Before You Start
Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it's for your site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questíons:
1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.2) What is the time-frame for this project?
3) What is the budget for this project?
4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?
Answering these questíons will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.
Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?
Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.
I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your site or clients.
Steady: Requirements Gathering
Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client's exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.
To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questíons answered:
1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScrípt, Flat HTML etc)2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)
3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing "?" symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).
4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?
5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScrípt drop-down menus?
6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?
7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?
8) What is the current link popularity of the site?
9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?
10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?
11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?
12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)
13) What are the site's geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?
14) What are the site's demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client's target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?16) Who are my/my client's major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?
17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
18) Do I have access to site traffíc logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?
19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client's conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?
20) What are my/my client's expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?
Answers to the first 10 questíons above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you'll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.
This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questíons BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.
The remainder of questíons are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.
For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.
Go!
So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You're ready to tackle the job.
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007
How much do you know about the visitors to your web site? Are they directly interested in what you have to offer them? Is what you are speaking about on your site general information that is available anywhere on the internet or something that they can only get from you? If you are simply rehashing what everybody else is saying than you are losing out on a lot of traffic and a lot of income.
Exactly how much you need to know remains something of a mystery. However, it is relatively safe to say that if you offer only generalities on your web page, you may generate a lot of traffic but you will probably not get a lot of return visitors. While people who come to your site initially may provide some base ad revenue, unless they can interact on your site, they are probably not going to be very receptive to actual sales pitches from you
Good web design is something that can be achieved relatively easily by sticking to a small set of guiding principles and avoiding some very common mistakes.
Truly excellent web design skills are born out of years of experience, dedication and plenty of hard-learned mistakes. Fortunately, being truly excellent at web design is not a pre-requisite for building a fantastic website and the lessons learned from those mistakes can be passed on without the hardship.
This article contains some of the principles which I have learned the hard way and the easy way. Each principle is fairly obvious but so many designers ignore them for one reason or another and the consequence is a hard-to-use, poor looking site that is difficult to manage and fails to make the top 1000 in Google. If your website adheres to the principles below it will almost certainly be much healthier, and you and your visitors will reap the benefits.
Blinkx didn't let Google's YouTube enjoy the limelight for too long. Less than a day after Google said it would use AdSense to syndicate YouTube content across the web, Blinkx announced that it will share revenue with consumers who post ad-supported videos on their blogs, social network pages and other sites.
Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake told The International Herald Tribune that he believes the decision to include consumers in the company's ad revenue stream will help it compete with rival YouTube.
While Blinkx has been around since May, the company has focused mostly on video search. Under the new program, users can submit videos to Blinkx to be categorized and posted on any site. When the video is played, Blinkx will serve up a relevant ad from its inventory, placing it either in a transparent window at the bottom of the screen or in a box outside the frame. When the ad is clicked, the hosting site will receive a fraction of the revenue.
"This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards," Chandratillake said.
By Michael Estrin- All of WP 2.3's new features have been in MT for years. Tags are the biggest "new" feature in WP 2.3, and there's still no way to edit, manage, or delete them. MT was one of the first blogging tools to support the Atom API, which is important if you care about supporting web standards. The other improvements to managing drafts have been in MT forever, too.
2. MT's Dashboard is a lot more powerful and has far better plugins for showing your site data. Instead of just having simple text links, you can show your comments, entries, and tags across all of your blogs (see below) with a pretty graph. There are even plugins for Google Analytics or FeedBurner or hosting your own stats.
3. It takes tons of plugins to make WP do what MT does out of the box. Here's a few of the ones you'd need to get some of MT4's features: Advanced Tag Entry, Backup WordPress, Better Comments Manager, Bluetrait Event Viewer, Excerpt Editor, Front Page Excluded Categories, Get Recent Comments, Inline PHP, No Self-Ping, Order Posts, Organizer, Recent Posts, Search Everything, Subscribe To Comments, Tag Functions, Text Control, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Widgets, WordPress Dashboard Editor, WP Calendar, WP-Cache, WP-MU, WP-Vault.
4. When you get on Digg, your readers won't see "database connection error". Aaron wrote a great post about WP 2.3 and by the time it got on Digg's homepage, nobody could read it.
5. You can run all your blogs in one install. Unlike WP-MU, it doesn't take a separate version of the system to run many blogs, and all the plugins that work with MT work with all your blogs.
6. You can manage all your files and images right inside MT. MT4 has a built-in asset manager, so everything that you've uploaded is listed right there, where you can even add tags to your assets.
7. MT is already on version 4.01, and they don't want to do a 4.02. So you don't have to wait for 2.31 to come out. As if it wasn't enough hassle when 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 came out, do you really want to go through all of your plugins breaking again like they did with 2.1?
8. MT already has a lot of the most popular WP wishlist ideas built in. Want to search both posts and pages? Need to automatically generate thumbnails for images? Want a more usable photo uploader? Want a better WYSIWYG editor? Those are all built-in already.
9. OpenID built right in. It's not a plugin, and it even lets you sign in to comment on your blog with a wordpress.com account, or any other OpenID provider. (See my explanation of OpenID.)
10. MT can import all of the content from your WP (and WP-MU) blog right now. And then you'll have more options of what to do with your blog. You can make PHP pages, sure, but you can also make ASP or JSP pages too.
Update: Make that eleven. (Or seven, depending on how you count.)
Two weeks ago, Google took some severe action against a number of general topic web directories. There was the usual uproar on various forums, lots of blog posts from web directory owners and even a post on Sphinn that blamed me (which is hilariously awesome):
All of these directories no longer rank for their trade mark names, Rand Fishkin (who condones link buying) does not like directories so he has been complaining to his buddy Matt Cutts and Matt has gone out and manually penalized a large number of the leading directories.
However, today I wanted to seriously cover the topic of how and why Google might take this move, along with some advice for anyone building a directory in the future. First off, though, I'd like to examine the directories that have been penalized. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list (and if you know of more, feel free to list them in the comments), but it does represent a good sampling of the affected domains:
- AvivaDirectory.com
- AliveDirectory.com
- Haabaa.com
- DirectoryDump.com
- BigWebLinks.com
- ElegantDirectory.com
- eWebPages.org
- LinkBook.org
- Trincas.org
- CBravo.com
- CDHNow.com
- FreeWebIndex.com
- Mingleon.com
- PremiumDir.com
- Submission4u.com
- Aerospect.com
- Bakie.com
- LinkForever.net
- LinksArena.com
- LinksFactory.net
- LinksHolder.com
- WebVerve.com
- Wezp.com
- BestInternetResource.info
- DirSpace.com
- Eonte.com
- Frogengine.com
- LinkLister.co.uk
- LinkVerve.com
- LivelyDirectory.com
- Submitdotcom.com
How do we know these sites are penalized? Search results are usually pretty good evidence, and here's the type of pattern you see for a site like Alive Web Directory:
- Doesn't rank for "alive directory"
- Doesn't rank for "alivedirectory"
- Doesn't rank for "alive web directory - internet site resources powerful human edited web directory" (title tag plus a few words from the meta description)
- Ranks #1 for "alivedirectory.com" (so we know it's still in the index; and it's even got the sitelinks - keep that in mind next time someone tells you sitelinks are a sign of trust)
I ran through a lot of searches - avivadirectory, aviva directory, haabaa, haabaa directory, directorydump, bigweblinks, elegantdirectory, elegant directory, ewebpages org, ewebpages web directory & catalog, and on and on, through every one of the directories listed above. The patterns were always the same - the sites couldn't rank for their own name, even when combined with obvious phrases from their homepage. They only appeared when the "domain.com" format was used. I would bet money (and lots of it) that these domains are receiving very little, if any, traffic from Google and that links that appear on them aren't currently worth squat.
Why?
Because of these Attributes of Obviously Manipulative Directories (I
almost gave that name to this post, but I figured it might be a little
much). These aren't "hard and fast" rules - they're just common traits
that many of the low quality directories seem to share. I'm NOT saying
that you can't run a directory and do any of these - there's always
going to be gray areas and matters of intent. These signals, however,
are ones that, particularly when combined, make me shy away from a
directory:
- General in subject matter - This isn't a bad thing on its own, but it's certainly a signal that you may be getting a manipulative directory . While there are a few good general subject directories that Google probably does want to count (Lii, Yahoo!, DMOZ), there are far more who simply build general subject because it maximizes potential revenue (as anyone can apply).
- Anyone can get in - If you don't filter out low quality, spammy websites from being listed in your directory, even a pretty badly built algorithm can easily spot and remove you. Besides which, Google has been on a tear for years about bad links and bad neighborhoods and how they use the sites you link to as a signal for spam identification.
- Marketing to Webmasters - If your forum signature at Digitalpoint (sorry to stereotype, but it's just so true) contains links to three directories you own, you're probably in possession of three obviously manipulative directories. I'm sure there are a couple exceptions, but if I were Matt Cutts, I'd just tell one of my quality control guys to go spend a few days trawling DP for directory domains.
- Promoting Search Engine Link Value, not Traffic - The great majority of the domains I listed use phrases like "search engine optimized" or "high PageRank" or "highly ranked" to describe their directory. Once again, this should be a clear signal that you're not selling listings in a directory, you're selling links that are supposed to manipulate the search engine rankings.
- Use of Manipulative Link Building - Since the general directory industry seems to pride itself on toolbar PageRank, there's a lot of very shady link building tactics being employed by many directory owners. Sponsoring blog template themes, buying links at crappy directories (I know, the delicious irony of it all is hilarious), putting out junk press releases, releasing link-passing affiliate programs, joining webmaster forums that allow signature links, etc.
- Stuffing Links & Content to "Look Natural" - It's rough to see the effort that many directory owners put into trying to "appear" natural, by adding links to government and education resource websites, major media sites, etc. A lot of the time, it's really easy to spot this "looking natural" business over an actual, naturally built directory. It's usually by category - the section on social sciences is filled with a few great sites, while the page on Minnesota DUI Lawyers looks a little funny.
- Setting up "Premium" Sponsorships - When directories have a higher price you can pay for "extra links" or a higher placement on the page or assurance that you'll be linked to in every category, that's a decent sign that Google's spam team is going to come calling one of these days.
- Interlinking with Other Directories - If I can buy entry in your directory, along with three other directories for "one low price," I'd probably be better off burning those twenties for warmth (or, you know, trading them in for $19 Canadian).
- Common Popular Links - When I look through a directory's "most recent additions" and see a cosmetic surgeon, an Internet casino games site, a UK mortgage property, and a Pennsylvania health insurance provider, I can be relatively assured that any decent, self-respecting search engine probably wants to yank the link value pretty quickly.
- Bid for Links - This has to be the most obvious link manipulation ploy I've seen in a while. How could you honestly think that search engines would want to count those links? It's like the eBay of spam, only without negative feedback.
- Multiple Links with Your Choice of Anchor Text - I shouldn't have to explain this one - if you can choose your anchor text and point to several pages on your domain from your listing, it's pretty clear that the directory isn't targeting humans.
- Banner Ads from Your Directory on SEO Sites
- It's like waving a flag with a voice-activated, wind-powered speaker
that yells "Ban me! Ban me!" Sure, you might get clicks and money and
submissions, but you've gotta know that search quality team members
read SEO blogs, too - so if you do this, make sure your directory is
ready to be manually reviewed by search engineers.
- Demanding Reciprocal Links - If a directory requires that you link back to them in order to be included, or that you can link to other sites they promote in exchange for reduced payment or free inclusion, it's almost certainly trying to manipulate search rankings through linkage.
- Choose Your Own Anchor Text - Not nearly as fun as Choose Your Own Adventure, this screams "manipulative and built for rankings, not humans." DMOZ & Yahoo! and lots of the more legit directories will only use the company name or a site description, rather than allowing the user to decide on their own anchor text. This is particularly egregious when the directory lets you link to 4 or 5 pages and pick the anchor text for each link.
Here's what gnaws at me a bit, though - why these fifty sites? Why did Google penalize a few dozen (or even a few hundred, since I probably don't know about all of them) directories, yet leave the great bulk of low quality, obviously manipulative ones alone?
Maybe they didn't - maybe Google penalized many more directories as well by removing their ability to pass link juice. It's possible, but it doesn't look that way right now. A few friends on the shadier side of link building told me that they can still get top rankings for moderately competitive phrases (usually with local modifiers) just by buying a few hundred directory links. It's a bit expensive, but it still works - and that's a fundamental problem.
I'm going to say this for the record - so long as Google (and Yahoo! & MSN/Live) keep ranking sites and pages purely on the strength of directory links, the directory industry will never disappear. If the search engines want to get serious about paid links and manipulative directories, they're going to need to hit a few thousand general directories harshly. Only when that's been done can they claim real credibility in this arena. Until that time, it's just fear-mongering to keep link buyers on their toes and, hopefully, make the less savvy ones shy away from spending money since they won't know if a directory's been penalized. And yes, for those who are keeping track, I think Google and the other engines should absolutely penalize a directory like SOCEngine (which, as longtime readers might recall, was a directory that SEOmoz started in 2004 & left inactive for the last couple years - what can I say, even I was tempted by the easy money of directories once).
One more thing on that subject - penalizing directories like Alive while still keeping the toolbar PageRank showing as 6/10 isn't going to stop very many people from buying those links. Google may be more concerned about letting the owners of the directory know that they can't manipulate their index, but personally, I wish Google would also worry about the uninformed webmasters and businesses who think that directory link buying is a good way to conduct search marketing. When you show an endorsement in the form of green fairy dust, you can't expect buyers to run a search, see the website's not listed, and make the right assumption about the value.
Before I let you go - I think it's important to cover the other big topic of this post - what makes for a good directory? The answer isn't quite as simple as "Do the opposite of the 12 steps above," although that's certainly a good start. Here's some tips for you directory builders out there who want to reform, take a new stab, and build a truly high quality resource:
- Start with a Niche - Find a topic you're seriously passionate about, from birds to routers to online clothing merchants.
- Don't Just Make a Directory - Put great content about your subject on the site: blog posts, articles, tools, resource lists, charts, diagrams, investigative journalism, etc.
- Offer to Review Sites in Your Niche - But, for goodness sake, only include them if you'd really, honestly endorse them.
- Provide a Reason Why They're Listed - Imagine a fellow hobbyist or researcher in your topic of interest in real life - if you couldn't sit down with that person at a table and show them on your laptop why you included a particular site, DON'T include it.
- Don't Offer Gimmicks or Link Juice - Offer listings on a site that real people who are really interested in your topic read and use and enjoy. If you start down the path of selling links for search engine value, you've lost your way. It can always be a secret side benefit, and plenty of folks who'll come to you for links will be thinking about it, but if you want to be truly immune to any future penalties or devaluations, you can't make it a focus.
Finally, I want to wrap up by addressing those folks who are seeking good, solid directory links that will add value in the long run. Granted, it's no easy task, but there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of great directories out there to be listed in. They usually don't look much like the directories I've commented on above, and many of them require antiquated submission, payment over the phone, a personal email, or even a pitch on why you should be included. Sites like Te Puna Web Directory, the Atlantic Canada Portal Web Directory, Harvard University's Molecular and Cellular Biology Dept. Biolinks, Comic Books X (a good example of some of the points I laid out above, if not a spectacularly designed site), and the Directory of Ecourses & Ebooks may be far more difficult to gain entry into, but that's precisely one of the reasons they'll provide value.
BTW - If search engineers are seriously having trouble finding manipulative web directories, here's a good place to start. Honestly, I don't mind the penalties, just the inconsistent way they're applied.
p.s. I had originally scheduled an interview with Jeff Behrendt of AvivaDirectory (one of the better directories on that list, at least in my opinion) about this topic, but Jeff's bowed out, unfortunately. Sorry about that - hopefully the post is still valuable without his input (though I would have loved to have it).
in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.
With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your
doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare
providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from
personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure
monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine
like Healthline's (here is the results page for "glucose"),
and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through
health-related search ads, but says it won't target those ads to any
personal data in someone's stored medical record. Access to the site
will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with
healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major
concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest
hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.
The Microsoft chief says that Facebook's appeal could fade - after being linked to an investment that would value the site at $10 billion
Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, believes that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a "fad", an admission that places questions over the software giant's mooted interest in the website.
"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people," Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.
The remarks follow reports last week that the Microsoft boss, who has committed himself to stir up Microsoft's lacklustre share price by extending the group's online presence, is weighing up taking a stake in Facebook that could value the social networking site at $10 billion (£5 billion).
Mr Ballmer would not comment on Microsoft's talks with Facebook but did suggest that he could see value in the Facebook brand and the "network effects" - or community - the site has built up by accruing more than 40 million users in the three years since it start.
However, he added that there was little in the way of technology to justify the lofted valuation attached to a site expected to achieve revenues of only $150 million this year.
"There can't be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That's for sure," he said.
It is understood that Microsoft has held early talks to pay as much as $500 million for a 5 per cent stake in Facebook, which was named last week as the most popular social network in the UK by Netratings, the research group, passing MySpace for the first time.
A move by Microsoft for the current belle of the internet ball would almost certainly trigger counter interest from a clutch of rivals including Google, the leader in search advertising, and Viacom, the media giant, analysts said.
Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, "had most of what Facebook has."
Geocities has since passed out of favour.
Betting that his site will not meet the same fate, Mark Zuckerberg, 23, the founder of Facebook, has mooted a valuation of $15 billion but so far has insisted that Facebook will remain independent.
Mr Zuckerberg is understood to have rebuffed approaches last year from suitors including Yahoo!, which is thought to have offered about $1 billion.
Apple reportedly is considering adopting Intel's Moorestown MID (mobile Internet device) platform processor in a new iPhone, according to OEM sources.
Intel revealed a Moorestown-based MID product with functions similar to Apple's iPhone at the recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF) San Francisco. The Moorestown platform is expected to launch in 2009 and Apple is considering developing an iPhone based on it, stated the sources.
Some channel vendors think that if Apple adopts Intel's platform in its iPhone, it will reposition the MID market place and affect both notebook and handset markets.
If your site has been buried under a heap of results, there may be a good reason for it. Google, which partially bases its search results on inbound links, has made life difficult for some marketers by declaring war on paid link sites.
While Google has always banned paid links, the search giant now seems serious about enforcing the rules.
Rand Fishkin, who compiled a list of 70 sites that have drawn Google's ire, told Forbes the crackdown on link directories has begun in earnest.
We do consider buying links to be outside of our guidelines, and be notified that we may take stronger action on that in the future," said Google senior engineer Matt Cutts. "If you're a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. But as a search engine, we can do what we think is best to return a high quality index."
But one concern over the crackdown is that Google may go too far, blocking out blogs and other sites that sell links to marketers.
"This is a shot across the bow from Google," Fishkin said. "They're seeing a heavy amount of manipulating, and they want to show what it looks like when they take punitive action. It's intended more as public relations than anything else."
