Over the last year I worked on a case study on SEO and how it works with Wonkie cartoons - I am currently writing a short White paper that I'll publish online and also be teaching as part of an information systems course later this year.
It is somewhat unfortunate in some ways that Google is so protective over their search ranking algorithms. Many SEO companies are finding it hard to predict their own rankings despite having years of experience in the field. With the introduction of the latest Google algorithm, results have become even more unpredictable than before. Basically Google is incorporating all sorts of funny stuff and changed, quite fundamentally the structure of how it evaluates potential search results with the latest release.
As a result it seems many affiliate programme owners are finding their websites either blacklisted or penalised severely and suddenly in terms of the new ranking. There will no doubt be a backlash against Google as the dominant market player imposing unilateral rules and apparently subject to no criticism. If webmasters choose to complain, they do so at their own peril - if they get banned for whatever reason (and I mean whatever reason!), getting any sort of justification from Google is futile.
In any case, all the best for the New Year and I hope things go splendidly for you in 2010! More on SEO coming soon - as soon as we figure out how best to work within the rules of the new Google game.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Thursday, December 31, 2009
2009 - a rocky year for SEO
With so many changes being made by Google, it's hard for SEO professionals to actually keep track about what works and what doesn't. Even if you're not trying to unfairly game the system, you still need to understand how it works in order to maximise the impact of search engine results from your potential customers.
I look forward to exploring the new algorithm - hopefully it's practical and easy to understand!
I look forward to exploring the new algorithm - hopefully it's practical and easy to understand!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
SEO Case Study
I've just spoken to Pratish and the guys at Wonkie cartoons to confirm next steps and they've agreed for me to use them as a case study. I'm drafting a typical set of questions an SEO consultant type would ask and see how well they fare on the basics.
The questions will include:
1. What SEO related activities are you currently engaged in to promote your blog?
2. Is SEO a priority for you? What percentage of your traffic currently comes from search engines vs CPC marketing?
3. Do you use tools such as Google Webmaster and Google Analytics?
4. Do you understand what the various terms in Google Analytics mean and how to interpret them? E.g. What is the bounce rate and what kind of figure should one be targeting for that metric?
5. How do you market your blog?
6. Have you bought links in order to improve SEO? If so, have you tracked how effective your purchased were?
7. When you make posts on other blogs etc, how do you link your site to your comment?
8. What keywords do you use? What keywords do you want to be ranked for?
The step after that will be to examine their site more closely and try to determine exactly what the optimisation gaps are and what kind of benefits closing those gaps will yield. Finally, we'll make some recommendations with reasons for the suggestions to ensure that this exercise is valuable for readers of this blog.
Until next time!
The questions will include:
1. What SEO related activities are you currently engaged in to promote your blog?
2. Is SEO a priority for you? What percentage of your traffic currently comes from search engines vs CPC marketing?
3. Do you use tools such as Google Webmaster and Google Analytics?
4. Do you understand what the various terms in Google Analytics mean and how to interpret them? E.g. What is the bounce rate and what kind of figure should one be targeting for that metric?
5. How do you market your blog?
6. Have you bought links in order to improve SEO? If so, have you tracked how effective your purchased were?
7. When you make posts on other blogs etc, how do you link your site to your comment?
8. What keywords do you use? What keywords do you want to be ranked for?
The step after that will be to examine their site more closely and try to determine exactly what the optimisation gaps are and what kind of benefits closing those gaps will yield. Finally, we'll make some recommendations with reasons for the suggestions to ensure that this exercise is valuable for readers of this blog.
Until next time!
Friday, January 2, 2009
New Year - New Beginnings
Hope you're all having a good start to the New Year.. mine was awesome! Diving in Mozambique and spending the Christmas on the beach... could not ask for a better start to the year!
This is really just a quick catch up blog post to wish you all well.. will write more once things settle down post the holiday season :)
This is really just a quick catch up blog post to wish you all well.. will write more once things settle down post the holiday season :)
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Last of the SEO glossary
So this is the last of the SEO term glossary we're going to cover before we're going to look at an SEO case study and work through an example step by step. More details of this below after today's final set of terms:
text links - These are plain HTML links that do not involve images, flash, or javascript
time on page - Exactly what it says.. the amount of time someone spends on one page before clicking an outbound link or entering a new address in the address bar. Longer is better, obviously.
toolbar pagerank (PR) This is a value between 0 and ten giving an indication of relative page importance - it is not the same as pagerank. This is not updated frequently by google and is so not a reliable indicator of current status.
trust rank - This is a method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages. Manual is given more weight than automated links.. debatable how accurate the SEO algorithms for determining this are.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator - This is the http:// .. web address you type in your address bar
user generated content (also known as UGC) This includes media like Social bookmarking networks, wikis, and some blogs that rely heavily on UGC. The content that users create drive the site and the business model.
walled garden a group of pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any external pages. A walled garden may still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it is unlikely to have high pagerank
web 2.0 Much hyped-about technology characterised by websites which are designed to encourage user interaction.
white hat SEO - SEO techniques that conform to best practice guidelines (viz. Google's guidelines). This is what you want to use.
widget - this is a small application on blogs, web pages etc that provide specific functions such as a displaying number of subscribers, hits, time and date etc.
So from the next few posts, we're going to be looking at a case study. I've exchanged a couple of emails to the cartoonists at Wonkie cartoon blog and they're keen to get input from an SEO point of view on their site.
text links - These are plain HTML links that do not involve images, flash, or javascript
time on page - Exactly what it says.. the amount of time someone spends on one page before clicking an outbound link or entering a new address in the address bar. Longer is better, obviously.
toolbar pagerank (PR) This is a value between 0 and ten giving an indication of relative page importance - it is not the same as pagerank. This is not updated frequently by google and is so not a reliable indicator of current status.
trust rank - This is a method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages. Manual is given more weight than automated links.. debatable how accurate the SEO algorithms for determining this are.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator - This is the http:// .. web address you type in your address bar
user generated content (also known as UGC) This includes media like Social bookmarking networks, wikis, and some blogs that rely heavily on UGC. The content that users create drive the site and the business model.
walled garden a group of pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any external pages. A walled garden may still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it is unlikely to have high pagerank
web 2.0 Much hyped-about technology characterised by websites which are designed to encourage user interaction.
white hat SEO - SEO techniques that conform to best practice guidelines (viz. Google's guidelines). This is what you want to use.
widget - this is a small application on blogs, web pages etc that provide specific functions such as a displaying number of subscribers, hits, time and date etc.
So from the next few posts, we're going to be looking at a case study. I've exchanged a couple of emails to the cartoonists at Wonkie cartoon blog and they're keen to get input from an SEO point of view on their site.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
SEO glossary - Terms S
Today we're covering the letter S.. I'm also working on getting a potential case study to walk you through a full SEO implementation. If you have any suggestions then drop me a line and you could get a freebie!
sandbox There is a rumour (and there are plenty about Google!) that Google puts new sites into a “sandbox.” Think of this as a trial period for the site in which it will not rank well. THe idea behind this is that a site should be around for a certain period of time to be relevant. Short term sites are unlikely to have anything of value for the end user. Again, debatable but you need to know the term.
scrape This is the process of copying content from a site, often through the use of bots. If you have half decent content with some keywords, it's likely your content WILL get scraped at some point or the other .. be prepared!
search engine (or SE) is an application that searches 1 or more documents for relevant matches of a user's keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. The big three Internet search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN
search engine spam These are webpages that are specifically created to cause search engines to produce inappropriate or less relevant results. Many people claiming to do SEO are actually spammers.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - SEM is used to describe the process associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure on certain keyword searches.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) This is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site through achieving high rankings in the search engine results pages (see SERP below). Obviously the higher the rank the better as there is a greater chance the searcher will click through to your webpage.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - the results page that comes up after a user does a search based on keywords
site map - This is a single page or group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website - exactly what it sounds like - a map of the entire website. An XML sitemap, often kept in the root directory of a website, usually has the specific purpose to help search engine crawlers ensure they index all website pages.
sock puppet - act of establishing multiple user profiles or hiding your real identity when posting comments, etc.
social bookmark This is very important - it's a form of Social Media where user's bookmarks are aggregated for public access. Common sites for this are Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Newsvine and many others. There are a number of products such as AddThis that allow a user to easily bookmark a page and share it with their friends.
social media - Web-based technologies used by people to share information and views. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media. As are sites such as Facebook.
social media marketing (SMM) Website/ brand promotion through social media
spam ad page These are Made For Advertisement pages which usually use scraped or machine generated text for content. These pages have no real value to users. Spammers often create sites with hundreds of these pages (they get revenue based on the ad-clicks)
spam-dexing Also known as search engine spamming, this is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. - definition taken from Wikipedia
spammer A person who sends/ posts something unsolicited and commercial
spider A bot or crawler used by search engines to find and add webpages to its index.
spider trap - this is an endless loop of automatically generated links which can “confuse” a spider program. These are often intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting by bots.
splash page Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. These are usually great for human users but can be very bad for SE spiders which usually only navigate through text links. Beware how you use these. The same argument applies to flash-based websites.
Splog - Spam Blog or Splog is a blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content. It's not as irritating for end users as it is for the original copyright owners. Sadly there is little to do to stop them. Report them as contravening the DCMA to Google .. it's a process but probably worth the effort to protect your content and ranking.
static page A webpage without dynamic content or session-id variables in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO in that they are friendly for search engine bots.
stickiness Opposite of bounce. Website should entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more pages - this is called improving “stickiness”. An internally well-linked site is important for stickiness
submission (to search engine) - submitting your URL to a search engine to crawl and index
supplemental index These are pages with usually very low or non-existent pagerank. They may be still relevant to a search query and can often appear in the SERPs (labelled as a supplemental result). This does not necessarily indicate a Google penalty.
That's S done for today! As I was typing this out I thought it may be useful to have a site that has a combination of images/ photos and text to optimise. The cartoon blog I mentioned in my previous post, Wonkie, is probably a good one for this.
sandbox There is a rumour (and there are plenty about Google!) that Google puts new sites into a “sandbox.” Think of this as a trial period for the site in which it will not rank well. THe idea behind this is that a site should be around for a certain period of time to be relevant. Short term sites are unlikely to have anything of value for the end user. Again, debatable but you need to know the term.
scrape This is the process of copying content from a site, often through the use of bots. If you have half decent content with some keywords, it's likely your content WILL get scraped at some point or the other .. be prepared!
search engine (or SE) is an application that searches 1 or more documents for relevant matches of a user's keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. The big three Internet search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN
search engine spam These are webpages that are specifically created to cause search engines to produce inappropriate or less relevant results. Many people claiming to do SEO are actually spammers.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - SEM is used to describe the process associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure on certain keyword searches.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) This is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site through achieving high rankings in the search engine results pages (see SERP below). Obviously the higher the rank the better as there is a greater chance the searcher will click through to your webpage.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) - the results page that comes up after a user does a search based on keywords
site map - This is a single page or group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website - exactly what it sounds like - a map of the entire website. An XML sitemap, often kept in the root directory of a website, usually has the specific purpose to help search engine crawlers ensure they index all website pages.
sock puppet - act of establishing multiple user profiles or hiding your real identity when posting comments, etc.
social bookmark This is very important - it's a form of Social Media where user's bookmarks are aggregated for public access. Common sites for this are Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Newsvine and many others. There are a number of products such as AddThis that allow a user to easily bookmark a page and share it with their friends.
social media - Web-based technologies used by people to share information and views. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media. As are sites such as Facebook.
social media marketing (SMM) Website/ brand promotion through social media
spam ad page These are Made For Advertisement pages which usually use scraped or machine generated text for content. These pages have no real value to users. Spammers often create sites with hundreds of these pages (they get revenue based on the ad-clicks)
spam-dexing Also known as search engine spamming, this is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. - definition taken from Wikipedia
spammer A person who sends/ posts something unsolicited and commercial
spider A bot or crawler used by search engines to find and add webpages to its index.
spider trap - this is an endless loop of automatically generated links which can “confuse” a spider program. These are often intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting by bots.
splash page Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. These are usually great for human users but can be very bad for SE spiders which usually only navigate through text links. Beware how you use these. The same argument applies to flash-based websites.
Splog - Spam Blog or Splog is a blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content. It's not as irritating for end users as it is for the original copyright owners. Sadly there is little to do to stop them. Report them as contravening the DCMA to Google .. it's a process but probably worth the effort to protect your content and ranking.
static page A webpage without dynamic content or session-id variables in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO in that they are friendly for search engine bots.
stickiness Opposite of bounce. Website should entice users to stay on the site longer, and view more pages - this is called improving “stickiness”. An internally well-linked site is important for stickiness
submission (to search engine) - submitting your URL to a search engine to crawl and index
supplemental index These are pages with usually very low or non-existent pagerank. They may be still relevant to a search query and can often appear in the SERPs (labelled as a supplemental result). This does not necessarily indicate a Google penalty.
That's S done for today! As I was typing this out I thought it may be useful to have a site that has a combination of images/ photos and text to optimise. The cartoon blog I mentioned in my previous post, Wonkie, is probably a good one for this.
Friday, November 28, 2008
SEO Glossary terms N-P
Today we're covering terms from N-P related to SEO - we're almost there!
natural search results These refer to search engine results which are the result of organic linking and not paid for or sponsored in any way.
nofollow This command is usually found in the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code (usually looks something like rel="external nofollow" when represented as part of a anchor href statement). This tells search bots to not follow either any links on the page or that specific link. Use of the nofollow statement is a form of link condom.
noindex This command is found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within an individual link code. It instructs search bots not to index that page or the specific link. Again, this is a form of link condom.
non reciprocal link This is also known as a one-way link. if site X links to site Y, but site Y does not link back to site X, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of dodgy behaviour between the 2 sites.
organic link organic links are those that are published only because the content creator feels they will add value for their users.
pagerank (or google PR) is typically a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google. It is a measure of link popularity and authority amongst other mostly unknown factors. Newbies should not worry about this too much for now - it can be pretty random and most SEO specialists agree that real page authority and pagerank often have little correlation. Also Google is a bit painful when it comes to assigning pagerank.. it all appears somewhat random at times. In short, don't sweat it!
pay for inclusion This practice, also known as PFI in short, basically amounts to charging a fee to include a site in a directory or search engine. Probably good not to consider a Yahoo directory submission e.g. as a paid link - it just helps with faster consideration of your site by SEs
portal A consolidator website which offers a wide range of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (or Pay Per Action) is similar to PPC (Pay Per Click) except here the publishers only get paid when click throughs result in a conversion - be it a sale or lead or whatever.
PPC (Pay Per Click) this is an ad scheme where sponsors pay advertising agencies, e.g. Google Adwords, whenever a user clicks on their ad.
More soon :)
natural search results These refer to search engine results which are the result of organic linking and not paid for or sponsored in any way.
nofollow This command is usually found in the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code (usually looks something like rel="external nofollow" when represented as part of a anchor href statement). This tells search bots to not follow either any links on the page or that specific link. Use of the nofollow statement is a form of link condom.
noindex This command is found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within an individual link code. It instructs search bots not to index that page or the specific link. Again, this is a form of link condom.
non reciprocal link This is also known as a one-way link. if site X links to site Y, but site Y does not link back to site X, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of dodgy behaviour between the 2 sites.
organic link organic links are those that are published only because the content creator feels they will add value for their users.
pagerank (or google PR) is typically a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google. It is a measure of link popularity and authority amongst other mostly unknown factors. Newbies should not worry about this too much for now - it can be pretty random and most SEO specialists agree that real page authority and pagerank often have little correlation. Also Google is a bit painful when it comes to assigning pagerank.. it all appears somewhat random at times. In short, don't sweat it!
pay for inclusion This practice, also known as PFI in short, basically amounts to charging a fee to include a site in a directory or search engine. Probably good not to consider a Yahoo directory submission e.g. as a paid link - it just helps with faster consideration of your site by SEs
portal A consolidator website which offers a wide range of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA (or Pay Per Action) is similar to PPC (Pay Per Click) except here the publishers only get paid when click throughs result in a conversion - be it a sale or lead or whatever.
PPC (Pay Per Click) this is an ad scheme where sponsors pay advertising agencies, e.g. Google Adwords, whenever a user clicks on their ad.
More soon :)
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