Jun
29
RSS Syndication Services And Directories You Should Be Using: FeedBurner
Filed Under RSS Syndication | 11 Comments
RSS syndication is much more than a little orange icon on your blog. Sure social network marketing systems like WordPress pretty much handle everything you need as far as RSS goes, but only at the most basic level. To compete in tight markets and increase both your visibility and market share, you must utilize more advanced RSS features than what comes out of the box with WordPress. This article will be the first of a few that will outline the more important tools and services that can help give your site an edge over your competition.
RSS Management And Distribution Service FeedBurner
In my post RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained I told you about the RSS services that I use to great effect. Here I am going to go into greater detail about FeedBurner as well as sharing with you the results of multiple tests I performed to see just how much benefit is derived from “burning your feed”.
FeedBurner - once looked at as the finest RSS distribution network, FeedBurner has been propelled into the stratosphere since its acquisition by Google for 100 million big ones. FeedBurner was started with 1 million in capital in 2004. They got another 9 million in funding in 2005, built up their services and subscribers and turned a 90 million profit two years later. Man I love the Internet!
Six months ago I ran a demo on two different blogs. The first I manually submitted the RSS 2.0 feeds to directories and utilized the Google Sitemap Plugin for WordPress by Arne Brachhold along with pingomatic to keep the major search engines and directories up to date with the blog. I had focused this blog on 10 specific keyword phrases.
The second blog also had 10 specific keyword sets and a very similar visibility index. In other words there was nearly the same amount of SERP results for both keyword sets. I submitted the feed with the default location within WordPress, i.e. domain.com/blog/feed. The second blog relied solely on FeedBurner as its means of feed management and updating. It also used pingomatic, but only the stock RPC service that is within WordPress.
After 2 months it was clear that the FeedBurner site had not only better placement, but more traffic outside of search engines. At this point I was convinced that there was no downside to having an outside domain control the RSS feed. In fact the FeedBurner page that was my RSS feed had equal Page Rank to my blog home page when PR was first issued.
The other site had equal Page Rank, but I expected that since both sites had equal inbound links. Even if Google hadn’t purchased FeedBurner, I would still be using it to manage all my RSS feeds based upon this study.
So what is FeedBurner and how can it help you? The first thing that attracted me to FeedBurner was the analytics. If you read my blog you know that I feel website analytics is one of the most important aspects of website management. FeedBurner has very complete analytics that tells you all about your subscribers. I knew that they had a great network since so many blogs I read used them to manage their feeds. After setting up an account I started “burning” feeds. Burning is their term for the services they provide which include publicizing your content and making it easier for people to subscribe to it. Another great aspect is the ability to optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be read by subscribers wherever they are.
I can’t stress enough how important the optimization aspect of FeedBurner is. If you have ever submitted your feeds to directories, the first thing you will find is not every directory complies to RSS 2.0 or Atom. Some don’t show the description properly, or say you don’t have a description and don’t accept the feed. I found this to be a problem on many real estate RSS directories that didn’t understand the WordPress feed, even though it is in the proper XML format.
FeedBurner eliminates all those formatting issues and sends out your feed the same way to everybody regardless of how they use the feed. We have already talked about their analytics so finally they have an advertising network that allows you to make some money through your feed. I suspect that this is why Google bought FeedBurner. Obviously AdWords will be their manager for the RSS feed ads.
The bottom line here is if you weren’t using FeedBurner to manage your RSS, you should. Now more than ever FeedBurner is a powerful ally in the Social Network Marketing arena.
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Jun
26
You see it everywhere: Web 2.0, but what is it, what does it mean, why should you care? There is more to Web 2.0 than meets the eye. While it is true that sites like digg.com, youtube.com and myspace.com are getting the most press and are the examples most people use to explain Web 2.0, they are only examples of the personal aspects of social network marketing, not the commercial side.
What Web 2.0 Is And How It Can Help An Online Business
From a personal standpoint, Web 2.0 can be a powerful and cool way to share your thoughts, pictures, songs, playlists, videos, or whatever you’re into, with your friends and family or even co-workers. This is the underlying structure of Web 2.0, bonding and communicating outside of the normal world wide web. Think about it for a minute. The world wide web is really based upon hyperlinking. Sites get built are linked to by other sites, listed in directories, and found through search engines. It is the same with products and shopping carts, or auction sites like E-Bay. All these commercial applications revolve around users entering what they are looking for in a search engine and then following the results to what they are looking for.
Things are much different with Web 2.0. It started a while back with forums. Places where people can share ideas and information even experiences. These forum threads are then spidered and can be found in search engines so new users are able to find other peoples answers and opinions on products, services or ideals. While forums were once very popular and in some industries still are, especially for technical support sites, the fact is they are hardly a secure solution for most of us. I personally have had quite a few forums hacked no matter how many security updates I did.
Besides hackers, many users also find forums to be hard to follow, update, moderate and maintain. Along comes blogging. At first blogs were personal web logs, online journals used to save and share ideas. They hit the big time when Google purchased Blogger. Now everyone and their mother has a blog. In fact more and more industries are moving much of their organic marketing into blogging. When you look at the commenting feature within most blogging systems again the ability for discussion makes a blog a community portal.
The real estate industry is probably the largest commercial community to fully embrace blogging as a sales tool. My wife Victoria and I both are strong in that industry, bringing social network marketing to the forefront of Internet Marketing campaigns.
While it is true that hyperlinks are still the most common glue that binds sites together, there is now a more powerful tool of communication that is the fuel that drives Web 2.0: RSS. Read my article RSS Syndication Explained for an overview of Real Simple Syndication.
With RSS a whole new way exists for users to obtain information. Through feeds, users can customize their home pages with updates about whatever they are interested in from news to home listings and product updates. RSS is the underlying foundation for Web 2.0.
From a commercial perspective social network marketing is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website as well as communicate with your customers. It is also one of the best ways to maintain support for your products by keeping online support journals.
My next article about social network marketing will go into excruciating detail about the commercial applications of Web 2.0. Below is a great video I found on one of my favorite blogs which is by Lawrence Lessig I think it is the best graphical overview of Web 2.0 I have ever seen.
Jun
25
Inbound links are the most important part of search engine optimization second only to keyword development and density of those keywords throughout URL’s, content and pages. You simply can’t have one without the other. All the keyword research and perfect optimization of those keywords throughout the site will amount to nothing without quality inbound links.
There are several types of inbound links and before we get into acquisition I am going to expand on the different types of links and how they effect your site.
The Different Types Of Inbound Links
The list below is broken down starting with the least powerful link to the most powerful link:
- Reciprocal Linking - The grand daddy of inbound linking, link swapping, which is basically: “I put a link on my site and you put a link on yours”, is out of date and has the least amount of weight. In fact there are some SEO experts now saying that reciprocal linking can actually hinder your placement. I am not sure I am willing to go that far, but they certainly don’t positively effect a site like they once did.
- Three Way Linking or Triangular Linking or Pyramid Linking - This scheme is a little better as far as weight goes, but I have been wary of it lately. With all the intelligence that goes into the algorithms of Google and Yahoo, I just can’t believe they can’t come up with a formula that can isolate Three Way Linking and filter it along with other spam tactics. The theory is simple and quite easy to implement when you or your link partners have multiple sites. Basically Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C which links back to Site A. Again there is no evidence that GoogleBot or Slurp have been tracking Triangular Linking, but I believe they do and will act on it, especially when abused. Another thing to worry about is the pass through ratio of ALL the corners of the Pyramid Linking foundation. If you don’t understand the pass through ratio check out my article: Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratios.
- One Way Inbound Links - This is a tricky, but highly effective means of boosting Page Rank as well as specific keyword optimization for a page. Link Baiting (Link Baiting has a bad reputation, but that is only because some tech writer used it in reference to those high-profile bloggers that tied “miserable failure” to George Bush’s profile page on whitehouse.gov, the fact is that trick was Link or Google Bombing, NOT link baiting!) is one of the most powerful ways to target your placement for a specific keyword. By obtaining several inbound links with the same exact phrase within the anchor text, you are effectively building authority for the site for that term. This tactic is especially effective when linking directly to the home page. If you are more interested in driving a tier 2 or tier 3 page up for a keyword, it requires more links. In fact if your trying to build authority for a tier 3 page, but the tier 2 page has weak pass through ratio, it will be much harder to obtain placement for the 3rd tier page. It important to understand that your websites linking structure both internally and externally are the foundation for your placement. You have to shore up the authority from your home page on down to your lowest page. A site that has many pages MUST employ Deep Link Navigation, not only from a usability standpoint, but from an SEO standpoint as well. No matter what your strategy, a one way link is nearly the most powerful type of inbound link. One key factor is the anchor text that links to your site should appear on the linking page. It is more about authority than it is relevance when looking at one way links. If you have any questions or need me to expand on this, leave a comment on this post.
- RSS Feed Link - By far the absolute strongest inbound link is when a website places your RSS feed on their site. If your feed is set up properly for optimization, your feed should have multiple attributes within the XML of the feed. The first attribute is “Publisher” this is the URL to your site that relates to the feed. For example if you have a blog, the home page would be the Publisher URL. If your blog is part of a larger domain, it is possible through XML-RPC to have dynamic feed content on your static home page. This would allow the actual home page of the main site to act as the publisher as opposed to just the home page of the blog. After “Publisher” comes the articles. Most sites will put up 5 articles from a site’s feed. They will obviously rotate as the feed gets updated. Here lies one of the problems with an RSS Link. If every time your feed updates then the search engine will be showing a different link since the URL’s of your stories are static. That is why it is imperative that you have the “Publisher” attribute in your feed. For more info read my RSS Syndication Overview. The bottom line here is that every time a site displays your RSS feed, your site’s authority doubles. The way to raise the authority for specific keywords is through the “Publisher Description” attribute. At this time I am not going to go over pingbacks, trackbacks and RPC as inbound links since that is going to be a 2 or 3 article series.
Inbound Link Gathering - How To Get Links
Looking at the above list about the differences between inbound links, I am going to spell out acquisition strategies in the same order. I don’t think I need to go into detail about reciprocal linking, since it is lame and doesn’t work anyway, but if you are hell bent on doing it, find related websites and send them an email with your information and where you put their link on your site. Back in the day I would do Link Extortion. In other words, I would put up 20 or 30 links on a page, build up its Page Rank, wait until Google was showing the links in the natural SERPS, i.e. link: www.domain.com, then send them an email with a link to Google’s page showing my inbound link to their website. I would point out to them that my link was already showing in Google and if they wanted to keep that link, they would need to reciprocate.
When acquiring links, the bottom line is you have to communicate with other website owners. The only other alternative is to purchase or rent links from a broker. This is another industry that has gotten a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fact is a good broker only places relative links. In other words the sites are somehow related. I only use 2 brokers. Text Link Ads, and Text Link Brokers. They both have outstanding inventory as well as common sense when it comes to SEO.
Another option for one way links is to use a service such as Review Me that puts together bloggers and advertisers. Basically you can either search for blogs that are related to your site and pay a one time fee to have a blogger either review your product or write about your site. They cost anywhere from $30 to $300 depending on the Page Rank of the blog. Make sure you research the blog. Make sure that articles that are 2 or 3 months old have the same or close to the same page rank. This is how you can gauge the pass through ratio of the blog.
Finally we get to RSS. Again this is a subject that will require 2 or 3 posts to cover, but here is the nuts and bolts. I use WordPress. WordPress is built for SEO and communication. It comes out of the box ready to communicate with search engines and RSS directories, but you still have to do a lot of work. There is a great service called pingomatic that notifies a slew of directories every time your blog (or if you are like me and have XML-RPC on your static pages as well) or site has been changed or an article has been added, or a comment has been made on an article.
Outside of this service there are a ton of news or RSS directories that you will have to manually “plant” both your blog/site and its feed. Once your blog and feed are planted, you will be able to plant your articles as well. It took me a whole month to get my blog, site, and feeds planted in the top 55 directories. I am now just starting to plant my articles, but already I have seen my inbound links within Google’s Webmaster Center, as well as Yahoo’s Site Explorer triple! Yep triple. I am not going to candy coat this. It is a lot of hard work, it took a lot of time, but my traffic has increased as has my search engine placement. I am now looking at a visibility index of 45% for the 125 keywords I track. Prior to implementing XML-RPC my index was around 22%.
My next article about linking is going to drill down into XML-RPC and how to employ it on more than just a blog. As always I welcome all questions, but I ask that they are put in as comments so I can get better placement and others can see the questions and answers. Remember that it all boils down to your inbound links!
Jun
19
Basic Blogging: Introduction
Filed Under Basic Blogging | 1 Comment
Together with my husband, Michael Stankard, we operate a successful social network marketing company called Get Found Now. We’ve both been blogging for awhile now and really enjoy it. I started out as a rookie on Blogger and eventually graduated to WordPress, which is a far superior platform.
Everything I’ve learned about blogging is a result of the expertise of Michael, whom I consider to be the “guru” of social network marketing. Michal Stankard was really one of the pioneers of blogging long before it had a name. Everyone thought he was crazy with his nonstop informational postings on PHP Nuke portals and phpBB forums. What Michael was actually doing was blazing the trail of the future of Internet marketing.
Yes, SEO is important, but social network marketing is really what it’s all about if you want organic search engine placement and traffic generated to your website. If your business relies on the Internet and your not blogging, you could find yourself nixed out of your market by competitors who are blogging.
More and more people, who rely on the Internet for their business, are wanting aboard the social network marketing bandwagon. They may not get how it all works, but they know they need to be doing it. The aim of Get Found Now’s blog is to post practical information on how social network marketing can be used as a component of an aggressive Internet marketing strategy.
Here’s a couple of blogs that I’ve regularly posted on:
- Mortgage and Real Estate Information Site
http://www.flarates.com/ - DTI Data Recovery Resource Center
http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/author/victoria-stankard/
Stay tuned for future posts on helpful blogging tips.
Jun
15
RSS Real Simple Syndication Overview
Filed Under RSS Syndication | 9 Comments
By now everyone has seen the RSS symbol and even the little add to Yahoo and Google on every blog and more and more websites. What is RSS, how does it work, why should I care? These are all valid questions, and I’m here to give you the answer. Below are some of the typical icons that you will see that relate to RSS syndication:
RSS Syndication Explained
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it surely is simple. Just about every blogging system that exists has RSS built into it. I have also heard that RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. In fact when you type “what is RSS” into Google, the #1 site is a one page wonder that calls it Rich Site Summary, but I haven’t heard anyone else call it that so we will stick with the Real Simple Syndication definition.
Ok so what is RSS? In tech speak it is a type of XML code that comes in 3 or 4 different languages such as Atom, RSS 2, etc. The type isn’t that relevant until you get to the point where you are actively promoting your own feed. If I had to choose I would stick with Atom since it is understood by the majority of readers and is the flavor of choice with Google Base.
Again most blogging systems put some code in the header of your site with meta information that tells RSS readers and other interested programs where your feeds are and what type they are. There are also RSS services that help you help yourself, by understanding your subscribers. A subscriber is a person that has either added your feed to their Yahoo, MSN, or Google homepage, bookmarked your blog feed in their browser or RSS feed reader, or if you are like me signed up to receive email updates to your site.
I personally use FeedBurner to manage all my feeds, It is free and easy to use. Plus they are a big believer in analytics and give you a quick overview of how many subscribers you have and how they are subscribing. Another company FeedBlitz allows your site visitors to subscribe to your feed via email. Since I am a WordPress guy I use a cool plugin called “What Would Seth Godin Do” written by Richard Miller. Get the plugin from Richard K Miller dot cooooooooom. What it does is add a little box either at the beginning or end of every post that prompts users to subscribe to your feed. It has an easy to customize plugin manager page that allows you to also throw in the FeedBlitz code for email subscription. Since I added the plugin a ton of subscribers signed up for email updates to my blog.
Before I move on FeedBlitz is free, but for a mere $14.00 a month you can update how your email is sent and even customize the template. I upgraded mine and I plan on using it as a newsletter. Since there are still a bunch of people who aren’t sure what RSS is or how to use it, calling it a newsletter is a great way to promote your site’s feed!
My next article on RSS will go into the nitty gritty of feed promotion as well as sharing with you the tools that I use to get the most out of RSS.
Jun
13
Website Analytics: Hits - Page Views - Unique Visits Explained
Filed Under Website Analytics | 3 Comments
Website analytics explained: the difference between hits, page views, unique visitors, visitors and returning visitors. If you are wondering why I just repeated the title it is because the description within the meta tag is drawn from the first hundred or so characters of the article. I had tried some different plugins for WordPress that control the tags, but they were interfering with each other after the latest WordPress update. Forgive me for the redundancy, but as you well know the meta title and description are very important!
The Vocabulary of Website Analytics
By now you all know that tracking your website visitors is very important. We have talked about the different types of website analytic services and software there are, and how they work. Next up is an explanation of the core stats and what they mean. The individual statistics that are tracked are called metrics. An individual statistical result of traffic analysis is a metric. Simply put hits, page views and visitors are metrics.
One of the most important terms that often gets overlooked is referrers. This can help you determine if your visitors are actually people as opposed to bots or spiders. In fact one of my favorite tools from way back (in Internet terms way back is around 2000) is AWstats. A simple but effective Perl scripting engine with a nice and simple GUI, AWstats was the first tool I ever used to analyze traffic. I bring it up because they actually have a category called people which simplifies the referrer data.
Other than people there is only one other term that might be confusing to a newcomer: bandwidth. My hosting company allows me 200GB of burstable bandwidth for my servers (2) every month. Unless I have a couple of Grateful Dead concerts on my site for download, there is little chance I will ever get close to using it up. There is reason to take a look at bandwidth however. Like many site owners that wanted a blog I chose the best of them all: WordPress. WordPress utilizes a technology called XML-RPC to communicate directly with search engines and RSS directories. Along with normal submittals I also use advanced tools called planters to list by blog as well as my articles. One of the engines I submitted to called MixCat, was getting caught in one of my image directories and looping through a cgi script I use to add image thumbnails into specific RSS feeds. This was taking a hell of a lot of bandwidth, and the worst kind - outgoing. It threw me over my monthly allotment. Once I saw the bill I called Rackspace and they found the culprit. That is why it is important to keep an eye on bandwidth.
For the remainder of this article I will be using terms and examples from Google Analytics. They are for the most part universal and you will be able to gain a clear understanding of traffic reporting terms.
Website Analytic Term: Hits
One of the most overused and least important statistic in analytics is “hits“. A webmaster boasting that they are getting a million hits a day might only be getting 100 unique visitors or actual “people” visiting his site! A website that has tons of graphics, scripts or uses spacer images to line up their tables will get tons of hits. Every time a page is loaded every image, script, css call, html tag, include, etc. is a “hit”.
Since every website is different in the way it is coded and laid out, hits are not useful for any type of real measurement of traffic or as a comparison of your traffic to another sites traffic.
Website Analytics Term: Page Views
One of the most meaningful metrics are page views or pages. Back in the “Internet Dark Ages” (1998 when I built my first web site) what everyone had was page counters or hit counters. Amazingly enough I still see hit counters on peoples websites! Anyway when a page is pulled up and loaded that is considered a page view. Taken with other metrics like visitors, this valuable stat tells you how many pages on your site are being viewed by your average visitor. If your visitors to page views ration is 1 or less, then you are in trouble. My site has an average of 4 page views per new visitor. That means that the first time somebody comes to my site they are looking at an average of 4 pages.
How you set up Analytics is so important to the page view metric. You must make sure that things like images and cgi scripts are not included in the page tracking. I am going to be getting very detailed in Google Analytics set up ans will be covering these important filters. Unless you are showing possible advertising clients your traffic and page views, you don’t want to fudge on what your Analytics package considers a page. Page types is another important factor. Dynamic pages that are created by a database with analytics code in a footer include can often be mistaken for other pages. This happens quite a bit on off the shelf e-commerce programs like OS Commerce and Zen Cart.
The page view metric is best used when applied together with another metric such as unique or returning visitors when you have a dynamic website. If your site is static then certainly the page data will be more valuable. Since pages and page views are different for every type of website please leave your questions as comments to these articles so I can clarify things for everyone.
Website Analytics Term: Visitors
In my opinion the metric visitors along with its sub metrics unique, returning and just plain visitors is the most important general metric. Everything that you track or is worth tracking is wrapped around the visitor metric. Even content, pages and site navigation analysis depends on the visitor statistics. Where a visitor came from, what they typed in to get to your site, what they did on the site, etc. are the heart of everything from ROI on pay per click to the stickiness of your content.
Since there is just so much to look at in analytics I am going to keep things basic at this point. A visitor can be separated into 2 distinctly different types: people and machines. I have my analytics set up to track spiders such as GoogleBot and Slurp separately from human visitors. I have seen many companies that are employing advanced tracking systems such as WebTrends actually completely filter spiders! How often and how deep a site is crawled is extremely vital information. That being said, it is also important to keep them separated. I also recommend that you filter your own IP and the IP addresses of your company or client. Skewed data is no good to anyone and if you are like me you hit your own website hundreds of times a day.
Unique Visitors And Why That Is The Money Metric
Of all the visitors, the unique visitor is the most important metric. Some analytics programs don’t separate the types of “visitors”, if yours is one of those, than I highly recommend that you ditch it and get Google Analytics. There is a huge difference from visitors and unique visitors.
A unique visitor is counted as the first visit of a computer to your site. I say computer as opposed to a person, because it is tracking both the IP (physical address) of the actual machine as well as a cookie that is placed within that machine’s browser. The cookie is a key factor since many people’s computers don’t have a static or unchanging IP address. If you are on broadband or DSL, everyone in your neighborhood has the same IP.
While some sites live or die by the returning visitor statistic, most sites don’t care too much about the average visit statistic. I personally don’t believe that it can be tracked with enough accuracy to warrant the attention that a site that must know if visitors are returning needs. Let me give you an example. A website offers software for sale. They have demo versions of the software that are free, and then full versions that cost money. A site like that would need to know how many people that downloaded the demo actually purchased the software. This is a lot more tricky than you can possible imagine since who knows how long the customer is going to take to decide if they want to buy the software? Some browsers like IE 7 don’t retain long-term cookies. In fact I suspect that 48 hours is the longest you can expect to obtain return visitor data with any type of accuracy.
SO what does that have to do with “unique visitors?” Well the amount of uniques your site gets is a very good baseline as to your traffic. If you base all your funnels (specific tracking campaigns) on the unique visitor metric, it makes it easier to gauge trends as well as set up goals.
My next article will delve deeply into the core functions of Google Analytics.
Jun
7
Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratio
Filed Under Linking Strategies | 4 Comments
Linking is the single most important part of search engine optimization. You might have built the most spectacular website in the world, but if no can get to it, or if users can’t find it in the search engines, it serves no purpose. Search Engine Optimization really boils down to 3 basics:
- Keywords - identify the words that users will type into search engines to find your site.
- Optimize - place your keywords within the domain, the URL’s and throughout the site’s content.
- Link - list your site in directories and obtain links from other web sites. Have a good internal linking structure.
Internal Linking Strategies
The most important part of your website is your content, but how that content is accessible is just as crucial. If your users can’t readily find what they are looking for, then they will leave your site and never come back. Every site has some sort of navigation. Whether it is a fancy Flash menu system with rollover effects going across the header or simple text links running down the sidebar, you have to have navigation.
How your internal pages link together outside of the navigation or footer links is extremely important for SEO as well as usability. For now I am concerned with SEO, but if you are interested in linking for usability read: Website Usability Deep Link Navigation. The search engine spiders follow the links within your content as well as the links within your navigation and footer. In fact it is the content links that are of more importance, especially on the home page.
A website and its pages are broken down into tiers. The top tier pages are your home page and any pages that are linked directly from it. The second tier pages are linked from pages other than your home page. For instance if you have a link from your home page to your services page, and from services you link to the individual pages that explain your different offerings, those sub pages are second tier. Those pages that are not linked to the home page, but only to your service page are third tier pages. If you have sub-pages under the different individual services those would be fourth tier pages and so on.
The graphic below shows a 3 tier system and how Google Page Rank diminishes the further a page is linked from the home page. This demonstration is taking into consideration that the tier pages have the proper “Pass Through Ratio”.
Search engines, particularly Google prefer that pages are within the root directory. Many webmasters will make a separate sub folder called /services/ and put that categories pages within it to better organize the files on the web server. Unless your site is dynamic or you have thousands of pages you should keep your pages within the root. This is also important to the tier linking. Pages within the same directory have a much better chance of passing the Page Rank on to its sub pages.
Pass Through Ratio And Why Its So Important To Linking
The pass through ratio is broken down into 2 types:
- Domain Pass Through - the carry over of page rank to pages linked from overall website elements such as footers and navigation.
- Page Pass Through - the carry over of authority and page rank from one page (or tier) to another.
When you are first developing a website drawing out your site linking structure is one of the most overlooked facet of design. You must plan your internal linking carefully to not water down your top tier pages. Too many outbound links on a page (even internal links) will take away its authority and ability to score higher page rank.
More importantly, on an existing website, the addition of new pages and their ability to rank in search engines depends on pass through. Top tier pages that need to also support pages under them must have outside linking to them directly for them to be able to pass on their authority.
When obtaining inbound links whether you do reciprocal link exchange or buy links from a broker make sure to also get links for your internal pages. That is the most important aspect of pass through, the weight of the internal tier pages. My next article will go into detail about link gathering tactics.
Jun
3
The rumor mill is working overtime as Microsoft is again pursuing the acquisition of Yahoo. Reportedly $80 billion is what Yahoo thinks its value is, even though most market analysts see it more in the $50 billion range. I have seen a lot of experts saying that Microsoft won’t pull the trigger since it has invested so much into MSN over the years. The fact is this move does make a lot of sense for Microsoft.
Why Microsoft Should Buy Yahoo
If you follow my blog you know that Google is moving into the portal space that is dominated by Yahoo. While as far as portals go, MSN is second, the difference is in the millions between Yahoo users and MSN users. By users I mean people that use my.yahoo as their home page. In the bad old days of dial up, AOL was the clear champion, but times have changed and they don’t even offer Internet access anymore. Since the majority of AOL users are in the under 20 - over 50 demographic, no serious Internet user would claim to use AOL.
Now that just about everyone has high speed Internet of one type or another, everyone needs a starting place. Google knows that users that have a Yahoo home page are more inclined to do their shopping and searching there. Sure many computers come with Google search tools built into their browsers and desktop. Anyone that uses Firefox has the Google search as part of the toolbars. IE users are downloading the Google Toolbar and anyone that is involved with Internet Marketing follow Page Rank with the Google Toolbar.
Having all that power is not enough for Google. They want to be the be all - end all for users on the Internet. Their move to Universal Search, (see my article The Changing Face of Google if you don’t know what Universal Search), the upgrade from Froogle to Google Base, Personalized Search and Google Checkout are all examples of Google’s move to be your home page. Throw in Gmail and they are trying to gain all your Internet activity. They also actively gather data to make your Internet experience better.
All these things point to Google keeping their dominance in the search arena. By doing so they will further increase the value of AdWords and AdSense. That is after all how they make their money. How can Microsoft possible compete within the paid search space? The fact is they can’t. Yahoo bought Overture a while back and that put them in the driver seat as far as paid search goes. Google has the rest of the market share, there just isn’t any room for MSN or Windows Live.
Microsoft has known for years that they have dropped the ball on the Internet. They have done a poor job and they know it. While some say it is a desperate move to buy Yahoo, I think it is the only way they can have any presence to speak of on the Internet. As the Internet Presence Manger for some high profile sites I know how a company can live or die with organic search. Giving Google real competition is the best way to keep them on their toes and be more friendly to SEO. While Google preaches that they want to help Webmasters, that just isn’t so. The only way to keep Google in line is to create competition, and Yahoo can’t do it alone. Only with the vast empire of Microsoft behind them can Yahoo hope to eat into Google’s space. Only together can Microsoft and Yahoo stop Google from dominating the portal space.
Since Google started its personalized search and instituted custom home pages, I have been maintaining both Yahoo and Google home pages. The big difference is Google’s attention to blogs. The ability to easily add a blog’s feed to your Google home page is the big draw for me. If Yahoo is going to go it alone, then they must pay more attention to blogs to hope to maintain its market share of the portal space.