I cannot say enough good things about SEOmoz.  Click here using this special link to get 30 days for free.

The video focuses on ways to get links and mentions for your own site.  Here are some of the tips that Rand offers:

• Give away your writing!  Guest post for others by doing a search in Google for “guest author or guest writer or guest blogger or guest contributor” – it’s also helpful to include your keywords as well to find sources you can write for.  ”Guest Blogger + Dog Training” for example.  Also, Rand suggests using Google blog search and Google discussion search.  Both great resources for places to promote your writing.
• Give away your videos.  In this video Rand recommends Wistia which actually gives you details on what your viewing audience is doing (a must have when you want to know if someone is bored to tears or if they have to keep going back and forth to re-watch something).   What Rand doesn’t mention in the video is that you must be certain your videos are branded.  Whether you use Wistia or another service such as YouTube, your brand must be somewhere on that video so that others can recognize you.
• Give away your product.  If you give something of yours away you can ask others to cover it or talk about it.  Be wary of saying “Hey, here’s my product, could you link to it?”
• Similar to giving away your product is giving away your time.  Offer to do something pro-bono and you could have not only a very happy client but someone who will sing your praises, link to you, and mention you quite often.
• Give away your contact details.  So often you’ll see folks post helpful information, whether in forums, blog posts, on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and yet, if the person is interested in what you have to say, there’s no way for them to contact you.  Make this as public as possible!
• Be sure you allow your images to be used.  You can add a creative commons license to them, etc.  But just be sure you’re getting the credit.  (This is really paraphrased – the video will give you more details).
• Within your RSS feed, you have the ability to publish only partial feeds or full ones.  Choose the full feed.    Contents of feeds get used quite often and it’s best to have the full feed available for someone.  Also, when you do link within your own feed, use the full url including the http:// portion – otherwise that republished content won’t link back to you.
• It’s likely you’ve collected data on your site visitors, etc.  This data may be extremely valuable to others.  But, you won’t know until you ask.  Refer to the end of the video for more details on this but suffice it to say, you can reach out to others whom you think may find your data valuable and then see if they’d be interested in receiving it.

Ideally, their hope is that if they link all of the smaller niche websites to the main website, that this will give that main website more credibility in the search engines.

This is what’s called a “Mini-Net”.  A set of websites that one person owns and that are all inter-linked together.

Let’s take an example shall we?

Let’s say Webmaster Joe likes the topic of hair removal.  So he builds a website that focuses on laser hair removal.  But, Webmaster Joe has also learned that if you build other, smaller websites that talk about a nichier (is that a word?) topic yet one still related to the main overall topic, and then link them together that this will help where his main website is listed in the search engines.

So Webmaster Joe creates 5 more websites all on similar but less competitive terms:

• cosmetic hair removal
• skin hair removal
• upper lip hair removal
• affordable hair removal
• hair removal surgery

These smaller, nichier sites aren’t high-quality by any means but they all have an article or two on them about the main keyword phrase they’re focused on.

The point of these additional sites is not to have them rank well but to have the main website that talks about Laser Hair Removal rank well which is his money phrase.

So Webmaster Joe visits a hosting company (HostGator is a good one that I personally recommend) and purchases a shared hosting package that allows him to have multiple websites on the same IP address.

What this means is that Webmaster Joe can add as many websites as he wants to his hosting account; doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that they’re all on the same IP address.

This is important because when search engines like Google come to pay a visit to all of these websites, they’ll see that they’re all linked together but they also all reside on the same IP address which diminishes their importance.

Think of it like this:

Let’s say that someone recommends a movie to you.  Later, five other people recommend that same exact movie to you so you start to think “Wow!  This must be a really great movie!”.  You find out later that all of these five people live in the same house, maybe they’re related to one another maybe not.  The point is, the only time you’ve gotten a recommendation to see the movie was from someone who lived in that house.

All of a sudden, that recommendation doesn’t seem so great does it?

The search engines feel the same way with websites.  Obviously if there are multiple websites all linking to one place, but all of those links reside at the same address (the IP address) of the site they’re linking to, then all of a sudden, it doesn’t look so great to the search engines.

And will eventually get you penalized.  Can I say that for certain?  Can I guarantee that?  Obviously, no, since I don’t run the search engines but I can tell you this.  It’s not something that I would recommend you trying during your online career…unless you’re into that kind of thing.

The bottom line is, a mini-net is nothing more than a group of websites usually all owned by the same website owner that link to one another in the hopes of getting better rankings for those websites.

Do these mini-nets always reside on the same IP addresses?  Obviously, no.  The savvy website owners have come to realize that this will get them penalized in the search engines, and so they’ve scoped out ways of getting around this IP issue.

Does that always work?  No.  As a matter of fact, it borders on “black hat seo” techniques.  Or in other words those techniques that the search engines frown upon.

But, that’s not the purpose of this post.  This post is to explain to you what a mini-net is and why people use it.

As always, leave your comments if you feel up to it

You can view the videos by clicking on the SEO Videos link at the top of the page.  There are 9 videos in all.

Enjoy!

Bing recently released their SEO Toolkit (currently still in beta) and I took some time to run through the toolkit to see what kinds of information it gave me.

The first thing you should know is installing it is less than a breeze.

First, you need to be using a PC – no surprise there.

In order to install the toolkit, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops first.

1. You need a PC running Vista, Windows Server, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It won’t work on XP (which is a shame).  Most of you reading this (if you’re not using a Mac) will have Windows Vista on your computer.
2. If you do have Windows Vista, you need to be sure that youalso have installed Windows Vista SP1 (service pack 1) or higher. Most of you will also already have this if your computer updates itself regularly.
3. You also need IIS 7 running on your computer. Unless you’ve worked on a server team, the typical webmaster probably won’t understand what this means (huge problem!). Click here to view the Microsoft installation guide and get IIS 7.
   UPDATE: Note that on the Microsoft site – this link points to a topic that is “No Longer Available”.  After checking Microsoft’s own post about this installation guide, I receive the same message.  Hopefully they’ll have it fixed soon.
4. Next, you need to enable IIS 7 before you can install the SEO Toolkit. To do this…
   1. Click Start.
   2. Click Control Panel.
   3. Click Programs.
   4. Select “Turn Windows features on or off”.
   5. When the window opens, select the “Internet Information Services” check box.
   6. Click the plus sign (+) to expand the directory (they call them nodes), expand “world wide web services” and then expand “Application Development Features”.  Finally, check the box next to .net Extensibility.
   7. Click “OK” and then wait…a long time…while your computer updates.

Now, you next have to determine if you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows.

(By now, I’ll bet that a vast majority of people have already said “This is WAY too much trouble – forget it!).  And I wouldn’t blame you.  As much as Microsoft search has evolved, it seems that the rest of the company has not.

To do this…

1. Click Start
2. Right click “Computer” and then choose “Properties”
3. In the “system group” the System Type will tell you what kind you’re running; 32-bit or 64-bit.
4. FINALLY, install the right version.  (Note that these links will download the SEO Toolkit to your computer – they’re directly from Microsoft. If you’d rather view the Microsoft page itself, click here.):
   1. IIS SEO Toolkit for 32-bit Windows
   2. IIS SEO Toolkit for 64-bit Windows
5. NOW, you’re ready to install and use the SEO Toolkit (and it’s probably time for a quick break).  I don’t know about you but my head hurts!

Once you have the SEO Toolkit installed, you’ll need to open the program.  But like most programs that you install, where you expect to see them in your Start menu, this one’s a little tricky.

1. Click the Start icon on your Windows Vista computer.
2. In the Start Search box, type “IIS”.
3. IIS manager should pop up in the window. I suggest that you move this to your desktop in an easier-to-find location.
4. Double click the program.
5. Once it loads in the main menu section scroll down to “Search Engine Optimization” and double click on “Site Analysis”.
6. Next, on the right, click “New Analysis”.
7. Give it a name.
8. Enter in the URL of your website and make your additional choices from here (which aren’t many).
9. Finally click “OK”.

Now the program will traverse your website and find issues (if any) that relate to SEO (as Bing sees it).

There’s various categories that Bing looks at such as SEO, Content, Standards and Performance.

Now, while this was a hassle to install it does give you a great deal of on-page SEO information.

For instance it found multiple spots where I had missed giving an image an alt tag attribute.

It also found a few spots where my description was too long and where I had a few broken hyperlinks – many of these attributed to a bookmarking service that I had included on my web pages.

If you double-click on any of the pages that had issues within the SEO Toolkit, you’ll get a very detailed analysis of that web page (this is definitely a plus).  Things like:

• A Word Analysis which shows you…
  • The counts for any specific word or phrase up to three word phrases.
  • The character count on the page.
  • The links referenced on the page along with their anchor text.
  • The links pointing TO the page.
  • The links coming FROM the page.
    • As well as what the linking status is, is it OK or not found, the linking title, the linked URL the type of link and the anchor text.  All invaluable information to have.

Now, all this being said, I will tell you of one very large (and frustrating) issue that I had.  After I ran through the steps and set up everything exactly as explained, I could NOT get to any of my websites that I had set up in the SEO Toolkit.

I could get anywhere else (so I knew it wasn’t my internet connection) but just not to my own sites.  Obviously very frustrating.

Now, my husband who is a VoIP engineer and who works with this kind of thing on a daily basis couldn’t even figure out what the issue was.  And we together tried multiple things…all to no avail.

Until…for the heck of it, I unplugged my DSL modem, plugged it back in and all was fine (Occam’s Razor).  So in the event you follow through this process, and have the same issues, just try rebooting your modem.  I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but it worked for me.  (You’ve just received a 5-hour-time-saving tip).

All in all, I think that the SEO Toolkit provides great information, so long as you’re willing to put up with the installation of it.  And best of all it’s free!

View this walkthrough at Bing (complete with screenshots) by clicking here.

Ever since Microsoft came out with their new search engine Bing, there have been lots of buzzing about it.  And good buzz at that…not what people expected to see which was just a name change from “Live.com” to “Bing.com” and nothing more.

But Bing has taken a lot of people by surprise and now that Yahoo! has agreed to use Bing’s search results as their own search engine (thus taking the number of major search engines down to 2), it’s a very big deal and has great potential to be a big competitor for Google.

Just for the record, the use of Bing’s search results at Yahoo.com probably won’t come to light until sometime in 2010 or beyond, but it is something to start taking notice of right now.

Because we know that this change is coming, we can be fully prepared for it.  And that means doing a few things to be sure that our websites are on top of these changes starting today.

I’ll be covering Bing in sections during the upcoming newsletters but for now, I want to focus on one of the more crucial elements of getting listed well in Bing and this is where your linking strategy comes into play.

Unlike Google who tends to keep information on ranking well in their search engine pretty close to the hip, only divulging just enough information, Bing seems to be moving in the opposite direction.  While not full-disclosure by any means, Bing does give you a lot of tips and ideas when it comes to ranking well with them.

So let’s take a look at what Bing considers to be important where linking strategies are concerned.

The do’s and the don’ts.

While some of the do’s and don’ts of link building will seem familiar to you if you’ve engaged in link building where Google is concerned, some of the advice through Bing is easier to understand… and truly gives a “no bones about it” kind of approach.

So, let’s cover what these do’s and don’ts are.

DO – Link TO (that is from your own site) other websites that your site visitors would find helpful and useful. When you link to another site you are telling your site visitor that you “endorse” that site, so be sure that you actually do.  Don’t link to a website just because it’s your Mom’s or you promised a friend you would link to them.  If it isn’t helpful and complimentary to your own, skip it.

Do – Link to other sites that are relevant to your own. A wedding cake website linking to a tuxedo rental website would be relevant.  A local coffee shop linking to a PPC marketing product would not be relevant.  The same holds true for those links that point to you – granted you can’t control who links to you, you can influence this to an extent.  IF you are engaging in a link-building campaign where you ask other site owners to link to you, be sure that those sites are relevant to your own.

Do attempt to get high-quality links pointing to you. Quantity is NOT the same thing as quality.  This also holds true for Google.  Just because you have thousands of incoming links to your site does not mean that you’ll rank well.  What matters is the quality of those links.  A thousand poor low-quality links cannot equal the ranking power of one high-quality link.

Do not participate in site-wide linking strategies from “bad neighborhoods”. Search engines know what a bad neighborhood is because the bad neighborhoods give off certain signals.  Bad neighborhoods often consist of families of websites that all link to one another, have little to no content in and of themselves and often cover every kind of topic under the sun.

You want links from authority sites – those sites that are older (and thus “more reliable” as stated by Bing), have had consistent content on them over time and have high quality links pointing to their site as well as away from their site.

You can use this tool – http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to help you determine if a neighborhood is “bad” or not.

Do use proper canonicalization. This means that you use one style of URL for every link within your site.  If you remember in a past blog post I had talked about how the search engines view different variations of your URL as different domains all-together.

This means that http://YourSite.com and http://www.YourSite.com are viewed as two separate URLs.  Why this is detrimental to you as the site owner, is because the importance of your websites are then spread across two domains instead of one – thus reducing the importance of your website in the search engines eyes.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, you can’t control how others link to you and they will use a vast number of ways to point to your URL which the search engines will all consider different UNLESS you set up a 301 redirect on each of the subsequent domain names.

So for instance if you wanted http://YourSite.com to be your primary URL that you referred people to and that you used consistently as absolute links on your own site, then…

• www.YourSite.com
• YourSite.com/
• www.YourSite.com/
• YourSite.com/index.html
• www.YourSite.com/index.html
• etc.

All need to have a 301 redirect set up on them that point to the URL you want to be your “main” URL.  In this case, YourSite.com.  Whenever you link within your own site, always, ALWAYS use the YourSite.com or whatever URL you have determined to be your primary URL.

Additionally use absolute links everywhere on your site.  An absolute link means that you actually place the “http://www…whatever your site is.

For example, if you had a page on your site named “espresso-beans.html” and you linked to this page from any other page on your site, it should look like this:  <a href=”http://www.YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html“> Espresso beans</a> and NOT <a href=”espresso-beans.html”> Espresso Beans </a>.

This is referred to as an “absolute URL” and as Bing states “The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL.”

When linking to your home page within your own site, use the trailing slash and omit the “index.html” or “default.html” whatever the name of your default home page is.  For example:

http://www.YourSite.com/ and not http://www.YourSite.com (notice the lack of the trailing slash.)

Bing also suggests that you use the title attribute within your internal links. For example:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” title=”keyword or key phrase describing the page you’re linking to“>Anchor text link (also the keyword or keyword phrase) </a>.

For sites that use dynamic linking (in other words pull descriptions and item numbers from a database), you know that the URL to those pages can get quite long.  Do a search on Amazon.com for any book title and then take a look at the URL in your address bar.  As you can imagine, these kinds of links can make a search engines job quite difficult.

In order to help the search engines use a more user-friendly version of that URL so that they don’t have to do a lot of hard work understanding the link, add some special code into the head section of your web page that will tell the search engines which canonical URL to use.

Ex:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://YourSite.com/products.php?item=espressobeans” />  And be absolutely certain that this link actually points to the page you want it to go to and that it WORKS.

Bing suggests to use the nofollow tag on your links if you don’t want them to follow that link.  However, if you want to block an entire page of links from being crawled, instead use the meta robots tag to block access to that content or use a robots.txt file.

What a nofollow tag looks like:

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/espresso-beans.html” rel=”nofollow”> Espresso beans </a>.

What a meta robots tag looks like:

<meta content=”noindex, nofollow”>  (this tells the search engines to NOT index nor follow all of the links on the page this is located on.

You can also use:

<meta content=”index, nofollow”>  which means that the search engines will still index your web page but they won’t follow any links on the page itself.

In summary, we know that the merger of search results between Bing and Yahoo! will be a significant step in the right direction where the search engines are concerned.  And we’re also aware that Bing is starting to get lots of great feedback.

Since Bing is new, relatively speaking, they are handing you outright information that can help you rank better with them.  Use these suggestions for your own site’s benefits.  All of these suggestions will work well with Google as well…rarely do we see a big change of what’s allowed and what’s not where the search engines are concerned.  But, Bing is a little more forthright with their information … which is something we haven’t seen in a long time with Google.

I’ll be posting the show here if you want to listen in.

Transcription of the Webcast is below

Links I talked about in the webcast

Twitter

Follow Me on Twitter

Get the Twitter Book for Free

Visit YouTube EDU

YouTube

Official AdSense Blog

Wordtracker

Detecting Commercial Intention

WebReader

The Google search used in the example

Matt Cutts talks about Universal Search

******* TRANSCRIPTION *******

The first thing I want to talk about today is some SEO news that you might find interesting.

One of those things is that YouTube has now added a Twitter button. If you haven’t noticed, Twitter is absolutely everywhere today and if you’re not using it for your business, you’re missing the boat. It’s free to sign up and you can do that at Twitter.com. If you’d like you can follow me there too my Twitter name is KristineWirth.

Sometimes I am just shocked, literally and I don’t know why really but when you hear of big names using Twitter it really stands up and makes you take notice. For example, yesterday I was watching the NASCAR Sprint Cup race on Fox and heard the announcers saying that you could now follow them on Twitter at NASCARonFox. That really shocked me. Not exactly sure why but you can bet it was impressive, especially when you heard D.W. (Darrell Waltrip for those of you who are not NASCAR fans) talk about making Tweets. Not what you expect to hear during a NASCAR race when it’s all about restrictor plates, brake calipers and lugnuts. I was impressed. Can you tell I’m just a bit of a tomboy? Maybe that’s why I’m in such a male-dominated business?

But back to the YouTube Twitter thing. If you visit any video on YouTube, you’ll notice that next to the spot to put the video on MySpace and Facebook is now a spot to Tweet the video at Twitter. Tweets are the posts you make at Twitter. This link is now located right there at YouTube under the video window.

When you click on the link it takes you to your Twitter account (of course) and automatically adds the link to the video into your Twitter window. Just another way to keep the ever-growing Twitter population interested.

Now, this is great for those of you who market online simply because you can obviously post a quick Tweet to one of your own videos at YouTube. Just remember, no one likes to be marketed to all the time so don’t forget to tweet other videos too even those funny ones that you don’t think are “professional” – everyone can use a good laugh now and again.

I’ve released a free book that you can download called “Twitter – What it Is, How to Use It and How Not to Be a TwitterTwit” which you can get for free at BoneheadSEO.com. I’ll have a link for you on the Bonehead Blog at boneheadseo.com/blog.

While on the topic of YouTube, you might be interested to know that they’ve also rolled out a few new improvements last week. They’ve added an upload progress bar. This has been a much-requested feature at YouTube and what this will do for you is allow you to see how far along your video upload is.

They’ve also rolled out YouTube EDU which is an “educational hub”. Essentially the way YouTube phrases it is that it was sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all of the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities. You can check out more about YouTube EDU at www.youtube.com/edu.

personally I’d love to see more dedicated channels to topics. Maybe we’ll see this in the future.

And just one more thing before I get off of the topic of YouTube. The other day I was watching a video and noticed a little lightbulb just at the top of the page just above the video. Now I don’t know if this was part of a Google test, if this was something new that I just completely missed all together (although I don’t believe so because I don’t see it there any longer). But if it was a part of a test, just know that it allows you to “turn out the lights” while viewing a YouTube video. If you click on this lightbulb, it turns the entire page black except for the video itself.

Now, as an online marketer, I hate this. Not only can you not see the additional videos that you might be interested in if it’s in “lights out” mode but the viewer can’t see your URL (or web address) in your description box (which by the way you should be adding), but they literally can’t see anything on that page but the video itself.

Oh, and of course there’s the ads at the bottom of the video that Google has now been including. Which obviously are still visible in “lights out” mode because they’re embedded within the video itself.

On that topic, here’s another juicy tip for you. In the past you might have been told (maybe even by me) to be sure you brand those videos with a logo, URL or watermark at the bottom of the video screen. Ideally a URL so that the viewer knew exactly where to go. But now those URLs are obstructed by ads (this is especially irritating if you’re watching a video that is translated at the bottom of the page). Sure, you can click them off but sometimes they come back! I’ve had it happen. So when you create your video for YouTube, place your URL at the top of the page (or your logo, your watermark, whatever it is that you use).

Now, all that said, it was just announced last week that Google is doing away with their AdSense video units feature. This allowed you to show YouTube content on your web pages that contained AdSense ads. This evidently has not been working out as well as Google had hoped and is being retired at the end of April. I couldn’t quite gather from their blog post at http://adsense.blogspot.com whether or not this also meant the ads in the YouTube videos themselves at YouTube (my guess is no, they’ll still stay there) but it is being nixed for AdSense publishers.

On the bright side of things, since you now know that the largest search engine available today is getting rid of ads within videos, it might be a good time to rethink any other third-party ads you may be running within your own videos because this is one very large case-study that is flat-out telling you it doesn’t make much money.

So there you have it, some news (and two tips on YouTube.) Time to move on…

Wordtracker, a keyword research tool (one of the best in my opinion) is coming out with a brand new version very soon. You’ll now be able to take a look at a keywords metrics such as the frequency with which the keyword was searched on, how competitive it is and what the commercial viability of that keyword is (which is VERY exciting in my opinion.)

All three of these metrics will allow you to find those keywords that are profitable, not just simply easier to rank well for.

Additionally, they’ll also be using “allinanchor” as their website count instead of the default Google exact match which the tool uses now. Why this is important is because before, (well, currently at least until the new tool is put into production), whenever you researched competitors within Wordtracker, Wordtracker based this information on an exact match of the phrase. This means that they’d only search for the keyword in quotes which gives you an indication as to how competitive a keyword really is. However, it appears as though now, Wordtracker will be providing you with information that tells you how many incoming links appear per keyword for the internet as a whole. Allinanchor means all of the keyword phrase within anchor text, or in other words the clickable link.

To clarify that even further, let’s say that one of the keyword phrases you were considering using was “dog hair dye”. Instead of simply searching for that phrase within Google and using that phrase in quotes to help determine the number of competitors there are, you now will be able to see how often that phrase of “dog hair dye” is used in a clickable link over the entire Internet.

Personally I can’t wait to update the Bonehead SEO course members about this information when it comes available.

And finally, the commercial intent portion is truly exciting. Microsoft has provided this information for a while now for free but since it will now be incorporated into Wordtracker’s tool, you can essentially get all of the best information for keywords in one spot. This tool allows you to see at a glance if the use of a keyword has commercial viability – that is, if someone who uses this keyword is likely to purchase a product or not.

This tool is also available for free at Microsoft’s AdCenter labs. And I’ll have a link to this tool as well as other information I talk about throughout this broadcast at the Bonehead SEO Blog.

http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/

Hmmmm…what else, what else?

Oh yeah! Here’s a great tool for many of you who already have a website up and running and are on the lookout for a new way to make the content of your site more interesting. I actually heard about this from Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com. It’s called WebReader and it speech enables your website or blog. What this means is that you add a button to your webpage and when a site visitor clicks on that button, it will read the entire page of content or only the content you specify. This is a great alternative to recording your own audio which you then upload to your site which can get very time-consuming and have a bit of a learning curve especially if you’ve never done anything like that before.

the only downside is that it’s a computer-style voice however, it does have a bit of a personality to it. It’s much better than the reader you would find in say Adobe Reader for example. If you’ve never used the Adobe reader function you should try it out sometime. It’s meant to be useful but sometimes is downright funny to listen to.

WebREader is not free but is very cost-effective. So if you’re interested, visit http://webreader.readspeaker.com and again I’ll have a link for you on the Bonehead Blog.

But, I won’t leave you hanging about the Adobe reader function either. Simply open up any PDF you have on your computer, click “View” and then click “Read Out Loud”. You’ll see (or rather hear) what I mean.

And finally in the “Google news you might not care about unless you live in China”, the Chinese government has lifted its block it imposed on YouTube. In case you missed the story, there was a YouTube video released that purportedly showed Chinese security officers beating handcuffed Tibetans. China said that the video was a fake but instead of taking proactive measures, it just flat out decided to ban all of China from even visiting YouTube all together. They have since lifted the ban.

And that’s a brief recap of things going on in the Internet world this past week.

So let’s get down to our main topic of interest and that’s Universal Search.

Back in early to mid 2007 Google introduced Universal Search. It’s a barely-noticeable set of links that sit at the very top left of a Google search results page. Essentially what it allows you to do is view other kinds of related information based on the search you just did within Google.

For example, if you search on the phrase “espresso” in Google you’ll get your search results page that contains links to various websites, videos, shopping spots for espresso, etc. But at the top of the page are a set of links labeled “Images, Maps, News, Video, Gmail, and “more”. “More” containing shopping, groups, books, scholar, finance, blogs, YouTube, calendar, photos, documents, reader, sites, and “even more”.

What these links are allowing you to do is a “vertical search”. Let me explain.

When you search in simply Google.com for a term you are searching “horizontally” that is, across a wide array and spectrum of various kinds of content. If you remember from the example we just gave the initial search results page returned links to websites, videos and places where you could shop for espresso.

However, when you do a “vertical” search by clicking one of the links within Google’s universal search at the top of the page, you are narrowing down your search to only find “videos” for example on espresso. You can also choose to only find “news” for espresso or “images’ of espresso. In other words, vertical searches allow you to focus on only one kind of content, video, news, blogs or books instead of getting the whole gamut of results.

Now you might be wondering why this is important to you the website owner. Well, it’s because of an interview of Google Engineer Matt Cutts done by WebProNews in December of 2008. And again, I’ll have this information up for you at the Bonehead Blog.

Essentially Matt tells us that Universal search will become more important as we move through 2009 and beyond. He also hints at Universal search being incorporated into the regular search results at Google.

Which brings me back to the initial search results we saw initially when we did a search for espresso in Google. Google didn’t just return links to web pages for us, no, it gave us not only links to websites but videos as well as places to shop for espresso. Both of which used to be tightly contained within the Universal search links at the top of the page.

So not only are these new additions to search taking up spots where typical websites would normally reside, they’re also a heck of a lot more eye-catching than just a single link.

The good news is that the actual number of web pages links on the initial search results page remain at 10, they are now pushed down a bit “below the fold” or in other words in a spot where you have to scroll down in order to view them.

And this is just one example. There are multiple different examples of Universal Search being incorporated into typical search results pages (just like Matt said they would be). When we view the espresso search results we’re only seeing video and shopping resources added to the listings. In some cases in addition to videos and shopping resources you’ll also have blogs that are related, news that is related and even images that are related to your search. The images are typically placed prominently at the top of the page.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it’s a great opportunity for you. Most of your competitors will still be focusing on getting that first page listing for their website. Not their video, not their images, not their blog but simply for their website. And if you take a quick look at any search results page that shows images or videos, you’ll immediately notice that these are what draws the eye. Not the links.

This should say to you that you should be using images on all of your web pages and using the same keywords that you’re using on your web page that you want to rank well for in the image. While always using images within any web page or blog post is important for visual appeal, it’s especially important for those searches that instantly return images at the top of the page in Google.

For example, if you do a search for your keyword in Google, say “prom hairstyles”, you’ll instantly see that images show at the top of the search results page.

The same is true of video.

In the espresso example, there are at least two videos that initially show up when you do a Google search. If you’re able to and you have the know-how to create a video around the keyword you’re using, I highly suggest that you do so. It’s always a good idea to have multiple different kinds of videos available for your topic that your website visitors as well as visitors within large video sharing sites can watch.

Plus, if you’ll notice, both of these videos on our espresso page are around 3 minutes or less in length. This seems to be a typical standard within Google so when you create your videos, keep them short and use the keywords you’re gunning for within the title of the video itself.

I’ll have more information about video marketing in upcoming episodes.

So that’s it for today’s installment of the Bonehead SEO BlogTalkRadio webcast.

If you’re interested in the entire BoneheadSEO course and wish to purchase it yourself, visit http://www.BoneheadSEO.com/cb/ and you’ll see some proof of results there as well.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our webcast by clicking the orange RSS feed icon to the right and feel free to share this via Twitter with your friends by clicking the “Tweet This” button.

All things being equal, how old your domain name is will generally put you at a higher advantage than your competitors.

The reason for this is that the age of a domain cannot be faked.  That is, unlike links which can be gathered from everywhere online and even purchased (and which also have an age factor assigned to them), the age of a domain is not something that can be manipulated.

So how does someone establish credibility with the age of a domain if they’re just starting out and need a new domain name?

One way is to purchase an older domain.  (The older the better).  However, just because a domain has been established for some time does not mean that you should rush right out and get it.  There are a few factors to take into account first.

1. Does the domain you’re considering have any current links pointing to it?  How long have those links been pointing to the site?  (The age of your links also plays a factor and we’ll talk about that in our next blog post).
2. Just because a domain name has been around and registered for a long time does not mean that it has been indexed for that same amount of time.  It’s important that the domain you’re thinking about purchasing has been indexed in the search engines and established itself already.
3. If a domain has been indexed, you’ll next want to determine if that domain has been penalized in the search engines for any reason.  One simple way to determine this is using the Wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php (this will also help you determine how long pages have been indexed in the search engines as mentioned in #2 above).  Enter in the domain name you’re considering and take a look at the different pages you receive.
   Here’s an example.  In a well-publicized event in early 2006, Google penalized the site http://bmw.de.  If you visit http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bmw.de and click on the pages for this time frame, you’ll see that some pages are no longer available (as of the time that the Wayback machine viewed them) and that they didn’t show back up for months.  This is in stark comparison to previous years when they were indexed nearly every day and at least once a month.  If you happen to notice something like this for a website you’re considering, it’s best to move on to another domain name opportunity.

The bottom line is, if you want to get a head-start on your website efforts, you might want to consider looking into buying an existing domain especially if you don’t want to have to wait to establish credibility in the search engines.  Just be sure that the domain you’re considering is, and always has been on the up-and-up.

It’s the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab and it just might be one of the best tools you can use for your industry.

What the Wordtracker Keyword Questions lab does is let you enter in a very generic search term and once you submit that term, Wordtracker will return to you a list of questions that people are asking right now within your industry.

Take for example the keyword “Twitter”.  If we head on over to this tool (which is free by the way), and enter in this generic phrase, we’ll see that people are asking all kinds of questions about “Twitter”.

Or, let’s take a look at the generic term of “jewelry”:

Whatever term you enter in, Wordtracker will give you back a list of questions that your market is currently asking about.

By taking a look at the questions above regarding “jewelry”, if we had a website about jewelry, these would be questions that I could answer regarding jewelry.

I could dedicate a page to “how to make jewelry” and create yet another page on my jewelry site about “how to make beaded jewelry”.

Since I already know that people are asking these questions, I can then answer these questions and use website optimization on a web page to do so.

This resource is just another way to make use of phrases that people are searching on right now.  By incorporating these questions (and answering them on my site), I can then add this to my ever-growing arsenal of keyword phrases surrounding the main topic of my site.

While this sounds like a simple process, it’s actually a culmination of lots of little things that you do right in order to get your website optimized.  The bottom line of website optimization is nothing more than getting your site listed within the first pages of a SERP or Search Engine Results Page.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, chances are you’re up against hundreds of thousands if not millions of competitors and at first glance it can seem rather daunting when you’re trying to compete against these other websites.

However, there are some fairly easy processes that you can follow in order to get your web pages properly optimized.  While this is only a fraction of what you can learn in the Bonehead SEO Course, it will help your web pages get moving in the right direction.

Here are just a few tips to help you along the way:

Keywords

By far, the most important first step you need to take is to use those keywords and phrases that people are searching on right now within a search engine.  While you might be tempted to just “guess” at what people are searching on in your industry, don’t.  You want the actual phrases that lots of people are using to find your product or service.

One way to go about this is to use a service such as Wordtracker.  Wordtracker offers a free version as well as a full-fledged paid version (with a 7-day-free-trial).  While you will get more results as well as more details on the keywords you’re researching with the paid version, the free version works just fine if you’re on a tight budget.

Simply visit Wordtracker and enter in a word or phrase that describes the kind of business that you’re in.  What Wordtracker will return to you is a list of those phrases that people are using right now online that include your topic.

It’s these phrases that you want to focus on within your website.

The Title

Once you’ve decided upon a phrase that you’ll be targeting on a web page, you’ll next want to use that phrase in your page’s title.  The title of the page is an extremely important factor in how search engines rank that web page.

If for instance you were targeting the keyword phrase of “website optimization” then you’d want to use “website optimization” in your title tag.

The Heading

Next, you’ll want to use this same phrase in a heading on your web page.  The heading will be one of the first things that a site visitor (and the search engines) will see so you want to be sure it’s contained within a header tag at the top of the page.  Again, use the keywords you chose for the web page within the header.

The Body Text

As you might imagine, the body text of the web page should incorporate the keyword phrase you have chosen for that page.  Use the phrase where necessary but whatever you do, do not “keyword stuff” your web page.

Keyword stuffing means that you use the same phrase you’re optimizing that page for multiple amounts of times.  This often makes the content sound unnatural and the search engines will pick up the fact that you are attempting to trick them by using your keyword multiple times throughout the text.

Instead, just write naturally and incorporate words and phrases related to but not identical to the main keyword phrase you’re working with.

In our example of the keyword phrase “website optimization”, I might use related words such as “website seo”, “seo”, “search engine optimization”, “ranking”, and “conversion.”

Just remember that when you do start optimizing your web pages that you make use of your main keyword phrase you’ve chosen in the appropriate spots on your web page and have also included related words and phrases throughout the content.

This will help get your web pages moving in the right direction.

For starters, meta tags and SEO are not one in the same; let me explain.

Meta tags are those tags that reside on your individual web pages that tell the search engines certain things about your site. Your website visitors don’t see these tags but the search engines do.

Here’s what just a few meta tags actually look like and what they do:

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THE META KEYWORDS TAG
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What it looks like:

META NAME = “KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”Keyword one, keyword two, keyword three”

What it does:
The meta keywords tag (shown above) is a meta tag that many website owners use in order to attempt to rank well in the search engines.

While using lots of keywords in the meta keywords tag used to be a good way to get your site ranked for the keywords you chose for the page, the meta keywords tag is no longer used by many search engines (Google in particular) as an indication of what your web page is about.

It is useful however to you or to the person who creates your web pages in the regard that it can help you to remember what keywords you’re optimizing that page for.

**************************************************
THE META DESCRIPTION TAG
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What it looks like:

META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”The description for your web page goes here”

The meta description tag, unlike the meta keywords tag is in fact used by the search engine as a brief synopsis of what the web page is all about. The description is directly below the link on any search engine results page.

Perhaps the biggest advantage to using the meta description tag is that it gives you the opportunity to “sell” your web page over your competition. Whatever you do, do not use keyword after keyword in your description. Instead use it as a way to compel visitors to come to your site over your competitors.

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THE META ROBOTS TAG
**************************************************

What it looks like:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”

What it does:
The meta robots tag is underused by a vast majority of web pages but is vitally important if you want to instruct the search engines on how to handle your web page.

For example, the “noindex” content portion of the meta robots tag tells the search engines to not index (or add to its database) that web page. While this might seem a little counter intuitive at first, consider that you might have a private page that you don’t want the general public to access on your website. If this is the case, you’d add the “noindex” content to the meta robots tag.

Additionally, the “nofollow” content to the meta robots tag tells the search engines to “not follow” ALL of the links on the page.

So say for example that your web page was a resource area that linked out to several recommended websites. You may not want to show the search engines that you’re following all of these links and so you’d add the “nofollow” content to the meta robots tag.

It’s important to remember that you don’t have to use them together, you can use the “noindex” only or the “nofollow” only within your meta robots tag.

There are a wide variety of meta tags available to you when you’re designing your site, but what’s important to understand is that none of these nor any other meta tags will help your site rank better in the search engines.

Of all the meta tags available to you, the meta description tag is perhaps the most important since it will give a description to any potential search visitor that searches on the keywords you’ve optimized that web page for.