The “Secrets” to Search Engine Optimization-ummm..relationships and authenticity

I have about had it with people looking for SEO techniques and e-commerce gimmicks. When you don’t know them, you tend to think that there are some magical potions that you can drink to take you to the top. Much like every other venture in life, these fables of gimmicks often lead people to die of old age searching for the fountain of youth…

Everyone wants the “easy way” when the “right way” is, well, right in front of our noses…

IT (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) IS NOT ABOUT LINKS! It is about the relationships behind those links. To TRULY succeed on the net, you need to be willing to be creative, develop long lasting relationships in your industry, and to work HARD to protect your online reputation–or pay someone to do it for you. It is that simple. Really.

SEO guys can teach you principles in doing that effectively and efficiently, but I swear that is how it works.

IT is ALSO NOT ABOUT GIMMICKS  ! It is about you being authentically YOU. If your online persona and your offline persona are in synch,  (and assuming that you do quality work), it will show and you will drive business. If people think you are a poser in real life then they will think you are a poser online.

Good search engine marketing doesn’t change who you are. It just promotes it in a very efficient and near real time manner.

Here’s to being who you are, working hard, being creative and getting ahead! (Some things never change…even with new media!)

a Webpage by any other name…(even post or category)

Dave Smith and Greg Swann are two of my favorite people that I have never met in person (yet). Why? Because they are into some of the things that I am into. They are some of the best bloggers around. They can write far better than I and I like people that I aspire to be like. They are thinkers. They like to teach and inform, not just broadcast on the net. They are REALTORS. And they like to learn and experiment on their respective labs on the web.

A starting point:

“A house is just a place for your stuff. That’s why your “stuff” is “stuff” and everyone else’s “stuff” is “crap”.

–George Carlin

“A blog has places for you to put your stuff. They are webpages. Whether they are called pages or posts or even categories, a webage by any other name still ranks the same in Google if identically constructed.”

–Eric Blackwell
Just over two months ago Greg put a blog together as an experiment to test the search engine characteristics of a Wordpress blog constructed out of pages rather than posts. Essentially this challenges my position stated above. One of these characteristics was how many of the pages would stay fully indexed in Google as opposed to slipping to their supplemental index. Would this be better than a blog constructed of posts? Was / Is there an appreciable difference? This was and is a concern to bloggers in that their individual posts slipping into the supplemental (can) affect the amount of exposure that a post gets on the web.

Greg’s results as reported earlier today on the RealEstateBlogLab are impressive.  With essentially pages only and no posts, Greg recorded just 6 pages slipping to the supplementals. More impressively, the pages that were there were ones that you’d expect to find in the supplemental index.

Now me, being the hands on search engine “figure it outer” guy that I am, I have to look at experiments like this and offer some explanations and present them to the rest of the blogging world for their comment. Here goes:

The key to this experiment lies in the question Why. Why did the pages stay indexed? Why do posts slip into the supplemental index? Here are some hopefully enlightening answers:

1) Greg’s test blog was constructed with many of the pages essentially linking to each other.  If you look down the right hand column of the blog, you will see MANY of the posts (errr….pages) there on every page. This “interlinking” is not veiwed by Google as an incestuous thing. It is simply good navigation. It is esentially providing many more inbound internal links to EACH post.

Here’s a truly ugly sketch of it….

2) In a typical blog construction with posts (errr…posts) you would not have near the interlinking that this blog has. This is because posts are typically arranged in a heirarchy (errr…categories–grin).

What interlinking does is SPREAD the link love between webpages and the only (errr…easiest) way for Google to decide which pages belong in the main index is how much respect they have on the web as expressed by link love (internal OR external).

The takeaway: When constructing a blog, set it up so that there is the maximum opportunity for interlinking to occur. Given the same amount of links from the outside, your posts and pages will get more exposure this way. It also provides your reader with easier navigation. Win-win.

Takeaway #2: Get links to pages either from external or internal sources to keep them in the main index.

Great job on the experiment guys. Please feel free to comment on this…

Internal Linking and Search Engine Optimization – Final Thoughts

Ok, so your thinking to yourself. “Great, now one more thing to worry about–making sure all of the link juice internally is going to the right place.” It is actually easier than it sounds and is not as complex. There are some real estate sites out there (which I won’t out, but will be happy to share with you if you drop me a line.) that are adding mass  quantities of pages that have a sentence or two of text and about 100 internal links to other pages on their site…

What is the reason for this?? You guessed it! SPAMMIN and JAMMIN. Do I agree with this approach? NO. Why? Because it does not pass my test for defensibility:

1) Does it enhance (or at least not DETRACT from) the user experience?

2) Does it utilize techniques that Google and other search engines are rewarding? (Deeds, not words here!)

3) Is this linking technique something that major search engines are trying to screen sites for in order to penalize or devalue this technique? (How do you know? –Research!) How far off do I think they are from accomplishing that? How big of a priority is it to them?

4) Is it (the linking method)  a natural part of the core of the web?

There are a few other questions that I ask myself as well, but i won’t go into them here yet.

Bottom line: Putting pages with essentially a keyword loaded sentence or two plus 100 internal links fails Question 1 right off the bat in that it detracts severely from a user’s experience.

The right way to do it is to think of all of the NATURAL and DEFENSIBLE interlinking that you can put into your site. Sitemaps on every page. Links between posts. WELL designed navigation. Links back to the home page FROM every page.

Finding World class strategies for doing this is what I am about. Happy to consult with you and provide you with some REAL answers for your site in this regard.

More Internal Linking thoughts….

A couple of days ago, there was a post on Real Estate Webmasters about someone who said that the ideal site had equal PR across all pages. I indicated that this was not the case. (I am looking for the specific thread and when I find it, I will cite it.) You want the emphasis link love wise to match the pages that you want to serve as landing pages. Plain and simple. I received an email from that asking if Google viewed it that way–in other words–Is it OK to use available tools to move the link love around your site to optimize things for reader experience and Google.

ABSOLUTELY.

I just noticed a conversation between Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin that caught my attention since we were recently on the subject of internal linking. Check it out. Pay attention to Question #2 that Rand posed to Matt and his answer. Rand is one of the best at extracting relevant info from the “horse’s mouth”. The BASIC thing we can derive from his answer to question #2 is that Google not only says it isOK, they want us as webmasters to guide them to the pages that we want to rank. Links are political capital. Use them wisely.

More advanced thinking on this same subject coming once I get more time to post.

SEO 101: Link diversity…a good thing

One of the surest signs of a less than adequate SEO effort is a lop sided, or less than diverse source of links. Search engines can (and do) see who links to your site (and everyone else who wants to rank for “your” keywords). They see who you are linking to as well.

They can see the anchor text with which you have linked. They can see the title tags of the page that linked to you. They know whether that page is a home page on the site that linked to you. In short, if it is text and on your site or someone else’s, TRUST me. They know about it.

Some of these linking strategies have gone out of “style” with certain search engines **COUGH** Google **COU GH**

Now that we all agree on that, doesn’t it make sense to have someone do your search engine optimization campaign who can a) provide a DIVERSE set of links from literally ALL available sources b) provide insight into COMING likely changes as search engines to help you move away from techniques that are out of favor with Google c) who knows not only what Google SAYS be what they are DOING about which types of links.

We commonly use 10 different TYPES of links here. (No, I am not mentioning them here…grin…and these are just the ones that come to mind easily). Then we use MANY different types of anchor text. We proactively try to help you make sure that you are not HEAVY into a type of linking that has gone out of vogue or may get you penalized. The NET result is that we try to create a broad-based link portfolio that will stand the test of time. This gives you the best ROI you can possibly acheive.

Just like the wonderful melting pot that we call the USA, diversity is a good thing in link building.

WordPress versions Out of Control

I’m a HUGE fan of WordPress as both a blogging platform and (to some extent) a CMS for websites. But there is one thing that threatens my support:

Too many version changes. 

Lately WordPress has been changing versions literally once a month. Here are some cliches for the folks behind WP…

Less is more.

There is a reason why it’s not Windows Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…etc (OK-bad example. They have updates-grin)

It takes a really good change to beat no change at all.

Measure twice. Cut once.

Is the reasoning behind the change SO critical that it must be rushed out?

Etc.Etc. Etc.

It takes an immense amount of time to upgrade blogs with each version change. This is true even for the most prolific and seasoned of us. So as a favor to those of us loyal users out there, can we PLEASE keep “stable release” from being something besides and oxymoron?

Thoughts?

Supplemental on Supplementals…

Just a quick note for those of you who are STILL looking at supplementals (and I think that is a good idea…). Here’s a quick way to find them:

Google       site:www.yourdomain.com/&      (It gives you your pages in the supplemental index.)

Google       site:www.yourdomain.com    (Gives you your total pages)

The difference is what is contained in the main index. More changes to mention, but not enough time!

Best;

Eric

Supplemental Results a Thing of the Past?

 

I noticed a few days ago that Google has apparently “done away” with Supplemental Results. OK, to be more precise, they have done away with the label. Yeah, the nice little red bottle above doesn’t have a label either, but what is inside? (grin)

Found my first look at it HERE. But just because the label is gone, does not mean that the index is gone. Nor does it mean that its effects are less (or more). There have been MANY debates about the consequences of Google’s hell or more correctly the hell formerly known as Supplemental .

Google tends not to want webmasters to focus on certain things (pay no attention to the man behind the screen)…but that is EXACTLY what those who optimize sites are paid to do. We must understand not only what is being done, but the effect it will have. I think Jim Boykins latest discussion of ” How to detect supplementals” in the new label free world of Google is a good start. Hopefully this link will help keep his page out of them. Kudos Jim.

Actually, that’s a serious thing. Those who have not taken seriously the call for deep linking and proactive internal link management are missing the boat. Google (and other search engines) are always on the prowl for better ways to sort relevance. That is their job. If you want your site to be taken seriously by them, then adapting to their ever changing requirements is a must. Part of that is having a diverse link portfolio. And a big part of a diverse (and defensible) link portfolio is WHERE that is linked to and HOW those links (and their stength) are managed.

I REALLY liked the method using Webmaster Central to grab the internal links and stack them up against your pages…so how did you fare? If you are leaving your web ass(ets) uncovered by not providing them enough link love to keep them out of the cold, the time is now. It’s summer now and you may get away with it, but winter is coming…

Best;

Eric

It’s the internal links, stupid….

Everybody on the net seems to be link crazy these days. People whoring themselves out for a link here and a link there. Much like politicians selling themselves for votes (great analogy, now that I think on it…), they think of bold and even risky (I don’t use the tired old black hat and white hat cliches because life is a business decision–not a cowboy show.) schemes to pull in external links in order to impress Google.

When all is said and done, it matters how many external links you got, true. BUT as was said in a recent US presidential election, It’s the Economy, stupid. When the economy is working right, the votes will come. In the SEO world, It’s the internal linking structure that pushes the link love around and when it is properly optimized, provides the best SERPS for the amount of external inbound links you have.

John Scott addressed it in April of last year. I read it at the time, thought I got it, and filed it away “for future use”…the future is now and it is time to pay attention. With external links becoming increasingly valuable, and the time that it takes to build them more costly in terms of time (read: money), it only makes sense that the person making the best use internally of those external resources wins. It was true then, but it is both true and CRITICAL now.

Jim Boykin’s treatise of internal linking was a damn fine look at the basics of it and his tool is pretty cool as well. He offers some good suggestions on where to start.. Allow me to throw in some specific ideas on it as well…

Defensible Internal Linking

1) THINK about your Nav bar and other links from the index page. PLAN which pages and ONLY which pages are going to be the ones which rank for you.

2) If you don’t need to rank with it, put enough internal links to it to keep it out of the supplemental index, but CONSERVE where you don’t need the juice. Having a site with all equally strong pages link juice wise gets you NOWHERE if none of them get you to your goals. Remember that it takes more now than before to stay out of the supplemental index. Using proper internal linking helps you spend less time whoring for external links.

Methods of spreading the link love:

• Nav Bars limited to pages which you expect to rank.
• Ummm..Sitemaps
• Directories
• Glossaries
• Archives
• Breadcrumbs (properly designed)
• Appropriate content linking (you can link to references in your own site just as well as other people’s. You are an authority, right?

Check out your ratio of internal links to external ones. I have seen VERY successful sites with almost 15 times as many internals as externals. (You can find this with Google Webmaster Tools) Most sites are FAR from that number. Most have far less internal links than external inbound links. While in my opinion the STRUCTURE is far more important than the number (read that twice-it is important), the idea is that most webmasters spend far too little time worrying about the internal links. They are too busy trying to buy, beg, borrow or bootleg the next external link, only to put it to marginal use.

There are only so many external links to be had without making yourself a huge spam target above the radar…let’s practice link strength conservation and good management. (grin)

Have a great day!

W.W.Bldg 43.D?

In my blog post on my REW blog about Defensible Link Building, I tried to make the case for long term asset building vs. Spammin’ and Jammin… I’d like to add to that now a bit as well… It has been a popular (and overused but effective IMO) phrase in the Christian community: WWJD or (What would Jesus Do). Since Google holds all the traffic (or a majority) on their search engine, they know seemingly everything including Google Analytics), they have the best minds in the search engine business, etc, one could almost claim that they have the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent qualities of deity. (grin).

With that knowledge comes responsibility for the relevance of the searches of the civilized world. The best SEO folks analyze Google’s next algorythmic move, by looking at past moves and then slipping on their W.W.<<Bldg 43>>D. bracelets and asking themselves What would Building 43 do? What would they do algorythmically (ala the 10 commandments)? At what point would you penalize someone individually (Like some Biblical cities that were destroyed)? How much “social engineering” would you do on the webmaster community to keep irreleva nce from creeping into your SERPS? How diligent would you be in chasing down the techniques of people who made a living off of exploiting the “holes” in your algorithm and the inherent weaknesses of a text bsed robot.

When you try to decide on an SEO strategy and how you are going to spend your time in promoting your site to the search engines, don’t forget to slip on your W.W.<<bldg43>>D. bracelet and then follow what you know will provide you the longest term asset.

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