Searching Solutions » “How-To” SEO

SEO Question & Answer

Justin Smith — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:34:25 +0000

A while back on Searching Solutions, we launched a free service that let people ask SEO questions for free. Unfortunately, we let it lapse and enter obscurity. Oops! This is a great tool for when you get stuck on a certain topic like pay per click, meta data, canonical URL’s, dup content, rankings or whatever. Please feel free to ask. We are here to help!

No question is too basic. And if it’s too advanced, we’ll tell you, and refer you to someone smarter than we are!

Don’t miss out on this important resource…

So what are you waiting for? Ask away!

Ask a New Question:

Video Tutorial: Practical Competitive Keyword Research

Justin Smith — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:13:58 +0000

In this video, I talk about a couple of simple ways you can find out how popular a keyword phrase is, and the general level of competition. This is done through Google’s keyword research tool, and a simple check of the titles in the Google results for that query. By the way, here are a couple of sample search queries that may help you along the way:

“my keyword phrase” (your phrase placed in quotes)
intitle:”your keyword phrase”
inurl:”your keyword phrase”

Hope you enjoy the video!

Practical SEO Competitive Research from Justin Smith on Vimeo.

Podcast Interview: Lorelle VanFossen – WordPress & Blogging Expert

Justin Smith — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:23:26 +0000

Click Here to Listen to this Podcast:

I had the great pleasure of being able to interview Lorelle VanFossen yesterday afternoon. For those of you that are not aware of her work, you can head on over to Lorelle on WordPress. She is considered to be one of the top blogging and WordPress experts in the world and can be regularly seen keynoting at large blogger conferences such as WordCamp, and SOBcon.

The podcast is quite long for an interview, so I won’t be able to transcribe the entire thing, but I will hit a few of the key points here.

0:58 – Lorelle launched one of the first websites in ‘94 – Taking Your Camera On The Road
2:10 – Lorelle as one of the early adopters of WordPress just after the 1.2 release.
4:45 – Development of early coding, plugins, and early testing.
5:10 – WordPress 1.5 and the launch of modular themes making design incredibly easy.
5:50 – Alpha testing WordPress.com based on the WordPress MU.
6:31 – Creating a blog network using the MU (New York Times, REI, and many other companies currently using WordPress MU)
7:52 – “blogs are not to be replaced by Facebook or Myspace, they are your online business card and resume. They speak very loudly for who you are, what you do, and what you’re offering to the world whether it’s your opinion, your product, or your service.”
8:40 – Discussing the number of websites that run WordPress, and the difficulty measuring downloads versus installations.
12:50 – Plug for the WordPress Sandbox Theme as a structurally sound theme that acts as a blank canvas.
13:35 – “micro-formats are very critical to the future of the semantic web”
15:43 – Lorelle’s prediction for 2009: “Alot of development in comment WordPress plugins”
16:25 – “The Captcha is dead – if you have a captcha comment system on your site, kill it. People are seeing it, and not commenting”.
17:25 – Video commenting, image uploads, more integration with microblogging; Twitter, etc.
18:05 – Biggest prediction for 2009: consolidate online administration, monitoring, and management of online tools. Better monitoring, and tracking.
19:02 – New social networking platform theme: BuddyPress
20:38 – Tips for new bloggers:

“You can’t get anywhere without a plan; my tip is multi-fold…”

Write down all the words that describe what you want to write about (what you want to write about, what you want people to search for, etc.) 25-50 words
Narrow the list down to 5-10 words. These should ultimately describe what you are going to write about, and will become your categories
Write a minimum of 5 blog post titles for each of the 5-10 categories (these are poswts that you could write immediately. You have the concept, the material, the ideas, in your head already)
“As you’re working through your list, you will naturally gravitate towards the things that are inherently important to you, and not just the things ‘I think I should be doing’. If you find yourself struggling to find just 5 articles per category, then don’t blog about it.”

This is just a sample of some of the great tips Lorelle has to offer from her book: Blogging Tips – What bloggers won’t tel you about blogging. Make sure to check it out!

Thank you again Lorelle for your time. I am genuinely thankful for the time you gave for the interview.

Make sure to check out Lorelle on these sites as well:

** Lorelle On WordPress

** Camera On The Road

** Woopra

** Blog Herald

The 5 Step Website Error Checkup

Justin Smith — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:09:09 +0000

Probably the most common request I get in the SEO field is: “Can you check my website for errors and problems?”. People often seem to be paranoid that there may be some feature of their websites causing the ranking to suffer, or that some secret piece of code is hurting their ranking ability. Usually this paranoia is unfounded, and they simply need better content, more links, etc.

But in some cases, I’ve found that there can be problems with sites that hurt the ranking. Usually these have to do with the ability of a search spider to crawl a site. I call this “Search Engine Friendliness”.

The Most Common Website Errors

The most common errors that lead to search engine ranking problems are:

Use of flash and java – the search engines can’t read text that appears in these website features.
Error in robots.txt – some site developers try to get fancy with this to allow or disallow certain search engine spiders but often make mistakes causing the site to turn away the search engines.
Use of noindex in the meta tag section is meant to tell search robots not to index the page. This is usually not intentional unless there is a developer that doesn’t know any better. I’ve seen cases where plugins in wordpress accidentally turn this on.
Spam links can often times draw a penalty from the search engines. This is another one that isn’t always intentional. Sometimes a site can get secretly hacked and spam links placed in secret hard to find places without the owner knowing. This can often times cause a search engine penalty as sites you link to can be viewed as an association or endorsementthr from you.
Large database driven sites with poorly written URL structures can sometimes run into ranking and indexing problems because the search engines can’t navigate dynamic pages and URL’s very well.

The 5 Step Website Error Checkup

So how do you know if you have any of the above problems, and how do you check for common errors? Try these 5 steps:

Step 1 – Do You Have a Penalty? Has your search engine ranking suddenly dropped in a drastic way? The best sign of this is a drop in search traffic. Did you go from 2,000 search engine visitors per month to 0? There is most likely a search engine penalty in place that dropped you from the rankings. Proceed to step 2…
Step 2 – Do you link to any spammy websites? This coule be intentional or unintentional. Either way, it could bring a penalty… and if you are seeing problems like in step 1, you may want to consider checking your outbound links. I use 2 tools for this that both work very well, the Link Validation Spider, and Link Slueth (more advanced). Both are mainly for checking for broken links on your site, but can be used to find hidden links and spam links. You might also try a simple query on MSN. Visit MSN.com and type this in the search box: “linkfromdomain:www.yourdomain.com”. It will search for all outbound links from a domain.
Step 3 – Don’t Drive Away the Search Spiders. More times than not, if someone is having serious ranking problems it can be due to a robots.txt or a meta data problem like the use of noindex. Try this tool from Submit Express to test for meta tag issues. To check for robots.txt issues, try this robots.txt checker. Make sure to use the address for your robots.txt file (Example: www.searchingsolutions.com/robots.txt)
Step 4 – Indexing Problems? Do you have hundreds of pages on your website but find that the search engines only record a handful of these pages? The easiest way to check how many pages you have indexed with the search engines is through the site command. Example: In Google, type: “site:www.searchingsolutions.com”. If for some reason only a very small percentage of your pages show up, you may have an indexing problem. This means that the search engine is having a hard time reaching all the pages of your website. Make sure to set up an xml or html site map that has a hyperlink list of all your pages. For smaller sites, you can put all your links on one page, and for larger sites, you can use multiple sitemaps or multiple categories. Make sure the search engine spiders can reach every page of your website within 3 clicks of the home page. Also, remove any javascript links, links that require form submission, frames, flash links, or anything other than a simple html based link.
Step 5 – Check For Meta Tag Duplication. This isn’t a problem that can lead to penalties or problems with indexing, but can seriously hurt your ranking. Page titles should always be unique as to avoid keyword and page cannibalization. Seomoz has a great Crawl Test tool that can help in this area.

I hope these 5 steps are useful. You may not need them very often, but when you do you’ll wish you would have bookmarked this post…

Dear Website Developer: Please Read This

Justin Smith — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:29:30 +0000

This is something I wish every web developer would read. It’s a simple document from Google that lists best SEO practices for onsite optimization. Nothing fancy, just some basic pointers for meta data, alt tags, heading tags, robot.txt, file structure, and alot more.

If you build websites or know someone that does, please share these links with them. I’m getting tired of explaining this stuff…

Search Engine Marketing Questions & Answers

Justin Smith — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:22:02 +0000

Ever had a search engine marketing or optimization question that you wish you could find a specific answer to? Google is usually a great help in this area, but sometimes you want to put skin on an answer and have a real person answer it.

That is the reason I’ve started the Searching Solutions Q & A. It is a free forum that allows you to post your SEO questions for free. Super easy.

So please, ask away! I can help you by answering your questions, and you can help me by helping me get new ideas for articles and help to build the content of my site.

To get started with your questions click Here:

Searching Solutions Search Marketing Q & A

Guidelines:

Only one question per person, per week.
Please be patient. Most questions will be answered within 48 hours, but could take longer.
Please do not ask questions regarding your specific website (example: “why is my site not ranking for this term?”)
Before asking your question, please view the questions below to see if yours has already been answered previously.
There is no such thing as a dumb question.

Here are some of the questions that have already been answered:

How to Break Up With a Search Engine Robot

Justin Smith — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:03:17 +0000

People in the search marketing industry are so obsessed with search engines. All they can seem to talk about is how to please the search engines, get on their good sides, and kiss up to Matt Cutts in some way shape or form. But so many people never talk about the different reasons you might want to break off a relationship.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few ways you can break up with a search engine and manage your relationships.

Breaking the Heart of Your Favorite Search Robot

Time to call it quits. Maybe you have a private member website, want privacy, or simply don’t want your site to be in the search engine results.

To cut off all communication and break the heart of that poor search engine robot, insert the following into the header section of your pages:

“Let’s Just be Friends”

“It’s nothing personal, I still really like you, but we make better friends than lovers.” Maybe you don’t want the search engines to index your pages (maybe you’re trying to combat duplicate content?), but you still want them to follow your links and find other pages of your site.

Use this in the header section of your pages:

The Messy Break Up

The search robot found out you were cheating and decided to pull your rankings. There’s nothing worse than a messy break up. Better make up as soon as possible. Leave behind your unfaithful ways and beg for forgiveness.

“Let’s Agree To See Other People”

Sometimes it’s ok to see other people for a while. Maybe you have a reason to want to include Googlebot, but exclude Yahoo Slurp from your website. Or maybe you want to exclude a specialized bot like Linkscape, image search, etc.

The best way to allow and disallow certain robots is through robots.txt. Here is a link to a very thourough tutorial on the subject of creating and using a robots.txt file.

Don’t Be a Stalker

Let’s face it, you know you are in love. You’ve become obsessed with this relationship. All your friends tell you that you need to break it off. This confined intimacy is killing you, and you don’t even know it. You’ve become so dependent upon approval that your entire livelihood is wrapped up in it. You sit around at home wondering why she doesn’t call (err, crawl) as often as she used to.

Don’t get too obsessed with the search engines. You want a steady long lasting relationship, not a one night stand.

Don’t spam the engines
Don’t become over obsessed and forget that SEO is about marketing
Focus on metrics that matter like traffic, conversions, and business (not just rankings)

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Yes, this was more of a fun post, and I didn’t include alot of “details” about how to disallow certain robots, proper use of robots.txt, excluding certain directories, using webmaster tools, etc… so if you have any questions, please comment and I’ll answer any specific questions you have…

Competitive Website Research Analysis | 10 Free Tools

Justin Smith — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:27:00 +0000

This post is a Re-Mix of a post I wrote in 2006, Formerly called: “How to Scope Out a Competitor’s Website and Learn From It.”

It’s always fun and interesting to check out what your competitors are up to. When you type in a search for your keywords, who comes up? Are your competitors ahead of you or below you? Why? Do you know what kind of traffic they get? Do you know how many links are coming into their site?

Competitive Research

In search engine marketing, competitive research and analysis is everything. Since search engines are all about ranking, the websites you see in the search engine rankings above and below you are your competitors. So it’s very helpful to know how to research those competitors to discover how and why they rank the way they do.

10 Free Tools For Researching Your Competitor’s Website

#1. SpyFu.com

SpyFu is one of my favorites as it can show you how much money a competing website may be spending on pay per click advertisements. And is also useful to show you which organic keywords may be bringing in the most traffic. Tool Use Rating: Easy

#2. SEODigger.com

SEO Digger is a free tool that will show you what keyword phrases different websites rank for. The ranking database is updated every 2 weeks and is usually very accurate. This can be a great resource if you’re trying to find out what phrases a competing website ranks for. They can also be sorted by order of Wordtracker popularity which shows how many times those phrases are searched. Tool Use Rating: Easy

#3. SEOmoz Tools

If you are already familiar with SEOmoz, you know that they provide a host of tools that can help with SEO. Many of which can be helpful for competitive website analysis including: SEO Toolbox, Trifecta, Term Target, and their new tool called Linkscape. Note on Linkscape: this tools is definitely for more advanced users, but can be very valuable to search for link data on almost any website. Tool Use Rating: Ranging from Easy – Difficult

#4. WebsiteGrader.com

The Website Grader is an extremely user friendly site that will give a quick review of any website and show helpful data like: domain age, domain renewal information, meta data, backlinks, onpage factors, traffic, and alot more. The really helpful thing is that it gives easy to understand explanations if it happens to find any erros on the website. This is a great tool for discovering basic strengths and weaknesses with any competing website. Tool Use Rating: Easy

#5. NicheWatch.com

Niche Watch takes a little different approach in that it doesn’t start with a competing website, but with keyword phrases. You type in a phrase, and it will show you data on the top 20 competitors including backlinks, links to the page, Page Rank, and alot more. This is a great resource to see info on offsite factors for each website and it can often times give you great insight as to why a site is ranking the way it is. Tool Use Rating: Moderate

#6. SEO For Firefox

SEO for Firefox is one of the more famous tools of the bunch. Aaron the creator claims that over 50,000 people are using it. If you don’t already have Firefox, you may want to consider downloading it just for the purpose of using this great add-on. When turned on, this tool will show extra data under each Google result after you complete a search. The data includes useful things like: backlinks, page links, .edu links, pages, domain age, Dmoz, Yahoo Dir, and alot more. Basically it lets you see why competitors are ranking in the results, and based on the data, it’s usually very easy to see why sites are being ranked the way they are. Tool Use Rating: Moderate

#7. Compete.com

Looking for exact traffic numbers for a competitors website? Too bad, that is priviledged information. But the next best thing can be found at a site like Compete.com. They compile data on millions of websites to provide you with fairly accurate traffic analytics, and basic search analytics; like which terms are used the most often to bring search traffic. It’s about as good as you can get unfortunately. If you want to compare data try Quantcast and Alexa. Tool Use Rating: Easy – Moderate

#8. LinkDiagnosis.com

Link Diagnosis is a newer tool that I’ve only been using for a few months. But I have been extremely impressed so far. It basically will look at the backlinks of any website and examine the anchor text, Page Rank, quality of link, and number of outbound links on the page and displays it in an easy to read and export format. It is really sweet for being able to tell how strong incoming links are to any giving website complete with data on NoFollow links. Tool Use Rating: Moderate – Difficult

#9. SearchRascal.com

Search Rascal is purely a ranking analysis tool that allows you to see who is ranking for any given keyword. The unique thing about it is that it tracks past ranking and will show whether or not websites have moved up or down in ranking in the last day, week, or month. It is very handy. Note: only works for more competitive phrases. Tool Use Rating: Easy

#10. Google & Yahoo

Believe it or not, Google and Yahoo are a couple of the best tools you have available for competitive analysis. You just have to know how to use them… Google consistently has the best search results, so make sure you use it the most when trying to search for actual competitors. If someone is ranking above you in Google, chances are they deserve to be there. Yahoo is great for searching incoming links to your website. In fact, almost all the tools above use Yahoo’s data to search for links. To get an overall picture of how many links are coming in, visit Yahoo Site Explorer, type in your domain name with or without the www, and click on “inlinks”. This will give you a full picture of your incoming links. Tool Use Rating: Easy

I hope these 10 free tools will come in handy as you try to learn more about your competition. Make sure to keep track of your findings, and if you have any questions about how to use any of them, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Is Your Website Eating Itself Through Keyword Cannibalization?

Justin Smith — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:06:18 +0000

Keyword cannibalization is an important topic with any website. It typically becomes a problem when over zealous website owners and designers decide they want to choose 1 primary search term that they want to rank for.

Definition of Keyword Cannibalization:

“The act of placing the same keywords or phrases on multiple pages of a website in titles and content in order improve ranking in the search engines… leading to confusion with search engines on which page to rank in the results.”

This is extremely important to the general health of websites. I see people so often trying to rank well for certain keyword phrases using this technique. But unfortunately, their efforts are misguided. Placing the same keyword in every title, every page, and every piece of content you create is a very bad idea. The common misguided notion goes something like this:

“Well… I really want to rank well for the keyword “Las Vegas Real Estate”, so I’m going to place that phrase in every title and every piece of content I create. After all, Google loves keywords, and the more I use it, the better chance I’ll have of ranking.”

Let’s explore why this doesn’t work:

Google ranks each page of a website independently of each other

You may have a home page, and 10 articles that all include the same keyword phrase in the title and body… but guess what? Only one (possibly 2) of those pages are ever going to rank in the search engines for that specific keyword phrase.

Using the same keyword doesn’t help gain extra relevance

Creating multiple pages with the exact same keyword phrase in the title and content does not force the search engine spider to interpret the site as being more relevant for that same keyword phrase. All it does is force the spider to choose which page is the best. One page will rank, and the others won’t show up at all.

The quality of your content will suffer

If you are using the keyword “Las Vegas Real Estate” in every title of every article, what are you readers going to think? Need I say more???

You are severely limiting your search engine traffic potential

Many of you probably understand the concept of the long tail by now. It works. Don’t get me wrong, “Las Vegas Real Estate” is a great keyword. But do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket when there are literally thousands of variations of that phrase that could do just as good or better? Why waste your time trying to get every page of your site ranking for the same term when there are so many others out there waiting to be ranked for? Think about it.

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Meta tag titles are typically the biggest problem with keyword cannibalization. Not only on the home page, but on sub pages and article pages as well. Each page needs to have it’s own unique title. This will give you the most likelihood of ranking for many different keywords and give you the most traffic potential.

Probably the most common place for keyword cannibalization is in blogs. People will create blog post titles that are often very similar to each other, and this becomes a problem because most blogs are set up by default to make the article title the meta tag title. Thus creating the keyword cannibalization effect with multiple articles.

Tips on Avoiding Cannibalization

Write unique Meta tag titles for your home page and sub pages. Use specific words that describe that page. If you can’t think of anything besides “Las Vegas Real Estate”… seek professional help. Or try this keyword suggestion tool.
If you have a blog, make sure your article titles are unique to what you are writing about. Using variations of a keyword are fine: “Las Vegas Condos”, “Las Vegas Real Estate Agent”, but don’t over do it. Try to appeal to your readers first, and to the search engines second!
Choose which pages are the best candidates for certain keywords, and send internal links with the anchor text of those keywords to that page.
Start broad on your links, and build out. Your home page and top level pages probably have the most potential for ranking with more competitive broader terms. Make sure you target those tougher terms on your top level pages (shallow pages), and work on the more specific long tail keywords with articles, and blog posts (deep pages).

~ Secret Tip ~

If you are really struggling with how to title pages, and can’t think of any more good keyword phrases to use, try using a good keyword research tool. Google Keyword Suggestions, SEO Book’s Keyword Research Tool, or even Wordtracker or Nichebot. Start by searching for a broad term, and use the results to find the most relevant, and the most popular keywords for your page. You may just find that the keyword you wanted to use in the first place doesn’t get as many searches as you thought… and that there was a related phrase you should have been using all along. Hint: I do this every time I write a new article…

So go get to work! Remove all those duplicate Meta tag titles. Do some keyword research. I think you’ll find that with a little work, you’ll see a much bigger return on your investment with broader search traffic.

The Ultimate Guide to Internet Business Branding on Search Engines

Justin Smith — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:59:25 +0000

The opportunities for Internet business branding on search engines has really come as a revelation to me in the last couple of years. It’s such a simple concept, but one that many SEO practitioners and companies don’t understand. This concept of branding has brought me so much enlightenment in the area of search engine marketing, and helped me to understand my overall purpose as an internet marketer.

Here are a couple of brief definitions of branding just for reference:

“in marketing, the sum total of a company’s value, including products, services, people, advertising, positioning, and culture”

“in marketing, the use of logos, symbols, or product design to promote consumer awareness of goods and services”

We all know the classic branding examples: Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Etc…

But what about branding online? To some extent, we see the same branding efforts online from many of the big companies. This usually comes in the form of banners, text ads, video sponsorships, etc. That’s all fine and good. I don’t question the supreme wisdom of Madison Avenue in this regard. But what are companies doing to brand on the search engines?

This is obviously an important question as search engines command such a huge amount of traffic and eyeballs. It would seem like such an obvious place to build brand awareness through higher visibility in search results. But sadly, so many marketers skip this step and go straight towards the “SEO drug” that so many people are hooked on these days: higher ranking.

I’m full aware of the temptation of purely going after higher rankings, it looks good, it boosts your ego, it’s impressive to show to clients… but it doesn’t always translate into more success in the long run. SEO is so much more than simply achieving higher rankings. And I want to point out some of the reasons why that is the case.

Search Engine Branding With Meta Tags

This is talked about quite often in the SEO space, but it is hugely important, and I want to spend some time covering it. Meta titles and descriptions are very important here. When you include company names and even tag lines in your Meta tags, you are maximizing your branding potential because that is what people see on the search engines.

Here’s an example for a “Car Insurance” search on Google:

What’s wrong with this picture? Everyone on the page has branded properly in their meta titles and descriptions except for autoinsuranceremedy.com Have you ever heard of them? I haven’t. But I have heard of all the other companies on the page. Coincidence?… or just poor branding?

Let’s take another example for a local real estate search:

Imagine this as a scenario: a first time home buyer is considering a purchase 6 months down the road. They have no idea what to do, and they have been researching for properties in their price range, good real estate agents, and information about the local area. They happen to use Google on a regular basis, and are doing multiple real estate related searches. This is where branding can make all the difference in the world. Take a look at the above results. Who is branding and who isn’t… Just because a title says La Jolla Real Estate, (which was the search term) doesn’t mean people are going to click it… and even if they do are they ever going to remember who you are? Of course, you may get lucky, and they might like your site and bookmark it for later. But the more likely scenario is that they will go right back to Google the next time, and the sites that displayed their brands in the results through meta tags will gain the mind/brand share.

Meta tags play a huge role in this online branding process because that is what people see in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

So what did we learn here? Place your name, company name, or site name in your titles and descriptions. Here are a couple of examples of good use:

You can see that placement tends to be different based on preference. I personally prefer to have the brand in the front of the title tags on my top level pages and money pages. And move it to the back on deeper level pages like articles, and product pages. The point is that you are building brand awareness with every search result that you appear in by placing the brand in the titles and descriptions.

Not Convinced Yet? Ok, here are a couple studies that prove my point:

A report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Nielsen NetRatings suggest that “27 percent (of survey respondents) were more likely to name a specific brand if it was in the top spot of the search results page.” (Sponsored Listings Effectiveness Study, July, 2004).

And again, a report by the Dieringer Resource Group, which surveyed 3,000 respondents regarding their online purchasing habits, found that 60% of the respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of online research (American Interactive Consumer Survey, June, 2004).

The problem that I’ve found with many SEO consultants is that they don’t come from a marketing background, but from a technical background. Thus, they can fall into the trap of trying purely to acheive that higher ranking, but not pay as much attention to effective search marketing in terms of results.

I admit that I am still learning how to be a good marketer first, and an SEO second… but understanding how to brand in the search engines has definitely opened my eyes to see a deeper purpose in my SEO efforts.

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