SEO Blogs

Blogging is one of the hottest trends on the net. A blog (short for “web log”) is a web-based diary where the author can ruminate on whatever strikes his or her fancy. The blogger may share photos, poetry, political views, gossip, industry trends, business advice, or the latest on their personal life. By definition, blogs are organized in reverse chronological order. Many are updated daily. They can have one or multiple authors, such as a community blog.

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Here we are, the last session of Search Engine Strategies. It’s been a great, but exhausting conference. The session I attended was on SEO Tools. Three of the five panelists provided their Powerpoints on their websites (just so happens they were the three best presentations), which you should definitely check out because they show screenshots of these tools in action. Download the first two Powerpoints from www.webuildpages.com/ses and the third from www.epiar.com/ses.

Jim Boykin:
Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor (spider simulator)
Copyscape (website plagiarism search)
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap (a keyword map for the whole Internet)
Hubfinder (looks for co-occurring backlinks, which may be authoritative links that help satisfy topic dependant link authority algorithms. To use Hubfinder enter a subject, and / or competing URLs to analyze linkage data of top ranked competing sites via the Yahoo! API.)
Keyword Tracker

Todd Malicoat:
Domain/server level information: Whois Source, DNS Stuff, and Check Class C IP Address (this last one is to make sure the links that you plan on buying are on different class C blocks)
Competitive information tools: GoogSpy, SwitchProxy extension for Firefox
Backlinks & offpage information tools: Pages Indexed, Backlinks Domain, PageRank, Allinanchor, Keyword Density tool, Yahoo! Link Harvester
Keyword information: Google Sets, Keyword Density tools, Google Suggest, Snap.com Keyword Stats
Header & page level information: Server Header Checker
Spidering & indexability: Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Sandbox Detection Tool

Ken Jurina:
Firefox extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, PDF Download, Roboform toolbar, Search Keys, IE View (all downloadable from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org)
Web CEO
Click Tracks
LiveSTATS
Roboform
Marketleap Link popularity check, Search engine saturation, Keyword verification

Bill Hartzer:
OptiLink
OptiSpider
Keyword Combinations
Keyword Helper
URL Trends domain analyzer (it also supports notifying you via email or RSS when changes happen)
Sources of other tools: www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, www.digitalpoint.com/tools/, www.seotoolset.com, www.seochat.com/seo-tools

Paul Bruemmer:
Alexa
RankingManager
Linxviewer
Yahoo! Finance
Hoovers Pro Plus
Print Screen Plus

Well I wanted to blog many more sessions than I did, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully for you, dear readers, there were many other capable bloggers blogging the SES sessions. In particular check out the coverage on Search Engine Roundtable blog.

By the way, a big hello to all the bloggers I met for the first time at SES, including Scott Miller, Aaron Wall, and Barry Schwartz, to name a few.

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I’m a bit behind on my conference session blogging. Waaay too many parties going on; doesn’t leave much time for blogging. The Google Dance last night. Yahoo! party at Great America the night before. And tonight I’ve got another party to go to. Yesterday I spoke on RSS. I’ll post a recap on that session later.

I just attended “Search Engine Q&A On Links”, which was great. Lots of useful advice from Google and Yahoo! about linking (nobody seemed to want to ask poor Ask Jeeves any questions). It was funny how obviously diametrically opposed the engines were to the immediately prior session on “Buying and Selling Links”. It’s hard to reconcile the two different sets of advice. Matt in the hallway before this session was adamant: “Don’t buy links!”

Anyways, without any further ado, here’s the session recap:

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves:
Be cautious of: reciprocal links and purchasing links
Avoid: link farms, cloaking pages, invisible or hidden links that trick the crawler
Become an authority on a subject
Focus on your busines and content. Rest will follow. [I say: “yeah, right…”]
Teoma uses subject specific popularity: garner respect in your industry, subject-specific text based links can be understood. (hubs and authorities model)

Tim Mayer from Yahoo!:
Here’s some important news!! Yahoo! has just launched a brand new service: Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search. Stop scraping the Yahoo site for backlink results and use Site Explorer instead. Access via an API is offered too. And you can export as a CSV file.
Yahoo has 19.2 billion web objects in its index. Over 20 billion objects, when you include the audio and video.
Plans to use community to improve search quality. Social search = within a trusted network, where someone within your network vouches for a site.
Create natural linking strategies. when things start to look unnatural, is when you’ll start getting into trouble. We look at intent (linking to plasma TVs, diamonds, and Viagra all on the same page) and extent (i.e. what looks normal. Having everything on the page as links or 200 links on the page is too much!)
Yahoo! offers a much more comprehensive sample of backlinks than Google, but not a complete set of backlinks. New system (Site Explorer) will be reasonably comprehensive, in his opinion the most comprehensive out there.
It’s unnatural to link to sitemap-1 sitemap-2 sitemap-3 sitemap-4 sitemap-5. If you are doing this, you’re headed in the wrong direction.

Matt Cutts from Google:
Good links are earned links, links that are based on editorial discretion.
Create services that really useful. e.g newsletters, an article a day, syndicate through RSS (attribute my article and give me a link). start a blog.
Matt launched his blog today: mattcutts.com
Think outside the box.
Only SEOs and librarians do backlink searches. Historically we decided to dedicate a subset of our servers to backlinks. Only a sampling of backlinks would be displayed but only for a threshold of PageRank 4 or higher pages. A suggestion was made to show backlinks for lower PageRank pages too. We liked that idea so we now show a random sampling of backlinks, including low PageRank scoring pages too. We show twice as many backlinks as shown before, but still it’s only a sampling of the backlinks.
In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged.
For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites.
Another good approach that alltheweb came up with: spider would always go 1 dynamic page deep from a static page.
Search engines only grab 100k or 200k or 500k so be careful loading up a huge page with a lot of links.
PageRank isn’t as important as SOME people make it out to be. BUT it’s NOT like “PageRank? Oh yeah let’s shuffle that one under the rug! That was sooo 4 years ago!”
“BO” = backlink obsession
We export PageRank only once every 3 months or so.

Technorati tag: Search Engine Strategies

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I attended the “Search Algorithms: The Patent Files” session first thing this morning. The panelists were Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind, Dr. E. Garcia of Mi Islita.com, and Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search, Become.com. My favorite presentation was from Jon. He was not overly technical (Dr. Garcia lost me at the advanced mathematics talking about calculating dot products of vectors) yet he gave solid advice. Here’s what he had to say, in summary:

Take these patents with a grain of salt, because…
- patent applicants don’t need to use all the stuff they include in a patent application.
- patent applicants don’t have to disclose all of its features in a patent application.
- and they recognize that SEOs and their competitors are pouring over their patent apps.

With that said, there are some valuable learnings from the 2003 Google patent. Search engines may take into account: CTR on your page in SERPs, rapid changes in content, rapid growth of in-links, and length of time users spend on your site.

So which of these actually impact your rankings? Some are red herrings, such as:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): it’s too easy to distort (e.g. through clickbotting, which is evil and likely to get you penalized). Probably CTR is used for demotion only. In other words, high CTR won’t help your organic rankings, but low CTR may lower your rankings.
- Time spent on a site: when users hit the back button almost immediately, it can signify an irrelevant page or 404 error. However, if this was used then this would in effect reward black hat tactics like mousetrapping and endless pop-ups — tactics that trap users within a site.
- Rate of change in content: Most recent crawl date, last time the content changed, registration date, and first crawl date mostly impacts crawl frequency, not ranking. Duplicate detection technologies are used to find meaningful changes in site content. Meaningful changes in site content do not include putting today’s date or today’s weather on the page — it doesn’t help rankings. When a site changes its IP address, it is often re-evaluated because it is possibly under new ownership.

According to Jon, what’s not a red herring is:
- Rate of change in links: Most Search Engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandboxing, link aging). A sudden jump in in-links (e.g. from link farming and interlinking and triangle linking lots of domains) can draw scrutiny. There are exceptions for ?ĺspike?Ĺ sites (editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blog posts, lots of web searches).

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Hello from sunny San Jose. I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference - THE place to be if you care about search. I’m going to be blogging the sessions, so stay tuned over the next 4 days.

Here’s my first installment: a recap on the session I attended before lunch today on “Earning from Search & Contextual Ads”. Panelists were: Jason Calacanis, Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc., Will Johnson, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc., Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager of Google AdSense, Google Inc. and Jen Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com.

Jen from JenSense.com started the panel off:
Jen started off by comparing and contrasting AdSense w/ Yahoo’s new YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network). Similarities include…
- very large pool of advertisers
- real time stats
- neither will tell you the revenue split
- can’t show both YPN and AdSense ads on the same page

Differences include…
with AdSense:
- 4 ads in smaller font
- international publishers ok
- offers additional tools & services
- more competition for higest paying
- multiple ad units per page
- “smart pricing” (CTR taken into account in pricing)

with YPN:
- 3 ads in a much larger font
- beta for US publishers
- only traditional ad units
- fewer publishers means less competition
- same ads on multiple units
- no smart pricing
- in future will be able to transfer your earnings to your advertising account

Many alternatives to AdSense and YPN:
- Kanoodle brightads: avg $0.35 earnings per click (EPC). 30,000 advertisers in network.
- Adsonar: thousands of advertisers
- Clicksor: avg $0.20 EPC. 4,000 advertisers running 20,000 campaigns. Will pull ads from other ad networks if insufficient clicks.
- Chitika: avg EPC $0.50
- Mirago: avg EPC .21p (approx $0.31 USD). you must invoice them. 12,000 advertisers
- ContextWeb: over 40,000 advertisers
bidclix: avg EPC 0.30. 11,000 advertisers
- Others include Miva Adrevenue xpress, Quigo, etc.
Rhetorical question from Jen: “When will MSN jump in?”

Optimizing tips:
- Placement: Bottom of page is bad. Good practice is to make link color the same as other links on the site. Anther good tactic is to place the ads on the left column where the nav usually is.
- Proximity:
- Ad unit selection: Try a variety of sizes and test.
- Ad unit colors & borders: Don’t use the standard ad unit colors / layout. Mix things up to prevent banner blindness. Try both complimentary and contrasting colors. Most sites find hidden borders yield highest CTR. like 2 or 3 times
- URL filters: Don’t do it as a way to get higher paying ads to appear. Only block your direct competitors or your own websites.

Testing:
- Use AdSense or YPN channels to track highest CTR & earnings pages. AdSense or YPN may perform better. Try both.
- Test on non-holiday weeks
- Try switching ad placement, ad unit sizes and colors
- Keep track of what works and what doesn’t
- Never assume that what works on one site will work on another.

(more…)

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I was recently interviewed by a journalist on business blogging and its benefits. He wanted to know specifically what it’s done for me to have a blog. Here’s what I told him:

• I’ve gotten inquiries from prospects who found Netconcepts through my blog.
• My blog helps me get speaking gigs and PR. In fact, I recently got one of my blog entries taken verbatim by a well-respected US magazine — DM News — and published as an article.
• It builds credibility and establishes me as a thought leader in the eyes of prospects and clients. For example, one of our recent clients choose us over a competitor for online marketing services partly because of my blog.
• It’s helped upsell existing clients on additional services, as many of them are regularly reading my blog. For example, some of our clients are going to start a blog and use us for blog design, blog consulting, etc.
• I’ve gotten links from popular bloggers, like Robert Scoble of Microsoft. It’s much more difficult to get a mention from Scoble (or other prominent bloggers) if you’re not a blogger. Scoble’s blog, called Scobleizer, is one of the most well-linked blogs on the Internet. Some bloggers have even included me on their blogroll, like Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog (Thanks, Toby!)
• It’s helped me with recruiting panelists for Thoughts Leaders Summits that I organized and moderated for MarketingProfs. For example, the lineup of panelists for one of the recent summits included Internet marketing gurus: Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Debbie Weil. My blog played a role in establishing my credibility with them and getting them to respond to my “cold call” email message.
• Blogs are also great for SEO (search engine optimization). Links are important to the search engines, and the blogosphere is richly interlinked with bloggers linking so much to each other. Blogs are also rich in content, which search engines also like. If I blog about RSS and SEO (which I have), for example, next thing I know I’m #1 in Google for [rss and seo].
• I’ve also built some great business relationships with other respected bloggers. They have referred business to me, shared speaking opportunities with me, etc.

I had yet another experience with that last item, just today in fact. I’m speaking at the Frost & Sullivan Sales and Marketing East conference in Boston, and a fellow blogger from a competing SEO firm who was sitting at the table I was facilitating earlier today on blogging very kindly publicly commended my blog to the rest of the group for its content and thought leadership. (Thanks Stephen!) There’s a guy who understands the benefits of coopetition (rather than competition)!

The journalist also wanted to know how my blog’s traffic had grown over time. Here are the charts I shared with him showing the growth trends in pageviews and visitors:

Pageviews:

Visitors:

A pretty respectable trend, I’d say. If you’re curious what the actual numbers are, I will give you a hint and say that the both charts measure into the tens of thousands of visitors per month. Hopefully the trend will continue.

One thing I really need to do to keep the numbers heading northward is to blog more frequently. I’m sure traffic growth will accelerate once I do. I just need to buckle down! I guess I’ll just sleep less… (sigh). You other bloggers out there know what I’m saying here, don’t you! More often than we’d like, it’s the wee hours when we’re blogging.

How might a blog pay off for you? For some general ideas, read this article of mine, on blogging, published in last month’s issue of Multichannel Merchant magazine.

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Last Friday it seemed like the whole blogosphere was abuzz with the news that Google unveiled its new Google Sitemaps service, a free inclusion service where you publish an XML file of your site pages to Google so its spider can get a better sense of what to crawl of your site. This is good news, especially for dynamic sites that aren’t getting fully indexed. I appreciate Google once again showing its thought leadership. Not only is Google giving webmasters a new way to relay information about their site structure information to its spiders, but it’s sharing this new technology with the other search engines by releasing the protocol and code as open source.

This all sounds wonderful, but there are 2 quite major problems with Google’s approach.

• First, it doesn’t solve the duplicate pages problem that a great many dynamic sites have. Even the Google Store suffers from this (which I blogged about previously but here’s a more recent example of a Google Store product page being duplicated times in Google’s index). The Google Sitemaps protocol does not provide a way for webmasters to convey which pages are duplicates of other pages. A site that gets crawled incorrectly by Googlebot, due to superfluous or non-essential parameters/flags being included in the URLs of links on the pages, will continue to get crawled incorrectly. An “Official Google Sitemaps Team Member” states that the sitemap XML file will merely augment their crawl, it won’t replace existing pages in the index:
  

  This program is a complement to, not a replacement of, the regular crawl. The benefit of Sitemaps is two fold:
  – For links we already know about thro our regular spidering, we plan to use the metadata you supply (e.g., lastmod date, changefreq, etc.) to improve how we crawl your site.
  – For the links we dont know about, we plan to use the additional links you supply, to increase our crawl coverage.

  The high-level Google engineer who goes by GoogleGuy in the online forums explains Google Sitemaps in this way:

  Imagine if you have pages A, B, and C on your site. We find pages A and B through our normal web crawl of your links. Then you build a sitemap and list the pages B and C. Now there’s a chance (but not a promise) that we’ll crawl page C. We won’t drop page A just because you didn’t list it in your sitemap. And just because you listed a page that we didn’t know about doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl it. But if for some reason we didn’t see any links to C, or maybe we knew about page C but the url was rejected for having too many parameters or some other reason, now there’s a chance that we’ll crawl that page C.

  So, the way I read GoogleGuy’s explanation, if pages A and C are essentially duplicates of each other, with A containing an additional superfluous parameter in its URL (like sortby=default or lang=english), then BOTH could end up in Google’s index. Thus, Google Sitemaps won’t reduce the amount of duplication in Google’s index; in fact, I believe it will increase it.

  Duplicate pages, on its own, may not sound like a problem for webmasters as much as it is for Google itself, which has to dedicate additional resources to maintain all this redundant content in its index. However, it does have serious implications for webmasters, because it results in PageRank dilution ?Į where multiple versions of a page split up the “votes” (links) and PageRank score that a single version of the page would aggregate.

• This brings me to the second, related problem with Google Sitemaps: it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the phenomenon of PageRank dilution. PageRank dilution results in lower PageRank, which in turn results in lower rankings. For example, consider that the above-mentioned Google Store’s product page (the “Black is Back T-Shirt”) is in Google’s index 5 times instead of just once. So each of those 5 variations earns only a fraction of the total potential PageRank score that it could have earned if all the links pointed to a single “Black is Back T-Shirt” page.Google Sitemaps needs to provide a way to convey, or to sync up with, the site’s hierarchical internal linking structure, so that it’s clear which pages should get how much of a share of the PageRank flowing into the site’s home page. Since the primary holder of PageRank score is the home page (that is, after all, the page that most everyone links to), it’s up to the site’s internal hierarchical linking structure to pass the PageRank of the home page to the rest of the site. As such, a page that is 2 clicks away from the home page will get a much larger share of PageRank score passed on to it from the home page, versus a page that is 5 clicks away from the home page.

Here’s how I suggest both of the above issues be rectified: by extending robots.txt with some additional directives that specify:

• which parameter in a dynamic URL is the “key field”
• which parameter is the product ID and which is the category ID (specifically for online catalogs)
• which parameters are superfluous or that don’t signficantly vary the content displayed

Armed with this information, Googlebot will be able to not only eliminate duplicate pages but also intelligently choose the most appropriate version to save in its index and then associate with that page the PageRank of ALL versions of the page. The days of session IDs killing a site’s Google visibility would be over! Google admits in its Sitemaps FAQ that session IDs are still a problem even with the advent of Google Sitemaps:

Q: URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them?

Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site.

Remember, getting indexed only gets you to the party, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be popular at the party. Google Sitemaps may help you get more pages indexed, but if those pages all have a PageRank score of 0, then what was the point? It’ll be like sitting along the wall the whole time with no one asking you to dance!

GravityStream, our SEO proxy technology (the concept of SEO proxies is explained in my article in Catalog Age last October) deals with PageRank dilution by distilling URLs in links into their lowest common denominator and replacing them on the proxy. We’ve found that, even as Googlebot gets more aggressive at spidering dynamic sites with complex URLs and starts indexing one of our clients’ sites more fully, our proxy still has a major leg-up on the native site that it’s proxying. For example, our GravityStream proxy of PETsMART.com is #1 in Google for “best pet toys”, and yet the corresponding page on the PETsMART.com native site is nowhere in the first 10 pages of results even though it is indexed. Until Google extends Google Sitemaps to deal with PageRank dilution, I’d expect that a GravityStream proxy will still trump a native site, even if it’s using Google Sitemaps. That means that currently, despite Google Sitemaps, GravityStream still plays an important role for online retailers. Nonetheless, it’s my sincere hope that Google takes my feedback on board and reworks their protocol!

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You can’t just ask a Search Engine Optimization vendor if they are ethical. Of course they will say “yes.” So if you are shopping for some SEO help, how do you screen out the baddies?

A while back I blogged about how to be objective with your SEO vendor selection, but I didn’t specifically cover how to screen out the unethical ones. I will do that now.

First off, interview the vendor extensively. Get them to explain the techniques they will be using. A “yes” from them to any of the following questions is a warning sign:

• Do your techniques involve any kind of deception?
• Do you use proprietary techniques?
• Do you use doorway pages or anything similar?
• Do you do deceptive redirects?
• Have you ever had sites banned?
• Do you offer rank guarantees? (You can?Ĵt guarantee something you have no control over. The only way you can get a guaranteed rank is through pay-per-click.)
• Do you send email to prospects with whom they do not have a prior existing business relationship or permission from those prospects in advance? (If so, that’s spam! Never do business with a spammer.)

During your discussions with the vendor, if they describe their SEO tactics as short-term, you might want to reconsider. SEO, when done right (i.e. when following “best practices”), has long-term sustainable impact ?Į for years, in fact. For proof, just read this.

After you’re done quizzing the vendor, talk to their clients. Ask those clients:

• Does your SEO vendor teach you how to fish, or do they always do the fishing for you?
• Have your traffic and sales gone up a lot because of the vendor? If so, do you believe the increase to be sustainable?
• How long have you worked with the vendor? How long do you plan to continue working with them? Any idea what the vendor’s client churn rate is?

Then you’ll need to do some of your own investigating. Check the HTML code on their clients’ sites for hidden text, hidden links, and so forth. Also examine what their clients’ websites are serving to the search engines. There are a couple different ways to view a website through the eyes of a search engine spider: one is through a Firefox browser extension called User Agent Switcher; the other is through the cached version of the page that was indexed by the engine, available from the Cached link in the search results. Compare and contrast the page meant for the search engines to that corresponding page off the native website as seen by a normal visitor. If the content served up to the search engines is something completely different than what is served up to visitors, then they are spamming. Things to look for when making your comparison: if the title tag is significantly different, and if keywords have been stuffed into the body copy, the meta tags, and into parts of the website to help the version that was shown to search engines rank better. Finally, search the online forums and SEO directories like SEOPros.com and SEOConsultants.com with Google for complaints about the vendor.

Got any horror stories or lessons learned to share from dealing with a less-than-stellar SEO vendor? Post a comment.

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There has been plenty of discussion in the blogosphere about blogs and search engine optimization (SEO). Google in particular seems to love blogs. Blogs are rich in content, heavily linked, with links that tend to be contextual, and without much in the way of code bloat or gratuitous flash animation. In short, blogs are search engine friendly out-of-the-box.

But what about SEO’ing a podcast, the blog’s newest cousin?

Podcasting (where anyone can become an Internet radio talk show host or DJ) presents unique opportunities to the marketer/content producer that blogging does not. I expound on this a bit more in my recent MarketingProfs article but the benefits of podcasting from an SEO standpoint wouldn’t seem as obvious. Podcasts are usually audio content, so you don’t get all this rich textual content that the search engine spiders can snarf up. You also don’t get the rich inter-linking that happens with blogs because you can’t embed clickable URLs throughout your MP3 files.

Nonetheless, I believe you can SEO your podcasts. Here’s how:

1. Come up with a name for your podcast show that is rich with relevant heavily searched-on keywords.
2. Make sure your MP3 files have really good ID3 tags ?Į rich with relevant keywords. ID3V2 even supports comment and URL fields. The major search engines may not pick up the ID3 tags now, but they will! And besides, there are specialty engines and software tools that already do.
3. Synopsize each podcast show in text and blog that. Put your most important keywords as high up in the blog post as possible but still keep it readable and interesting.
4. Encourage those who link directly to your MP3 file to also link to your blog post about the podcast.
5. Consider using a transcription service to transcribe your podcast or at least excerpts of it for use as search engine fodder. Break the transcript up into sections. Make sure each section is on a separate web page and each separate web page has a great keyword-rich title relating to that segment of the podcast. And, of course, link to the podcast MP3 from those web pages. There are many transcription services out there, where you can just email them the MP3 file or give them an URL and they send you back a Word document. Here’s a partial list of transcription services .
6. Submit your podcast site to podcast directories and search engines such as audio.weblogs.com.
7. Let people in your industry, such as bloggers and the media, know that you have a podcast because podcasting is quite new and novel. It will be more newsworthy and linkworthy than just another blog in your industry.
8. Don’t just get up on your soapbox. Have conversations with others, in the form of recorded phone interviews, and podcast those as well. Pick people who have great reputations on the web and great PageRank scores, and ask that they link to your site and to your podcast summary page.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of tactics. It is simply meant as a catalyst for creative thinking. SEO, in particular the link building aspect, isn’t about just following a set list of formulae. It is about creatively thinking outside the box and differentiating yourself in ways that make your site eminently more linkworthy than your competitors.

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Hello from Search Engine Strategies in NYC. Yesterday I spoke at the Webfeeds, Blogs, and Search session. My talk was focused on on implementing RSS feeds as part of your search engine marketing strategy. I’ve made my Powerpoint deck available online at www.netconcepts.com/learn/rss.ppt.

A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.

There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:

• You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the <content:encoded> container. This is known as a “web bug.” Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
• You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the <link> containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user’s IP not on clicktracked URLs)
• You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed… Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs… for example Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber’s email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.

I consider personalized RSS feeds to be “best practice.” As of yet I’m not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I’m sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can’t scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it’s one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you’ll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.

IMPORTANT: An oft overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!

Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders’ feed access.

Some more “gotchas” if you don’t set things up right:

• You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
• You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the “Add to My Yahoo!” link; don’t just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically “ping” Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)
• Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don’t know your RSS feed address. That means putting <link> tags in your HTML. For example:
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.rdf" />
  Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: “Subscribe in NewsGator,” “Subscribe on Bloglines,” and “Add to My Yahoo!”

RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:

• Getting onto bloggers’ “blogrolls” (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
• Getting links through “trackbacks” (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers’ blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)

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