Usability Keyword Research Blogs

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 | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

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 | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

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 | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

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 | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

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 | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) starts with keyword research. If you chase after the wrong keywords, your search engine optimization efforts will be a waste of time.

Filed under: Articles Keyword Research SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | 1 Comment »

Spread the word:      

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.

Filed under: Articles Blogs Business Blogging SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

I love Google as much as the next person, but their official blog just doesn’t do it for me. The “voice” just does not seem real, or anything I can relate to. It feels scrubbed by the PR department; I might even go so far as to say it comes off as a mouthpiece of the PR department. I don’t get that feeling from Google engineer Matt Cutts’ blog. The official blog, however, has its face to the company, and consequently its butt to the reader. That’s just a gut feeling I get reading their blog, but the specifics of what bother me I found harder to put my finger on… until now.

I’m not telling you anything new when I say that business bloggers who are overly self congratulatory or self promotional are anathema to the blogosphere. But where do you draw the line? When is it too much? In trying to quantify what bothers me about the Google blog, I came up with what I believe is a quantifiable “sniff test” to ascertain if a blog is too narcissistic or inward-facing: it involves “keyword density.” Keyword density is simply the ratio of a particular word to the the total number of words in a page (or in this case, in a post). Read on, to learn how you can apply this test to your or others’ blogs.

As an SEO (search engine optimizer), I scoff when I hear the words
“keyword density”. Calculating and fine-tuning a page’s keyword density
in order to appear higher in the search results is a fool’s errand.
Yet, I think I’ve finally found a valid application for a keyword
density calculator, and it has nothing to do with SEO. Here’s what you do…

Add up the number of occurrences of “we”, “us”, “our”, and your company name in the blog post. Do the same with “you” and “your”. Calculate the
ratio of these two numbers. And calculate the keyword density for both.

What about “I” and “me”, and “my”? I’ve intentionally not counted them, because I recognize that the blogger needs to claim their thoughts and opinions as their own. It’s the faceless self-important corporate voice that really bugs me the most. And that’s what this sniff test ferrets out.

Let’s work through an example. Take for instance this post from the Official Google Blog:

• 17 occurrences of “we”, “us”, “our”, “Google” or “Googlers”
• 3 occurrences of “you” or “your”
• 6:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 422 total words in the post
• 4% “it’s all about us” density
• 0.7% “it’s all about you, the reader” density

Compare that with this randomly-selected post from the Yahoo! Search Blog:

• 7 occurrences of “we”, “us”, “our” or “Yahoo” (in the context of the company not part of a product name)
• 8 occurrences of “you” or “your”
• 1:1 ratio of us-speak to you-speak
• 214 total words in the post
• 3% “it’s all about us” density
• 4% “it’s all about you, the reader” density

In this very small sample set, Yahoo’s blog seems to talk to the reader
much more effectively. Not to mention their blog supports reader
comments, unlike the Google blog.

Now to make this more scientifically valid, we just need an automated
tool that analyzes all of the posts from both Y!’s and Goog’s blogs to
compare. That’d be a nifty little tool if it existed. Perhaps I’ll get
someone here at Netconcepts to code it…

– Stephan

Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

The marriage of search engine optimisation and usability can be a happy one. Granted, just creating a successful user experience can be a challenge. But to also cater to the search engine’s algorithms concomitantly - this can seem downright daunting. Many companies, often inadvertently, choose one approach over the other. The goal, elusive as it may seem, is improved search engine rankings ALONG WITH greater accessibility and better overall usability. Get ready for a dose of insight, strategy, process, and well-considered opinion to cure what ails your site.

Join Stephan for an information-packed session covering:

• Wordsmithing approaches
• Benchmarking criteria
• Contextual linking
• Role of keyword analysis
• Optimal site structure
• Wielding the full power of CSS
• Measuring Return On Investment
• Best practices & worst practices

Filed under: Seminars SEO Usability | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Steve Spangler of SteveSpanglerScience.com leapt in — boots and all! First time attendee and speaker on my panel “What Happened when eTailers dove into Blogs, Podcasting and RSS” at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week, Steve didn’t let the thought of mingling with billion dollar online retailers intimidate him. And he has a message for all those more modest online retailers — be there next year! His head still hurts, because there was so much to learn.

Steve says:

There was so much information that I filled an entire reporter’s notebook. And I also asked myself: “How is it that we are surrounded by people who are so smart?” In a culture where the Internet is changing so quickly, and everybody has got their different spin on what’s happening, I realized there were 1500 people there, 1499 of whom knew more than I did about on-line retail.

To get to have breakfast with the Internet Marketing Director of Best Buy, or the guy from CNET, or Amazon.com, these people were willing to share their best practices in an open and frank way. I learned how to increase clickthrough rates. Conversion rates. Landing pages. I was overwhelmed by what people were willing to share with us. What was so refreshing was that the major players were extremely honest with one another as well!

There is no magic bullet, nor one thing that anybody can do to make their website search better look to their customers. A website is a living breathing being. You have to feed it, nurture and care for it. Just like raising kids. We are all excited when a child is born, and then it grows and we get into the serious business of parenting.

Walking the exhibit hall for the first time in my life, I visited a booth called BillMeLater. They offer a great service, but don’t take on any company doing less than $15 million in on-line retail. We’re a little smaller than that! But it certainly was eye opening.

From the standpoint of finding out what a landing page was, and what caused people to stay on that page - that was the best takeaway from the whole conference. We were in the process of doing a product page redesign, and what I took away from that session changed what we put on that page. What would be the #1 factor on that page? Price? Shipping? Trust? Answer: Free shipping ?Ĭ or some form of shipping discount. An orange “free shipping!” logo or box drew the greater conversion rate. The key is to get people to put their credit card in and drive those sales.

Kelly Mooney’s “Gender Agenda” session provided a great insight into website viewing habits. The guys tend to stay predominantly on one site, 3 or 4 clicks just to compare prices. To women, however, it is an incredibly enjoyable experience, many taking 20 minutes to browse for products other than their initial reason for visiting. That sort of information is important to an on-line retailer. I have got a lot of work ahead of me.

As for my own panel presentation with Stephan, I looked out at that audience and saw people from those huge billion dollar retailers thinking that this blogging lark could be something we are going to have to explore.

Listen to my podcast interview with Steve after Shop.org for his full and frank views on this remarkable event. And take on board his recommendation: Be There Next Year!

Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word: