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SEO Game Changers – Search Engine / SEO History

November 21st, 2009

from: http://www.stuntdubl.com/2009/06/21/seo-history/

SEO History and Game Changers

There is a misnomer in search marketing and SEO that things change all the time. I think I stopped consuming SEO blogs and news sites on a daily basis about 2 or 3 years ago when I decided enter full time consultancy with no one else’s safety net. There was no extra time for anything accept a low information consumption diet. I had to develop unflinching confidence in the work I was doing to execute on various strategies based on my understanding of how search engines have historically worked, and the assumption that they will continue to function in basically the same manner for some time to come.

SEO ChessThis is from a conclusion that there have only been a handful of changes that affected how I conducted my business. I learned from both blackhats and search engineers both to come up with a strategy that fit my ethical code while indulging my competitive nature and hunger for success. I am convinced that the cat/mouse dynamic between blackhats and engineers has helped to form the current state of information retrieval based on strong needs to stay relevant in certain areas that were exploited solely for capitalistic monetary gain.

I’ve found some great posts and articles about search history and how search engines have evolved over time, but not many mentions of how search optimizers have changed their strategies over time. There are a few good resources listed below, but none quite summed up the changes that affected what I like to refer to as the “SEO mentality”. I’m hoping to create a fairly comprehensive document for Market Motive Internet Marketing Training (where I’ll be discussing this shortly with legendary SEO’s Greg Boser and Marshall Simmonds, to help add to the increasingly comprehensive body of SEO training we’ve developed over the past two years (Over 40 Videos now!).

I learned what SEO was in about 2002 – shortly after offpage factors started to strongly determine relevance. I spent several years and thousands of hours on forums reading, learning, an interacting and teaching to figure out how search engines worked. When I made the choice to work for myself at home after another great year of learning and consulting at We Build Pages (with Jim Boykin – one of the sharpest SEO’s I’ve ever known), I decided it was time to start doing. I built sites, and strategies for myself, using consulting money to fund development of website projects, and parlaying to thinks like being able to even afford the insane cost of living in the SF Bay area. It was based on the unwritten understanding of the changes that are mentioned below, and not listening to a lot of the SEO garbage that is spewed all over on the interwebs.

When I started doing – I realized that not much changes with SEO in terms of strategic execution. It is a pretty logical art and science of determining risk to reward ratios, and implementing strategies in a sequential fashion following certain established rules based on intended outcome. I’ve developed a playbook and these SEO rulesets by understanding the HISTORICAL GAMECHANGERS in SEO. Feel free to add some on twitter with #seogamechangers

I’ve been taking a mental inventory of these game changes for a few months, and here is what I have them broke down to:


1. Onpage factors (1995 – 1999)
2. Offpage factors (2000)
3. Florida update (2003)
4. Fresh Crawl/ Everflux (2004)
5. Sandbox effect (2005)
6. Duplicate content filtering (2006)
7. Human editorial (2006)
8. Onebox/ Universal Search (2007)
9. Paid linking handling (2007)
10. No follow (2008)
11. User data validation and segmentation (2009)
12. Brand Mentions (update Vince – 2009)

Some of my dates may be a bit off, but for the most part these are the major factors that affect my actionable SEO Strategies. These are the major changes that contribute to the hurdles, filters, and challenges of ranking a site on a search engine.

I’d love to hear from other folks on the things that you think should be included in the list. There are MANY minor things that full under these categories, but after revisiting most and asking twitter, I think this is pretty comprehensive, as things like local search 10 pack, personalization, geotargetting all fall under one of these other areas (even if the dates aren’t exact). Please let me know if you can think of anything I missed. I’ll try to watch the comments on the post closely for once:) Please post any great resources, or suggestions for adding/updating to the list.

Resources

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How to Find SEO Competitor Keywords, Social Media & Backlinks

November 9th, 2009

from: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-find-seo-competitor-keywords-social-media-backlinks/7827/

In the past I did quite a few posts on competitive research:

Today I am going to focus on what you can learn from your competitors if you are smart enough.

First of all, a few things to take note of:

  1. Your established competitors, who have been in play long enough, have probably come across numerous pitfalls and learned how to cope with them;
  2. The fact that your competitor has been exploring the niche much longer than you doesn’t mean he is now doing everything right;
  3. Promoting a site without proper competition research means to promote it blind;
  4. By merely copying your competitor, you will never be able to surpass him;
  5. If you focus on finding what your competitor is doing profoundly wrong, you have good chances to get ahead of him.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s see what you actually can learn from your competitors.

The Keywords

Keyword research is both difficult and tricky. The only way to effectively refine your list is to test it in practice (PPC campaign may help you with that).

Your competitor may have already tested the keywords and chosen the best ones that both generated good traffic and converted. I do not suggest relying on his keywords completely. But if you take time analyzing and comparing several of your competitors’ on-page and off-page keyword targeting, you can make your list much better.

How can you do that?

Quick tip: don’t forget to compare which terms your competitor tried to rank (i.e. which terms he is using throughout the site) and which terms he ended up ranked for. Thus, you will be able to do better than him.

The Backlinks

Those who linked to your competitor, will most probably want to link to you. Again, the key here is not to copy step by step but to do better. So:

The Social Media

Check where your competitor has found his topical community. Make sure to analyze how the social media users react to your competitor, their feedback and comments, what they like and dislike.

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3 Smart Ranking SEO Tips You Better Be Aware Of

November 6th, 2009

from: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/smart-ranking-seo-tips/

3 Smart Ranking SEO Tips You Better Be Aware Of

By Ayaz Malik on October 31, 2009

This article will take a little insight in several most popular ranking systems around here and teach you how to get better Google pagerank, get better results on Alexa and Moz ranking systems as well. Many of these tips will seem very basic and easy, but that’s so through – optimization is not hard, bust just requires small but regular time investments. If you can use those tips in daily basis, then you definitely get some great results! For example, check on 1stwebdesigner.com website which is only a little bit more than one year old, but has got really high rankings!

I wrote a post Learn SEO by Improving Important Web Ranks a few months before but now I guess it’s the right time to upgrade and elaborate it because Google and other search engines are changing their policy at high pace. First we need to get head into three of the most important ranks on web:

  1. Page Rank
  2. MOZ Rank
  3. Alexa Rank

1. Page Rank:

google-pagerank-logo-seo-smart-tips

Nowadays there is a big fuss that Google removing page rank or it’s the end of page rank. Well yes Google have removed page rank from webmaster tools, but still I don’t think it’s an end to page rank because this topic is going on from past 4 years. That is why we will talk about improving page rank as well.

Page rank is one of the most important and commonly talked about ranks on web. its the heart and soul of SEO and getting traffic from search engines. Page Rank is said to be an estimate of your site’s popularity on the web by measuring the number of websites linking to your site, assigned by Google. Page Rank is determined by Google Links not Inbound Links!! This is an important part to understand, Google links and inbound links are not same. Inbound Link means that links pointing to your site from another site, while Google links are an extract of the quality inbound links. In Short Google links are taken from the inbound links, but only quality links.

How to improve your site’s Page rank:

Improving page rank is a difficult but still not so difficult task to do. You can easily get about PR 3 in first two months. Sounds impossible? Well not actually I can do that with a challenge :) , I have done that to plenty of sites. So how to? Some very Simple Techniques!!!

  • Optimize your homepage for search engines.This includes proper page Title, Proper Keywords, Proper Description and most of all Proper Content. Now what do i mean by proper?

    By Proper I mean that your title, keywords and description should not consist of extra stuff like numbers, stop words (and, or etc.), same keywords must not repeat more than 3 times in title and description. In Content Optimization Keep your content clean, fewer images, Use your main keyword in H1, also try to use keywords in h2 and h3. (For Details see this post : on page Optimization)

  • Install Google Toolbar
  • Start using Chrome Browser since they take data of sites you are browsing.
  • Post your site’s Links to these social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Deddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkzDirect etc.
  • Nofollow outgoing or not so important links. How to do that?Normal Links: <a href=”http://www.sitename.com”>sitename</a>

    Nofollowed Links: <a href=”http://www.sitename.com” rel=”nofollow”>sitename</a> (See This post for more: Nofollow)

  • Ask for sites with same focus for link exchange, Don’t hesitate to ask they won’t say no trust me :)
  • Avoid using URL Shorteners if you are bookmarking your site’s link in social bookmarking networks, because with this the inbound link goes to the URL Shortener site not you. Twitter is exception since it nofollows all links.

In about two months u will achieve Page Rank 1-3. If you want to improve your site’s Rank and push even further please see this post: Link Popularity Building

2. MOZ Rank:

Moz rank is some what like link juice estimation. Link Juice just like page rank flows from page to page of your site or links to others sites on your pages.

In simple words the more quality inbound links you have the better moz rank you get. Quality links are considered as inbound links on sites whose page rank is higher than your site. For example if my site’s page rank is 2 then putting link on site who’s page rank is higher than 2 or 3 would be considered as quality Inbound link, of course by using proper link posting method.

Proper Link posting is something like this:

Normally if u post a link u do it like this. <a href=”http://www.sitename.com”>Site Name</a>. Well yes u did made a link but not quality link. Here is how u can optimize your link. <a href=”http://www.sitename.com/” title=”your-keyword”>Your Keyword</a>

Now what’s different in it? You are using a title attribute which strengthens your links focus and instead of using link on your site/brand name it’s better to use your keyword in it.

Once you do this and get a grip on SEO Moz tools you will easily control the flow of your link juice in your site and can control your site’s SEO to some extent

3. Alexa Rank:

alexa-ranking-seo-smart-tips

Ok, everybody knows what it I won’t get into details is. Just simple to improve alexa rank just install alexa toolbar and browse your site daily. Refresh after a few minutes or so in a week you will improve your rank to about 200000 places. Note also this will work only to really new and fresh sites, for well established websites you still need traffic to get ranked.

Want even more??

  • Optimize your homepage for search engines (it’s very simple just read this post : onpage Optimization)
  • Ask members of your site or friends to install alexa toolbar and browse your site.
  • Even More?? Install alexa toolbar on a network of computers and set your browser’s homepage to your site so whenever its opened your site sends a hit to alexa , thus your rank improves..

When u will go through all these steps just to improve your site’s rankings once, you have learned SEO.

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Write a Keyword-Rich Article to Increase Site Traffic

October 28th, 2009

from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/websmarts/article173448.html

If you have a way with words, we have 3 simple steps that’ll help increase your web traffic–for free.

Want to increase traffic, build credibility, improve your search engine rankings and get people talking about your business–at no cost? Then open up your word processor, and start writing. By determining your best search keywords, writing an article that includes those keywords and getting it distributed online, you’ll be putting yourself on the radar of people looking for what you provide.

Step 1: Set up your site for maximum “searchability.”
Your site has to feature the keywords your potential customers use to search for your product if you want them to find you. To determine your keywords, type a word or term you think people in your market might search for into Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Keyword Selector Tool to find out how many people searched for that particular term over the past month. It’ll also show you a list of related words and phrases and how often they were searched over the last month, too.

Once you’ve generated a list of useful keyword ideas, you can do some more serious research. Wordtracker goes into more depth to show you not only what people are searching for online but also how many other sites are competing for the same audience. You’re looking for search terms that are popular but don’t have too many sites competing for them. Wordtracker is a paid service, but you can sign up for a day for less than $8 and for a week for less than $27.

Now that you have some great keywords for your market, find as many places as you can to plug them into your site. Use them in your title tags, source code, page copy, headers and subheads, and your opt-in.

Step 2: Create a keyword-rich article.
Write a keyword-rich article that relates to what you sell, then give it away to other sites–for free. Believe it or not, this is one of the best ways to drive a steady stream of eager customers to your site.

Why does it work? Well, people basically come online for one of two reasons: to check their e-mail or to look for information. Sure, some of them end up making purchases, but this isn’t generally the reason they log on. They want the answer to a question or the solution to a problem–and you can provide that in a short article.

Make sure that each article you write contains rare, valuable or hard-to-find information. Not only will this increase the chances that other site owners or managers will post your article, it’ll also increase the number of visitors who click through to your site after reading it.

For example, if you have a site that sells used golf equipment, you could write an article about three things to look for in a good, pre-owned putter. Or if you sell an e-book about setting up your own home computer network, why not write an article about common problems people have in setting up a wireless router?

Look for article ideas in the questions people ask you all the time or in the things you often see people doing wrong. Share hot new tips on how to use the products you sell, or talk about trends you’ve spotted in your industry. Your quick piece should:

  • Be no longer than 400 words (not even a whole page in Microsoft Word)
  • Contain a relevant keyword in the first 90 characters
  • Contain the keyword in the first and last paragraphs
  • Have a short, credibility-building bio with a link to your site at the end. For instance, “Joe Smith is a recognized authority on the subject of widgets. His site, www.JoesWidgets.com, provides a wealth of informative articles and resources on everything you’ll ever need to know about widgets.”

Step 3: Get your content headed everywhere on the web.
Once you’ve taken the time to write one or two articles, head to one of these top online content distribution sites. Upload your keyword-rich content to:

These sites carry hundreds (some carry thousands) of articles on a range of topics. If someone’s looking for content for their site, they can download or copy an article from the distribution site without paying a dime to use it. They can’t change the text of the article, and they must publish it with the author’s name and information intact.

Now people plugging your keywords into search engines will be directed to your content at these highly ranked sites, and site owners looking for fresh, search engine-attracting content will download your article–along with your bio and link–and put it up on their pages. And once visitors see that you know what you’re talking about, they’ll click on the link in your bio and head straight to your site.

Some content distribution sites also offer “send to a friend” links next to articles posted on their sites, so make sure you’re uploading your articles to sites with this kind of capability. Every time someone enjoys your article enough to pass it on, your audience grows. And since people don’t forward bad content to their friends, they’re basically recommending you as a credible source just by passing it on.

The best thing about this strategy is these visitors are quality, targeted traffic–they actually want what you’re selling because you’re meeting a need or giving them help with the problem they came online to solve.

Derek Gehl is Entrepreneur.com’s “E-Business” columnist and the CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, an internet marketing firm that has helped thousands of people learn to start and run their own online businesses.

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Maximize Your SEO

October 27th, 2009

from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2008/december/198608.html

5 simple secrets can make the most of your search engine rankings.
By Gwen Moran   |   Entrepreneur Magazine – December 2008

Need a little search engine love? Liam Scanlan, author of The 12 Habits of Highly Effective Websites: A Primer on Search Engine Optimization for Non-Technical Executives and founder of SiteLeads.net, a website consulting and content firm, shares five simple secrets to search engine optimization.

  1. Get a good domain. It’s best if your domain relates to your product, advises Scanlan. “If you are selling handmade dolls online, but your domain is acmeproducts.com, that doesn’t help the search engine.” Don’t forget that you can register multiple domain names. To avoid running into issues with search engines that may overlook numerous domains pointed to the same page, direct them to separate landing pages with links that will draw visitors into the site. That can help your rank.
  2. Take care with titles. Scanlan says the biggest and most common mistake that small businesses make in their SEO is having an incomplete title or missing title tag. Most sites are created using traditional HTML editors that don’t flag weaknesses in site creation, he says. Plugging in page titles is an easy way to attract search engine algorithms that look for titles on multiple pages of the site. Using the doll example again, it’s far better for one of your pages to be titled “Barbie” than “Page 7″ if you’re targeting the doll-buying set.
  3. Use keywords wisely. Yan Lyansky has bumped up the Google rank of his $3 million company, Downtube, a folding-bicycle manufacturer and distributor in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, by integrating keywords throughout his website. “You can’t have ‘folding bicycle’ [over and over] or people won’t read it,” says Lyansky, 37. But the company does include those words in product titles and descriptions, page headers and wherever else they can be used without being a turnoff to customers.
  4. Make your contact information obvious. To prevent spam, some companies design their contact information as a graphic so that it can’t be picked up by programs trolling for new e-mail addresses. That’s a mistake, says Scanlan. “You need to make your contact information easy to find online, especially if you’re trying to get your ranking up for a specific region.” Opt for text-based contact info instead and embed e-mail information in a hotlink.
  5. Link up. The more relevant links you have between your site and others in your industry, the higher the rank, says Scanlan. Lyansky beefs up his results by building pages that compare the attributes of his bikes to his competitors–and including links to those competitors. He says, “When someone searches for one of our competitors, this helps our site come up pretty high in the rankings.”

Gwen Moran is co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Business Plans. Reach her at gwen@gwenmoran.com.

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