USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

Before you can try to get ranked well in search engines, first you need help finding the right keywords to get ranked for. What are the terms that you want people to type in to find you on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing? You’ll probably have some phrases in mind right away, but there are other steps you need to take before you start your work to rank well for those keywords.

Before you begin ranking, make sure the terms you try to rank for a worth your while. While some of the terms (like your brand name) might be obvious, a lot of the terms you work on should be researched to find out if a significant amount of people search for the term and if it’s even possible to rank for. Some of the terms you come up with might not generate any traffic, even if you’re the top spot in all of the search engines. Other keywords might generate traffic if you rank well, but that might be impossibly difficult depending on how much competition there is for the specific key phrase. If it’s obvious a lot of SEOs are already competing for a key phrase, your time might be better spent finding one that is less competitive that you can easily rank better for.

There are some good sources out there to help you find out the information you need to potential key phrases you might want to work one. SEOmoz has posted an excellent article that includes a lot of great information on this subject. Another great tool everyone looking at key phrases should use is the Google AdWords keyword tool, which can give you great insight into how many people are search for the possible key phrase each month. Google will also give you possible alternatives, so you can decide exactly what you want to go after.

Techcrunch’s CrunchUp a few days ago had an interesting panel on real-time search. The panel included SEO heavyweights like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s Matt Cutts. The discussion surrounded what real-time search is, and what companies like USA SEO Pros are striving for it to be.

It’s good to know what the big whigs of search are doing to stay with the times, and while some of the panel members seemed to avoid specific answers, others weren’t afraid to address the issue head-on.

Cutts from Google’s Web spam team was asked what approach Google is taking to attack the real-time search problem, and all he would say is that they’re working on it as they always have. This was very different from the answer Microsoft’s representative gave when he mentioned Bing’s integration of Twitter results, and specified that real-time search is something they are definitely focusing on.

A few other panel members made some good points when the group was discussing the definition of real-time search and exactly what it is. The consensus when defining real-time search seemed to be that it is a collection of the consciousness of the Internet, where as traditional search engines are the Internet’s memory. Where regular search engines will bring up what has happened in the past, real-time search brings up what is happening in the now. Real-time search is what the Internet is thinking, not what it used to think.

Another point that was brought up is that real-time search needs to distance itself from the rankings that traditional search engines use. While filters should be put in place to get rid of spam and the like, there should be no ranking system when it comes to real-time search results. This is obviously  a matter of debate, but as real-time search gains popularity, this debate will no doubt take place where it needs to, and the resolution that companies come to should be interesting.

Check out video of the panel while they were at CrunchUp below:

Indexing and crawling are two concepts you need to learn about if you ever want to rank in search engines. Without crawling, you site can’t be indexed, and without indexing, your site can’t rank. You have to know how to do the first two in order to achieve the third, and the third is the whole point of SEO.

It’s tough to know exactly how search engines work, but there is one outfit that does a good job of coming up with a lot of reasonable assumptions based on testing and experience in the SEO business. SEOmoz seems to be right most of the time when it comes to search engine optimization, they have some good tools to use, and they recently released a video that explains the details behind crawling and indexing pages.

While the information in the video is really just the best guesses that the SEOmoz team has come up with, they make a lot of sense and SEOs can reasonably assume that SEOmoz people know what they’re talking about. While a lot of what’s discussed is common sense, it’s always good to see it laid out on a whiteboard and put in front of you all at once. It shows people exactly what they need to focus on, and how much work has to potentially be put in to it.

Of course, after crawling and indexing, the pages still need to rank well, but you have to walk before you can run. Make sure your pages have the potential to rank before you try to increase their rankings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in running your own Web site or doing anything involving search engine optimization, it’s a good idea to check out the YouTube videos Matt Cutts hosts. Cutts seems to be the embodiment of the Google algorithm, so anything he says should definitely be looked in to. The videos on this channel involve Cutts answering questions that people have asked concerning ways to get their Web sites ranking better on Google’s search engine.

These videos can be extremely helpful. Some of the stuff is just common sense, but there are dozens of videos, and chances are you’ll find something out you didn’t know before.

Cutts’ job title at Google is “Head of the Web Spam Team,” which doesn’t sound like “SEO Ambassador,” but that ends up being a good chunk of what he does. He can be seen attending most of the large search marketing conferences, and routinely gives presentations on how to properly rank well in search engines. Cutts also gives tips on what not to do while putting together pages on a Web site, since there are a variety of different penalties that can be enforced by engines like Google’s.

Below are a few different videos from the channel you can check out. If the content seems interesting, the link at the beginning of the post will take you to the channel that as all of the different video Matt Cutts has done so far. By the way, he has the same red shirt on in a lot of the videos, because he’ll do a series of videos, then publish one each day.

With the last day of SES Toronto passing on the 10th, there are quite a few things to talk about. One of which is the first keynote speaker of the event, Tara Hunt. She’s the author of “The Whuffie Factor” who is hailed by the founder of Wikipedia and the co-founder of Twitter to be the perfect author for a book about building business via social networks. One of the reasons for the endorsements is because she’s done just that.

Within the first section on their agenda, they jumped right into getting sites internationalized for the companies that targeted a number of countries or markets. Covering everything from technical keyword research to cross-border management issues. Great for the bigger business, but for more localized companies, this session provides little, unless they’re close to hitting it big.

Of day 1, I personally think the two most important sessions were about linkbait and Twitter. With  linkbait, it seems to me that Tara Hunt should have been one of the speakers. The “Beyond Linkbait” session provided major tips on how a company should portray themselves online. Instead of caring a horrendous amount on getting that link, care about how that community or authority takes a look at them. Last thing you want is Biz Stone of Twitter mad at your company. While the publicity would be nice (regardless of the fact that you’re being slammed) wouldn’t you rather they be talking about it in a good sense?

Day two disappointingly started off with paid search coverage. While yes, paid search is a very good way to get that exposure for certain terms, it can end up being quite expensive. Not to mention a good deal of people ignore the paid search results entirely. Analytics coverage seemed like a much better topic to open up with as the analytics to any given site hold the information that shows the owner where people are coming from, what they’re searching for, how often they bounce away, and what pages they’re looking at. Google Webmasters is another incredible tool that should have been mentioned with resources on how to set it up.

Covering social media was also a big topic that everyone was on edge to see. There are an astounding amount of companies that are supposedly big game that are just missing the mark in the area. Also telling you which bits of social media are just falling off the wayside, this session was surely an eye opener to a good deal of attendees.

The last day was helpful to many, since the workshops seemed to be divided between the SEM and SEO aspects. The only problem is that you couldn’t attend both. Unless you had a friend go and take notes in one while you took notes in another. Needless to say, if you missed out on SES, you really did miss out.

It’s now commonly known that having valuable, trusted link-ins do a lot for your site on search engines. SEOBook  put out an article that discussed 101 ways to build link popularity, which was an obvious, but helpful plug to gain more PR. No attempt is made to hide this since the first way they even point out that making a “101 list” as one of those 101 ways!

Number 9 on their list is pay-per-click (PPC), which can be incredibly helpful for big business, but for the individual hosting a fan site for an MMORPG, or a competing club in a city, this proves to be an incredible waste of money. Especially if their competitors know that they can manipulate the PPC system and cost you money.

Links into your site can be very hard earned, yet well worth it if you snag them. Of course, you don’t want to go bugging the site administrator for that link in if they’ve already said no. If they have a community, show that you can indeed be a helpful part of it and make some educated posts. Gaining trust is all part of the game, and the sooner you get it from the domains that have been around a long while, the better off you’ll be.

Gaining link-ins from sites that have nothing to do with yours will gain you little, if any, help in terms of search engine juice. For example, why would you want your site about boxing to be linked to a well ranked knitting site? It doesn’t make much sense for your business, and it doesn’t make much sense to search engines.

Syndication also proves to be a decent help. It’s hard content, it changes often (as often as the source updates), and if coming from a reputable source, will gain you some points. Setting up your own as well as trading syndication also works with others if you can get good trades.

SEOBook provides a lot of good tips and while they did provide warning on going to sue Google for publicity, I don’t think that should have been listed. Someone out there is bound to want to proceed with the same process and waste taxpayer dollars on it. If you win or not in the battle, you certainly will gain publicity in one way or another, but it might not be the publicity you want.

Design as a linking element should have included jquery. It’s visually appealing, requires very little coding, and can give sites an interactive edge against the competitor.

Andy Hagans throwing himself out there for hired help is of course something a businessman has to do. But linking to andyhagans.com four times within the same post is a bit much in my opinion. Yes, I do realize that I threw out his URL yet another time. Least I can do for the article he provided. Woah! Rules 1 and 5 taking effect right here. Well, the desired effect of rule 1 that is.

From SEOmoz and their article concerning tips to get domain diversity if you have any control over this at all, make sure that your link into your site has a valuable (though not cheesy) anchor text. For example, if you’re the ABCD Business that deals with cough drops in Seattle, you would want your link text to have your business name or a combination of “cough”, “drops”, and “Seattle”. Nothing too long, nothing too short. They suggest bit.ly to shorten a URL if you’re going to be posting it in places such as twitter if your link is too long.

Sometimes people will link to you on an article you wrote on a blog (that you should have by now!) and not even use an anchor tag to put a shorter link up for the reader, and instead use the actual URL. Hopefully the blog you’re using shows the title of your post in the URL so that when the anonymous person posts your link in a forum or blog post somewhere, you still get the benefit of those keywords showing up. For example, the blog title of SEOmoz’s  “8-tips-to-get-domain-diversity-with-the-anchor-text-you-want”. All of that is in the URL that will help overall. Finally, SEOmoz does have one cute kitten, which is always good to help you get links if you’re willing to stoop that low.

It’s a joy to be in the changing industry of SEO, and it was very refreshing to see what was going on during the second day of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference. We also covering the first day of SMX yesterday.

At the conference, they covered many things that are good to keep in mind, and touched on good habits that everyone should keep in mind when working on Web sites. There were two things that I got the most joy out of reading, the first was how to better add flash in to a site and not lose out on all the rankings. I am someone that enjoys the look and feel of a good flash site and likes adding audio and video, and I like to learn new things that will allow me to do this and not lose rankings. To add to it, most major search engines are also working hard to index sites that are composed mostly of flash. In my mind this just makes for an all around better web experience, but it is still far from being perfect and not for every site.

The other interesting thing covered at SMX was conducting an SEO Audit and the many sides to consider in doing so. The presentation was very well laid out and gave many tips to consider when performing an audit on a site. Some of the tips included looking at URLs, site navigation and site latency. There is also a great list of tools that were talked about that can help you in your quest of making the most search friendly pages. I would have to say that the key to having a good audit is being able to keep proper track of problems and what actions you tried to do to correct the problem. This will let you see over time what has worked and what effect everything had. Sometimes it will not just be one thing keeping you from getting high rankings, but it will be a few small factors working together that have a negative effect on the site you are working on.

I think that every SEO tech out there can take a little comfort in knowing that most true techs out there are dealing with the same issues. This conference shows just how true that is. I would say if you have been in the business for years or are just starting out, reading the articles at searchmarketingexpo.com are well worth the time. I know I have enjoyed the experience and can’t wait to see what others have to say about it.

With the first day of SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced passing, there were a few things that were of interest from an SEO point of view. The “SEO Ranking Factors In 2009” was one of these things. A lot of what we already know still holds true and other SMX events like the one in London covered some of the information, but there were some tweaks to how search engine giant Google is going to be looking at things. There is a lot of speculation into Google’s future algorithm concerning links: 47 percent of people believe that the importance of links will decline while of course, still retaining at least some importance.

The URL, Title and Alt text came up as the most important on-page factors according to Rand Fishkin. Images having alt text are not only better for page validation, but seem to have a correlation with high rankings. In their words though, “Correlation is NOT causation,” which is important to note. Personally, I find it funny that Outspoken Media has this bit of information on their site, and fails validation through W3C’s Validation Markup Service for not having alt text in their images. Even a blank alt text would have gotten them out of that pinch.

A bit of information that may interest people is the data from SEOmoz concerning their view of Google’s algorithm:

• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
• On page keyword use - 15 percent
• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
• Hosting and registration - 5 percent

What concerns me the most is trust authority of host domain. For those just getting into setting up their own site with the hope of getting on page one of Google, this list of just how trustworthy a host domain is definitely not readily accessible. Setting these hosting providers up with a numerical value seems like it would be something Google would just sell to the highest bidder. Those in the know of numerical values would abuse it, setting up where the authority was highest. Godaddy is likely on the list of one of the higher providers since they’re mainstream enough to have sponsored NASCAR.

Another bit of information that is sure to hurt a lot of sites out there such as Squidoo is the possibility that Google may change their Nofollow algorithm. SELand broke it down very simply:

“…if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”

The sculpting that sites do to give more authority to certain things rather than others is going to lose effect. Making site owners modify their sites accordingly without sculpting, since it won’t hold as much weight.

On a final note, it seems that MSN’s new project Bing is sponsoring two of the time blocks for SMX. A small pittance for the trouble to have caused many over the personal and business tracking of ranks over keywords. Looking at Bing, it doesn’t seem any different from MSN’s old design when it came down to the submission.

Here’s a funny side note: When I had first heard of Bing, typing bing.com directly into the URL bar brought up nothing. But searching for Bing on Google and clicking on their link made it work. Good job Bing.

Not much video has been released from SMX Advanced 2009 yet, but there are other videos like this one with Matt Cutts from SMX events earlier in the year.

The SMX (Search Marketing Expo) has already made its stop in London this year, and some interesting tips were brought up during the event. There have been several posts that list some of the more helpful tips that were discussed, and we’ll summarize some of those in this post. USASEOPros already does most of these things, but a lot of people seem to be behind the times. It’s important to keep on top of the SEO community, or it’ll leave you behind pretty quickly.

One of the posts about SMX London is a list of quotes from the event and it can definitely be helpful for marketers and SEOs. Most of these quotes come from two people who really seem to know what they’re talking about when it comes to SEO: Rand Fishkin (from the SEO authority SEOmoz) and Patrick Altoft (from Branded3). They both had some very interesting (and sometimes obvious) things to say that people should think about.

One of my favorite quotes from Rand is, “Alexa data is slightly better than random guessing.” This has always seemed to be the case, but for some reason a lot of people still believe that Alexa is an authoritative source for data that they don’t actually produce. One of the more obvious, but still little-known facts that Rand covered was that Google devalues links in sidebars and footers. If you want a link to have power, make sure to put it in the main body.

Patrick had some good things to say at the event as well, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me in the article was, “It doesn’t matter if a link is paid for or not. Important is if the end product looks like a paid link or not.” The debate between whether or not buying links is kosher has been argued for a while, and this is an interesting outlook on the situation. While Patrick obviously doesn’t mind buying links, he brings up a good point: make sure they don’t obviously look like they’ve been bought if you do decide to go that route.

A different blog post includes an attendee’s notes that he wrote up after going to the event. The post lists 41 tips that he heard while listening to presentations, and there’s some good stuff in there. Some of the better tips in the list include paying attention how your competitor’s site is set up for SEO, and also optimizing for popular misspellings (but make sure to do this in a professional way.

For an Internet marketing, the SMX events can be a great benefit to your profession. The events happen all across the globe, so when you’re unable to attend one, it’s great to see that other people are willing to spread the knowledge like the creators of the above two posts do.

An interesting column has come out of Search Engine Land listing 85 different reasons why developers and designers help keep the business of SEO alive. Some of the reasons in the list seem to be legit, but the column has received some criticism for generalizing too much. The column understandably could be offensive to designers and developers, but at the same time, there could be truth to what the author of the column is saying.

Some of the criticism of the article can be found on the Sphinn page. The author says she had to generalize a bit to make the article work, but some disagree with her. Some of the 85 reasons in the list suggest that designers and developers think SEO is impossible, SEO is keyword stuffing, and SEO is a magic formula. In general, the reasons on the list fall into two categories: SEO myths and hidden SEO tips.

The myths in the list seem to be there to try to be funny, and the tips can be found in reasons like: SEO is all about the long-tail. Of course, it’s not all about the long-tail, but some of it is. The reasons that say what SEO is “all about” aren’t true, but if you replace “all about” with “sometimes” there is some truth in what is being said.

Even if you don’t agree with the list, it’s good article to check for the SEO tips if nothing else.