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Aug
22
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In my previous post, I explored how to assess the competitive level of your keywords and I shared my strategy for optimizing non-competitive keywords. As promised, here is my strategy for optimizing highly competitive ones.
As this is a rather dense topic I will split it in two. This post will explain how to use link analysis to understand your competitor’s rank, and the following post will explain how to leverage that information in your own link-building efforts.
Not all links are created equal
At the moment, we need lots of links to our sites. My strategy is to study the link structure of my chosen web authority carefully, as well as their incoming link text in order to build a similar relevance profile for my site. If I can get similar links and anchor texts, chances are that I will be ranking right next to my competitor.
Unfortunately just getting links to your site is not enough; you need to look for the right links. No link is measured exactly the same. As I explained before, the more pages that match for a targeted query, the more the search engine needs to know about those pages to rank them properly. It is very important to understand this concept. It is the single most important reason why on-page optimization is not enough to compete for very popular keywords.
Just like on-page metrics, there are several metrics search engines use to evaluate links. Before you set out to perform link analysis and build links, there are some basic principles you need to learn.
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Aug
15
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Optimizing for highly competitive keywords requires a completely different strategy than optimizing for non-competitive ones. First, let’s clarify a few points. When I talk about long tail or fat head keywords, I am talking in relation to the search demand for those particular keywords. I am not talking about the offer (the number of sites competing for those keywords). Although demand and competition are generally in direct proportion, there are cases where this is not the case, such as unexploited niches.
In this post, let’s just explore the simple case where you are targeting non-competitive keywords. They have decent demand but not a lot of competition. You may be asking yourself how you can tell the competitive and non-competitive keywords apart.
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Aug
15
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Search engines are just like teenagers. Don’t believe me? Consider this analogy.
Let's say you have a teenage kid with a handful of friends. He knows them very well and even remembers their phone numbers by heart. He’s bright and it doesn’t take him long to become very popular at school. Now, he has dozens of friends. While extremely intelligent, he doesn’t have the memory to recall all his new friends’ contact info. Now he uses a paper address book to keep track of them, looking them up by their initials.
Later, he discovers social media sites on the Internet and gets addicted. He gains hundreds of friends all around the world. He genuinely wants to stay in touch with them but his paper address book is no good and he upgrades to a web-based electronic one. Now he can find any friend by simply typing in the first or last name. After joining several social networks and starting his own blog, he has several thousand friends. Suddenly he is faced with another unforeseen challenge: many friends have the same name! He needs to use a differentiating piece of information, their country or city for example, to tell them apart. But in several cases even this fails; he has three friends in Korea named John Kim, and two of them in Seoul! He has to tell them apart by age.
Now imagine that this kid is a search engine and his friends are our web pages. Instead of a few thousand listings, search engines have to sort through billions to find what is being searched for. This is when things get really interesting. 
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Aug
9
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There has been a heated debate on Sphinn about a controversial post by Rand Fishkin of Seomoz. There is a lot to learn from that discussion, but instead of focusing on the debate, I want to talk about something that keeps coming up: Google's Sitelinks.
Google doesn't provide a lot of information, but this is what they say about the matter:
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Sitelinks are presented if they are found to be somehow useful.
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A site’s structure allows Google to find good Sitelinks.
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The process of selection, creation and presentation of Sitelinks is fully automated.
Let's forget the technical details for the moment and focus on what Google's purpose is here: they want to save users some clicks by pointing them to the right page directly in the search results. Sitelinks appear only for the first result, and only for sites with meaningful traffic. (Google uses the toolbar data of visitor frequency to make this determination.)
I decided to dig deeper and study the sources, try some examples of my own and make my own conclusions. I'd definitely like to have Sitelinks when people search for my blog, and I'm sure many of my readers here would like the same. Here’s what I learned…
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Aug
2
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Is SEO just a game?
Consider two chess players, Mike and Tom. Mike has never been able to win against Tom. Mike knows all the rules of the game: how to move every piece, when to capture, when to castle; he even knows all the tactical ideas like forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks.
Mike's problem is that while he knows all the rules and has read a lot of chess books, he still looks only one or two moves in advance. It is very hard to prepare a winning plan looking so short-term. Tom on the other hand thinks at least five moves ahead and moves all his pieces so that they complete his master plan. Tom anticipates all of Mike's moves and prepares for them with a strong counterattack.
The world of search engine optimization is no different than this. As SEOs we need to think ahead of our competitors and, more importantly, we need to be on top of search engine advances. The world of search is moving so fast that any slacker will be left behind, with no time or opportunity to catch up. Check and mate.
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Aug
1
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We have discussed before how to control Googlebot via robots.txt and meta robot tags. Both methods have limitations. With robots.txt you can block the crawling of any page or directory, but you cannot control the indexing, caching or snippets. With the robots meta tag you can control crawling, caching and snippets but you can only do that for HTML files, as the tag is embedded in the files themselves. You have no granular control for binary and non-HTML files.
Until now. Google recently introduced another clever solution to this problem. You can now specify robot meta tags via an HTTP header. The new header is the X-Robots-Tag, and it behaves and supports the same directives as the regular robots meta tag: index/noindex, archive/noarchive, snippet/nosnippet and the new unavailable_after directive. This new technique makes it possible to have granular control over crawling, caching, and other functions for any page on your website, no matter the type of content it has—PDF, Word doc, Excel file, zip files, etc.
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Jul
27
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My old pal Skitzzo from SEOrefugee revisits what he calls an SEO “myth”: that a competitor can potentially harm a site owner just by pointing links to his or her site.
According to the number of Sphinns, it looks like a lot SEOs agree it’s a myth. That’s understandable, as it would be very unfair for the search engines to allow this type of thing to happen.
Unfortunately the situation is not as simple as it first seems. As has been my practice on this blog, let's dig a little bit deeper to understand why—although difficult and possibly expensive—it is very well possible to pull of this exploit. For those concerned, I explained how to counter this type of attack in a previous post about negative SEOs. Check it out.
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Jul
25
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Link building is without a doubt the most time consuming—but most rewarding—aspect of search engine optimization. It usually takes more effort to promote your content (build links) than to actually create it. As I have stressed repeatedly before, compelling, useful content should make your link building efforts much easier.
Before I go any further, let me note that I have a slightly different perspective when evaluating link-building tactics than most SEO consultants. I do SEO primarily for my own sites and my income depends on the ability of those sites to make money. That means that I try to build links that primarily offer long-term value. I still try to get the short-term and medium-term value links, but I like to build authority for my sites. If you’re working for a client or a boss that wants to see immediate results, your priorities will probably be different.
In situations where I have to pay or put some serious effort to get a link, the most important criteria is always: Will the link send useful, converting traffic?
Why is this my most important criteria? Let's explore three different scenarios to illustrate this:
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Jul
23
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I frequently get asked why a particular page is no longer ranking. I wish there were a simple answer to that question. Instead of giving personal responses, I’ve decided to write a detailed post with the possible problems that might cause your ranking to drop, as well as all the solutions I could think of. I also want to present a case study every week of a ranking that dropped and what we did to get it back. If you have a site that is affected I invite you to participate. Send me an email or leave a comment.
There are many reasons why your page or website might not be ranking. Let's go through each of the three steps in the search engine ranking process and examine the potential roadblocks your page might face. We’ll see how to avoid them, how to identify if your page was affected, and most importantly, how to recover.
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Jul
19
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Duplicate content is one of the most common causes of concern among webmasters. We work hard to provide original and useful content, and all it takes is a malicious SERP (Search Engine Results Page) hijacker to copy our content and use it for his or her own. Not nice.
More troubling still is the way that Google handles the issue. In my previous post about cgi hijacking, was clear that the main problem with hijacking and content scraping is that search engines do not reliably determine who is the owner of the content and, therefore, which page should stay in the index. When faced with multiple pages that have exactly the same or nearly the same content, Google's filters flag them as duplicates. Google's usual course of action is that only one of the pages — the one with the higher PageRank — makes it to the index. The rest are tossed out. Unless there is enough evidence to show that the owner or owners are trying to do something manipulative, there is no need to worry about penalties.
Recently, regular reader Jez asked me a thought-provoking question. I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially he wanted to know: "Why doesn’t Google consider the age of the content to determine the original author?” I responded that the task is not as trivial as it may seem at first, and I promised a more thorough explanation. Here it is.
"Advanced yet simple and strategic SEO" 78 pages full of useful insights and valuable tips
