Seo for your living

[Video] Planning & Preparing for Success Online

I am by no means a standard for success (I have many flaws that need fixed), but this 5 minute and 25 second video highlights some of the things I did right that helped me do well on the web.

I am off to the blogging conference tomorrow, so no videos for a few days, but please let me know what you think of this one. If you will be at the Blog World Expo I am speaking there Tuesday about SEO. Feel free to stop by and say hi.

• Register Domains Early & Often: As soon as you have a good idea go register the related domain. The registration and re-registration fee is negligible compared to the potential rewards of executing on a good idea.

• Built At Least a Few Links: Search engines and web users have a limited number of ways to gauge trust and credibility. Setting up at least a basic site and building a few links for it costs next to nothing compared to the potential rewards of owning a good idea. Throw out a shingle, get it a few links, sit on it for a year and come back to it.
• Ride Successful Trends: You don’t have to be first, but it doesn’t hurt to be. Also look to duplicate some of the best ideas from the past, while looking for ways to modernize them.
• Reinvest in Your Best Channels: If something is a success reinvest in improving the design, the layout, and the offering. If you are beyond self sustaining you are not far from making relatively large profits. A few months of learning, testing, and tracking can lead to a ten fold increase in income.
• Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow: Google is mapping out your psychological flaws. Tomorrow the web is going to be dirtier and more competitive. Skipping one hour of work today might mean 3 hours of work next year or 12 hours of work the following year.

[Video] Creating Your Site’s Internal Link Structure for Google and Searchers

This video is a bit longer than some of the earlier videos, clocking in at 9 minutes and 39 seconds.

• The Dual Roles of Navigation: Navigation needs to be user friendly and search engine friendly. If you want a user to pay attention to an offer you have to link to it with a call to action in the content area of the page. If you want search engines to pay attention to a page you have to link to it on important pages and/or from many pages. In general it is also better usability and better for your rankings to use descriptive (or keyword rich) text links over image links for your primary navigation, and in most in content links on your site.

• Navigation Should Parallel Keyword Strategy: Your primary site navigation should be aligned with keyword categories, structured in related groups that capture keywords along the entire purchase cycle. If you have navigation that is not aligned with your keywords (like date based archives or an about page) you can use nofollow on it to prevent passing link equity through that portion of your site. You may also want to demote sections of your site that convert exceptionally poor relative to the better performing options.
• Examples of Channeling Link Equity: Some websites, such as Target.com, show Google more navigation than they show end users to promote seasonally hot items. Other sites, like Chocolate.com, chose to use nofollow on unimportant internal links to de-emphasize unimportant options. You can view the nofollowed links on Chocolate.com by viewing their site with SEO for Firefox turned on. In some cases it also makes sense to use nofollow on user generated content to lessen the incentive for driveby spamming.
• Clean & Clear Structure: If you author many pages about the same topic it is important to link to the most important articles in order to emphasize them, and use breadcrumb navigation to help structure the site and show what pages are most important.
• Duplicate content: Google likes webmasters to believe that Google has duplicate content figured out, but if they have multiple similar pages indexed you are splitting your PageRank and they may rank the wrong version. Make sure you do not place the same (or exceptionally similar) content on multiple pages. Stuntdubl has a good list of resources for dealing with duplicate content.
• Subdomains: If you have logical breaks in your content you may want to use subdomains to create smaller focused mini sites. If you have a strong brand you can get a bit more aggressive with subdomains, like eBay is.
• More: Here are some more internal linking tips from a prior post on the topic.

Welcome to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (Pensions Net)
Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial Tutorial on optimising your sites meta tags to improved search engine results. Free Meta Tags Generator Generate meta tags for your site quickly a simply using this meta tag generator.

Network Solutions® Releases White Paper Detailing Pros and Cons of Pay Per Click Advertising and Search Engine … (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)
Network Solutions releases white paper, “PPC vs. SEO - Friends or Foes?” explaining the benefits of utilizing both PPC and SEO services to drive Web site traffic.

How Natural is Your Site’s Growth? Check Your Google Indexing Profile

Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters, Michael created the Index Rank tool, which allows you to see the growth of a site’s profile in Google based on the number of pages indexed over different periods of time. The tool also allows you to compare multiple sites against each other.

Why is this data useful?

• Since Google removed the supplemental results label, the next best thing we have to test site trust for lower end longtail pages is how quickly new pages are getting indexed.

• If you see a rapid increase in indexing you know that is caused by an increase in domain trust due to better inlinks, an increase in content creation that leveraged unused authority the site was sitting on, solving a crawling issue, improving internal site architecture, or some technical issue that might be associated with creating duplicate content pages.
• If everything you create is getting indexed you may consider creating content at a faster rate, perhaps using sub-brands off subdomains.
• If you keep pumping out content but are not seeing your indexing stats go up, that is a cue to build links.

Network Solutions® Releases White Paper Detailing Pros and Cons of Pay Per Click Advertising and Search Engine … (PRWeb)
Network Solutions releases white paper, “PPC vs. SEO - Friends or Foes?” explaining the benefits of utilizing both PPC and SEO services to drive Web site traffic. (PRWeb Nov 19, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/VGhpci1Mb3ZlLVBpZ2ctSG9yci1UaGlyLVplcm8=

Good and Bad Clients: an SEO’s Point of View (ISEDB)
This article is addressed mostly to people who consider hiring an SEO. If you understand from the start what an SEO expects from a client, you’ll probably find it easier to achieve understanding. In our profession, the client’s understanding is often a key to success.