Entries Tagged 'SEO Techniques' ↓

I know a guy who repeatedly calls me with ‘the latest and greatest’ in dropped domains and its something that i think coupld really benefit any SEO in their day to day link development work.

Basically the process would follow:

• Source dropped domains from sites like unwanted-domain-names.co.uk (anyone know any more)
• Check back link numbers for accuracy
• Check anchor text for backlinks using opensiteexplorer.org to ensure relevancy
• Check deep links for backlinks and try and match with pages on target website
• Buy domain
• Register with Google Webmaster Tools
• Create .htaccess file with 301 redirects for all old content url’s to new url’s

This could be a great way of building some nice authorative backlinks pretty cheapley and if on-topic would bring new custom.

Id be tempted not to buy a domain if the anchor texts were off topic as this could lead to a world of hurt.

Anyone got any experiences of this they’d care to share?

Is it just me or does Google Webmaster Tools give you the ability to target www. domains at one country and non www at a different country whilst keeping the target URL the same?

Try it for yourself, log into Google Webmaster Tools and set up (and validate) two entries www.domain.com and domain.com go to each sites settings and there you can see you can set the country of focus.

Best use of canonical domains ever!

Tim of SEOWizz fame and resident guru at Branded 3 has recently posted an article which he debunks popular link building myths.

One key point he argues is that Google is attributing the anchor text on the first pass of the bot and that changing anchor text once its been ‘indexed’ has no effect.

This is massive as one of the first things I (used to) do for every client was to check the backlink profile and re-purpose any links that were not anchor text based.

It seems the key is to get the link right the first time.

I need to see how this effects new links pushed into old content as that could be a huge hurdle for link aquisition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

As I’m now SEO Manager at Blueclaw I thought it only right that I help promote the work of the team starting with an SEO Guide created by Monica our Senior SEO consultant. This guide is aimed at people who are new to SEO and contains practical guides and information on the SEO process and how to impliment key elements of success.

This is refreshing as many of the guides and e-books out there simply spout the same old un-practical and out-of-date rubbish that does no one any good.

The SEO Guide is available as a free PDF download and will soon be published as an active document which will form the basis of a knowledge-share like SEO Bible.

If you have anything to contribute let me know.

If you’re heavily into SEO and link building then you should be into content aggregation and Guest Posting is a great way of not only getting your content out there but also a way of building your brand (and the brand of your clients). If you don’t know what guest posting is then its simply the act of having an article posted on a 3rd party website.

There are pleanty of guides to how to effectively guest post out there and key to this is tailoring what you have to say around what the target blogs community wants to read so I’d even go so far as to say you’d be better of writing completely unique content for this purpose.

Theres a new resource in town created (I think) by the world famous Anne Smarty and this is myblogguest.com. It’s basically a forum of publishers and SEO’s/writers who are looking for their opposite party within the guest post relationship.

The main reason for this post is to encourage UK bloggers and SEO’s to get involved as at the moment its mainly USA focused and the good ol’ UK needs to represent!

If you want a guest post from me then look me up on there.

njoy.

A recent post by a well known UK based SEO ‘guru’ provided a critique on Katie Price’s new baby clothing store, a comment of which was that the title tag was over 85 characters and as a result wouldn’t be ‘counted’ by Google.

In my experience this isn’t so although I believe it to be a common misconception and popular rumor that this is the case, so I set about looking for some published research and practical explorations before I set about validating it for myself.

The following 2 posts smash the 85 character rule and show that although Google prioritizes the earlier keywords in a Title Tag and clips the SERPS display at 85 characters it does use information over this mount for SERPS keyword usage.

Check them out for yourself and be enlightened:

hugoguzman.com/2010/05/dont-believe-the-hype-google-does-fully-index-long-title-tags

seomofo.com/snippet-experiment.html

UPDATE

It seems that DaveN has gone back over his original statement and done some testing and now says that they’ve tested up to 213 characters and Google is indexing them without issues.

Check it here

Do you use use the Google Toolbars PareRank meter as a way of determining the ‘value’ of a link? Well it may be that you’re missing a trick or two when discounting Grey Bar’d (perceived) PageRankless pages as a source of links.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll recap a standard policy on Link Building. Building effective links falls into 3(ish) camps with a combination of all 3 needed to give you a well rounded, Google proof organic backlink profile. These are:

• Authority – sites that are trusted sources of information
• Juice – sites that pass PageRank (not green bar)
• Relevancy – links that are wholly relevant to your niche

Add to this list that links to your site should have a nice keyword rich anchor text and you’ve got the cornerstones of a highly effective campaign.

It’s rare for one site to deliver a link that achieves all three (unless your competitors start linking to you) and within boundaries where anchor text is king, it is important to make sure that many of your terms are linked using one of the 1000s of keywords you’re firing at your site.

In the quest to build great anchor text rich links many people qualify pages on a wide variety of measurements including SEOMoz’s Domain Authority, Number of inbound links from unique domains, domain age and the ubiquitus PageRank however it is Anchor Text where the real power lies.

For example. I currently market a furniture site that is doing really well for its main two word terms but we would like to attract more traffic from fuzzy searches where people don’t know the type of product we well whilst targeting terms that accurately target our niche i.e. Vintage, Antique, Period etc. To achieve this with maximum effectiveness and minimum outlay we have decided to use Directory submissions as a way of quickly building a back-link pool of targeted terms (you could use social media, articles or micro-sites if you are prepared to spend more time) but with so many low quality directories out there and PageRank disappearing straight off the home page how are we to determine effectiveness?

As an experiment I decided to use Googles Cache date as a measure of whether Google is actually visiting the internal Directory pages, on sites where the site is listed and the cache date is under 45 days I requested a link.

The net result is that our site is gradually improving in ranking for these fuzzy prefix and suffix terms. Agreed its only a start, but Ii think that when you’re trying to deliver maximum benefit for minimum cost that tactics like these when properly monitored and controlled can deliver great results.

I’ve just come across a great post from the guys at Authority Domains where they talk about a new search widget currently being tested by Google – Brand Links. These links show above your listings and relate the search terms to branded products that match i.e. “laptops > HP”.

Theres some really great tips in the article which should be easy enough to implement in a few minutes.

Google Brand Links

As Many SEO’s out there including myself try to use every tool in the chest in order to give our clients/employers the best back link profile. For many years there has been a number of ‘top SEO directory’ lists that quote many sites as being the best in class for providing listings that help improve your Google search position. In recent years directory owners have noticed that there’s a great potential revenue stream for paid directory submissions, possibly as they see paid submission as a way of telling Google that their site is a growing concern and a serious business as opposed to the many rubbish directories that popped into existence back in the 00′s as a way of building a pseudo-authoritative site on a particular niche.

I thought it would be beneficial to put some of these rock star directories through my basic back link qualification process to see if any of the big names actually deliver on their promises. As a caveat I’d like to point that this research was conducted to determine a directories benefit to organic search placement and does not in any way reflect the traffic driving capabilities of such directories. In addition I’d like to point out that I’ve picked the ‘best’ category for my listing, this being the one that most accurately reflects the target sites content (in this case furniture/living room furniture/sofas etc)

Key

dR

Domain Rank (Via OpenSiteExplorer)

IBL

In Bound Links – The number of unique domains linking to the sites home page

pR

Googles PageRank

pR: N/A

No PageRank i.e. Grey Bar

OBL

Out Bound Links from this page

Data

Analysis

The key to this research is whether the page on which your listing is places is indexed by Google and has any PageRank to pass onto your site. As you can see in a vast majority of cases this is what lets these sites down. Of course you could attempt to ‘game’ the directory owners into putting your link onto a less relevant page (in this case it could be antiques/antique furniture etc) and a pR search using the SEOChat tool will certainly show you what pages have the highest PageRank for this purpose.

So what’s my advice? Firstly to Directory owners, it’s no good saying your a pR9 directory if you’re listings pages aren’t in the Google index. So work through your sites to ensure each page has adequate content and reduce the number of links off a page i.e. think more about your category structure. For SEOs and Directory submitters, don’t waste your time or money on directories that aren’t passing juice.

And finally. I know the Google toolbars measure of PageRank is not a great indicator however is it is the standard rule of thumb and as this is a quick guide, it should serve most peoples purpose.

Heres the second great little tool created by the Virante team. This time, the tool checks for inbound links from 3rd party sites that are targeted at 404 pages on your site. Whats really great about this tool is that it not only gives you a pretty comprehensive list but also gives you the ability to generate 301 redirects for each url to the page of your choice via a .htaccess file generation tool.

The tool also gives you an idea of what MOZRank will be recovered should all of the links be fixed… nice!