Twitter’s Deal With Search Engines? I Called That.
october 2009 by sryo
News broke yesterday that Twitter is talking to major search engines (Google and Microsoft) about licensing Twitter’s full firehose API. Over the past few months I’ve been seeing signs leading to exactly this kind of thing; here’s why Google will jump on this data.
When Twitter announced their intentions to completely re-engineer how ReTweets work, I took a strong stance against the move, mostly because it means that 3rd party researchers will no longer be able to index and analyze ReTweets in the same way we can today.
I speculated about the reason behind the move:
By taking out the “RT @username,” Twitter is making it impossible for users to search for retweets themselves, says Zarrella. “They’re limiting how much you can analyze retweets.” Zarrella speculates as to whether the retweet button might have been created so that, down the road, Twitter can charge for different features, such as extensive tracking of retweets.
And more specifically, in a tweet, I noted an interesting relationship between Project ReTweet’s lead, Zhanna and Google (her LinkedIn profile says she works for both Google and Twitter):
Does @zhanna work for Twitter or Google? http://tinyurl.com/oa355k
And over the summer at SES Toronto, I gave a presentation, which I’ll be giving again at PubCon Vegas, that detailed the reason and the way Google should be using the Twitter stream to aid in real time search:
This move was coming. Twitter knows they have a valuable data resource on their hands and they’re starting to reel in the 3rd party developers and researchers who’ve been using it for free. I’m just glad I’ve got my 60 million plus ReTweets already indexed.
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Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
Tweet This!
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Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don't forget to follow me on Twitter
.
Online_Marketing
SEO
Search
Social_Media_Marketing
twitter
from google
When Twitter announced their intentions to completely re-engineer how ReTweets work, I took a strong stance against the move, mostly because it means that 3rd party researchers will no longer be able to index and analyze ReTweets in the same way we can today.
I speculated about the reason behind the move:
By taking out the “RT @username,” Twitter is making it impossible for users to search for retweets themselves, says Zarrella. “They’re limiting how much you can analyze retweets.” Zarrella speculates as to whether the retweet button might have been created so that, down the road, Twitter can charge for different features, such as extensive tracking of retweets.
And more specifically, in a tweet, I noted an interesting relationship between Project ReTweet’s lead, Zhanna and Google (her LinkedIn profile says she works for both Google and Twitter):
Does @zhanna work for Twitter or Google? http://tinyurl.com/oa355k
And over the summer at SES Toronto, I gave a presentation, which I’ll be giving again at PubCon Vegas, that detailed the reason and the way Google should be using the Twitter stream to aid in real time search:
This move was coming. Twitter knows they have a valuable data resource on their hands and they’re starting to reel in the 3rd party developers and researchers who’ve been using it for free. I’m just glad I’ve got my 60 million plus ReTweets already indexed.
Share this on Facebook
Share this on del.icio.us
Email this to a friend?
Share this on Linkedin
Share this on Reddit
Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
Tweet This!
Share this on FriendFeed
Sphinn this on Sphinn
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don't forget to follow me on Twitter
.
october 2009 by sryo
Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II
september 2009 by sryo
Earlier this year I did a guest post on this site to show you how to track your SEO rankings with Google Analytics. It was quite some news for a lot of people, just take a look at the 300+ comments. And now it's time for the follow-up.
Google's new technologySince a while Google is testing a new AJAX version of their search engine. I'm not sure who's seeing the AJAX version and who isn't, but in Holland most of the Firefox users do see it. You can see if you're one the new one by looking at the url of a result page:
The great thing about this new version is that it makes Google Analytics capable of tracking the clicked position. Yes you heard what I say: the position. Where the 'old' Google only allowed us to track the page a keyword was on, the new Google allows us to track the exact position.
The new filtersYou can use the first 2 filters mentioned in the old article, be before you do that: create a new profile where you can apply these filters to (tip: watch the video where Joost explains this all):
Filter name: "Ranking 1" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Medium" Filter pattern: "organic"Filter name: "Ranking 2" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Source" Filter pattern: "google"And this is the new filter that is capable of tracking positions:
And the copy/paste version:
Filter name: "Ranking 3" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A -> Extract A: "Campaign term", "(.*)" Field B -> Extract B: "Referral", "(\?|&)cd=([^&]*)" Output To -> User Defined: "$A1 (position: $B2)"The new reportsIf you have implemented everything correct you should see this in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report:
A list of keywords with the position the keyword was on when a visitor clicked it. Now you're able to see the exact positions, more precise than any ranking tool that is out there. There's 1 minor drawback: business listings next to the little maps are counted as a position also:
The blue result is counted as the 11th result, and not as the first organic result. But when you're analyzing your positions you can easily separate the geo-related keywords from the rest.
SitelinksVery interesting: the sitelinks positions are also tracked, and in a more intelligent way than the maps results. If you click on a sitelink, the actual position of that sitelink is passed on. For example, this sitelink has position 4:
If you want to get better insights about your sitelinks you should create an extra profile with the first 3 filters mentioned above. Then add this extra filter to only track those keywords where people clicked on the (full or oneline) sitelinks:
Filter name: "Ranking 5" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Referral" Filter pattern: "oi=(oneline_sitelinks|smap)"The positions you will see are pure sitelinks positions, and you will get an idea about which sitelink is popular and which isn't.
Extra tipWhile we are dissecting the referring url from the Google Search engine we could take a look at the "meta" parameter (my dutch blogpost about this). It's used when people use one of these options:
The selected country or language is in the "meta" parameter (not applicable for Google.com) and can be made visible with the following filter:
Filter name: "Language / Country" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A -> Extract A: "Referral", "(?|&)meta=([^&]*)" Output To -> User Defined: "$A2"And remember: do this on a new profile so you don't mess up existing profiles. The selected language(s) or country is visible in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report.
I had this filter for quite a while on a lot of Dutch sites and saw that the three options where used like this:
The internet: 96,69%Pages in Dutch: 3,28%Pages from Holland: 0,03%Well, that was the update, hope you liked it.
Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!
Analytics
SEO
Google_Analytics
from google
Google's new technologySince a while Google is testing a new AJAX version of their search engine. I'm not sure who's seeing the AJAX version and who isn't, but in Holland most of the Firefox users do see it. You can see if you're one the new one by looking at the url of a result page:
The great thing about this new version is that it makes Google Analytics capable of tracking the clicked position. Yes you heard what I say: the position. Where the 'old' Google only allowed us to track the page a keyword was on, the new Google allows us to track the exact position.
The new filtersYou can use the first 2 filters mentioned in the old article, be before you do that: create a new profile where you can apply these filters to (tip: watch the video where Joost explains this all):
Filter name: "Ranking 1" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Medium" Filter pattern: "organic"Filter name: "Ranking 2" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Campaign Source" Filter pattern: "google"And this is the new filter that is capable of tracking positions:
And the copy/paste version:
Filter name: "Ranking 3" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A -> Extract A: "Campaign term", "(.*)" Field B -> Extract B: "Referral", "(\?|&)cd=([^&]*)" Output To -> User Defined: "$A1 (position: $B2)"The new reportsIf you have implemented everything correct you should see this in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report:
A list of keywords with the position the keyword was on when a visitor clicked it. Now you're able to see the exact positions, more precise than any ranking tool that is out there. There's 1 minor drawback: business listings next to the little maps are counted as a position also:
The blue result is counted as the 11th result, and not as the first organic result. But when you're analyzing your positions you can easily separate the geo-related keywords from the rest.
SitelinksVery interesting: the sitelinks positions are also tracked, and in a more intelligent way than the maps results. If you click on a sitelink, the actual position of that sitelink is passed on. For example, this sitelink has position 4:
If you want to get better insights about your sitelinks you should create an extra profile with the first 3 filters mentioned above. Then add this extra filter to only track those keywords where people clicked on the (full or oneline) sitelinks:
Filter name: "Ranking 5" Filter type: "Custom filter - Include" Filter field: "Referral" Filter pattern: "oi=(oneline_sitelinks|smap)"The positions you will see are pure sitelinks positions, and you will get an idea about which sitelink is popular and which isn't.
Extra tipWhile we are dissecting the referring url from the Google Search engine we could take a look at the "meta" parameter (my dutch blogpost about this). It's used when people use one of these options:
The selected country or language is in the "meta" parameter (not applicable for Google.com) and can be made visible with the following filter:
Filter name: "Language / Country" Filter type: "Custom filter - Advanced" Field A -> Extract A: "Referral", "(?|&)meta=([^&]*)" Output To -> User Defined: "$A2"And remember: do this on a new profile so you don't mess up existing profiles. The selected language(s) or country is visible in the "Visitors -> User Defined" report.
I had this filter for quite a while on a lot of Dutch sites and saw that the three options where used like this:
The internet: 96,69%Pages in Dutch: 3,28%Pages from Holland: 0,03%Well, that was the update, hope you liked it.
Track SEO rankings and Sitelinks with Google Analytics II is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!
september 2009 by sryo
Don't Promote Your Website, Use Your Website to Promote YOU!
july 2009 by sryo
by Stoney deGeyter
In today's business environment, a website is absolutely necessary. It provides an avenue for people to find you and find out more about you as they sit in the comfort of their homes, while waiting in line at the grocery store, sit on the commuter train, or wherever. Unfortunately too many business take the wrong approach to how they build and market their websites.
Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.
The website is just another something the business must have in order to do business, but it never fully succeeds in being a tool that works for them to generate business.
Online marketing is different from off-line marketing, primarily in that you have to promote the very tool you use as a promotion for your business. With radio and TV you don't have to go out of your way to get people to listen. You run the ads and people do or don't. Websites must first be optimized in order to help improve traffic and visibility before they can be used as a business generating tool.
No wonder businesses pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (phone book, magazines, radio, etc.,) which often produces significantly less return on the investment dollar. When it comes to properly planning and executing the development and promotion of their website, well, it's a bit more complicated.
Make Your Website Promote YOU.
With some exceptions, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective for your target audience. With that said, there are specific components that almost every website needs in order to be an effective marketing tool.
Home Page
The home page is the online "face" of your company. It may not be the entry door for every visitor, but it is your front door and you need to make sure that you have it right. The home page should provide an all-encompassing view of what you do or offer while helping to establish trust with the new and repeat visitor.
To be effective, your home page must accomplish several things:
Establish your brand: Your home page sets the tone of the visitor's expectation. Everything from brand identity to confirmation that you can provide what they need must be established here.
Display your offerings: Visitors need to be provided a quick overview of the products, services and information they can expect to find as they dig deeper into the site.
Generate interest: The home page must do more than just provide information of what you offer; it must generate interest in those offerings. It must create a desire within your visitors to click further into the site to find out more and see how they will be benefited by your products or services.
Convey trust: Your home page can often be the first impression you give your visitors, therefore it must be able to establish an element of trust. If you come across as a slick used-car salesman, or a less-than-professional hobby site, your visitors will bolt.
About Us Page
Why do visitors go to the About Us page? Its a good question that is often ignored when web developers fill the content of these pages. Too many sites simply do not provide enough--or the right--information on this page.
The About Us page should be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you've been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc.,) mission statement, bios of the executive staff. The information you provide on the About Us page is designed to help your visitors feel comfortable doing business with your business.
Contact Us Page
Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it's still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. It may seem odd, but many people looking for your contact info will ignore the information on whatever page they are viewing, looking instead for the link that reads "Contact Us."
Your Contact Us page should provide several different ways of contacting you including email, phone, and a web form. You should also include a physical address and possibly even a map. This is also a good place to display hours of operation.
Product & Service Pages
If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it's likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.
Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you're selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it's laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.
Site Navigation
Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website's performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.
Be consistent: Don't confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area. Be consistent in it's look and placement. There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.
Be obvious: Make sure it is impossible for your visitors to get lost on your website. You want them to know where they are at all times and how to navigate back to the current and other main sections. Make good use of breadcrumb links as this provides your visitors a great visual indicator as well as easy navigation.
Be helpful: Large websites with many pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. It is essential that visitors don't have to "hunt" for what they want. This can be accomplished by providing clear section headings in your main navigation. You can also assist the visitors by including a site map that can be easily accessed and a properly function site search box.
Putting the Pieces Together
A website is far more than the sum of its parts. While all the components mentioned above are necessary to have a working site, when implemented properly each component compliments the others.
A website, like any ad made for radio, TV or newspaper, it must effectively do the job it was built for: selling. Building a website is necessary for online success, but you have to go beyond the build. Websites must be promoted effectively in order to get the visitors you need, but once there the site must then be able to do its job selling. Too often we promote the site but fail to get the site to promote the products and services we want people to buy. Before you promote your site, make sure your site promotes you.
Check out our small business news site.
Search_Engine_Optimization
promotion
search_engine_marketing
seo
from google
In today's business environment, a website is absolutely necessary. It provides an avenue for people to find you and find out more about you as they sit in the comfort of their homes, while waiting in line at the grocery store, sit on the commuter train, or wherever. Unfortunately too many business take the wrong approach to how they build and market their websites.
Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.
The website is just another something the business must have in order to do business, but it never fully succeeds in being a tool that works for them to generate business.
Online marketing is different from off-line marketing, primarily in that you have to promote the very tool you use as a promotion for your business. With radio and TV you don't have to go out of your way to get people to listen. You run the ads and people do or don't. Websites must first be optimized in order to help improve traffic and visibility before they can be used as a business generating tool.
No wonder businesses pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (phone book, magazines, radio, etc.,) which often produces significantly less return on the investment dollar. When it comes to properly planning and executing the development and promotion of their website, well, it's a bit more complicated.
Make Your Website Promote YOU.
With some exceptions, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective for your target audience. With that said, there are specific components that almost every website needs in order to be an effective marketing tool.
Home Page
The home page is the online "face" of your company. It may not be the entry door for every visitor, but it is your front door and you need to make sure that you have it right. The home page should provide an all-encompassing view of what you do or offer while helping to establish trust with the new and repeat visitor.
To be effective, your home page must accomplish several things:
Establish your brand: Your home page sets the tone of the visitor's expectation. Everything from brand identity to confirmation that you can provide what they need must be established here.
Display your offerings: Visitors need to be provided a quick overview of the products, services and information they can expect to find as they dig deeper into the site.
Generate interest: The home page must do more than just provide information of what you offer; it must generate interest in those offerings. It must create a desire within your visitors to click further into the site to find out more and see how they will be benefited by your products or services.
Convey trust: Your home page can often be the first impression you give your visitors, therefore it must be able to establish an element of trust. If you come across as a slick used-car salesman, or a less-than-professional hobby site, your visitors will bolt.
About Us Page
Why do visitors go to the About Us page? Its a good question that is often ignored when web developers fill the content of these pages. Too many sites simply do not provide enough--or the right--information on this page.
The About Us page should be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you've been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc.,) mission statement, bios of the executive staff. The information you provide on the About Us page is designed to help your visitors feel comfortable doing business with your business.
Contact Us Page
Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it's still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. It may seem odd, but many people looking for your contact info will ignore the information on whatever page they are viewing, looking instead for the link that reads "Contact Us."
Your Contact Us page should provide several different ways of contacting you including email, phone, and a web form. You should also include a physical address and possibly even a map. This is also a good place to display hours of operation.
Product & Service Pages
If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it's likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.
Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you're selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it's laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.
Site Navigation
Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website's performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.
Be consistent: Don't confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area. Be consistent in it's look and placement. There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.
Be obvious: Make sure it is impossible for your visitors to get lost on your website. You want them to know where they are at all times and how to navigate back to the current and other main sections. Make good use of breadcrumb links as this provides your visitors a great visual indicator as well as easy navigation.
Be helpful: Large websites with many pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. It is essential that visitors don't have to "hunt" for what they want. This can be accomplished by providing clear section headings in your main navigation. You can also assist the visitors by including a site map that can be easily accessed and a properly function site search box.
Putting the Pieces Together
A website is far more than the sum of its parts. While all the components mentioned above are necessary to have a working site, when implemented properly each component compliments the others.
A website, like any ad made for radio, TV or newspaper, it must effectively do the job it was built for: selling. Building a website is necessary for online success, but you have to go beyond the build. Websites must be promoted effectively in order to get the visitors you need, but once there the site must then be able to do its job selling. Too often we promote the site but fail to get the site to promote the products and services we want people to buy. Before you promote your site, make sure your site promotes you.
Check out our small business news site.
july 2009 by sryo
Cómo geolocalizar una página web
july 2009 by sryo
Uno de los temas más interesantes en la actualidad es cómo geolocalizar las páginas de un sitio web, sobretodo por los cambios que están sufriendo los resultados de búsqueda en los últimos tiempos. Para hacerlo hay varios métodos, aunque aquí os dejamos con 4 de ellos:
Microformato GEO (visible):
<span class="geo">
<span class="latitude">37.0625</span>; <span class="longitude">-95.677068</span>
</span>
RDF – W3C (visible):
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos">
<geo:Point>
<geo:lat>37.0625</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-95.677068</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</rdf:RDF>
Meta-tags GEO (invisible);
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.0625;-95.677068" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Barcelona, Spain" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="es" />
ICBM Meta-tag (invisible):
<meta name="ICBM" content="37.0625,-95.677068" />
leer en la web - OJObuscador - © OJO internet S.L. - fb9c46bdOJO2cbd0d246buscador560711a7413500d (74.125.112.136)
OJObuscador
local
posicionamiento_en_buscadores
seo
from google
Microformato GEO (visible):
<span class="geo">
<span class="latitude">37.0625</span>; <span class="longitude">-95.677068</span>
</span>
RDF – W3C (visible):
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos">
<geo:Point>
<geo:lat>37.0625</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-95.677068</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</rdf:RDF>
Meta-tags GEO (invisible);
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.0625;-95.677068" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Barcelona, Spain" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="es" />
ICBM Meta-tag (invisible):
<meta name="ICBM" content="37.0625,-95.677068" />
leer en la web - OJObuscador - © OJO internet S.L. - fb9c46bdOJO2cbd0d246buscador560711a7413500d (74.125.112.136)
july 2009 by sryo
SEO Audits: What You Need to Know
july 2009 by sryo
“The first step in diagnosis is to find the root cause.”
- Vanessa Fox at SMX Advanced 2009
Conducting an SEO Audit
We couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly how we approach SEO audits, they’re a diagnosis. You have a horrible, gaping wound and we’re here to fix it. There isn’t a fool proof system in place for what we do and we don’t have some trademarked, five step diagnostic process we follow. We’ve been doing this for a long time and don’t need some proprietary SEO audit checklist to tell us that you’re hemorraging duplicate pages or have unhealthy linking practices. We do have our methods for analyzing a site, but we don’t limit ourselves to only analyzing x pages and 37 on-site factors (or some other random buzz number).
We quote our clients for SEO audits based on the scope of the problem. This means, we’ve figured out the problem before we send you a proposal. From there, everything else is a formality, so that we can explain the problem thoroughly, cater the prescription to your resources and find other potential problems.
The problem we face when proposing SEO audits to potential clients is that they sound expensive and confusing. Worst still, many of those clients have gotten burned by them in the past. The truth is, SEO audits can be both costly and intimidating, but the benefit is immense when everything is implemented properly. So, I thought I’d take a moment to outline what you should and shouldn’t be looking for from an SEO audit, because frankly, I have to answer this too often.
What Shouldn’t Matter about SEO Audits
What the report looks like.
I love working with lawyers! They get it. They know that time is money and if they want the best from us, the more time we spend physically doing the work, the better return for them. I could give some of our clients a full SEO audit in a text document and they wouldn’t give a rat’s ass, because they know we’re getting the job done.
The length of the report.
Everyone wants their money’s worth and as painful as this may sound, size doesn’t matter. You don’t need bullshit. You need actions and you need them implemented quickly. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do to fix very specific problems and I’m going to try to do it in the least possible amount of words. Sometimes I find myself looking for ways to beef up an audit, because it’s only two pages. That’s when I have to sit back and realize the suggestions we just gave you in two pages (though they’re rarely this short) are going to have a HUGE impact on the performance of your site. This is advice you’ve been struggling with for years and we just handed it over. Should we wrap the answers to your problems in a beautiful shroud of bullshit? No, go implement the advice and the sooner the better. We respect you enough to know that you don’t need fluff, you need real help.
Testimonials.
Of course we have happy clients and happy partners and those are going to be the only testimonials we put on the site or share with you. Every company is like this, so why does it matter? You want some kind of insurance that we’re big and trusted. We get that. However, everyone screws up and sometimes, the biggest names in the game can hide crap results behind dozens of testimonials. This isn’t a popularity contest. It’s your business. So, don’t take our word when it comes to results, don’t take our partner’s words, don’t even take our friend’s words. Go and do the homework. Read our profiles, do searches for the company, analyze the sites we can publicly share with you, read interviews about us on other reputable sites, look at the history of speaking engagements, etc. Do whatever you have to do to feel confident in our abilities, but turning to a giant testimonials page on our own site just isn’t trustworthy.
Education.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
- Frank Zappa
College degrees mean next to nothing in this industry and if our educational background is important to you, we’re not right for each other. Before you go getting your panties in a wad, let me clarify. Education is important, but where you get it from isn’t. Not just some but most of the best SEOs in the world did NOT go to college or if they did, they didn’t finish. This industry moves too quickly to study it in a formal classroom setting. You have to be in it everyday, testing, learning, sharing, succeeding. I did graduate from college and I don’t regret that decision, but I do know that “Internet marketing” was a single paragraph in my Principles of Advertising class. That’s it! One paragraph that said that Internet marketing was too new and risky for agencies to pursue it, we were better off carefully crafting newspaper ads and direct mailers! Thankfully, I was employed as a SEO before I graduated and I’ve never looked back (at least not in this field, primatology is a different story).
The sad fact is that these “shouldn’t matter” subjects will always matter to certain business owners and companies. The good news is, there are plenty of Internet marketing companies to go around.
What Makes a Good SEO Audit
Personalization.
Whoever you go with, the audit should be written for you. If it looks like a template, it’s easier to lose sight of the big picture. You came to us with a specific need and you won’t fit into the same box previous SEO audits came in. We aren’t going to only look at x pages and x on-site factors. We’re going to look at YOUR site, the industry, the competition and then figure out what’s wrong. I know I could waste an hour detailing every title tag on your site, but what if the problem has to do with dozens of mirrored sites? Well, that seems like a terrible waste of my time and your money just for the sake of conformity.
Customization.
You might already have a team of experienced SEOs, you might be one yourself, or you might have absolutely no knowledge of the basics. Whatever the situation, we want to know where you stand today, so that everything we give you is useful, not a bunch of links to other sources or blog posts or guides that are available for free on our site. You deserve a SEO audit that’s customized to your resources, goals, timeline and budget, not ours.
What do we need from you for the SEO audit?
Before we start, we’re going to ask you for access to your site’s:
Analytics solutions
Google Webmaster Central account (or we’ll verify our own account)
Other webmaster accounts if the problem isn’t specific to Google
Other types of information and access based on your situation
Once the work has been scheduled and we have access to everything we need, we’ll dive into the site.
What are we looking at in a SEO Audit?
The following is in no particular order and I’m sure I’ve left off lots of other fun stuff we find along the way, but it’s a quick breakdown of our client’s most common diagnoses after a SEO audit. Sometimes clients know the problem when they come to us, so also consider this a list of problems we can prescribe solutions for:
Duplicate content
Redirect issues
Indexing issues
Crawl issues
Improper categorization
Crappy title tags
Crappy meta descriptions
Usability problems
Conversion problems
Keyword research
Keyword density (we don’t have some 3.14% keyword density formula, but more often than not, our clients don’t have the keywords they want to rank on the pages that should be getting targeted!)
Internal linking strategies and anchor text
External linking strategies and anchor text
Site architecture and URLs
Nofollow, disallow, noindex
HTML and XML sitemaps
Social media indicators
Again, that wasn’t in a certain order and I already know I’ve left off some other yummy things we look at, but you get the big picture. We’re diagnosing your site just like a doctor would. We start with a blank slate and eliminate the things that aren’t hurting you, making note of the areas that are. Sometimes the problem is obvious and sometimes it’s a mountain of tiny problems. Whatever the situation, you deserve more than a pretty, fluffy, by-the-books audit. You deserve a custom and personalized SEO audit that quickly puts you on the road to recovery or growth.
SEO
clients
seo_audit
from google
- Vanessa Fox at SMX Advanced 2009
Conducting an SEO Audit
We couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly how we approach SEO audits, they’re a diagnosis. You have a horrible, gaping wound and we’re here to fix it. There isn’t a fool proof system in place for what we do and we don’t have some trademarked, five step diagnostic process we follow. We’ve been doing this for a long time and don’t need some proprietary SEO audit checklist to tell us that you’re hemorraging duplicate pages or have unhealthy linking practices. We do have our methods for analyzing a site, but we don’t limit ourselves to only analyzing x pages and 37 on-site factors (or some other random buzz number).
We quote our clients for SEO audits based on the scope of the problem. This means, we’ve figured out the problem before we send you a proposal. From there, everything else is a formality, so that we can explain the problem thoroughly, cater the prescription to your resources and find other potential problems.
The problem we face when proposing SEO audits to potential clients is that they sound expensive and confusing. Worst still, many of those clients have gotten burned by them in the past. The truth is, SEO audits can be both costly and intimidating, but the benefit is immense when everything is implemented properly. So, I thought I’d take a moment to outline what you should and shouldn’t be looking for from an SEO audit, because frankly, I have to answer this too often.
What Shouldn’t Matter about SEO Audits
What the report looks like.
I love working with lawyers! They get it. They know that time is money and if they want the best from us, the more time we spend physically doing the work, the better return for them. I could give some of our clients a full SEO audit in a text document and they wouldn’t give a rat’s ass, because they know we’re getting the job done.
The length of the report.
Everyone wants their money’s worth and as painful as this may sound, size doesn’t matter. You don’t need bullshit. You need actions and you need them implemented quickly. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do to fix very specific problems and I’m going to try to do it in the least possible amount of words. Sometimes I find myself looking for ways to beef up an audit, because it’s only two pages. That’s when I have to sit back and realize the suggestions we just gave you in two pages (though they’re rarely this short) are going to have a HUGE impact on the performance of your site. This is advice you’ve been struggling with for years and we just handed it over. Should we wrap the answers to your problems in a beautiful shroud of bullshit? No, go implement the advice and the sooner the better. We respect you enough to know that you don’t need fluff, you need real help.
Testimonials.
Of course we have happy clients and happy partners and those are going to be the only testimonials we put on the site or share with you. Every company is like this, so why does it matter? You want some kind of insurance that we’re big and trusted. We get that. However, everyone screws up and sometimes, the biggest names in the game can hide crap results behind dozens of testimonials. This isn’t a popularity contest. It’s your business. So, don’t take our word when it comes to results, don’t take our partner’s words, don’t even take our friend’s words. Go and do the homework. Read our profiles, do searches for the company, analyze the sites we can publicly share with you, read interviews about us on other reputable sites, look at the history of speaking engagements, etc. Do whatever you have to do to feel confident in our abilities, but turning to a giant testimonials page on our own site just isn’t trustworthy.
Education.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
- Frank Zappa
College degrees mean next to nothing in this industry and if our educational background is important to you, we’re not right for each other. Before you go getting your panties in a wad, let me clarify. Education is important, but where you get it from isn’t. Not just some but most of the best SEOs in the world did NOT go to college or if they did, they didn’t finish. This industry moves too quickly to study it in a formal classroom setting. You have to be in it everyday, testing, learning, sharing, succeeding. I did graduate from college and I don’t regret that decision, but I do know that “Internet marketing” was a single paragraph in my Principles of Advertising class. That’s it! One paragraph that said that Internet marketing was too new and risky for agencies to pursue it, we were better off carefully crafting newspaper ads and direct mailers! Thankfully, I was employed as a SEO before I graduated and I’ve never looked back (at least not in this field, primatology is a different story).
The sad fact is that these “shouldn’t matter” subjects will always matter to certain business owners and companies. The good news is, there are plenty of Internet marketing companies to go around.
What Makes a Good SEO Audit
Personalization.
Whoever you go with, the audit should be written for you. If it looks like a template, it’s easier to lose sight of the big picture. You came to us with a specific need and you won’t fit into the same box previous SEO audits came in. We aren’t going to only look at x pages and x on-site factors. We’re going to look at YOUR site, the industry, the competition and then figure out what’s wrong. I know I could waste an hour detailing every title tag on your site, but what if the problem has to do with dozens of mirrored sites? Well, that seems like a terrible waste of my time and your money just for the sake of conformity.
Customization.
You might already have a team of experienced SEOs, you might be one yourself, or you might have absolutely no knowledge of the basics. Whatever the situation, we want to know where you stand today, so that everything we give you is useful, not a bunch of links to other sources or blog posts or guides that are available for free on our site. You deserve a SEO audit that’s customized to your resources, goals, timeline and budget, not ours.
What do we need from you for the SEO audit?
Before we start, we’re going to ask you for access to your site’s:
Analytics solutions
Google Webmaster Central account (or we’ll verify our own account)
Other webmaster accounts if the problem isn’t specific to Google
Other types of information and access based on your situation
Once the work has been scheduled and we have access to everything we need, we’ll dive into the site.
What are we looking at in a SEO Audit?
The following is in no particular order and I’m sure I’ve left off lots of other fun stuff we find along the way, but it’s a quick breakdown of our client’s most common diagnoses after a SEO audit. Sometimes clients know the problem when they come to us, so also consider this a list of problems we can prescribe solutions for:
Duplicate content
Redirect issues
Indexing issues
Crawl issues
Improper categorization
Crappy title tags
Crappy meta descriptions
Usability problems
Conversion problems
Keyword research
Keyword density (we don’t have some 3.14% keyword density formula, but more often than not, our clients don’t have the keywords they want to rank on the pages that should be getting targeted!)
Internal linking strategies and anchor text
External linking strategies and anchor text
Site architecture and URLs
Nofollow, disallow, noindex
HTML and XML sitemaps
Social media indicators
Again, that wasn’t in a certain order and I already know I’ve left off some other yummy things we look at, but you get the big picture. We’re diagnosing your site just like a doctor would. We start with a blank slate and eliminate the things that aren’t hurting you, making note of the areas that are. Sometimes the problem is obvious and sometimes it’s a mountain of tiny problems. Whatever the situation, you deserve more than a pretty, fluffy, by-the-books audit. You deserve a custom and personalized SEO audit that quickly puts you on the road to recovery or growth.
july 2009 by sryo
4 Reasons Why Marketers Should Choose Facebook Pages Over Facebook Groups
june 2009 by sryo
Some of the world’s most well-known brands are launching marketing campaigns on Facebook, but many just getting started on Facebook may be wondering which is the best way to go: Facebook Pages or Facebook Groups?
While it used to be the case that either would work, these days the decision is clear. For businesses large and small, Pages (now also known as “public profiles”) are the way to go for four important reasons:
Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO
Sorry Groups, but the future of marketing on Facebook will be through the stream.
1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
With Groups, admins have a few different ways of communicating with members: sending messages to their Facebook inboxes, starting discussion topics on the Discussion Board, posting on the Wall, and uploading photos, links, events, and videos. However, none of these actions automatically make their way to the News Feed.
Compare this to Pages: admins can post status updates, links, photos, and videos to their Walls and get direct access to the News Feed - not to mention get instant feedback when fans like and comment on Wall posts. Pages are a must for organizations who want visibility in the stream.
The New York Times’s recent video generated 128 likes and 50 comments.
versus
A university’s Class of 2008 Group: here’s the Group’s Wall, which doesn’t allow for photo, video, or link attachments; posts are not placed in the News Feed.
2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
Not only do Pages have more powerful access to the Facebook home page, but they also have better integration with rich media. Page admins can attach links, photos, and videos to Wall posts - and more recently, application content with the Publisher coming to Facebook Pages. With this Publisher integration on Pages, Pages can be used by organizations in increasingly creative ways, as suggested by the Developer Blog:
Promote philanthropy, coupons, or sweepstakes. A Page admin can solicit a charitable donation, publish a coupon, or announce a sweepstakes, and the resulting post appears in the streams of its fans, driving traffic to an appropriate tab on the Page or an external site.
Gauge fan interest. Polling applications are a good way for a band or brand to gather information from its fans.
Encourage fan interaction. The many artistic applications out there can give fans the ability to create works of art directly on a Page to show their appreciation.
Host live events. Bands, brands, and public figures all want to interact with their fans and supporters in real time. Use the Publisher to announce a live event and drive traffic to the event.
3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
In early May, Facebook announced an upgrade to its Facebook Insights dashboard for Page admins. As we shared back then, new features to the dashboard include:
A new graph showing different types of fan interactions with the Page over time. Here, you see that the graph combines comments, wall posts, and likes to show relative volume of interactions.
A new count of active fans this week, with full age/sex/location breakdown.
A new count of total interactions this week, broken down by type.
A new post quality rating, from 1 to 5 stars.
Graphs for Interactions, Interactions per Post, Post Quality, Stream CTR, Posts, Page views, Media Consumption, Reviews
For all organizations, from nonprofits to big corporations, tracking how users are interacting with content is vital. Knowing numbers and seeing trends help Page admins constantly improve their Pages; by contrast, there are no such tools for Groups, leaving Groups admins guessing what they’re members are thinking.
4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO!
Increasing your organization’s rank in Google search results is another reason to choose a Page over a Group. When Facebook added Pages to users’ default public search listings, Pages such as Gap, U2, and Obama saw a dramatic increase in their Google search ranking in just one weekend - with over 112,000 new links pointing back to Gap’s Facebook Page, 188,000 to U2’s, and 3.1 million to Obama’s. This is especially true for larger organizations that get vanity URLs for their Facebook Pages. (The latest news is that vanity URLs may be given away in a land rush.)
Conclusion: The Future of Groups?
It’s evident that Facebook Pages are evolving alongside the Facebook Platform in ways that Groups aren’t: Facebook has integrated Pages with the stream and rich media, as well as provided benefits to Page owners in the form of greater analytic tools and SEO. But that said, Groups still have their place among tight-knit communities that want to leverage the social graph in more intimate, exclusive settings. If Groups continue to be popular among users as they have been, then in time we should expect to see them evolving in ways that provide members with a more integrated user experience.
For more comprehensive details and best practices on marketing with Facebook Pages, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible.
Advertising
Applications
Business
Facebook
Marketing
SEO
ViralCulture
from google
While it used to be the case that either would work, these days the decision is clear. For businesses large and small, Pages (now also known as “public profiles”) are the way to go for four important reasons:
Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO
Sorry Groups, but the future of marketing on Facebook will be through the stream.
1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
With Groups, admins have a few different ways of communicating with members: sending messages to their Facebook inboxes, starting discussion topics on the Discussion Board, posting on the Wall, and uploading photos, links, events, and videos. However, none of these actions automatically make their way to the News Feed.
Compare this to Pages: admins can post status updates, links, photos, and videos to their Walls and get direct access to the News Feed - not to mention get instant feedback when fans like and comment on Wall posts. Pages are a must for organizations who want visibility in the stream.
The New York Times’s recent video generated 128 likes and 50 comments.
versus
A university’s Class of 2008 Group: here’s the Group’s Wall, which doesn’t allow for photo, video, or link attachments; posts are not placed in the News Feed.
2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
Not only do Pages have more powerful access to the Facebook home page, but they also have better integration with rich media. Page admins can attach links, photos, and videos to Wall posts - and more recently, application content with the Publisher coming to Facebook Pages. With this Publisher integration on Pages, Pages can be used by organizations in increasingly creative ways, as suggested by the Developer Blog:
Promote philanthropy, coupons, or sweepstakes. A Page admin can solicit a charitable donation, publish a coupon, or announce a sweepstakes, and the resulting post appears in the streams of its fans, driving traffic to an appropriate tab on the Page or an external site.
Gauge fan interest. Polling applications are a good way for a band or brand to gather information from its fans.
Encourage fan interaction. The many artistic applications out there can give fans the ability to create works of art directly on a Page to show their appreciation.
Host live events. Bands, brands, and public figures all want to interact with their fans and supporters in real time. Use the Publisher to announce a live event and drive traffic to the event.
3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
In early May, Facebook announced an upgrade to its Facebook Insights dashboard for Page admins. As we shared back then, new features to the dashboard include:
A new graph showing different types of fan interactions with the Page over time. Here, you see that the graph combines comments, wall posts, and likes to show relative volume of interactions.
A new count of active fans this week, with full age/sex/location breakdown.
A new count of total interactions this week, broken down by type.
A new post quality rating, from 1 to 5 stars.
Graphs for Interactions, Interactions per Post, Post Quality, Stream CTR, Posts, Page views, Media Consumption, Reviews
For all organizations, from nonprofits to big corporations, tracking how users are interacting with content is vital. Knowing numbers and seeing trends help Page admins constantly improve their Pages; by contrast, there are no such tools for Groups, leaving Groups admins guessing what they’re members are thinking.
4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO!
Increasing your organization’s rank in Google search results is another reason to choose a Page over a Group. When Facebook added Pages to users’ default public search listings, Pages such as Gap, U2, and Obama saw a dramatic increase in their Google search ranking in just one weekend - with over 112,000 new links pointing back to Gap’s Facebook Page, 188,000 to U2’s, and 3.1 million to Obama’s. This is especially true for larger organizations that get vanity URLs for their Facebook Pages. (The latest news is that vanity URLs may be given away in a land rush.)
Conclusion: The Future of Groups?
It’s evident that Facebook Pages are evolving alongside the Facebook Platform in ways that Groups aren’t: Facebook has integrated Pages with the stream and rich media, as well as provided benefits to Page owners in the form of greater analytic tools and SEO. But that said, Groups still have their place among tight-knit communities that want to leverage the social graph in more intimate, exclusive settings. If Groups continue to be popular among users as they have been, then in time we should expect to see them evolving in ways that provide members with a more integrated user experience.
For more comprehensive details and best practices on marketing with Facebook Pages, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible.
june 2009 by sryo
Ten Minute Guide: How-To Become a Wikipedia Pro
april 2009 by sryo
There’s enough that Internet Marketers should know about Wikipedia for me to write a book about using it, and lots that can only be learnt by exploring and interacting with the site.
Of course - you don’t have time to mess about reading books, so this guide is intended to give you enough knowledge to get you started, and well and on the way to getting good value from time spent on the site.
As a great philosopher may have said:
“You get as much out of Wikipedia as you put into it.”
More broadly: building a strong (and hence powerful) account involves only making useful, constructive contributions to the site. This doesn’t just mean initially, until you try and drop some big fat link into a high traffic page, but consistently.
I assume that you’re familiar with Wikipedia; if you’re looking for an official primer, I recommend a look at Learning the Ropes and How to edit a page for all the technical information you’ll need.
(I’ll link to Wikipedia a lot in this article, sometimes to give examples and often to the project’s documentation about certain topics, so that I don’t repeat what they have to say. It will mainly be useful to follow those links if you’re interested in a particular aspect of this, and need to find out more.)
Why SEOs and Internet Marketers should care about Wikipedia
Knowing that one of the world’s Top 10 websites is editable by anyone was too much of a temptation for less reputable SEOs, and the site now applies nofollow to all external links.
However, there are three very genuine ways that being linked to from Wikipedia can help a website. I’ll discuss them in more details later, but they are:
the referred traffic that comes from the site
the fact that Google may use nofollow links within its linkgraph
the followed links on sites that scrape Wikipedia’s articles.
Building a trusted account
To begin, here are things you can do that will always be helpful to the project:
Search for and fix spelling mistakes, e.g.: site:en.wikipedia.org Tuseday
Look at the categorised list of articles needing images, pick a topic you are interested in, e.g.: ice hockey, and see if you can provide images for any of these pages. (Read the images and image use policy pages first.)
Help overcome vandalism by monitoring edits with a tool such as Mike’s Wiki Tool. This highlights new edits to you, which you can assess and revert if necessary.
Think of any specialist knowledge you have, and find ways to add useful content to the relevant pages, particularly if you know of trustworthy references that can be included in the articles. (N.B.: don’t choose a topic like SEO; think of your hobbies, academic subjects, etc.)
Search the list of Stub categories to find partially built articles that you could contribute to and improve.
Create new pages (read: Your first article.) You may know of something valuable that is missing from the project, or visit the lists of Requested articles and Most wanted articles to find pages that the community would like to be created.
Add references from news stories to appropriate pages. E.g.: After new dates were added to Michael Jackson’s tour, this deserved an addition to Wikipedia.
Find articles that link to disambiguation pages, and link them to the correct article. For example: The page about the Skrulls links to the Watcher disambiguation page; this link should be updated to point to the Watcher (comics) page.
Some tips for making edits to pages:
Use the talk pages (click ‘Discussion‘ tab above an article) to discuss potential changes to an article, and to catch up on discussion about an article before you make edits
Check the page history before editing (click ‘History‘ tab above an article) to check you are not jumping into the middle of an Edit war.
When making edits, do leave an edit summary and do preview changes before you save the page
Add pages to your Watchlist; this allows you to see edits made to your watched pages at a glance.
Use the ‘What Links Here‘ sidebar link to see internal links to an article. E.g.: page that link to Whisky.
Wikipedia for SEO & Internet Marketing
If you have a website that you are promoting, it may not be unreasonable to link to it from Wikipedia, but want to make sure you are not submitting spam. Let’s get back to the bullet points:
How can your site improve Wikipedia? Check the External link page for the criteria regarding which pages are appropriate to include in the ‘External links’ section of an article.
Some article have unreferenced facts and need citations. Check if your site is a reliable source on a topic, in which case it may be appropriate.
Find Wikipedia pages that may be related to the site. Use the Wikirank tool to see the number of daily visitors a page receives.
Make sure the page is good; it should contain useful, well written content. Make edits to the article to improve it.
To add a reference within an article, read the page about Citing sources and look at the sample code on the Cite web page. Use an accurate title, probably the title of the page being linked to.
As the guidelines linked to above explain (and as other editors will tell you if you stray into the territory) the project won’t benefit from linking to sites that are not authoritative, or that are very commercial (e.g.: they are sales/promotion pages or exist only to generate advertising revenue.)
Being linked to from a Wikipedia page can bring significant traffic to a site. Here are three of the top reasons why:
1 - Referred Traffic
This can be particularly true on a short article with only one or two useful looking references.
For instance: people looking for information on ‘polish flats‘ are likely to visit the page for that term on Wikipedia (Polish flat) which ranks at #1 in Google. Try comparing the Wikirank stats for that page to a keyword volume estimation for the term. The single reference source linked to from that article will get a significant amount of referred traffic via that link - possibly more than most of the pages that actually rank for the term in Google.
2 - NoFollow does not mean NoUse
Can a link from Wikipedia actually help a page rank? Over at SEOMoz, Will hinted that Wikipedia links may be used for discovery, and may even pass weight.
3 - Scraper Sites
Wikipedia is available to copy and republish under a GNU license, so the articles are often available elsewhere online. There are even ’scraper sites’ that copy most or all of the articles. For example: Wikipedia’s article about Surety Bonds is also available on Absolute Astronomy, but on the scraped version all the external links are followed. Although these pages will tend to be very weak, the volume of them could have a considerable cumulative effect.
Bonus: Wikipedia as an authoritative directory
An extra benefit of being linked to from Wikipedia, is that if someone is looking for an authoritative page on a topic to link to, Wikipedia may well be the first place they look to find such a link.
Online Reputation Management and Wikipedia
If you’re managing the online reputation of a company, brand or individual, Wikipedia can either be a blessing (having it ranking highly can reduce the visibility of a less neutral page) or a curse (see: Wiki-Circularity.)
Back to the bullet points, beginning with how to make a Wikipedia page rank higher for your search term:
Wikipedia is very bad at redirecting pages when titles / URLs change. Hence, decide exactly what phrase you want to rank for before you begin, and make sure that the article page is moved before you begin, if needs be. See: Moving a page and Merging and moving pages.
To help a Wikipedia article rank for a specific term, work to build internal links to the page. Using appropriate search queries, you could find articles that mention the topic, but that don’t link to the page; update them to do so. An example Yahoo search query: find pages that could link to Michael Jackson.
However, if a Wikipedia page is causing reputational issues for you or a client, you have a variety of options.
To begin: if there are libellous comments on a page about a living person, Wikipedia has very thorough guidelines regarding Biographies of living people. This page includes details of how to deal with issues of defamation; the BLP Noticeboard can be used to report and discuss such issues.
For issues not regarding an individual, you will want to temper or remove the offending content from the page. If the content is not written from a Neutral Point of View, this is a good reason to edit it. Be aware of the project’s rules about conflicts of interest, and do consider Wikipedia’s dispute resolution processes.
If an issue exists for a brand / person that doesn’t fulfil the criteria for notability, then you could apply for the article to be deleted. This happens via a proposal for deletion or speedy deletion.
It can be important to respond to such issues quickly. Since Wikipedia is free to copy and duplicate, incorrect information could be scraped from the site and published elsewhere online, and fixing the issue at the source wouldn’t remove all published versions of the false content.
Before the page is deleted, check the ‘What links here‘ page, to find its internal links. After deletion, remove these links from the other articles.
There is an extra step here, which I can’t disclose. Seasoned ORMs will spot it straight away; but if you don’t, Will Critchlow will be discussing it at the Give It Up session at SMX London 2009.
Well, that’s the semi-brief run through. A couple of extra pointers would be:
Don’t just build content on the site, but build relationships too. If you are friendly with various editors (particularly those who edit the pages of any clients who could potentially suf[…]
Reputation
SEO
ORM
wikipedia
from google
Of course - you don’t have time to mess about reading books, so this guide is intended to give you enough knowledge to get you started, and well and on the way to getting good value from time spent on the site.
As a great philosopher may have said:
“You get as much out of Wikipedia as you put into it.”
More broadly: building a strong (and hence powerful) account involves only making useful, constructive contributions to the site. This doesn’t just mean initially, until you try and drop some big fat link into a high traffic page, but consistently.
I assume that you’re familiar with Wikipedia; if you’re looking for an official primer, I recommend a look at Learning the Ropes and How to edit a page for all the technical information you’ll need.
(I’ll link to Wikipedia a lot in this article, sometimes to give examples and often to the project’s documentation about certain topics, so that I don’t repeat what they have to say. It will mainly be useful to follow those links if you’re interested in a particular aspect of this, and need to find out more.)
Why SEOs and Internet Marketers should care about Wikipedia
Knowing that one of the world’s Top 10 websites is editable by anyone was too much of a temptation for less reputable SEOs, and the site now applies nofollow to all external links.
However, there are three very genuine ways that being linked to from Wikipedia can help a website. I’ll discuss them in more details later, but they are:
the referred traffic that comes from the site
the fact that Google may use nofollow links within its linkgraph
the followed links on sites that scrape Wikipedia’s articles.
Building a trusted account
To begin, here are things you can do that will always be helpful to the project:
Search for and fix spelling mistakes, e.g.: site:en.wikipedia.org Tuseday
Look at the categorised list of articles needing images, pick a topic you are interested in, e.g.: ice hockey, and see if you can provide images for any of these pages. (Read the images and image use policy pages first.)
Help overcome vandalism by monitoring edits with a tool such as Mike’s Wiki Tool. This highlights new edits to you, which you can assess and revert if necessary.
Think of any specialist knowledge you have, and find ways to add useful content to the relevant pages, particularly if you know of trustworthy references that can be included in the articles. (N.B.: don’t choose a topic like SEO; think of your hobbies, academic subjects, etc.)
Search the list of Stub categories to find partially built articles that you could contribute to and improve.
Create new pages (read: Your first article.) You may know of something valuable that is missing from the project, or visit the lists of Requested articles and Most wanted articles to find pages that the community would like to be created.
Add references from news stories to appropriate pages. E.g.: After new dates were added to Michael Jackson’s tour, this deserved an addition to Wikipedia.
Find articles that link to disambiguation pages, and link them to the correct article. For example: The page about the Skrulls links to the Watcher disambiguation page; this link should be updated to point to the Watcher (comics) page.
Some tips for making edits to pages:
Use the talk pages (click ‘Discussion‘ tab above an article) to discuss potential changes to an article, and to catch up on discussion about an article before you make edits
Check the page history before editing (click ‘History‘ tab above an article) to check you are not jumping into the middle of an Edit war.
When making edits, do leave an edit summary and do preview changes before you save the page
Add pages to your Watchlist; this allows you to see edits made to your watched pages at a glance.
Use the ‘What Links Here‘ sidebar link to see internal links to an article. E.g.: page that link to Whisky.
Wikipedia for SEO & Internet Marketing
If you have a website that you are promoting, it may not be unreasonable to link to it from Wikipedia, but want to make sure you are not submitting spam. Let’s get back to the bullet points:
How can your site improve Wikipedia? Check the External link page for the criteria regarding which pages are appropriate to include in the ‘External links’ section of an article.
Some article have unreferenced facts and need citations. Check if your site is a reliable source on a topic, in which case it may be appropriate.
Find Wikipedia pages that may be related to the site. Use the Wikirank tool to see the number of daily visitors a page receives.
Make sure the page is good; it should contain useful, well written content. Make edits to the article to improve it.
To add a reference within an article, read the page about Citing sources and look at the sample code on the Cite web page. Use an accurate title, probably the title of the page being linked to.
As the guidelines linked to above explain (and as other editors will tell you if you stray into the territory) the project won’t benefit from linking to sites that are not authoritative, or that are very commercial (e.g.: they are sales/promotion pages or exist only to generate advertising revenue.)
Being linked to from a Wikipedia page can bring significant traffic to a site. Here are three of the top reasons why:
1 - Referred Traffic
This can be particularly true on a short article with only one or two useful looking references.
For instance: people looking for information on ‘polish flats‘ are likely to visit the page for that term on Wikipedia (Polish flat) which ranks at #1 in Google. Try comparing the Wikirank stats for that page to a keyword volume estimation for the term. The single reference source linked to from that article will get a significant amount of referred traffic via that link - possibly more than most of the pages that actually rank for the term in Google.
2 - NoFollow does not mean NoUse
Can a link from Wikipedia actually help a page rank? Over at SEOMoz, Will hinted that Wikipedia links may be used for discovery, and may even pass weight.
3 - Scraper Sites
Wikipedia is available to copy and republish under a GNU license, so the articles are often available elsewhere online. There are even ’scraper sites’ that copy most or all of the articles. For example: Wikipedia’s article about Surety Bonds is also available on Absolute Astronomy, but on the scraped version all the external links are followed. Although these pages will tend to be very weak, the volume of them could have a considerable cumulative effect.
Bonus: Wikipedia as an authoritative directory
An extra benefit of being linked to from Wikipedia, is that if someone is looking for an authoritative page on a topic to link to, Wikipedia may well be the first place they look to find such a link.
Online Reputation Management and Wikipedia
If you’re managing the online reputation of a company, brand or individual, Wikipedia can either be a blessing (having it ranking highly can reduce the visibility of a less neutral page) or a curse (see: Wiki-Circularity.)
Back to the bullet points, beginning with how to make a Wikipedia page rank higher for your search term:
Wikipedia is very bad at redirecting pages when titles / URLs change. Hence, decide exactly what phrase you want to rank for before you begin, and make sure that the article page is moved before you begin, if needs be. See: Moving a page and Merging and moving pages.
To help a Wikipedia article rank for a specific term, work to build internal links to the page. Using appropriate search queries, you could find articles that mention the topic, but that don’t link to the page; update them to do so. An example Yahoo search query: find pages that could link to Michael Jackson.
However, if a Wikipedia page is causing reputational issues for you or a client, you have a variety of options.
To begin: if there are libellous comments on a page about a living person, Wikipedia has very thorough guidelines regarding Biographies of living people. This page includes details of how to deal with issues of defamation; the BLP Noticeboard can be used to report and discuss such issues.
For issues not regarding an individual, you will want to temper or remove the offending content from the page. If the content is not written from a Neutral Point of View, this is a good reason to edit it. Be aware of the project’s rules about conflicts of interest, and do consider Wikipedia’s dispute resolution processes.
If an issue exists for a brand / person that doesn’t fulfil the criteria for notability, then you could apply for the article to be deleted. This happens via a proposal for deletion or speedy deletion.
It can be important to respond to such issues quickly. Since Wikipedia is free to copy and duplicate, incorrect information could be scraped from the site and published elsewhere online, and fixing the issue at the source wouldn’t remove all published versions of the false content.
Before the page is deleted, check the ‘What links here‘ page, to find its internal links. After deletion, remove these links from the other articles.
There is an extra step here, which I can’t disclose. Seasoned ORMs will spot it straight away; but if you don’t, Will Critchlow will be discussing it at the Give It Up session at SMX London 2009.
Well, that’s the semi-brief run through. A couple of extra pointers would be:
Don’t just build content on the site, but build relationships too. If you are friendly with various editors (particularly those who edit the pages of any clients who could potentially suf[…]
april 2009 by sryo
Whitehouse.gov Keeping Searchers From Asking Questions (Inadvertently)
march 2009 by sryo
Yesterday on the O’Reilly Radar blog, I posted that a key component of the American government’s initiative to be transparent and open with its data is to ensure content from government web sites is available through the major search engines. Tomorrow, I’ll follow that up with a post that details some of the specific obstacles that are blocking them now and how they might become more search engine-friendly.
While I was working on that post today, I checked out the new section of whitehouse.gov called “Open for Questions“. Since this is a brand new feature and has been talked up quite a bit online, I thought it would be a good study on government efforts do in search.
The trouble with Google Moderator
Open for Questions uses Google Moderator, which as I’ve previously posted, is a black hole for search engines. That’s unfortunate, since people who are searching for information on health care reform, financial stability, or the environment would likely benefit from finding a lively discussion on whitehouse.gov with concerns from fellow citizens. Another of Google Moderator’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t provide a unique URL for each topic, so for instance, if I wanted to email a link to the discussion about retirement security to my mom or post a link to the education discussion on Facebook, I couldn’t. The best I could do is tell people to go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ and then scroll to the topic and click on it. If I wanted to share a specific question from one of those topics? Not a chance.
The semantic structure of the page
I then noticed that the title tag of the page uses the text “Open For Questions” with no additional clue that this page is part of whitehouse.gov or that these questions are intended to be from citizens to the White House. That’s not great for either search ranking or search acquisition. If searchers see a listing in the search results for “Open For Questions”, it could mean anything. (Much of whitehouse.gov has title tag issues.)
The heading on the page is “Your Questions on the Economy”. That’s kind of confusing, since you can use the topic navigation to ask questions about all kinds of things. And the heading is in a span class, not an H1, so it doesn’t signal clearly to search engines that this is what the page is about. The text mentions “Thursday”, but no date, which makes me wonder if these discussions will no longer be online after tomorrow. If they are, having the date on the page from the start would make the page a lot easier to maintain later.
Of course, since all of the text is pulled in from Google Moderator via JavaScript, the search engines (and possibly those on mobile devices, screen readers, and older browsers) can’t access any of it anyway. Instead any of those users see this: “Google Moderator is a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations, and events. You must have JavaScript enabled in order to use this feature.”
The real problem: indexability
But as it turns out, all of those obstacles are inconsquential. A search for [white house open for questions] brings up lots of pages that reference the feature, but not the http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ page itself.
White House Open For Questions
I was initially surprised because even though much of the content on the page is inaccessible to search engines, the pages has lots of links with descriptive anchor text. And then I realized this isn’t a ranking problem, it’s an indexing problem.
White House Open For Questions, Not Indexing
Surely the search engines have seen the page by now. I checked robots.txt but didn’t see anything blocking it. And then I looked at the source code. There it was.
<meta content=”noindex,nofollow“ name=”robots“/>
They didn’t follow the first rule of indexing.
My guess is that blocking search engines is either accidental (which happens all the time when pages are first launched, since they are often blocked during the development phase) or this page is intended to be only temporary, meant to gather questions for a short period of time, but not keep them as an archive later. I hope the latter isn’t the case, because I think having a repository of the questions Americans care about most can be very useful for a number of reasons.
How can this be fixed?
It may be difficult to fix the issues with indexing Google Moderator content (and that’s really something I wish Google itself would address), but it should be fairly simple to expose the “Open for Questions” landing page to search engines. Just remove the meta robots tag, make the title a bit more descriptive (”Open For Questions: Ask the White House About Your Concerns”), and add a paragraph of text that’s outside of JavaScript that describes what the feature is about. And in the short term, perhaps the content could be exported to an HTML file once questions are closed so they could be searched over later.
Check O’Reilly Radar tomorrow for more tips on how the government can make its content more findable.
Blog
SEO
from google
While I was working on that post today, I checked out the new section of whitehouse.gov called “Open for Questions“. Since this is a brand new feature and has been talked up quite a bit online, I thought it would be a good study on government efforts do in search.
The trouble with Google Moderator
Open for Questions uses Google Moderator, which as I’ve previously posted, is a black hole for search engines. That’s unfortunate, since people who are searching for information on health care reform, financial stability, or the environment would likely benefit from finding a lively discussion on whitehouse.gov with concerns from fellow citizens. Another of Google Moderator’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t provide a unique URL for each topic, so for instance, if I wanted to email a link to the discussion about retirement security to my mom or post a link to the education discussion on Facebook, I couldn’t. The best I could do is tell people to go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ and then scroll to the topic and click on it. If I wanted to share a specific question from one of those topics? Not a chance.
The semantic structure of the page
I then noticed that the title tag of the page uses the text “Open For Questions” with no additional clue that this page is part of whitehouse.gov or that these questions are intended to be from citizens to the White House. That’s not great for either search ranking or search acquisition. If searchers see a listing in the search results for “Open For Questions”, it could mean anything. (Much of whitehouse.gov has title tag issues.)
The heading on the page is “Your Questions on the Economy”. That’s kind of confusing, since you can use the topic navigation to ask questions about all kinds of things. And the heading is in a span class, not an H1, so it doesn’t signal clearly to search engines that this is what the page is about. The text mentions “Thursday”, but no date, which makes me wonder if these discussions will no longer be online after tomorrow. If they are, having the date on the page from the start would make the page a lot easier to maintain later.
Of course, since all of the text is pulled in from Google Moderator via JavaScript, the search engines (and possibly those on mobile devices, screen readers, and older browsers) can’t access any of it anyway. Instead any of those users see this: “Google Moderator is a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations, and events. You must have JavaScript enabled in order to use this feature.”
The real problem: indexability
But as it turns out, all of those obstacles are inconsquential. A search for [white house open for questions] brings up lots of pages that reference the feature, but not the http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ page itself.
White House Open For Questions
I was initially surprised because even though much of the content on the page is inaccessible to search engines, the pages has lots of links with descriptive anchor text. And then I realized this isn’t a ranking problem, it’s an indexing problem.
White House Open For Questions, Not Indexing
Surely the search engines have seen the page by now. I checked robots.txt but didn’t see anything blocking it. And then I looked at the source code. There it was.
<meta content=”noindex,nofollow“ name=”robots“/>
They didn’t follow the first rule of indexing.
My guess is that blocking search engines is either accidental (which happens all the time when pages are first launched, since they are often blocked during the development phase) or this page is intended to be only temporary, meant to gather questions for a short period of time, but not keep them as an archive later. I hope the latter isn’t the case, because I think having a repository of the questions Americans care about most can be very useful for a number of reasons.
How can this be fixed?
It may be difficult to fix the issues with indexing Google Moderator content (and that’s really something I wish Google itself would address), but it should be fairly simple to expose the “Open for Questions” landing page to search engines. Just remove the meta robots tag, make the title a bit more descriptive (”Open For Questions: Ask the White House About Your Concerns”), and add a paragraph of text that’s outside of JavaScript that describes what the feature is about. And in the short term, perhaps the content could be exported to an HTML file once questions are closed so they could be searched over later.
Check O’Reilly Radar tomorrow for more tips on how the government can make its content more findable.
march 2009 by sryo
¿Cuantos enlaces por página?
march 2009 by sryo
Matt Cutts revisa de nuevo la “norma” de no más de 100 enlaces por página y vuelve a recomendar no superar este número, como ya ha hecho más veces.
Lo que dice no es nuevo, es un recordatorio, que se puede resumir así:
100 es un númeor razonable de enlaces por página
Google no deja de indexar automáticamente si hay más de 100 enlaces
100 kilobytes es lo que google suele indexar por página, de ahí esta recomendación
Google indexa más de 100k por página, pero le preocupa la experiencia del usuario
Si hay más de 100 enlaces, es posible que Google no siga o indexe todos los enlaces
La transferencia de PageRank por cada unos de los 100 enlaces va a ser minúscula
Sin embargo, si miramos la cantidad de enlaces que tienen en sus portadas las 98 webs más importantes, nos encontramos con que pocas de ellas tienen menos de 100 enlaces, y la mayoría multiplican el número de enlaces:
SEO
from google
Lo que dice no es nuevo, es un recordatorio, que se puede resumir así:
100 es un númeor razonable de enlaces por página
Google no deja de indexar automáticamente si hay más de 100 enlaces
100 kilobytes es lo que google suele indexar por página, de ahí esta recomendación
Google indexa más de 100k por página, pero le preocupa la experiencia del usuario
Si hay más de 100 enlaces, es posible que Google no siga o indexe todos los enlaces
La transferencia de PageRank por cada unos de los 100 enlaces va a ser minúscula
Sin embargo, si miramos la cantidad de enlaces que tienen en sus portadas las 98 webs más importantes, nos encontramos con que pocas de ellas tienen menos de 100 enlaces, y la mayoría multiplican el número de enlaces:
march 2009 by sryo
Ask se pasa a los frames
february 2009 by sryo
Aunque parece haber sido una simple prueba, muchos usuarios han detectado que Ask ha estado ofreciendo una barra superior a la hora de entregar los resultados de búsqueda, dejando siempre una barra superior en la que se puede observar que hay un cajetín de búsqueda y la opción de cerrar esa barra.
En este caso, la barra se puede cerrar sólo por esa vez o para siempre. Aún así, al ser una prueba no es el resultado por defecto, y parece que el buscador no aplicará este sistema.
leer en la web - OJObuscador - © OJO internet S.L. - fb9c46bdOJO2cbd0d246buscador560711a7413500d (72.14.199.39)
OJObuscador
ask
posicionamiento_en_buscadores
seo
from google
En este caso, la barra se puede cerrar sólo por esa vez o para siempre. Aún así, al ser una prueba no es el resultado por defecto, y parece que el buscador no aplicará este sistema.
leer en la web - OJObuscador - © OJO internet S.L. - fb9c46bdOJO2cbd0d246buscador560711a7413500d (72.14.199.39)
february 2009 by sryo
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