Identifying Quick Wins

When I ask a new client what they are looking for, the answer almost always involves either the phrase “low hanging fruit” or “quick wins”. It makes sense too, we all want to find efforts that have a low cost associated with them (resource or monetary) and have a significant impact. Unfortunately quick wins frequently tend to be harder to find than high cost initiatives like revamping your entire site architecture.

I went through some old reports and came up with the following list of Items to check that can provide quick wins:

404 Errors

While 404 errors aren’t inherently bad, they can become a problem if there is a lot of link equity associated with these pages. Sometimes you can end up with several 404 error pages receiving a significant amount of links. This is frequently due to things like site redesigns (and not employing proper 301 redirects) or killing off old product inventory.

To fix this, 301 404 pages with link equity to the most similar page. If there isn’t a similar page, the decision process becomes less black and white. In this circumstance, I like to redirect to a relevant parent or category page.

302 Redirects

These are bad. We all know that 302’s don’t pass link equity but 301’s do. The good news is that these aren’t your fault and you can look pretty good if you come in and have them fix a bunch of 302’s and consolidate their link equity causing an increase in traffic. Easy.

Pages blocked by robots.txt

Are you orphaning link equity and prevent it from flowing to other pages? A lot of sites receive links to their privacy, TOS, and about pages but have them blocked by robots.txt. This blocks this link equity from flowing out to other pages and the link equity is stuck at a page Google can’t access. Bad news.

To fix this, you should remove the page from your robots.txt file and link to important relevant pages. If you want to keep these pages out of the index, you can throw up a meta robots “noindex” tag.

Text in an image

A problem I saw quite frequently when working with small businesses was that many of their pages were done using a lot of images. The reason behind this was usually that they got the cheapest web designer they could find (or their friend’s kid “does web design” and made them a site). The solution is pretty simple (but not always elegant for a small business to implement), get that text out of an image.

Having content stuck in Flash is another common iteration of this.

XML sitemaps

If your client has poor indexation but isn’t submitting an XML sitemap, simply submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools can have a significant impact on indexation. It’s important to understand that XML sitemaps aren’t a replacement or solution for having poor site architecture.

While XML sitemaps help with indexation, they don’t pass link equity so you may be able to get pages indexed but they won’t rank (unless they are very long tail oriented pages). The fact that these pages aren’t in the index is a sign that you currently don’t have an optimal site architecture, so you should really look into improving your site architecture instead of just creating and submitting your XML sitemap in GWMT.

Meta robots noindex/nofollow

You should check to see if important pages (or sometimes all pages) are being kept out of the index. Sometimes a noindex tag will get carried over from a dev environment and will be overlooked or the tag might be mistakenly put into the code. Regardless of the reason, it happens. Check to make sure the tag is being applied appropriately.

Further, you should check to make sure the nofollow tag is applied appropriately. I’ve seen things like all internal links get nofollowed during a code push. Again, while it may not be common, check for it.

A great way to monitor this (as well as other significant errors) is through the SEOmoz Campaign app (warnings shown below).

Internal anchor text

Is your content being linked well? If you aren’t going to link to your own content with great keyword phrases, who will? Notice how Songsterr links to AC/DC tabs with their song name while Ultimate Guitar links to AC/DC songs with the song name + tab. Make sure you are using an optimal keyword phrase to link to your content/product.

Local businesses targeting national terms

I have seen a lot of local businesses targeting national phrases where they should really be targeting local phrases. Think about a local bike shop. Local bike shops should be targeting localized keywords like “Santa Barbara Bike Shop” versus simply bike shop or the name of the bike shop.

Canonicalization

Dispersion of link equity can be a significant problem for some sites, consolidating that link equity can have a a significant impact, depending on the severity of the Make sure that the site is canonicalized not only with the canonical link tag but also with 301s. Make sure that you use 301’s to:

• Establish the www or non www version of the site as canonical
• Enforce a trailing slash (or not, just enforce one)
• Redirect extensions of index files to the root (/index.html > /)

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/identifying-quick-wins/31160/

How To Trick Black Hatters Into Building Links To Your Site

So you are intrigued by black hat SEO, just to scared to try it? Good, the only thing you will experience is pain.

But, there is another way to get black hat SEO to benefit your site while protecting it from the Google ban stick. As you already know, there is a real problem with content being stolen and used around the Web. It infuriates most site owners, but it makes me very happy ;)

So, let’s set a little trap for the black hatters and watch as links come pouring into our site.

Black Hat Content

Black hat SEO has many faces and has become as complex and challenging as white hat SEO. Most black hatters spend most of their time focused on link building and figuring out ways to game the system. They are not natural content creators.

Actually, creating content is the bane of most black hatter’s existence. So they steal it from all types of sources. The smart ones know where to find content that has not been indexed, like sites that do not take advantage of ping. You are not one of those webmasters, right?

You, on the other hand, have one very unique advantage over black hatters, you love to create good content. Content that is legible and popular. Content that is loved by the search engines and regularly indexed.

Even if you use ping, when black hatters steal your content they are betting on their domain and link authority to push their page above your page in the SERPS. If it doesn’t work, oh well, your page of content is only one of thousands that they have automatically scraped and stolen.

Black Hat Automation

Black hat SEO is about one thing, automation. They look for ways to automate their processes. The more automated processes they employ that is successful, the more successful they are.

To scrape content, a black hatter needs a page related to that information to scrape. They have to be able to automatically locate that content through other sources.

RSS feeds make it extremely easy to steal content, since it is in standard format for RSS readers.

Here is how the process goes down typically:

1. Black hatter builds site own specific niche, like “Digital Cameras”
2. He scrapes the Google Blog search for the most recent posts related to “Digital Cameras”
3. He scrapes the sites featured in the blog search and steals the content, posting it to his WordPress blog
4. He automatically gathers inbound links to these pages at a heavy rate, usually from a large link network that he has set up, scraping content to do so.
5. He repeats the process over and over again until Google finally bans his domain and hopefully has made his money from the affiliate or ads on his site

Black hatters hopes they can overcome white hat sites with sheer volume of links and content. If it didn’t work, there would not be so many black hat SEO’s.

Backlink Placement

The key to making your stolen content work for you is to include back links in your post to your site. This can be manual links or related posts at the end of your post. Most black hat SEOs do not remove the links inside of a post. It is less likely that they will be reported for spamming if they leave the links intact.

Plus, removing the links requires more processing time and is not in their best interest to do so. This leaves you with a great inbound link opportunity.

Using a plugin like RSS footer gives you the ability to add a link to your original post and a link to your home page with your chosen anchor text. Both of these tactics are extremely effective. Linking to the original post insures that your post will always outrank the content the black hatter has stolen.

Getting your content stolen

It is a good idea to provide a full version of your post in your RSS feed if you are using RSS footer. This makes your site easier to scrape. The more times your site is scraped and your content is stolen, the more backlinks you will acquire.

Make sure you can get to your feed by going to /feed/. If you can’t, add a 301 redirect to your site sending visitors and scrapers to your true feed location.

Promote your RSS feed to as many aggregators as possible. Every time you publish a new post, you want the content scrapers to grab your page and post it on their site.

Make sure to ping Google blog as this is one of the favorite places to find new content sources for many black hatters. Ping everyone, everywhere.

Advanced Technique

Alright, this technique is slightly gray hat. You have been warned.

You need to create a script that monitors what is hot in the online universe. You can pull the Twitter hot feed or any other social media tracking stats.

You can bet that if something goes hot on Twitter or other social media outlets, black hatters are moving rapidly to capture whatever search traffic they can. What do the black hatters need? That’s right, your content.

So, we want to trick them into linking to your content over and over again. Here is what you do:

1. Create a script that monitors what’s hot
2. Create a pinging script to ping blog aggregators (I would leave Google out)
3. Create a scraper to grab generic post titles from a blog aggregator
4. Once you have those three scripts, you combine them into one script that looks at what is hot, creates random post titles, adds your post with internal links, and pings blog aggregators.

So, you ping the same post with the same links back to your main page over and over again with a different title. Make sure to include a canonical URL in the head section of your page in case Google finds the page.

Your site on Digital Cameras republishes the same content over and over again under a different title and slightly different URL. The black hatters are monitoring the same social media telling them what is hot. Their script detects from one of the blog aggregators that your site has a recent post on the subject based on the title.

They grab your content and post it on their site. While all the black hatters fight to rank for the topic, you sit back and collect as many links as you want.

You could literally gather thousands of links in a very short period of time. Remember, you don’t want to overdo this technique. But if you are stuck a few pages back, you may want to give it a try.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-trick-black-hatters-into-building-links-to-your-site/31173/

33 Things You Can Do To Grow Your Business Today…

Every day you are given the gift of time (OK, so there is never enough of it, I hear ya, but all you can do is make the most out of what you do have). So what are you going to do during that time?

There are so many demands on your time, your To Do list is growing rapidly and there is always a fire to put out. Again, I hear ya. BUT what happens is you become too reactive and not proactive enough. We all spend so much time reacting to things, we never get to being proactive about the important things – the things that will help grow a business.

So let’s set aside some time each day and let’s pick 33 things that will help grow our businesses.

There is no magic pill or fairy dust that produces traffic. But there are a bunch of activities you can engage in that will produce traffic. There ARE 33 things you can do today to help grow your business. Then there are 33 more things tomorrow. The next day you could try doing 33 more things. You get the idea. Daily action puts you a step closer to your goals.

So what are the 3 things you could do? Let me give you some ideas:

1. Check on your exposure in the search engines – there is usually something you can do to boost your SEO efforts. Add content, check for broken links, look at web stats and Webmaster Tools and identify problem areas, build links, ask your SEO firm how you can help (if you’ve outsourced the work) etc.

2. Get active on Facebook. Some ideas:

• a. If you don’t have a Fan Page – get one. (Need help with that? Email me and I’ll get you a quote).
• b. Invite new friends and fans so you can network and connect.
• c. Post to your Fan page and engage fans.
• d. Look into a contest to grow your fan base.
• e. Make sure your Blog, Facebook, Twitter and site are all working well together for maximum benefit.

3. Get active on Twitter:

• a. If you don’t have an account yet, get one started.
• b. Writer tweets and engage your followers.
• c. Connect with industry leaders.
• d. Share content.
• e. Build followers.

4. Build content for your site or Blog. Make it interesting, engaging and be sure you include calls to action.

5. Write a newsletter or email offer for your list.

6. Check your Blog’s backend and be sure it’s properly configured with the right plugins to get maximum benefit.

7. Check your web stats and find areas you can improve your site to increase your bottom line.

8. Check for 404 errors and clean up your site. Not as fun but important none the less.

9. Review Webmaster Tools and see what you can learn to improve the optimization of your site. (Notice I mentioned it in the first suggestion and then slid it

in there again? It was worth repeating)

10. Review content and make sure there are no errors, make sure your copy is clean and tight and prepared to sell your site visitors when they enter your site.

11. Test your shopping cart to make sure everything works and is user friendly.

12. Invite Guest Bloggers to add some interest, different perspectives and fresh content to your Blog.

13. Check on your PPC campaigns and see what you can improve.

14. Set up split tests on landing pages to improve results.

15. Find opportunities for you to be a Guest Blogger.

16. Make sure your product feed is working and up to date.

17. Look into mobile search and mobile marketing.

18. Make sure your local listings are all accurate, up to date and optimized for maximum results and exposure.

19. Get active on LinkedIn.

20. Follow up with leads and prospects (follow up is a key area that most businesses fail)

21. Identify opportunities that you have been too busy to take advantage of and get on it!

22. Get a press release out there.

23. Write an article for syndication (just know the rules and guidelines so this doesn’t end up working against you)

24. Get a video online and promote it like crazy.

25. Check out your competitors and see what you need to do to beat them out.

26. Build links. (Yep, another repeat but again worthy of the repeat)

27. Check out Google+ (ask for an invite if you don’t have one)

28. Add “Like” and “+1” buttons to your site and Blog.

29. Network and comment on Blogs and forums. No spamming allowed. Offer real insight and contribution to the conversation.

30. Plan a webinar or conference call to present to prospects.

31. Create a Whitepaper that people can get after they opt-in and promote via social media to build your list.

32. If you prepare written proposals for clients, look at your template and make sure it’s clean, easy to understand, full of benefits and error free. Your proposal is going to be what either excites them to talk further about doing business with you or it turns them off because it doesn’t look professional or grab their attention.

33. Come up with your own list of items if you think I forgot something. Take it up somewhere in your office so you see it every day and then be sure every single day you pick 3 and take ACTION.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-things-you-can-do-to-grow-your-business-today%E2%80%A6/31176/

Google Focusing In, Retiring Labs & Other Projects

There’s little doubt that Google has long employed a “strategy of everything,” attempting to be all things to all people – at least on the internet. However, Larry Page (co-founder and, since April, CEO) has spearheaded a new tactic of increased focus and more concrete prioritization. As part of that effort, many Google projects have been retired. The newest casualty is Google Labs.

The Retirement of Google Labs

Google Labs, a site that demonstrates new Google project ideas (and works as the first beta/vetting opportunity), has been a major part of Google since 2006. However, this product is being retired alongside a large number of APIs and several additional side-projects. “While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead,” explained Bill Coughran, Google’s SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure.

The labs won’t all disappear (although, yes, many will). As stated by Coughran, for some labs “we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas.” Additionally, several mobile labs will continue to be available for download on the Android market.

Page’s Focus

Larry Page commented on the company’s new, more focused strategy. “While much of that work has not yet become visible externally, I am very happy with our progress here. Focus and prioritization are crucial given our amazing opportunities,” he stated. “Indeed, I see more opportunities for Google today than ever before.”

Part of the prioritization process involved shutting down services like Google Health, Google PowerMeter, and a long lineup of APIs. The remaining products are being streamlined and simplified, according to Page. Certainly the release of Google+ has shown a lot more branding unity and cross-integration, and if Page’s remarks and the current trends are any indication, we can expect a lot more of this in the future.

[Sources include: Larry Page & The Official Google Blog, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-focusing-in-retiring-labs-other-projects/31236/]

5 Smart Ideas On How To Use Video For Your Blog

If you own or manage a blog site, then most likely multimedia is on the list of things to do as part of your content marketing strategy. But did you know that videos are often an overlooked part of of an overall content strategy?

This puzzles me because videos are viewed at an alarming rate according to YouTube sources (and there are other video streaming sites too). Daily views of video is at 2 billion per day, per this infographic on Mashable. That’s an insane statistic, and it gets more insane when you consider that video sharing via social media is also very high. So it makes sense to add multi-media to your blog and to do it in the form of video. Let’s take a look at five ways to use video on your blog site.

1. Reviews – one of the best ways to explain an idea, service or product is to have it come alive via video. You can do it yourself or hire someone to film and produce a high quality video that reviews your concept like nothing else can. Keep it short under 2 minutes and make it fun, interesting or controversial.

2. Customer Testimonials – are your blog readers, customers or visitors praising you left and right? Best capture it on video and let your new audience see the praise. Video testimonials are all the rage on epic shopping sites such as Amazon. Why? Because people love to watch video and what better way to showcase what someone has said about you, your company or your service than with a live representation.

3. Interviews – is there someone in your blog niche that you wish to interview? Perhaps a fellow blog owner that is releasing a shiny new product your readers should know about? Whatever the case, make sure video is at the forefront of what or whom you seek to interview. This can be a super simple set up where you meet with the intended person and ask a series of questions live on the scene or you can send your questions over email to the interviewee and have him or her set it up and and send it your way.

4. Contests – who doesn’t love a fun contest with an awesome giveaway? Many blog readers and visitors will do just about anything to win the big prize, including submitting wacky videos of themselves in all sorts of situations. For your contest, make it the point of entry. In order to win, have the contestant submit a video he or she made at home. This could be a great way to attract traffic to your blog, not too mention keep visitors on longer. Since everyone will want to watch all the videos the others have submitted. The more fun everyone is having, the better your chances of making it a successful video contest. Go big!

5. Product Showcase – you can describe a product via text and do it justice, however words cannot describe, show and tell quite like a video can. Wouldn’t you agree? Why do you think commercials are so effective at getting people to a store to try out the latest toy, electronic, gadget, etc. Just think of the “Old Spice man” and his uber successful videos. He has managed to bring back a franchise my dad was into, a brand no one in the last decade ever thought or talked about anymore. Now it’s become a household name again. The power of video at work.

So aside from the fact that using videos on your blog is good for traffic, it’s also good for any of the five ideas mentioned above. Be creative, be daring, be controversial, be inspiring. Just don’t side step it any longer, try using video on your blog today.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-smart-ideas-on-how-to-use-video-for-your-blog/31168/

How to Conduct a Quality Score Audit

You know Google’s got this “quality score” (QS) thing – and you know it matters. It matters because AdWords uses this 1 to 10 scale to rate how good and relevant your ad is compared to others, and the more relevant AdWords thinks your ad is, the more it’ll get shown and the less you’ll get charged for each click.

First, let’s quickly review…

What factors into the quality score calculation

• Clickthrough rate (CTR)
• Ad history
• Landing page relevance
• Landing page speed

This is a simplistic view; in reality, there are lots of factors that influence the quality score calculation and you can read more about them in this more comprehensive post.

What’s most critical is this: CTR is the single biggest determinant of QS. If you have fantastic CTR – assuming you landing page loads normally – you’ll usually have great QS.

How to improve quality score

Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

• Separate the good from the bad. Start with the hatchet, and then we’ll use the scalpel. Set up a filter using AdWords Editor for all keywords with QS < 7. Cut all of those keywords and put them in a separate campaign(s).

The traditional school of thought around QS is that, although it’s only reported in the AdWords interface at the keyword-level, there’s actually adgroup-level and campaign-level QS too. The higher the overall QS of your adgroups and campaigns, the better.

You also want to isolate the QS < 7 keywords in order to troubleshoot them.

• Figure out why the QS is poor. Bad QS indicates poor relevance. Luckily, Google helps you troubleshoot this, at least in broad strokes, if you mouse over the little speech bubble in the “Status” column when looking at the “Keywords” view.

It can also be useful to try the diagnostic tool (the “Ad Preview and Diagnosis” link shown above). In the case above, though, there are no clear issues with the QS. It’s just that the keyword / ad combo isn’t all that fantastic when compared against others for this search term. The thing to do in this case is, well, see point “a” below.

Here are a few common reasons your QS sucks:

• Your keywords need to be tightly related to the ads in your adgroup. If your keywords are thematically all over the place, your overall CTR will come down and impact QS.
• The destination page where you’re sending people who click your ad isn’t clearly relevant to the content of your ad. If your ad is for flowers, that landing page better be about flowers.
• Your ad copy doesn’t contain the words in the keyword phrase you’re bidding on. This comes back to having small, tightly thematic adgroups. Your ads need to say to users, “You searched for pretty red flowers, and I’m all about pretty red flowers.”
• Your landing page loads too slowly. It isn’t super common that your page loads so slowly that Google dings you with respect to quality score.
• This is a controversial one, but Google account teams have confirmed it to me in the past: you’re simply not bidding enough. If you’re in a competitive space and your bid is leaving you with a poor average position (5-8, let’s say), your position results in a poor CTR and that poor CTR impacts your QS. Harsh but true.

The only solution here is to create a single-keyword adgroups, A/B test ads that are super relevant, and raise your bid. If you achieve decent position and start to get that CTR up, developing some good CTR history will help you and can eventually make the term less expensive.

• Raise your CTR. Sounds easy enough. How?
• Make your ad copy laser-targeted. How to write good AdWords ad copy is a whole other beast, but at minimum, know that you need to say what you’re offering in the ad headline, match it to the specific words the user searched, repeat those words throughout the ad (but don’t overdo it – the ad needs to read like it makes sense or you’ll lose credibility), and capitalize the first letter of each word, excluding prepositions, conjunctions, etc.
• Try this exercise. Google one of your top keywords and take a look at what competitors’ ad copy focuses on. Check out the search I conducted below to buy herbal tea online.

What do you notice about each of the ads? The first one emphasizes health benefits. The second one touts a testimonial (I’m not sure who Sir Jason Winters is, but if I’m ignorant, just let me know in the comments). J The third promotes its tea as “award winning” and offers a coupon code. The fourth ad is all about low prices and free shipping.

Now, go into your own AdWords account and create 3 ads tied to a few of your highest-volume keywords. Make sure they’re related closely enough to share an adgroup. Focus each of the 3 ads on a completely different benefit. One can be price-oriented with a coupon code; another can talk about all the great press you’ve gotten on CNN and the BBC.

Measure their respective CTRs and get a sense for what your customers care about most. Then, kill the 2 underperformers and create 2 new ads focused on the winning benefit, using different wording. Test tweaks to description line 2, for instance. This is how you refine ad copy to lock down a great CTR and a solid quality score.

The bottom line

While there’s no one-size-fits-all QS solution, and no one knows exactly how the algorithm works, we do know you’re typically rewarded with good QS when you build strong account history with highly relevant ads that point to good landing pages.

If you adhere to guidelines from the “layman’s 30-minute SEM audit,” develop single-keyword adgroups and maximize traffic coming from exact match keywords – that often covers half the battle when it comes to quality score optimization.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-conduct-a-quality-score-audit/30899/

Top 15 Free Things Every E-Commerce Website Should Do After Launching

Here is a list of the top 15 things every e-commerce owner/marketer should do after launching their new site. I am not including anything like keyword research, competitive analysis, on-site SEO, creating unique/keyword rich content, or anything else that is generally done before a site is launched. With that being said, here are the top 15…

1. Create a sitemap.xml file (and robots.txt file)

- This will get your newly created site indexed by the search engines. You can choose to link to the sitemap directly from your website, or you can opt to upload your sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Central, and Yahoo Site Explorer. There are a number of sites online that will create a free sitemap for you (as long as your site in under a certain number of pages).

*Note – you may also want to set up a robots.txt file to disallow certain search engines from indexing unwanted pages in your site. This is used to eliminate duplicate content, preserve “crawl space” (as I like to call it), and keep unwanted pages out of the index (such as your shopping cart page).

2. Set-up product feeds

- Setting up well optimized product feeds can be tedious at first, but it is well worth the effort. The data feed can then be submitted for free to various places such as Google, MSN Shopping, TheFind, Price.com, myTriggers.com, & PriceSCAN. There are also paid services that operate on CPC and % based pricing structures. Data feeds will earn you more traffic and resulting sales. There is no good reason not to have one submitted to all of the free outlets.

3. Submit to DMOZ and other free niche directories

- The Open Directory Project or DMOZ is one of the best free links you can receive. Every new site (e-commerce or other) should submit their site to DMOZ upon launch. Due to the incredibly large amount of entries, it may take a while (months) for your site to be included. Be patient, high quality sites are often included. If you operate as a micro site or an affiliate site – well then try your luck somewhere else.

- There are usually also a number of niche directories you will be able to submit your e-commerce site to. If it is well designed and visually appealing, submit to any number of CSS galleries and directories. If you sell Bar Mitzvah cards, try submitting to Jewish directories. Get creative with your searches and you should find some easy, free, and relevant directories well worth your time and effort to submit to like www.perfectwebdirectory.info, directory.freewebsitelist.com etc.

*Note – Don’t forget to submit to free local directories!

4. Sign up for Google Analytics

- Google analytics is a no brainer for any website, e-commerce or not. It is completely free to use and is a very capable analytics program – sufficient for most of the sites online. All you need is a Gmail address and then place the analytics code on your site, and you are good to go.

*Note – Do not forget to set-up goals and conversion funnels. Also remember to filter out your own IP address and the IP address of anyone else that works on the site. Last, you may want to take advantage of one of the newer features and install page load time tracking.

5. 301 Redirect your various homepage URLs to be consistent

- While this may seem like a small tweak, it can actually be the difference between your site ranking on the 1st page or the 4th. If your site URL is http://www.perfectwebdirectory.info but you also have http://perfectwebdirectory.info (along with other variations like /index.htm) you are creating duplicate content & spreading your link juice across multiple URLs. It’s standard practice to use a 301 redirect to consolidate all of these pages to one URL. Whichever version you choose is up to your discretion.

6. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools & Webmaster Central

- This step is incredibly simple, and it can provide you with a variety of useful data points that will allow you to manage your site more effectively. You will be able to track backlinks, organic search clicks/impressions/CTR, average site load time, html errors, most important keywords, and much more. All you have to do is register your site and verify using one of the various methods. I suggest verifying through meta-tags or uploading a file to your server. It’s incredibly simple, yet incredibly useful. You may also wish to set up an account with Bing Webmaster Central – the Microsoft version of Google Webmaster Tools.

*Note – Don’t forget to set your preferred domain, as well as your geographic targets.

7. Send out a press release

- Sending out a press release is another must. A simple introduction of your company, what you sell, what makes you unique, etc is all it will take. While you can pay a lot of money to have this press release distributed, there are also a large number of free sites that will let you distribute for free (and some even let you include backlinks). Some of the most popular are PR.com, PRlog.org, OpenPR.com, Free-Press-Release.com, 1888PressRelease.com, i-Newswire.com, 24-7PressRelease.com, TheOpenPress.com, submissionsvalley.com, PRUrgent.com, pressreleaseprint.com, PressMethod.com, & of course eCommWire.com.

8. Start a free blog

- Blogging is a great way to engage your audience, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, network, and build quality backlinks. Use a free platform like Blogger or WordPress and you can have a company blog started in less than 30 minutes. You can also pay to have the blog hosted on your domain – either way, it’s up to you.

*Note – Don’t forget to set up an RSS feed for your blog!

9. Create social media accounts

- Nowadays it seems every business in every industry has social media accounts. While not every industry truly needs to be on Facebook, every e-commerce website should be. Create social media accounts on the big 3 – Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn. You may also want to create accounts on Youtube, Quora, Flickr, MySpace, Scribd, or any number of other social media sites related to your niche. For example, a retailer of baby products would want to make an account on CafeMom. Use your best judgment to determine which accounts are worth your time, and which aren’t. There’s no point of creating an account if you aren’t going to participate in the community and keep your information current.

10. Create social bookmarking accounts and start bookmarking your most important pages

- Social bookmarking is a great way to gain traffic and backlinks. While the links are not as authoritative as other sources, they will get your site indexed quicker and they are a great starting point for any e-commerce site that has just launched. The major players are Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Folkd, Fark, Diigo, Slashdot, & StumbleUpon. Wists, Kadooble, Fancy, & Nuji are also great social shopping sites that allow you to bookmark your products and gain traffic/backlinks. There are thousands more sites for social bookmarking, but unless you have an unlimited amount of time and resources to dedicate to this – I suggest you stick with the big ones and actively participate. It’s better to have a few social bookmarking accounts that carry weight, than hundreds that are neglected.

11. Sign up for HARO

- HARO (or Help a Reporter Out) is one of, if not the best place online for free PR. It’s a completely free subscription based service consisting of 3 day emails loaded with queries from various media outlets. It’s made up of journalists and bloggers looking for expert opinions, stories, and products. It’s a no brainer for any e-commerce site. You have the opportunity to earn media coverage on a wide variety of outlets – from the largest to the relatively small.

*Note – There are similar, yet smaller, services that virtually mimic HARO – Reporter Connection, Pitch Rate, & Flacklist (think Facebook meets HARO), just to name a few. They are all free and definitely worth your time.

12. Set up Google Alerts to monitor brand mentions (& competitors)

- Setting up Google Alerts is simple as can be. Visit google.com/alerts and type in the terms that you want to be notified of as soon as they are included in any new indexed web pages. This is great to monitor brand mentions – not just your own, but also those of your competition. It’s also great for monitoring your most important keywords. You may find new opportunities or inspiration relatively quickly. Best of all, its free, and you don’t even need a Gmail account to use it.

13. Take advantage of $75 of free Google Adwords coupons

- There are many reasons for e-commerce site to try Google Adwords at least once. It can give you a better idea of the actual search volume of specific keywords, it lets you know which keywords your site performs best for, it lets you test different ad copy/promotions/landing pages/and marketing messages, and you can get $75 credit free when starting a new account! There’s no good reason not to give it a shot…

14. Sign up for and/or verify your local search pages

- If you are an E-commerce site with an actual brick and mortar storefront, you should be claiming and verifying your local search pages. Google Places, Yelp, Yellowpages, CitySearch, SuperPages, InsiderPages, Merchant Circle, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local are the first places to optimize for. Local search is a completely different animal…but signing up for and verifying your place pages is the first step to gaining additional, local traffic.

15. Inform all of your contacts about your new site

- This one seems like a no brainer, but you would be surprised how many people simply forget to utilize their existing database to help spread the word about their new business. You can choose to use email, phone calls, or traditional mail.

*Note – Don’t forget to link to your website and any relevant social accounts in all of your email signatures from launch date onward.

These last tactics were so close…but didn’t make the cut. – Either because they were too advanced for the normal e-commerce site owner, not a large enough priority after an initial site launch, take too long to become effective, require too many resources, or because they are not entirely necessary for operating a successful e-commerce site. There were also many other ways to market your new e-commerce site that were not included, simply because they cost money.

• Register for an affiliate program (a free one)
• Blog comments and Q&A site participation
• Download free SEO toolbars for Firefox
• Article marketing
• Guest Blogging
• Link request emails
• Competitor link theft
• Giveaways, donations and product reviews
• Link bait
• Forum participation
• Submissions to general directories
• Creation of a press list and contact of all the bloggers/journalists in your niche

Hopefully all you e-commerce people out there have already knocked most of the items off of this list…and if you haven’t – what are you waiting for? The sooner you get going, the sooner you start increasing traffic and start making more money.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-15-free-things-every-e-commerce-website-should-do-after-launching/30906/

What can Google Images See?

Like many SEOs I like the idea of advertorial content for link building purposes – it’s quality written content, which is rich in semantic keywords, and is genuinely interesting for customers. Furthermore, it drives engaged traffic, you have control over anchor texts, and the sites that carry advertorials are usually of high value.

However, Google doesn’t like them unless they use a ‘nofollow’ instruction (link attribute). While this is not necessarily a problem in itself, for a number of reasons, many people still want to be able to have followed links rather than be dictated to.

As part of the ever-changing landscape, advertorial content on news sites needs to be described using words such as ‘this is advertorial’ or ‘sponsored content’ and this isn’t even a decree from Google - it is a legal requirement. So, to avoid using crawlable, detectable words like ‘advertorial’ on a page, many publishers have been using an image with no alt text to ensure they are legally compliant without being ‘Google Compliant’ per se.

Unfortunately, Google appears to have been trying to stay ahead of this, learning to crawl text within images and as rumours have it, within flash. So, with all this in mind, how can we test what Google actually 'sees'?

From what we can see, aside from colour signals, Google is getting clues from the page the image appears on, such as; target page, proximal content, or content in general, alt tags etc.

Time for a Little Experiment...

A search Sponsored post image brings up these results:

On the right hand side of the results:

…exactly what I was after.

But if you check the page that the image is from, there are numerous references to ‘sponsored post’ on the page; alt, URL, article title, nearby text, so that’s easy for Google to discern:

A Google image search for the actual image URL brings up these results below… all pretty close matches and it seems to have got the ‘sponsor’ bit right. But; all the main results in the ‘pages that include matching images’ section are from pages that have at least one on-page clue that the image relates to ‘sponsor’, and the ‘visually similar images’ at the bottom are clearly colour based, rather than matching text. So, no actual evidence that Google is reading the images.

So I tried saving one of the sponsored images as something unrelated, ‘billybobharry’ in this case, and then uploading that file straight into to the search to see what I get. Lo and behold, I get exactly the same results as for the URL search above. I wasn’t expecting that:

The results are exactly the same; so you would have to deduce that Google can match images exactly.

I then tried a search with another image from my PC (the image can also be found online) and I only get the results of the exact same image from across the web, but nothing with the same subject (me) in a different context. So, Google can match images exactly, but it’s idea of visually similar is very rough at best - I look nothing like these people…

But … and here’s the good bit … if I create an image in paint with the words ‘Sponsored Post’ clear and bold across a white background, I get only visually similar images, no matches for the text itself (Google likes to put in the natural results for ‘time cost quality’ for this search. I couldn’t get rid of it at all). There are no clues as to the meaning of the image online for Google, and no online match for the file, so it just gives me visually similar images, and nothing even close to sponsored post images.

In short, if an image is going to be used to hide text, such as ‘sponsored post’, then I think this strategy will still work for the moment.

Good news! If you like that sort of thing.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2092604/What-can-Google-Images-See

Buying Links With Nofollows

A HighRankings Forum thread has one SEO saying he was asked by another SEO company to sell them a link, a text link. But the weird part is the SEO company specifically asked for the link to be nofollowed.

Typically when you get a request to buy a link, the person requesting specifically wants the link to be clean of nofollows but not in this case.

We have sold several nofollowed links on this site, based on request. Most of the time it has to do with testing Google and sometimes it has to with fear of being caught for buying links and even some people just don't want the link value.

But in most cases it is SEOs trying to test things.

I'd be careful when selling links and even if they do not want it to be followed, they might come back to you later and ask you to remove the nofollow. So be careful and make sure the deal is in writing and includes the nofollow portion of the deal.

That being said, Google says there is nothing wrong with selling links with nofollow - so enjoy.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/paid-nofollowed-links-13678.html

Google+ Review; Can It Beat Facebook?

A good friend of mine who was one of the first people on Google+ shared a photo of his wife with me yesterday. As he shared it through Google+ I was automatically sent an invite so that I could join up and see the photo. This has proved to be a great opportunity to learn a little bit about Google+ before it is released to the general public.

On first glance Google+ is very much like Facebook. Your homepage has your entries on, then you see notifications from friends and acquaintances. Your profile photo is to the left, the search bar above and the menu to change settings all on the top right. It feels familiar to start with.

However, Google+ features something which is very new – Circles. This is likely to be the single feature that will encourage more people to migrate from Facebook to Google. In the news tech reporters are talking about Google+ being more secure and having better privacy settings than Facebook. The main reason for this is that you have much better control over who sees you and your content.

Google+ Circles

Google+ Circles allow you to place other Google+ users and non-users (they receive an invite when you share something with them) into seperate “circles”. This allows you to avoid embarrasing situations such as your parents hearing about what you have been getting up to in the evening, or your boss hearing what you really think of the company that you work for. Here is how it works.

You start with 3 main circles; Friends, Family and Acquaintances. There are also Following and Blocked, which allows you to Follow people without them becoming your friend and also allows you to Block annoying people.

So, whereas with Facebook everyone will see your latest status update or photo, in Google+ you can upload a photo and then select the Friends circle to share with. Everyone else will be unaware of your new photo.

You can of course break this down further, for example you may want one group just for University friends and another for your friends in the football club. Likewise, you could use acquaintances for everyone in your work and business life, or use it exclusively for people you have met online but do not know very well. For example, I had added many people to Acquaintances who I have chatted to on forums and known through blogs etc.

So if I post something specifically about me or my family, I can share with just friends and family. If I post an article about a great new service I have found, such as MyBlogGuest.com, I can share it with Acquaintances only as many of my friends are not interesting in the business of the Internet. You can select people to individually share items with too, which makes it like a private messaging system. This is really what Circles is about. It is simple in theory but can become very powerful.

The other main features are the integration of Picasaweb photos into Google+. Any Picasaweb photos that you upload or comment on from now will appear on your Google+ homepage and be visible in accordance with the rules set in your Picasaweb settings. This is the first of the negative points though. If you chose to follow someone who is very popular then you may find that their photos infest your homepage as each time a new comment is added the photo will jump to the top of the page again. This is where the Mute button comes in very useful – you can chose to stop seeing updates on a post / photo / video etc.

Sparks so far seems to be lacking in any substance. The sites that come up in Sparks are generally not very well chosen. I have nothing else to say about Sparks at the moment other than it is a disappointment.

The other main feature is the Hangout. Here you can chose to arrange a Hangout with up to 10 people and chat in live with video or just audio, and generally use it to hook up. This is another feature which Facebook is severely lacking in and could be something to draw in the younger crowd.

Some Tips for Google+

When you first sign up by default you will receive email notifications for everything that you are involved in. You may want turn off these emails as your inbox will quickly get flooded. I chose to only receive notifications for when someone shared something with me for the first time. This seems to work well.

At the moment it is very clear that the Googlers are still doing a lot of testing, which is why not many people have been invited so far. Down the bottom right there is a “send feedback” button which will allow you to send a screenshot of any problems you are seeing.

The main difference between Google+ and Facebook at the moment, other than the lack of people, is that there are no diversions. No games, no extra add ons. It is refreshing in a way, but Facebook’s strength is that people login in the evening and stay glued to it all night as even when their friends are busy there are games to play or groups and pages to discuss things in. Google+ is a little quiet at the moment, and no groups either – apart from your own.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-review-can-it-beat-facebook/30911/

Google's Matt Cutts on PR Updates

PageRank, or PR, was once the most vital element of ranking in Google. Over time, PR has become just one of many ranking factors. Some have noticed, however, that PR has yet to see an update in the post-Panda world, which led to some questions about whether PR was being further diminished – or even discontinued – as a result of link-buying abuse or other frowned upon behavior. One brave individual, Rajeesh, contacted Matt Cutts to get the answer to just that question.

Cutts take a roundabout way of getting there, but I’ll skip to the important part: Yes, PageRank is still a thing, it will still be updated, and there’s no current indication that it’s being diminished as a ranking factor. To explain why people haven’t seen an update since Panda, however, Cutts took the time to explain how the PageRank numbers are generated and displayed.

As it turns out, Google actually keeps track of your new PR every time a portion of the web is re-crawled, which – thanks to Google caffeine – means constantly. The PR for all the sites on the web is “stored on a bank of machines,” and all that data can be exported manually and posted to the Google Toolbar. Additionally, the PR data in Google is “real floats or scalers” that go well beyond just the 0 to 10 rank that the toolbar provides.

The reason to keep the figures more narrow and the exports less frequent go back to avoiding webmaster obsession. Google decided they didn’t want webmasters checking back in multiple times per day to figure out exactly where their PR was, and Cutts specifically emphasizes that “there’s a lot of different stuff you can pay attention to beyond just that green indicator in the Google Toolbar.”

[Sources include: Google Webmaster Help, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-pr-updates/31024/]

A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing

Online article marketing can effectively improve organic search results in a number of ways:

• Improve visibility for your target keyword phrases
• Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches
• Assist in building awareness and reputation
• Increase targeted traffic from other quality related websites
• Helps attract more incoming links to your site
• Helps make your website more unique and useful

Google’s Panda update showed once again, that it’s important to have high quality, unique content. We recently evaluated a large ecommerce website that was stung by the Panda update. They have a few issues that have probably hurt them, but one of the areas of concern included many articles they had written and placed on various websites, many of which had been devalued in Panda.

In this article, I’ll cover the steps we take with article marketing. These steps have been developed from years of examining what competitors of our clients have done to become the ranking and traffic leaders in their industries. Effective article marketing is a key strategy for many of them.

Effective Article Marketing Is NOT About Submitting To Article Submissions Sites!

Let’s dispel a misconception right now. Submitting articles to article submission sites, especially low quality articles written primarily for search results, does little for you.

We examined the results of the work done for one of our clients, for example, by their prior SEO who was writing low quality articles and submitting them to article submission sites like ehow.com with links to their site. These articles where doing almost nothing for them (and this was prior to Panda). Checking their analytics, we saw that no traffic ever came from these article submission sites, ever! It’s very unlikely that these articles helped their search engine rankings at all.

Most article submission sites do not pass much, if any “link juice” (or PageRank or whatever you want to call it) to the sites the articles link to. We found none of these articles in any of the tools we use to identify strong links, those that may be helping improve search positions. Finally, none of the articles were ever picked up and run by any other site (no surprise as they’re not very good or useful articles).

Having your Web marketing company produce low quality articles is of little value to anybody (other than the marketing company that gets paid to write the articles).

The Goals Of Online Article Marketing

Effective article marketing is about writing quality articles that are useful or interesting to your market, using some on your own website and getting some published on other related websites.

Here are our goals for online article marketing for our clients:

• Improving Organic Search Results (Getting found for more keyword searches and helping to increase rankings).
• Help Attract Incoming Links To The Site.
• Building Awareness And Often Reputation Building.
• Increasing Targeted Traffic From Related Sites.
• To Help Make A Web Site More Unique And Useful (e.g. Help educate your readers, help them decide what products/services to buy, etc.).

Step 1: Start Writing Quality, Useful Articles For Your Own Web Site

Later, we’ll outline how to market articles to related websites but if you aren’t writing quality articles now, then get started by writing articles to use on your own website. You need some momentum and a critical mass of example articles before you can market articles to others.

Write articles that will be helpful to your website visitors and place summaries of the articles around your website where your site visitors will see them when they are interested in the topic. Don’t just put them in a blog or section of the site where most of your website visitors may never see them.

Crutchfield, the electronics reseller, for example, does an excellent job using articles on their website. Helpful articles (and more and more videos) are suggested as visitors examine product pages or browse product categories.

Browse to the Home Theater categories page, for example, and you’ll see articles and videos suggested such as those in the screen shot below.

Helpful Articles and Videos Suggested While Shopping

Make It Easy For Readers To Click Through To Related Products & Services

You want to make it easy for your article readers to get back to the location on your website they were looking at when they clicked to read the article.

For this reason, it’s best to host the articles on your website surrounded by the same or a very similar page template (banner, navigation sections etc) as that on the webpage they were looking at when they clicked through to the article.

It’s ok to host the articles in your blog, but it’s ideal if the blog has the same or similar page template too. We suggest that for most marketers your blog be a part of your main website, not a separate blog web site (See “Where to put your blog for best search engine results“). Put any articles that you do not use on your main website in your blog.

• Include links in your articles to products and services

Add links within the article or at the end of the article (or both) to get people who read the article to click through the main website, ideally to product or service category or item pages related to the article. As you progress with article marketing and get more and more people linking or sharing your articles, these links will help pass additional PageRank to your product and service pages helping them to rank better.

• Add social sharing buttons and announce your articles

Add social sharing buttons (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc) to your articles. Announce each of your useful articles through your social networks and other communication vehicles (like e-newsletters, etc) that you use. If they are truly useful articles some people will share them or link to them, which will help improve rankings and get more people to read them and learn what you have to offer.

Placing articles on your website helps entice visitors to read them why they are looking at related topics they are interested in. Useful articles help convey your expertise and make your webpages more unique (more important than ever after Panda).

In addition, these articles add content to the site that search engines should index and they’ll likely be found in searches. Finally, as you progress with article and social marketing, you’ll likely attract more and more incoming links to your articles from related websites bringing more targeted traffic and helping to increase rankings.

How To Find Article Ideas

You should never be at a loss for ideas for useful articles. Here are some tips to come up with compelling content.

Keyword research

Use your favorite keyword research tool to search on your important product or service keywords and see what related information people are searching for. You can write articles that address some of these searches.

For example, if your site is all about luggage and you see a number of people searching on phrases such as “carryon luggage regulations”, “carryon luggage sizes” etc you might write an article about carryon luggage regulations and sizes and include links to relevant pages on your site.

In this manner not only will you be helping to make your site more useful to your visitors, these articles will probably be returned in search results for people searching on phrases such as “carryon luggage regulations” who may read your article and learn about what you have to offer.

FAQ’s

What questions are you often asked about your products or services? Think about writing articles that answer some of those questions.

Search for articles ideas

You’ll usually find many articles by searching on your primary topic, product or service keywords and appending “articles” or “blogs” to the query such as “travel articles” or “travel blogs”. Or, search on the keywords within some of the article submission sites (search on “articles” and you’ll find tons of submission sites) . Scan through the article headlines for ideas (Ideas = inspiration. Not plagiarism.)

But I Can’t (Or Don’t Have The Time) To Write Articles

Can’t write or don’t have the time to write articles? Here are some ways to get articles written.

Empower your people

Perhaps some of the people who sell or market your products would just love to write articles. See the Crutchfield site mentioned above. Most of those articles and videos were developed by their product marketing folks.

Ask your customers

Perhaps some of your customers can write articles such as case stories like “how we use xx” type of articles.

Hire writers

Ideally, most of your articles should be original, but you could hire writers who specialize in your topics to produce useful articles. There are networks of writers who specialize in many topics. You can find some of them while you are searching for article ideas (See the section above).

As you look for article ideas, search on the names of the authors. Many times you’ll discover the author is a freelance writer who specializes in a couple of fields. Contact them about writing for you. It’s best to be honest and include the writer’s name as the author.

Use ghost writers?

This is an ethical question that I’m on the fence about and have never used myself or for any client. I believe it may be ok to use a ghost writer (such as a freelance writer who specializes in your field/topic) if you work closely with them, outline your initial thoughts, let them do research for you if needed, oversee the development of the article, work with them to revise the article, and make sure the article is accurate and reflects your knowledge and opinions.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-effective-online-article-marketing-83526

Google: PageRank Is No Longer The Be-All & End-All Of Ranking

Google has finally written a blog post specifically about PageRank and how Webmasters and SEOs should probably focus on other things.

The blog post is named Beyond PageRank: Graduating to actionable metrics, written by Susan Moskwa, one of the fearless Googlers involved with webmaster communication.

She said, "PageRank is no longer—if it ever was—the be-all and end-all of ranking." She then goes on to explain:

If you look at Google's Technology Overview, you'll notice that it calls out relevance as one of the top ingredients in our search results. So why hasn't as much ink been spilled over relevance as has been over PageRank? I believe it’s because PageRank comes in a number, and relevance doesn't. Both relevance and PageRank include a lot of complex factors - context, searcher intent, popularity, reliability - but it's easy to graph your PageRank over time and present it to your CEO in five minutes; not so with relevance. I believe the succinctness of PageRank is why it's become such a go-to metric for webmasters over the years; but just because something is easy to track doesn’t mean it accurately represents what’s going on on your website.

Susan instead recommends you look at the following metrics that are "actionable" such as conversion rate, counce rate and clickthrough rate (CTR).

This is not the first time Google has downplayed PageRank. They downplayed it in the recent toolbar upgrade and we know that Google's Matt Cutts has always wanted PageRank removed from the toolbar. Adam, back then "mini-Matt" asked for feedback on the removal of PageRank from the toolbar. Plus we know, many SEOs want it gone from the toolbar. There were rumors in 2008 that Google was removing it and it 2009 they removed the data from Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-pagerank-no-13645.html

Google+ Opens To More People, But Will That Last?

Haven’t gotten into Google+ yet? It appears anyone can sign-up now at the Google+ home page.

Hitting the page now brings up a sign-up box, rather than the usual “Keep Me Posted” message that I believe had been there:

Tony Steward on Google+ seems to be the first, or one of the first, to have spotted this, saying:

Just got news that Google Plus is open for everyone.

Earlier this week, Google opened up an invitation system for people to use. That was closed after only a few hours. So, it might be this opportunity will go away soon.

Note that some people are reporting that they get the “Keep Me Posted” type of message when they go to the page. It could be that Google is randomly allowing people in who visit the page.

Others say that even after they sign up, they get the “Keep Me Posted” message, like this:

But others do appear to be getting through.

Since invites were officially closed earlier this week, Google has still been allowing plenty of people through the system. The “share” method, described in Google Now Lets Those In Google+ Offically Invite Others, has been working for days now.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-open-to-everyone-but-will-that-last-84103