. If you find a
particularly profitable type of advertising, then look for ways to expand it, possibly
reducing the budget in other areas where you aren’t generating a profit.
In the long run, we want our link building campaign to pay for itself. That’s not an
easy goal to reach right away, but it is possible to get there over time.
17 Other than obsessively tweaking on page stuff, which is unlikely to help much
Refine
External
Strategy
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Chapter 9:
The Random Chapter…
Ideas
Gotchas &
Technical
Details
Tools Technical Gotchas
The first six chapters of this book really laid out “how to do SEO” for
95% of readers. The following two chapters explained the
importance of measuring your results and continually refining your
strategy and tactics.
Then there’s this one... the random chapter. A whole bunch of stuff
that was too detailed, too speculative, or too strange to include in
the first 8 chapters.
What’s The Point?
So what’s in this chapter? Well, all through this book I’ve
been promising to tell you a little more about tools,
promising to explain a little more of the technical detail, and
warn you about a few little “gotchas” that could trip you up.
I did this so that you could keep moving, since most readers will never need to know
about any of this. Along the way, it occurred to me that there are a lot of dumb (and
smart) ideas that just need to be explained, or explained away. So we’ve got a little
of that too.
Cool Tools You Can Use
When I first mapped out the 2007 edition of SEO Fast Start, I
had a huge list of tools that might be a part of it.
The more I worked through the process maps, the more I
realized just how few tools we actually needed. As we get your
Gotchas &
Technical
Details
Tools
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participation and feedback in the portal, I’ll add some reviews of the tools you’re
most interested in, and if we find cool tools, we’ll let you know.
Technical Jibba-Jabba
In this section, I’m just going to run through some technical stuff
real quick, mostly using links to online resources. There’s a lot
of technical detail in SEO, but most of it will never matter to you.
If you have questions that aren’t answered here, check the
portal for more information, and if you don’t find an answer, just ask!
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a simple text file that you upload to the root directory of your website.
Spiders request this file first, and process it, before they crawl your site. Robots.txt
tells the spider what pages they are allowed to fetch.
It helps to work through an example to really understand how this works, so that’s
what we’re going to do. The simplest robots.txt file possible is this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
That’s it! The first line identifies the user agent – an asterisk means that the
following lines apply to all agents. The blank after the “Disallow:” means that nothing
is off limits. This robots.txt file doesn’t do anything – it allows all user agents to see
everything on the site.
Now, let’s make it a little more complex – this time, we want to keep all spiders out of
our /faq directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
See how simple it is? The trailing slash is necessary to indicate that this is a
directory. Without the trailing slash, not only the /faq directory, but any file whose
name begins with “faq,” would be disallowed. We can also add more directories to
the disallowed list:
Technical
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User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /info/about/
That was easy, but what if we want to disallow access to only one file? It’s simple:
User-agent: *
Disallow: about.html
Disallow: /faq/faqs.html
Now let’s get specific. So far, we’ve created rules that apply to all spiders, but what
about an individual spider? Just use its name:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /faq/
Now, let’s combine individual spider control with a catch-all:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
This set of commands tells Googlebot to take a hike – the slash character (“/”) by
itself means that the entire site is disallowed. For all other user-agents, we’ve just
kept them out of the /faq directory.
Each record in a robots.txt file consists of a user-agent line, followed by one or more
Disallow directives. The blank line between the two user-agent records is necessary
for the file to be processed properly.
If you’d like to add comments, you can use the “#” character like this:
# keep spiders out of the FAQ directory
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
You can use any text editor that saves text in a web-friendly format. I like Notepad
or Unixedit, both of which are free.
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Google has created their own extension to the robots.txt format, which allows the
use of “wildcards” to do partial matching on file names. Yahoo now supports this as
well, and their documentation (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000372.html) is
a lot better than Google’s.
XML Sitemaps
With Google, you can submit your sitemap via the Webmaster Tools console
(www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps). With Yahoo, you can use the Site
Explorer tool (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) to submit an XML sitemap or a list of
URLs to crawl.
Submitting is no longer necessary, because the big three (Google, MSN, and
Yahoo) have gotten together and agreed on a standard protocol, which is described
at www.sitemaps.org. This new protocol allows you to specify the location of your
XML site map in your robots.txt file.
There are many tools that can help create an XML sitemap, and developers are
busy at work, adding sitemap capabilities to applications as diverse as blogs,
shopping carts, and content management systems. If you can’t create a sitemap
automatically, I recommend GSite Crawler (www.gsitecrawler.com), which is free.
301 & 302 Redirects
Not everyone needs to know about redirects, but one redirect that you should set up
if possible, is a 301 redirect to combine the “http://www.example.com” and
“http://example.com” versions of your site into one.
Redirects will also come up if you need to move a site, or if you’ve got affiliate links
coming into your site. This is a huge subject, and I can’t do any better with it than Ian
McAnerin already has: http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/related.asp
The Gotchas That Can Get Ya
There are a few ways to cause yourself problems with search
engines, besides trying to spam… these things aren’t usually
deadly, but they can be dangerous if you don’t deal with them.
The first is duplicate content, and closely related is “spider
traps” or endless loops.
Gotchas
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Duplicate Content & The “Canonical Link” Tag
I’ve already mentioned duplicate content, in its most mundane form – pages that
have the same content, or very little unique content. There’s a more subtle form that
can arise from dynamic sites, where you can potentially have hundreds or thousands
of URLs that deliver the same content, if a script isn’t well written.
GSite Crawler (mentioned above) does detect “exact duplicate” content, so if you
use that, it will help you identify the worst type of duplicate content problems.
Google announced a new solution in February 200918, which allows you to add a tag
on duplicate versions of a page, pointing the spider to a single “canonical” URL.
You just add this tag in the <head> section of your pages:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/page.html"/>
This won’t solve every duplicate content issue, but it can come in handy when you
have a product page that exists in multiple categories in an ecommerce store. By
adding this tag, you effectively consolidate all those pages (and link juice) into one.
Spider Loops
A spider loop is an endless sequence of pages that link to pages that link to pages
that… you get the idea. The best (worst) example is the “perpetual calendar” you
often find on web sites, which shows a calendar of events. The “May 2007” page has
a link to “June 2007,” which if you follow it links to “July 2007,” and so on to the end
of time. Most of them will also go back in time as well, to the dawn of the Universe.
A spider doesn’t know that it’s never going to stop getting pages… if it’s well
programmed, it will eventually stop checking, but it’s a lot better to just use robots.txt
to keep the spiders away from spider loops. Leslie Rohde has created a program
called Optispider (www.windrosesoftware.com/optispider/) that can check your site
for these issues.
18 For more details: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
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But What About…
There are a lot of good ideas, and a lot of crazy ideas, floating
around in the SEO world. In this section, I’ll try to give you the
highlights so you at least understand what the heck people are
talking about.
Latent Semantic Indexing
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is the latest overblown concept to hit the SEO (and
predatory marketing) scene. If you want to understand how it works, take a look at
his entry from the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing
If that didn’t make any sense, don’t worry about it… because none of the search
engines have implemented LSI, and as far as I can tell, it’s a very long way off even
if they wanted to, because it would take a lot more computing resources than any of
them would want to use.
If they ever do use LSI, the “fast start” system will work just fine, because natural
writing and linking related pages together is the right thing to do for LSI too.
Double Listings & Super Listings (aka Sitelinks)
Google normally allows only two pages from the same site to appear on the same
SERP. If you have a page at #1, and another at #10, they’ll actually appear as the
first two listings, with the second one indented under the first. This is called a
“double listing,” and it’s one of the reasons why we map each of our major search
terms to two pages.
Google occasionally shows a lot more than two links for a site – for example, if you
search Google for “advanced web ranking,” you’ll probably see this in action. This is
called a “super listing,” or “Sitelinks,” and there are plenty of theories on how to get
one… all of them are probably wrong. This is done automatically, when Google
thinks they have a pretty good idea which site you’re looking for.
Ideas
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The “Google Sandbox”
There’s no doubt that new sites have a hard time cracking the top rankings on
search engines. I don’t know if this is especially true of Google, but since everyone
seems to worry about Google more, this phenomenon has been dubbed the “Google
Sandbox.”
The theory is that Google puts new sites into a “holding cell” or something until
they’ve aged enough to warrant consideration. First of all, this is definitely not how it
works, but it’s quite possible that new sites are “untrusted” at first.
The biggest reason why new sites have a hard time getting ranked is that they
should have a hard time. Their competitors have had years to get plugged into the
web. Years to build links, develop content, etc.
I don’t know of any easy way to overcome this, but I don’t think it’s inevitable that
you must wait a year or two to get ranked. I know it’s not inevitable, because I
launch new sites with my students all the time.
“SSA” Penalties (Retrieval, Ranking, and Reordering)
Way back in the day, search engines were pretty simple machines. They retrieved
some results from their index, they ranked those pages, and then they presented the
search results to the user.
Now, there’s a third step – reordering. After the search engines have ranked the
pages, they apply another level of “something” to change the order of the results.
Sometimes this is easy to see, but usually it’s invisible to us as searchers.
Google applies some very obvious re-ordering to some sites. One of my students
got caught up in this last year, with a group of sites she inherited. One day, lots of #1
rankings. The next day, lots of #41 rankings.
On search term after search term, the sites dropped exactly 40 spots. After resolving
some duplicate content problems and other issues with the sites’ quality, they
miraculously returned to their former top positions.
Other sites have dropped from the first page all the way to the very last page (page
99, results 991-1000). This is clearly no accident. We don’t know the cause of this,
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but it seems to happen primarily to sites that have significant quality problems, such
as:
Very little unique content, which may result from not creating new content,
and having other sites “borrow” or copy (steal) the existing content
Broken links – both internal links to nonexistent pages and links to
nonexistent pages on other sites
Large amounts of machine generated or “scraped” pages, pages built from
nothing but RSS feeds, etc.
The solution to this, as far as I can tell, is to clean up the mess and file a reinclusion
request with Google through the Webmaster Tools console, detailing what the mess
was, and how it has been cleaned up.
All of the “big 3” search engines do some kind of re-ordering, which is probably
based on user feedback and mathematical models that predict a user’s satisfaction
with a given search result. It’s the future, folks19.
Site Launch Process
I am often asked what I do to launch a new web site. The short answer is that we
use the “fast start” process to build a good site that’s well optimized, and start
promoting it. But there are a few things I wouldn’t go without, when launching a new
site:
Submission to Yahoo and DMOZ (Step 4, Stage 2) – nothing says “we are a
legitimate business” quite like paying Yahoo to do an editorial review… and
passing it.
An active pay-per-click advertising campaign, with at least Google Adwords.
As we work through the PPC campaign, we inevitably find things we can
improve about the site and the user experience. I suspect, but can’t prove,
that the “quality score” on Google Adwords is similar to whatever Google uses
to “re-order” search results.
19 If this is really the future, where is my flying car?
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Other marketing and promotion activities that aren’t directly related to SEO,
but that do generate links to the site. This would include things like a press
release on launch, advertising in vertical directories, asking bloggers to
review the site and give feedback, etc.
The Secret To Success In Life Is…
I don’t really know, but if you see me at a conference or seminar, buy me a drink,
and I’ll give it my best shot. Unfortunately, I promised to keep this book to 100
pages, and we’re already there – or I might hazard a guess right now.
Watch the Portal, and Join the Conversation
As we continue to develop the SEO Fast Start community portal, I’ll continue to add
content – you can also get on the newsletter mailing list if you aren’t already:
http://www.seofaststart.com/
About My “Link Liberation” Training Program
Link Liberation (as I mentioned at the end of Chapter 6) is my new 12 week long link
building course, which includes a lot of stuff that you just can’t cram into a book.
To learn more, join the next class, or just get on the mailing list, go to
www.linkiberation.com - I’ll be delivering regular updates and free link building tips
and advice to all subscribers, via a regular podcast called “Link Liberation TV.”
My advanced video course is on sale for a dollar…
If you liked SEO Fast Start, you’ll love my advanced video course on SEO,
“Stomping the Search Engines 2.0” – produced in partnership with StomperNet. You
can see their latest offer for this course at www.stomping2.com
At the time of this book’s publication, the offer was a whopping $1 if you take a trial
subscription to The Net Effect, which is a monthly magazine for online marketers
that I write for.
Your sample issue of the magazine, and the course, are just a dollar, and you have
30 days to decide whether you want to keep or cancel the subscription.