EzineArticles.com is widely known as “the” spot to place your well-written articles in order to help you get backlinks to your website.
Whether those backlinks come from Ezine Articles itself or from another website who has published your content.
However, in the future EzineArticles.com will no longer follow the links within your body text. It appears that as of now they will still follow the links in your author’s bio.
This is not yet implemented but look for it very soon in the future.
If you’ve been a bit gun-shy when it comes to advertising on Google’s AdWords program, afraid that it might cost you an arm and a leg, then Video advertising might be just what you’re looking for.
Google has rolled out the ability to advertise your videos on YouTube as a way to help your video get seen the same way that your ads get seen on a Google search results page.
Google is narrowing its focus more and more on segments of its audience and advertising via YouTube is another method of many that I’m sure we’re going to see in the future.
Not a whole lot of people are aware that they can advertise their videos much like they advertise text ads on AdWords and so the chances of you getting seen for a highly competitive keyword or phrase is much better and logic would have it, much cheaper than AdWords text-based advertising itself (at least for now).
Here’s an example, if I am at YouTube and I simply type in the keyword “baby” I get a list of about three sponsored videos on the right (highlighted in red).
YouTube Video Advertising
I haven’t yet noticed the typical “More Sponsored Links” that you usually see at the bottom of a typical Google search results page, like this (highlighted in red):
A screenshot of More Sponsored Links
So this leads me to believe that you’ve still got a window of time in which to get your video seen for your product or service, at least for a lower cost.
Google’s Video sponsored listings run much the same way as an AdWords advertisement would, you choose the keywords you want your video to rank for, set a price per click, and so on. So if you’re already familiar with AdWords then the YouTube sponsored listings might be just what you’re looking for to ramp up your sales.
Some statistics say that 51% of Internet users spend time viewing videos online. So why not take advantage of this while you can?
Just a quick post today before I head out to help with my son’s preschool Thanksgiving day party.
Lately I’ve been running across lots of neat Twitter applications that you might enjoy. Here are 4 of them.
Mr. Tweet - Ed Dale - http://twitter.com/Ed_Dale brought this one to my attention. What Mr. Tweet will do is give you a list of people that are outside your Twitter network that you should be following. It’s billed as a “personal assistant” for Twitter but acts like Facebook’s friend finder. You can read more about what Mr. Tweet does at http://mashable.com/2008/11/26/mr-tweet/
Quitter - Quitter will email you when someone stops following you and to top it off, will also tell you the Tweet you posted that may have caused them to stop following. You can read more about Quitter at http://mashable.com/2008/10/17/qwitter/
Magpie - Be-a-Magpie allows you to either purchase advertising on Twitter or earn money from advertising on Twitter.
TwitWall - Twitwall allows you to make those longer posts that you wish you could make in Twitter. Completely free for all Twitter users.
On November 20th, 2008 Google released it’s new SearchWiki that allows you to rearrange how you view your search engine results pages.
Here’s a quick video from Google explaining how it works. Once you watch this, I’ll give you my two cents on how this might affect your websites SEO positioning.
All right, so after watching the video you now know that you can:
Rearrange the search results to your liking;
Add notes to websites for your future reference;
Delete sites that you don’t want to see come up in your search results;
Add a web page that you’d like to see in your own search results and
Even read other people’s notes on websites if you like.
Keep in mind that the SearchWiki will only work if you’re signed into Google. If you are signed out of Google you’ll only see Google’s search results, not your personalized search results that you set up in SearchWiki.
How this relates to your overall SEO process.
Since SearchWiki has just been released to the public, we don’t quite know yet how it will affect search engine listings. However, I do have a few theories as to what Google is trying to accomplish with this seemingly helpful way to rearrange items on your search results pages.
One idea is that Google wants to incorporate real users information with their own algorithms. Since you, the end user of a search engine needs to remain happy, Google can only assume so much information about you. For years they have attempted to try and figure out what you, the web searcher, might be looking for when you use Google. This has been the basis for their algorithm over the past few years which has been updated, tweaked, and refined based on its own artificial intelligence.
With a SearchWiki, Google can now move out of the “assumption” phase of determining what you’d like to see in a SERP (search engine results page) and incorporate actual users preferences based on what sites they move up to the top of their own listings, what sites they delete and what sites they add to their search listings.
Now keep in mind that only you can see the search listings you personally have chosen. The actual search results that you see if you aren’t signed into Google will be Google’s typical search results.
However, I believe that as more and more people start using the SearchWiki, we’ll see this information end up as part of the overall Google search algorithm. So in essence, you’re building the algorithm for Google.
As with all things that could be a possibility and end up as part of a search results page, this is open to SPAM. Here’s how…
First, while signed into Google, you can add notes to each individual website. Since we aren’t sure yet, (but we can theorize all we want) whether or not these notes will be taken into account into regular search results pages, we can assume that Google will someday incorporate these notes into their overall algorithm.
This means that a search engine spammer could, theoretically, hire a large group of people to sign into Google and create keyword-rich notations for a particular website. Of course, we don’t know if these notes will be taken into account in Google’s algorithm, but again, we’re just theorizing here.
Additionally, these same folks could hire another group of people and add a website that they’d like to see listed at the top of their search results for a certain keyword phrase. Enough people adding a website could trigger to Google that this is a website a lot of people would like to see listed at the top of a SERP for a certain keyword.
Google’s SearchWiki, at least to me, is acting much like a voting system that you’d see at a social bookmarking site but instead of making your personal rearrangement public, it’s private (well, to you AND Google). At a typical bookmarking site, the more people who vote on a site, the further to the top the listing moves. I believe that Google is doing the same thing without actually calling this a “bookmarking” site. Kind of a Google 2.0 if you will. Google is taking notes as to what you do, but instead of sharing your arrangement with the world like you could share a bookmark with anyone you’d like, you’re only sharing your information with Google. Who, I believe will in fact use this in their future algorithm updates.
Keep in mind however, that not everyone on the planet has a Google account (much to Google’s dismay I’m sure) and so couldn’t possibly take into account every last web searchers preferences. But, there are plenty of us out there; enough to make a difference in Google’s entire algorithm.
Something else that could be potentially hazardous to search results is that of deleting a website when using SearchWiki.
Let’s say that another group of people are hired to purposefully delete a website from their search engine results listings when signed into Google. Could this then mean that with enough money, and enough people at their disposal, that a rogue company could take out their competition?
Remember this is all theory.
So let’s say that Company A has the #1 position and Company B has the #2 position in a Google search results page for a certain keyword.
Company B desperately wants that #1 position.
So rogue, underhanded Company B hires a vast amount of people to log into Google, and remove Company A’s listing from their personal search results perhaps affecting the overall positioning of Company A.
Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into a great search results listing but you can’t help but wonder if someone removing sites from their listings, adding keyword-rich notes to sites and then arranging certain sites to the top of their listings will make an overall difference in the entire future Google algorithm.
Again, these are simply theories. There’s nothing based in fact here, these are just the ramblings of an 8-year SEO veteran. So I wouldn’t take them into account whatsoever.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about something that is often overlooked in SEO and that will start to become a factor as the search engines continually update their algorithms. That is, find better and better ways to rank websites.
I’m referring to the importance of visitor engagement. So what is visitor engagement or VE? VE is the ability to draw people into your website and keep them there by offering engaging features that your competition may not offer. These are things like videos, audios, gadgets that enhance the website visitor experience, etc.
I believe that the days of strictly text-based websites that have little to no visual engagement for the website visitor are numbered.
Don’t misunderstand me however, I’m not saying that your site should not have text on it. What I am saying is that the text that you do have, needs to be enhanced with something a little more interactive such as video or audio.
As visitors attention spans get shorter and shorter, we need to find new and better ways to bring that visitor into the website and give them all kinds of opportunities to learn about the information that we want to share with them.
Just as there are people who prefer to read information, there are just as many if not more people who prefer to listen to information or to watch information. Reading takes a lot of time, and so it is your job as a website owner to integrate some visual or at least auditory aspects into your website to keep those site visitors engaged.
Here’s some ideas you can use as soon as today to aid in this VE experience:
Add Videos. If you don’t already have videos on your website you can either create some or use pre-made video content from sites like YouTube.com, Revver.com or Metacafe.com.
If you do add videos to your site from any of these sources, be absolutely certain that you watch the video yourself first, for a couple of reasons:A) You wouldn’t want any questionable content being revealed to your site visitors unknowingly. What a video says it is and what it really contains can be two different things.B) Be sure that the video doesn’t contain any self-promotion. That is, have a competing website address embedded within the video. If you don’t mind that another site that is complimentary to yours is advertising within the video, then feel free to use it. However, you certainly don’t want to be advertising your competition.
Create your own videos and upload them. A great program to use is Camtasia Studio - used for screen captures to walk people through websites or instruct them on just about anything you wish. Camtasia studio also integrates with PowerPoint so that you can create your own PowerPoint slide presentation and it also works with your webcam so you can simply have a virtual chat with your site visitors. I use Camtasia studio personally for all of my videos that you may have seen here at Bonehead SEO. Plus, Google labs is now in the process of indexing the audio contained in videos - it’s currently in beta but is a promising sign that not only will the text be indexed on your site but the words that you use within your videos will as well. You can read more about GAUDI at http://labs.google.com/gaudi/static/faq.html.
Record audio and then place an audio player on your website so that people can listen in. One suggestion that you can use is to take an article you’ve written and not only place that text on the page, but record the article as well - thus giving your site visitors the option of choosing their own VE.
Use gadgets that enhance your users experience on your site. A widget like the one from http://www.meebome.com/ allows you to add chat to your site so that you can interact with your visitors.
The bottom line is, as the search engines evolve as they always do and will continue to do, the VE that you have on your website could very well mean the difference between a good listing and a great listing.
One of the holy grail’s of online marketing and SEO is getting good incoming links to your site. Ideally links that don’t require a link back; also known as one way links.
But, as more and more people get familiar with, and use, the nofollow tag, these quality incoming links are getting harder and harder to come by.
Let me explain. A few years ago Google endorsed the “nofollow” tag within your links. This meant that any link you had on your website or blog that you didn’t want Google to follow, if you simply placed the rel=”nofollow” parameter within your link tag, Google would not follow that link to its destination page.
You might wonder why a website owner would choose to do something like this.
Well, there’s a few reasons:
The web page that the nofollow link is located on may not want to pass link juice. For example, if a web page has a PageRank of 6 every link located on that page gets a piece of that PageRank passed on to it and the web page owner might not want to give all links on that page a portion of its link juice instead choosing to keep all or most of the link juice for themselves.
The web page may have affiliate links on the page that they don’t want search engines following. If a search engine sees that you are linking out to lots of affiliate sites, they may devalue your page. Therefore, by using the nofollow parameter, these links don’t get followed back to the affiliate’s page.
However, there are still people online who don’t use the nofollow tag in their links. Whether this is by design or simply not knowing any better and it’s these pages that you want to locate so that you can get a true incoming link to your site.
That being said, here’s how to find sites that do follow your link.
It’s important to note here that if you find a blog related to your site’s content that you’d like to leave a comment on, be sure that the comment holds some value. Don’t simply post a non-sensical message just for the sake of getting a link back to your site.
Here are some dofollow blog directories that list blogs that all follow your link:
Lastly, there are many blogs who have downloaded and used the CommentLuv Wordpress plugin. What this means is that these people who are using this plugin have specifically chosen to follow links posted on their blog.
This source gives you a comprehensive list of blogs that are all using the CommentLuv Wordpress plugin.
And lastly, if you want to be sure that a blog or site is still following links, you’ll want to download a Firefox plugin that will highlight all of the nofollow links on a page. This allows you to see at a glance which sites are following and which ones aren’t. I created a video a while back to show you how this works.
Don’t be shy! Do you know of more resources that list blogs or sites that do follow? Let us know by commenting below.
Earlier today I had a question submitted to BoneheadSEO about a Google sitemap issue and felt that it was important that I answered it for everyone since it’s likely that at some point in your SEO career or even when you begin the Bonehead SEO courses, you may run across this same issue as well.
The question was:
I have a lot of these errors on many of my website files. What does it mean that the paths don’t match?
We’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that doesn’t include the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap do use the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/myfile.htm).
What this person ran into was nothing more than a simple error that can be easily fixed but to someone who is unfamiliar with submitting sitemaps it can be a very intimidating and scary message.
When you first visit Google’s Webmaster Tools the very first thing that you’ll need to do is add your website so that Google can give you various reports. One item within the Google Webmaster Tools area that’s very important to make use of is their “Sitemap submission”.
The sitemap area within Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to enter the URL where your sitemap resides on your site so that Google can then update their records with all of the pages that you’ve included within your sitemap.
However, if the path for your website that you initially submitted and the path for your sitemap are different you’ll receive the error that the person received above.
Notice that the difference between the two URLs in the message above is nothing more than a missing “www” in the sitemap link that was submitted.
All that this means is that when you initially added your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools area you added a different URL (either containing the “www” or not) than the URL your sitemap resided on.
An easy fix to this is to first check and see what the URL is to your sitemap file (either http://www.SomeSite.com/GoogleSitemap.xml or http://SomeSite.com/GoogleSitemap.xml and then when you are ready to add your site, be sure that the URL to your site is the same as what your sitemap URL is, either with a “www” or without.
You know that Yahoo Cash 4 Idiot’s would catch my eye, naming my site product “Bonehead SEO” but that’s not all that has me excited about this product.
In a nutshell, Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots is the perfect extension to a section in Bonehead SEO about PPC or Pay-Per-Click marketing.
As an 8-year veteran in the SEO industry I always tell people who come to me for advice on their websites that while they wait for their site to move up in the natural search results listings, they should use PPC. The downside to PPC is that it can cost a lot of money - especially if you’re using Google.
Yes, Google has the largest PPC network but they aren’t exactly known as the most “advertising friendly” PPC network available. Oftentimes their rules change at the drop of a hat and oftentimes without warning - and worse yet, without viable explanations as to why it happened.
The bottom line is, Google, while large, has repeatedly become an advertiser’s “big brother”; slowly over the years telling you how to run your business while you end up spending horrendous amounts of money on clicks. And, what you’ll learn in the Bonehead SEO course is that there are only a select few spots on a Google search results page where ads get attention - and not surprisingly, it’s these spots that typically cost you the most amount of money.
Is it still possible to get low-cost clicks with Google? Yes but certainly not for a competitive keyword, or even a mildly competitive keyword; the bottom line is, it’s becoming harder and harder to get good rankings in Google’s PPC marketplace while still keeping your costs at a manageable level and make any money in the process to boot.
An alternative that most people don’t take a look at is Yahoo’s PPC program who isn’t nearly as stringent and best of all, most clicks cost far less than Google’s.
There is no doubt that while you wait for your site to slowly move up in the search engine rankings you need to advertise; but why put yourself into a position where the learning curve is horrendous and the costs are outrageous? I highly suggest that you take a look at Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots and take a refreshing look at PPC without all of the stress that comes with it.
There’s plenty of video proof on the Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots page if you’re skeptical. But be warned, it doesn’t launch until Monday December 1st. However, beginning Friday November 28th, you’ll be able to see the initial pre-launch video so stay tuned.
It used to be that one of the top reasons web pages were ranked highly was due to their excessive use of stuffing keywords into their meta keywords tag or filling up their web page with the same word or phrase over and over; also referred to as “keyword density”.
As times have changed and as they continue to change there is still one critical element to effective SEO that has remained consistent throughout all search engine time and that is your title tag.
The title tag on your page holds a great amount of weight in the search engines; however, many websites still use their title tag the wrong way. What follows are the top 5 tips for effective title tag design that you can begin using right away for your on-page SEO strategy.
And just for the record, when we refer to the title tag, we’re referring to the code on your web pages that looks like this:
<title>The Important Page Title Keywords</title>.
Tip #1: Keep your title tag under 64 characters. While each of the largest search engines; Google, Yahoo! and MSN each have their own rules when it comes to how many characters they display on their search results page, Google has the most restrictive rule of 64 characters. Anything longer than this, you run the risk of very important keywords or phrases not showing up in the search engine results page. This is important because your title tag is the hyperlink that a search visitor would click on to get to your page and if you had included some very important keywords in a text string longer than 64 characters, that title tag would get cut off in Google.
Tip #2: Keep the most important keyword for the web page front and center. What this means is that whatever main keyword or phrase you’re optimizing for on your web page, make it the very first word within your title tag. For example, if you were optimizing a page for “gourmet coffee” then you’d place that word at the beginning of your title tag. <title>Gourmet Coffee Tastes Great</title>
Tip #3: This goes without saying but always, always use a title tag for each and every one of your web pages. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple little thing on their web pages but just to give you an example, visit Google and type in allintitle:”Untitled Document”. This will return all of those web pages that currently don’t have a title which means that they’re missing out on all of the potential search engine rankings they could be getting.
Tip #4: Remember that you write for a web searcher not a search engine. What this tip means is that even though you may be following the rule above by placing your main keyword at the beginning of your title tag, it must still read well for a typical web searcher. This is important because when your site does come up in the search engines results pages, the title tag for your web page is what becomes the clickable link that will take a web searcher to your web site. Additionally, the keywords that the person searched on are bolded if they’re contained within your title tag; and if you’ve done your job correctly, they will show up bolded within that link. If you simply can’t make the title to your page sound like a normal person would talk, then simply just use your keywords.
Here’s an example using our “gourmet coffee” keyword. You know by now that the phrase “gourmet coffee” should show up within your title tag since that’s the word you’re optimizing for. However, you might mention some gourmet coffee brands on this same web page and be tempted to use them in your title tag like so:
This doesn’t necessarily read well to the end user (the web searcher) so if you can’t make it sound like a real person would speak, don’t toss keywords in there just for the sake of using them. Stick to the simple keyword phrase of “gourmet coffee” like so:
<title>Gourmet Coffee</title>
Tip #5: Keep your company name out! A very large mistake that many companies make is by placing their company name at the beginning of the title tag like so:
<title>The Coffee Company - Gourmet Coffee</title>
First off, the main keyword phrase isn’t listed near the front of the title tag which is mistake #1 and mistake #2 is that the search engines will believe that the web page they’re indexing is about “The Coffee Company” first and “gourmet coffee” secondarily.
If you’re looking to rank your site for your company name, this is all well and good (although not recommended). You’re attempting to rank for “gourmet coffee” but instead are giving a higher importance to your company name.
If you absolutely must use your company name in your title tag, then place it at the end - like so:
<title>Gourmet Coffee - The Coffee Company</title>
Whenever possible, keep your title tag simple and to the point. There’s no need to place an excessive amount of information within the title tag. Stick to the keywords that you’ve chosen for that page, keep your company name out of it if your boss will let you, and you’ll be thanked by the search engines by being so well-informed.
Millions upon millions of people use Google as their search engine of choice everyday to do searches. But Google has so much more to offer when it comes to just the basic web search. Here are some top Google search tricks to help you in your SEO efforts (and then some).
allinanchor
What it does: the allinanchor operator within a Google search will find all of the keywords you’re searching on within the anchor text of any web page. As an example, if we use the operator allinanchor:baby bottles Google will find all web pages that have links on them that contain the term “baby” or “bottles”.
allinanchor:baby bottles
allintext
What it does: The allintext operator within a Google search will find all web pages that have all of the terms you searched on within the web page’s text.
For example, if we decided we wanted to find only those web pages that had the terms “baby”, “bottles”, “diapers” and “newborn” on it, we would query Google like so:
allintext:baby bottles diapers newborn
intitle
The intitle Google search operator allows you to find only those web pages that have the word or phrase you searched on within its title.
intitle:cakes
Would return web pages that had the term “cakes” in their title.
If instead you’d like to find those web pages that had a phrase in their title (more than one keyword), you can use the following allintitle operator which is covered next.
allintitle
The allintitle operator when doing a Google search allows you to search only those web pages that have the search phrase contained within the title.
For example, if you’d like to find out how many websites are not optimizing their title tags and have used the default “Untitled document” within their web page’s titles, you’d simply enter the following into the Google search box:
allintitle:”Untitled Document”
This is also helpful if you’re scoping out your competition and would like to know if a competitor has not used their title tag properly. For example, let’s say that your competitor is Starbucks and you’d like to see if they have not used any of their title tags properly.
You’d enter the following into a Google search page:
allintitle:”Untitled Document” site:starbucks.com
Which brings us to the site operator.
Google’s site: operator allows you to search Google’s index for a website. This is helpful if you aren’t sure if your brand new website has yet been indexed by Google or you want to see how many of your web pages are in Google’s index.
site:YourSite.com
Notice that we leave off the “www” and the http:// portion of the website address. This will allow Google to pull all instances of the site regardless of if it found a “www” version or simply a http:// version.
inanchor
Google’s inanchor search operator allows you to search for web pages that have a specific word or phrase within their anchor text (the text that links to another page) like so:
Babies inanchor :bottle – will return all web pages that contain the word “babies” AND have the phrase “bottle” within their anchor text.
We can also use this in conjunction with the site operator as we did above. So let’s say that we’d like to see what web pages that http://www.coffee.org has that have the word “coffee” in their anchor text. We’d simply enter in the search query like so:
inanchor:coffee site:coffee.org
inurl
The inurl operator allows you to find those web pages that have that word you’re searching on in their url or web site address.
For example, if we placed the following in the Google search box:
inurl:computer
Google would return all of the websites that had the word “computer” in their website address.
If instead you wanted to find a phrase and not just a single word within a website’s address or URL, you’d then use the allinurl operator covered below:
allinurl
The allinurl operator allows you to find websites that have key phrases within their website address or URL. For example, if we wanted to find all the websites that had the phrase “computer parts” in their URL or website address, we’d enter the following into the Google search box:
allinurl:computer parts
Keep in mind that both the inurl and the allinurl will find websites that not only have those words or phrases contained within their actual URL such as http://www.SomeSite.com but that also have used that word or phrase in a directory off of their main site.
So in a search for computer parts you might see the following:
http://www.computerlabkids.com/parts.htm
link
The link operator allows you to find websites that are linking to a certain website. So if you wanted to see who was linking to http://www.houseofquilts.com you would enter the following into the Google search box:
link:houseofquilts.com
Note that Google does not reveal to you all of the links pointing to any one website. Instead for SEO purposes, I recommend http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com who will give you the first 1,000 links coming into any one website. And we cover this extensively in our BoneheadSEO.com SEO training classes.
These are just a few of many different search operators that Google offers when doing a search. However, these are the ones that you’ll find most important when doing your SEO research so keep this list handy and make reference to it whenever you can.
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