Top 12 SEO Tips for 2010
So here I am for the fifth year and about the 10th version of Top Tips (updates included).. It’s taken me awhile to get around to them this time because as time goes on, you become more educated and recommending something that hasn’t already been said is difficult. Therefore this time around I’ve decided to do a mix of some questionable techniques (that of course I do not condone) with some still seemingly unknown or underutilised white-hat information, and one or two tips that consolidate other basic, but important tips that I have broken up in the past.
I decided to do this because even today I speak with people that read my stuff years back but have yet to implement them. We also have many readers that are new Webmasters and Affiliates that will benefit from seeing that the small stuff is just as important as the big stuff.
More importantly I want to share techniques in a step-by-step way that anyone can implement them without even knowing a word of code.
Once again I must say that I am simply a messenger of information. I do not condone in any way the use of these techniques, as some are dangerous – as well as some of the software that I will mention.
Now that that’s out of the way let’s get going!
1. Links – I thought I’d tackle the bull by the horns from the start. I have a lot to say about links, and since at least half of the questions I get in the forums, at conferences and from clients is about links, I’m guessing it’s what you are most interested in.
So Google has said over and over not to buy links. If you do buy them, then you have probably seen some damage, depending on your techniques.
Establishing what links to buy and where you buy them from has always been a bit speculative because everything from page size, site size, the number of other links, the quality of the links, the relevancy of the site and various other factors have affected what a link is actually worth. Then you had to deal with things like checking the integrity of the link was still intact, or even still there. There are dozens of tools out there that were built just for this purpose.
So what do you do? I had a look at all the different methods available and several are still effective (I.e. blog posting, blog rolls, establishing forum links, Yahoo Answers and so on) and in the end, what I’ve found is that the clear winner for my money is going out there, doing the homework and negotiation and actually buying sites. If I own the site then I also own the content, and more importantly the links I’ll put in the existing content. I’m looking for related content or a website with a silo of related content that I can take existing keyword phrases and change them into hyperlinks.
I usually look at the overall spend on “sponsorship – wink, wink” x 18, in order to establish a maximum offer. So if the total amount the client is spending on links is £1000 per month, I look to buy a site for up to £18k. Anyone that has looked around at brokerages that sell sites knows that £5k can buy you a lot, let alone £18k. Take into account the money saved on maintaining purchased “sponsorship” dues versus your campaign expectations. Outside of hosting and domain renewal you will own the links forever – they will never expire.
There are a few other factors to look at before buying a site;
Domain Age – 2 years minimum unless other factors outweigh this factor
Page Rank – yes it does matter when buying a site because it represents G-Trust
Number of existing back links
Quality of those back links and are they to any deep pages?
How many pages are indexed with Google?
Install McAfee Site Inspector on your computer. It will flag any issues to do with bad history, malware or any one of many other problems it may have
Other pluses are host location vs. target location, the number of registrants of the domain, DMOZ listing and rankings. If it’s a forum, the number of active members and recent posts are important.
2. Auto Posting & Spinning for Content – In line with tip #1, now we will use these forums, blogs and websites and start building regular content. There are several pieces of great software out there but two of the best are SENuke and ArticleSpinner.com. In short, once setup with basic logins and passwords you can populate your sites with unique content – even if it’s not – and all automatically.
Hot Tip – By translating a page using any of the search engines translators (usually in the toolbar they offer) on your existing page you essentially create a new page of related content (with links back to your site of course) and a new URL is created. This is a live page! And it is linked to from the search engines/authority sites. According to a colleague of mine (Rob Kerry a.k.a. EvilGreenMonkey) it’s a technique that works well with Yahoo and MSN.
3. Blog/Forum Spamming + Creation – I’M GOING TO REITERATE ONCE MORE THAT I DO NOT CONDONE OR ENDORSE THESE PROGRAMS OR TECHNIQUES, BUT KNOWING WHAT YOUR COMPETITION MAY BE DOING MAY HELP TO ANSWER A FEW QUESTIONS FOR YOU.
This is nothing really new but there are some improved programs out there that have made it easier for the novice to do. Auto-blogger is one for automatically posting to blogs; X-Rumer is a good one that if you know just a bit about basic coding, you can create hundreds, even thousands of blogs automatically. Then you go back to #2 and scrape articles, spin them, then auto post to your own blogs with links to your sites.
XRumer is a Windows program that posts forum spam with the aim of boosting search engine rankings. It has been claimed that the program is able to bypass techniques commonly used by many websites to deter automated spam, such as account registration, CAPTCHAs, and e-mail activation before posting. The program makes heavy use of a database of known open proxies in an attempt to make it more difficult for administrators to block posts.
In addition, X-Rumer can avoid the suspicions of forum administrators by first registering to make a post in the form of a question which mentions the spam product (“Where can I get…?”), before registering another account to post a spam link which mentions the product. The side effect of these innocent-looking posts is that helpful forum visitors may search on a search engine (e.g. Google) for the product and themselves post a link to help out, thus bolstering the product’s Google stats without falling afoul of forum posting policies.
The latest version of XRumer can defeat CAPTCHAs of Hotmail and Gmail. This enables the software to create accounts with these free email services, which are used to register in forums that it posts to.
I still believe in the old fashioned way of manually posting to 20+ blogs 2-3 times each week and establishing a good member status on 12-15 forums and posting 2-3 times each week.
These are practices that black hats have been using for some time, but php skills were necessary until now.
Below is a list of dofollow forums;
1. http://forums.digitalpoint.com
2. http://www.vuju.com/
3. http://checkthisup.com
4. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums
5. http://www.thewebmasterforum.net
6. http://www.webmasterforums.com
7. http://www.allcoolforum.com
8. http://www.warriorforum.com
9. http://forums.webicy.com
10. http://thehyipforum.com
11. http://www.webmasterforumsonline.com
12. http://www.webmasters.am/forum
13. http://www.webmasterforums.net
14. http://www.devhunters.com
15. http://www.webmaster-forum.net
16. http://www.geekvillage.com/forums
17. http://www.zymic.com/forum
18. http://www.webmastershelp.com
19. http://www.webmasterdesk.org
20. http://www.webmasterground.com
21. http://developers.evrsoft.com/forum
22. http://www.websitebabble.com
23. http://www.elancetalk.com
24. http://www.talkingcity.com
25. http://www.australianwebmaster.com
26. http://www.wtricks.com
27. http://www.forums.webzonetalk.com
28. http://www.htmlforums.com
29. http://www.searchbliss.com/forum
30. http://www.webmasterize.com
31. http://www.webmasterserve.com
32. http://www.freehostforum.com
33. http://www.seorefugee.com/forums
34. http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums
35. http://forums.seo.ph
36. http://forums.delphiforums.com
37. http://www.web-mastery.net
38. http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/index.php
39. http://www.webproworld.com
40. http://www.bzimage.org
41. http://www.v7n.com/forums
42. http://www.dnforum.com
43. http://www.webcosmoforums.com
44. http://forums.webicy.com
45. http://forum.hittail.com/phpbb2/index.php
46. http://www.affiliateseeking.com/forums
47. http://siteownersforums.com/index.php
48. http://www.webmaster-forums.net
49. http://www.geekpoint.net
50. http://www.smallbusinessforums.org
51. http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com
52. http://www.experienceadvertising.com/forum
53. http://opensourcephoto.net/forum
54. http://forums.seochat.com
55. http://forums.searchenginewatch.com
56. http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums
57. http://dishnews.medianetwork.co.in/yabb2/YaBB.pl
58. http://www.businesss-forum.com
59. http://www.9mb.com
60. http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums
61. http://forums.seroundtable.com
62. http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs
63. http://www.startups.co.uk/6678842908486596004/forums.html
64. http://www.webmaster-talk.com
65. http://forums.comicbookresources.com
66. http://www.clicks.ws/forum/index.php
67. http://www.acorndomains.co.uk
68. http://forums.onlinebookclub.org
69. http://www.ableton.com/forum
70. http://www.davidcastle.org/BB
71. http://www.webtalkforums.com
72. http://www.bloggapedia.com/forum
73. http://www.bloggertalk.com/forum.php
74. http://paymentprocessing.cc
75. http://www.directoryjunction.com/forums
76. http://www.internetmarketingforums.net
77. http://www.lex224.com/forums/index.php
78. http://forum.joomla.org
79. http://forum.mambo-foundation.org/index.php
80. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php
81. http://www.namepros.com/index.php
82. http://loanofficerforum.com/forum
83. http://iq69.com/forums
84. http://forum.hot4s.com.au
85. http://forums.mysql.com
86. http://forums.amd.com/forum
87. http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-us/Forums
88. http://forums.cnet.com
89. http://seotalk.medianetwork.co.in
90. https://www.computerbb.org
91. http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com
92. http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com
93. http://www.app-developers.com
94. http://forums.stuffdaily.com
95. http://forums.seo.com
96. http://www.webdigity.com
97. http://www.inboundlinksforum.com
98. http://forums.gentoo.org
99. http://ubuntuforums.org
100. http://forum.textpattern.com
4. RSS Feeds for Building Free Links – This is a little sneaky one I use to counteract Black Hat.
You create RSS feeds to supply information on site updates, increase traffic to your site and place links in your content that will be republished and provide free links back to your site. Using the scraping technique mentioned above, Black Hat SEO’s would search out RSS feeds and build a data base with the content for future use, spin the content and reuse it or just republish the content. In all cases they would insert their own links. They build programs or plug-ins (such as the Word Press All-In-One SEO plug-in) and these will take any chosen word or phrase and search through the content and when found change the code to make it a link to their chosen site. There are many other ways this can be used but you get the basic idea.
The neat thing here is that they need to do this automatically for speed and being able to make rolling URL’s and websites quick enough to beat the spam-bots for a few weeks for this technique to pay off. Because of this most don’t have the time to clean everything up properly, so your links remain.
Publishing the URL of your RSS feed on the many different sites that list these (I.e. FeedBurner) will insure a nice number scrapers posting your links to their sites.
I guess the first criticism of this would be that they will put you on Viagra sites – well even if they do I haven’t seen this particular method draw penalties when I messed around with it. But remember – I don’t condone or endorse….blah, blah, blah.
Here are some simple steps to get started with RSS:
Set up a FeedBurner account to allow your feed to be consumed by others.
Share your feed on your various social networking profiles. Many social networking sites have the ability to consume and display your RSS feed to your friends, followers, and fans.
Submit it to multiple RSS submission directories (do a search for RSS submission for some options).
Here’s a starter list for you of where to submit your RSS feeds through;
http://www.feedmil.com/addfeed.jsp
http://www.feedest.com
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedgy.com/Submit.aspx
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedbees.com/add.php
http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://feedfury.com/submit
http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank/?Fe…com%2frss.aspx
http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
http://www.rss-network.com
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.rssmad.com/index.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.plazoo.com
http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com
5. Webmaster Central Tools – Google – I have always included Google WMC in each of my Top 12 SEO Tips for 2010 because each end every year they come out with more tools that make my life easier. I have never subscribed to the theory that associating your website with any of Google’s tools would give things away to Google that you might not want them to know. I’m sorry but I’ve dealt with them for years and have seen every end of the spectrum; from SEO to PPC on every one of my clients, past and present, and have never seen any adverse effects to installing Analytics on a site. I also believe it’s ridiculous to think Google has the time or resources to analyse.
In fact, depending on how you choose to read into it, Google’s Matt Cutt’s himself has said that Google does look at some of the elements that Google Analytics and Webmaster Central Tools provide in order to rank a site better. Things like click through rates and time on site. They have also stated recently that load time will become more a more important ranking factor.
So I guess the next reasonable question is; if they admit to using the information for positive ranking considerations, what’s saying they aren’t using it for negative ranking considerations?
We all have our theories but I personally believe that 99.9% of anything Google would use this information for is automated and unless you are doing things you shouldn’t, you will not throw up any red flags to prompt further investigation by a human editor.
With that addressed, let’s take a look at their tools and what we use them for.
Health Checks
i. Robots.txt – these tell ALL the bots where to go and where not to go. If you have admin or member files you don’t want indexed
ii. XML Sitemaps – these (and I make individual ones for data files, pic files, pdf files, doc files, etc.) tell the bots the files you do want indexed and where they are
iii. Internal Links – lets you know if you are cross-linked, which may confuse the bots or split influence between two similar pages
iv. External Links – tells you who is linked to you. Helpful in optimising anchor text and bad links pointing to non-existent pages
v. Crawl Errors – advises you of any crawl errors Google finds like broken links or orphaned links.
I have seen in some cases a website that has reformatted URL’s or rebuilt a website and neglected or missed using 301 redirects and using this tool have found 100’s of links pointing nowhere (404 error pages). Once they addressed this issue they gained the value of these links and subsequently better rankings.
vi. Top Queries – this shows the top queries to your site which will allow you to improve specific landing pages for quick wins or target terms that have good existing rankings so that you can build new silos or pages to further enhance positions and traffic. In the gaming market the difference between
vii. Associate Domains – This is an extremely easy quick win if you have WMC set-up. (This takes 5 minutes). Go into WMC and choose which domain you want as your primary (www or http). The benefit of this is that currently Google sees each as individual pages. Links that you have pointed at your URL may have both and you are losing the full benefit of your back links. You can accomplish this with a 301 but if you don’t know coding this is just as effective.
viii. Geotargeting – I’m going to cover this in greater detail in number 6 because it’s actually a huge change in the last 12 months to anyone outside of the states that can be a fantastic advantage to a site with a global market, but for now I’ll just explain what it does. Geographical targeting (selection) in WMC allows you to target a specific region. So if you want to target England, just West Yorkshire, or just Leeds itself, Geographical targeting allows you to do just that. Be careful not to over-filter your target market region as this setting may or may not affect your rankings. Test it out before integrating it permanently.
6. Geographical Targeting & Subdomains – (Advanced Geotargeting) – This isn’t for the feint at heart, the lazy, or the website owner that isn’t ready to do the extra work to get your piece of the pie.
Using Geotargeting for Language and Regional Targeting
The various ways that people search and the results the search engines are delivering are evolving rapidly. Smarter queries and more complex algorithms mean that you need to use various techniques to be sure you are showing up in the results. Local search, advanced search, regional search and language-based searches are some of the filters an end-user or a search engine can use in determining who shows up, when they show up and where they show up.
Geotargeting is one tool Google has refined and one that you can manipulate to a point in order to increase saturation in any market.
Beyond the obvious on-page considerations, different searches will deliver (in most cases) a different set of results.
The results can differ greatly depending on several considerations;
1 .The IP of the end-user
2 .The server location of the website
3 .Any geographically targeted settings in Webmaster Central
4 .The relationship between the search filters and the resulting web pages (I.e. Did they search for Pages from [region] or Pages in [language]
5 .If the end-user is searching a different extension than the defaulted engine (they manually enter Google.com searching for US or English results in a non-US region.
The other elements that will affect rankings will be back links;
1 .Are the links from a TLD that matches the destination URL (I.e. .nl linking to an .nl website)?
2. Is the IP linking website located in the same region and the linked URL?
3 .Page rank, linking anchor text, additional outbound links on the page linking to you
4 .On-page relevancy
5 .Language based meta-tags
6 .Everything in the above 5 items relating to the linking website/page
Any one of these elements can give you an edge over your competition.
Searching any of Google’s (non-US) datasets will generally return a variety of websites when no language or location filter is selected. These can include internal pages in a website, subdirectories (www.yoursite.com/french), Subdomains (www.french.yoursite.com), and various TLD’s (top level domains like .com and .nl). All 11 of the above factors are present (but not exclusive) in the automatic algorithm.
The problem is that no one really knows which approach is best, or which algorithmic attribute is the most effective, so what can we do with this?
What we want to do is to look at the existing results using the available search filters, and the existing websites that are ranking high and determine what the best strategy for your website is. This takes deep page analysis of your competitors.
The important thing to note is that there is a hierarchy between one and the other in terms of which is the best solution. Every website has its own individual solution based on their demographics, site mechanics and available resources.
What you need to consider are;
1 .Your target market?
2. If you need or don’t need geographical targeting?
3. If you need language based subdomains or subdirectories?
4. Should you move hosting?
Can I afford to do it all?
How & When to Use Geographical Targeting
Here’s what to do if you wish to;
Geographically target a region?
1 .Create a subdomain or a subdirectory in the native language and use Webmaster Central to geographically target it
2 .Host the subdomain on a server in the native region and use geographical targeting
3 .Build back links from similar TLD’s
Target a specific language?
1 .Create a subdirectory in the native language (I.e. www.yoursite.com/nl/)
2 .Build back links from same language websites
3 .Do not use geographical targeting
The reason that you do not want to use geographical targeting along with a language-based strategy is that if the end-user searches in the native language on Google.com, a site using content in that language will be stronger than the same site with geographical targeting in place. (This isn’t dependent on whether you use subdirectories or subdomains unless you hosted the subdomain in the target region).
The answer for me is that I want it all…and NOW!!
I’ve recently had subdomains rank with geographical targeting turned on and in the native language rank top 10 in 6 weeks. I’ve had brand new websites with the appropriate TLD’s (I.e. .nl, .de & .es) show up in 8 weeks. I’ve even had a .com hosted in the US without geographical targeting show up in the top 10 results for “Hollywood” terms when they had never been in results in the UK.
You can start with subdomains. Look at your log files to determine where the current traffic is coming from to tell you what to do first. Bounce rates can also tell you a lot.
For example, if your secondary traffic source is Germany and you have a high bounce rate, start with a language-based subdirectory, then maybe move onto creating a subdomains, hosting it in Germany, then set the geographical targeting to Germany in Webmaster Central. Then go back and start all over again using the region that has the next highest contribution.
Important Things to Remember!
• To target a language using only subdirectories do not use geographic targeting
• You can target a language with both subdomains and subdirectories but if you have a top-level TLD (.com) use subdirectories versus subdomains.
• You can use Google geographical targeting on subdomains and subdirectories
• Your title should be in the native language and/or use regional slang terms where they apply.
• Use language-based meta tags whenever targeting language-based searches
• Host subdomains that are for geographical targeting in the target region
• When you implement the subdomain strategy, link to it from the original website
• Create new sitemaps for each subdomain
• When creating meta tags and content be sure to use native slang. (If you sold pants in the US and the UK. Pants are referred to as trousers. Sweaters are referred to as jumpers.
• Get back links from same TLD’s (get a .nl link to your .nl site in the native language)
• If you have a TLD (like .nl or .de) do not use geographical targeting. These domains are already associated with its designated region
TIP – In the past when you moved domains to a new host (or in this case Subdomains) it could take up to a week. Google WMC now has a tool that makes this almost instantaneous. Just get your ‘A’ address, move your content and any redirects from the parent site (Remember linking to the new subdomain from your parent site will pass nearly 100% of the PR, trust and authority, even though its seen and treated as a stand-alone website)
In a nutshell, I recommend that if you already have an existing website with a TLD like a .com or .cu.uk, and they are your target market, do not use the geographical targeting option. Start building subdirectories using the top native language determined by looking at Google Analytics or your log files. Identify your top referrer language. If the languages are close, as it the case between the US, UK, New Zealand and Australia, use native slang in the title, metatags and content. Build a new xml site map and manually submit it through all the main search engines.
The next step is to create a subdomain and get it hosted in the region that you are targeting. Build content in the native language and get r submit it, as well as setting up the geographical target in Webmaster Central.
By implementing this strategy, you will have a significant advantage over most of your competition (or a little less after this article is released).
Whether the search is initiated in the region or outside the region, whether your site is located in the region or just hosted there, or even if they search in the native language or manually enter a specific Google engine like Google.com.mx or Google.es, you will have improved saturation.
7. Canonicalisation – Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues.
I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.
8. Other Important Factors
a. Alt Attributes and Titles in Images – Use alt attributes on images to preserve content integrity while providing internal links for ranking factor. Using the alt attribute in images allows you to reinforce topical relevance with the on page text based content to improve a pages relevance score.
b. Anchor Text Optimization – Use pertinent anchor text and do not waste link equity from excessively linking to non reciprocating pages within a site. Employing anchor text optimization means using relevant keywords to link to relevant pages within a site. Do this enough and before you know it you are virtual theming – creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence. This can distinguish your site from competitors as each granular layer consolidates ranking factor for a website. This is why Wikipedia dominates search results.
c. Flattening Site Architecture – Keep site architecture as flat as possible or use breadcrumbs to aid in information architecture and crawling.
Avoid using sub folders excessively within a website domain.com/categories/products/colour/page.html vs. flattening the url and site by using more descriptive naming conventions for a page domain.com/Super_Audi_R8_Black_2010.html. The closer the more competitive keyword landing pages are to the root folder, the easier it will be for them to gain additional ranking factor, page rank and page strength to express the content on that page.
d. Content Volume – Ensure you have enough content to dominate a competitive keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword with millions of competing pages with a little or no content is a waste of time. You will need topical relevance which means articles, posts and pages all internally linked and consolidated within a clear silo to create the proper on page signals for that keyword. Shoot for a minimum of 300 words that integrate LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or associated keywords and typical keyword phrases. You can find these using Google’s keyword suggestion tool or better yet look for the bolded print within the snippets when utilising Google’s beta LSA search query by typing a tilde (~) just before your keyword in a search on Google. Also use these keywords and keyword phrases in internal back links and external anchor text links.
e. Contextual Links – Link contextually within related document to select preferred landing pages through virtual theming. If you are on a page about poker rooms, and have a keyword phrase such as “free poker rooms”, link the keyword phrase to the free poker room page. Do this for every keyword/kw phrase (just once per page if it appears more than that) and you have just added a virtual theme to your keywords. This means that each page can now work together collectively to support the parent theme (which is the main/root keyword itself).
9. Social Bookmarking – I have included Social Bookmarks (SBM) in many of the last few Top Tips I have written because it just made sense that it would only be a matter of time before Google and the rest of the SE’s started placing more weight on them in the overall organic algorithms they use. A couple reasons why I believe this is that they are methodically devaluing links; they need some type of mass voting system that works much like back link valuation; and most of the social networks are progressively monitoring the way their services are used; or in other words policing member accounts and patrolling for spam accounts. Oh, and Google Buzz.
We did some testing two years ago and I made the results public on SEOChat. In short, a member said that he had a competitor that had two of the top 10 listings for “Poker” in the Netherlands. This meant he was getting bumped out of the top ten – or front page of results and was wondering how to eliminate this dual listing. So we took a non-competitor site that ranked below his competitor and above him and used software called Onlywire that posted to several SBM services in one click. (I posted screenshots of the before and after in the thread). We revisited the experiment in less than 24 hours and not only had it bumped the secondary listing that his competitor held, but it also gained him an extra position.
So what does this mean in the big picture? Anyone in the Poker industry online knows that one position gained in the top 10 results can be huge. In the graph below take a look at the difference between the #4 and #3 position; the CTR jumps from 4% up to 9.82%.
This is primarily because when you are in the top 3 results on Google you are syndicated across other big sites like AOL, Netscape and iWon to name a few, but even the jump from #6 to #7 adds 1.5% CTR. 1.5% of a few million searches is pretty significant. Do the math and see what this small move with very little effort would make to your bottom line by increasing your position.
One that I have been messing around with that seems to have more-or-less perfected this technique is Ping.fm. It added a few other viral services to the mix like GTalk, Twitter and LinkedIn, and is a one-click tool as well
10. Other Killer Apps I use – Over the years I have isolated several programs and utilities that save us a massive amount of time. I’ll list them here, what they do and how we use them;
a. Google Alerts – This monitors Google’s data bases and will notify you when content appears that contain the kw/kw phrase that you are looking for. We use this to monitor the effectiveness of Press Releases, monitor the competition, identify new “buzz” in certain industries (primarily gaming), client reputation management and certain content. It can load directly into your iGoogle desktop.
b. Google Trends – This is a tool that shows graphs identifying the traffic trends over time, from the last few years to the last few weeks and allows you to see a snapshot of most any industry. Great for researching your next product offering.
c. Google Insights – This is a supercharged version of Trends. It monitors the actual search queries globally. So if you wanted to see what city, county, country or region had the most activity for a particular search term, this tool does that – and more! It can add delimiters such as time frames, and will also compare regions, compare related keywords and any mix of the above 3 filters. Then it will graph them all for you as well for a clear look. One of my favourite accessories that Google Insights has is that it will monitor the sector for related kw’s that have significantly increased search volume – they call them Breakout Terms and you can have these delivered to your iGoogle desktop as well. I can’t tell you how helpful this is when you are in a highly competitive field trying to find niche or long tail terms to target and get the jump on the big guys. Once we identify these terms we then create pages for them and add them to a silo. So for instance if “Million Dollar Bingo Game” is a breakout term being searched enough to draw a “Breakout Term” notification from Insights, we’ll build a page for it using all the steps mentioned above, add it to a relevant silo, bleed PR to it using no follows, and suddenly we are ranking very well.
TIP – We also use the upgraded version of Domain Tools much in the same way. We monitor for our kw (e.g. Casinos). Anytime a domain is purchased with that kw in it we get an email. When we see that all the TLD’s (Top Level Domains like .com, .net and .org) are all purchased at the same time, we know some VC out there is paying to buy them up in expectation of a future site launch. Posh Bingo is a great recent example. We received email notification from Domain Tools, put an Alert on the term, and then watched Insights for a breakout alert. (We monitored the URL as well for launch)
d. XENU – crawls your website and identifies errors, link structure, page size, external links and many other things that are important to the health of your site
e. SEO Spyglass – Gives you a detailed report of your own or a competitors back links and ranks them using important factors like follow-no follow, Page Rank, and other factors. You can even import your Google WMC exported BL report and see if any of the back links to your site are potentially hazardous.
f. EXCLUSIVE – VanguardSEO’s Dual Depth Back Link Checker – When acquiring a website we want to know who is linking to the sites that are linking to us, rather than just the first level of linking, so we built this free tool. – http://toolbox.vanguardseo.com/td/
g. SEOMoz’s Linkscape – Another great tool for evaluating a competitors back links, anchor text, and discovering the strongest pages on a site.
h. Majestic SEO – Looks at the back link trends of competitors to identify if a sudden surge in back links could be the reason for their rankings increase, then you can use one of many other tools (Link Assistant, ShoeMoney, SEOMoz) to identify these links that significantly changed their ranking and go after the same links or an equivalent linking structure)
i. Rank Tracker – The best tool I’ve found so far for checking daily SERP (search engine rank positions) checking. It gives historical information and clear signs for increases and decreases from day to day or pre-seo to current day. It graphs everything over the full term of the campaign. It has human emulation and scheduling to reduce the chance of getting blocked. And my favourite; it queries any search engine anywhere as if you were there, so IP concerns aren’t an issue.
j. Firefox SEO Quake Plug-in – Great for a quick look at all of the important ranking factors of the top 10 or just one site. This is a toolbar that allows you to set the values you wish to see like PR, indexed pages, registration date, SBM references, DMOZ, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu, and most other SE’s, plus a ton of other information on the fly.
11. Niche and Longtail Targeting – I mentioned this at the RoNewMedia Event in Stockholm last year and I think a few people fell out of their seats; 25% of searches on Google that are searched each day have never been searched before.
Now that my friends is a pretty significant stat! This is the reasoning behind Google buying Applied Semantics years ago and their more recent claims of gradually combining their current results with Universal results and Latent Semantic Analysis. Doesn’t it all make sense?
You take the phrases people search, look at the CTR and time on-site versus the results hierarchy, run them through a semantics formula for related terms, then pool the terms in relevant silos. Factor in back links and semantic associations and you’ll probably have a pretty good start to a less-engineered set of search results.
Well, that’s a sloppy example but you see what I’m getting at.
Long tail and niche terms aren’t just important to target for the low-hanging, high-converting traffic, it’s crucial in content and back link anchor text, as well as SBM because Google doesn’t want to be “gamed” or their result manipulated by guys/gals like you and I. They want related content from related sites; not a bunch of Affiliate portals, and without the best content, laid out in the best way, things are set to get a bit harder for anyone to rank well if you’re not an Operator or big name brand.
So how do you identify these LT phrases? For real-time I use HitTail. For building a data base for mySQL use I prefer raw log files. Other options are Shoemoney’s kw tool, WordTracker, or even Google’s keyword tool along with Shoemoney’s kw tool. There are also tools like IBP that will scrape your competitors sites and export an excel file to your desktop to play around with (like adding your city or region or brand). Many of these techniques I use whilst building PPC (Pay Per Click) accounts. Just be sure that you create silos with your kw strings and that you don’t link to multiple pages using closely related keywords or Google may consider them to be too closely related and not index one or split the value between the two pages. Using individual page titles and meta descriptions, along with non-duplicated content, then some back links and SBM should take care of this.
I mentioned this once before; go after the low-hanging fruit. It converts better.
I know I mentioned 25% of all search queries have never been searched before.
Well this one is just as good; 60%+ of all conversions come from niche and long tail terms.
12. Get Free Help – Tip 12 is very simple; read Top 12 SEO Tips for 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Most are still relevant. Send me an email or pick up the phone – I don’t bite or charge. You are also invited to approach me at a conference and have a quick question or a 1-on-1 session. Lastly, I am sponsored by Euro Partners and as an Affiliate of Euro Partners you get 100% free access to me, my network and free hands-on advice – so if you aren’t an Affiliate get signed up!
Those are my Top 12 SEO Tips for 2010. I am sure I am bound to get a bit of flack from colleagues for releasing some of this information, I seem to be good at doing that, but in the end it’s about information sharing and passing it forward.
Remember, I don’t recommend or endorse any of the above mentioned techniques or software. To a point you need to follow these instructions ass explained. Some of them are slightly risk with measured benefit, some are downright aggressive with a high likelihood of drawing some type of penalty (specifically the Auto-Blogging, SENuke and X-Rumer).
If you have questions regarding any of these methods or programs email me or my team at VanguardSEO and we’ll give you free advice.
I’ll be covering these Top 12 Tips for 2010 in greater detail with Q&A’s and 1-on-1 sit down’s all week and during the conference.
Don’t miss CAC Amsterdam this year April 15-16th. We are assembling some of the best SEO’s in the industry for an SEO related event rather than just Gaming or just Affiliates.
