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The Great Misconception of Long-Tail Keywords and SEO

By Jill Whalen in Featured

As I write this, I just came back from a meeting with a potential client with a startup who wants to make sure they bake SEO into their website from the start while also not making any SEO gaffes along the way. They were referred to me from a current client who was in similar shoes about a year ago. I love working with startups who have a well-thought-out business model, which is in part to create a website and business so great that it dominates their space.

During the course of our conversation one of the many things we discussed was the need for a “long-tail keyword strategy.” Which makes sense because part of dominating any niche is showing up in the search results for any and all keyword phrases that relate to the business. We talked about the usual long-tail keyword vehicles…a resource center on the website, a blog, etc., all of which this company was planning to implement down the line.

After the meeting I made a quick stop at Trader Joe’s for nuts and berries for my husband (I think he’s part chimpanzee!). When I got home it was noon so I fired up my “Jill Whalen Daily,” which provides me with great lunchtime reading. The paper.li dailies are cool because they provide you with all the links your Twitter followers posted during the last 24 hours. I often use mine to help me find good articles to submit to Sphinn, as well as to keep up with the latest news in the search marketing world and beyond. As I was browsing it today, however, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be reading other people’s articles because I had a newsletter to write and no clue what to write about! My only excuse was that perhaps I would get inspired by something I read.

3 Superb SEO Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

By Stacey Zimmerman in Featured

Search engine helps you to generate traffic, but consequently Search Engine Optimization is very complicated, which beginners and expert bloggers dismay in joining such a strategy for achieving traffic. Starting a wordpress by default is pretty suitable at letting search engines see what’s happening. Fortunately, there are wide varieties of plugins accessible to keep you attain a good ranking for your blog, lessen that the stress of typing the code of your blog to obtain results of the search engines.

Here are some very beneficial SEO plugins to help you build a better wordpress blog.

Redirection

In improving our wordpress blogs, we cannot avoid our permalinks to be broken. This happens when you make changes to an old post, or maybe in upgrading or improving your wordpress blog also when you make changes on your permalinks. These changes can break up your entire wordpress blog.

Ill explain what really happens behind these changes, each post has its own URL this is what we call permalinks. When it is broken, those visitors won’t find your blog post. The redirection plugin helps you to redirect the visitors to follow the new permalink. So that your traffic will work efficiently.

features include by John Godley:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

Existing features include:

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages * Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

Robots Meta

Robots Meta plugin allows you to point specifically to the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll gain more respect from search engines, and likewise more traffic.

This plugin by Joost De Valk makes it possible to:

• Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex, follow robots meta tags.
• Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
• Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
• Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
• Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
• Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
• Disable author and date-based archives.
• Prevent attachment pages from ranking in the search results over your articles.
• Enforce a trailing slash on archives.
• Edit your .htaccess and your robots.txt from within WordPress.
• Assign robots meta tags to individual posts & pages.
• Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Add noarchive tags to your blog.

SEO Smart Links

Internal linking structure is the prime subject of SEO. If you have more links it just convey how well your website structure is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.

Here are some advantages by Vladimir Prelovac:

• SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
• SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
• SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
• Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
• It is a perfect solution to get your blog posts interlinked or add affiliate links to other sites.
• Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

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Stace Zimmerman is an Internet Marketer who owns & maintains many websites online. Please visit this site for wordpress themes and other blogging information. He also runs a hoodia information site.

What Are Meta Tags and Why Do I Need Them?

By admin in Featured

There is no other way to put it; the World Wide Web is big business. As an example, you only have to look at the phenomenal success of the online bookstore, Amazon. In 2008, Amazon brought in over nineteen billion dollars in income, yet only required an operating budget of approximately eight hundred and fifty million dollars. It really is no surprise to anyone then that more businesses are investing in expanded web presence and capability. Yet, not every organization has the same successes. Barnes and Noble was selling books online before Amazon was even an idea, and yet it isn’t Barnes and Noble that people think of when considering online bookstores, it’s Amazon. The key? Amazon took greater advantage of the opportunity to effectively market their product.

Search Engines, Spiders and Websites, Oh My

The most important and often least understood tool for online marketers is the search engine. The primary type of search engine is the web crawler – these are largely automated programs that crawl through available web pages, indexing data according to a variety of parameters. In short, the crawler, or spider, examines each page of a website. Once it has examined the page, it submits it to an index. Then, when a person uses the search engine software, the index provides links to these pages, ranked according to relevance. It is worth mentioning two other points. First, not all engines index the same way. Some use keyword density; others focus on the content of the first paragraph. Second, any changes to a webpage are likely to affect search rankings, so webmasters must carefully consider each change and its possible effects.

I Never Meta Tag I Didn’t Like

One important part of preparing a page for good search engine rankings is effective use of HTML meta-tags. These tags do not directly relate to the position a site will have in a search result, but they do offer webmasters some control over the way their sites are presented when they come up in a search. In brief, meta-tags are additional bits of code added to the head of your HTML document, right after “TITLE.” Because of the tendency for unscrupulous coders to find and abuse loopholes in search technologies, search engines do not rely heavily on these tags for rankings. Their benefits to web users are important, however.

First, there is the Meta Description tag. This is a brief report about the content of the webpage in question. When a search engine presents users with a hyperlink, there is frequently a small description accompanying that result. In many cases, that is the Meta Description tag the Webmaster put in the HTML document so that when a spider visits the site, it indexes this information. This is not always the case, however; Google in particular will generate its own description for a site.

The Meta Description is often the first piece of information someone using a search engine will see. The URL may not mean anything to them, but this description will. If it is poorly written, the user will likely skim right past the site for one that presents itself more effectively. Thus, the key is effective, concise writing that conveys exactly what the site is about.

The second tag is the Meta Keywords tag. This tag is a list of keywords the Webmaster considers most pertinent to each page. Proper use of the keywords tag is also vital. While search engines use a variety of keyword systems, and have in recent years de-emphasized the Meta Keywords tag, it still contributes to website rankings and should not be neglected. The best method is to examine each page carefully, and pick approximately ten keywords that best represent the data therein. Too many nonspecific keywords will lead to inconsistent search results, and too few means missing an opportunity to get a message in front of users. In addition, many sites are actively on the lookout for keyword abuse. Google in particular is known to ban certain pages from its index entirely if they consider the article to be an abusive, loophole-seeking piece.

There are other, less relevant tags that can provide some benefits, though they aren’t as important as the previous two. An example is the Robots tag, which is only useful in making sure certain sites do not index a particular page. This can help a Webmaster keep their content from being associated with undesirable elements, but it does not contribute directly to higher search placement.

No Meta Tag is an Island

Once again, it must be stressed that meta-tags are not a magical solution to the very complex problem of online marketing. They must be regarded as one tool in an inventory of other tools, and should be used responsibly. Properly implemented, they will help complete an effective marketing strategy.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Google Strikes Again! Why Your Links Are Now Worthless

By Margo Little in Featured

It is no secret that Google shifted from content based ranking to link based several years ago. The way most people discovered this was by seeing their pages disappear from top ten placements overnight. Unfortunately that same lesson is being re-taught today as Google shifts from an “all link” model of determining popularity to one of “inbound only.”

It should not come as a big surprise. It’s been happening slowly for the past year or so but is now in overdrive. Pages that have dominated top spots for years are suddenly disappearing without a trace and linking is the key. In short, reciprocal links no longer count as they once did. Google expects to see one way inbound links in its top ranked sites. The reason apparently being that worthy sites can attract links without having to reciprocate.

Talk about a popularity contest! It reminds me of junior high school on Valentines Day where the most popular students would be buried in cards while sending out only a few of their own. Google even refers to inbound links as a form of “votes.”

So how does Google judge the value of inbound links? Let’s just say a nod from the prom king or queen is a lot more desirable than one from the kid who had to escort his first cousin to the last school dance due to lack of options. But even still, every vote counts even if just a little.

I agree that it is sad and unfair that quality of content counts for so little but Google, perhaps naively, believes the links (or votes) will go to the most deserving sites naturally. I can’t change Google’s mind, but I can help you crack Google’s link value code. Just follow these simple steps.

First: Know your link targets. You want pages whose topics relate to your topic and with the highest PR possible.

Note: PR refers to Google PageRank which is a value assigned to the page on a scale of 1 to 10. Pages begin at 0 and earn PR points for various reasons. There are plenty of ones and twos but anything above three gets scarcer and more valuable. You can easily find a page’s PageRank by using the Google Toolbar available at http://toolbar.google.com.

Second: Forget about just linking to the home page. Google now prefers deep links so make the majority of your links go to pages at least one level deep below the home page. And be sure that page is named after its main keyword, such as “main-keyword.htm” or “main-keyword.htm.”

Third: Make sure the pages you are linking to, link back to your home page by using their main keyword as anchor text.

Note: Anchor text is simply a clickable text link. It is usually a different color; such as blue and underlined to show it is a link. You want your main keyword to be a clickable link leading from the topic page to the home page.

Fourth: Be sure the inbound links you build consist of your main keywords embedded in anchor text.

Recap: So if “online business services” was the main keyword the words “online business services” would be embedded as anchor text leading to a page called “online-business-services.htm” and that page would in turn link to the home page using “online business services” as its anchor text link.

Fifth: Google scans not only the area immediately surrounding the anchor text but also the whole page of text around it. It will be looking for consistency of topic throughout the page so be sure your link is coming from a page closely related to the topic of the keyword you are targeting.

Note: This last part is crucial because if you can control what is on the page you get links from, you can rocket to the top of Google. This can be done through blog postings, article publishing and even simple directory submission. If you are in a hurry, try a pre-packaged solution that removes the guesswork. I use a combo training and automated software system called “Link A Minute” (http://www.linkaminute.com) that does the trick for me. There are good ones out there so hunt around and find one you like. Just do not try any link farms if you value any future placement on Google.

Follow these tips and you can steal a top spot on Google in no time.

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Margo Little is a successful SEO marketing consultant who got her start in 1997. Today SEOSoftwareSurvey.com benefits from her knowledge. From finding a killer suite to a simple keyword tool, she can help.

Local Search and Optimisation

By Robert Cerff in Featured

Recently I was reading an article about the trouble in Zimbabwe and how it affected South Africa. I was surprised to find that many people didn’t realize that South Africa was a country in its own right, but most thought that Zimbabwe was a country in South Africa. While I find this amusing (as both South Africa and Zimbabwe are very much individual independent countries) I did realise that not everybody is 100% clued up on their geography.

Okay so what does this have to do with search? As many small businesses are unable to supply the entire world with their product or service many try to localise their client base. This is carried over into their website. It’s not easy for a plumber in London to be making callouts to China. While this is an extreme example I think you get the point.

When it comes to optimising websites for local searches it is important to always include the area name in your key phrases. So instead of optimising your website for say “experienced plumber after hours” you might optimise it for “experienced plumber after hours in London”. But as you may have guessed that while the tail grows longer you are expected to have fewer visitors. Don’t forget that long tail keywords do convert better though. However at this point you may also have noticed that you could start to shorten your key phrase. Now it would be easier to obtain top rakings for the phrase “experienced plumber in London” or even at a push simply “plumber in London”.

However remember that while local search is intended for localised visitors not all qualified visitors will be locals. Okay, so that sounds a little confusing but consider the fact that not everyone searching for your services will be in the same town while doing the searching. Sometimes people need to do a search of a location and services that they may need while away on holiday, business or even for someone else. Imagine a chronic diabetes sufferer needing to know of the nearest doctor while on vacation or someone needing to know where the nearest laundromat is while on vacation in a small seaside town. Both of these searches may be done with only a little information on the actual location of where they may be.

I have often gone on vacation to small towns where many of the nearest services were in the next town. Often people won’t even know which suburb of a town your business may be located in. I think of Johannesburg and while I know that there are literally thousands of tiny suburbs, many people (and yes, even I am guilty of this) simply lump them all together as Johannesburg.

So what does this all mean for localised search?

Never assume that the visitors know exactly where you are. If your town only has a population of 75 and has never been a hot spot of any kind, then chances are nobody will know your town off hand. In these instances go bigger, optimise for the larger geographical area or town as well as the suburb. I know that this certainly has worked for smaller estate agent websites we have worked on based in a small suburb of a major South African city. While they rank highly for variations of their keywords for their specific town and suburb, the bulk of all traffic comes from the very broad searches as this makes a great starting point. While this traffic doesn’t convert as well, it certainly means that you won’t be missing a potential lead.

Always include area info. Once again as many visitors may not know the area very well it may prove very useful to supply a map of the greater area with a breakdown town by town. As mentioned earlier with many of the small towns that dot the map, many of the service providers may supply more than a single town due to supply and demand. This should help with two things. Firstly, it will help put distance and location of your business into some perspective in relation to where they will be. Secondly, this certainly won’t hurt in the search engines. Always remember relevant information is always welcome; just don’t cram it full of useless information.

Going back to the opening paragraph we must remember that not everyone knows their geography that well, and fewer still are masters of localised geography. Keep this in mind when optimising your website. Always try to think like an out-of-towner. Keep it specific, going broad when you must but always make sure that you have your bases covered for your local searches (although if you’ve done your offline marketing well this shouldn’t be a problem).

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant in South Africa for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

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