And, it lays the groundwork for your site’s relevancy. Be sure to maximize where you can!

Maximizing Your Site`s Long Tail Keyword Traffic

Rating: 4 stars / 3

2009-08-10

Table of Contents:

# Maximizing Your Site`s Long Tail Keyword Traffic

# The analysis and power of long tail traffic

# The game of profit: competitive versus long tail terms

# A deep look at your content: how do you write for long tail terms?

via Maximizing Your Site`s Long Tail Keyword Traffic.

Chat Man

The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools

Rating: 5 stars / 3

2009-08-11

Table of Contents:

# The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools

# Finish Verifying the Site

# Second and Third Important GWT Tasks

# Fourth and Fifth Important GWT Tasks

via The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools.

There’s a new sheriff in town – and we don’t know if it’s social or not…. But, if it is, you can find it with the new FaceBook feature of real time searching.

Social Networking

Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Search

So according to the Facebook blog, we can now search up to the last 30 days of our Facebook News Feed containing status updates, photos, links, videos and notes shared by our Facebook friends.

via Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Search.

Although, there may be some SERP changes; so you should check ‘em out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

More info on the Caffeine Update

August 10, 2009

in Google/SEO

via More info on the Caffeine Update.

My professional opinion leans toward not setting a crawl rate, at all. SEs will gauge the ‘crawlability’ of your site and will crawl at a frequency that is best suited for that site.

However, I do find it rather useful to have dynamic pages, such as news, blogs, and the like, to a more frequent setting so that the SEs are aware of and can find new, fresh content.

Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot

Should you set a crawl delay?

Many factors affect the crawling of a site, including (but not limited to):

* The total number of pages on a site (is the site small, large, or somewhere in-between?)

* The size of the content (PDFs and Microsoft Office files are typically much larger than regular HTML files)

* The freshness of the content (how often is content added/removed/changed?)

* The number of allowed concurrent connections (a function of the web server infrastructure)

* The bandwidth of the site (a function of the host’s service provider; the lower the bandwidth, the lower the server’s capacity to serve page requests)

* How highly does the site rank (content judged as not relevant won’t be crawled as often as highly relevant content)

The rate at which a site is crawled is an amalgam of all of those factors and more.

via Bing – Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot – Webmaster Blog – Bing Community.

For a few individuals, single-engine optimization is the holy grail. With the development of Bing and the inevitable ‘others to come,’ it isn’t the wisest choice to over-optimize for a singe engine. The simple fact is that REAL SEO is universal, allowing for dominating rankings across all engines.

A tool that I’m sure I’ll use a fair amount is ‘blind search‘ – just to gauge how a traffic ranks across the big three without having to open tabs and stuff. I use dogpile to gauge overall rank, but to see all three SERPs, clutter-free, is pretty nice; especially because there’s no need to install any add-ons – it’s just a search page.

But, this has got to be some interesting search data that’s coming across… After a year, a decent trend curve could be shown over a myriad of markets, all based on live, direct searching – WITH VOTING TO BOOT!! I wonder what, if any, data Mr. Kordahi might be interested in sharing….

Blind Search: Side By Side Search Results For Google, Yahoo & Bing

2009 August 9

by MHB

A employee of Microsoft, Michael Kordahi, has launched a “fun experiment”, side project to see how the three major search engines return results for the same keyword.

He calls the service, “BlindSearch, the search engine taste test.”

“”The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?”

The columns are randomized with every query, so Google isn’t always in the first, second or third position.

Obviously, this works best for a site you own, to see how it ranks side by side on the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I did this for “the domains”, “luxury bedding” and “discount bedding” and the returned results for each of the three search engines, did match what I found doing a direct search.

In some cases Google was the best, returning the domain higher and sometimes Bing returned the better result.

Try it for yourself.

Michael makes the following disclaimer on this site:

“The system has many flaws that I know about already, the primary one of interest is the lack of localisation. So, all searches are going through the US as US searches. The other deficiency worth noting is that there is much missing from the actual experience of using these search engines eg, image thumbnails, suggestions, refine queries etc.”

via Blind Search: Side By Side Search Results For Google, Yahoo & Bing | The Domains.

Needless to say, although I was able to optimize for commanding ranking across Bing, Dogpile, Ask, and Google on 2nd tier keyphrases, the top tier phrases that the client really wanted stayed just beyond reach. And never once did I complain. I just reiterated that once you have 90% of the SEO done, there are still 1% factors that need to be addressed – and when you’re going after firecely targeted keyphrases, the luxury of ‘but the competition doesn’t seem to have those problems’ as a point of insight is no longer relevant, really.

When minor tech issues are the only problems you can find, you’re much better off just correcting them.

So, even though Bruce seems to be reiterating obvious points that should be considered and optimized, they are points that all too many feel won’t matter in the long run…. They might be points that don’t make *the* difference, but they do have their place.

Chat Man

Bruceclay.com – SEO is in the Details: Bruce Busts the Boondoggle – SEO Blog.

HTML Constructs

It used to be that a site needed every Meta tag in order to rank. Now that’s not the case. No one element will cause a site to rank, but it’s crucial to remember that SEO is effective as a whole.

Make your site all that it can be by using HTML as it was intended.

XML Sitemaps

an XML file often causes pages to be added to the index, which is an important objective of search engine optimization. Also, consider the use of an XML Sitemap when redirecting one site to another.

Keywords in URLs and Image Links

Keyword-rich URLs add value to a site in more than one way.

Page Copy

There is no magic [keyword] density, but there are winning page footprints. density alone is nearly useless, but it does have its place.

But, if you’re busy and need quick insights, Glydo may be the best keyword seeder I’ve come across….

clipped from www.searchenginejournal.com Glydo FireFox Addon Discovers Related Articles & Tweets as You Surf Glydo (install it here) is a new interesting FireFox addon that analyzes the pages you are viewing and displays more related posts in the status bar.

The post discusses how often certain ‘areas’ of the page, such as footers, switch-out links to better detect paid linking. Many sites have relegated paid linking to footers and other segments of the page that seem natural.

The ambiguity of whether or not a page’s content should be updated on a regular basis is touched on, but is left just as ambiguous as ever. I think it’s common sense: If you have a news page, it should change quite frequently. If you have a statistics page, it should change as often as stats are measured. If you have a resource/reference page, then it should be updated ONLY as often as authoritative information changes.

I’m, personally, delighted to see that ‘partial indexing of pages’ is being given serious focus, if only briefly.

We all know, and have for some time, that the more inter-related terms a page ranks well for gives it better ranking for these terms, across-the-board.

I do, however, find that what is discussed about ranking ceiling, traffic throttling, and the yo-yo effect has some solid basis – as opposed to just giving SERP watchers something to complain about.

Enjoy!

Chat Man

clipped from www.webmasterworld.com Google’s Patent on Backlinks – many interesting clues from 2007 tedster With the current update apparently doing “something different” with backlinks, I went back for another reading of the 2007 patent application Document Scoring Based On Link-Based Criteria PAGE SEGMENTATION and RATES OF CHANGE Not only the back link juice itself is weighted differently, whether it changes is also given a different weight, depending on where the link appears on the page PAGE CHANGES CAN IMPROVE OR LOWER RANKINGS …it all depends on the query terms! PARTIAL INDEXING OF PAGES search engine may store “signatures” of documents instead of the (entire) documents themselves to detect changes to document content. RANKING FOR SEVERAL SEARCHES RANKING CEILINGS, TRAFFIC THROTTLING and the YO-YO EFFECT Google may allow a ranking to grow only at a certain rate, or apply a certain maximum threshold of growth for defined period of time.

With my own experience of good, ‘ol fashioned trial-and-error, I also learned the following:

— Keeping text, especially Title Text and directional/decorated text, in its own PDF field is important. If you do not ‘field’ these items, you may end up with a jumbled mess of characters instead of a solid, spiderable, keyphrased title or header.

— Gain more keyphrase weight by reflecting/repeating keyphrases found on pages that link to your PDF and those pages that your PDF links to. (Only if this worked for HTML pages, too… Darn!)

— I don’t recommend archiving PDFs. Establish a URL and leave it!

— If you go through the trouble of publishing a PDF, at least get some credit for it by using in-copy linking with clean links.

— PDF Document Properties are also categorized and indexed. Not taking advantage of them is like not using alt text on your images.

— Use ‘outline’ formatting where possible to auto-generate heading tag formatting.

— Don’t publish a photo without having something relevant to say about it. Use event names, dates, branding, etc. Avoid: “Joe at the bar.” Use: “ABC’s Summer Picnic 2009: Joe’s Drinks.”

— If you think about file naming, logically, then picking off any minor visibility issues with ALL file names can only enhance spiderability.

If you have any tips of your own, leave a comment!

Chat Man

clipped from www.promotionworld.com Search Engine Optimization for PDFs by Sharon Housley July 31, 2009 1. Text Based the most important thing involves how the PDF file is created. 2. Optimize Text Text contained in a PDF file is very similar to web copy 3. Link Depth links to the PDF files that you wish to have indexed by the search engines should be on a web page that is frequently spidered by search engines. 4. Add Links 5. Document Properties this is done in Adobe Acrobat. Details: File -> Document Properties Advanced – > Document Meta-data 6. Bold Heading Use H1 or H2 tags to make headings and sub-titles bold. 7. Caption Under Photos search engines will index the image captions just as they would the “alt text” on a web page image 8. Name Of The PDF Use related keywords in the actual file name for the PDF file.