Wingnut SEO

I was reading an article today, written by Robert Musud, about What Employers Need to know about Employee Blogging. This caught my attention more because recently my company started its own blog and of course I asked for some link love, all links are good links.

I didn’t worry about it, because I am really happy with my company and the people I work with… but what happens if/when I am not? An unlikely situation in the foreseeable future.

What I worry about more is what happens if I have an opinion that doesn’t fit with the company? In Robert’s article he speaks about people being fired over posting racy pictures or speaking ill of their employers - but how far of a cry is that from catching flack from saying something the company wouldn’t? Since they are linked to me does everything I write reflect on them? Damn right it does.

Before I got the link with my company’s blog I really didn’t worry about what I wrote. I would rant about things and curse up a storm when I felt it was needed.

Now though, I am starting to wonder if by directing my fellow employees to my blog - did I do myself a disservice? Do I now have to bite my tongue rather than speaking freely? It feels like I just turned my personal blog into a work blog. I asked for a link without even thinking about that. Foolish.

I think when it comes down to it - it depends on the company. With where I work, I think I have more leeway when it comes to what I write in my blog - as long as I’m not an idiot.

It is something to keep in mind though, and I guess I’ll see what comes of it.

If anyone was wondering what yesterday’s post was all about it was seeing how much traffic I get by writing about apple and just posting on digg… Since I roughly get about 50 views a day, I thought it would be interesting.

It sent 100 visits above the average.  It didn’t get any other diggs, but 100 more people than normal came to the site.  Just putting “Apple” in the title and submitting to digg - not even with a link-baiting title.

So, cool.   Want a bunch of extra visits to your blog?  Write about something Apple related and submit to digg

On news of Apple opening up it’s fancy iPhone and iPod Touch to developers - the first thing I did was go out and register a bunch of domain names that I hope to capitalize on.

One of these names, to my delight, instantly started getting direct traffic and clicks and has brought in a whopping $30 in the couple of weeks I have had it up on my parking service. For those wondering -  the domain that is doing so well is iTouchGame.com

(I also have iTouchGamers.com and iTouchPrograms.com and several others…. I will do something with them as well… probably network them all and try and rank for “ipod/iphone games/programs.” Best part about it, I’m pretty much promised a front page listing on Digg thanks to the word ipod well maybe not, but a solid post.)

I could leave these sites parked like this. Making a few dollars a day - but I know I can make more with just a simple site, an affiliate program and some Google ads.

As I found out later “iTouch Game” is one of the most popular iphone games at this time… so I lucked out with the name… why not take advantage of it. As of yet I have not had much free time to build even a simple site pulled from OSWD, hopefully I can do that this weekend.

Point of this post you ask? If you have a great idea to make money with a site - register the domain name and park it even if you have no time to do anything with it. Domains are cheap, less than $10 a year and just by parking them you can bring at least that in a few months. (Well most of the time anyway - a friend of mine is bringing in about $70 a month with gocandle.com just with parking not much… but gocandle? The hell is that?)

So just recently… about the time I started this blog almost a month ago…  I have been slowly taking over the first page on Google when I type in my name, Dave Winget.

With less than 200k results found with “Dave Winget” in the search - it has been easy.  Already the first 4 spots are mine, and that’s without trying.

I put nearly no time into it… other than writing for this blog. I guess I never really thought about how easy it is to be ranked for something that no one else is trying for….

So after this I wanted to test how easy it really is to start from nothing and compete with something slightly more difficult and find out exactly what it takes for more competitive words (using the scientific method, or at least a bastardization of it… like the kind creationists use).

I chose “storage” and “moving” in Phoenix, Tucson, and Arizona. Not an impossible task under 10million results for each of these . So I made 2 sites (starting small again as little effort as possible - designs lifted from OSWD) linked them together and just put up a lot of content about moving and storage in Phoenix, Tucson, and Arizona in general. Not even 2 weeks later and one of the pages is ranking for “Tucson Storage” and “Tucson Moving.” (just under 2million results for each of these) it isn’t my main goal but was a side goal… but it just happened with my content/descriptions and such.

This page is not on the first page yet, far from it - it is on the 9th. Well shy of the top three… but for putting very little effort (only adding it to few free directories) not a bad start.

I will keep an eye on it and let you know how far/fast it moves up or what other real tactics I try.

(Note: The link to these sites from my blog counts as a no effort tactic)

When I was a young SEOer, small-time, freelancing my way through life - charging a set fee for one or two sessions with the client to do what I could optimize their sites in as little as time possible - things were great. They were happy, I was happy - life was grand. They would come back to me a few months down the road and ask for more help… good times. Then things changed when I took on a full time job with an agency.

All our clients pay monthly for SEO X amount of hours per month with no real set end date - of course the process is set to continue forever - and this isn’t bad because link building never technically ends and you always have to make small changes to the site to optimize as time goes on - to keep up with trends and new algorithms etc.

What happens though, every client eventually thinks they don’t need the SEO or that they can’t rationalize paying monthly for it. They either cut hours back or decide to leave and do SEO in-house completely.

This is especially true because my company believes in educating the client so what we do becomes less magical as time goes on. This is fine.  Clients like us for it because we do good work and teach them how SEO works.

It just makes me sad every time… But I suppose it’s just the great circle of SEO life.

So I think I like Gooruze… Just not that much. I can tell it has some serious potential (and to validate my blog feed Wingnut.gooruze.com ) They are new and will be interesting to see where they go but if they don’t change some stuff up soon - I’m done with it.

The site navigation needs work. It’s rather unintuitive and takes too long to get anywhere. Overall the design looks like someone took a basic Joomla template and then ate some yellow crayons and then pooped all over it. Then for good measure (and maybe laughs) they made the default link text bright yellow so you have to squint from the glare and the rest so small you have to press your nose against it to see what news articles there are and what other things are going on.

Then just to be greedy (and piss me off and make me not want to go there) they put Google ads right at the top without even trying to make it look like it goes with the site design or be non-annoying. It’s supposed to be a site for online marketers IE the WEB SAVVY who the hell is going to click on these ads anyway? I suppose you get something for views… but come on. If you’re going to have money links at least make them better than shit Google Ads. Sell books about online marketing or something else - that would at least be useful.

It seems to be growing really fast but thanks to some major design flaws and annoying bits I fear it will burn out pretty quickly. If they change some stuff around it could be great

It has the most complex social media navigation I have ever seen - and as of yet I haven’t looked at any of the news articles because it’s too hard to tell what news there is/if it’s good.

The navigation is so bad it actually makes me angry trying to use it. They need to take a look at Sphinn or you know… any good social media site where you can actually tell what content is there and what is hot/new etc…

I have found the Q&A a bit helpful and actually would go to the site just for this. Makes for a great forum.

I’m far too addicted to Social Media these days and this is just one more thing that I’m going to be checking a couple times a day. Provided they change up the design.

What do you all think?

With the open letter to Ron Paul supporters issued by Allen Wastler, managing editor of CNBC.com and the slurry of posts about it throughout the SEO blog community it seems perfectly clear that the future of political campaigns is changing - or at least adding to it’s armory.

This letter and the following blog storm it has caused will be noticed by the savvy campaign managers that are going to be looking towards online reputation management along with SEO to get their messages to the top of the search engines.

With an already huge and growing number of people getting their news from social media and online newspapers it would be silly to ignore what a little SEO (and perhaps PPC?) could potentially do for a political campaign. Think about it, a political party could bring the search engines to their Team’s side and make sure the people only see what they want them to see… I’m not sure how this will play out… will it be pure reputation management - making sure only good things about your party show up on the magical first three pages of search results - or will it be a twisted reputation mud-slinging battle that will make sure every bad thing about the opposing side pops up to the top.

Either way it should be a pretty bright (and possibly fun) future for current and up-and-coming SEO’s and pretty interesting for the SEO world in general. It may change the face of SEO (at least somewhat) from a competition against the numbers and faceless webmasters - to a downright brawl, king of the hill style, between SEO managers from each party.

I, for one, am excited.

Well… not really.  But it does make you look cool and you can totally impress the ladies with your badassness.  This is a pretty basic overview of what Meta-tags are and how you should use them.  Hope it helps.

1. Keyword Meta Tag

<META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, your, keywords”>
Before sitting down to write your meta tags, you must determine your key words, as the meta tags would be based on them. This would require some brainstorming. You need to think of words by which your web site should be found. You can check out the sites of your close competitors for ideas. Once you have a list of key words ready, ask your friends and more importantly your customers for more suggestions. This would help you come up with the more popular key words. It is a better strategy to identify a few important key words and focus your tags and content on them, instead of trying to coming up with every possible key word under the sun and cramming it in your web page.

Different search engines give different limits for the keyword tag. They range from 200 to 1000 characters. This means around 10 to 150 keywords. If your keyword limit exceeds the limit specified by the search engines, they would simply ignore the extra key words. However, do not try to repeat keywords, as this would be considered spamming. Use various synonyms of your most important keywords. Try to concentrate more on keywords that you have used in your web page content. This would contribute towards your keyword density.

Also include key phrases in your keyword meta tags. These would be a combination of keywords that the users may search for. For example, if you have an online jewelry store, you may want to include: handmade designer jewelry, online jewelry store, buy jewelry online. Someone who is searching for jewelry is likely to type in the above phrases, as a search for only the word “jewelry” would give too many search results.

Opinion is divided as to whether keywords should be separated by commas or not. If you don’t use commas the risk of repeating keywords is lowered. However, according to most search engine experts presence or absence of commas does not make a vast difference. Hence, inclusion of commas between keywords would largely be a matter of personal preference.

2. HTML Title Tag

<TITLE> Title of document </TITLE>
The HTML Title tag appears on top of your coded web page, and would also be seen by your web page readers. This tag is given extreme importance by almost all search engines when a web page is being ranked. Even search engines which ignore all the other tags like keywords, description and meta tag, definitely index the title tag. Therefore it is necessary to write your title tag very carefully.

Avoid using proper nouns (like the name of your company) in your title tag, unless you are a very well known business concern, and expect people to search for you by name. Instead make the title descriptive, including your most important keywords in it. Make sure that your title tag is placed right after the head tag, especially if you haven’t hand coded your web pages. Placing the title lower, would decrease its importance with the search engine.

Do keep in mind that inclusion of keywords in the title would have positive impact on keywords density and search engine ranking. Hence the title tag should be utilized to its fullest capacity. The search engines specify no word limit for title tags. However, to be safe and not to be accused of spamming, ten words (no more than 90 characters) would be a reasonable limit.

Don’t repeat your keywords more than twice in the title and don’t use all caps. Title case and lower case Title tags are seen to have a better impact on rankings as opposed to upper case tags.

3. Description Meta Tag

<META name=”description” content=”description of your website”>
The description of your website is extremely important. Not only would it be indexed by most search engines, it would also be used by directories in your website listing. Hence, searchers will use the description as a decisive factor to choose to visit your website.

The description must be short, typically 250 characters long. Do not use marketing slogans or hyped up language in the description. Instead, concentrate on telling the reader about how they would benefit from visiting your website. Try including as many of your keywords as possible in the description. Make sure that the keywords included in your Title tag are there in the description tag as well.

Get an idea of how your competitors are writing their descriptions, by searching your targeted keywords on the major search engines. Make a note of the most effective descriptions, and what you like the most about them. Try to incorporate those factors in your own description.

Every new client I have ever dealt with has asked the same thing: “How should I write copy to be SEO friendly?”

This is the document that I have handed out for the past year and a half. I didn’t write all of it - most of it came from forums and blogs that are no longer active.

Enjoy

The Basics of SEO Copywriting
Writing for the search engines would be an easy task if all one needed to do was stuff content for website with keywords. But this is certainly not the fact. SEO Copywriting is a challenging task that involves writing content that appeals to search engines as well as to the human eyes. Given below are steps that can help a SEO copywriter in writing search engine friendly online content which is effective.

Researching for Keywords
One thing that differentiates online content from offline content (print) is the use of keywords. Any search engine friendly content needs to make use of keywords and not just that, the keywords need to be arranged in the most strategic manner within the copy giving the impression of professionalism to the reader and a search engine friendly feed to the search bots. So researching and analyzing keywords becomes the primary part of SEO based copywriting.

The important question that you need to ask yourself before researching for keywords is

* What is the Copy all about?
* Who would be interested in the copy?

Answering these two questions can prove extremely helpful when researching for keywords. There are many tools online that can help you find the keywords that people have actually used when looking for similar content. Some good tools that you can use are overture search keywords and worktracker.

Planning the Copy
Planning the copy involves finding out the content that needs to be added in reference to the keywords. This also involves arranging the keywords in an ascending order based on their importance levels. The top keyword is the one that you would be optimizing for and all other keywords will be used as secondary ones.

For instance: A company offering e-mail marketing solutions for small businesses can have the following hierarchy of keywords based on research.
1.) Small Business Email Marketing Services
2.) Small Business Email Marketing Service
3.) SMB Email Marketing services
4.) SMB Email Marketing Service
5.) Affordable Email Marketing Services
6.) Affordable Email Marketing Service

It should be noted that in the above example the keywords have been arranged in hierarchy based on the importance. This means that the first keyword ‘Small Business Email Marketing Services’ is the most important and needs to be optimized to the fullest. All other keywords that follow will act like complementary keywords. The most important keyword will be used as the title, in the heading and included within the first few lines in the content.

Most Important keyword will be included in the;

* Title of the web page
* Heading of the copy
* First few lines of the copy
* Ending lines of the copy
* In bold within the copy

Writing a SEO friendly heading

Search engines place more importance to the heading (especially those placed within heading tags) of a document and not only that, even humans tend to read the heading first. If the heading is good then people proceed towards the copy; if the heading looks bad people might simply turn away. So writing a highly descriptive heading becomes extremely important.

To write a search engine friendly copy, it becomes almost inevitable to include the most important keyword in the heading. The keyword becomes stronger in the eye of the search bots if it is used in the title of the webpage as well. The heading can include only the keyword if it describes the content that follows in a perfect manner; but in most cases this is not possible. In such cases the heading can use three to four additional words with the keyword. Care should be exercised that the keyword is not altered in any manner and even if it is broken the order of the keyword is not changed.

For instance: To write a heading for a copy that describes online marketing services offered by a company which is to be optimized for the keyword ‘online marketing services’ one can write ‘Comprehensive online marketing services for Small Businesses’.

In the above example you will find that the keyword “online marketing seervices” has been complemented by the words ‘comprehensive’ and ’small businesses’ to make the heading more attractive. Though it should be noted that adding more words to a keyword can dilute it.

Writing the SEO friendly Copy
The best way to write an SEO friendly copy is by planning the copy based on the keywords. This will ensure that the copy looks clean and the keywords look blended in, instead of giving an appearance that some words have been inserted later.

The copy should be planned in such a way that the most important keyword (the keyword which has been used in the heading, title, alt tags and Meta tags) is used within the first few lines. These lines are given most importance by search engines and many search engines tend to cache only the first few lines to form their database.

In addition to the first few lines the important keyword can also appear in the main body of the copy and near the ending lines. Care must be taken to ensure that a single keyword is not overused, as this could give rise to the problems of keyword stuffing.

All other keywords can be used within the body section of the copy in the most natural manner. For any copy depending on the length it is best to restrict the use of keywords to a maximum of three to four unique ones. Copy should at-least be 200 words in length with keywords used in the most natural manner.

Breaking unusual keywords
Most People tend to make use of highly unusable keywords while searching online. The problem here is that it becomes extremely difficult to write meaningful copies using such keywords. Inserting them would mean spoiling the entire image of the copy and avoiding them would mean loosing out on visitors.

The solution here is to break up unusual keywords without changing the order and use them in the copy as natural ones. For instance a keyword like ‘marketing email solutions’ can be used in the copy after breaking it up like; ‘We offer online marketing and email solutions ‘. It can be noted that the keyword has been broken down into two without changing the order. This strategy can be adopted even for headings and title tags.

Breaking up bigger copies
Relevant links can be provided within the copy and the copy can be broken up into two in-case it has more than 1000 words. Breaking up copy can give you a chance to optimize for two different keywords by keeping the second level keyword as important in the second copy (refer keyword hierarchy above). Linking to the second copy from the first copy using the second important keyword or the keyword that is going to be important for the second copy will add to its importance. This is because search bots place high level of important to keywords that contain hyperlinks to another page that has content related to the keyword description.

For instance a copy that describes two different services offered by a company can be broken up into two based on the type of service and the first copy can be linked to the second and the second to the first with necessary keywords.

Providing links within the copy
Providing relevant links within a copy is an extremely good practice, but care must be taken not to overdo it. Too many links within a copy makes reading difficult and may give a complex look to a document. Links can be giving using keywords as anchor texts (to documents which relate to the keyword) wherever possible.

Google is great for search… they own it, us.  But when they make it official that they punish people for something they do?

I have a problem with this.  Adwords is a cash cow for Google but when someone else tries to charge someone to place an ad on their site their page rank goes down or worse they get de-listed?

Their mantra is “Don’t be evil” but come on.  Sure - you can say “well, they arn’t forcing you to not sell links… they will just take you off their engine.”

With 65% of the search market and rising a no listing on Google can really take down a sites traffic.  Perhaps enough so that a paid ad isn’t worth putting on your page because you can’t charge more than 10 cents.

It just feels like a slap on the hand to punish us for our wrongdoings.  I’m all for better search but at what cost?  If we continue to let Google rule us what will happen next?  Your site will be de-listed if you don’t give Google your first child so they can feed it to their new algorithm that can only be powered by tender baby meat?

Come on Google, this just feels lazy. There has to be a better way to not pass on PR when someone buys a link other than punishing the seller…

I suppose if I were as powerful as Google, I’d just stop trying too.