Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404.

See also:

• W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions

This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.

See also:

• W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
• On Apache servers you can redirect URLs in a .htaccess file or via in the headers of some dynamic pages. Most web hosts run on Apache.
• On IIS servers you can redirect using ASP or ASP.net, or from within the internet manager.

Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors.

See also:

• W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions

Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to

• view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
• report navigational problems within your site

Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.

See also:

• W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions

See also:

• Google AdSense heat map – shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://moonviper.com/folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Example relative link

<a href=”../folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a> ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/absolute-link/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/adcenter http://moonviper.com/glossary/adcenter#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:53:58 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=770

While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft’s limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

See also:

• AdCenter – sign up for an account
• Microsoft AdLabs – view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.

AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

• cost per click – advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
• CPM – advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.

AdSense ad formats include

• text
• graphic
• animated graphics
• videos

In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

• how niche their site is
• how commercially oriented their site is
• the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical

It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

• AdSense
• affiliate marketing
• direct ad sales
• selling your own products and services
• a mixture of the above

See also:

• Google AdSense program – sign up as an ad publisher
• Google AdSense heat map – shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
• Google AdWords – buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.

AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

• Google AdWords – sign up for an advertiser account
• Google Advertising Professional Program – program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
• Google AdWords Learning Center – text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section.
• AdWords Keyword Tool – shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates.
• Google Traffic Estimator – estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.

Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other’s affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of

• algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
• manual review; and,
• implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.

See also:

• Commission Junction – probably the largest affiliate network
• Linkshare – another large affiliate network
• Performics – another large affiliate network
• Azoogle Ads – ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
• CPA Empire – similar to AzoogleAds
• Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate program
• Clickbank – an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information

Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

• Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data – mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.

Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

See also

• Alexa.com

Example usage

<img src=”http://www.moonviper.com/images/whammy.gif” height=”140″ width=”120″ alt=”Press Your Luck Whammy.” />

See also

• W3C QA: Alt Attribute

See also:

• AltaVista

Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

See also:

• Google Analytics – Google’s free analytics program
• Conversion Ruler – a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
• ClickTracks – downloadable and web based analytics software

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

<a href=”http://www.seobook.com/”>Search Engine Optimization Blog</a>

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:

• Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
• [audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
• Wikipedia: arbitrage

See also:

• ASP.net

Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Example potential topical authorities:

• the largest brands in your field
• the top blogger talking about your subject
• the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic

See also:

• Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s home page
• Hypersearching the Web

See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API.

A few popular bid management tools are

• Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
• BidRank
• KeywordMax

It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

• how and why they were created and their own experiences
• the current set of social standards in which they exist
• other markets they operate in
• the need for self preservation
• how they interface with the world around them
• their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one’s exposure

• The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
• I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
• Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
• If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
• Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

• Black Hat SEO.com – parody site about black hat SEO
• White Hat SEO.com – parody site about white hat SEO
• Honest SEO – site offering tips on hiring an SEO
• SEOConsultants.com – reviewed directory of SEO professionals
• SEO Black Hat – blog about black hat SEO techniques

Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

The most popular blogging platforms are Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad.

Automated blog spam:

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Manual blog spam:

I just wrote about this on my site. I don’t know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking through to mine. Check it out!!!!!
by
cluebag manual spammer (usually with keywords as my name)

As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another.

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms.

See also:

• Blogger.com

Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.

There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.

Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.

See also:

• Del.icio.us – Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
• Yahoo! MyWeb – similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
• Google Notebook – allows you to note documents
• Slashdot – tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
• Digg – decentralized news site
• Netscape – Digg clone
• Google Video – Google’s video hosting, tagging, and search site
• YouTube – popular decentralized video site

A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows you to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward higher margin value based pricing.

Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Example breadcrumb navigation:

Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on down through the site structure.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

See also:

• Business.com

The buying cycle may consist of the following stages

• Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
• Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
• Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
• Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon
• Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline
• Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.

Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

• http://www.moonviper.com/
• http://www.moonviper.com/index.shtml
• http://moonviper.com/
• http://moonviper.com/index.shtml
• http://www.moonviper.com/?tracking-code

Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

• The Definitive Guide to Cloaking – Dan Kramer’s guide to cloaking.
• KloakIt – cheaply priced cloaking software
• Fantomaster – more expensive cloaking software

See also

• Google Touchgraph – interesting web application that shows the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you enter.

Blog software programs are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content.

Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else’s related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

See also:

• blog comment spam – the addition of low value or no value comments to other’s websites

HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as <!– your comment here –>. They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.

As the number of product databases online increases and duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level pages to make them be seen as unique documents.

For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

See also:

• Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising program.

Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.

Here are a few common example desired goals

• a product sale
• completing a lead form
• a phone call
• capturing an email
• filling out a survey
• getting a person to pay attention to you
• getting feedback
• having a site visitor share your website with a friend
• having a site visitor link at your site

Bid management, affiliate tracking, and analytics programs make it easy to track conversion sources.

See also:

• Google AdWords – Google’s pay per click ad program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads.
• Google AdSense – Google’s contextual ad program.
• Microsoft AdCenter – Microsoft’s pay per click ad platform.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo!’s pay per click ad platform

Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.

Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

See also:

• Google’s Matt Cutts video on Google Crawling Patterns
• Matt Cutts post Indexing Timeline – mentions sites with unnatural link profiles may not be crawled as frequently or deeply

Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. You can link to an external CSS file using code similar to the following in the head of your HTML documents

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.moonviper.com/style.css” type=”text/css” />

See also

• W3C: CSS – official guidelines for CSS
• CSS Zen Garden – examples of various CSS layouts
• Glish.com – examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources

Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

• Pages on new websites (or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and re-cache of the web.
• During some updates search engines readjust crawl priorities.
  • You need a significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed and keep it well indexed.
  • Duplicate content filters, inbound and outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities.
• Pages which have changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed.
• Search Spam:
  • If a website tripped an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed.
  • If a website is editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine directly to request reinclusion.

See also:

• Del.icio.us
• Del.icio.us Recently Popular

Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

• use a description from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory) for homepages of sites listed in those directories
• use the page meta description (especially if it is relevant to the search query and has the words from the search query in it)
• attempt to extract a description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search query and ranking page (this is called a snippet)
• or some combination of the above

See also:

• Digg.com

Some directories cater to specific niche topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Smaller and less established general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust their links at all.

See also:

• DMOZ.org
• Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project

Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

See also:

• Dreamweaver official site

Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also:

• Duplicate Content Detection – video where Matt Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection
• Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents
• Search Engine Patents On Duplicated Content and Re-Ranking Methods
• Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content

In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.

Many paid links, such as those from quality directories, still count as signs of votes as long as they are also associated with editorial quality standards. If they are from sites without editorial control, like link farms, they are not likely to help you rank well. Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank, some search engines may place more trust on well known sites with strong editorial guidelines.

If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the keyword they searched for. If you are doing link building it is important to point links at your most appropriate page when possible such that

• if anyone clicks the link they are sent to the most appropriate and relevant page
• you help search engines understand what the pages on your site are associated with

Some search marketers lacking in creativity tend to describe services sold by others as being unethical while their own services are ethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

The only ethics issues associated with SEO are generally business ethics related issues. Two of the bigger frauds are

• Not disclosing risks: Some SEOs may use high risk techniques when they are not needed. Some may make that situation even worse by not disclosing potential risks to clients.
• Taking money & doing nothing: Since selling SEO services has almost no start up costs many of the people selling services may not actually know how to competently provide them. Some shady people claim to be SEOs and bilk money out of unsuspecting small businesses.

As long as the client is aware of potential risks there is nothing unethical about being aggressive.

In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

See also:

• Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video – Matt talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to everflux.

Some people believe in link hoarding, but linking out to other related resources is a good way to help search engines understand what your site is about. If you link out to lots of low quality sites or primarily rely on low quality reciprocal links some search engines may not rank your site very well. Search engines are more likely to trust high quality editorial links (both to and from your site).

See also:

• US Copyright Office Section 107

Upload an image named favicon.ico in the root of your site to have your site associated with a favicon.

See also:

• HTML Kit – generate a favicon from a picture
• Favicon.co.uk – create a favicon online painting one pixel at a time.

See also:

• Bloglines – popular web based feed reader
• Google Reader – popular web based feed reader
• My Yahoo! – allows you to subscribe to feed updates
• FeedDemon – desktop based feed reader

For example, if a site publishes significant duplicate content it may get a reduced crawl priority and get filtered out of the search results. Some search engines also have filters based on link quality, link growth rate, and anchor text. Some pages are also penalized for spamming.

See also:

• Download Firefox

Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content. If you use flash ensure:

• you embed flash files within HTML pages
• you use a noembed element to describe what is in the flash
• you publish your flash content in multiple separate files such that you can embed appropriate flash files in relevant pages

Given the popularity of server side includes, content management systems, and dynamic languages there really is no legitimate reason to use frames to build a content site today.

Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does not generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to creating new content. The primary advantages to fresh content are:

• Maintain and grow mindshare: If you keep giving people a reason to pay attention to you more and more people will pay attention to you, and link to your site.
• Faster idea spreading: If many people pay attention to your site, when you come out with good ideas they will spread quickly.
• Growing archives: If you are a content producer then owning more content means you have more chances to rank. If you keep building additional fresh content eventually that gives you a large catalog of relevant content.
• Frequent crawling: Frequently updated websites are more likely to be crawled frequently.

Many content management systems (such as blogging platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP.

Fuzzy search technology is similar to stemming technology, with the exception that fuzzy search corrects the misspellings at the users end and stemming searches for other versions of the same core word within the index.

See also

• Google corporate history
• Google labs – new products Google is testing
• Google papers – research papers by Googlers

Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad targeting.

See also:

• Google’s crawl caching proxy

Google Base may also help Google better understand what types of information are commercial in nature, and how they should structure different vertical search products.

See also:

• Google Base

See also:

• Google search: miserable failure – shows pages people tried ranking for that search query

Typically it is easier to bowl new sites out of the results. Older established sites are much harder to knock out of the search results.

See also:

• Google Checkout

Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

The second meaning of Google Dance is a yearly party at Google’s corporate headquarters which Google holds for search engine marketers. This party coincides with the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference.

See also:

• Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video – Matt talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to everflux.

See also:

• Google Keyword Tool – tool offering all the above mentioned features

Please note that the best way to submit your site to search engines and to keep it in their search indexes is to build high quality editorial links.

See also:

• Google Webmaster Central – access to Google Sitemaps and other webmaster related tools.

If you do not submit a bid price the tool will return an estimated bid price necessary to rank #1 for 85% of Google’s queries for a particular keyword.

See also:

• Google Traffic Estimator

See also:

• Google Trends

See also:

• Google Website Optimizer

Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:

<h1>Your Topic</h1>

Heading elements may be styled using CSS. Many content management systems place the same content in the main page heading and the page title, although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible.

See also:

• W3C: Headings

While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.

See also:

• Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents

See also:

• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF]

As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms, largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page. If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries.

As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can’t afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.

See also:

• .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO

Some newer web pages are also formatted in XHTML.

See also:

• W3C: HTML Home Page

See also:

• Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s home page

Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.

When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.

It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website.

Good information architecture considers both how humans and search spiders access a website. Information architecture suggestions:

• focus each page on a specific topic
• use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions which describe the content of the page
• use clean (few or no variables) descriptive file names and folder names
• use headings to help break up text and semantically structure a document
• use breadcrumb navigation to show page relationships
• use descriptive link anchor text
• link to related information from within the content area of your web pages
• improve conversion rates by making it easy for people to take desired actions
• avoid feeding search engines duplicate or near-duplicate content

See also:

• Download IE

Many SEOs refer to unique C class IP addresses. Every site is hosted on a numerical address like aa.bb.cc.dd. In some cases many sites are hosted on the same IP address. It is believed by many SEOs that if links come from different IP ranges with a different number somewhere in the aa.bb.cc part then the link may count more than links from the same local range and host. ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/ip-address/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/isp http://moonviper.com/glossary/isp#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:47:24 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=513 Internet Service Providers sell end users access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage data to web analytics companies.

Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript. In AJAX, JavaScript has been combined with other technologies to make web pages even more interactive.

Long tail and brand related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords because they typically occur later in the buying cycle and are associated with a greater level of implied intent.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

See also:

• The Keyword Density of Non Sense
• Keyword Density Analysis Tool
• Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?

See also:

• MSN Search Funnels – shows keywords people search for before or after they search for another keyword

Example keyword discovery methods:

• using keyword research tools
• looking at analytics data or your server logs
• looking at page copy on competing sites
• reading customer feedback
• placing a search box on your site and seeing what people are looking for
• talking to customers to ask how and why they found and chose your business

Short list of the most popular keyword research tools:

• Overture – free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point.
• Google – free, powered from Google search data.
• Wordtracker – paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.

Please note that most keyword research tools used alone are going to be highly inaccurate at giving exact quantitative search volumes. The tools are better for qualitative measurements. To test the exact volume for a keyword it may make sense to set up a test Google AdWords campaign.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

A few general link building tips:

• build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
• create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
• mix your anchor text
• get deep links
• try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
• register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
• when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
• create link bait
• try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
• It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position

See also:

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 – 101 ways you should and should not build links
• Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] – Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

• increased usage data
• increase in brand related search queries
• traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
• many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains

See also:

• Information retrieval based on historical data

See also:

• Information retrieval based on historical data

Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.

Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

• many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
• if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
• outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores

“Of course, folks never know when we’re going to adjust our scoring. It’s pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.” – Quote from Google’s Matt Cutts

See also:

• Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World) – article about how being a platform (ie: someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority.

For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they do not show when you do a link: search.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

See also:

• Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

See also:

• Live.com

How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value.

Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core brand related term (and this site only has a couple hundred pages and has a rather strong brand).

See also:

• The Long Tail – official blog
• The Long Tail – the book

See also:

• Looksmart.com

See also:

• Quintura Search – free LSI type keyword research tool.
• Patterns in Unstructured Data – free paper describing how LSI works
• Johnon Go Words – article about how adding certain relevant words to a page can drastically improve its relevancy for other keywords

See also:

• Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public – article about Inktomi’s spam database from 2001
• Search Bistro – links to Google’s General Guidelines on Random Query Evaluation [PDF] and Google’s Spam Guide for Raters
• Google Image Labeler – example of how humans can be used to review content

See also:

• Mechanical Turk
• Google Image Labeler – image labeling game
• Human Computation Speech Video at Google

A good meta description tag should:

• be relevant and unique to the page;
• reinforce the page title; and
• focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.

Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page title.

The code for a meta description tag looks like this

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your meta description here. ” / >

See also:

• Free meta tag generator – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more “>

Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.

See also:

• Free meta tag generator – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

A meta refresh looks like this

<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm”>

Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.

See also:

• Myriad Search – an ad free meta search engine

• The page title is highly important.
• The meta description tag is somewhat important.
• The meta keywords tag is not that important.

Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.

See also:

• Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] – Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing

Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content. The one exception to this is that if you are a hosting company it might make sense to offer free hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source software site to build significant link equity.

Movable Type is typically much harder to install that Wordpress is.

See also:

• Movable Type

See also:

• MSN Search
• MSN Search Features, Documentation, & Guidelines

See also:

• MySpace.com

It is best to use regular HTML navigation rather than coding your navigation in JavaScript, Flash, or some other type of navigation which search engines may not be able to easily index.

See also:

• Netscape.com

Search is a broad field, but as you drill down each niche consists of many smaller niches. An example of drilling down to a niche market

• search
• search marketing, privacy considerations, legal issues, history of, future of, different types of vertical search, etc.
• search engine optimization, search engine advertising
• link building, keyword research, reputation monitoring and management, viral marketing, SEO copywriting, Google AdWords, information architecture, etc.

Generally it is easier to compete in small, new, or underdeveloped niches than trying to dominate large verticals. As your brand and authority grow you can go after bigger markets.

The code to use nofollow on a link appears like

<a href=”http://moonviper.com.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text </a>Nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag to prevent a search engine from counting any outbound links on a page. This code would look like this

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Google’s Matt Cutts also pushes webmasters to use nofollow on any paid links, but since Google is the world’s largest link broker, their advice on how other people should buy or sell links should be taken with a grain of salt. Please note that it is generally not advised to practice link hoarding as that may look quite unnatural. Outbound links may also boost your relevancy scores in some search engines.

See also:

• Wikipedia: Ontology

On the web open source is a great strategy for quickly building immense exposure and mindshare.

Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results. Some studies have shown that 60 to 80% + of clicks are on the organic search results.

Some webmasters believe in link hoarding, but linking out to useful relevant related documents is an easy way to help search engines understand what your website is about. If you reference other resources it also helps you build credibility and leverage the work of others without having to do everything yourself. Some webmasters track where their traffic comes from, so if you link to related websites they may be more likely to link back to your site.

See also:

• Live Search: LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com – shows pages that my site links at.

See also:

• Yahoo! Search Marketing

See also:

• Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Since PageRank is widely bartered Google’s relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank.

The PageRank formula is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)

In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given from each page pointing at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.

See also:

• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web

See also:

• Directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com allow websites to be listed for a flat yearly cost.
• Yahoo! Search allows webmasters to pay for inclusion for a flat review fee and a category based cost per click.

Publishers publishing contextual ads are typically paid per ad click. Affiliate marketing programs pay affiliates for conversions – leads, downloads, or sales.

If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy.

Some sites are also filtered for various reasons.

See also:

• Google -30 rank penalty – an example of a penalty

See also:

• PHP.net

See also:

• What Are Poison Words? Do They Matter?

See also:

• AdWords – Google’s PPC ad platform
• AdCenter – Microsoft’s PPC ad platform
• Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo!’s PPC ad platform

Search spam and the complexity of language challenge the precision of search engines.

A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is close on all the occurrences of both words it may also be a sign of unnatural (and thus potentially low quality) content.

See also:

• What is Quality Content?
• When Unique Content is Not “Unique”

There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high quality link:

• Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
• Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
• Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
• Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks for co-citation from expert sources.
• Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
• In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.

While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches. ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/quality-link/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/query http://moonviper.com/glossary/query#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:04:43 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=371 The actual “search string” a searcher enters into a search engine.

Query refinement is both a manual and an automated process. If searchers do not find their search results as being relevant they may search again. Search engines may also automatically refine queries using the following techniques:

• Google OneBox: promotes a vertical search database near the top of the search result. For example, if image search is relevant to your search query images may be placed near the top of the search results.
• Spell Correction: offers a did you mean link with the correct spelling near the top of the results.
• Inline Suggest: offers related search results in the search results. Some engines also suggest a variety of related search queries.

Some search toolbars also aim to help searchers auto complete their search queries by offering a list of most popular queries which match the starting letters that a searcher enters into the search box.

When sites link naturally there is going to be some amount of cross linking within a community, but if most or all of your links are reciprocal in nature it may be a sign of ranking manipulation. Also sites that trade links off topic or on links pages that are stashed away deep within their sites probably do not pass much link authority, and may add more risk than reward.

Quality reciprocal link exchanges in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but most reciprocal link offers are of low quality. If too many of your links are of low quality it may make it harder for your site to rank for relevant queries, and some search engines may look at inlink and outlink ratios as well as link quality when determining how natural a site’s link profile is.

See also:

• Indexing Timeline – Matt Cutts states that sites which have many low quality inbound links and / or outbound links may struggle to rank or even get deeply indexed by Google.
• Live Search: Linkdomain:SEOBook.com LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com – shows SEOBook.com’s reciprocal links
• What a Links Page Should Not Look Like – article by Jim Boykin

See also:

• Google Reinclusion – sign up for Google Sitemaps, and request reinclusion from within Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Reinclusion – request a review here Yahoo! Search: URL Status – Second Review Request

Example relative link

<a href=”../folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://moonviper.com/folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a> ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/relative-link/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/reputation-management http://moonviper.com/glossary/reputation-management#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:02 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=354

Many search engines may also bias organic search results to informational resources since commercial ads also show in the search results.

See also:

• Google vs Yahoo! vs MSN – compares the relevancy algorithms of the three major search engines
• Search Engine Relevancy Challenge – survey of search relevancy based on user voting

Rewrite (see URL Rewrite) ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/resubmission/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/reverse-index http://moonviper.com/glossary/reverse-index#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:59:15 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=350

See also:

• Google: a Behind the Scenes Look – video where Jeff Dean talks about Google’s architecture
• FantomNews – archived newsletter featuring a Chris Ridings article about stop words and reverse indexes

Do not put files on a public server if you do not want search engines to index them!

See also:

• Robotstxt.org

While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.

Search engines may also determine what a document is about and how much they trust a domain based on aggregate usage data. Many brand related search queries is a strong signal of quality.

Also known as:

• Search Marketing

SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

See also:

• Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?
• Copyblogger: Magnetic Headlines

Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Server logs typically do not show as much data and are not as user friendly as analytics software. Not all hosts provide server logs.

Important steps:

• Stemming: taking in account for various forms of a word on a page
• Local Weighting: increasing the relevance of a given document based on the frequency a term appears in the document
• Global Weighting: increasing the relevance of terms which appear in a small number of pages as they are more likely to be on topic than words that appear in most all documents.
• Normalization: penalizing long copy and rewarding short copy to allow them fair distribution in results. a good way of looking at this is like standardizing things to a scale of 100.

Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular value decomposition because it requires exceptionally less computation. When combined with other ranking factors only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary.

Tips:

• On large websites the on page navigation should help search engines find all applicable web pages.
• On large websites it does not make sense to list every page on the site map, just the most important pages.
• Site maps can be used to help redistribute internal link authority toward important pages or sections, or sections of your site that are seasonally important.
• Site maps can use slightly different or more descriptive anchor text than other portions of your site to help search engines understand what your pages are about.
• Site maps should be created such that they are useful to humans, not just search engines.

See also:

• Slashdot.org

See also:

• Del.icio.us – social bookmarking program
• Digg – social news site

Search engines also like to outsource their relevancy issues by calling low quality search results spam. They have vague ever changing guidelines which determine what marketing techniques are acceptable at any given time. Typically search engines try hard not to flag false positives as spam, so most algorithms are quite lenient, as long as you do not build lots of low quality links, host large quantities of duplicate content, or perform other actions that are considered widely outside of relevancy guidelines. If your site is banned from a search engine you may request reinclusion after fixing the problem.

Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt protocol.

Make sure your home page has relevant content on it if possible.

See also:

• Ad Aware – spyware removal software
• Stop Badware – site about fighting spyware and other adverse sleazy software programs

To use a server side include you have to follow one of the conditions:

• end file names in a .shtml or .shtm extension
• use PHP or some other language which makes it easy to include files via that programming language
• change your .htaccess file to make .html or .htm files be processed as though they were .shtml files.

The code to create a server side include looks like this:

<!–#include virtual=”/includes/filename.html” –>

It is both fine and natural to use stop words in your page content. The reason stop words are ignored when people search is that the words are so common that they offer little to no discrimination value.

Some topical or vertical search systems will require submission, but you should not need to submit your site to large scale search engine.

Some search engines, such as Google, have multiple indicies. Documents which are not well trusted due to any of the following conditions:

• limited link authority relative to the number of pages on the site
• duplicate content or near duplication
• exceptionally complex URLs

Documents in the supplemental results are crawled less frequently than documents in the main index. Since documents in the supplemental results are typically considered to be trusted less than documents in the regular results, those pages probably carry less weight when they vote for other pages by linking at them.

See also:

• Technorati.com

See also:

• A Theory of Indexing
• Mi Islita: Term Vector Theory and Keyword Weights
• The Term Vector Database: fast access to indexing terms for Web pages
• Vector Space Model

Since the web was originally based on text and links people are typically more inclined to pay attention to text links than some other ad formats which are typically less relevant and more annoying. However, search engines primarily want to count editorial links as votes, so links that are grouped together with other paid links (especially if those links are to off topic commercial sites) may be less likely to carry weight in search engines.

Thesaurus tools can also be used as a keyword research tool to help search marketers find related keywords to target.

The title is one of the most important aspects to doing SEO on a web page. Each page title should be:

• Unique to that page: Not the same for every page of a site!
• Descriptive: What important ideas does that page cover?
• Not excessively long: Typically page titles should be kept to 8 to 10 words or less, with some of the most important words occurring near the beginning of the page title.

Page titles appear in search results as the links searchers click on. In addition many people link to documents using the official document title as the link anchor text. Thus, by using a descriptive page title you are likely to gain descriptive anchor text and are more likely to have your listing clicked on.

On some occasions it also makes sense to use a title which is not literally descriptive, but is easily associated with human emotions or a controversy such that your idea will spread further and many more people will point quality editorial links at your document.

There are two main ways to write titles and be SEO friendly

1. Write literal titles that are well aligned with things people search for. This works well if you need backfill content for your site or already have an amazingly authoritative site.
2. Write page titles that are exceptionally compelling to link at. If enough people link at them then your pages and site will rank for many relevant queries even if the keywords are not in the page titles.

See also:

• W3C: Title Element
• Copyblogger: Magnetic Headlines
• Free meta tag generator – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating page titles and meta tags.
• Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?
• Copyblogger: Magnetic Headlines

See also:

• Topic-Sensitive PageRank – official research paper on the topic
• How To Prosper With The New Google – Dan Thies offers a downloadable PDF highlighting how TSPR may have been largely at play during the Google Florida update.

Due to the automated nature of trackbacks they are typically quite easy to spam. Many publishers turn trackbacks off due to a low signal to noise ratio.

See also:

• TrustRank algorithm – my review of the TrustRank research paper.

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Typepad.com, or to publish content which appears as though it is on its own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

See also:

• Typepad.com
• Domain Mapping – how to have your Typepad hosted blog appear under a different URL.

SEO is an inherently risky business, but any quality SEO service provider should make clients aware of potential risks and rewards of different recommended techniques.

See also:

• Google Terminology – Video where Google’s Matt Cutts discusses various commonly used terms inside Google.

See also:

• Apache Module mod_rewrite – Apache module used to rewrite URLs on sites hosted on an Apache server.
• ISAPI Rewrite – software to rewrite URLs on sites hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Server.

The structure and formatting of text and hyperlink based calls to action can drastically increase your website usability, and thus conversion rates.

See also:

• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug’s book about designing an easy to use website.
• The Big Red Fez – Seth Godin’s short book on common website usability errors.
• useit – Jakob Nielson’s newsletter on usability and web design.
• A User Interface Usability Checklist for Ecommerce Websites – Kim Krause’s website usability checklist.

See also:

• Google Groups – a popular Usenet archive interface.

For example, Business.com would be a B2B vertical search engine, and YouTube would be a video based vertical search engine.

Using a virtual server can save money for smaller applications, but dedicated hosting should be used for large commercial platforms.Most domains are hosted on virtual servers, but using a dedicated server on your most important domains should add server reliability, and could be seen as a sign of quality. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Some domain registrars also allow you to hide the ownership data of your sites. Many large scale spammers use fake Whois data.

See also:

• DomainTools Whois Source – shows Whois information by domain name. Paid members may also view other domains on the same IP address and the domain ownership history.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

• White Hat SEO.com – parody site about white hat SEO
• Black Hat SEO.com – parody site about black hat SEO
• Honest SEO – site offering tips on hiring an SEO
• SEOConsultants.com – reviewed directory of SEO professionals
• SEO Black Hat – blog about black hat SEO techniques

See also:

• Wikipedia

See also:

• Wordnet – official site

If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

See also:

• Wordpress.org – download the software
• Wordpress.com – offers free blog hosting

Due to Wordtracker’s small sample size their data may be easy to game.

See also:

• Wordtracker.com – official site
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool – free keyword research tool which returns keyword research data from Overture and Wordtracker side by side.

See also:

• Xenu – official site

See also:

• W3C: XHTML

See also:

• Yahoo.com
• The History of Yahoo!
• Yahoo! Netrospective

See also:

• Yahoo! Answers

The Yahoo! Directory is one of a few places where most any legitimate site can pick up a trusted link. While the cost of $299 per year may seem expensive to some small businesses, a Yahoo! Directory link will likely help boost your rankings in major search engines.

See also:

• Yahoo! Directory
• Newly Added Sites

See also:

• Yahoo! Search Marketing

See also:

• Yahoo! Site Explorer

All websites fall into two categories:

1.) they offer content

2.) they offer a service

Examples: A blog about computers offers content. A site that lets you put dates into a calendar is offering a service. Many of Google’s websites offer a service: email at Gmail and spreadsheets at Google Docs. If you have an already existing company and you’d like to put up a few pages describing (or selling) your products/services, then you are envisioning a content site. If you’d like to do a magazine style site, then you are still considering a content site.

Price Ranges

Different kinds of projects have different price ranges. We can only offer very rough guidelines as to the kinds of prices we’ve seen for previous projects. Talk to us about the specifics of the project you are thinking of and we could probably offer you a better idea of how much you need to be prepared to spend.

• A personal or company blog, set up using a free service: $0 (or whatever value you place on one hour of effort). But to keep this going and acquire traffic will probably cost thousands of dollars, at least in terms of your time.
• A small company site that has 5 to 10 pages describing the products/services offered by the company. $1,000 to $5,000 depending on how prepared you are, and also on how clear in your own head you are about what you want. Disorganization and changing your mind are both expensive.
• A company site describing the products/services offered by the company, and operated by software that allows the staff at the company to continually update the content on the site: $4,000 to $20,000.
• A company site that both describes products/services and also offers some kind of software service. For instance, a real estate firm might allow users to look up listings based on zip code or a manufacturer of skateboards might allow users to design their own skateboard, mixing and matching those variables that can be customized. $10,000 to $40,000 depending on the complexity of the software to be developed.
• An online store that sells digital downloads of songs or videos: $25,000 to $100,000 depending on the variety of prices/royalties you want to support with your suppliers and how much marketing you want to do. If you want original technology for handling the songs or videos, you might easily burn through another $50,000 on computer programming.
• A company wiki so the staff can document a particular kind of information – perhaps support information for your customers, or technical info for use by your sales people, or a human resources directory aimed at answering common staff questions. This should be on the low end of $2,000 to $30,000. The biggest variable is whether you need some special, custom feature. If you can use unmodified, off-the-shelf software, you can keep things quite inexpensive. But as soon as you get into custom programming, the cost will sky-rocket.
• An online magazine/blog meant to dominate a particular niche: $25,000 to $100,000. For instance, you might want to cover fishing in Alaska. You’ll probably want to establish commercial relationships with 6 or 7 avid fishermen who are also known to be good writers. They might each post something once a week. You might spend $50 or $100 a week on each of them, depending how much news they can commit to delivering. You should also hire a lawyer to create an agreement you want the writers to sign.
• An online social network for some demographic niche, for instance, new moms, or hockey fans: $20,000 to $500,000. You can keep costs low by using off-the-shelf software, but you will probably want to customize the look and feel of the site, for the purpose of branding. The more services you offer (upload photos? upload videos? search for other users in the same geographic area?) the more expensive the programming will be. If your target demographic niche is risky (perhaps you want to run a site that offers services to recovering drug addicts) then you’ll want to hire a lawyer to write an air-tight Terms Of Use agreement. Lawyers are expensive, so this will drive up your start-up costs. Also, you’ll need a budget for marketing or you’ll never acquire any traffic.
• A completely original idea for a software service that no one has ever thought of: price unknown. There is a rule in software design that the more original the idea, the harder it will be to accurately estimate the cost of the project.

What drives software development costs?

If you are considering a software site, be aware of what drives the costs of software development.

• The more customization you need, the more expensive things become
• The bigger the project, the more customization you’ll need
• When programmers invent things from scratch, the number of bugs increase, and the amount of time that will have to be spent beta-testing
• If you want original technology, then your programmers will need to invent things from scratch
• To control risk, all programmers must live by the “Hit By A Bus” rule, which is, if they are hit by a bus and killed, with a project only half-done, another programmer should be able to easily take their place
• The more original the technology, the harder it will be for other programmers to understand the code (creating possible violations of the “Hit By A Bus” rule)
• Cost, risk, complexity and understandability (of the code) can be controlled by the use of a software “framework”. Some of the popular frameworks for web development include Ruby On Rails and Symfony (written in PHP).

MoonViper Web Services works hard to keep costs down.

Whenever possible, we attempt to “recycle” code from other projects to keep our client’s costs as low as possible.  Please note that every project, just like every client, is unique.  We work hard to provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed.

Contact us today to learn how MoonViper Web Services can provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed on the constantly expanding internet.

Scott Edelstein classes, workshops, and seminars provide a true insider’s view of writing, editing, and publishing. They offer practical advice, strategies, guidance, and inspiration that writers can quickly put to use as they plan writing projects and careers.

CLASSES are a series of from 3 to 6 sessions, once a week, on a specific topic. When you enroll in a class, you will be take part in all sessions.

WORKSHOPS are a single session on a specific topic.

This site has full ecommerce capabilities, and will include affiliate marketing, newsletter marketing, and many other automated marketing features.

Client companies rely on MoonViper Web Services not only for its core specialty of web design but also for a wide array of marketing services including Customer Relationship Management, Newsletter Production, Localized Advertising, and much more. Consistent, professional implementation of a company’s brand across a wide range of print and on-line services leverages the impact of each to generate even greater combined results.

Our unique approach allows us to custom tailor a client’s site to meet their individual needs, while allowing them the ability to update and maintain their site on their own.

We can provide complete solutions, enabling your company to automatically implement your marketing.

With a MoonViper designed website, you have options for your site that you won’t find anywhere else, such as:

• Automatically notify Google, Yahoo, and MSN every time your site is updated.
• Automated SEO, placing your website at the top of the list for search engine visitors.
• Web History of every page on your site a customer has visited, whenever they fill out your contact form.
• Constant synchronization of your Facebook and Twitter profiles every time you update your site.
• Full ecommerce capabilities.
• Autoresponders and newsletter tools to enable you to communicate with your customers.
• Ongoing updates to the software that runs your site, so you always have the latest tools at your disposal.
• The ability to invoice your customers, right through your website.
• RSS Feeds, and other tools to help you broadcast your message across the internet.
• Podcasting capabilities.
• Make certain sections of your site available only to those who have registered (either free or paid) with your site.  This enables you to provide information only to those who you desire to have that information.
• Customer surveys and polls.
• And much more!

Contact us today to learn how MoonViper Web Services can provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed on the constantly expanding internet.

CONSUMERS ARE SEARCHING FOR BUSINESSES JUST LIKE YOURS, AND THEY’RE USING SEARCH MARKETING TO FIND YOU

Your customers use search engines like Google® and Yahoo!® every day to locate businesses and compare products and services. In fact, more than 1.3 billion local searches are performed in a month throughout the U.S., and 82% of online users report conducting local searches. But your business’ Website alone might not be enough to get you noticed online and considered by your potential customers.

That’s where MoonViper Web Services can help. We have access to exciting new technology that gives your potential customers the opportunity to learn about your business online via our search marketing product. Our simple process is designed to put your business in front of customers by distributing information to local search platforms. Plus, we offer sponsored links advertising that gives you even more online attention.

Contact us today to learn how MoonViper Web Services can provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed on the constantly expanding internet.

Our marketing software helps your company get found by the qualified prospects that are looking for the products or services that you sell in search engines, blogs and the blogosphere, and social media.  Once these qualified visitors are on your website, we help you convert more of them into leads and paying customers through landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics.

Our unique approach allows us to custom tailor a client’s site to meet their individual needs, while allowing them the ability to update and maintain their site on their own.

We can provide complete solutions, enabling your company to automatically implement your marketing.

With a MoonViper designed website, you have options for your site that you won’t find anywhere else, such as:

• Automatically notify Google, Yahoo, and MSN every time your site is updated.
• Automated SEO, placing your website at the top of the list for search engine visitors.
• Web History of every page on your site a customer has visited, whenever they fill out your contact form.
• Constant synchronization of your Facebook and Twitter profiles every time you update your site.
• Full ecommerce capabilities.
• Autoresponders and newsletter tools to enable you to communicate with your customers.
• Ongoing updates to the software that runs your site, so you always have the latest tools at your disposal.
• The ability to invoice your customers, right through your website.
• RSS Feeds, and other tools to help you broadcast your message across the internet.
• Podcasting capabilities.
• Make certain sections of your site available only to those who have registered (either free or paid) with your site.  This enables you to provide information only to those who you desire to have that information.
• Customer surveys and polls.
• And much more!

Contact us today to learn how MoonViper Web Services can provide you with the tools and resources you need to succeed on the constantly expanding internet.

MoonViper Business Services is proud to have been selected to run the San Francisco offices of Merchant’s Barter Exchange.

In the coming months, MoonViper will be working with Merchant’s Barter to redesign their web site, bring high quality businesses into their network, reconfigure their marketing, and much more.

Information on Merchant’s Barter can be found at MerchantsBarter.com.  For more information on becoming involved with Merchant’s Barter services in the San Francisco Bay Area, please call 415-318-0378 to schedule an appointment and learn about our double your money back guarantee, balanced barter exchange, and much more.

We work hard for our clients and they’re not afraid to tell us how much they appreciate it! If you like what you see here and think that we can help you, request your free quote today.

I’ve received phone calls and emails regarding this subject, so I thought I’d follow up with some proof.

Once of the main sites I promote is a website called Out Gay Life.  It’s the perfect example to demonstrate some of the claims I make.

The first point I made was regarding Google counting links from non themed pages.  As you can probably tell from the title of the site (Out Gay Life) the site is a portal for the gay community.  With conventional wisdom, you’d expect that gay themed sites linking to the site would count, while non “gay” sites linking would not count.

A quick couple of screen shots from my Google Webmaster Tools account should prove the point:

This shows several sites linking to the Out Gay Life site. If you were to visit them, you’d find that virtually none of those sites contain a single word about the gay community.  I did an experiement in using “Anchor Text” as a linking method and it worked pretty well. With just a few minutes work, I managed to achieve a third place listing on Google for the term “Sarah Palin Blog”.  With all the media surrounding Sarah at the time, it’s pretty good.

What’s important to Google are the words used to link to a given site. I could post other examples of this as well (in fact, just look at some of the other terms there).  I’m also post the terms I’m listed highly on this week below.

Now, on to the last point. (I’m skipping the second point because a quick google search on the sites mentioned above that are linking to the Out Gay Life site will reveal their individual page rank.  Google counting links from duplicate content pages.  For this, I’ll refer to this very site (the MoonViper Web Services site).

I was hired by a company to build 50 “different” sites.  They had different contact forms, but for the most part every bit of content on each of the sites was the same. (note: this company has since taken over the management of these sites, and we no longer administrate them)

Try a Google search for “Green Carpet Cleaning Policy” and you’ll see 4960 results.  The vast majority of them (about 99%) are these site we built for this company.  A quick search of their statistics will show that all of their sites are getting traffic from Google.

I’ll even link to the statistics of the Out Gay Life site to demonstrate this same point.  This site is actually 21 different sites, all working off the same MoonViper CMS database.  The only real difference between the sites is the front page, which features different content  based on the URL being typed into the address box.

Of course, in these few words, I can’t explain everything (and I have to leave a few trade secrets secret.  Long story short, the methods we use work.  I’ll post one last screenshot below to show a Google search that shows we can even get Google listings in less than 10 minutes!

Links

Links have always played an important role in determining citation value. Incoming links help judge the value of a document. The more citations, or links, the more important and valuable it must be. But Google adds some criteria to those citations.

In the past, the number of incoming links scored high, but a judgment on quality of the incoming link source was added to the mix. If the linking page and site had a high page rank value itself, then clearly, it knew a good thing when it linked to it. Still, this link quality aspect became harder to define as so many sites were joining the web and the quality became diluted.

Historical factors now play an important roll in addition to the number and quality of the incoming links. It seems Google’s method includes counting the moment a new site is discovered and applying an “aging process” to the site. Google monitors the link as it changes over time, the speed at which the site adds incoming links, and the life span of the link. It isn’t about having thousands of sites that link to yours, but about building those thousands of links over time.

The “aging process” that monitors the history of the links and site helps to combat spam sites. Spam sites tend to come and go very quickly, building links fast through their spamming techniques, then closing down and moving on. Thus, the older the site and the links coming into it, the more “points” the site may get. The shorter the life of the site domain, no matter how many millions of links are coming in, the less Google is interested.

Google monitors the historical value and the slow building of value of incoming links, and they also monitor the changes in the link anchor text over time and throughout the site.

Consistent link anchor text scores low. This is considered “Anchor Spam”. What this means is that if you use the same text in a link, such as <a href="link.php">perfume sales</a> consistently through your site, then it won’t score very high. If you vary the link anchor text, especially over time not just within the same page, your odds will increase as Google monitors the changes in links over time. Generally, it is recommended to change the keywords in your anchor text around the top 5-10 keywords, to maintain consistency with keyword rankings and link rankings.

So the perfume sales might include link text such as:

• cologne market
• perfume market
• cologne sales
• fragrance sales
• sales of fragrance

This changes the whole landscape. The idea of link exchanges and link spam as a method to attract Google’s search engine bots just doesn’t work. Age before linkage.

Google also states very clearly that exchanging and buying links won’t work. They know the tricks and techniques. Also, getting links from documents that have no content, just links, also won’t work. Links without content won’t score high.

Now, does this mean that if you link to a page and they link back to you, your scores will go down and it might be considered link spam? No. The other criteria goes into effect to help offset this normal linking techniques. But it does impact the concept of the Blogrolls, which are sometimes considered link exchange lists. So choose your link exchanges wisely and avoid hundreds of links from your site to others, or being on a list of hundreds of links.

Domain Age

One of the other criteria is the age of the domain. Again, driven by spam sites which pop up and die off quickly, the age of the domain is usually a clue they tend to be in for the long haul.

This causes some problems. If you change your domain name, then are you back at the bottom of the barrel? Well, maybe not. If the rest of the criteria stays the same and your content maintains consistency, as does your traffic and incoming links, then this might just be a temporary drop and the rise will happen again soon.

Many hosts offer special rates for long term hosting and domain registration. Consider registering your domain for at least two years, five is better. This means you need to make sure that the domain name you choose is one you can live with for two to five years. You can change hosts, but the domain registration needs to stay the same, and stay in your name over the long haul to score points with Google.

Click Through Rates

The click through rate (CTR) of your site may play an important roll in adding up good points on your Google Search Engine score card. The CTR is the rate that people click “through” to your site. Referrer statistics are the numbers and methods visitors use to visit your site. This information tells the site administrator, and Google, from where did you arrive from to land on this site. Did you click through from a search engine (which one), directly, from another site (which site), or, as revealed in the patent, from the cache, temporary files, bookmarks, or favorites of your Internet browser.

The click through rate is also based on the CTR of the advertising on your site. The more ads which are clicked, the higher your score.

The CTR is also monitored for fresh or stale content – in other words, are they visiting new content on your site or old posts or articles? Trends and seasons are also taken into account as certain subject matter gains precedence with the time of the year and the current fad.

Trends, Fads, and Seasons

Built into the Google page ranking technique is the ability to track current and historical trends, fads and seasons. If your site deals with beach wear, the odds are that it will have more traffic during the beach wear season of summer than it will into the fall and winter. This seasonal traffic is taken into account and you may not lose rank when the traffic dies down seasonally.

It also tracks whatever is hot in trends and fads. Right now, everything to do with Hurricane Katrina is hot, hot, hot, but a couple years ago, everything and anything to do with protecting you and your home from biological terrorism was top of the list. Paris Hilton was top of the charts for a long time, doing battle with Britney Spears, but now, both of them are old news.

This is an interesting aspect of page ranking. If your site continues to push keywords long past the fad’s life span, then this could be seen as keyword spamming. Yet, using trends and fads keywords as they come and go could attract attention. Luckily, the rest of the criteria in the page ranking evaluation can help to clear out abusers of keywords related to the current fad or current event.

Posting Frequency

How often you update your pages and add content is monitored over time. It isn’t just how much but when. If you update or add hundreds of articles within a very short time, this is suspicious, but if you rarely update your site or add content over time, then your ranking will probably drop. Finding a happy medium is still a hit and miss angle, but the information seems to point to consistency not just random spurts of energy.

If you consistently add content once a week, and it stays steady, then it is seen as stable. If you add content consistently every day, and then it drops to nothing, then this change indicates an instability. If you do hit and miss content updating and additions over time, and then suddenly post a ton of activity, this can also be seen as instability and suspicious. Steady and consistent, no matter how frequently, adds weight to the score.

Many researchers say that frequent new or updated content carries more weight than infrequent changes to the site. I could find nothing in the patent that lent proof to that theory, but showing consistent activity does work.

A “stale” page is one that is old and rarely attracts interest. A “fresh” page is one that is new, and will be watched to see what kind of interest it may attract. By updating a stale page on your site, you may attract new interest by rewriting or structuring the information and keywords to attract more attention, breathing life back into the page. Google monitors this “refreshing” of pages to show activity and an increase in interest, scoring high.

Not all “old” pages on your site need updating. If it is still attracting decent traffic, then leave it alone. It is working for you.

The patent also reveals that stable pages that are working which suddenly attract a “spike” in the number of incoming links or click throughs may be an indication of a change of site ownership or spamming. Google evaluates not only the content but the historical changes in the content of the page and the site and if the changes are dramatic and sudden, then the site will rank lower. Stability over time scores higher.

Keywords Still Play a Roll

Keywords and keyword density still play an important roll in evaluating the content and content history. Putting keywords in titles, links, headings, tags, and throughout the page is still critical to the success of your site’s page ranking and keyword ranking results.

Changes to keywords, by arrangement, closeness, and inside of links, titles and headings are also monitored, much like link anchor text. Consider reviewing and updating your keywords and checking their density and use throughout your site on a regular basis, if search engine page ranking is important to you.

In upcoming posts, we’ll discuss how to maximize your keyword density in your blog posts.

Rank by Traffic, User Behavior, and You

Like other comparative search engines, Google’s patent also tells of how page rankings are compared across the board and monitored over time. The traffic is recorded and monitored. How much traffic each page gets as well as the overall site.

User behavior is checked. Google keeps track of how long visitors stay on your site and from what pages they exit your site. You also get points for bookmarking or adding to favorites.

Keyword search results are constantly monitored. What keywords brought the visitor to your site and what keywords they used to search once on your site.

But “you” also play a roll in determining the page ranking with Google. The domain registration information is checked and compared to the information on the site to make sure the two match. The address of the domain owner may help localize search results to that specific geographic area.

How you have your site hosted also is among the other administrative items checked off. Shared IP host addresses run a risk since they are shared. If someone else is using that server for spamming or other evils, you could also be punished. Dedicated hosting is very expensive, so make sure you choose a reputable host who is publicly and actively stopping spamming sites if you choose shared hosting.

The validity of the site’s code and structure plays a small part, but is still part of the criteria. Make sure your site’s code is validated, checked for errors, and friendly to search engines. Any errors in your page structure or code can easily thwart a search engine’s process through your site. Table designed sites rank low while CSS based designs are much more search engine friendly.

Spelling is still important. Not that Google’s patented page ranking process includes a spell checker – words that are not recognized get dumped. If misspelled keywords are among your missed spellings, then your site will be hurt in the rankings.

This is basically what I am doing. I put out marketing to find people that would like to work with my clients that are not directly competing with me. An example would be a tiny ad on my homepage that says “Add Your Business, Service or Product To My Local Resource Directory”. Then, I explain that my clients would benefit from having a great list of local providers and I’d be willing to list them there if they also linked to my website from their website. It is a pretty typical link exchange request.

I was talking to a business associate of mine that was looking for ways to network and get more referral business from a certain industry. I told him about what I was doing and how he could, with some very small modifications, set up a similar program to build a referral network. They key, and what many business owners miss, is that you do need to actively market this exchange just as if you were marketing a product for sale. Fail to market it and you’ll fail to make a sale (in this case the sale is exchanging links).

In fact, I look at so similarly to how I look at making a sale, I actually track conversion rates on a squeeze page to get more information about exchanging links (and even blog about that, but that’s a topic for another day). You can, and I believe should, actively be doing something very similar in your business and to promote link building on your business website.

The recent Google shakeup is all about paid links. Stop paying for links now! Google is now “punishing” websites for having paid links, because they feel it’s cheating the algorithm. You might be upset by this, but they are doing it to improve the quality of their results. Here is how you can take advantage of it.

Google is moving towards algorithms that favor sites that are “naturally” linked to. What is “natural” linking? These are links that a webmaster puts up because he or she wanted to, not because they were paid to. They saw something they liked, and put a link to it. This means all those shady SEOs who were buying links up by the hundreds can’t cheat good sites out of the rankings anymore. So how you do get natural links?

Focus on Your Subject

There is a saying in marketing, if you market to everyone, you are marketing to no one. Maintain your focus, and keep your content within your niche. Don’t try to spread yourself too thin.

I personally have been guilty of this sin in the past. At one time JeremyMorgan.com had SEO articles, PHP scripts, Ford Mustang News and photoshop tutorials, and pictures of my family and locations back home. Needless to say I didn’t really dominate any of those niches. Focus your efforts, and try to stay on topic.

Give Them Something to Link to

Once you find your focus, provide content that others in your niche want to link to. It’s really that simple. Think to yourself, “are people going to want to link to this?”. As much as I think my speculations and opinions on industry trends are great, the reality is most people link to articles I write that actually tell you how to do something. If you really want to build links, give them something helpful or really interesting to link to.

Even pages that you cannot easily monetize. The more links you get, the better.

Join the Community

In 2008, they have a community for almost anything. Get involved in those communities, sign up for forums and comment on posts. Become an authority. Just by being helpful to others and bringing information to a community, people will link to your site out of respect, knowing that their audience will appreciate the link. Be honest, helpful, and maintain your integrity on the boards. Instead of making fun of that newbie, help them out.

Look for Places with High Quality Links

Don’t be afraid to ask to exchange links with others who might benefit from your service. Links from sites like your local library or community-centric pages go a long ways. Even your employer may put up a link (be careful not to mess that one up!).

Get Deep Links

Deep links are very important. Try to get links pointing towards inner pages of your site rather than the front page. With enough of these types of links, you can dominate some of the serps related to that topic, as well as build your overall quality.

Write Articles

Chances are, you’re reading this article on somewhere other than JeremyMorgan.com or Webfoot Central. That’s because I submit articles all over the internet. Not only do you help build backlinks, but you contribute to your community, and make a name for yourself. Don’t write spammy articles, or try to advertise too hard. Make something useful that others will want as content on their own site.

Issue Press Releases

I can’t really comment on this one too much, because I’ve never done it, but for some sites it’s a very useful tool for getting inbound links, and good publicity. Make sure you have something going on that’s worth talking about!

Blog, Blog, Blog

Every site needs a blog. Even if your site is primarily about selling widgets, have a widget news related blog. Individual articles will get people linking to them, and will keep your site fresh and add content, which google and other search engines love.

If You Must, Sponsor Some Links.

There are a few sponsored links worth getting. Yahoo Search Inclusion is one example. If you are in a highly competitive industry, such as adult, SEO, mortgage, finance, or gambling you will need to purchase links to get an edge. There are a lot of people competing for your terms.

Conclusion

Use common sense. The best way to get ahead is by being honest, and providing a decent service. Stop trying gimmicks or tricks to cheat your way into good rankings. The best long term SEO plan involves taking the high road and doing things honestly. Check out the SEO book to see what I learned about ethical SEO. Now I don’t have any problems getting people to my website. You can too, all it takes is a little effort!

Webmasters receive regular requests for reciprocal link exchange either by e-mail or through their websites where provision is made for the submission of requests for reciprocal link exchange. Why are most requests rejected to the utter disappointment and dismay of webmasters of new websites anxious to increase their link popularity and page rank?

Some of the major reasons for the refusal to reciprocate a link exchange request can be attributed to:

1. When a reciprocal link exchange request is received, the obvious thing the webmaster will do is to visit the website making a request and try to identify what this website is all about. If the request is from a website with an irrelevant theme, the chances are the request will be turned down. The reason is that search engines will not give him any credit for linking with an irrelevant site and he cannot expect any targeted traffic from such a website either.

2. Poor content of your website is another major reason for the rejection of your reciprocal link exchange request. Websites with good quality theme related content are seldom rejected. In fact webmasters appreciate reciprocal link exchange requests from non competitive theme related websites since these sites will provide their own visitors with useful website experience and also receive targeted traffic.

3. If your website is with a PR zero or with a low Page Rank and if you request a link exchange with a high PR site, unfortunately your request will most probably be turned down. The reason being that the high PR site will not benefit by linking with your site. One saving grace here is that if you have excellent theme related content and indicate that you are growing fast some websites will link to you hoping that you will achieve high PR rank soon.

4. Most webmasters want to know whether your link directory is easily accessible to your website visitors. Hiding it in a maze of other information will not help. Your link page should be only two clicks away from your home page. A webmaster with a good link directory set-up will not be interested in complying with your request if your link directory is not easily accessible.

5. Having several dozens of links in each page is another reason for the rejection of a link request. If you wish to succeed in your request then you should ensure that you categorize the link directory and have not more than twenty five links to a page.

It should now be obvious why most requests for reciprocal link exchange are turned down. Having good quality unique content is the best way to start your reciprocal link campaign and succeed in your efforts.

One of the best things that a Handyman can do to significantly improve their chances of being found from search engines and take advantage of the fact that very few other handyman services are web savvy in their markets is to build up links to their website. Building up links leading to their website will not only bring traffic directly to the site from the websites that are linking to them, but also will increase their popularity and give them a huge bump in the chance of them coming up in a search engine for someone searching for a handyman in their local area with a search engine.

As a real estate investor that runs hundreds of different real estate related websites, I get the opportunity to both help the investors visiting my websites and help the handyman that wants to increase their exposure and links on the web.

As a handyman looking to increase the websites linking to you, you should consider finding other real estate related websites like mine that are willing to either directly exchange links with you or link directly to you without a link back. To help you thinking of the right types of businesses, let me name a few that you will want to seek out: real estate agents and real estate brokerage websites, real estate property manager websites, real estate investor websites, lenders and mortgage broker websites.

Think about the people that have referred business to you in the past. Do you have a friend in the roofing business that does not do general handyman type work? Ask him if he will link to you on his website and you can link to him from yours.

Another strategy that handyman often overlook is placing tiny classified ads on websites like CraigsList. These are one-way links coming to your website and, although there is an on-going debate over the effectiveness of these types of links in building link popularity, you should, with the right ad, be able to generate direct traffic from them at a minimum.

In conclusion, handyman services should focus some time on finding local, related websites to link to them to increase their business with direct traffic from those websites and also to significantly improve their chances of coming up for search engine searches for a handyman in your area.

Why waste your dollars ?

I know it sounds tempting. 10000 links at only $10… But the real thing is whether these 10000 links are helping your website to rank better in search results or Page Rank. I can tell you that the answer would be a definite NO. So invest that $10 on some other more useful things or you can even choose to donate to the Orphanage. Be meaningful.

Getting Quality links NOT Quantity.

Getting 10 Quality Links is far better than getting 10000 rubbish links. Search engines value quality website that contains rich and helpful information and having such websites link to you, will be telling the search engines that you also deserved to be a quality website too.

Paid Links : The Grey Line

News of Google going down on paid links have been published all over the Web. Is it time for Google to step in and take control of the situation where by webmaster buys paid links to get high Page Rank and SERPs ranking? I am really unsure how Google is going to penalize paid links, but i have already started seeing decrease in my paid inbound links in Google’s indexes. Time to build quality links…

Squidoo

Squidoo is a creative website that allows anyone to create a free web page easily and write on any topic they choose. They also have a unique revenue sharing program in which you can make easy money with your free web page.

What most marketers don’t know is that the search engines love Squidoo. If you can get a few links back from Squidoo you can gain in the search engine rankings. I’ve been creating squidoo pages related to my niche for awhile now and my rankings have went through the roof! Setting up a free web page there is easy to do and can be quite fun.

It’s important that when you create a lens there you create some unique content relevant to your niche.
After you create your content you can configure it there with various options. It’s pretty self explanatory but you should keep in mind you want a QUALITY back link. Once you’ve configured all of the various options you should post your content with a link back to your website.

Extra Tip: Add a link from your website back to it. This will encourage your current visitors to visit it and interact while also getting your lens rankings higher. This will give your Squidoo a much needed boost.

Free Web Hosts

Free Web Hosts have been around for a long time and most of them out there possess a lot of authority with the search engines. They spider and rank these pages regularly. I usually make one page websites with a unique article and a link back to my site.

Free Blogs

Free blog hosts like Blog Spot and Blogger are owned by google. Google constantly spiders these pages and they make for good links. If you have the time, create a blog at one of the many free blog hosts and create some good relevant content. Post every other day for a couple of weeks. Make sure to drop a link to your website in each post.

Free Forums

There are many free forum hosts out there that will let you have your very own forum. These sites usually have a high page rank and are slightly aged. These can provide good rankings and a link back from them usually does well.

There are many other creative ways to get links back to your site. Try to think outside the box and constantly reinvent your linking strategies.

Good Links – Spend Your Time Getting These:

Press releases: Google loves crawling PR sites, so getting your link