I’ve moved the blog over to my own website: http://www.vtsearchmarketing.com/blog/
Please find all future posts there.
Thanks!
-Jeff Santoro
Getting links back to your website is the name of the game.
But, how do we get links to our site without running around posting on every forum we can find and submitting to every single directory?
Yeah, that doesn’t sound much fun. Granted, we still need to do some of that type of work, but it isn’t the type of linking that’s going to be the highest leverage.
What we really want to do is very simple.
Marketing!
The absolute best way to get links on the internet is to develop good content in the form of articles, blogs, press releases, free software. By simply creating something that your customers will find interesting.
Once we have this piece of killer content, we then need to go about marketing that content to article directories, news papers, and other blogs.
Since our article will have links back to our website in it, every time we get it picked up by another venue we are not only creating links to our site but also attracting new customers that read our content.
If we do our job properly, and the content is absolutely killer, you’ll also notice that it starts to get picked up by other venues across the internet.
With the development of social bookmarking, it’s entirely possible to have a single article that you have marketed to 15-20 websites generate hundreds of links to your site.
I’m currently in the process of testing several different submission services and directories, I’ll give you a list of my favorites once all my testing is done. 
Basically, off-page factors can be boiled down to one main concept.
Backlinks
A backlink is any time a hyperlink from a page not inside your own domain points to one of the pages on your website.
Backlinks are what you’ll find so many SEO companies talking about. “We can get you 1000 links in a day!” Yeah, great… For those of you that have dabbled in SEO or are even reading this blog because you are looking to hire an SEO company, I have some important news.
Don’t fall for the bait!
While backlinking is extremely important, I need to take a moment to reshape what you may already know about getting links or make sure if you are new to links that you get some good information upfront.
Rule 1: All links to your pages are NOT created equal.
Getting 1000 links in a day can be entirely worthless. If you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ll know that getting links from pages that aren’t even indexed by the search engines can be largely useless. Every link pointing to your site does two things. It gives you Authority and/or Reputation.
Authority is when you have a link from a website that has a high amount of PageRank. Reputation comes in the from what that link says in the anchor text. Having good link reputation in both your on-page and off-page SEO can have a significant impact on your rankings.
That said, a link passing you no Authority (because the page it is on isn’t indexed) and no Reputation (because it just has www.example.com in the anchor) will be almost entirely useless for your ranking efforts.
Rule 2: Be natural and be honest with your link building efforts.
Here’s a quote directly from the help documents from Google Webmaster Tools:
“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”
I’m sure you’ve thought; “What if I just make a bunch of websites about my market place and have them all link to me?” or “Isn’t there some automated link trading system I can use to just pass links back and forth with every other website?”
Let’s pause for a moment and think about what the internet is.
…
The internet is basically trillions upon trillions of links. These links are the backbone of how we move around the internet, how we get from one page to another. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “messing” with the whole premise of the internet would be frowned upon? You bet!
If you engage in excessive link trading, building external pages to just spam links on, or several other “black hat” methods. You will ultimately be caught and slapped by Google and the other search engines.
It may not happen instantly, but our goal with SEO is to create traffic to our website in the hopes of building an actual business. I’m not sure about you, but I would want all the hard work I’m going to put into my business to get crushed because I decided to take a less than desirable way to get my traffic.
If you develop good content and have good marketing, you can build links on the internet quickly, effectively, and naturally. People will link to good, engaging, and relevant content.
These are what I consider to be the two main points to understand before starting any link building campaign for a new website. These two simple rules can save you hours, days, and even years of time… not to mention the potential millions in lost sales you would experience from having your traffic basically disappear overnight.
Next time we’ll talk about a few other rules that I like to consider before starting my link building process, but that aren’t necessarily rules that would ruin your website if not followed.
On-page factors when talking about SEO is much more than just what words appear on your page.
Let’s discuss.
I’m going to start by going through my basic check-list that I use when looking at a new website. This is by no-means my complete list, but it’s what I use to gauge things initially.
1. Tracking – Make sure you have some sort of tracking installed on your website. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are a great start. If you do not have a way to track your progress and results, then you are essentially going to be putting in lots of hard work without any way to know if it’s paying off. You could spend weeks continuing to optimize a specific page or keyword and never know if what you are doing pays off.
2. Spider-ability – Are your pages causing the search engine spiders any problems? You can find out easily through the Google Webmaster Tools… install it on your website, enough said.
3. Text Links – Do you have footer links at the end of your pages that point to the main category pages on your site? These are extremely important in helping the search engines know what you feel is important on your own site. Why should they think it’s important if you don’t. You want to use text links to point to the pages you want to rank, and you want those links to use your keywords right in the link itself.
4. Title Tags – Do you have your keywords in the title tag? Great, does the title make any sense for potential customers? Stuffing a bunch of great keywords into your title tags can really help your rankings, but what if the title just under yours is far more attractive and unique. You’ll miss out on a lot of clicks by confusing the searchers with hard to read or sloppy titles.
5. Descriptions – Do your descriptions use your keywords and have a clear call to action? This is your chance to really entice someone to choose your link over the ones around it. Be unique! You’ll also want to see if the search engines use your description, or make one up by pulling content from your site.
6. Javascript and Style Sheets – Make sure your javascript and style sheets are in external files. Having all of that extra code on your page will cause the spiders to treat your content as less relevant because it appears further down the page.
7. H1, H2, and other text styles – By including your keywords in the actual headline tags and other styled text such as bold or italics. This is always a good idea for SEO. However, be sure that your headlines are compelling. You don’t want people to hit the back button, so make sure you are engaging your visitors.
8. Broken Links – Search engine spiders hate to run into broken links. The entire internet is defined by links, it’s the only way to get from one place to another. By having broken links on your website you are in essence slapping the entire internet in the face… so don’t do it. Check your links often and be sure to fix broken ones as soon as possible.
That’s my basic checklist for getting started with on-page SEO. As I said before, this is not an exhaustive list. However, implementing these basic ideas on your website can often have tremendous effects in markets that aren’t very competitive. I’ve seen pages that simply do those steps and jump from a page 8 listing to a page 1 listing in a few weeks.
That’s all for now!
Best,
Jeff
Since it’s taking me a while to get my content together for my own website, I figured I would do a post on a very important concept when it comes to content.
Duplicate content is something that you may already have present on your website. Don’t worry! We’re going to talk about how to fix it right now.
First, there are two different types of duplicate content that I think you should know about.
1. Exact Duplication – two pages on your website that are identical.
2. Close Duplication – two pages that are so similar in content that only a few words or sentences are different.
There is also something called external duplication, but that really shouldn’t be a worry for you. It only really becomes a problem when it gets to extreme points with hundreds of pages with the same content.
Close duplication is probably what you’ll run into most often. On websites that have dynamically generated content for product pages or categories, it can often appear to be a duplicate page because you really haven’t gone in and developed each product or category to the point where the search engines can make sense of the difference between the actual product and your page templates.
Exact duplicates are generally caused when your website displays pages with the WWW at the front or not. VTSearchMarketing.com goes to the same place as www.VTSearchMarketing.com. This can be a problem, however there is a simple solution.
Jump over to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Once you install this on your website, you’ll then have a preference to let Google know to treat both versions as one. Hence solving the duplicate content problem.
You’ll also want to be sure that all the links on your website link the same way. You can link to your homepage by www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html (or default.aspx). Both of those appear the same, but you can help the search engines by being consistent with your linking throughout your pages.
For near duplicate pages we have a couple of options.
By far the best option is to add relevant content to those pages. Both the spiders and your website visitors will thank you for it.
The other option is to use the robots.txt option inside Google Webmaster Tools.
This file lets you tell Google what pages not to index. You can remove single pages…
Disallow: /security.html
Or even whole folders on your site
Disallow: /images
Reducing the amount of duplicate content on your website can have give you a significant boost in rankings once the spiders have had time to crawl your site and notice all the clean-up you’ve done.
Since you ultimately have control over all of the links and content on your own website, the search engines take very seriously how well you manage those elements when deciding how to rank your pages.
Fix the pages that have duplicate content.
Google wants to help you with this. The Webmaster Tools recently got an update that will show you which pages it considers to be duplicates. Simply go to Diagnostics -> Crawl errors and you’ll be presented with a list of pages that Google isn’t too thrilled about.
Check back often, as sometimes it can take months or even several months for Google to post this information after crawling your website.
That’s all for now,
Jeff
I’ve posted a living example of how to implement a site structure that focuses PageRank to your Tier 1 pages. Use the link below.
Vermont Search Engine Optimization
Please note that I haven’t included any content yet so that you can see the layout in its most basic form.
All of the links at the top of the page are tagged with a “nofollow” so that the search engine spiders won’t pass page rank through those links.
All of the links at the bottom of the page do NOT have the “nofollow” tag. As such, we are passing page rank to those pages.
Notice that the links at the bottom of the page use the keywords that we are trying to rank for as the link to the new page in the site structure. This helps with our page reputation and helps the search engines understand what content is on the page.
Now, we have to go back through our pages and write content for each page. Fun!
Next time we’ll have a brief discussion about content generation and some simple things you’ll need to get the most out of your copy writing.
Please feel free to post any questions.
Enjoy
-Jeff
Today we’re going to connect our keyword groups with one of the site structures that we discussed previously.
There are hundreds of site structures that you can use to optimize your website for the search engines, but today I’m going to show you my favorite.
With this structure, we’ll used the concept of stacked pyramids and adjust the linking between the tiers for maximum effect on our keywords.
Start by arranging your keyword groups by theme. With my keyword set I have 3 main themes that focus around “Optimization”, “Marketing”, and “SEO”
I start by taking the most competitive group from each theme and placing it under the home page to create our tier 1 pages.
Group 1 is around the them of Optimization, 2 – Marketing, 3 – SEO
My home page will like to each of these groups using text that gives reputation to the page by including the main keyword or keywords as the actual hyperlink.
NOTE: This site structure is for search engine spiders only. There will be other links on the homepage that use a “nofollow” tag in the link for visitor navigation.
Notice that our Group 1-3 pages do NOT link back to the homepage. Linking back to the home page will cause your PageRank to pool at the homepage. If you have one set of HIGHLY competitive terms that you are trying to rank for, then place those on the homepage and return links from each page in your site structure back to the homepage.
Moving on, I’ll now take the less competitive terms from each theme and place them under the main grouping from that theme.
Now with this tier we will want to point links back to the most competitive group in each them to pool our PageRank on our tier 1 pages.
What we have here are 3 separate pyramid shapes under the home page. The pyramids do NOT connect to each other preserving reputation and page rank in each individual theme.
If you remember back to our keyword groupings, I discussed creating a second group that switched the modifier terms with your main keywords. What I do now, is take our structure and double it and then link the sub-group tier 1 pages to the main-group tier 2 pages and vice versa. It ends up looking like this.
You can see that the tier 1 pages still do not link to each other, and likewise with the tier 2 pages. We’ve just cross linked our tier 1 and 2 sub-group pages to each other.
Group 1 links to: G5, G5.5, G6, G6.5
Group 1.5 links to the same tier 2 pages.
Over the weekend I’ll work on implementing this site structure on my actual website so you’ll have a living example to look at shortly.
I’m assuming by now that you’ve completed the competition analysis from your keyword list generated by following the instructions in my previous posts on keyword research.
Now we need to organize this research into small groups of 3-5 keywords. Each group will eventually become a webpage inside our website.
I usually start by making a new tab on my spreadsheet where I’ll begin to cut and paste keywords. This allows me to keep my original data for later reference.
We’ll use this list of keywords as a working example:
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont small business seo]
[vermont seo strategy]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine marketing service]
[vermont search engine submission service]
[vermont targeted website traffic]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]
We want to start by looking for terms that share words. In this case, “search engine optimization” seems to be common to the first few terms, so let’s break those out first:
Group 1
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]
Group 2
[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]
As you can see I took every term with “search engine optimization” and put it into Group 1 while leaving the remaining terms in Group 2.
Now we need to take a look at our competition. Are our keywords highly competitive? If so, we need to have a narrow focus on our groupings to target those terms. If we are less competitive, we can pull the modifiers from the term and proceed forward.
In my example, the search terms are not highly competitive. So I’ll continue by taking any words following “vermont search engine optimization” and tag them as modifiers for the group.
Group 1
Modifiers: firm, specialist, marketing, consulting, expert
[vermont search engine optimization]
Now we’re left with one search term in our grouping. This isn’t a bad thing. Now I can go back and pick the most competitive modifiers and bring them back into the group.
Group 1
Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert
[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
From here I like to write a potential title tag for my grouping. Since Google only displays 65 characters of your title tag, it’s good to keep your title length to 65 characters. If you don’t you’ll end up with annoying “…” following your title in the search results.
Title: Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist
Perfect, we come in at 59 characters. I’ll explain later the art of writing title tags, but for now let’s move on with grouping our keywords into landing pages. Keep not of your modifiers, you’ll want to be sure to include them in the content of your web pages as you build them.
Now, we have a group with 3 main keywords and 3 modifiers. What if we make another group that switches the modifiers and the main keywords?
Have you ever seen those fancy indented listings on Google? Those happen when a website has not one, but two pages on the SERP. Regardless of rank for the second page, Google will slide it up under the highest ranked page on your site for that term.
This gives us an opportunity to not only focus in on our modifier terms, but possibly end up with enough ranking to have each page act as an indented listing for the other.
Group 1 – Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist
Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert
[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
Group 1.5 - Vermont Search Engine Optimization Consulting | Marketing Expert
Modifiers: firm, specialist
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]
Continue through this exercise arranging your keywords into groups of 3-5 terms with accompanying modifiers and titles.
Tomorrow we’ll take our group of pages and arrange them into a working site structure and channel our PageRank appropriately.
| [search engine optimization firm] |
| [search engine optimization specialist] |
| [search engine optimization marketing] |
| [small business seo] |
| [seo strategy] |
| [search engine optimization consulting] |
| [search engine marketing service] |
| [search engine submission service] |
| [targeted website traffic] |
| [search engines optimization] |
| [search engine optimization expert] |
Today I’d like to dive a little deeper into what exactly Page Rank (PR) is.
If you want to get the full story, I suggest heading over to Wikipedia. There you’ll find all the fun and fancy math formulas that show you how Page Rank is calculated. I’ll give you a quick overview here.
Basically, the Page Rank of a particular page can be considered its popularity on the internet as a whole. Page Rank comes from a calculation of links pointing to that particular page times a dampening factor to simulate a normal person eventually deciding to stop clicking on links.
Toolbar Page Rank is what Google releases about four times a year for public information. It’s a numeric value between 0 and 10 with 10 being the most popular pages. Google.com has a Page Rank of 10.
The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank is what Google returns whenver a search query is initiated. This is the true Page Rank and is considered to be a primary factor in how well a particular page will rank in the SERPs for a particular term.
Abstractly, you could say that for a particular search the highest PR page would be listed first and then on down the line. In reality, there are many other factors that Google uses to display SERPs. PR is not the only factor involved.
PR is distributed through the internet by links. Each page will pass PR through all links that do not include a “nofollow” tag. The amount of rank passed by each page will then be multiplied by a dampening fact of about .85.
Assume we had only 3 pages on the internet. A, B, and C. Each page starts with a Page Rank that is 1 divided by the total number of pages. In this case, 1 divided by 3. Each page starts with .33 amount of Page Rank.
As you can see here by this example, if we add another page to the internet… say D. We have in essence sliced off a piece of Page Rank for ourselves. 1 divided by 4 (A, B, C, D) gives each page a rank of .25.
Now lets say that we own page C and D, but want page C to have more Page Rank. We simply link page D to page C, but don’t link C back to D. Now Page C will have .4625 Page Rank. (D(.25)*Dampening(.85) + C(.25))
Now that we know what Page Rank is and how it is calculated, the next logical question is: How is it used?
Every time a search is done on the Google search engine, it will return results based on a number of factors. One of which is the Page Rank of a given page. That said, we can use this knowledge to pool Page Rank inside our own websites to have specific pages have a better chance of getting into the SERPs.
Google also requires a minimum amount of Page Rank for your page to even be included inside it’s index. So, just making a page doesn’t mean that you’ll have enough authority to get ranked or even indexed by Google.
Questions or Comments?
In today’s post we’re going to go over a few basic website structures that you can find on the web and which of these will make the most sense for your first website.
There are two types of site structure that you’ll need in order to make the most of your SEO efforts.
1. Visitor Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that visitors can follow. Your basic navigation.
2. Spider Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that the search engines will follow. The important one.
Any link on your website a visitor will be able to follow. You can stop the search engines from following a link by including a “nofollow” tag to the link. Links that include the “nofollow” tag will not allow Page Rank to pass through that link.
This allows us to build a website that is both user friendly AND optimized for ranking with the search engines.
If you aren’t familiar with Page Rank, I will post some basic Page Rank concepts tomorrow.
There are 3 main site structures that I’d like to cover today. Many others are out there, but I feel these are the most important.
1. YarnBall – This site structure is the most common on the internet. A YarnBall happens whenever a site is built with a template and one simple navigation bar that cause each page on the website to link to each other page on the site. Simply, every page links to every other page. This structure distributes Page Rank evenly among all pages on the site.
(Image Coming Soon)
2. Circles – This site structure isn’t all that common and typically only used by SEO experts that are trying to rank for a specific term or two. In this structure, each page links to a page next in line and never links back to the previous page EXCEPT at the starting point. With this structure you have 2 pages that will gather page rank.
(Image Coming Soon)
3. Stacked Pyramids – This site structure I consider to be the best choice for most SEO campaigns. With this structure, you have your home page linking to 3-5 Tier 1 pages. Each of these pages links to 3-5 Tier 2 Pages, but NOT to each other. The Tier 1 pages and Tier 2 pages all link back to the home page.
(Image Coming Soon)
By using the stacked pyramids, you are able to pool your page rank from the website back toward the home page of your website or toward your most competitive keywords.
This gives us two advantages.
The first, most naturally occurring incoming links will be pointing toward your home page. Thus giving more Page Rank to your home page.
The second, if we start our link building campaign with some of our less competitive keywords, we will be driving links deep within our website structure pooling Page Rank to be pass back toward our home page.
I know this all may seem a little random at this point coming from our keyword research, but stick with me!
Tomorrow we’ll go over what exactly Page Rank is and how it relates to these site structures, get some images posted to help visualize, and then move on to organizing our keywords into pages that we’ll plug into the stacked pyramid structure.
From there, we’ll just need to build our website and start building links.
