But probably the main and most exciting reason, is because I’ve been working on creating a little *something for everybody*.

The first is a Free Membership area where you can get all kinds of absolutely no-cost access to lots of free SEO and “how-to” videos.  This area will also contain an SEO Guide for beginners; so if you’re uncertain where to start, this is the spot to go to first.

The second is a Premium Membership area where all of the advanced SEO information will be held.  All of the same information located in the Free Membership area will also be located within the advanced SEO Membership as well so that way you don’t have to jump back and forth from one to another.

I’m taking great pains to be sure that every last one of the videos available to you is easy-to-understand and easy to follow along with; this *is* BoneheadSEO after all.

Plus, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised at what the premium membership area is going to cost.

Both Memberships will be available within a few short weeks (maybe sooner).

Here’s a little hint however, if you’re subscribed to the BoneheadSEO feed, the email list or follow me on Twitter, YOU get a *little secret something* out of it.

We’ll talk soon!

Today I’ve decided to give you some pretty darn important information about SEO straight from Google’s own Matt Cutts.  The information you’ll find in this blog post are the important points to take away from Matt’s videos on the YouTube Google Webmaster Help Channel.  I highly suggest that you subscribe to this channel as it almost always contains information that’s important for you to know if you’re optimizing your own site.

That said, here are the points that you should take away from these videos.

From “Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR?”

• SEO is not all about position in the search engines.  It’s also about getting those visitors to come to your site.
• Title and description tags absolutely can increase your CTR (click through rate).
• The description should entice people to visit your site.

From “More than one H1 on a page:  good or bad?“

• If you have multiple sections on your web page, it’s not a bad idea to have those separated into different H1 (header) tags.
• Do not use an entire H1 on your page and then modify with CSS.

From “Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?“

• Use dashes or hyphens if you can.
• Dashes or hyphens are considered as separators and underscores are not.

From “Two questions about nofollow“

• Google does not follow links from Wikipedia.

From “Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?“

• Example:  example.com/keyword/London better than example.com/London/keyword?
• Helps a little bit to have keywords in your URL.
• 4 or 5 keywords might work well.
• On his blog he’ll take the first 2-5 words related to his post and use that as the URL.
• Don’t worry about where the keywords are in the URL.

From “Why does Google index blogs faster than other sites?“

• Google does not guarantee that if you submit a sitemap, they’ll go crawl it.
• There’s a difference between indexing and crawling.  A ping will cause Google Blog search to crawl you.
• If you do show up you’ll show up in the “Blog search corpus” not the “index corpus”.

I suggest that to get the most out of the information Google does provide to you to take a moment and watch these videos (as well as the others that are there).  They’re short and to the point.

But, in this post I want to bring to your attention something that some unsavvy folks might decide to do to your local listing especially since now the local listings are becoming more prominent.   It’s something called MapSpam and even though you may not have heard of it, it’s extremely important that you understand what it is and how it works to prevent your own listing from being hi-jacked.

I made a video about this issue around six months ago when the floral industry was the victim:

Here’s what’s important to understand:

• If you do not claim your local listing, it can be hi-jacked.
• This issue may become more prevalent since Google is now showing local listings for more competitive terms.
• If you’ve never claimed your listing, you wouldn’t be notified.
• If you attempted to later claim it you have to jump through hoops to do so proving you are the original business owner.
• To claim (or add) your local listing visit https://www.Google.com/local/add/

In essence, what a “niche” is, is nothing more than a small sub-section of a larger market.

Take the example of “dog training”.  Dog Training is a large market that currently has over 23,000,000 web pages competing for the term.  However, when you’re looking at a niche market you want to narrow this down to a market that is less competitive yet more responsive.

In our example of “dog training” there are multiple niches you could consider.  Here are just a few:

• dog training collars
• in home dog training
• dog agility training
• dog training tips
• service dog training
• career in dog training
• dog training supplies
• dog obedience training

All of these focus on one specific area of the overall larger market of “dog training” and each one has a variety of factors that make each of these markets more lucrative than the overall generic term itself.

Here’s why.  Whenever someone does a search in Google for example, on dog training, you really have no idea as the website owner exactly what kinds of dog training the web searcher was looking for.

However, when you focus on a niche, the web searcher essentially tells you exactly what it is they’re trying to find as in the examples above.

The person searching on “dog training collars” wants collars that will help dog train.  The person searching on “career in dog training” is looking for information on starting this kind of career.

Essentially, niche markets are far more lucrative because the web searcher tells you exactly what it is that they’re looking for and you can then create your website around that specific need by making use of keywords and SEO (search engine optimization).

For more information on how to choose a niche properly as well as optimize your website, visit http://www.BoneheadSEO.com/cb

Any business, online or off needs to know what their competition is doing so that they can stay ahead of the game.

It’s not a new practice by any means.  Companies for years have kept close tabs on their competitors but, unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, as website owners we have a much easier way of detecting what our competition is doing; at least online.

Here’s a few tips to get you started:

Google Alerts
Google Alerts allows you to set up your own alert system so that you will be notified whenever someone mentions you, your company, or your products.  However, where it comes in handy for SEO is when you use these alerts to notify you whenever a keyword used in your industry is mentioned in a blog post, on a web page or in a news release.  Additionally, you can also set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever someone mentions your competitors.

Google offers various alerts you can sign up for:

• News alert: A news alert will tell you whenever a phrase you chose has shown up in the latest news articles.
• Web alert: A web alert will show you the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice.
• Blog alert: A Blog alert will show you the latest blog posts that contain your search terms.
• Groups alert: A Groups alert will let you know of any new posts in groups that contain your search term.
• Comprhensive alert: A Comprehensive alert will show you the latest results from many sources allowing you to check out multiple sources at once.

The Internet Archive: You may very well already be familiar with the Internet Archive which shows you year by year and month by month how a website has changed. So why is this important to you and how is it important to SEO?

The Internet Archive allows you to go back and take a look at how your competitors website has changed its content over the years and even find out how often they do so.  You’ll also be able to see what changes have been made to their sales copy as well. Don’t underestimate this very valuable tool!

Search Status Tool: This tool is one that a webmaster should not be without and one that I personally use. This convenient free tool for your Firefox browser shows you at a glance what a webpage’s PageRank is, what their Alexa popularity rank is, where incoming links are coming from via Alexa, a WhoIs search what’s in their meta tags, what kind of keyword density a page is using and more. This is an incredibly useful (and free) tool.  Just remember, you’ll need to be using the Firefox browser in order for this to work for you.

The nuts and bolts of SEO is the process of getting your website to the top of a search engine results page for your keywords of choice that can drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic being website visitors who are actually interested in your stuff and aren’t just out “browsing”.

Your keywords of choice are those words and phrases that people are typing into a search engine to find information on your website’s topic.

While that sounds pretty cut-and-dried, there are a hundred tiny details that go into getting a website in that prime location.  So let’s talk about what some of these tiny little details are exactly.

First, there’s two parts to SEO; on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the process of using your keywords that you have chosen for one of your web pages in strategic places throughout that page.  Note that I said “one of your web pages” not your “web site”.  Each web page within your entire website is ranked differently.  Each web page should be optimized for one or two keywords specifically related to the website topic.

So for instance if you were a store that sold tools, you would have a page optimized for hammers, another page optimized for saws, another page optimized for nails, and so on. All of the pages being part of the same “Tools” website.

Off-Page Optimization is the process of getting links pointing to your web pages.  A lot of people don’t consider off-page optimization part of SEO.  I completely disagree.  The point of optimizing your website for the search engines encompasses all factors.  What you do on your own site as well as what you do to promote that site since the promotion of that site will help you get better search engine rankings.

This off-page optimization is the most time-consuming task of SEO.  It’s the process of getting links to your site, yes, but they have to be the right kind of links; in the right neighborhoods not to mention those links have to have the ability to be seen by thousands of eyeballs that are interested in the information you’re providing. They must be located on pages related to your niche, they must have the right keyword anchor text and so, so much more.

So for those who were interested in what SEO was exactly, there you have it, in the most condensed form I could come up with.  SEO continues to change on a regular basis.  There’s always new strategies, new ideas, new search engine shakeups.  That’s why SEO is so important to the average website.  It’s an ever-evolving process that continues to change as the Internet grows.

1. Create a Video and submit it to the different video directories. Video will only continue to get more prominent as time goes on.  It’s already estimated that 25% of online users view videos every single day – that’s a huge number.  Plus, the added benefit of video is that the video market is far less saturated than the web page market.  One simple search in Google for the highly competitive phrase of “internet marketing” brings back a whopping 95,000,000 web pages.  However, that same term only produces 13,500 search results in Google video.  Take advantage of this while you can.Make reference to your URL in the video’s description.  A failure to do this will not get a link back to your site.While YouTube does not follow links back to their originating source, Google Video does (which by the way includes videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, Guba and more).  Take advantage of it while you can.
2. Do you use Google Notebook? You should.  Currently Google Notebook’s links are followed and, if you make your notebook public, will be indexed by Google.
3. Answer a question at Yahoo Answers. (http://answers.yahoo.com)People ask all kinds of questions on every topic imaginable here.  Whatever your niche topic is, you’re sure to find someone asking a question about it that you can answer.  Don’t forget to link back to your site as a resource.
4. Create a blog post with a helpful list. People LOVE lists.  And they tend to bookmark them quite frequently.
5. Bookmark your own web pages at places like Delicious.com, Newsvine and Technorati.  You can also use a service such as OnlyWire.com to do this for you.  Don’t worry about the nofollow tags on some of the social bookmarking sites.  Even though the nofollow won’t get you a link back to your site in the search engines, it can still get some eyeballs within the social bookmarking directory itself if you use the right tags in your bookmark.  (Tags = Keywords).
6. Write Articles. Not as effective as it used to be but will still get links pointing to your site however they won’t be the best most authoritative links.
7. Get listed in a niche directory. It’s likely that your business caters to a specific niche; if it doesn’t you need to really consider doing so.  Your niche will also very likely have niche directories that you can add your site to.  Unlike larger directories like Yahoo and Google (who gets their directory results from DMOZ) that are general website directories, there are also niche directories that have less competition.  Do a Google search for “your topic” + directory and see what comes up.  If your niche website would fit well in that directory, and the directory has a decent PageRank and a fair amount of pages indexed, add your site.
8. Link Build With Images. Places like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) for example, allow you to place photos within their directory, give those photos tags relevant to your niche and use keyword-rich link text within the description.  For example, if I ran a Wedding Cakes business, I could upload photos of “wedding cakes” use keywords related to those wedding cakes to tag my photos and use within my anchor text.
9. GIVE, GIVE, GIVE. Believe it or not, the more you GIVE away, the more people will link to you.  This could be a free report, free ideas, tips, whatever your target market would find helpful and useful.
10. Niche Websites. Does your niche have a website that people visit often?  For example, if you’re a WAHM (work at home Mom) or a WAHD (work at home Dad) there are a wide variety of websites available that talk about this topic.  See if you can’t be a “guest blogger” or contribute an article to them free of charge in exchange for a link back to your site.
11. Talk. Do you like to talk about your topic?  Use places like BlogTalkRadio.com and host your own radio show.  People will find you and subsequently visit your site. This is a great way to get links.
12. Review a Product. Is there a product you’ve used recently that you liked?  Ask the site owner if you can give a testimonial and then see if they’ll link to your website.
13. Make a Google Gadget. One very overlooked way to get potentially thousands of people to your site and linking to you is to create your own Google Gadget – you can read more about how to do this at http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/.  I recommend you take some time to see what the more popular gadgets consist of first – are they funny?  Useful?  Helpful?  Fun?  Incorporate these same ideas into your gadget so that they’ll get viewed (and used).

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.

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.

Until next time,

Kristine

BoneheadSEO.com