This screencast, presented by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer, explains how to install and use the free Firefox extension SEO-Links to gauge the succesfulness of text link advertisers.
First Stephan installs the extension. Then he jumps to the Seacoastonline.com home page, which is selling links over in the right column half-way down the page. By simply hovering the cursor over each of the text link ads, he obtains backlink counts for each advertiser and their rankings across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search for the phrase in the anchor text. This provides an indication as to how effective that advertiser is at SEO. The assumption is that an SEO-savvy and successful text link advertiser will make better advertising decisions than an unsuccessful one. If a bunch of successful ones flock to a particular site selling text link ads, then that’s an indication that the site is a good one to advertise on (assuming other things check out like the advertisers aren’t using spam tactics).
Turns out the site is not a good site for link advertisers. Find out why by downloading the 4 minute video as either a 2 megabyte WMV file or a 5 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)
Filed under: Link Building Screencasts SEO
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I’ve produced my first screencast, using TechSmith’s excellent software program Camtasia Studio. In it I show how to install and configure the Google Toolbar in the Firefox web browser to display PageRank scores on any web page that you visit. I also show how to change the display of the Toolbar and some other settings. If you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed on your PC or Mac, this little 6 minute video will show you the process along with some of the benefits.
I’d love feedback on how to improve my screencasting. I intend to do quite a few more of these, so feedback early on will help ensure that these screencasts are the best they can be.
Note that I will be providing beginner, intermediate, and advanced level SEO tips and tricks. This particular one is beginner level.
Download the screencast as either a 5 megabyte WMV file or a 6 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)
Filed under: Blogs Screencasts Tools
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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging Tools
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Content is king on the web. A site without content is doomed to lousy search engine rankings. Search engine spammers can’t be bothered writing good content. Especially when they can easily steal it from other web sites. How do they do it? They use “scrapers” — spiders that trawl web pages and/or RSS feeds and siphon off the content. They then stick your content on their own site and slap their own ads and affiliate links onto it.
The spammers especially want you to use relative links across your web site. That way they can lift your entire website and they don’t even have to go to the trouble of rejigging your internal links to make them point back to the scraped site. Granted, as far as bandwidth conservation, relative links are better than absolute links (also known as “hard links”). But let’s not make the spammer’s job any easier.
So use absolute links throughout your site.
As a side benefit, if your site responds to multiple domains and you use absolute links, you’ll also be helping the search engines reduce the potential for duplicate content by definitively identifying the full, canonical URL.
Also, to check if your site has been scraped, use Copyscape.
Filed under: Blogs SEO
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Tag clouds, a Web 2.0 sort of user interface for navigating tagged content a.k.a. folksonomies, gives certain hyperlinked keywords a larger font size treatment than others. These links lead to various category pages, tag pages, or search results pages.
One of my favorite implementations of a tag cloud on a blog is on O’Reilly Radar (on the right).
Another is the one on Eurekster’s blog (on the left).
The latter uses a new approach of “auto-tagging”. Eurekster calls this tag cloud of theirs a “BuzzCloud”. Webmasters can get one for free by signing up for their new Swicki service, which is a personalized Web search engine that is targeted and relevant to your site’s audience. You can seed your buzzcloud with search terms of your choosing, then Eurekster adds additional terms based on which searches are popular with your visitors. Visitors who click on the links are taken to a Eurekster search results page for that term. The results popular with you & your audience are promoted to the top of the search results and marked with an icon — in essence, tagging the results as well as the term.
Tagging that requires manual intervention such as del.icio.us and Technorati definitely have their use, but I think they are primarily for more web-intensive users; the combination of manual control and auto-tagging offered by Eurekster with swickis can potentially lead to mass uptake amongst web content editors. I’ve put a Eurekster swicki & buzzcloud here on my blog (on the right-hand column, near the bottom). Try it out and let me know what you think. Get your own free swicki for your blog or website here.
Filed under: Blogs SEO Tools
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Most affiliate programs do not benefit search engine rankings because the link from the affiliate to the merchant doesn’t count as a “vote.” Thus, the merchant will not see a benefit in their Google PageRank and consequently in their search engine rankings. For example, any merchant using LinkShare or Commission Junction will not see such a benefit. That’s because they all use temporary redirects, also known as 302 redirects. That type of redirect, which is the one programmers and site administrators tend to use by default, doesn’t pass the link gain (e.g. Google PageRank) on to the target (final destination) URL. Only a very few affiliate management services allow the merchant to capitalize on the link gain of the affiliate. MyAffiliateProgram.com is one such affiliate solution. So I checked them out, and it turns out that it kinda works. Yes, kinda.
Here’s the problem. The affiliate solution needs to use permanent redirects (a.k.a. 301 redirects) rather than temporary (302) ones. MyAffiliateProgram.com uses what they call “direct links.” Here are a couple examples of affiliate-tracked direct links that they provided me to look at: http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/?kbid=1001 or http://www.kitchen-universe.com?kbid=1001. But when you visit either of these 2 URLs, there is no redirect at all. Consequently, this creates lots of duplicate pages in Google when Googlebot finds these affiliate-tracked direct links and follows them. Taking the first URL as an example, if you search Google for site::www.myaffiliateprogram.com inurl:kbid you’ll see 6,980 duplicate pages in Google. In other words, these are pages that were already in Google with URLs that don’t have kbid= appended at the end.
Think about it this way: Yes, with MyAffiliateProgram.com a merchant will get PageRank flowing to all the links contained on the countless duplicates of the merchant’s home page that are getting indexed. But because there is no 301 redirect present, MyAffiliateProgram has failed to collapse the link gain to one definitive version of the merchant’s home page. Then search engine spiders come along and index all these versions of the merchant’s home page which compete with the merchant’s true home page (the one without any kbid=). Furthermore, searchers who click on listings in the search results that contain kbid= in the URL will get counted as referrals from the affiliate and the merchant will pay for that. Ouch!
So, buyer beware when shopping for an affiliate management service that passes PageRank to your site. The devil’s in the details.
Any readers want to recommend affiliate solutions that do effectively pass link gain?
UPDATE: Just found this great blog post from Greg Boser that discusses this issue in more detail.
Filed under: Blogs SEO
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Optimizing your site for higher search engine rankings is an obvious activity for anyone with a website. Optimizing your site for higher conversion rates is another obvious one. But how about optimizing for higher advertising revenue — specifically, a bigger check from Google for the AdSense ads that you display on your site.
Consider for example if you had a website on redecorating for Do-It-Yourselfers. You might have a page all about “housepainting.” But, as described in this article in USA Today about webmasters making money off of AdSense, “housepainting” isn’t a great money term for AdSense revenue — it’s only a 20-cent word. “Home improvement,” on the other hand, is worth $2. That’s a $1.80 difference.
So in effect you can give yourself a nice pay increase just by changing the keyword themes of your pages that display AdSense ads by creating new content pages around those keywords. And the real opportunists out there are creating pages about mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer caused by asbestos that lawyers are bidding on. That keyword is worth an order of magnitude more than “home improvement.” But that would be sooo dirty! Thankfully I don’t know anyone THAT dirty!
Filed under: Blogs SEO
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MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Links are the currency of the search engines. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will be in vain.
Link building is arguably the most difficult, most misunderstood, and most poorly executed aspect to SEO. Join SEO and link-building expert Stephan Spencer as he guides us through the quagmire and shows us the way to great search engine rankings.
You will learn:
- Google’s PageRank scores: red herring or useful metric?
- What makes a link valuable or not
- Creative strategies for building link-worthy content
- What works when approaching webmasters with link requests
- Pitfalls to avoid if buying or bartering links
- The phenomenon of Google bombing and making it work in your favor
- The role of authorities, hubs, and topical relevance
- How to leverage blogs and the blogosphere for link building
- To get your content successfully syndicated onto other web sites with RSS
- How to capture the link gain (PageRank) of your affiliates and your advertising
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
Filed under: Link Building Seminars SEO Webinars
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Links are the currency of the Web, so it is important to have a plan in place to improve the number and quality of the links to your site from the outside.
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Filed under: Articles Link Building SEO
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