Aug
30
Link Juice Explained
Filed Under Linking Strategies | 7 Comments
I just received an email from a webmaster asking me what “link juice” was and where could he buy some. While it is possible to buy links, they are actually worthless if they don’t give your site any weight. He had heard of the term “link juice” when it was used by Matt Cutt, Google’s spam cop, in an interview with SEOMOZ. The truth is, it was Greg Boser whose site Web Guerrilla first started the new buzz word.
Personally I refer to the weight of a link as “Pass Through Ratio” and wrote about it in my post Website Linking Strategies: Overview Of Pass Through Ratios. The concepts are very similar. Link Juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links. If you are looking at buying some links or setting up some multi-link deals, then you are going to want to take a hard look at where your links are going to be placed.
Link Juice Pass Through Ratio Rules
I agree that link juice is a hipper name than pass through ratio or PTR, so I will stay trendy and continue to use it for this post. Since this is a core part of my business I am not going to give away some of the more advanced tools I have to calculate link juice on a site, but these following rules will still serve you well:
- Know The Page - if your site will be linked to from anything other than a home page, make sure you know exactly which page your link will be on. Some of the more shady link brokers won’t tell you exactly which page your link will be on, until you have already paid. This is a bad sign. All good brokers show you in advance where your link will be.
- No More Than 100 TOTAL Outbound Links - the page linking to you should not have more than 100 TOTAL links including internal navigation and other site control links.
- No More Than 25 Paid or Sponsored Links - make sure they don’t have a ton of paid or sponsored links. Really 16 is my rule of thumb for paid links, but enough industry people agree on 25, but the less the better.
- No More Than 2 Google Adwords Boxes - any site that has more than 2 Adwords boxes will not help you.
- At least 1 Point Higher In Page Rank - the site should have at least a 3 PR, as well as being higher than your page. Sites that have below 3 PR have little or no pass through.
These are basic guidelines for accepting inbound links. The thing to remember is; your own internal pass through, or link juice, also depends on your site following the basic rules of linking. Don’t have more than a couple advertisements, no more than 100 total links on a page, etc. By properly stuffing keywords and creating optimized content your pages will have more weight, which will in turn make your internal links have more go juice.
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Aug
25
Live Search Webmaster Portal In Beta
Filed Under Live Updates | 2 Comments
Well Microsoft Live Search is finally joining Yahoo and Google in giving webmasters access to information about their sites through a webmaster portal. Even though they are behind the times as usual, at least they are doing it. Get Found Now are beta testers of the portal and we will be passing along useful information to our readers as we use the new portal.
The public release of Live Search’s Webmaster Portal will be available to the public sometime in the fall. Since March Microsoft has been working on tools to help webmasters. I am sure you noticed that you couldn’t search for backlinks on Live anymore. This is the result of fixing the problems that link searches created. They will also be adding these tools:
- Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
- Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
- Statistics about your website
- Consolidation of content submission resources
- New content and community resources
This is a solid move on their part to increase the interactivity of their site. Even though Live is a distant third in the grand scheme of searches, their 8 or 9% market share still results in millions of searches per day. The bottom line is nobody is in a position to ignore any types of major traffic sources. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and will pass on to you what we have learned.
Aug
23
Website Usability rules come and go mostly due to changing technology and design awareness. As time goes on users become more experienced with website design elements and learn how to use the standard features of their browsers. Even though many old website usability rules don’t carry as much weight as they used to, there are still a few that will never change.
Website Usability Rules To Ignore At Your Own Risk
So what are the steadfast rules that no designer in their right mind would ignore?
- No Unscannable Text - users just don’t want to read your site’s content. Sure this isn’t as true with blogs, but if your primary site is a blog, or you have over 25% of your inbound traffic coming into a blog that is part of your main site, you still need to follow this rule. Often called “Dense Content”, long sentences without paragraph breaks and headings make for a hard read. When a visitor hits your site or a page on it and they feel they need to work at getting the info they need, they will make like a tree and leave. You have to make your content scannable and use bolding to highlight the primary keywords within a paragraph. This is also a good SEO practice.
- Visited Links Must Have A Different Color Than Other Links - if you follow standard practices then you utilize breadcrumb navigation and other techniques to help your site visitors navigate your site. This is all well and good as long as the visited links have a different color than the standard blue of millions of hyperlinks all over the web. Users can get confused pretty easy and they should always know when they have followed a link. By changing the color of visited links you assure your users of knowing where they have been.
- No Pop Up Windows - if you use the Internet you must hate pop up windows. In fact most browsers, ISP’s and toolbars come equipped to block pop ups. So why do sites still use pop up windows? Who knows, but it is still a very bad idea.
- No Back Buttons - yes there are still sites that employ the hated “back” button. Back. Back where? Use bread crumb navigation at least, no back, down, up, forward, right or left. This is and always will be a bad practice.
- Don’t Over Do Ads - too many ads on a site is one quick way to loose whatever stickiness you might have had. Having banner ads all over the place will take away from whatever worthwhile content you might actually have on the site. Most users know by now that primary site features are usually in text or in buttons that correspond with shopping carts and images. Google Ads all over the site is a sure way to loose your visitors.
These are just a few of the steadfast website usability rules that have been passed down over the ages. Stick to common design practices and you will do just fine.
Related Posts:
Website Usability Overview
Home Page Usability
Website Usability and SEO
Search Engine Usability
Aug
21
Even though this article is primarily about WordPress, it is important for anyone that has a website whose URL structure is less than optimal. We all learn by doing, SEO isn’t a precise science, in fact the rules change all the time. With WordPress you have options when setting up your site, but what if you didn’t set it up right in the first place?
Well that is what happened to me. I followed the guidelines on the WordPress permalink page, and used the year, month, and day string in my URL structure as recommended. I set up my blog like that as well as most of my clients’ blogs. I jumped right into WordPress without really testing the waters like I should have. The problems weren’t really on this site, but on my wife’s site homesadvisory.com which has a 4 PR on the home page, but isn’t getting any love in Google. I found that a lot of her articles were in supplemental results. I know that Google is eliminating sup results, but I really don’t think that is going to do anything for her SEO.
After much research I realized I had broken one of my oldest rules: no duplicate content! So what to do? I found a lot of great websites with many different answers. I decided to just do what I knew is best, solid URL’s and no chance of dupe content.
The important thing is I don’t want to loose placement for posts that are doing well. For example I am #2 for “rss syndication services” which is accounting for 20% of my traffic. So if I change the permalinks within WordPress, I know that at the site level I am OK, but what about the links within the SERP’s and all the other sites that link into my posts?
The answer is a cool plugin called Permalink Migration from Dean Lee. It allowed me to easily change all the links on my site from /2007/05/02/postname to /postname.html. You see the main reason I want to do this is to stop Google from spidering my archives. I can easily do that by adding Disallow: /20* as a line within my robots.txt file, which will stop any date based archive pages or posts from being re-spidered, eliminating the dupe content.
This isn’t the only step though. If you use a sitemap plugin like me, you have to go in and manually change the settings to NOT add the archives to the sitemap. My sitemap is now totally clean and my URL’s are cool. The only thing left is the links within the posts themselves. I firmly believe in Deep Link Navigation so my articles have tons of internal links. These unfortunately weren’t changed.
I am currently looking into doing a replace within the MySql database rather than modify hundreds of posts. I’ll add comments to this post on the progress. If you have a WordPress blog and are using date based URL’s, you need to change your permalink structure! Leave any questions as comments on this post.
Aug
17
RSS Brings The News To You
Filed Under RSS Syndication | 1 Comment
I was just watching CNN and they were running a story on how many websites were losing major chunks of traffic. Sites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with Fox and CNN are losing traffic. They are asking why, but the answer is right in front of them.
People no longer need to visit those sites. Everything you need to know comes to you via RSS right on your Google or Yahoo home page. A few years ago I discovered that My Yahoo allowed me to insert content from just about anyplace that had a feed. I didn’t know what a feed really was, but went ahead and created my first Blogger blog. It was very cool to see my words right there on my Yahoo home page. That blog about hard drive recovery is now syndicated worldwide and has hundreds of subscribers.
So if you are not on the RSS bandwagon, you better jump on, or you will be left behind. By easily allowing your sites’ visitors to subscribe to your news, you are going to be in constant communication with your audience. It is true, your site’s traffic will suffer, but by placing ads in your feed, you can still turn a profit if that is your business model.
The fact is sites like Bloglines, News Gator and Technorati have extreme page rank which means Google feels they are authorities on just about every subject. By planting your feeds, and submitting to directories you can reach an audience that just isn’t using search engines the way they used to. Why else would Google buy FeedBurner and start adding news and blog results in the SERP’s? Google’s implementation of Universal search is just a beta test of how it is going to integrate feeds into natural searches.
As a user, RSS has eliminated around 75% of my search activity. I scanned my history for the last 4 weeks and was shocked to see how few websites I visited. I live in Florida so I am keeping an eye on Hurricane Dean, but you know what, I never leave my iGoogle page. Everything I need is brought to me through RSS.
As a business man and a person responsible for the livelihoods of hundreds of families, I need to stay on top of the way people use the Internet, to better prepare my clients. You see, all my clients rely on the Internet to survive, and I am their Internet Presence Manager, so that makes me responsible for their employees as well as for myself. For those of you who are like me, I suggest you track your Internet usage, how you search and shop online. To be able to help your clients, you need to understand how visitors actually use the Web.
RSS truly brings the news and the world to you!
Related Posts:
RSS Overview
RSS Syndication Services
RSS to Email
Aug
13
If you have a website or a blog by now you must know that it has to be promoted in one fashion or another. I have written a lot of posts about different ways in which to promote your sites in both search engines and RSS directories. I have been getting a lot of emails from people asking for an overview of website promotion. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I am going to talk about my company’s primary service and use that as a blueprint for those of you that do self promotion.
A lot of my peers have asked me why I give so much information away, particularly about marketing tactics and SEO. The fact is most of my readers are advanced users and would find this information either the way I have through trial and error, or by searching the Internet for it. SEO and Social Network Marketing, especially optimizing WordPress is a much covered subject. The clients that I have now and are on the lookout for, are companies that don’t have the personnel to execute a Web 2.0 marketing plan. Whether they lack the programmers or content writers, they just can’t put the time in to commit to Web 2.0. Make no mistake, if your business relies on the Internet, especially organic traffic, you must put in the time and resources to be successful.
Content Creation And Syndication
Assuming that you have either a website with a blog, or a blog system that serves as your site, the 2 primary things to work on is solid and optimized content, and syndication. I am working on several articles about WordPress optimization both from the writing side and from the server side. In fact I have been putting together a plugin package that will take your WordPress system to a new level. I know that not everyone uses WordPress so I am also creating a new real estate portal that will be using TypePad as well as another mortgage related portal that is using ModX as its content management system. I have a rather large real estate company as a client and have had unbelievable success with WordPress, but I do think it is wise to not put all my eggs in one basket. So as I work with these other systems I will post articles on the SEO progress of these other systems.
One last thing before I get started; all of the guides that have to do with WordPress are using standard SEO practices, so if you have a regular website you can take the tactics and easily apply them. The hardest part of Web 2.0 on a static site is RSS feeds. It is possible with either CaRP Evolution or even Feed For All to create dynamic news feeds from static pages. This will allow you to utilize feed and article planters as well as ping services and XML-RPC on a non-blog site. I have had a lot of skeptics that say XML-RPC on a static site is a waste of time, or too hard to implement and not worth the effort. I am running a major test series now on a high profile website. Next week will be the first post in a series of articles explaining XML-RPC and how to utilize it on static sites.
Get Found Now’s best selling service is the Managed Content Syndication Service. It basically is a Web 2.0 action plan for businesses with a static website. I have only done 2 jobs in the last 3 years for clients that had no web presence whatsoever, but I have done hundreds of upgrades and WordPress installs for businesses that have an existing site. The fact is we have had a great deal of success.
It all starts with a solid content plan that is based upon keyword research. By knowing my clients keywords, I can create URL’s and content that gives the website authority in the search engines for those keywords. It is all about authority. Your page must seem to be an authority on the keywords you are promoting. This is done by moderate keyword stuffing and link baiting the pages with inbound links that have those keywords in the anchor tags.
The key is to plan ahead in your content outline. On a static site I recommend bread crumb linking as the means to ferment deep link navigation, an essential part of SEO and usability. Read my article about Website Usability and Deep Link Navigation for more info. Once you have content the next goal is to get it out on the web.
RSS Syndication is the most powerful means for a website to reach the masses. Read this article if you want an Overview of RSS Syndication. By using RSS Syndication Services you can reach more readers than any other method of organic traffic acquisition. I use FeedBurner to manage all my feeds and have been beta testing FeedBurners RSS to Email service. While it isn’t as sexy as FeedBlitz, it is great to track all your subscribers at once rather than relying on separate analytics.
By taking standard SEO practices, providing original and optimized content, then submitting the site through syndication, Get Found Now has found a recipe for success in Internet Marketing. Our Managed Content Syndication Service is the heart of our social network marketing strategy.
Aug
9
WordPress SEO Search Engine Optimization: Getting Started
Filed Under WordPress SEO | Leave a Comment
Search engine optimization of static pages is a subject that is covered ad nausea. How about those of us that have more dynamic Internet presences? I personally prefer the WordPress system to any other type of content management system, and believe me I have tried them all. Unless you have an e-commerce site with hundreds or thousands of products, more than likely you could use WordPress as your content management system.
Using WordPress Posts and Pages For SEO
When you have WordPress installed either as a standalone application or part of a website, your options for SEO are increased big time. In my post WordPress SEO Server Side I explain the basics of WordPress and the importance of a good theme. Now that it is up, what do you do?
The first steps involve the sites content. You must have a plan for at least the first 20 posts or pages. There is a difference between WordPress posts and pages. A page is pretty much the same as a standard web page. It takes longer to get into the SERPs, but also has more staying power. A post can get you instant gratification, but unless the post is commented on frequently, it won’t stay in the SERP’s for long.
Creating Keyword Intensive Pages
If your site is specific to a set of keywords, the best game plan is to create keyword heavy PAGES. I have found that an optimized page other than the home page can rank highly for about 3 keywords or keyword phrases. The key is to use the keyword phrase in both the URL (in WordPress that would be the slug which is best formatted in lowercase with words separated by a dash, i.e. keyword1-keyword2-etc) and the Page title. In the slug or URL field do not use noise words like the, and, or, a, etc.
WordPress SEO is pretty basic on the client side if your system is set up properly with the right plugins. You have your title and slug with the keywords you are promoting on the Page. The first sentences should be a description of the content on the page. You need at least 1 or 2 paragraphs to start off the page prior to using H2 tags. The H2 tag should also have a keyword phrase in it. If you are optimizing for multiple phrase, then use multiple H2 tags, but always have at least 2 paragraphs between H2 tags. If the keyword phrase you are promoting has sub-topics use H3 tags to break down and isolate the different phrases.
It is important not to spam the page, and to have as much keywords that make sense. It is always good to rotate between <strong> and <em> tags to bold and italicize your keywords and phrases. This shows the spiders that the page is an authority on the keywords mentioned.
By creating Pages that are keyword heavy, you now have a base for deep link navigation that will help you gain authority in the search engines and give your users an idea what your site is about. The Pages are the foundation for getting started with WordPress SEO.
Promoting WordPress Pages With Posts
Once you have your primary keywords within Pages, you can now start writing WordPress Posts to promote them. During the WordPress set up you should have created at least the most basic categories to put your pages in. If you haven’t then now is the time to create your categories.
Most new blogs have a growing period from inception to getting regular readers and subscribers. That being said the first posts are probably not going to be consumed by the masses, which is why it is good to use them to promote your optimized WordPress Pages.
Setting up a WordPress Post for SEO is basically the same as it is for a Page except that you also will have tags and keywords. The same principles of title and slug remain the same, use your keywords in both. Once you have created enough posts that link to your pages, your blatant self promotion is over and you are ready to get busy writing your articles and setting up your subscription base. If you are unfamiliar with syndication read my post RSS Real Simple Syndication Overview.
WordPress SEO is a big topic and I will be covering it over the next 2 weeks, please leave any questions as comments on this post. I am putting together a plugin package along with an instructional video on how to install and configure the SEO plugins I use. I hope to have that done by the end of next week.
Aug
7
RSS To Email Services Update
Filed Under RSS Syndication | Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about FeedBlitz as being the best rss to email service that I had found to date. I recently discovered that FeedBurner had upgraded their RSS to Email service. Find out more about RSS Syndication Services - FeedBurner to see my original post about FeedBurner.
I had used FeedBurner’s rss to email service in the past and it wasn’t all that great. I suppose that was one of the first things Google upgraded when they took over since the service is very good now. I have been testing it on my wife’s Homes Advisory Real Estate Portal WordPress install, and it works great.
Why RSS to Email is So Important
Not everyone is up to speed on what RSS is. In my original post about FeedBlitz RSS to Email I explained the nuts and bolts of how to best exploit and use RSS to Email. The only difference is that you can now go to the “publicize” section of FeedBurner and activate the email subscription service.
The best reason to do this is to have all your subscribers stats under one roof. There is a definite correlation to RSS subscribers and rankings such as Technorati authority. In fact with Google’s purchase of FeedBurner, you have to think that it will play into the natural SERP’s sooner rather than later.
I have gotten so many requests for more information on how to use FeedBurner that I am working on an instructional video now that will be released later in the week… so stay tuned.
In the meantime if you have any questions about RSS to email, please leave a comment in this post.
RSS News
Aug
2
One of the most important aspects of Website Usability is keeping content above the fold so users are not scrolling up and down your web pages. This is absolutely essential when it comes to the home page. People just don’t scroll on the home page.
By now you should know what I mean when I say “above the fold”, but if you are new here I will explain. When you visit a website, whatever is within the boundaries of your screen is Above The Fold. If you have to scroll down to read content or take action, you are venturing below the fold.
No Scrolling Is The Best Policy
Most users just don’t scroll when they come to a web page. This is more true on the home page than any other page. The majority of your sites’ visitors enter on your home page. The ones that don’t have more than likely hit an optimized page that you created for specific keywords. If they don’t see what they are looking for in 30 seconds they will either hit your home page or leave.
These statistics and others I am going to be using, come from years of experience and analytics from thousands of websites. Today I oversee the management of hundreds of websites, together the average close to a million unique visitors a day. I use advanced algorithms to create usability studies. I also have used teams of these companies employees in usability studies over the years. Read my Website Usability Overview and Website Usability Deep Link Navigation posts to learn more about how and where I get my data. I feel it is nesassary to qualify these statistics so everyone can see the importance of usability and analytics in their web strategy.
I want to be clear about this: I am not saying “don’t put content or site features below the fold” , I am saying “put your message and IMPORTANT site controls above the fold”! I generally will put content geared more to search engines than people below the fold. I am not talking about keyword stuffing, I merely am saying that a few paragraphs and static links within the bottom part of a page can go a long way to letting search engines know what your page is about. The critical info for users as well as search engines needs to be as close to the top as possible.
Users just don’t scroll, in fact 65% of home page visitors will not look at more than 1.3 screens worth of data under any circumstance on sub pages that actually have the information they are looking for! If your site is designed around either templates, includes, or css, keep the skin short, headers should not be more than 150 px high. This give you more screen real estate to work with. I prefer navigation elements to be on the left and across the header. These are very common design practices.
Last year when I was involved in a re-design of a 350 page web site that averaged 10,000 unique visitors a day, my team and a team of their employees looked at a list of 400 websites that were on or similar in topics to my clients. We found that 80% of the sites we looked at used the same design approach.
Out of those 400 websites, 90% of them had major site elements below the fold on the home page. Since my client had hired me to obtain traffic organically as opposed to the $16,000 they were spending a week on Google and Overture, I needed to come up with a design that would not only convert, but also be optimized for search engines.
We set up 4 different versions of the home page and split up the PPC so they got pretty close to equal traffic. By studying the different home page styles we were able to have their site visitors work for us and help us decide which was the best design! This is called landing page optimization. There are several companies that sell landing page optimization systems, and they are all very expensive. They also use scripting to control the different “recipes” or page designs. This is so similar to cloaking that I wouldn’t do it even if my clients had thousands of dollars to throw down the drain. We were able to do it all with our analytics suite for no extra costs at all.
The results were pretty much what I expected. The page that converted the most leads had all content and controls above the fold and used standard design and navigation.
One year later, this company is spending only $4000 a month on pay per click and is averaging more than 10,000 unique visitors.
The moral of this story is: KEEP YOUR CONTENT ABOVE THE FOLD!!!