Category: Leveraging the Search Engines

Tonight we covered a lot of great questions from the Peanut Gallery like…

• What does grilled cheese have to do with your SEO efforts?
• Should you use categories and tags?
• Something is wrong with my site… did I mess up my SEO?
• How many words should my search optimized posts be?
• Follow or no-follow links?
• Will linking to other sites hurt my rankings?

Check it out, leave us a message with your questions and we’ll answer it in our upcoming podcast.

We recently did our weekly call on the SEO of WordPress Categories and Tags. This is a recap of that call, but not the transcript. If you’d like to listen to that and all our other calls, you just have to register to get in at http://FreeWeeklyMastermind.com

Anyway, we covered three basic tenets of WordPress Categories and Tags. We spoke about the duplicate content issue, Google indexing issues, the compelling need to use every feature and the SEO benefits of categories.

So what are WordPress Categories and Tags? Well WordPress is content management software. The categories and tags are two of the bells and whistles that were designed into the software to make it easy to organize your content. But like a TV remote control, you don’t have to use all the buttons. Continue reading “SEO of WordPress Categories and Tags”

On FreeWeeklyMastermind.com a friend asked a question about recovering from Google Penguin. I couldn’t tell from her question whether she was even 100% sure Penguin was the problem. So here are the steps you need to take in the event you were hit by Penguin and you’re interested in recovering from Google Penguin.

Let’s do this on a Step-by-Step basis to make it easy:

Step 1.

Pull up your Google Analytics and look at April 23 – April 25. If your traffic dropped that day you got hit by Penguin. If it didn’t dive that day, you didn’t get hit. You have a different problem – but the recovery steps may be the same. Continue reading “Recovering from Google Penguin, Fast!”

Logistically, categories and tags have all kinds of SEO science behind them. It’s really easy to make mistakes with categories and tags. But I’d like to leave the website organization and SEO mistakes for another blog post. In this one, let’s talk about user experience.

I bring this up after having visited Gizmodo.com today and thinking to myself how interesting that site was. I actually wondered to why I didn’t read it more often. And that entire string of thought came after seeing their sidebar.

Typically blog sidebars are pretty much the same from site to site. There’s some ads, a tag cloud of some sort and an index to the categories, pages or tags of the site.  But after seeing Gizmodo – that doesn’t make sense at all. Continue reading “Mistakes with Categories and Tags”

I really want to help make you aware of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool mistake that many people make. But first I want to start by saying that it is not your fault if you are making this mistake. Very big SEO companies, big time internet marketers and even IM conferences teach how to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. And I recently saw a video teaching it where a commenter said it was very useful.

But they are wrong.  They make a mistake just teaching it.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is not for content marketers. It is not a keyword research tool. What you learn from it is not what you think you learn from it.  The Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides information for one group – Adwords Advertisers. Continue reading “The Google Adwords Keyword Tool Mistake”

The rel=author thing is pretty cool. It’s not necessarily new but Google has made it more fun and useful. And since they got rid of the indented listing, the rel=author thing is the next best search results promotion tool.

So what is it? Simply put, rel=author is an html tag you can add to your webpages and posts to link yourself, as the author, to your Google + Profile where more information can be found out about you. But the big benefit is the addition of the Google + profile photo embedded right there on the search results page.It really catches your eye and can make your search results position be the #1 traffic “getter”, even if you’re #4 on the page.

Step 1: Google Plus

You’re going to need a Google+ Profile page. So head on over to Plus.Google.com to get your page and profile set up. Of course the more complete you fill out the more information Google knows about you as an author. So attempt to answer all the questions. Continue reading “How to do the rel=author thing”

So, we have Susanne Myers on the call today. Yeah – she’s the expert behind EasyLinkLove.com.

She definitely brought it. When was the last time you listened to someone whose built 72,000 links to a site talk about link building?

Press play if you want to learn more about guest blog posts, strategic link building, adding links to your article resource box, google analytics, what a link profile is, site silo architecture, unique article wizard and her program:

Traffic to the list to the content to the sales

Great stuff. We also spent a good deal of time talking about UAW and why it is useful.

Enjoy!
Continue reading “Link Building and UAW Awesomeness”

Keyword research is truly like studying for a test. If traffic is the answer then keyword research is the text book.

When people are searching for you, the only tool they have at their disposal are words. Letters and numbers are what people use when searching for products, services, information or entertainment. Put together those letters and numbers entered into the search box are keywords.

A thorough understanding of these keywords is paramount to the success of any webpage, in terms of people finding it via the search engines (ie. . . Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.)

At the NAMS 4 event in Atlanta, Georgia I sat with Lynn Terry, Susanne Meyers, and Karon Thackston on a keyword research symposium.  We talked about search statistics, keyword density, wordtracker, and 10 other vital tips.

And while I’ve been rewarded with #1 positions and great relevant traffic to my clients’ local business websites, I was floored by the information Lynn, Susanne and Karon had at their fingertips. These ladies know their stuff backwards, forwards and upside down. This information is so good, I learned a ton to make my business better.  We recorded this 90 minute mastermind session, and are offering it just for you.

This MP3 download:

• delivers almost 90 minutes of focused discussion, tips and techniques for easy and practical keyword research.
• breaks down complex keyword research ideas into manageable pieces.
• explains the various research tools and how to choose the right one for you.
• gives you an easy plan of action for finding the best keywords for use with websites, blog posts, articles, and social media.

I guarantee your SEO knowledge will increase, your rankings will get better and your traffic will be more relevant after listening to this audio.  Go to the NAMS site and get it now!

Did you happen to see the new “Google Starred Results” on your last search? It would have showed up at the top of the search results. It’s like an interactive “favorites” button – but one that stays in Google and not necessarily on your computer.

My question about Google Starred Results (and I see Wayne Liew has the same question)  is whether they’ll play a part in the search engine’s algorithm.  Since the entire web is moving from “factual proof” to “social proof”, it only makes sense that Google will weigh these stars as “social proof” that a web page is good.

Right now “links” and “traffic” are the ways Google measures “social proof”.  (I’m way overusing quotes now, sorry). The more links a page has from other sites and pages on the net, the more likely it is that your page is “valued” by the general community.

As Facebook and Twitter take over as the leaders of social proof, will a combination of links from those sites plus the stars give a web page even more value to the search engines than either alone?

SEO is fun if you like puzzles. And I imagine being the guys that design the puzzles is  pretty fun too. If Google wants to remain the top search engine, it continually must prove it returns the best most relevant results.

The question for us SEO lovers is whether Google Starred Results is just another piece of that puzzle for them, or is it just an added feature purely for the enjoyment of searchers?

So your task, if you choose to accept it, is to star not only your favorite sites as they come up in the search results – but your own sites. And if you’re a company with employees, I’d ask that you have them do it too.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world – so don’t hesitate.  Step up and play ball.

Have you ever wondered how to get a double listing in Google? Some people refer to them as indented listings, either is fine.  An indented listing is not often thought about during the web design process, but from a search perspective it can push your traffic through the roof.

A double listing is the culmination of two pages on your website ranking well for the same keyword. They don’t have to rank 1 and 2 for the keyword, but they do need to rank on the same page.  When they do appear on the same page of the search results, Google uses the indented listing to show they’re from the same site. It’s really just an efficiency thing for Google.

So, how do you go about getting a double listing? As far as difficulty goes, it should be as difficult as it was to get your first page ranked for that keyword.  And then just a smidge harder.

If you want a formula, start with the title tag and description tag. For the page of your site that currently ranks on the first page of Google, how often does your keyword occur in both of these, and what percent of the total tag is your keyword?  Figure that out, then write a title tag and description tag for a second page that matches the number and density.

The key here is to use the same keyword, but write a different title and description.

The next phase is to analyze the components of the webpage itself. On the page currently ranked, what is the density of your keyword and where in the page does it occur? You’ll want to mimic both the density and placement on the second page. But again, keep in mind the rest of the content needs to be different. Just keep the numbers the same.

That was the easy part.

And the hard part. . . maybe. . . where are the links coming from that are going to the original page? Backlinks? Blog links? Other interior page links? One way links? anchor text links? etc. . . (You may want to use Market Samurai or the SEO Quake tool bar to help figure this out).

Once you do figure this out in a quantitative way, the goal is to mimic what you did on the first – without using the same sites. You can use some of the same sites to link to the second page – but ultimately you’ll want different links with simliar pagerank.

The folks at Google aren’t idiots. They may just notice if everything is duplicated. The key here is to create a natural web of links to both pages. And the second key is to have the patience to not expect results tomorrow. Do these things then wait a bit and see what happens.

If you’ve had luck with double or even triple listings – and have a “secret”, we’d love to hear it.