• Content Mapping at Scale
• Automated Core Web Vitals Reporting
• Influencer-PR SEO Integration Process
• Content Copy Priority Tracker
• Google Trends for Multiple Keywords

Right before the pandemic, I moved from Drum Agency (formerly BKV) to 360i. This involved moving from managing half a dozen SEO clients and a small SEO staff to managing a smaller number of SEO clients within a much larger, fuller staffed SEO practice – and only take on leadership responsibilities that I really love – SEO product development, marketing, evangelizing and a little mentoring on the side. This freed up time for me to dig deeper into client work and build solutions that I didn’t have time for in the past.

One challenge of working in an SEO agency is that you must spread your attention and efforts across multiple clients and limit the scope of work, while knowing you could dive deeper. SEO automation is one way to extend your scope within limited hours.

Like many other people, I also spent 2020 on a variety of self-taught DIY home improvement and repair pandemic projects. I got ambitious and dove into new areas of plumbing, electrical, and house exterior, often requiring a tall ladder ignoring any fears of height on a 2 story house or exploring the crawlspace beneath the house, including: applying exterior brick mortar wash, installing a dishwasher, repairing a bathroom faucet, installing window box planters on 2nd floor windows, disassembling and repairing a skylight, sawing apart old plumbing to replace a valve, replacing guts of a toilet, repairing a leaking bathtub, repairing motion lights hanging off the second floor roof and other less impressive sounding projects.

But the focus of this article is SEO automation tools that sprung up during 2020. Some of this was inspired by Hamlet Batista, who we sadly lost during the pandemic. He inspired me to begin learning Python, however these projects used Knime, Datastudio, Excel, Google Sheets, Screaming Frog, Node JS & Lighthouse-Batch, Windows Task Scheduler, Bat text files, and whatever data sources were used.

Content Mapping at Scale

Project: Perform Content Journey Stage Audit of Client and Competitors

Identify the journey stage of all content across multiple websites for a competitive view of performance and gaps at each stage: awareness, engagement, consideration, decision and retention.

• Problem: You may be tempted to look at URL directories and assume everything in that directory falls in a particular journey stage. That may work to an extent for some page types like products, services, about, and contact. However, resource areas and blogs are often the largest sections of pages and they contain a mix across many of the stages, especially awareness, engagement and consideration. Within a limited budget, it is not feasible to manually view and bucket each article in the correct journey stage.
• Solution: Use Screaming Frog custom search to identify text and calls-to-action that provide a signal that suggest a particular journey stage. This process was specific for each website. I had to manually review a sample of pages, blogs and resources in order to identify phrases like calls-to-actions that were indicative to a particular journey stage. Then in Excel, I reviewed pages and QA’ed where they fell in the journey stage. Finally an audit of content types let’s us see a view of audience, stage and content type to see what types perform best and where the gaps are.

Automated Core Web Vitals Reporting

Project: Capture Lighthouse Core Web Vital and Page Speed Reports in Weekly Batches

Perform weekly automated Lighthouse reports across a sample of pages across main website templates in order to diagnose issues, identify areas to focus, track improvements and monitor for new problems.

• Problem: Recurring reporting on Page Speed and Core Web Vitals across batches of pages was taking up valuable time.
• Solution: I began by running Lighthouse-Batch reports using Node.js in the command prompt, with all my configurations saved in a .bat file, like where to find the seed list of URLs and where to output the resulting JSON files. I then automated these using Windows Task Scheduler to run the .bat file on a weekly basis. Lastly, I used Knime to read the JSON files, transform the data and save it into G-sheets where it powers my DataStudio report. The only problem was that is used my own computer to run this process. Shout out to Tyson Nakayama for adapting the process on an Amazon Workspace, using the official Lighthouse API and saving the data to BigQuery in a dentsu managed data lake. Tyson and I also worked together to create reports that show which scripts are causing problems site-wide, not just at the page level.

Influencer-PR SEO Integration Process

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

Content Copy Priority Tracker

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

Google Trends for Multiple Keywords

Project: [details coming soon]

• Problem:
• Solution:

The post SEO Tools for Automation and Scale That I Built During the Pandemic appeared first on Blend SEO.

Study of 1.4 million queries by Perficient Digital (slightly more than the 7 query study by WSJ that has been refuted across the search industry) saw an increase in total rich answers, driven mainly around an increase in image carousels (a type of rich answer) appearing in search results.

Enable: Why you need to know…

Since 2015, Google has been increasing the presence of rich results that provide an answer to queries, reducing the need for users to click through within every step of their search journey. This growth in image search may point to Google’s move toward visual search, announced in May 2019.

Pause: I need to know more info….

Visual search can become a new direction for online shopping. Google is partnering on image search development with Target, Samsung, Volvo and Wayfair. Brands such as retailers with robust image SEO in place will be in a good position to take advantage of this trend.

Delete: Be cautious…

Image search traffic often does not convert and requires special setup to measure, as outlined by AJ Kohn. However, rich results such as image carousels only represent part of the user search journey. When we see stats like 50% of searches result in no click, it does not mean people stopped reading, researching and buying online. It simply means that for every click through to a publisher or brand, there was a preliminary search where the user ingested information from Google results that informed their next search.

The post Rich Answers Doubled: Enable, Pause or Delete this SEO News? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Search Console API

Pull 5000 Queries from Google Search Console

Go to Google Drive sheets and install https://searchanalyticsforsheets.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

1. Open a spreadsheet
2. Add-ons > Search Analytics for Sheets > Open sidebar
3. Select client website
4. Select date range
5. Group By: Query
6. Results Sheet: Active sheet (or pick which tab to overwrite)

Backups

Backups can been enabled for all clients. These will eventually run out of Google Sheets line limit. When they do, a new Google spreadsheet must be created to continue the backups.

Client Monthly Excel Reports

• Copy data into GSC Data tab of monthly report
• Fill in the date column with the month and year the data covers

Setup Python for GSC API

If you want to use Python to create your own API, use https://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-search-console-data-api-python?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Keyword Research Tools

1. Keywords Everywhere (Chrome Extension)
   Adds search volume and CPC data for Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, Answer The Public, Soovle, Keyword Shitter, Majestic & Moz.
2. Wordtracker Scout (Chrome Extension)
   Pulls keywords and data from a competitor page
3. Keyword Mixer
   http://www.keywordmixer.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
4. Quora or Yahoo Answers
5. LSI Graph – latent semantic indexing keyword generation tool
6. Google Trends and Google Correlate
7. UbberSuggest
8. AnswerThePublic.com
9. KeywordTool.io
10. Soovle.com
11. Keyword Shitter
12. Moz Keyword Explorer
13. Google Adwords

Chrome Extensions for SEO

1. Keywords Everywhere
2. MozBar
3. PageSpeed Insights
4. LastPass
5. Google Tag Assistant
6. CC – shows number of characters selected
7. Wordtracker Scout
8. Web Developer
9. Link Redirect Trace

Bookmarked Tools

1. Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. Zemti
4. Tag Manager
5. Google My Business
6. Conductor
7. Majestic
8. Followerwonk
9. Google SERP Snippet Optimizer & Preview Tool by Predikkta
   This is the only Title and Description preview tool that is updated to the correct length for Google since it made listings a little longer in 2016
10. Brightedge
11. SEMrush
    Quickly get a starting list of keywords

SEO Apps

1. Screaming Frog
2. Excel add on – ASAP Utilities
3. A1 Sitemap Generator – and other A1 tools: I generally use ScreamingFrog now instead of these.

The post My Favorite SEO Tools for the Consulting Agency appeared first on Blend SEO.

If you are my new SEO client, one of the first things I include in your SEO plan is ensure we have good measurement and tracking in place. In fact, before signing on as a client, you may have seen line items in your SEO Proposal under New Client Onboarding for:

• Discovery
• Competitor Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Measurement Plan
• Tracking Plan
• Report Design

Most of these may sound self explanatory, except Measurement Plan and possibly Tracking Plan. Though you might guess the tracking plan has to do with a Google Analytics audit and setting up additional goals, segments, etc. that will be reflected in the reporting. But you may wonder, what is a measurement plan?

What is a Measurement Plan?

A measurement plan: identifies your business objectives and determines what you need to measure, technology used, implementation and refinement.

The point of a measurement plan is to make sure your digital efforts support the overall business objectives. 

5 Steps to Define Measurement Plan

Google provides a comprehensive measurement plan training video as part of its Google Analytics Individual Qualification training series.

1. Document business objectives
2. Identify strategies and tactics
3. Choose KPIs
4. Choose segments
5. Choose targets for KPIs

Here’s an example of what you might create for the first 4 steps. This uses a fictional outdoor sports store business.

Identify Strategies and Tactics

Common strategies for different types of businesses or websites often include selling products or services, collecting leads, generating engagement & frequent visitation, helping customers find information, and generating awareness, engagement & loyalty.

This graphic from Google shows a business type on the left and its associated strategy on the right. However, most businesses are doing a mix of efforts. So you might see the left column as your efforts and the strategy on the right.

Choose KPIs

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. These are commonly the metrics you find in Google Analytics. A metric is a number. This is where you might setup events and conversion goals. Events can be defined, like CTA button clicks, playing a video, social share clicks. Goals can be created based on events, page visits, or even triggered after a visitor views a certain number of pages.

Many SEO KPIs must be measured outside of Google Analytics. Keyword rankings, back-links, positive reviews and keywords that drive traffic must be measured in 3rd party paid tools. Google Search Console is free and can help with some of this. But realize, it does not help Google make money when your business gets organic visibility. Like most of the internet, Google search is a high quality free product that is paid via advertising. Most websites I have ever tracked get 50%+ traffic from “free” organic search. So to measure KPIs and optimize organic efforts, you need to go outside of Google’s free tools.

Choose Segments

Data segments let you break apart KPIs to help better optimize. Marketing channels and traffic sources are almost always my first go-t0 segments.

SEO is usually measured in Google Analytics by organic search traffic. But SEO includes content marketing and link building. Therefore, it will contribute to referral traffic and a little toward direct traffic. Direct traffic for the most part is a reflection of your branding efforts.

Because Google is a for-profit business, and GA is their free tool, the paid efforts are much easier to track. GA gives you default segments for paid search, display, email and social.

Google Analytics has recently improved its segment capabilities to include visitor data. You can now create segments for visitor activity going back 90 days.

Choose Targets for KPIs

Choosing targets are like setting your goals. This is not referring to GA conversion goals, but in the classic sense of goal setting.

I’m sure you’ve heard the advice:

Goals need to be obtainable, measurable (so you know if you obtain them), and set within a time limit.

You can use the same mindset in picking KPI targets.

To help you figure out your targets, you can look externally and internally.

• Externally: you can look at industry stats, competitors or use forecast tools to get an idea of how high you want to be
• Internally: you can look at your historic trends to get an idea of what growth is realistic

Use external tools to see how high you need to get to become a leader in your space. Forecast tools like Brightedge Search Opportunity Forecasting or Conductor Business Case Builder can model your positioning and revenue based on some assumptions. But these assumptions often make the forecast pretty high. For example, you have to plug in a conversion rate for the website. But not every keyword will convert. Many keywords you track may be intended to generate top of the funnel, awareness or consideration visits. These will probably later convert on brand terms. Therefore, temper your forecast with industry competitor data and your own historic data.

The post 5 Steps to Create a Digital Measurement Plan appeared first on Blend SEO.

But over the last few days, we have been seeing 3 line and even 4 line descriptions in SERPs.  Of course I searched around to see if anyone was already talking about it.  There’s very little out there yet.  Mary Soule, with Hall Internet Marketing posted her SEO research on what might trigger this. Her study looked for correlations with keyword density or link authority.  But she found no connection.

With Google’s latest algorithm focusing on mobile and user intent, and now publicly announcing an algorithm based mobile SEO penalty, my thought is to look at user intent or search intent.  Part of Google’s latest push has been to answer questions in the SERP so you don’t have to click through and leave the site.

Scenario: I know, I sometimes try to find answers to my questions by skimming the descriptions — I’m too lazy to click through or don’t want to wait for a page to load and read through it to find the answer.  If I do click through and don’t find the answer, I’ll hit the back button and take a second look at the description. This time I look for context that will help me find where on the page my answer is.

Mary Soule’s post noted that the longer descriptions pull the first part from the META description and the second part from the content of the page.  It’s easy to see how content from the page surrounding your search term can either answer your question or at least help you find the context of your answer.

Long Tail Queries Trigger Long Descriptions

My preliminary research suggests that long tail queries are more likely to trigger SERPS that include long descriptions. These tend to include forum results, long detailed blog posts or articles.  However, I don’t see a simple relationship between the length of a post and it’s likelihood to show a long description compared to other results in the SERP.

For example, a search for the 3 word phrase “descriptions in SERPs” triggered all traditional 2-line descriptions.  This 4 word query “descriptions in Google SERPs”, though “in” may be considered a stop-word, triggered all 2-line descriptions.  And some were the same results (however a 2 line version) that appeared as 4-line descriptions for this longer query “very line long descriptions in google SERP”.

Answer Box Results Also Appear as Long Descriptions

Another theory is that there is a connection with content that appears in Google Answers and it’s likelihood to display more description lines when it appears in regular web listings.  However, this may not be a cause and effect, but in my opinion more likely a coincidence due to an overlap in criteria for content to appear in either spot.

Both theories combined paint a picture about Google’s intention to better answer the needs of the searchers and fulfill their intent. A 4 word query may be more complicated and detail oriented.  Therefor, Google provides a detail oriented answer directly in the SERP.  If search intent is informational research, than Google can possibly provide an answer right in the SERP.  If the intent is transactional, Google will need to send you off to a shopping area that best suites you.  However, if you are researching products, like “which sports cars have 4 seats”, Google gives a handful of 3 or 4 line descriptions.  If you shorten it down to a more transactional search where you are describing a product, “sports cars with 4 seats”, you see all 2-line descriptions.  So it seems there is a mixture of results depending on how much the query skews toward research.  With this line of reasoning, there is no point for Google to give long descriptions for a transactional query.  It makes more sense to just send the user off to buy the product.

SEO Recommendations for Long META Descriptions

It may be worth while to experiment with longer descriptions. Since Google claims they do not affect rankings, and they more often appear jumbled & rearranged, why not? The place to do it that makes the most sense are the FAQs, detail pages, articles, blogs or anything that tends to give long answers for questions.  Historically this type of content lands a large volume of organic traffic across a wide range of long tail searches.

Let me know in the comments or tweet me about your results for long descriptions in SERPs.

The post 📊 4 Line Long Descriptions in Google SERPs appeared first on Blend SEO.

• first, if they should even use schema.org?
• why they should do microdata?
• what parts of schema.org should they use?
• what is the benefit of having rich snippets?
• what does schema.org have to do with semantic search and Google Hummingbird?

It’s not just upper management or website owners who have questions about Schema.org. Chris Everett, an SEO consultant here in Atlanta with a high degree of technical knowledge recently asked my opinion on schema.org. So I’m writing this post to address both the business question on whether to invest in Schema.org structured data as well as the SEO practitioner questions on keyword strategy. I’ll go through a 4 step process to break down the opportunity into its basic building blocks, identify opportunities, assign measured ROI value and make a prioritized tier based budget.

Business & Marketing Strategy for Schema.org

Rich snippets have been around for a long time. It was one of the first areas I dove into as an SEO Research and Development Technician about 4 years ago at my previous SEO agency in Atlanta. At that time, rich snippets required structured data, a feed or an XML sitemap (which also acts essentially as a feed).  Microdata was the newest structured data markup, as search engines already supported rDFA and microformats. About a year and half later, Schema.org was established via joint effort by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to have one vocabulary and semantic markup language.

I’ve since reviewed $100K+ websites that had structured data as a website development requirement, but in reality only had blank tags. No one came back after the developer to fill in the content for the tags.  I’ve seen developers take their best stab at integrating schema.org across websites for major brand names, only to see no change in search results.  As much as I love and respect web developers (hey, at one point that was the direction my career could have gone), a decision for exactly what content to cover with schema.org microdata should be made by an SEO who is familiar with your business goals and what search engines are capable of using and where they are headed in the future.  It is possible to tag every little detail of your website.  But the best business decision requires you to know the limitations and opportunities in search engines for this technology so that you can invest just enough to use it to leverage visibility for your content that will achieve your business goals.

SEO Strategy for Schema.org and Rich Snippets

For the last 4 years, this has been my strategy for using rich snippets. It follows basic logic that will continue working for years to come.  However, at the end of this article I mention additional considerations to keep in mind for the future as semantic markup and semantic search become a focal point for Google in mobile device search experience. But regardless of who you are, when you decide to use microdata and schema.org markup, the end goal is to maximize visibility in search in a way that leads to marketing goals.  This often means brand awareness, demonstrating thought leadership, some degree of reputation management and of course lead generation.

1. All the Building Blocks: Know What Google Will Display as a Rich Snippet.
   Google Webmaster Tools Help provides a list for types of rich snippets supported by Google. Knowing this list is important. It’s like your tool belt, your art brushes or your building blocks.  Schema.org provides a HUGE list of vocabulary you can markup, starting from thing and drills down to the next level labeled action, class, broadcast service, creative work, event, intangible, medical entity, organization, person, place, product and property.  But not everything you markup with Schema.org will appear in Google. Webmaster Tools Help provides a lot of information and several pages about rich snippets that you can spend hours reading and clicking through. But this is the best page buried among the others to use as a starting place. It gives you all the choices of things that you would bother to mark up.  Because these are the only things that will appear as rich snippets.
   • Rich snippets – Breadcrumbs
   • Rich snippets – Events
   • Rich snippets – Music
   • Rich snippets – Organizations
   • Rich snippets – People
   • Rich snippets – Products
   • Rich snippets – Recipes
   • Rich snippets – Review ratings
   • Rich snippets – Reviews
   • Rich snippets – Software applications
   • Rich snippets – Videos: Facebook Share and RDFa
   • schema.org markup for videos
   • Supported software application types
     
2. Your Blocks: Take Stock of Website Assets That Can be Marked Up
   If you are familiar with your website content and what assets may be available (like videos, expert reviews, customer testimonials, or event calendars), matching them up with items on the list above should be pretty easy.  Breadcrumbs and organization can be done on practically every website.  Video is also pretty common.  Products used to be a good one until Google Shopping required paid-inclusion.  People may be useful for high profile executives, celebrities, actors, lawyers, doctors, politicians or anyone that appears elsewhere online and may be searched by your audience. Events are good if the site keeps updated listings for upcoming events.
   .
3. Which of Your Blocks Can Fit the Holes: Keyword Research for Rich Snippets
   Just because you code a page with proper microdata and test it with a Bing or Google rich snippet markup testing tool, it does not mean a rich snippet will appear in live search results.  Google tells you in the rich snippet testing tool that the appearance of rich snippets is not guaranteed, that it depends on the query.  Here’s what that means in English. Google tries to understand search intent for every keyword.  Based on your keyphrase searched, Google is trying to guess what task you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for somewhere to go? You probably could use local map search results.  Do you need to know a definition, translation or basic information about a subject? The Knowledge Graph may answer your question directly. Do you want to learn how to do something? Videos may be most helpful.To figure out if you have a good chance for your rich snippets to appear, some SEO software like Brightedge will tell you which keywords trigger universal results.  However, I found it more accurate to manually check. But you only need to check keywords where you rank relatively high.  Just check keywords that rank on page 1 or 2 (and maybe page 3), and keep a column that shows which webpage  ranks for each keyword.  If you are doing this exercise for multiple types of rich snippets, it would be wise to keep a separate column for each type, since one keyword can trigger multiple types of rich snippets.  Keeping a column for search volume will help you prioritize later. The idea is to figure out what existing rankings you can boost traffic through by turning a plain listing into a rich snippet. You may also see an improvement in ranking position.NOTE: Go ahead and do breadcrumbs and organization.  Breadcrumbs are sitewide and can appear in all your listings.  The search engine listing will display your breadcrumb navigation between the title and description, giving the user multiple links to multiple pages of your website.  Organization tagging can go on every page or just on contact or about-us pages. Organization tagging should coordinate with your Local SEO efforts and Google+. Refer to this article on how to implement schema.org microdata for Organization.
   .
4. Picking Your Best Blocks: Determine Best Pages to Optimize with Microdata
   This step will help you keep your cost down and narrow your efforts to the best pages. You should have a list of keywords where you have page 1-3 visibility, that display rich snippets for assets you are considering optimizing with schema.org microdata tags. You should also have the search volume and ranking webpage for each keyword. It’s likely that the same pages ranks for several keywords. You can use an excel table to filter the data. Order by webpages and find the subtotal for keyword search volume of all the keywords that rank for each page.  You can do this individually for each type of rich snippet.  Now you have a measure for the return on investment of optimizing schema.org microdata for each page in terms of potential visibility based on search volume.

Budgeting for Schema.org Microdata Tagging for Rich Snippets

With the method above you can create a prioritized list of pages for implementing schema.org tagging, and a measure of potential return on investment for each page based on search volume of the tracked keywords for which each page currently ranks.  Now you have the flexibility of creating tiered estimated cost by implementing across sets of pages divided into whatever tiers make sense from your potential ROI determined in step 4.

Schema.org SEO and the Future of Semantic Search

Google’s search product is being geared toward mobile voice search and has been retooled with the Hummingbird algorithm. The more information Google can pull from your structured data and serve via rich snippets and Knowledge Graph, the more complete the experience becomes.  Google wants to answer questions right in the SERPs, often without the need for a user to click through to a different website. This means SEO must strive to coordinate and maximize brand exposure in SERPs.  Therefore, schema tags for Organization, People, etc. must coordinate with social media, local SEO, Wikipedia and online PR efforts for brand mentions.

For more information on the future of SEO in Google, see my contribution (heading #3) of this BKV article on 2014 media predictions.

The post 4 Step Schema.org SEO Strategy & ROI for Microdata, Rich Snippets & Semantic Search appeared first on Blend SEO.

Background History of Site Migration and Animated Email

1. We migrated the blog from Expression Engine to WordPress in June.
2. We changed the directory structure and used the appropriate 301 redirect rule in the HTACCESS.
3. The rule did not work for all posts and redirected some URLs that should be errors to live posts.
4. The old structure allowed Google to double list every blog post under two different URLs.
5. To eliminate duplicate content, we used the robots.txt to disallow one version of the URLs.
   Disallow: /blog/comments/

SEO Research

Rankings Shuffled After Site Migration to WordPress

In particular we noticed rankings for animated email went from #4 to #67 to zilch.

Despite the 301 malfunctions, I found that http://www.bkv.com/blog/comments/animation-in-email-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss was 301 redirected to http://www.bkv.com/blog/animation-in-email-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

SEO Strategy and Theory

My theory is that Google did not have time to re-index the 301 redirected URLs before disallowing the page.

I have asked the developer to remove the disallow line and I will ping Google to re-index the old URL.

I have also place a link to both URL in this blog post.  That should be enough to get the page re-indexed and hopefully ranking in its old position.  Even though a month has passed, the blog was old in the first place to be ranking so highly.  I suspect it can rank page 1 again.  Let’s see…

The post Animated Email: SEO Experiment to Regain Page 1 appeared first on Blend SEO.

I was asked to contribute to a BKV internet marketing blog post.  This is supporting research and analysis of SEO areas of opportunity for 2013 based on trends in Google algorithm changes. At a concept level, core ideas in SEO have not changed since 2004, when I began my SEO career. But at a tactical level, new white-hat avenues appeared and will likely continue evolving and growing throughout 2013.

1. Core SEO Best Practices …Come Back
2. Local SEO
3. Social Media for SEO
4. Structured Data & Schema.org

1. Core SEO Best Practices …Come Back

Google’s original and ongoing challenge is to rank websites based on original, high quality, authoritative content. 2012 was Google’s first big attempt to algorithmically penalize “cheaters”, evident from algorithm changes:

• constant Panda updates
• Penguin updates
• automatic penalties for too many ads above the fold
• linkbuilding scheme/spam penalties
• boosts for trusted sources
• penalties for repeated copyright infringement
• devaluation for exact match domains used to game rankings
• page layout factors

My SEO Prediction: Google will continue honing its ranking algorithm and efforts to penalize websites using algorithm loophole tactics.  If you have not kept to SEO best practices, you’ll need to clean up your tactics in 2013 because 2012 was only Google’s first clumsy whack at enforcing penalties on the same essential webmaster guidelines that have been standing since the first half of the previous decade.

Remaining 3 SEO Areas…
Social Media for SEO, Local SEO and Structured Data

We can see specific SEO areas of opportunity in Google by looking at past & recent trends in Google algorithm change history while keeping in mind Google’s long term goal to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible and useful.  Bare in mind what you already know about 2013 and future estimates for use of mobile devices and social communities.  Couple that with Google’s recent developments in Schema.org structured data technology, and we make some assumptions.  However, let’s take a closer look at the evidence so we can get a more specific picture of how social media SEO, local SEO and structured data can be leveraged moving forward.

2. Social Media for SEO

As we head into 2012, we see more and more social media tools showing up in Google Analytics, and some sites like Reddit, Meetup, Diigo and Google Plus (no surprise) are labeled as “hubs” that provide a data feed to Google.

My SEO Prediction: We are likely to see more social websites sharing data with Google, providing stronger Social Media SEO signals in 2013.

3. Local SEO

Closely related to social media and the biggest component in mobile search, local SEO provides Google authentication with the real world using manual human input via phone, mail and reviews.  Google rolled out several 2012 local based updates to the algorithm.

• Venice in February
• The 7-Pack in August
• Updates to how local results are calculated in March
• Updates to how local results are calculated in August/September.

My SEO Prediction: Local SEO importance will parallel 2013 growth in mobile device usage, and its authenticity signals will spill over into the general web results algorithm.

4. Structured Data & Schema.org

Knowledge Graph introduced in 2012 is a work in progress that showcases what Google can do with structured data. Microdata data tags using Schema.org vocabulary & definitions make it easy for search engines to interpret meaning for content.  You can wrap these tags around content on your webpages in order to label items in a way Google will understand and feed into their databases. You can insert “meta” tags within microdata, but Google asks  us to keep this to a minimum and in some places claim to only pay attention to tags that wrap visible content. Structured data tags are the SEO “tags” with the most potential.

My SEO Prediction:    Thanks to structured data, the new focus for SEO will be to figure out what content to make visible and wrap with microdata tags.  In my experience, I’ve come across many marketing people outside of SEO who wish to eliminate website content and push SEO into a little box of someone inserting keywords in meta tags that only appear in the code.  Schema.org now puts SEO back in a place that requires marketers to include SEO in the decisions about creating optimized visible content (which is where white hat SEO people have been saying they need to be all along).

The post Top 4 SEO Opportunities for 2013: Website, Social, Local, Structured Data appeared first on Blend SEO.

Some hard learned real estate lessons spurred on the start of a new SEO project.  Experiences with unethical real estate agents really motivated us to put our Atlanta house for sale by owner.  Early this morning, I launched the blog with its first blog post into the wild.  I’m trying out SEO Ultimate as the WordPress SEO plugin.  It’s feature that sold me on trying it out was the rich snippet creator for places and reviews.

So far I wrote one nice long blog post of 1020 words.  I optimized for terms related to for sale by owner with modifiers such as Atlanta, house, home and buyers agent.  I plan to continue writing posts about the for sale by owner experience that people will find helpful who are considering the process.  This will be the link bait.  I also plan to make use of the places and review schema.org structured data and other bells and whistles in SEO Ultimate plugin.

As a future consideration, I’d like to re-skin the blog with a WordPress real estate template, put it on its own domain name, and open up the site for anyone to post their for sale by owner home.  I think free for sale by owner listings would be great link bait and a wonderful way to enable the site to grow and provide something really helpful for people who need to sell their home but can’t afford to pay realtor commissions.

The post For Sale By Owner Real Estate SEO Project appeared first on Blend SEO.

How Good is the Data From Your Keyword Research Tool?

The most important thing for any keyword research tool is its database. No tool can possibly capture 100% of searches performed.  Any keyword tool that provides search volume must capture searches from users that in some way allow their searches to be tracked.  This may be a known panel of users, or users that install a browser toolbar or use a service that in the terms of use agreement (which no one reads) requires users to allow their searches to be tracked.  The fact is, since searches are captured from a limited number of users there is likely to be some skew or level of inaccuracy in the data collected compared to the much greater number of actual searches performed worldwide.  Bells and whistles aside, the quality of the keyword database defines the quality of the keyword research tool.

Example of Keyword Spam in Wordtracker

It appears to me that the Wordtracker database is capturing searches that include a substantial number of systematic searches, probably performed by a program on someone’s computer that is supplying data for Wordtracker’s keyword search volume database.  When researching keyword search volume on “IT security”, a terms I would expect would have a pretty decent volume, slight variations of the same 18 word phrase ranked above and below IT Security.  The variation in the 18 word phrase was only 2 letters.  If this were a common typo for what you would think would be a popular phrase, I could dismiss it.  But the keyword phrase is 18 words long!  And each variation was searched about 100 times!  The 2 letter variation makes it look like some kind of brute force hacking attempt.  Brute force hacking is when a program is used to guess a password by trying every possible character combination.  In this case, it appears like a program is attempting to fill a search form using character variations of a phrase copied from a login page.  Possibly a virus on one or more computers included in Wordtracker’s user database was attempting to hack into a login form on a page that also had an embedded search engine form.

Wordtracker Verses KeywordDiscovery

A glance at KeywordDiscovery results for IT security show absolutely no phrases similar to that spammy phrase found in Wordtracker.

The Right Mix of Keyword SEO Tools

I’m a regular user of Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery SEO keyword research tools.  I use the paid version of Trellian Keyword Discovery and the free plugin for Wordtracker SEO Blogger.  I used to use the paid version of Wordtracker from 2004-2010.  I had access to Keyword Discovery, but never really got into it because the interface was not intuitive and hard to find your way around without clicking and trying everything. I switched to Keyword Discovery in 2010 when I worked as the search engine optimization research & development technician at Medium Blue, an SEO agency in Atlanta.  I basically switched at that point, because that was the keyword research tool they were using.  They had the enterprise package, allowing unlimited keyword lists. Even now as SEO manager at BKV (full service advertising agency in Atlanta), I am sticking with Keyword Discovery as my first choice.  However, I am training my team to continue using Wordtracker to inform their keyword research.  Wordtracker seems to pick up keywords that KeywordDiscovery does not.  The search volumes don’t compare apples to apples across Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery, but you can still get an idea of relative search volume compared to other nearby terms.  Google’s Keyword tool can give a third opinion.  But here again, trust your gut when you see outrageous estimated search volume that looks too good to be true.  Google holds its data close and can provide anything it wants as an “estimate”.  Especially if it entices PPC customers to spend more money on keywords that Google says are going to be popular.  Therefore, I go to Keyword Discovery first, and look to Wordtracker and Google Keyword Tool to get ideas for expanding my list.  I then dump those keywords into Keyword Discovery, export search volumes as Excel and include a column for Google Keyword Tool monthly search volume.  This way I can look at both counts side by side and prioritize which keywords to target.

The post Wordtracker Keyword SEO Tool Spammed By Brute Force Hacker? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Panda Filter Strategy

I enjoy giving free SEO consultation and advice.  The following conversation string is copied out of emails between myself and the www.rocknrolltv.net?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss website owner who filled out the BlendSEO contact form because she abruptly lost rankings for her blog.  Per the website owner’s request, I have omitted her name throughout the conversation.

The unifying theme you can learn from this conversation is that rich, unique content is essential for organic search engine visibility.  Content is what the search engines rank.  If you have content, optimization is a matter of finessing and organizing the content.  As you read below, the ranking problem is due to her website being caught by the PANDA filter.  After comparing competitors and with an understanding of what  degree of thin or duplicate content trips the PANDA filter, the proposed solution is based on content.  There are some great SEO tips in there as well.

Website Owner:

Hello.

I’m interested in possibly hiring your services to help me with our site. We seem to be hitting some penalties with Google. Our site is a music news video show with affiliates. The affiliates give us coupon codes which we have to push. Several of the promo code pages have slipped drastically in the Google rankings and I’m not sure why. I used to be #6 or #7 for “4inkjets coupon code” .. now I am down around #80 or so. This has happened with a few important keywords to me and my income! Please let me know how you work and if you think this is fixable.

Thanks.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Hello [website owner]

You may have either been penalized by the Panda filter, or other competitive coupon websites may have popped up around you crowding you out of top rankings.  Do you have access to ranking and/or traffic data?  I see you have the Google Analytics code on your site.  Did you lose rankings and organic search traffic on a single day or gradually over time?  If on a single day, what date?  Panda filters were run in January and then approximately every 3-7 weeks afterward.  We are currently due for another one any day now.

My first impression is that you have a WordPress blog where the main theme of the content is centered around celebrity news.  The coupon code appears to be “thin” content compared to the news content.  The other sites ranking on page 1 of Google are completely themed about coupons/promo codes. One initiative of the Panda filter is to rank websites where the site as a whole is a quality resource for the search query.  You may have read that one goal for the Panda filter is to eliminate affiliate websites with “thin” content.  You don’t really fall in the category of a site with thin content, except in the area of coupon codes.  For example, there is a link in you navigation to a “Promo Codes” page that has no content (http://www.rocknrolltv.net/promo-codes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss). There is not a real strong connection between printer ink, coupon codes and celebrities, but you may be able to gain back some rankings if you start blogging about coupon codes and building out that area of content.

Website Owner:

Hello Greg,

Wow. This is VERY informative. Thank you! I am formulating a plan of attack and repair now.

Yes, the loss in rankings happened suddenly. It happened twice which I thought was odd. My competitors with video shows and affiliates have also dropped so what you are saying in regards to thin content is making sense. Although these guys seem to be holding up better than the rest of us: www.emmaandpete.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

But all of us have dropped from the top ten as there used to be a little gang of us battling it out. LOL. (all content producers for the same network!)

Good point on the promo codes page. I shall remedy that.

I do have another site or two that I could use just for the coupon codes. www.thesecouponswork.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss It is a little out of date but I could update all of the codes on there and build out the pages etc. And then blog regularly on it to keep things rolling etc etc.

Would you agree that the coupon site would be a better approach and in the meantime, remove dupe content and maybe… start blogging about coupons on the rock n roll tv site? Sort of a two pronged approach?

I appreciate your time with this and if you have time to answer. Great. If not, that’s cool too. It’s hard to figure this stuff out when you’re a video producer/musician first and trying to do SEO the best I can … second! ha ha!

Greg at BlendSEO:

I think the strategy looks good.

Emmaandpete.com has a good amount of content related to the coupons as “Emma’s Blog” (http://www.emmaandpete.com/emma?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) seems to focus on it completely.  Also, “Pete’s blog” has tons of really long posts with tons of copy about whatever he seems to be interested in…as well as “Cooper Acres” also has tons of text about it.  All this text content makes for very rich content.  Videos are great for users who watch them, though they only provide as much search engine friendly content as an image.  Those sections of Emmaandpete.com appear to be categories that get pulled into the blog loop on the homepage.  With all that on-topic content mixed with other rich content, I’m not surprised they did NOT get penalized for thin content.

SEO Tip

A good rule of thumb for length of text on a post is 200 words.

Also, I notice each of your posts has a smattering of content about several different unrelated affiliates.  You might have better luck if each post only talks about one affiliate, and goes a little more in depth talking about that affiliate within the post.  Working the subject matter of one affiliate into a post should give that post a more unified and stronger theme of its subject matter.  Using a couple links from that tighter themed post back to your affiliate landing page will carry more weight than one link from a loosely related post that also links to several other unrelated landing pages.

Part of the Panda filter penalizes sites that have too many advertisements on one page.  I would suggest removing the horizontal banner below each post:

and the one midway down the homepage:

If you do this, and narrow your post content to one affiliate per post, I would not be surprised if you bounce back up the next time the Panda filter is run (it has been run about every 4-5 weeks).

Increase Relevance to Improve SEO

You can take the themes a step further by coming up with a way of categorizing your content so that only certain affiliates are pushed with certain types of rockers.  For example if you only push diamond promo codes in articles that mention Aerosmith.  Or if you don’t write about Aerosmith frequently you could choose some other way of categorizing the rockers like old school rockers, younger pop stars, older pop stars, etc. Then divide up the affiliates and assign them each to one of these categories.  When a post falls into a category, only mention those affiliates assigned to that category.  If you consistently associate affiliate content with a type of rocker content, Google will see the pattern and associate them together.  As long as you use a logical way to categorize the rockers, Google has probably seen that association before among all the web content in the world.

Another way of building an association between the affiliate content and the rocker content might be to take a literal connection.  For example, pushing the 4inkjets in a post about a rocker who has a lot of tattoos, pushing ice/diamonds in a post about a rocker that mentions their jewelry, push match.com in an article that discusses someone’s dating life, etc.

The more consistent you are in presenting the information, the more likely Google is to recognize a pattern in your content.  This will strengthen the relevance of your content around your rockers and affiliate related content.  Google’s goal is to serve up relevant content for search queries.  So keeping the affiliate keywords relevant to your main content will help your rank better for your affiliate content.

Attract Relevant Inbound Links

This consistency between your affiliate content and main content will also help leverage your inbound links.  My guess is that your posts naturally receive links because of the video content and rocker news content.  The strongest inbound links have meaningful anchor text related to your post content…and those links come from pages that are related to your post content.  Aligning your affiliate content with your rocker post content also aligns it with your most powerful inbound links.

Website Owner:

This is incredibly helpful, Greg.

WOW! Thank you so much for answering in great detail. You obviously know what you’re doing and everything you have written makes  alot of sense!

I will remove those ads.

What about the 4×4 squares on the side. Do you think maybe keeping two of them is okay? Does it matter if they link offsite to a ‘conversion’ page rather than in the site?

Greg at BlendSEO:

I see you removed 2 of them.  It is fine if they link off site, but you need to have rel=”nofollow” in the link code.  Not a huge deal, but Google can devalue your links if you allow ads to pass PageRank by not using the nofollow.  This is what you have….

<a href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

It should look like this….

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

Website Owner:

My only other question for you is this.

Posts should be 200 words. Should I simply use my video script as the post so it is all the rock news? This would provide a post that is very appropriate for the site in terms of searchable terms and be over 200 words at the same time. Then… do what you said and align one affiliate with one rocker type thing and write about that as well.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Using the video script is a great way to do this.

Wow. This is really incredible. Thank you so much.

Okay. I was wrong. One last question. I assume I should not ‘go back’ and make changes to previous posts?

Greg at BlendSEO:

There’s nothing negative for SEO. It’s just your preference. I didn’t want to assume.

Another plan is to puff up the FAQ pages and other personal pages so Google knows we are ‘legit’. (I read that can help?)

Greg at BlendSEO:
Your FAQ, About Us and Contact Us look pretty thorough already, but more content can only help.

Thanks for the brilliant idea. I will implement it today and find a way to redo my categories to align them with affiliates. Very cool!

The post Free SEO Consultation Diagnosing PANDA Filter Penalization appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO Tools, Strategies and Upcoming SEO Research

SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig, affectionately known as SEOmom, presented at the Online Marketing Summit July 19th, 2011.  The event was held in Alpharetta, GA at a venue called Roam Atlanta, in the metro Atlanta area, about 20 minutes north of midtown Atlanta, where Blend SEO consultancy is located.   Gillian Muessig revealed a glance at impressive and practical capabilities of SEOmoz software.  Gillian’s prepared presentation hit all the SEO strategy essentials.  She also gave insight on research performed by SEOmoz, keyword optimization strategies and answered questions about Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.  After her presentation, Gillian Muessig caught me up on some of the current social marketing and SEO research her son Rand Fishkin is up to.

Here’s the question most failed internet businesses never asked.

Gillian Muessig, president of SEOmoz (an SEO software tools company), began her 2011 Online Marketing Summit presentation talking about this question.  Before investing in a website, a logo, website hosting, or even a business plan, you must research this question.  How hard will it be to rank on Google page 1 for my product/service? A sure way to failure is to jump into the game without researching your online competition…your would be competitors in search results.  Your competitors for search engine traffic may not be the same direct competitors with which your are familiar.  Whether considering a new website or just a new product line or service, competitive keyword research will help predict your level of success given your level of resources. For a glimpse of keyword competitors, SEOmoz offers the Keyword Difficulty Tool.

The Keyword Difficulty Tool is an SEO research tool that displays in depth results about your keyword phrases.  For each keyword phrase, it displays:

• A Keyword Difficulty score
• Google AdWords search volume
  • local
  • global
  • broad match
  • exact match
• Top 10 ranking pages with data for each
  • page authority
  • domain authority
  • PageRank
  • number of linking root domains
  • number of root domains linking to the root domain

These results are a brief overview of the more in depth information collected via the original SEOmoz Linkscape tool, which is currently provided within the more in depth Open Site Explorer SEO tool.

SEO Research for Keyword Strategies

Next, Gillian Muessig discussed keyword strategies.  For every single keyword, there are variations of phrases that contain that keyword.  To help narrow the focus on what keyword phrases to target, Gillian provided statistics on the length of keyword phrases.  She pulled out the Search Demand Curve chart, which may be old news to some, but a good basic strategy to keep in mind. Realistically speaking, Gillian explains it is impossible to optimize your content specifically for each of the various the long tail terms.  Therefore, target on the “Chunky Middle”.  These are the medium length phrases that may include a core keyword with a few popular modifiers.

To further support targeting the “chunky middle” keyword phrases, Gillian pulled out this chart. It supports targeting the 3 and 4 word phrases, because those are the ones that convert.  4 word keyword phrases are the most converting.

Before talking about blogging, SEOmoz president Gillian Muessig answered various questions, such as why Bing and Yahoo search results mirror each other so closely.  Her answer was that Bing purchased Yahoo’s search technology.

Blogging Fresh Content for SEO

As Gillian put it, freshness is the frequency at which content changes.  Gillian also through out this factoid many people don’t know.  PageRank is named after Google c0-founder Larry Page.  It determines how frequently a webpage is crawled.  Part of the factor for Google to decide how frequently to crawl your webpage depends on how frequently the content changes.  Ways to provide rich new content include blogging on your website, allowing commenting and user reviews.

Hot topics for your business blogging that get picked up and shared by other online resources include:

• money
• health
• family
• infographics
• video

She also suggests to comment on other articles using intelligent conversation invoking comments that link back to your pertinent content.  She warns to avoid making comment spam, comments of little value, or engaging in personal attacks.

Upcoming SEO Research from Rand Fishkin & SEOmoz

After the presentation, I had a chance to chat with Gillian Muessig and find out what Rand and the ‘Moz team will be working on next.  Gillian noted that as social media signals continue to increase in importance, SEOmoz is focusing more on integrating information about social media metrics into SEOmoz toolset.

For example, SEOmoz recently tested whether a page with lots of tweets and just one link was likely to rank better than that same page with plenty of good links from a variety of sources (in other words, following best practices) and just a couple of tweets.  the page with lots of tweets outranked the page with plenty of links.  (A link to these results coming soon)

SEOmoz is also working on helping marketers understand the various kinds of social media metrics and their relative value, including…

• the value of different twitterers
• the value of tweets
• keywords in tweets
• blog mentions

and other citations across social media platforms.  You can expect to see a variety of new work in the social arena from the mozPlex in the coming months.

The post Online Marketing Summit Featured SEO Software Company SEOmoz President & Co-Founder Gillian Muessig appeared first on Blend SEO.

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms.  The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links.  Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites.  Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic.  Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Image Source].

This is not a new issue.  Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed.  As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same.  The penalties just got a bit more serious.

Some of my SEO client sites, despite warnings about duplicate content still don’t realize they have significant duplicate content.  A new SEO business client who owns hundreds of domains was pointing different domains to the same webserver, serving the exact same website – same IP address and everything. Only the website domain credited as the originator will sustain rankings.

In other situations, the same text copy is used on several pages of a sister company websites under different brands.  It used to be that the duplicate pages from these re-branded websites would not rank.  Now the entire site is losing overall rankings.

This kind of thing means they are due for copy writing frenzy.  Find the offending pages – those that use the same copy from other sites and rewrite them as unique.

You can post your new page of copy on a live test bed site and check how similar it is to the other page using this tool.

[Update: March 31, 2011]

My update to this article, along with in depth background on the history of the biggest search engine algorithm changes was posted today on the Medium Blue blog.  I provide search engine optimization research and development for Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing.

The post Panda Content Farm Google Algorithm Update and Duplicate Content appeared first on Blend SEO.

The below table of Microsoft Core fonts is no longer freely available from Microsoft, but these free standard fonts are available here, completely legally thanks to the terms of Microsoft’s font license.

Thanks to Nick Shanks for hosting these fonts and sharing his knowledge on them.

The post Core Fonts for SEO Friendly Website Development appeared first on Blend SEO.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

There are a few options to address redirects, depending on your situation for the old domain to new domain transition:

1. If the two sites are different, ideally, you would redirect each interior page of the old site to a relevant interior page of the new site.  In the .htaccess file of the old site, you would specify the old page (using a relative path) and the new page (using an absolute path).  Here is the code to redirect one page to another individual page.Redirect 301 /old-page http://new-domain.com/new-page?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
2. If you are just changing the domain name and keeping the same folder structure, you can just redirect every page of the old domain to the same path on the new domain.  Here’s the.htaccess code for that.Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
3. If  the sites are different and there is no way to identify relevant pages for a one to one page comparison or if comparing every page of each site is simply not feasible or cost effective, you can use a wildcard in the .htaccess to simply redirect all the interior pages of the old site to the homepage of the new domain and a separate line to 301 redirect the old website to the new domain.  Here is the code for that.

RewritEngine On
RewriteRule . http://www.newdomain.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [R=301,L,NC]
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

.htaccess Redirect Best Practices

301 Redirect non-www to www

Generally any page of a website is accessible by typing the URL into your browser without “www” and with “www”.  For example http://website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and http://www.website.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss will serve the same page.  Any link to a non-www URL that a spider finds, will lead that spider to crawl the entire website using non-www for every page.  This assumes you are using relative paths in your navigation, which most CMS and web developers do.  The search engine is thus crawling your site twice, doubling the task for the crawler.  Now understand that search engine spiders have a limited crawl budget for each website.  Google uses PageRank to determine how deep to crawl your website.  If you look at crawl stats, you will see that your entire site does not get crawled each time the bot visits.  If the bot must crawl through two versions of your website, you basically doubled its work.  Later, the search engine algorithm will analyze the content, identify duplicate pages and determine which ones take priority over the others.

But why make extra work for the search engine?

If you want to optimize your website for search engines, than cut out this extra work for the crawler and algorithm.  Don’t let the crawler find the non-www version of your website.  The server URL rewrite that returns a 301 code will not allow the search engine crawler bot (or humans) to access any non-www URL pages of your website. This is an old standard SEO best practice for reducing duplicate content issues.

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss [L,R=301]

.htaccess Language – Apache Server Configuration Directives

There is a lot more you can do with .htaccess code that will affect SEO.  The below SEO .htaccess tips and more in depth background for creating your own Apache server directives can be found at http://www.corz.org?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.  Many  of these use regular expressions, or regexes that are explained very well at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss.

Escaping:

\      char escape that particular char

For instance to specify special characters.. [].()\ etc.

Text:

.                 Any single character  (on its own = the entire URI)
[chars]       Character class: One of following chars
[^chars]      Character class: None of following chars
text1|text2    Alternative: text1 or text2 (i.e. “or”)

e.g. [^/] matches any character except /
(foo|bar)\.html matches foo.html and bar.html

Quantifiers:

?      0 or 1 of the preceding text
*      0 or N of the preceding text  (hungry)
+      1 or N of the preceding text

e.g. (.+)\.html? matches foo.htm and foo.html
(foo)?bar\.html matches bar.html and foobar.html

Grouping:

(text)     Grouping of text

Either to set the borders of an alternative or for making back references where the nthe group can be used on the target of a RewriteRule with $n

e.g.  ^(.*)\.html foo.php?bar=$1

Anchors:

^      Start of line anchor
$      End   of line anchor

An anchor explicitly states that the character right next to it MUST be either the very first character (“^”), or the very last character (“$”) of the URI string to match against the pattern, e.g..

^foo(.*)   matches foo and foobar but not eggfoo
(.*)l$   matches fool and cool, but not foo

The post Using .htaccess file for 301 redirects and URL rewrites appeared first on Blend SEO.

See the video demonstration below of Yahoo’s instant search product on AllTheWeb.

The post Google Instant Search Produced by Yahoo in 2005 appeared first on Blend SEO.

Frequently SEO consultants and SEO tool providers create and circulate videos promoted as how-to or help resource videos.  But a lot of time these videos have little helpful content amidst a lot of marketing.  Want to save some time?  This video by Ken McGaffin, Chief Marketing Officer of WordTracker is over an hour long. Here is my review of the video on linkbuilding, produced by WordTracker.

For starters, the webpage containing the video gives a list of  How-To’s for the hardest parts of linkbuilding.  It makes claims to solve the hardest problems in linkbuilding.  However, on the outset of the video, you are given a list of some pretty elementary topics.

1. 6 ways link building helps your website.
2. Why would another site link to yours
3. How to find quality link prospects
4. How to determine a quality link?
5. How to get organic links (backlinks without asking)
6. Pitfalls of most link building campaigns
7. How to Plan a blog campaign. 

Keep reading below the video for my in depth review before you watch.

After an introduction selling you on the importance of linkbuilding,  you are given a sales pitch to purchase this linkbuilding tool. For the most part, the demo of the tool WordPress Link Builder gives you a start to end process of managing your linkbuilding campaign.  Some common tools are built in.  For the most part, these tools can be replicated by using advance search parameters in search engines, for example to find back links for your competitive websites.

As far as finding link prospects, I can do much better using Aaron Walls SEOBook Hub Finder tool.  This tool actually gives you common backlinks for your top competitors for a keyword phrase.  The WordPress Link Builder tool, on the other hand falls short in that it simply gives you backlink counts for websites that you enter, as well as another screen for backlink counts for sites that rank for a keyword.  SEO Quake and SEOBook browser plugins can give you this info at a glance or export to a spreadsheet.

The Hubfinder tool does this for you, AND narrows your search by only providing those backlink sources that are COMMON between your keyword competitors (and of course you can specify additional competitors into that mix).  Of course the Hubfinder tool ONLY comes with a $300 per month membership.  It’s up to you whether you want to save time or money.  You can do the same thing by hand by compiling a spreadsheet of keyword competitor backlinks and searching for common domains among the backlinks of your top keyword competitors.

The other major tool I see in the video for thisWordTracker Link Builder tool is a PageRank indicator for each domain providing a backlink, as well as the ability to order prospects in your list by their backlink counts.  So you have backlinks to competitors and counts for their backlinks.  I suppose that’s good if you are in a hurry and don’t want to bother thinking about anything else.  I generally use more ways to judge the quality of a link prospect.  For example:

• How many unique domain outgoing links are on that page? 
• Is it a .edu or .gov top level domain?
• Does the site have .edu or .gov backlinks?
• Are the links using no-follow code? (duh)
• How old is the backlink prospect?

Later in the video, Ken McGaffin gives a list of 12 questions to consider in deciding if a site would be a high quality backlink.  This is very good information, however not built into the tool.  You can find spreadsheet templates out there with checklists built in for these items.

1. Is the site relevant to your website?
2. Does the site link out and are they real links?
3. Are the pages indexed by Google?
4. Does the site invite submissions or guest posts?
5. Has the site been around for a while?
6. an you find the humans behind the site and are they easy to contact?
7. Does the site have a good number of inbound links?
8. Have the articles been published recently?
9. Is the editorial of good quality?
10. Does the editorial attract comments?
11. Are the links in the body copy?
12. Do the links stay in place?

Besides these tools I mentioned, the main other uses of the link building tool WordTracker is selling is management.  It lets you check different back link prospects from the list and and them to a sub list that you can label.  There are places to enter notes for each prospect, etc.

WordTracker Link Builder leaves it up to you to decide how to apply these questions.  I like to keep a spreadsheet with a lot of these questions where the answer is in number form using some sort of ranking.

Here is where most of the learning and teaching in the video comes in.  The tool that Ken McGaffin demos is not that impressive, but he does give some good examples of digging up subcategories. He shows where you can find related communities of bloggers.  There’s no secret really to finding them other than surfing around within a "community" of interlinked websites. He gives examples of link bait, such as the www.willitblend.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss viral videos, controversial articles, surveys, contents, lists, etc.

 Ken McGaffin of WordTracker also gives a list of pitfalls for link builders. These are what he identifies as the most common problems for link building campaigns.

1. Doesn’t create a good enough reason to link
2. Doesn’t spend enough time researching who is important
3. Goes for quantity over quality
4. Expects immediate results
5. Doesn’t engage with the specific community
6. Doesn’t work link building into their regular routine.

At the end of the video, Ken McGaffin describes  the process WordTracker performed in a link building campaign centering the SEO Blogger keyword tool.  This includes

• a synopsis of research

• creating the tool

• commissioned a book about the tool

• created section of content on the website about the tool

• directly contacted authority individuals in the market and asked their opinion of the tool before launch

• wrote and distributed customized press releases for different markets

• tweeted about the SEO Blogger tool launch

The video closes with some more calls to action to buy the WordTracker Link Builder tool.

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