First Page SEO Basics
Posted by Mitch on Aug 16, 2010
Two weeks ago I was having an interesting debate with a guy on LinkedIn. It was supposed to be on the subject of social media and SEO, and instead it turned into a debate on SEO and what’s important.
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He was saying in this group that it wasn’t important to optimize one’s home page anymore because we were all under an illusion if we thought that most of our visitors came in through the home page. In his opinion, optimizing all the other pages were more important to attracting visitors than anything you might think of doing on your home page.
I of course countered, saying that without optimizing and working on your home page that your other pages don’t really have all that much of a chance to get you anywhere. The bots sent out by search engines start off with your main page, “index” if you will, and if you haven’t taken care of that then the bots get confused as to what your site is all about and almost nothing else you do will overcome that lapse.
Strangely enough, I was talking to my wife about it, someone who knows nothing about computers or coding or SEO or anything related to technology, and she said “Don’t you need a foundation before you do anything else?”
Exactly! It’s like what many people write about when they’re talking to brand new bloggers who are getting into the game to make money. The recommendations are always the same, and they’re true; think about content and building up a community more than the money part initially. If the day you start your first blog post your site is already loaded with all sorts of banner and affiliate ads all over the place and your articles are geared towards the “make money” market, you’re going to look at little bit goofy. This isn’t saying you can’t have anything, but unless you’re someone like John Chow, who was already rich before he started blogging, you’re not going to come across as well.
Anyway, back to SEO and foundation. If you’re putting together a site, it works best if you decide what your site is going to be about and then try to figure out what you want to be found for before you even begin constructing your site. Doing that research helps you write your copy, and make it as natural as possible so the search engines have no problems reading your site and determining what it is you do. Sure, you could try to go the backdoor route, and you might possibly succeed in some fashion, but it’s not the best way to do it.
Optimize every page on your site as much as possible. But always start with your main page.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media And SEO
Posted by Mitch on Jul 29, 2010
At the workshop I put on last week with my friend Renée, one of the interesting questions that came up was how social media marketing impacted a business website’s SEO (search engine optimization). I thought I’d answer that here as I did last week because if I was asked there, then someone else might want to know that answer as well.
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One of the things you often hear about what helps you rank higher on Google, and I’m not talking page rank here, is getting one directional (I’m debating as to whether it’s “directional” or “direction”; have to think about that more) inbound links. By that, it means you’re getting a free link from someone without necessarily giving one back. Supposedly, search engines love that, because it shows that outside people are giving you love without your asking for it. By the way, that’s also why they hate paid links, even if you use the “rel=nofollow” attribute, because they think those advertisers are trying to game the system, if you will.
So, let’s look at a few of the social media sites where you might do some marketing to see how it all works. If you use Twitter, you have to create a profile, and if you’re smart you’ll put your business link in there. Mine has my business link instead of the link to this blog. Now, the only link I have back to Twitter is to my name on Twitter so people can follow me. I have nothing on my business site that goes to Twitter except for the same thing. Now, every blog post I make pops up on Twitter, which means all of my blogs get immediate link love. If someone clicks on the links, they’ll go to my sites. Even if they don’t, I still get link love, and I get more if someone decides to retweet it. Not a bad deal for a quick post.
LinkedIn and Facebook work in a similar way. When you create your profile, if you pop in a link to your business website, you’ll get the benefit of an inbound link. Both of those websites are pretty prominent, so that benefits your site. But then you go further. On both sites, posts from my business blog show up like they do on Twitter. This means I’m generating one directional links to my blog, which is attached to my website, and thus I’m helping to increase my SEO. Even with my creating a business page on Twitter and linking it to my blogs, like you see there to the right, my SEO is intact because every time I write something on that page, or anyone else does, it gets shared with everyone who’s decided they “like” my page, and if they’re commenting on a link I left, that gets spread around as well. By the way, on Facebook I’ve included links to all of my sites, whereas on LinkedIn I’ve only added links to my two main business sites and my blog.
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The concept pretty much works with all the social media marketing areas you might try. If you create a YouTube account and set it up properly, you’ll get an inbound link. Every email you send where you have a link in your profile you get a little bit of that, but you get more if it goes to a place where someone has to log in online to see their email. If you participate in forums, you should make sure you have a signature file with your link in it.
Now, I have to say this one thing, and it’s important. Just getting links means nothing. If your website isn’t optimized correctly, those links aren’t going to help you one bit. If you don’t have any real content, the search engines still won’t know what you do, and neither will people who eventually might come to your site. So, you have to have a well rounded SEO program going for any of this to help your site and your business.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
The Myth Of Link Building
Posted by Mitch on May 10, 2010
Almost every SEO article you read talks about the importance of link building. They say that you have to create organic ways of getting people to link to you to build your prominence.
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They say if you can get one way links that you’ll be in a much better position than trading links. Even Google said that they base their rankings, invalid as they are, on the number of people who link to you without your linking back to them.
What’s happened because of all this talk? I keep getting people writing me and wanting to link to many of my websites, including my business websites. They look at the PR (page rank) on those sites, which is pretty good, and think that by offering me the “opportunity” to trade links with them that it will work out great for me. They may even look at the Alexa rank, which is almost always better than theirs, even if they have high PR (that’s one reason why I question PR) and think they can snow me.
There are many myths that are related to link building. Many of the ideas people come up with don’t work. Some things people believe about link building aren’t true either. Let’s look at some of these things.
1. Link building will automatically boost your site’s prominence. That’s not quite true, although it is partially true. There’s this thing called relationship link building. That means if you link to a page on pink elephants and your blog or website is about quantum physics, you’re not going to get much bounce from that. Whereas if you link to a page that’s related to yours, you’ll get some benefit out of it.
Actually, sometimes linking to a site that doesn’t have much to do with your topic, but helps highlight something you want to be known for, is beneficial to you. For instance, on my business site, I tell people what I do, which works pretty well. However, I also wanted people to know I was based in Syracuse. So I linked to Syracuse and highlighted it, and if one looks me up and adds Syracuse I come up pretty high on the list as well.
2. All related links to your page are going to boost your site’s prominence. You’d think this would be true, but in actuality it’s not always true. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of these requests from someone. Every once in awhile the subject on another site or blog seems like it might be a good fit. That is, until you take a good look at that site. Try to see if you can find the page they’re telling you they’re going to put you on from the main page. Most of the time you can’t because what they’ve done is thrown in a page that doesn’t link to any of their other pages, but is on their site. You don’t get any benefit from that at all; that’s one of those one-way link tricks that benefits them, and it’s sneaky.
3. If I don’t get enough external links, I’m not going to have any good rankings at all. That’s not true, and I’ll give you the perfect example. I’ve mentioned it before, but who’s checked out W3C? That stands for the World Wide Web Consortium, and they’re the folks who pretty much create and monitor the standards for how the web is supposed to work, including coding. They have almost no external links at all; pretty much everything they do is internal.
They’re the masters at internal linking, and the best example for the rest of us. When it comes to page rank, their main page is 10/10. Their Alexa rank, as of when I wrote this, is 479. It’s in looking at that page that I knew that internal linking was the way to go, which is why I often link to my own content on this blog. A few people use a WordPress plugin to do it, but I’d rather do it myself. This way I can bring up some very old posts or newer posts, and hopefully it’ll be more relevant if I do it myself than if software does it. Maybe not, though; sometimes you just have to get a little silly.
Link building is a big deal, but not in the way you might think it is. I’d start off working through your internal linking first, because it’s the main thing you can control. If you still feel the need to do backlink building, at least do it intelligently and ethically.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
SEO Doctor
Posted by Mitch on Apr 28, 2010
From Kristi’s most recent Fetching Friday post came an article from Search Engine Journal on a Firefox plugin called SEO Doctor. In essence, it gives you a heck of a lot of information on how your SEO efforts are working on your website, and if you know how to dig deeper, might give you some indications of what you can do better.
After checkout out the article, I went to the page, downloaded the plugin, and of course added it to my browser, where it’s sitting at the lower left as I type. The biggies, as it pertains to what you want to know, are: the percentage, out of 100%, of effectiveness your page is in its SEO efforts; the number of external links and links overall on that page; and the number of visits that page has received.
When I go to my main business site, it’s ranked at 96% out of 100%; I like that. Some of my other pages on that site are perfect, and I like that even better. The worst page on that site comes in at 90%. It shows me I have 3 external links and 43 links overall; I had to go counting to find those links overall, but they’re there. It shows me… well, it shows me nothing as it pertains to visits. That’s because you have to belong to Compete, and you have to have an API key to pop in, and of course I’m not signing up for that. I wish I could change it to something else, but I’m stuck with that; oh well…
There are two other things on the toolbar as well. One is something called Flow, which measures the percentage of page rank you’re retaining on your site. Since y’all know I don’t particularly follow page rank all that much, I’m not worried about it, which is why it’s not in my top 3. However, on my business page it says I’m retaining 88% of my page rank. The last thing is this little green tab to the far right, which allows me to track nofollow links if I so choose; I don’t at this juncture, but it’s neat enough to take a quick look at.
Finally, you can right click on any of the information listed and get even more information, which you can download if you prefer in a .csv format. Of course, if you have nothing in Compete, that one won’t work.
Anyway, it’s a neat little tool you might want to check out, but of course you have to be on Firefox to use it.
Linking To Your Tags
Posted by Mitch on Nov 7, 2009
Earlier today I was checking out one of the many blogs that I follow called Online Social Networking. I’m not sure where I originally met Larry online, but we started our blogs around the same time.
I was reading this one particular post, which was pretty good, but that’s not what caught my eye. For the first time, I noticed that Larry has a lot of links in each post. I’d never really paid much attention to it, though I’d clicked on a link from time to time, but tonight it really drew my attention. I decided to hover over some of them, and what I discovered has lit something in my mind.
Before I tell you what, let me mention these couple of things. Larry’s blog has a PR of 4; as I always say, I don’t overly care about page rank, but it’s a number so we’ll use it for the moment. He has an Alexa rank of 52,170. He has 703 RSS subscribers. He doesn’t write as often as I do, his posts aren’t as long as some of my posts are, and he has very little in the way of marketing items.
What he does have, though are those links. And what I noticed today was that many of those links aren’t just internal links, but are links to his tags.
As I’ve said, I’m relatively new to tags. I’ve done more tagging on my finance blog than I’ve ever done here. I have categories here, but not as many tags. Still, I could recognize the importance of the internal linking even more than I have up to this point. I link to much of my content when I think about it. However, there’s nothing wrong with doing some of that internal linking to either tags or categories. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had thought of it before now.
Of course, I don’t think that’s the only reason his blog is ranked better than mine. He sticks to his one particular topic, which is pretty much anything that has to do with social networking and social media, while I kind of dabble in, well, pretty much whatever I want to dabble in. But one of those things we all need to remember with our blogging is internal linking and SEO, and this is one brilliant step that I’m going to start doing, just as I hope to start tagging some of my missives a little bit more also.
Oh, I still won’t have PR for awhile, but I’ve been wondering if there might be ways to increase my Alexa rank, since they still like me, and this might be the next step in helping to put me over. Also, something else I’m going to start doing is paying more attention to other articles I’m reading on other blogs, and if something fits an old post of mine, I’m going to link to it. Anchor links are important to do, even if the content isn’t on your own site. And other people deserve some love also, as I got this week from Kristi’s Fetching Friday post.
Something to important and yet to simple; oy! 
GoogleRankings Is Dead; For The Most Part
Posted by Mitch on Oct 9, 2009
One of those little inside things I’ve always had going for my SEO business is that I had a Google API so that I could use GoogleRankings. This little tool allowed me to put in keywords and see where I was ranked for those keywords (SERPS); that was wonderful. When I wrote a post about this little SEO Project I undertook, which actually ended up working pretty well but took longer than I had expected, the way I was able to check my rankings was through GoogleRankings.
Now, why I was ahead of a lot of people is that Google had stopped giving out APIs some time in 2006. They said they weren’t really going to support it anymore, but would continue running the service. I thought that was great since I had my number.
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Suddenly, it stopped working. I had thought that maybe there was a glitch somewhere, so I didn’t worry about it. However, when I checked again today, now I was wondering what was up. So I did my search on Google, and lo and behold I learned that they’ve totally shut down my SOAP API service. This meant I could basically check GoogleRankings for Yahoo and MSN, but nothing else. Because they weren’t updating it, they weren’t ever going to add Bing, and actually MSN had pretty much shut down, as well as Ask. And then, just after midnight, they shut down the site totally; GoogleRankings is no more.
So, what will I use next? I’m kind of at a loss. I found a couple other sites, but none of them worked. And I mean that literally; it’s not that they didn’t give me what I wanted, they just decided they didn’t want to play. I will find something, though; I have to have my information. Anyone have any ideas out there?
SEO & Common Business Sense
Posted by Mitch on May 29, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with someone about some of the things I did. I told him that one of my careers was being an internet marketing consultant for small businesses. He of course asked me what I meant, and I told him.
At that point he said “I have a website, but I’ve never done anything with it, and it hasn’t done anything for me.”
I said “Well, if you haven’t done anything with it, what were you expecting it do for you?”
He said “I don’t know; I thought I’d have people calling me for business, but it’s never happened.”
This is very common in business across the board, but especially for small businesses. I do okay with my main business website, and I’ve at least gotten some work through my SEO, though I’m working on things, as I talked about in my posts on my update (which, by the way, I hope you saw my last comment on, which mention that things may have gone better than I’d thought). I asked him if we could take a look at his website, and since we were in a place with internet access, we did.
I looked at his site, then I asked him what he did, though I knew what he did. He said “I offer business solutions for people and help them solve their efficiency issues.”
I said “No, that’s a result of what you do. What do you do?”
He thought about it for a moment, then told me exactly what he did. I asked him where that was on his main page, and he looked; nowhere. I asked him where he did his business, and where was it on the site; nowhere. We pulled up my main business site for comparison; with some stuff hidden, since I’m not in advertising mode for that business today, I showed him my first line: “XXXXX, is a health care revenue cycle and management consulting company based in Syracuse, NY.”
Right from the beginning, you know my business name, which, of course, is in the top logo. One should always put it into their content on their main site because search engines can’t read images. You know exactly what I do if you’re in my industry and are looking at the site; if you’re not in health care this means nothing to you, but at least you know. And you know where I’m based, which many businesses omit. Sometimes it’s contained on the contact page, which you know I hate; I’m going to have to write an article on that one of these days.
We looked at a couple more pages, and he was starting to get the picture. I told him this was a free consultation, but to mention it to friends and other business owners if he got something out of it. After all, I need to get the word spread on what I do for local businesses.
The thing is, this can be perceived as just SEO stuff to help someone’s search position on the internet. Sure, it’s a part of that, but in reality, this is a business concept. If you don’t tell people what you do, then they won’t know. If people have to drag it out of you, then things may never get to that point, and they’ll never know if they could have used your services. This happens at networking meetings, and it happens with websites.
It’s probably the reason why I hate most sales pages I see online. Sometimes you read what could be 5 to 10 pages of sales stuff, and never get to just what the product is for. Sometimes you only have a few words, and you either get a video that usually says nothing or you’re being asked for your name and email address so you can receive some report.
Once again, not selling (as proven by no link here), but on the site with my website marketing book, I first ask the probing questions (which is also a good way to handle advertising; find the pain), show the product, then tell exactly what it is. After that, I use some testimonials and the like, but I get to the point immediately. If that doesn’t intrigue people, then nothing else I saw is going to be seen; if it does, then the rest may help to enhance the sale.
Take another look at your website, if you have a business site other than your blog, and see if you’re really telling people what you do, and how soon. Who knows, it could help increase your business overall.
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