Posted by randfish

For many SEO professionals, on-page optimization is back to basics. But sadly, there seem to be a lot of us who still make some very basic mistakes. In this post, I’ll try to add on to my previous writing on perfecting on-page optimization by sharing some visuals that can hopefully help to hammer key points of the practice home.

#1: The Value of Optimization and the Danger of Overdoing It

I generally abide by the 80/20 rule when it comes to keyword use. 80% of the value to be had comes from 20% of the effort. Nail the title, the headline and make sure the phrase is on the page (and the page is actually on the subject of the keyword) and you’ve done your job. The additional impact on rankings to be gained from perfectly calculating the number of repetitions or ensuring every paragraph fits into the “theme” of the keyword and document is likely to be a waste of time better spent on other priorities. That’s what this graph tries to illustrate:

Nothing in the on-page world is going to provide exceptional ranking influence, but getting perfect is often only marginally better than just nailing the title and headline. If you’re spending a ton of bandwidth on the last 80% of work (providing 20% of value), I might re-consider your to-do list.

#2: On-Page SEO is More than Keywords

When I first got into SEO in the early 2000′s, the search engines seemed to have a fairly naive algorithm for content analysis, which led to SEOs adopting equally naive tactics for on-page optimization. Years later, these tendencies, sadly, still persist.

Yes, it’s essential to effectively target your keywords in your page titles, headlines (or early in the body copy), URLs, etc. But content analysis has become far more sophisticated with engines “reading” pages almost the way humans do and pattern-matching good content, design, layout and usability. There may even be some elements of on-page analysis that look at the authenticity and passion of the written word (or something that approximates it).

In the graphics below, I’ve tried to illustrate this:

I’m not suggesting one shouldn’t optimize for keywords or that using terms and phrases that stay relevant and on-topic won’t help. I’m merely noting that optimizing for the experience real, human users have and the value they derive from your work can produce outsized returns to simple, classic on-page optimization.

#3: How Search Engines Can Measure a Page’s Value

This one’s less of an illustration and more of a text-based diagram. I wanted to help explain all the signals Google can measure from their many sources of information, and how this can potentially affect SEO:

Google’s tremendous reach across the Internet, measuring nearly everything and every way people interact with web pages brings with it powerful data. That data is likely used to improve the quality of search results by helping the stuff that appears authentic, editorial and high quality to rise up while the junk falls to the bottom (at least when the data+algorithms work properly).

For on-page optimization, this means we can’t merely focus on keyword targeting. We need truly great content.

#4: Consolidation vs. Multi-Page Targeting

The question of whether to target two keyword terms/phrases on the same page or build individual pages for each seems to be a consistent struggle for SEOs. I field a question like this almost every week, and in 9/10 cases, the following flowchart would provide the right answer:

It’s not complex – and that’s the beauty. When targeting similar phrases or phrases that can work together and target the same intent for most users, a single page should suffice. When the phrases cannot logically work together in a title/headline or when the intents don’t have a high liklihood for overlap, it’s time to build different pages and target the keywords separately.

Feel free to use these in your presentations, websites and internal/client documents (though a source credit is much appreciated). And best of luck with your keyword targeting + on-page efforts!

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

I’m not sure what other writers are calling Google’s algorithm update, as we’ve only had it for a day. I’m staying with the KISS (keep it simple stupid) method, and calling it “Google Fresh“. No doubt, SEO experts, webmasters, and …

Read other posts by this Author: John Vinson

If you’ve been following the search industry for the last month or two, I probably don’t have to tell you have big an impact Google’s Panda update has had on a lot of sites. Google had only rolled the update out in the U.S. and it has already sent tremendous ripples throughout the web in terms of traffic and search engine rankings.

A lot of webmasters felt that their sites were undeserving of being victimized by the update, while many were more obviously the intended targets. Either way, it was just in the U.S. and publishers have been bracing (by scrambling to improve quality of content/design) for the next wave of the Panda update – the expansion into other countries.

There is some talk in the Webmaster World forum by webmasters who think it has indeed begun rolling out in other countries. So far, this is unconfirmed.

“Today, for the first time, after checking daily, I can now see US Panda results on Google properties worldwide including but not limited to: .co.uk, .ca, .co.in, .com.au, .fr, .de, .se, etc,” said user incrediBILL, who started a thread on the topic. He later added, “I see the same results on multiple non-US data centers…However, it could be rolling out in waves meaning I’m seeing a segment of the index changed others aren’t seeing yet, but the US Panda results for my niches and some other stuff I track are now worldwide best I can tell.”

“It has definitely hit the UK, my sites have been hit pretty hard -80% in the last couple of hours,” another user, c41lum, said.

“It has been live in France for a while now ..but only over the last 48/72 hours have I seen it hammering directories and public info scraper/repackagers hard..they were moving agitatedly before..now some are dropping hard ( 100 to 200 places ) all across the sites,” wrote user Leosghost. “It has hit very hard over the last 15 to 21 days on the shopping comparative sites that just acted as “bridge” pages / aff feeders to other sites ( who frequently did not have the goods ).So no loss there..IMO.”

Throughout the thread there is a mixture of people indicating that their sites have also been affected, and some who haven’t noticed any change.

Again, whether or not this is Panda rolling out in these other countries is unconfirmed. Google has yet to respond to a request for comment. It’s worth noting that Google did make a very public (and proud) announcement when the update was initially launched in the U.S. It’s hard to say if we could expect them to do the same for the rest of the world, though the original announcement did say, “To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.”

They’ll keep us posted. It would seem that this was either an empty promise, or Panda has not rolled out to more countries yet.

Update: Google has made it official. More here.

Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum

Search engines have become one of the primary ways that people find products and services right in their hometown. This growing reality significantly increases the need for small local business owners to master this thing called local search.

There are many ways to make your website pages much more localized. This is one of the underlying elements that tell the search engines that yours is indeed a local business.

There are a number of things that website owners can do offsite, such as social media participation, that help them come up when people look for local goods and services, but the first step is to make sure that the content on your own site is local focused.

Below are five ways to make your website more local friendly.

Geo content

Simply adding geographic content to your web pages is one of the fist steps. This can include your physical address, directions with street and town names, maps, suburb names and names of communities or neighborhoods where you do work..

It’s also a great idea to do keyword research with local terms to find the best phrases to localized phrases to add to your pages. Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.

Geo meta tags are also something worth investigating. Google continues to ignore them. Bing has admitted they do use them to help determine business location. These tags go in the head section of a page and list the latitude and longitude of a business as well as city, state and country.

The tags for my business are:

meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-MO” /
meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Kansas City” /
meta name=”geo.position” content=”39.040409;-94.598657″ /
meta name=”ICBM” content=”39.040409, -94.598657″ /

Here’s a great Geo Meta Tag tool that will create these for your business address.

Internal Links and External Anchor Text

One of the ways that you can enhance the local nature of your onsite and offsite content is to add local keywords in the internal links on your pages (Links that send people to another pages on within you site). So a remodeling contractor that is showcasing kitchen and bath projects located in San Diego would have links to the project pages that would read San Diego Kitchens and San Diego Baths rather than simply Baths or Kitchens.

You also want to add local keywords to the text used to link back to your site from places like LinkedIn or in article directories. So if you’re an attorney in Texas rather than using your URL or firm name in a link you might use Dallas Texas Bankruptcy Attorney as the words or anchor text for a link to your site.

Rich Snippets

Google is busy creating some of its own HTML coding to help it find and display local content and by using what are known as rich snippets you can help Google find geographic information, information about people in your business and reviews of products and services.

Beyond improving the presentation of your pages in search results, rich snippets also help users find your website when it references a local place. By using structured markup to describe a business or organization mentioned on your page, you not only improve the Web by making it easier to recognize references to specific places but also help Google surface your site in local search results.

Here’s a good tutorial for Rich Snippets and Google’s explanation of Rich Snippets for Local Search.

Community Resource

It’s become an extremely good idea to add a blog or even use blog software to run you entire site. This format gives more flexibility when it comes to adding pages and content.

Many businesses can create tremendous local content by adding features such as an events calendar or coverage of local happenings around town. It’s not too hard to find an angle that is relevant to your business, interests or industry and then use it as a vehicle for producing local content.

If you partner with local non-profits you might consider giving them coverage on your site.

Local Contributors

One great marketing strategy is to develop a team of local strategic partners – other businesses that serve your same market. These partners should be looked at as a great source of potential potent local content.

Invite each member of your team to contribute content to your blog.  Create video interviews with team members and add directory pages with full local descriptions and ask that they link to these pages with local anchor text.

Find relevant local bloggers using a tool like placeblogger to exchange links and content with.

Don’t forget to get your customers in the act too. Create video success stories and describe the local nature of these customers.

Take a little time over each week to knock out one of these tips and in a little over month your local site overhaul will be paying dividends.

* Originally published at Duct Tape Marketing.

Read other posts by this Author: John Jantsch

Google couples its search engine with an automatic email generator, enabling online copywriters to monitor keywords, competitors, hackers and plagiarists.

Of all the online robots and applications on tap, my favorite is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is the online copywriter’s friend. It’s powerful, uncomplicated and free.

Here’s how you can use it to aid your SEO copywriting and help maintain your high Google search rankings.

• Track your targeted keywords and discover when new information is being posted about your core topics.

• Discover your competitors for specific keyword phrases and how they are using them to attract organic search traffic that could be going to your website.

• Track your brand, your own name, and the names of your bylined columnists and bloggers.

Be the first to know if someone defames or libels you.

• Discover what users are saying about you and your website on Twitter, Facebook and on other public forums.

Use [inblogtitle:], [inposttitle:], [inpostauthor:], and [blogurl:] for best results.

• Discover new competitors for your products and services.

• Discover when Google has indexed a new page on your site.

Use [site:yourwebsitedomain.com] for best results.

• Discover if your site has been hacked.

Chances are, if you have a popular website, some miscreant will eventually hack it. Setting up individual Google Alerts for your website name and the words n*ude, s*ex, V*iagra, and p*oker can alert you immediately to most vandalism.

• Discover plagiarism of your proprietary content.

In fact, a Google Alerts competitor, GigaAlert (nee Google Alert), is provided by Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd, a private company that also provides the Copyscape service.

Copyscape provides a free plagiarism checker for finding copies of your web page content online, as well as two more powerful professional solutions for preventing content theft and content fraud.

I’ve been happily using and recommending both Google Alerts and GigaAlert for years. Copyscape is very cool, too, if your site content is prone to getting ripped off.

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What are your favorite uses for Google Alerts and GigaAlert?

Please add your comments to the website version of this blog post.

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Peter A. Schaible is Mequoda’s Chief Copywriter. For more of his unique perspective on copywriting, you can subscribe to his complimentary series on Targeting Your Prospective Customer by Type: How to Position Your Brand to Trigger an Emotional Response, available at www.SunDanceNewMedia.com. No obligation.

Read other posts by this Author: Peter A. Schaible

Posted by randfish

During my first few years in the SEO field, half of the sites I’d visit – those my SEO brethren in the forums or over email owned – were what today we’d probably call “over-optimized.” They tended to have features like:

• Keyword after keyword stuffed into the title element of every page
• Overly-lengthy and keyword rich URL strings
• Page filled with “SEO’d” content that was never intended to be a focus for visitors
• Backlink profiles that lacked a single high-quality, “editorial” link

At its best, our profession is about making amazing things that people are asking to see (via their search queries in the engines) and then marketing it in the most optimal ways. At its worst (excluding the crap-hat junk that doesn’t even deserve to be called “SEO”), it looks like this:

There’s a gigantic gap between this type of “SEO” and the industry’s best practices, but the individual recommendations and changes are so subtle that it’s not surprising many practitioners go a bit overboard. After all, the process of starting SEO often looks like:

• Week 1: Notice in your analytics that search sends awesome traffic and start optimizing some meta tags (since you heard that’s what SEO is about) by putting more keywords in them
• Week 2: See that those changes have had no effect, so begin doing some light reading on the topic
• Week 3: After you’ve glossed over a few SEO resources (perhaps not necessarily the best ones), start “optimizing” pages by filling the tags you’ve heard were important with your keywords, changing your internal links to be keyword-rich, placing more keywords on your pages in every conceivable tag and location, maybe even optimizing for some wholly bunk metric like the average keyword density of the top 10 ranking pages
• Week 4: Possibly see a bump in some rankings and, tragically, inheriting confirmation bias, convincing yourself that the strategy has worked and that it needs to be repeated.
• Week 5-20: Struggle with and eventually give up on SEO, or skate by on the fringes with equally poor quality linking practices that get many/most of your pages penalized but maintain rankings on a few

This pattern (or some similar variation) has played itself out in 9/10 stories I hear about folks who’ve jumped into the waters of SEO haphazardly – and honestly, it’s hard to blame them. The engines provide just enough information to keep webmasters curious but unsatisfied. Many of the sites and pages that rank well do actually employ pretty spammy SEO tactics, making it hard for those trying to learn SEO by reversing their competition’s success (temporary though it may be).

This doesn’t just apply in the on-page world.

If you haven’t yet read it, this thread from Reddit – My Job Was to Game Digg – and this one on Hacker News about it, are excellent examples of the perception problem that social media pushes for SEO have caused. This comment, in particular, stood out to me:

As you can see, the web’s social voters and contributors have a passing tolerance for the “right” kinds of optimization, but a zealous abhorrence for those that violate their sense of propriety. Even if Google doesn’t worry about “off-topic” linkbait, linkbaiters themselves should have cause for concern.

The engines aren’t going to take it.

More and more, though, the engines are fighting back against this through changes like the Vince update (and subsequent focusing on brands as a way to sort out the web’s “cesspool”). We’ve also recently seen a dramatic increase in the aggressiveness with which Google will change your titles, descriptions and negatively alter the rankings/visibility of sites that step over this line.

In the long run, it’s hard to imagine Google allowing poor results to flourish – especially those who garnered rankings through manipulation. Those sites and pages that follow every single optimization tactic, from internal links to massive keyword focus to “perfect” anchor text in their off-site link building are going to stand out like sore thumbs to the engines. Sites that build pages designed to attract links with little to no relation to the host site will struggle against the biases in the social media world.

And sites/pages that abuse these practices (both on and off-page) are going to have a terrifically hard time earning “natural” links. The organic sectors of the web tend not to link out to those types of sites/pages if they can help it.

It might sound ironic, but there’s an art to under-”optimizing” in order to achieve true “optimization.”

p.s. Some folks noted they were hoping for a link to some good “best practices for on-page optimization” – here you go!

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish