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16 August 2006
The rebranded Google Webmaster Central (formerly Google Sitemaps) is set to finally resolve Google’s canonical issues. For some time Google has had problems with the www.domain.com/.. and domain.com/.. versions of site URLs (detecting if they are one and the same site, distributing linking popularity properly). Many websites have incoming links pointing to both the www.domain.com and domain.com URL versions. The problem was exacerbated when the internal linking structure uses relative URLs (links like /article.htm opposed to links like www.domain.com/article.htm).Recently Google added a new feature in their Webmaster Tools section (former Google Sitemaps), where every webmaster could set a preference for www. or non-www. URLs on every validated domain. Instead of guessing, you simply tell Google to use the www. or non-www. URL versions for every site of yours. This helps properly aggregating PageRank and showing the proper URLs within the SERPs. In addition, Google offers a variety of other goodies like giving you crawling stats, problems, penalization info, reinclusion requests for penalized sites etc. I’ve been using these features for some time and they are getting better and better and are a must for every webmaster. It is interesting to know what kind of stats does Google keep for every site in its index. Judging from their Webmaster Tools section, Google keeps ranking information (for which keywords does your site rank and at what positions). As I have written numerous times, ranking for as many keywords as possible (even non-competitive) gives you a ranking boost for more competitive ones (content is king). Another great stat that Google shows is the most common words used within content on your sites and in the anchor text of links pointing to your site. I have noticed that Google has associated the anchor text keywords of some of my sites with words that do NOT appear in the anchor text, but words close to the links. So, yes, Google looks at text around links and probably uses it for scoring purposes. The keywords associated with your content and links do not appear for all sites. I’ve noticed that when I added my sites using the www.domain.com version as the URL name of the site, I didn’t get these stats. When I set a domain preference for the www.domain.com versions, Google added the domain.com versions to the list of my sites and now shows these keyword associations when I click on the non-www. versions. I think that’s a glitch, but anyway, Google shows these vital stats when you have your sites added as non-www. domains. I highly recommend the Google’s Webmaster Central Tools to all webmasters, especially the domain preference feature.
17 June 2006
Let me ask you a few questions. What is your keyword targeting strategy? Do you go for the more general and competitive terms or for the more specific, longer and less competitive ones? Do you prefer shorter or longer articles? Are you targeting Google or Yahoo and MSN?Before I lay down my general keyword strategy, let me explain what is the “keyword ladder” and then I will elaborate on why I believe in climbing it (a bottom-up approach). Imagine a ladder where you put the most general and competitive keyphrases on the top rung and the least competitive keyphrases on the bottom rung. As an example, let us consider the SEO industry. On the top rung we would have general queries like: “search engine optimization”, “search engine marketing”, “seo” etc. Somewhere below we will have less competitive and more specific keyphrases like: “google search engine optimization”, “yahoo search engine optimization”, “search engine optimization services” etc. Going down the ladder we might come down to queries of the type: “affordable seo specialist in New York”, “where can I learn seo for free” etc. What are the general characteristics of the ladder? The top keyphrases are the most competitive, they have the highest traffic potential per keyphrase, they are fewer in numbers and they convert worst (there are too general). Going down the ladder we come to keyphrases that are less competitive, easier to rank for, have lower search volume, but are higher in numbers and usually convert much better (because they are very specific). The problem with very specific long queries is that it is hard to keyword research them. Depending on who you ask, about 20% to 50% of all daily queries are unique never-searched-before ones. Add to these the loads of queries from the bottom of the ladder that are searched for once in a while and we come to the fact that most of the queries from the bottom of the ladder don’t show in keyword research tools. That of course, can’t stop us from targeting them. I try to target the bottom half of the ladder for at least these reasons: 1. It is easier to rank higher for less competitive keyphrases 2. The traffic you can get from thousands of lower profile keyphrases is more diverse and stable since you don’t put your eggs in too few baskets (keywords) 3. The bottom half of the ladder can provide more total traffic, since the number of low profile keyphrases is higher (it is like getting 100 visitors from one general keyphrase vs getting 10 visitors from each of 10 less competitive queries) 4. Searchers are starting to use longer and more descriptive queries, which bumps up the traffic potential of the bottom half of the keyword ladder 5. The bottom half of the ladder converts better (more revenue for you) 6. Targeting many low competitive keywords at the same time is not that difficult on Google. If you still haven’t noticed, Google has introduced ranking scores which push up the overall rankings of pages and sites that rank well for a variety of keyphrases. In other words, when you have a lot of content, you rank well for a variety of less competitive queries, which pushes up your rankings on the more competitive queries from the top half of the ladder, which in turn pushes the rankings of the even more competitive ones etc. Or to restate it in other words, with Google it is much easier to rank for the general high search volume queries (top half of the ladder), when you have already conquered the bottom half of the ladder. That is what I call ‘climbing’ the keyword ladder. All you have to do is have loads of content. Let me get back to the last point above: you must climb the keyword ladder by starting from less competitive queries and gradually increasing your rankings for more and more competitive keywords. Here’s a snippet from Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data”: “Thus, the quantity or rate that a document moves in rankings over a period of time might be used to influence future scores assigned to that document. In one implementation, for each set of search results, a document may be weighted according to its position in the top N search results.” Every time you rank a page in the top N results, you may get a little general ranking boost (for other queries). The more times you can rank pages in the top N search results, the greater ranking boost you get. You can rank a great number of keyphrases in the top N when you have a lot of content and when these keyphrases are from the less competitive bottom-half of the ladder. Google keeps statistics of which queries you rank for and which are selected by users within the SERPs. You can see the top stats, if you use Google Sitemaps. The above “content is king” ranking factors are very different from how Yahoo and MSN operate. Let me give you a real world example. You are writing an article that discusses how to optimize AdWords campaigns. You wrote a very comprehensive and long article that covers the ins and outs of AdWords. Now you are coming to the point where you need to optimize the article for search engine traffic. You do some keyword research and it turns out there are let’s say 20 good keyphrases to target. How do you target all of these? Since Yahoo and MSN (and also Google not so long time ago) rely mostly on the anchor text of incoming links, link popularity and page titles, you need incoming links with the anchor text targeting these 20 keyphrases. You also need to place as many of these keywords in the page title. That seems like an impossible task. Some webmasters may try to partition the content into multiple pages trying to target each of these 20 keyphrases. But how do you get links to all these parts of the article. There will always be someone to outrank that approach by targeting a single page with a specific keyword from these 20. What most webmasters do at this time, is they just pick one or two of these 20 keywords to target. That is not bad but it is unnatural. It is like webmasters who offers generally the same AdWords content, share the traffic between them by everyone emphasizing a certain keyphrase. Google is clearly trying to stop this traffic partitioning. Google will try to infer which is the best AdWords page and will try to send as much relevant traffic (including these 20 keywords) to the top few authorative pages. How will Google do that? By boosting the rankings of the sites that have real content (having rankings for the bottom-half of the ladder). Not so long ago, I was into the “links are king” camp. Now I am at an equal distance between the “content is king” vs. “links are king” camps (maybe closer to the “content is king” camp, when I think long-term). I don’t want to be misinterpreted here. Sites with almost no content can outrank sites with a lot of great content. Fact is, everything else being equal, a site with no content (haven’t conquered the bottom half of the keyword ladder) will need more and higher quality links to outrank a site with great content. To reframe it another way: having a lot of content decreases the amount and quality of links you need. Naturally, you should be able to get higher quality links long term with a great content site. Your competitors will need to buy many links in order to compensate for their low-quality websites. And sites with no content will have a hard time overpowering your bottom-of-the-ladder traffic. They can only steal your general keyphrases traffic. Let me take out my crystal ball and see into the future of search engines…Hmm, I see Yahoo and MSN copying Google… I see Yahoo and MSN becoming more Google-like… Got the point? Sooner or later, Yahoo and MSN will find a way to give ranking boosts to genuine sites with loads of content and little over-optimization. We will start to see Google doing this better and better. In a way, it supports the notion of “the rich becoming richer” – or having the SERPs dominated by a handful of the most authorative websites. Now let my lay out my keyword targeting strategy Write Long Pages When you write longer pages, you use more unique and repeated words per page. The repeated words increase the rankings of the queries they participate in. The unique words open the possibility of ranking for more keyphrases. Any way you look at it, the more words on a page, the more keyword phrases you target. It is that simple. When your pages are longer, you are basically going for more keywords from the bottom of the ladder. You get these and Google boosts your rankings for the more competitive ones. Longer pages will always outperform shorter ones. Write naturally Don’t overrepeat one or two phrases. Write naturally. Good content is written naturally. While search engines cannot understand the quality of content by way of interpreting its meaning, they can detect and devalue unnatural overrepeated and stuffed content. When you write naturally, you usually use synonyms, related words and that ups the number of potential phrases you target. But wouldn’t that dilute your keyword density? Forget the nonsense of keyword density. Keyword density has never-ever been used by Google or any other decent search engine (because it does not improve relevancy). That is one of the SEO myths trotted by the SEO “experts”. Optimize your page titles When you do keyword research, remember, that you cannot research the bottom of the keyword ladder. You research the top of the ladder – the competitive high-traffic, most common search terms. Place the most general ones in the title of your home page and the titles of the major sections. Your content can target one or two general keyphrases in the page titles. Research and use the common keyword subphrases Have you noticed that if you make a long list of queries related to your pages, you start to see common subphrases. Let’s say you sell a weight loss ebook. You can target keyphrases like: weight loss book, weight loss ebook, weight loss program… but you can also target keyphrases like: diet book, diet ebook, diet program … Here we see that a lot of keyphrases that are common to queries relevant to your page include subphrases like “weight loss”, “diet”, “diets”, “dieting”, “calories” etc. It makes sense to think that most of the queries from the keyword ladder (top + bottom parts) will include the above subphrases as parts of the queries. These common subphrases are usually some of the more general queries (top of the keyword ladder). When you have identified the common subphrases you need to do 4 things to greatly increase your chances of ranking for a lot of queries. 1. Use all these common subphrases generously in your long articles. Don’t focus on one subphrase. Use all of them + their stemmed variants. These are the ones that should be repeated more often. All the other text (non-common subphrases) should be written naturally. To use as many of them, you need to write longer articles. 2. When using the common subphrases within content, write them as parts of the longer queries. If you focus on “weight loss”, use it as “weight loss book”, next time as “weight loss program” or “weight loss failure” etc. 3. Place a few of these subphrases in the page title 4. If you have control over the anchor text of the incoming links (as with home pages), try to inject as many subphrases as possible. Anchor text is still very important. Let’s say that the subphrase “weight loss” is a subphrase in 8000 potential queries you may target on your page. You need to inject it into as many incoming links and then all the other words on the page will combine nicely with “weight loss” to form longer queries and increase your rankings for a great variety of phrases. If you submit to directories, rotate the anchor text subphrases. In our case rotate among “weight loss”, “diet”, “calories” etc. There are obviously a lot of other factors to consider. Pages are going up and down the ladder constantly. Have you noticed that after each update your traffic and rankings increase or decrease across most of your pages? In a way, all ranking factors together either made you climb the ladder (rank for more queries) or made you go down the ladder (rank for less queries). That is why I believe the most powerful factors for ranking on Google are domain based – they act upon all pages on the domain. One of these domain based factors is the “how many queries do you rank for in the top N results”. Google’s patent on “Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data” clearly states that a “document” may mean a page, a site, a part of a site (a subfolder).
17 May 2006
Matt Cutts has been sharing a great deal of inside information on Google’s ranking algorithm on his blog and through an interview with Mike Grehan.You can read the full scoop on the Bigdaddy update at Matt’s blog here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/ The most interesting point from the post is that Google has changed the way they calculate crawling priority. They seem to factor how trusty are the incoming and outgoing links of a site when determining how much of it to crawl. Matt gives great examples. Basically, for a new site you need to have quality incoming and outgoing links. If you just swap reciprocals with low quality sites, you get both low quality incoming and outgoing links which is a no-no. Mike Grehan has done a great interview with Matt Cutts. You can read the gist of it here: http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/article.php/3605961. There are two links to the full audio interview at the bottom of the article. This is a must read / hear. Matt speaks about the importance of PageRank, reciprocal, triangular etc. links and the (non-)existence of the alleged Sandbox effect on new sites. Matt debunks the Sandbox theory that I haven’t been a fan of. He says: "I think a lot of what's perceived as the sandbox is artefacts where, in our indexing, some data may take longer to be computed than other data." The take home message from all this information is: stop using reciprocal links, triangular links or whatever easy link exchange scheme; don’t buy links (or don’t get caught buying links); link out to great sites; focus on user experience
10 April 2006
A brand new Microsoft research paper caught my attention recently. The paper reinforced my firm belief that one of the most important SEO factors in the future is going to be: usage statistics (Google’s terminology) or popularity (Microsoft’s terminology, not to be confused with link popularity).The paper “Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking” deals with Microsoft’s RankNet technology and devising query-independent ranking factors. The RankNet relevancy technology works on training neural networks. Microsoft has developed a large dataset of common queries for which humans were used to order the top results. In the paper, the researchers tried to find which ranking factors could be used in order to produce ranking results as similar as possible to the ones done by real humans. The tested groups of ranking factors were: PageRank, Popularity, Anchor Text and inlinks, Page factors, Domain factors. Popularity The researchers tested the actual popularity of a web page (the number of times the page has been visited by a user over a period of time). This is not link popularity, but usage popularity. There are 3 basic sources of popularity data – Microsoft’s toolbar, proxy logs and click tracking within the SERPs. Anchor text and inlinks Information related to the anchor text of the page’s incoming links (total text, unique words etc). Page factors These were factors associated with the page and its URL. The researchers pointed out they used 8 simple features and named only 2 of them specifically – number of words in the body and the frequency of the most common word on-page. Domain factors Factors computed as averages across all pages in the domain (like average number of outlinks, average PageRank per page etc.) The researchers found that when PageRank was used alone against the other much simpler factors (Popularity, Page.. factors), PageRank was outscored. Basically, the other tested factors provided much better relevancy (compared with human ranking). Now comes the meaty part. The 2 most important factors that boosted the ranking relevancy mostly were: Page factors and Popularity. The researchers found that from the Page factors the URL was insignificant and the important factors were on-page text. Even though, the researchers had very limited Popularity data, they found that this data was a very significant relevancy booster (second to Page factors). They also found that the more Popularity data they gained, the better the relevancy boost. All of this reinforced my contention that one of the hottest new directions in search engine relevancy is usage statistics or user/usage popularity or in simple words – how may people visit a web site / page, how much time do visitors stay and how often they return to a website. The tricky part here is: how to obtain this popularity data? Toolbars, proxy logs, click tracking etc. Microsoft could have an edge in the future by having the most popular operating system and browser. Google has the toolbar, AdSense, AdWords, Analytics etc. The war on gathering usage data would be interesting as Google has at least 2 patents dealing with it. The old saying: make web pages for users, not for search engines should be the new webmaster mantra. The 10 commandments of building a quality website
09 March 2006
Here is a very important factor for your website success: “How much time does a user spend on your site per visit and how often does that user come back?”. The more, the better. When your visitors spend a lot of time on your sites, a bunch of cool things happen…1. Search engines will increase your rankings. One of the hottest new directions in search relevancy is tracking user behavior (time spent on sites, clicking on search results, bookmarks etc.). “Usage statistics” as Google calls it, is a substantial part of user behavior. The more time a user spends on your site, the better your site must be, right? When users go around reading all your content, it means your content is interesting, relevant and of high-quality. It also means your content is not just a bunch of stuffed keywords. Google, for example, talks about using user behavior and specifically usage statistics (traffic data) for ranking purposes in at least 2 patents – “Methods and apparatus for employing usage statistics in document retrieval” and “Information retrieval based on historical data”. 2. The more a user stays at your site, the better are your chances of making a good impression. That means more incoming links, more repeat visitors, more bookmarks etc. This in turn means more repeat traffic, more traffic from incoming links and more search engine traffic (better rankings). 3. The more pages a visitors sees, the more times your advertising gets shown (more ad impressions). More ad impressions will turn into more revenue. Some time ago, I thought the best thing for AdSense revenue was to make simple pages with very few links and put AdSense all over. These made-for-AdSense kinds of pages get a higher CPC per visit BUT… If the visitor is directed to read more of your content, you will get more ad impressions per visit, more repeat visitors, more search engine traffic, links etc. In the long-run, making a valuable, usable and easy to navigate content site will make you much more money than trying to monetize users on the very first visit by overloading with AdSense and providing no usable navigation. How do you make your visitor stay at your site longer? 1. Make your site load fast! In a recent thread on WebMasterWorld, there was a very interesting discussion that when sites were moved to a faster server, ad revenue jumped. It seems that a lot of visitors don’t wait for slow websites to load. They just go away. I personally, associate slow-loading sites with sites overloaded with advertising. Surfers tend to stay more at fast loading sites. To make your website load faster: - Get a better hosting provider located in the area where your primary traffic comes from (example: USA). Don’t fall for the cheap oversold hosting that guarantees slow response time for scripts. Shelling out a few more bucks per month will be compensated by a higher revenue. - Use faster scripts - Use gzip compression - Minimize unnecessary images - Take off all advertising until your site gets established and ready to monetize heavily 2. Provide a more useful navigation. Make it really easy for your visitors to follow links to other content on your sites. - Put links to related articles / blog entries / forum threads below your content - Put links to the most recent articles / blog entries / forum threads below your content. Showing links to your most recent articles / blog entries on every page is a neat idea because you can also take advantage of topical queries as I have explained in a previous blog entry about the v7ndotcom elursrebmem seo contest. - If you have a rating system in place, put links to Top Rated content on your site - Cross reference your articles within your content. Place longer and more descriptive anchor text links, as there is research suggesting that when longer anchor text links are given more value than shorter links, relevancy increases. The authors of the paper speculate that longer links involve more editorial vote in them than shorter links which are most often parts of the site navigation. - Place navigational links below your content (not only above your content). How do search engines know website traffic details? Toolbars, ad network statistics, browser history, purchasing web logs from the biggest ISPs etc. etc. Search engines can spy on user behavior. If it weren’t true, they will not file patents and develop tools that make this spy job easier.
04 February 2006
I would like to share a very effective content building strategy with you. It can bring you search engine traffic and profits much faster than you would expect from brand new sites.Before I share the specific strategy with you, I want to say something important about Content Building. So listen up. Quality Content Building is the most important SEO strategy. Most people don’t consider Content Building to be a part of SEO, but I disagree. To me, SEO is anything that helps you get more organic search engine traffic and Content Building helps tremendously, especially with Google. Now let me ask you a question: consider two sites that are of the same age, the same link popularity, keywords etc. everything being equal, except that one of the sites has 10 times more content. How much more traffic will the bigger site get in the next few months? 10 times more? Sorry, you are wrong. It will get much more than 10 times the traffic of the smaller site, if you do it right. I will talk about the specific reasons in an upcoming SEO book that I am writing at the moment. The book will also discuss the recommendations that I will lay out in this article. The strategy is simple. Team up with 2, 5, 10 or whatever other trusted people that have good knowledge in the chosen field. Start building a content site and share the profit. Consider this fact. If you write one good article per week, you will end up with 52 articles in a year. If 5 people write one good article per week, you will end up with 260 articles in a year. That is a tremendous leverage for getting lots of natural links and getting traffic from Google. What kind of articles? Long articles will always outperform short articles for SEO, conversions, getting natural links etc. Long articles can and will rank for much more keyword combinations. Long quality articles can impress your visitors way better and make them want to link to you. Most of the articles that get linked to for years are high quality, long and comprehensive articles on a given topic. Posting short, controversial, flamy or newsworthy articles in a blog can get you links short-term, but in-depth long articles covering some specific topic will get linked to long-term. Treat the articles as sales letters. Make them long, interesting, in-depth. Start with a catchy title etc. Focus on content, not keywords. Trust me, long in-depth articles, covering the full aspects of a topic will outperform short articles any time. Don’t break your articles into smaller ones. Doing so has the only advantage of getting more keyword rich title tags, but long articles will still outperform the short ones. How to split the profit? That is the easy part. Every author can place his AdSense, YPN code on his articles (that is a good incentive to write more articles). The same can be done with AdSense channels. Profit from other sources can be split in any way you like. One person can take care of webmastering and SEO. All members of the team can post at forums and blogs with links back to the shared-profit-site. All members can actively monitor forums for questions about the field, hot news etc. and write about them etc.etc. Teaming up has a great leverage advantage that will easily outperform the competition. How will a single person produce more content, links and buzz about a single site? It is impossible.
22 January 2006
You’ve probably heard about the new SEO contest revolving about ranking for the keyphrase v7ndotcom elursrebmem. Let me ask you a question: what is the most interesting thing about this new SEO contest? No, it is not the $4000 1st place prize.The target keyphrease v7ndotcom elursrebmem is pretty darn interesting. Why? Because it is a topical query (hot topic). Topical queries are queries that suddently start to get searched for way more than before. I bet there are more than enough people who regularly check the top rankings of the contest query, which in the eyes of Google is a sudden increase (from zero searches). That IS a topical query – hot topic. Also when the number of documents containing a query suddenly increase (as in our case) – this indicates a topical query. So what? Google’s patent Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data has some interesting information about topical queries influencing the ranking of documents. The 2 major points are: 1. Google may score documents (sites, pages) associated with topical query higher! 2. Google’s anti-link spam detection is less sensitive to topical queries! How many people SEO for topical queries? Very few. Webmasters are fighting mostly for non-topical queries. In my opinion, all the post-seo-contest-analysis articles that are going to pop are going to be worthless and won’t apply to the real world (mostly non-topical queries). But that is not the end of the story. Based on the above information from Google’s paper, we can actually take advantage of topical queries - simply by regularly including content rich in topical queries! Consider this blog entry of mine. I used the topical keywords in the title. Also, all my blog and article pages list the latest blog entries (they list the title which includes the topical query). According to the patent, some or all of my pages can get higher rankings. This in turn according to the patent can further push the rankings up by getting my site ranked in the top 30 for more queries. According to the patent, it is a very good idea to regularly include content about current hot topics. How to do it? - write about current hot topics in your industry in articles / blogs - include a list of the latest articles / blog entries on as many pages as you can - include topical keywords in the titles - at times when your site is associated with a hot topic, you can be slightly more aggressive with link building Here are a few more examples of SEO specific topics that were hot no so long time ago – Google’s Florida Update, Google Analytics, Yahoo Publisher Network etc. |
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