SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

The Motherload of SEO Patents, Papers and More

Over at the Cre8asite forums, Bill has posted an excellent gathering of SEO patents, books and papers that should increase your reading list for the distant future.

Flashback: Advanced Keyword Reaserch - Measuring Competition

If you’ve been conducting keyword competition research solely by searching for the phrase in quotes at your favorite search engine, you’re missing the boat, Dan Thies says.

Wordtracker’s “competition search” doesn’t really give you any idea of the level of competition. All it gives you is the total matches for an exact phrase search. A lot of those “competitors” aren’t even trying.

Instead, try these:

First, the very least someone would do to optimize would be to include all the words in the page title. To find out how many there are, do an “allintitle:” search on Google. For a 3-word search phrase, your query on Google will look like this:
allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

Second, you can narrow that search down to pages that have the exact search phrase in the title, as a phrase:
allintitle:”keyword1 keyword2 keyword3″

That tells you roughly how many are trying to compete with you. Now let’s see how many are competing on “off page” factors as well. To do this, you want to know how many of the pages with the phrase in the title, also have the phrase in the text of inbound links:
intitle:”search phrase” inanchor:”search phrase”

Now, let’s see how many incoming links the top ranked sites actually have. You may need to match their counts, or get higher quality links, in order to compete. You can look at ‘em with the Alexa toolbar installed, and it will show you, or you can do a “link:domain” search on Google. Don’t just look at the links to the ranked page, because interior pages will show few links. It’s also a good idea to look at their link popularity on other search engines.

Lodefizzle, SEO and Coding

Mike Davidson of mikeindustries.com has a much publicized critique of SEO and HTML coding that has been brought up enough to warrant a revisit.

The conclusions of his four tests:

1. The H1 tag does indeed assert some dominance and we can therefore assume you are better off using proper headings in your HTML documents.
2. The mere appearance of many nested tables in your code does not have a strong enough negative effect to be considered a drag on search engine ranking.
3. It’s not clear that validity helps search engine ranking, but it’s definitely true that certain errors in your code can get you completely removed from indexes.
4. The semantic effect of hierarchical HTML headings is a stronger factor in search rankings than more rudimentary measures such as physical keyword placement.
5. Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.

I won’t speak about his linking conclusion here - SEOs are familiar enough with the impact of linking in quantity, quality and relevance - though I do want to address some of his coding conclusions. On first glance, it seems that clean code is not that important - well, at least when considering TITLEs, content and links. He’s right on that, but it is dangerous to discount clean code. Of the 100+ factors search engines use to determine placement in their SERPs, clean code is obviously among them. Take it from Mike after conclusion two:

I imagine the only negative affect at all was because the ratio of “lodefizzle” to other content on the page was slightly lowered by the addition of more code. This, however, could be an argument to keep your code as small as possible.

Therefore, if your content and linking (ha!) is where you want it, it’s time to look at the code. Raising the content-to-code ratio is key here. Besides, less code means less bandwidth usage and quicker loading times, which is arguably part of online marketing in and of itself.

Beating the Sandbox - Another Theory

Prompted by a comment by John Scott in the Cre8asite SEO Forums, Rand from SEOmoz comments on the Google Sandbox and what causes it. The consensus seems to rest in the arena of links.

John’s comment:

It applies to links, not sites. And the age of the link is not the only factor. The IP range of the links and other considerations are made, and the person who I discussed this with said that Krishna Bharat is at Google primary to develop and implement this new algorithm. It is supposed to radically change the way links are evaluated.

Rand’s bottom line:

The bottom line is that I now feel very strongly convinced that the Google Sandbox Effect is a side effect of their paying attention to links and the documents that provide them. A good rule of thumb going forward is that you probably cannot trust any link to help you with your search results. This is most likely not what Google wants people to conclude, but it is a safer approach to link-building than seeking out links based on any particular criteria.

But I like Andy Hagan’s comment best:

The sandbox is the trustbox. To beat it, either

1) Aquire HIGHLY trusted links, or
2) Aquire SOMEWHAT trusted link and let them age

Starting Your Link Building Campaign - Best Practices

This article over at Search Engine Guide has a great walkthrough of how to craft that first batch of link requests for a new site:

Be personal. I began my email by explaining that I’d heard of her plight while visiting CNN’s web site. I went on to explain that I’d been an active milk donor in my own town and that I had been interested to read about how she’d purchased her own pasteurizer and was processing milk for her own children.

Be relevant. I briefly mentioned my own blog and my t-shirt shop and mentioned that I had written about her site on my own blog and that I hoped she would see some new visitors and interest from my readers.

Offer something of value. Finally, I suggested that since she receives a reasonable amount of traffic, she might consider adding AdSense to her site as another way to earn money. I also suggested that she consider becoming a Lactivist affiliate as another way to raise funds through the site. I told her that I would be happy to help her with the AdSense integration or with getting an affiliate account setup for the shop.