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…
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.
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:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
“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:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
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.
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.
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.
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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…
Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, you probably realize by now that the best way to market online is through quality content. By content I mean: articles, posts, pictures, video, etc… I’m pretty sure I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you that putting quality stuff on your website is the best way to market. But besides from the obvious, why is this the case?
I just want to review a few reasons WHY quality content is important.
I hate to break it to you, but people could really care less about you, your business, and your website. If I’m going to take the time to visit your website, I want to know what is in it for me.
PEOPLE VISIT WEBSITES BECAUSE THEY SEE POTENTIAL VALUE.
Think about it. Why would you visit some random website unless there was actually something valuable for you there. Give your visitors something real, or at least create the perception of value.
Nothing can kill a website or blog faster than spammy commercialized content. We’ve all seen it. You click a link and find yourself on a website that only talks about how great it is. In fact, if this website were a person it would have an ego size comparable to Beckham.
No one wants to see a website that is obsessed with self promotion.
In case you didn’t know, building authoritative links is one of the best ways to improve your ranking in search engines. And there are plenty of ways to build those links… but the best way is to write/build/share something on your website that is of true value. When you do that, people will be much more likely to link to you.
If you create a website that simply talks about how great your company is but doesn’t actually provide anything of value, you shouldn’t expect to get any respect from the internet community. Traslation: no links.
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Last Thoughts… If you are one of these companies that have made these errors, there is still hope for you. Simply create something of value for your website visitors, and stop making people drink from your firehose of self promotion.
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?
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.
#1. SpyFu.comSpyFu 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.comSEO 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 ToolsIf 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.comThe 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.comNiche 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 FirefoxSEO 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.comLooking 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.comLink 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.comSearch 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 & YahooBelieve 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.
Just had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Shotland, a local search engine optimization expert, and had the opportunity to ask him some local SEO questions. Click the podcast button for the audio version, or read below for the transcript.
Hi this is Justin from Searching Solutions, and I have Andrew Shotland on the line with me. He’s a local SEO expert, and I was hoping he could answer a few questions for us. Thank you Andrew for joining us today. If you wouldn’t mind just letting people know what your background is, and what you’re doing right now.
I’ve been in the internet business since the beginning in the mid 90’s. I launched Showtime network’s first website, and I worked for NBC for many years and worked for NBC.com for a while. For the last several years, I’ve been doing search engine optimization consulting, and I worked for a local startup called Insiderpages.com where I did a lot of local search engine optimization. So I worked for some big media companies, a lot of startups and a lot of small businesses who were looking for local search help.
What would you say your percentage of clients are that are more focused on localized search… I know your blog is pretty much all local SEO.
I’d say it’s probably about 50/50, but more and more even big media clients are sort of getting it. For example, right now I’m doing a project for a lot of big television stations, and they think of themselves as local, but they never really thought of themselves as candidates for local search, and now that we’re having these conversations with them, it’s opening up their eyes to all this local traffic that they’ve ignored.
So their thinking more in terms of building a national brand awareness, and things like that? Instead of localized searches basically?
They’re thinking of very specific local searches. There not as much interested in national awareness. They have all this content and programming on their site, but they never think to try to rank for keywords like ‘Oprah’. They are really focused on news, traffic, weather, and classifieds. They’ve never thought until recently that there was traffic outside of those things. Be it Yellowpages, event searches, restaurant reviews, etc. A lot of these companies have very authoritative and trusted websites, and don’t really need to do a lot to rank well for these niche terms.
You have unique experience coming from Insiderpages.com. One of the questions I had was: You constantly see in localized searches these big authoritative directory type websites like Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, etc. What are you finding that it takes for the smaller guy that’s trying to rank well in those local searches? What is it typically taking to rank well above those?
It’s not as hard as you’d think. I’m constantly amazed when I see some startup kicking a$$ over the yellowpages.com or superpages.com type of websites. Those sites have a lot of trust, but they haven’t been especially good at getting people to generate content. They’ve gotten better with their architecture, but they’re still very slow moving in adding new stuff. For example, when I was at Insiderpages, we talked to Superpages a lot about “hey, can we share reviews with you” We wanted to share our reviews all over the place. They kept saying, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, but it took 2 years to just add reviews because they had so many mine fields to navigate before they did that. But if you look at a site like Yellowbot, which came out of nowhere last year, they were able to quickly launch a generic IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) and use some really creative architecture mostly around the idea of niche local tagging to start getting all these crazy niche local searches which … you know… sites like Yellowpages.com, they’re just not there. So I’ve seen a lot of start ups be able to instantly dominate these big IYPs because they’re more flexible, they’re faster, and they’re more focused. So for example, You have a site in… where are you located?
Castle Rock Colorado, just below Denver
Ok, so if you wanted to create a Denver local search site, I can pretty much guarantee, if you just work at it for a couple months, you could start to outrank DEX for a lot of searches. Because you’ll focus. You’ll get a lot of people in Denver linking to you, you’ll get a lot of content created, whereas, they’re trying to do 20 million different things.
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that in our local market. I was just curious to see what your perspective was on it because that seems like some of the primary competition. Especially for your medium sized markets… between 50,000 - 100,000 residents. There’s not a lot of competition there, but the main competition seems to be these big authoritative type hubs.
Yeah, if you wanted to create a local search product, for small towns all over the place, it could do really well. Even just… think about architecturally, a yellowpages.com or superpages, they need to focus on the biggest markets. So if you focused on instead of the top 50 markets, the bottom 50 markets, you’d have all those markets prioritized in your architecture.
I wanted to talk about the long tail just for a minute. You know it’s a very common term in the SEO industry… but moving it over to localized search, for the small business owner… Most of the small business owners I talk to… you know, you have a local plumber that’s in the Denver area, and they’re just thinking in terms of trying to rank for phrases like ” Denver Colorado Plumber”. And they’re totally not thinking about long tail type searches, and they’re just not even considering the possibility. Do you think there’s value for small businesses to move in that direction and work on some of these long tail phrases? Keeping mind that there’s not a lot of search volume for those types of phrases, but do you think there is some value there?
Oh for sure. First off, to get back to your previous question, I think the small business owner has the biggest advantage when it comes to competing and ranking in these pages. Because ultimately that’s the content that Google wants to show you. The guy that can actually do your plumbing, not the page that aggregates 20 people who can do your plumbing. Which is just kind of a repeat of Google’s search results. I think for small local companies, just focus on SEO a bit, and you will see dramatic results. Because, they are so much more favored. They have a lot more relevant links to them usually, and they just have a lot more interesting relevant content created.
So I think, in your plumber example, I think they can get a lot of bang out of long tail because many times, long tail keywords are much more qualified people. I’d rather have someone for me, looking for… let’s say… “leaky toilet in Denver”, then “Denver plumber”. Because it’s just a much more qualified searcher, and they certainly know what they want. It definitely couldn’t hurt. This is always the challenge, it takes a little bit of work and research to just figure this stuff out, and figure out where is the relevant search volume in the market, and can I first rank for that, meaning I have to create content for it and build links to it, and then, can I service it and turn it into a lead. But I think that the smart local guy will do the same things that the big sites are doing just on a smaller scale.
One more quick question before I let you go. If you could speak directly to that local business owner. Everyone knows the economy is tighter, and business budgets are pretty tight, but what would be a couple real practical tips you’d give to the business owner that may not be the most technically savvy type of a person, where they could really improve their rankings without too much of an investment.
A lot of it’s the basics. Look at your title tags first. That’s always the first thing, and best thing to do. And make sure you get content on the page that targets specific terms you want to rank for. Make sure that you have your phone number on every page. And that’s not for SEO, that’s for getting people to call you. And it couldn’t hurt to have email me, or a contact form on every page as well in big letters… so many companies don’t do that. Certainly try to get local links from your local chamber of commerce, and friends, partners, things like that.
But the thing that I’ve found that is the biggest bang for the buck is looking in your analytics, and most web packages, even cheap ones, have some kind of analytics that they can get access to, and most businesses don’t really look at these things, but if you can get access to your charts… here’s how many people you’ve got this month from Google, or Yahoo, and here are the keywords they used to get to you. If you take a look at that, And look at the keywords that are sending traffic, then go to Google and search for them and see where you rank, getting an approximation of where you rank… and if you rank let’s say, at the bottom of page one or page two, That’s a sign that that keyword is pretty good for you if you’re getting traffic for it. So I would recommend figuring out which page is sending that traffic for that keyword, and boost your internal links to that page for that keyword, with the keyword as the anchor text. I’ve found that it works for big sites, small sites, and it works really fast, which is great.
That’s a great tip. Thank you so much, and thank you for taking the time to give this interview.
For more information about Andrew Shotland you can view his page on Local Search Optimization at LocalSEOGuide.com
Thanks again Andrew!
The search marketing industry, in large, doesn’t necessarily function according to a certain list of regulations or enforced standards. Sure if you are blatantly violating Google’s standards by spamming, cloaking, sneaky redirects or any other “black-hat” SEO method, watch out, there could be penalties!
But, on the home front, this industry is relatively new and evolving so quickly that there are no official “codes of conduct” being strictly enforced or regulated at this time. To implement any type of regulatory agency would call for a massive effort by many and could take a long time before any real results became evident.
However, SEO’s and others are under the shadow of the search engine giants, they set the standards and regulate to some extent, what takes place in the SEO world. Tick someone off at Google and good luck!
Here at Searching Solutions we hold a strong view that Search Marketing shouldn’t be a heavily regulated industry. Why? First of all, Searching Solutions is a “real” business that operates on core sets of business values which supersede any standards out there! Even if there were strong regulations out there, just like any other business there will always be those who violate them!
Furthermore, SEO and Internet Marketing is so vast, so intricate so much more like an art form than a practice, it would be extremely difficult to regulate. As a result, your market would become like a Government agency and take months to see results if strong standards were introduced.
Searching Solutions strives to win consumer trust and achieve real results. We do this by working directly with businesses; we get to know your business inside and out! We are locally based in Colorado and if at all feasible, we will come to you and meet face-to-face! That would be a little difficult for those based in India or elsewhere.
Who can offer professional SEO credentials? As of now, nobody! Don’t be fooled. As a business, our goals are consumer trust, real results and satisfaction always! If we can’t achieve these we may as well shut the doors. We avoid “cookie cutter” methods because every business is different so don’t expect a “package deal” with us, you deserve a deeper strategy than that. In short, we base our degree of professionalism and credentials on real results! Check out our case studies and see for yourself!
We’ve all seen how big reviews can impact a sales decision. Sites like Amazon changed the way we make product purchasing decisions online forever. With big local business search sites like Yelp and Insider Pages picking up speed in the local search world, online business reviews have become a huge part of online marketing for any business.
There have been many articles written that try to debunk the review model, usually citing the large number of fraudulent reviews. But whatever your view on the effectiveness of local business reviews, the fact of the matter is that reviews are becoming MORE important, not less as time goes on.
We are now seeing many sites giving special algorithmic boosts based upon number and quality of reviews. Even Google seems to rank sites higher in the local results that have more reviews than others.
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So what does this mean for your local business? It means that reviews on sites like Yelp and Google, and a host of others will not only help someone make a buying decision, but also help you rank better on many sites. I’ve seen a simple well devised review campaign launch a local business to the top of the results with a relatively small number of reviews.
Take a look at this map from the Local SEO Guide that shows the number of online reviews for restaurants around the country:
There are alot of great opportunities out there. One of of the things Searching Solutions does for many local businesses is to work directly with managers and business owners to come up with creative ways to increase the number of reviews a business receives.
If your local ranking is suffering in the search engines, call us! We can help…
Searching Solutions
Justin | 720.670.0742
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