Archive for the ‘Seach Engine Optimization (SEO)’ Category

Just Another Blog About SEOMoz PRO Training

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

(or…5 Things I Learned About SEO & Stuff)

I already miss Seattle.

I was fortunate enough to arrive in the Emerald City 2 days prior to the SEOMoz PRO Training Seminar and was able to hike around and experience some of the awesomeness that Seattle has to offer. Between the beautiful downtown area and the amazing talks given by the presenters the last weekend I took away several concepts that will come in very handy in the future.
Rand Fishkin & Jeff Loquist - SEOMoz PRO Training

1. Grown Men Turn Into Little Boys Around Rand Fishkin. (a quote from my wife) – It’s true. Myself included. Much like a bunch of pre-teens trying to get close to their favorite rockstar, SEOs couldn’t wait to get a word – and a picture – with the founder of SEOMoz.

2. Ben Hendrickson is an Absolute Genius – Would you call a person that reverse-engineered part of Google’s algorithm anything else. The reverse-engineering we’re talking about is the part that deals with content relevancy and Ben’s LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) Tool allows you to see how relevant your content is to a search query based on the context – not just the keyword density. The LDA Tool can fairly accurately predict a site’s ranking based on the content alone. Seriously.

3. There is another Genius Out There. His name is Will Reynolds. – I could go on for an entire blog about the enthusiasm and great ideas this man offers (and I just may), but I will stick with the one that hit me the hardest. Want to find links for your site? Utilize Open Site Explorer to find out where your competitors have failed and take advantage. Simply run OSE on a competitors website and take advantage of 404 errors by contacting the linking site’s owner and letting them know that they have a broken link…and you have a link that would work just fine. Simple. Easy. Genius.

4. My Baby is Ugly. – And it makes me sad now. Tim Ash gave a presentation on the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization. Covering simple things you can do to improve the user experience, including offering too many choices, having unclear calls to action and asking for too much information (yes, you can and probably do do this), Tim really got me looking at the sites I optimize and reevaluating how I am offering my products and services to my visitors.

5. Seattle is a Very Safe & Clean City – While I would like to say that everything I learned revolved around SEO one of the biggest things I learned is that Baton Rouge makes me sad. I was absolutely stunned at how clean Seattle was and that it is possible to walk down the street (regardless of the time of day or night) and not have to worry about personal safety. In fact, the 3 biggest crimes in Seattle (in order) are bike theft (and I mean bicycle), theft from the trunks of cars (Rand said it is because Seattleites are too nice to actually break a window) and jaywalking.

Anyway, while the PRO training offered a whole lot more than I have said here (obviously) this is all I have time for tonight as I am packing to leave for Iowa tomorrow and need to get some sleep. If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend the seminars do a search on Twitter for #mozinar and dig around for a while. There were plenty of great people posting their thoughts throughout the training.

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Posted in Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Rants & Raves, SEO Specialties Business, Seach Engine Optimization (SEO), Uncategorized | No Comments »

What the Hell is the Supplemental Index?!

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

We all get sidelined from time to time with questions from time to time.

Google's Supplemental Index

This is especially true when we forget that SEO (What is SEO?) is relatively new and most people don’t even have a basic understanding of the “magic” that Internet marketers perform. What I was not expecting was for someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of search engine optimization concepts to toss this one out there…

A little back story…

I am the Search Marketing Manager for an Internet retailer so I get questions thrown my way all day long about best practices for optimizing SEO and PPC efforts. Yesterday one of the people – dare I say two – of the people working on one of the teams lost his (their) gourd(s) after performing a check of indexed pages via the “site:URL” query in Google. Seems to be that a couple weeks ago their site had over 12,000 pages indexed and was now down to roughly 1700.

Another little back story within the back story…

Over the past few weeks I have made several changes via “nofollow” on links and “noindex” on pages to remove unnecessary pages and duplicate content from the search engine’s indexes (cleaner websites mean happier visitors).

That was reason #1.

Reason #2, I explained, was that Google probably moved pages it deemed less relevant to the supplemental index.

And this, my friends, plants us in present day…

So…what the hell is the supplemental index?

Basically, The Internets is BIG fellers. And Google needed a way to streamline search results to not only improve search results for people but also make the return for search queries fast.

Like…cheetah fast.

The Internets Be Cheetah Fast!

The supplemental index is not a place where web pages go to die, however. In a nutshell (while typing this originally I wrote butshell there…just had to throw that out there.), pages that are deemed less relevant by Google spiders for more common search terms are removed from the main index to help streamline results and placed in the supplemental index where they wait patiently for someone to use a longtail search term that cannot be satisfied with main-indexed pages. This is when the GoogleBot (aaargh!!!) scours the supplemental index to find relevant results to serve. An example of these pages would be an item page on a large e-commerce website.

Is there a way to move pages from the supplemental index to the main index?

The short answer is yes. Through link building efforts you can increase the relevancy of web pages and get them moved from the supplemental index to the main index of Google. As long as none of your highly important pages are in the supplemental index and all of your key pages are in the Main index a more important question would be how important is it and would the time and effort you spend improving the relevancy of a page that is geared to the longtail anyway be better spent improving key pages of your site?

The down and dirty…

Let’s get down to business. Quick and dirty, here is how you find out how many pages you have indexed in Google…and I mean ALL of Google.

The Main Index:

Enter site:www.yoursite.com in the Google search box. For our example site I used BBQ Guys, this returned 11,700 pages.

The Supplemental Index:

Enter site:www.yoururl.com *** -sljktf in the Google search box. This time, for our example site it shows 101,000 page indexed in the supplemental index.

Doing the Math:

If you want to determine the ratio of pages in the main index to the supplemental index simply divide the pages in the main index (in our case 11,700) by the number of pages in the supplemental index (101,000). For this website, that number comes out to roughly 11.6% – not too shabby for a large e-commerce website.

Utilizing the supplemental index information allows you to compare your site to others in your industry and can also help you determine where your site is lacking and could use improvement.

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Posted in Seach Engine Optimization (SEO), google | No Comments »

SEO Has Made Us Lazy: Or…Why we are Losing our Hunter/Gatherer Instincts Because of Online Search…And Love It

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

The Internet has made life easier.

Duh.

With the understatement of the century now said we can ask a totally related but possibly unpopular question:

Could Search Engine Optimization (SEO) contribute to our loss of hunter/gatherer instincts and the downfall of society in return?

What?!

I can hear the gasps from readers already. I think it could be a legitimate argument someday, however. In a society that is as technologically advanced as the one we currently live in (though it can be argued that even today only about 365 million people have access to a computer…even more staggering is the idea that nearly half the world’s population has never even seen a telephone – think about that the next time you are using Google Maps on your iPhone) many people have forgotten that only a couple centuries ago (if that) our ancestors, while not having access to technology got by with grit, determination and hunting and gathering know-how.

We have lost some of that in the modern world…in fact, to say some of that is another major understatement. It would be an interesting sociological experiment to see how many people could survive without modern conveniences (and I don’t mean like on Survivor). I doubt many could…much less perform simple tasks like starting a fire without a match or even changing their own tire.

While technology has made life easier, it is easy to see that it has also made us much less self-sufficient as a species.

So…what does SEO have to do with this?

After the invention of technologies such as large farm implements which allowed people to grow large amounts of food and raise cattle and poultry people no longer needed to know how to hunt and grow food. Today, anything you need from food to clothing and even automotive services can be found at your local Superstore.

The most hunting and gathering most people in America today see is finding the last pack of toilet paper on aisle five.

But at least people still need these instincts to find information on the Internet.

Right?!

With the onset of SEO it is now easier than ever for Search Engines to find and provide information to their customers that is highly relevant to the topic or product they are trying to gather.

We no longer even need to hunt online!

What are we going to do in the event there is no longer an Internet…and, dare I say, no longer computers?

It’s a frightening concept.

Grab your bows and gather your arrows people! We need to re-learn how to provide ourselves with sustenance.

***This has been a public service announcement from SEO Specialties***

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Posted in Bored On A Saturday, Rants & Raves, Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) | No Comments »

A Google Search for Your Site Name Will Not Get You Noticed

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

The other night I went over to a friend of my wife’s house for a reason I cannot remember (yep, it works like that).

This particular friend and her husband have recently started a website for their business. While sitting around their kitchen the subject turned to their website and how they were hoping to get more traffic and, in turn, business for their…er…business. At this point I got very quiet.

May reasons for this are two-fold:

  1. I like to see what other people know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  2. When they first set up their website they used me for some free advice (yes, I’m like that and you should be too)

Her friend was talking about how they had gotten a few visitors but needed more. She then asked if everyone would please do a Google search for their business name so it would receive first page rankings.

Scooby Doo head snap

Now, if it would have been anyone else I would have corrected them as I am letting you know now that doing a Google search for your business name will not get you ranked for anything. This will happen automatically as long as your website is not doing any shady business.

And what about the keywords people are typing in for your service? Ranking for your business name is great, and if your well known even better. But if you are like them, and most of us are, you need quality SEO to get noticed by the general public.

I’m hoping most people know this but hearing them ask people that really got me wondering.

Then again…if many people do think things like this it means more of an advantage for people that understand the importance of search engine optimization

Posted in Bored On A Saturday, Rants & Raves, Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) | No Comments »

Title Tags Still Amaze Me

Friday, December 4th, 2009

And usually not in a good way…

One of the easiest and most effective tactics in a sites optimization arsenal and it is still amazing how many sites I come across with little or no optimization in their Title tags.

It doesn’t matter if you feel like you have competition or not. Providing your site with keyword-rich and relevant meta titles can make all the difference when trying to rank in the SERPS.

Yes…this is short.

Yes…it is Friday night.

Yes… I’m beating a dead horse.

And no…I shouldn’t have to.

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Posted in Bored On A Saturday, Rants & Raves, Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) | No Comments »