LDS Media Talk

Matt Leonard over at Search Engine Journal recently wrote about Twitter SEO: 4 Simple Tips to Help Your Twitter Profile Rank. If you’ve got a Twitter account and want to make sure your profile appears the way you want in search engines, then this is a good article to review. Here is a brief review of Matt’s suggestions:

1. Optimize the title tag by using your actual name instead of your Twitter username.
2. Optimize the meta description  by writing a good “one line bio”.
3. Build followers, links and PageRank. Followers who have pages with higher PageRank can help boost your profile’s PageRank and good quality tweets should help with conventional SEO.
4. Link to your Twitter profile using your name as the link anchor text every now and then.

If you have any questions about these Twitter SEO tips, check out the whole article.

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Last year I created a personal blog and wanted to optimize it for search engine traffic. So, as expected, I googled “wordpress seo” to see if anyone had written tips on optimizing a WordPress blog. Sure enough, I came across a number of articles on the subject.

One of my favorite articles is Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog. Joost takes a “holistic view of SEO” and goes through many of the steps necessary to set up a blog for search engine optimization. Some of these include:

1. Basic Technical Optimization reviews permalink structure and optimizing, titles, descriptions, the “more text”, and images.
2. Template Optimization which covers how to use breadcrumbs, headings, code, speed, and sidebars to advantage.
3. Advanced Technical Optimization shows how to avoid duplicate content penalties and manage the flow of “link juice” through a site.
4. Altering a Blog’s Structure for High Search Engine Rankings points out the importance of turning posts into “pages” and linking to related posts.
5. Conversion Optimization shows how to turn readers into subscribers.
6. Comment Optimization and Off-Site Blog SEO give tips about how to involve readers with a blog and connect with other bloggers.

Even though the article covers a number of technical considerations that are specific to WordPress blogs, bloggers using other platforms can benefit by applying these guidelines to Blogger, TypePad, and other platforms.

And of course, just setting up a blog is only part of the work. Unless the posts make effective use of keyword research, they won’t be optimized. However, we’ll save that topic for a later post.

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Following Larry’s post that blogs are hot, Googler Matt Cutts recently presented at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 and posted his slides at Straight from Google: What You Need to Know. Mr. Cutts presented some tips for optimizing a WordPress blog for Google. A few points that caught my attention:

• WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization.
• Google crawls roughly in decreasing order of PageRank.
• Use categories that are also good keywords.

While there is perhaps nothing earth-shaking or new contained in his slides, it’s always good to get another blogger’s perspective on optimizing a blog for Google. Good information if you have a few minutes to scan through 50 slides or so.

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Recently, Danny Sullivan posted a story that SEO Makes Front Page of Los Angeles Times. This particular story caught my eye since Larry previously blogged about The Shrinking World of Newspapers.

As evidence of this trend, the Times story It’s Web 101 for this experienced intern describes how former TV Guide magazine editor Lois Draegin lost her job and is now an unpaid intern at The Women on the Web.

“The Women on the Web,” or WOW, needed Draegin’s magazine-world wisdom, and she needed their guidance through a maze of technology that was as baffling to her as hieroglyphics. In a search for a new job in the media, she had suddenly found herself techno-challenged. She didn’t know a URL from SEO.

It wasn’t until she was teamed up with Randi Bernfeld at WOW that she understood the obsession with terms such as search engine optimization (a method to increase traffic to a website) or used Google Trends to pick story topics and write a uniform resource locater (Web address).

Previously,

. . . she hadn’t bothered to learn such skills as writing tags and URLs because she was paid to think globally about the direction of her magazine. Now she had to think globally not only about each topic but about every word she wrote in the URL, headline, subhead, tag and links in the story.
Everything had to be crafted to draw readers.

“It’s really a challenge to do all of that at once,” Draegin said.

As Mr. Sullivan said:

As part of her new job, she’s discovered that how people search — and maintaining a search friendly web site — is an essential part of the content process.

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Today I noticed that the article 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum Benefit got Sphunn. As alluded to in the post Google Quickly Defuses Obama Google Bomb, “links are an important signal in [Google’s] PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful (see More Ways for You to Give Us Input).

Here are five suggestions by Gyutae Park that will help you “optimize existing links to your site and increase their SEO value. This will help you to obtain more direct traffic and creep up in the search engine rankings for your targeted keywords.”

1. Ask for more links – One way to get more links to your site is to simply ask other webmasters for them.
2. Optimize link anchor text – Sometimes bloggers and webmasters link to a a site using poor anchor text such as “click here.” Make sure others link to your site using keywords in the anchor text.
3. Correct errors – Monitor 404 errors on your site to ensure that pages which link to your site use the correct URL.
4. Change link locations – If a site links to a page on your site that is blocked from indexing by a search engine, ask the webmaster to link to another page on your site – and if possible – from a page with high PageRank.
5. Turn your site name references into valuable links – Search for websites that mention your site – but don’t link to it -and ask the webmaster to link to the site with the suggested link anchor text.

This is just a brief review on optimizing links to your site, so check with the original article for additional information.

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Last week Fox News reported Google Quickly Defuses Obama Google Bomb (see Unlike Bush’s ‘Google Bomb,’ Google Quickly Defuses Obama’s). Here’s an excerpt of the story:

In 2003, President Bush’s detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words “miserable failure” to Bush’s official biography on the White House Web site.

The result was that when someone typed the search term “miserable failure” into the Google search box, Bush’s bio rose to the top of the search results.

And that’s how it stayed until 2007, when Google developed an algorithm to detect what became known as “Google bombs” and re-directed the term “miserable failure” to non-political pages.

Unfortunately for Obama, “miserable failure” reverted back to his bio when he moved into the White House. The new president was also Google-bombed with the phrase “cheerful achievement.”

But this time, Google stepped in quickly, rectifying the situation in a few days, instead of four years.

Below is an example of the results you would have gotten in Google a number of years ago for the query “miserable failure”.

Here is an excerpt of Google’s response to this “Googlebombing ‘failure’”:

Regardless of your political persuasion, Google bombs underscore the power of link juice. Recently, Scott Dimmick blogged Are You Helping the Opposition’s Cause? and pointed out how linking affects a site’s PageRank. I recommend a read through if you are concerned where you send your site’s link juice.

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Adding an XML Sitemap to your blog is one way to ensure your blog is getting indexed by all the major search engines. And unless the content in your blog is getting indexed by an engine like Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask, and others, it won’t be found by search engine users.

According to the Sitemaps web site:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Since I have a WordPress blog, I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. After installing and configuring the plugin, my blog’s inclusion ratio – or the ratio of pages in a search engine’s index divided by the total number of web pages – has consistently hovered above 95%. The image on the left indicates that at present, Google has indexed 756 pages of LDS Media Talk.

TypePad, Blogger, and other blog platforms provide similar functionality. For example, see TypePad: Creating a Google Sitemap, WordPress: XML Sitemaps, and Blogger: Sitemaps and Blogs.

Although adding a Sitemap to your blog won’t guarantee that web pages are added to a search engine’s index, it’s simply another way to ensure your blog is search engine friendly.

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We recently ran a list of the most frequently misspelled words or phrases that people have entered into the search box on LDS.org. The following is a portion of the list from June 2008, and shows the number of times someone spelled the term that way during the month. It is interesting to see how people think words are spelled.

• geneology 611
• repentence 280
• pagent 268
• poligamy 124
• patriartical blessing 166
• patriachal blessing 103
• book of morman 65
• sacrafice 65
• sacrement 60
• babtism 56
• melchezidek 56
• confrence talks 55
• preperation 39
• priestood 37
• grattitude 36

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Another post from the Web 2.0 Expo:

Integrating SEO, Usability, and Internet Marketing for High Performance Results

Web sites are not “projects.” They are living, breathing environments. SEO, usability, and Internet marketing are often introduced on completion of the site and retrofitted later to support visibility and promotion to target audiences. This is counter-intuitive and country-productive.

Every aspect of the experience needs to be optimized with intent:

• Web site architecture
• user experience and interface
• content
• metadata
• assets
• media & publicity
• Internet marketing

Proven methodologies

• Competitive research and positioning (not copying other successful sites)
• Keyword research and positioning
• Ongoing content management
• Metadata optimization
• Formatting to maximize efforts, leverage best practices for widespread success (metadata, keyword utilization, etc.)

Since search engine algorithms change, best practices sustain these changes over time, without putting your site at risk of being blacklisted and will perform best for YOUR Web site.

True SEO incorporates (1) company mission, (2) unique value proposition, and (3) pre-qualification of audience. You want to attract people who are perfectly matched to your content.

Usability:

• Give your visitors what they want as quickly as possible.
• Promote engagement before they “bounce” (leave your site).
• Empowers the user to control the experience.
• Empowers viral marketing.
• Provides clear execution of desired outcome at all times.
• Promotes conversion.
• Answer every conceivable question or objection leading to the conversion.

Your mission is to meet the immediate and long-term needs of your audience.

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Today, about 80% of all Web traffic begins at a search engine. Increasing a Web site’s natural search engine rankings through search engine optimization (SEO) can help people access your site. Studies have shown that ranking on the second or third page of a search result can increase Web site traffic by up to 9 times. Top 10 rankings, or first-page listings, can mean an additional six-fold increase in traffic

Although SEO is not a panacea, it should be employed as an integral part of an overall promotion and marketing strategy. The best way to determine how much SEO to implement is to determine how your target audience currently searches for your content categories. Get reports that provide historical perspective of the popularity of key phrases that relate to your content. If you find that thousands of Web surfers are searching for your particular category per day, then you should move SEO to the top of your marketing priorities.

Remember that SEO is an ongoing, long-term investment. You need to continuously optimize content, fine-tune metadata, and optimize the page’s code to maintain excellent search engine results.

This is important both internally and externally. Internally, as you update your site’s content frequently, you need to optimize it so it continues to rank appropriately on search engines. Externally, since the ranking algorithms used by public search engines change constantly, you need to stay abreast of how your site is being ranked.

Ignoring SEO can be detrimental. Give search visibility the attention it needs to protect your brand and help people find your content.

(Several of the ideas in this post came from Business to Business.)

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Many Web sites are missing the boat with search engine optimization by focusing primarily on the home page. Key pages of content also need to be optimized, especially when site visitors may jump directly to those pages without going through the home page.

Many people–and in some cases most people–will find your content with a search engine, which will take them directly to the content they seek, instead of being escorted through the home page front door and relying on a site’s internal navigation or internal search engine. While this is a valued benefit of a well-planned search engine optimization strategy, it also raises issues about successfully introducing and cross-referencing content.

It is critical for a site to have a solid information architecture to accommodate a variety of different user scenarios. That model can’t rely on a single home page to introduce visitors to your content and brand. Instead, you need to treat every page like it’s your home page. Brand awareness, site navigation, and marketing need to be reinforced at all levels. Even the deepest parts of your site should help visitors understand what the site is about as if they were seeing your brand for the first time.

Site navigation is not only a user’s guide, it is a communication tool and opportunity to market your content. Carefully consider the navigation labels you use because they will inform site visitors of new offerings that may interest them.

Once on a page in your site, visitors will be most responsive to content related to what they searched for. If done right, contextual promotions will prompt them to read the message and interact with it. Introducing modules that integrate with the content such as “If you’re interested in X, you may also be interested in Y” is a great example of this.

Understanding how visitors arrive on your site and how they get around will help you craft a holistic user experience.

(Several of the ideas in this post came from Business to Business.)

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One of the best ways to get your site or blog listed on page one at any search engine is to have a substantial number of inbound and outbound links. So, how do you get those links? First and foremost, make sure your site has useful, interesting, up-to-date content that people will consider link-worthy. Next, set up a blog as part of your site because it is one of the best ways to build both inbound and outbound links. Below are some ways to get inbound links.

How to get people to link to your site

1. Get found. Find out what phrases people are searching by using a tool like Wordtracker. Then, make sure your pages use those phrases, so people will find you before they find other sites.
2. Stay current. Make sure your pages contain relevant, informative, and interesting information.
3. Promote your site. Encourage readers to digg and del.icio.us your articles. This puts links to your site on some very credible news feeds.
4. Let visitors generate content. Allow comments on articles and blogs.
5. Make lists. There’s nothing is more link-able than a good list.
6. Start controversy. That’s right, don’t be afraid to be controversial. As they say,“any press is good press”.

Consider who would benefit from linking to you

1. Bloggers. A great way to get noticed is to get out into the blogging community and start commenting on other blogs. Most blogging platforms will link to your site when someone clicks on your alias. Many bloggers rely on outside articles to supply their blog with updated, relevant information. Many are a quick “copy & paste” of information with a link to the external source. Even journalistic blogs will cite other blogs as references for their information. Whenever you get an e-mail or a comment from someone on an article you’ve written, make sure you follow up with them. If they are reading your content, they must think you are a reliable resource and this could be the start of a great business relationship.
2. Business Partners. These could be your blogger friends, your conference networking buddies, old colleagues, but they may also be your competition. It may be easier than you think to form a strategic alliance by finding a way that both will benefit. Many people will link to you if you link to them–even competitors.
3. Customers. Who better to spread the word about you than your loyal clientele? Offering links in your thank-you e-mails to related articles, and even outwardly asking them to link to you is a great way to invite traffic to your site. Many people will do so if you just ask. Any incoming link helps.
4. Suppliers. Think about offering testimonials (closing with a link to your site) on the testimonial pages of your dealers. Most organizations can use new testimonials, so a good deed for a good deed is good business. Ask them to list you on their “Partners” page.
5. Friends. If all else fails, talk to your friends. In the digital age, almost everyone has a blog or is part of some social network. Tell your friends to link to your site in their forum signatures, blogrolls, MySpace and Facebook profiles, and anywhere else they can think of.

How to get bloggers to write about you

This is the epitome of link building. If your list of blogger prospects isn’t large enough, find more at Technorati, Google Blog Search and Ask.com’s blog search engine. Here are a few ways to get bloggers to notice you and link to your articles:

1. Contact the blogger. This is a bold move, but if you think that something you’ve written will be of interest to the writer, then by all means, put yourself out there. You can usually find contact details on a bloggers site or contact page. When you contact bloggers, start with a compliment. Talk about how much you enjoy their blog, and do your research beforehand. Make sure you provide them with all the details they need to link to your site. For more tips, check out Ogilvy’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics.
2. Comment on other blogs. This has multiple benefits. If you write genuinely-interesting comments, people will feel inclined to learn more about you. Most blogs link back to your Web site if a user clicks on your comment name. Another benefit is that your comments immediately create backlinks to your site. Don’t leave obvious promotional comments; no one likes reading them.
3. Ask for a review. If you are product-based, offer relevant bloggers a chance to receive a free product in exchange for their review. Even if they are not an immediate fan, if they blog about your product you still a backlink that others may follow and even find a different product they prefer.

How to get your competitors to write about you

On the Web and in the blogosphere, it may be you have no competitors at all–just potential partners. Find arrangements that are mutually beneficial when it comes to link-building.

1. Exchange links. A non-threatening place to suggest a link-exchange would be in a blogroll or “partners” area of your competitor’s site. It doesn’t distract their readers but it’s still a valuable placement.
2. Fill a void. It may be that you have a complimentary article or product on your site that they don’t cover and they may see it as valuable to their readers. Many bloggers rely on other bloggers to fulfill their editorial needs by cutting and pasting, or speed-linking (a post composed completely of links to interesting articles and sites) to fill some white space. Fill that space.

How to get other inbound links to your site

Think about user-generated sites to create your own external inbound links. Use forums, online communities, social bookmarks, and online reviews to create live links to your content.

1. Social networks. Read more about how to do this in an article about being a social networking evangelist. It includes a link to our “evangelist toolbox” which shows you multiple places to set up shop and create links to your site from multiple domains, including Digg, MySpace, LinkedIn, Technorati and more.
2. Online Press Releases. If appropriate to your content, consider an online press release, which may generate multiple links to your site from all over the Web. Not only from PR sites themselves, but also from any browsing blogger looking to pick up a story. A list of free and paid resources (as well as a step-by-step how-to) is at Quick guide to distributing press releases online.

How to find out who is linking to your site

1. Try Yahoo! Site Explorer
2. See the backlink tool in Google Webmaster Tools
3. Check out the backlink analyzer Domain Stats Tool
4. The Firefox browser has a great plugin called “Search Status” that displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank, and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with a fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info, and more.

This post was adapted from several articles at Mequoda.

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Getting on page one is more important than ever. Make sure you target keywords that will get you on page one.

Many people will find your Web site by searching, using public search engines like Google and Yahoo! If you want people to find your content, how good do your search engine rankings have to be?

That question is answered in part by an iProspect Search Engine Behavior Study. The study is from April 2006, but its lessons are just as valid today.

What is the main lesson? Get on page one at all costs!

Why?
   23% of Web searchers will click on the first few results on page one. 
   62% click on a result from the first page. 
   90% click on a result in the first three pages of search results.

So if you’re not on the first page, most people won’t find you. If you’re not on the first three pages, forget it! And over the past several years, those percentages are rising.

If your rankings are low, the only way to raise them is through discipline. There is no quick fix to win a page-one ranking.

Start by finding the keyword clusters that apply to your content that users are actually searching for. Try tools like Google Suggest to gauge the competition and WordTracker to see the keyword search frequency. The point is to find keywords to target that you’ll eventually be able to get on the first page for.

Once you pick good keywords, make sure your content is optimized for those key words and phrases. Use the relevant keywords in the content copy and in the metatags. Organize the content on pages according to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It will take time to show results, but keep at it.

Lastly, do all you can to have other Web sites link to your pages.

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Google’s May 16th press release explains that their new Universal Search will begin providing a “more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online,” because the Google results will now include online news, books, video, maps, and other online databases, in addition to Web pages. Results from all these sources will be mixed with the traditional Web page results.

Bottom line: Now that more sources will be included in Google results, it’s now more important than ever to optimize your pages and your other content. If you were skating by before, you may find that news and video results will push your Web site’s rank down. Your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy must include optimizing not just Web pages, but also video, books, news, and other content you have online.

So what?

• If you’re a Google user, you’ll begin to see changes now, and more over the next few weeks, incorporating additional types of content in your search results.
• If you’re interested in search engine optimization, I recommend you read SEO guru Danny Sullivan’s good explanation of the implications of Google’s Universal Search on SEO.

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