The Maine SEO Blog

Javascript, Flash, and (God forbid) tables may look cool.  You might even get them to work the same in every browser.  Admittedly, that is half the battle – making your site appealing to people, that is.  But the other half is building a website for search engines.

One way to see exactly what the search engines see is by looking at your code (or viewing the page source).  If you can’t read HTML, then checking out Google’s cache is your next best option.

There’s a few ways to do it.  One of my apps (SEO for Firefox) gives an option to look at the cached version of the page.  Or, when making a search, you can see the option next to each result; in this case, a holiday appropriate search:

Then, when selecting “Cached”, you see exactly what Google sees.  Be sure to choose the text only version:

As you can see, Google will highlight the keyword you searched for.  This way, if pressed, you can make a decision: be it a really cool flash intro or just some great content.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Halloween!

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Keywords/Trends

1. Keyword Discovery – for all the keyword research you could ever care to know. It does require a subscription – this or Word Tracker (which I’ve never tried) are considered the best.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – supplement keyword research; also gives better stats as to what people are actually searching for.
3. Webconfs.com Keyword Density Tool - there are a million keyword density tools out there, but I’ve found this one to be the most user friendly.
4. Google Insights/Google Trends – both give good insights as to what’s hot and what’s not.  Insights will also give you upcoming popular search terms.

Link Building

1. Marketleap’s Link Popularity Checker – gives you both Google and Yahoo!’s index of backlinks, plus others.

Plug-ins and Apps

1. SEO for Firefox – see nofollow links; look up PR, backlinks, meta-tags; plus much much more!
2. SeoQuake – many of the same benefits as SEO for Firefox, but you don’t necessarily have to have Firefox.  Plus, when activated, SeoQuake will give you a handy little toolbar with at-a-glance SEO stats.

Analytics (the one and only)

1. Google Analytics – it’s free and gives you everything you need.  Why go for something else??

I use quite a few more, but these are my favorite, and the ones I use the most often.  Do you have any favorites?

Nicki Hicks
I think I need a bigger toolbelt…

Are you a little over-excited when you check your Google Analytics because your stats look great?  You might be if you, people at your company, or maybe a consultant are on your website a lot.  Your analytics pick up those high stats from you!

So what to do?  Block your IP address! Check it out:

First, go to your homepage for Analytics – Analytics Settings – and click on your filter manager.

Click “add filter”.  You’ll see this screen:

Insert your filter name (using the IP address is a pretty easy choice), choose the filter type (to exclude all traffic from an IP address), and insert your IP address.  Below that, choose which sites you’d like to filter, and you’re all set!

You’ll find that your Analytics may no longer look as impressive, but at least they are no longer skewed!  Also – be sure to filter any other IP addresses you don’t want included in your analytics!

Nicki Hicks
Filter your measurements

The Search and the iPhone SMX presentation I went to a few weeks ago opened my eyes.  I had already been aware of how important optimizing for mobile devices was becoming – but it wasn’t until this presentation I realized JUST how much.

An article from eMarketer this morning confirmed and reminded me how SEO for mobile is very quickly becoming a necessity.

Mobile marketing, alone, should be taking the industry by storm, and it is – when 53% of users have access to the SMS function on their cell phones.

Optimizing your website for smart phones is the next step, but just the beginning.  While 17% of people have access to the internet on their phones, 15% have access to email.  So, even seemingly simple things like mobile emails that do not download pictures are helpful in faster download times.  This begs the question: why include so many pictures in email marketing campaigns?

Now, ever increasingly popularity of video, music, picture, and game downloads makes asking what type of movie, game, or app your company can create that people will actually download an inevitable one.

Nicki Hicks
What’s your YouTube channel?

Social media has a thing or two to say about politics and the two major presidential candidates’ stake in the race.  Putting aside Facebook, MySpace, and other indicators of who is winning the internet war, Twitter has proven to be an interesting gauge of this race.

Obviously Obama’s staff stays far more up-to-date on his Twitter profile.  Not only that, but take a look at the difference in followers.  Needless to say, I think this proves a fundamental difference between Democrats, Republicans, and their web use (or maybe just Twitter use).

Nevertheless, a cool tool called twInfluence shows exactly how much influence a Twitterer (or is it Tweeter?) has on fellow Twits/Tweetees (sorry, getting carried away with all of the names I can make).  BarackObama is #1 on this list, while JohnMcCain doesn’t show up in the top 50.

At first, this doesn’t seem all that fantastic or interesting.  You may be thinking: “So what, Obama supporters like Twitter more. Big deal.”  The interesting part comes in when Googling both of their names (and by the way, I turned off my personalized settings when I made these searches).

Barack’s profile turns up #10:

McCain’s profile took a little longer to find, down on the 5th page, #58:

Oh wait a second.  That’s not John McCain’s official Twitter account.  Guess I have to keep looking…oh here it is! 8th page, #82:

Whether Twitter has a significant role in this race, I highly doubt it.  However, search may very well have a large part in it:

Nicki Hicks
Vote for Twitter

That is the question…

First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures.  Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket.  Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites.  Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes.  So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them.  This visual should help:

(Picture credit: eVisibility)

To nofollow

So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site.  In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs.  By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages – and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.

Pages typically nofollowed are those like:

• Privacy Policy
• Contact
• Search
• Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
• Affiliates

Not to nofollow

Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags.  However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).

Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link?  I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.

In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not.  Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.

Nicki Hicks
Nofollow-er

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Jill Whalen, CEO and Founder, High Rankings
Mike Greban

Topic: Social Media

• Bruce Clay: site has spiked on search engines due to traffic from social media links
• Rae Hoffman: great for letting Google know that people are visiting your site and using it
• Mike Greban: Social search – people searching social networks; “new signals to search engines”; bookmarks give search engine weight

Topic: Content

• TF: become the expert in your industry – and show you are with the content you provide
• JW: are you answering people’s questions?
• MG: content is NOT just compelling copy: video, images; “Build good content and build it for the end user”
• RH: content doesn’t need to be perfect or great every time – just good content all the time, and tastes of great (example: cool content for flower shop: the funniest cards they see)

Topic: nofollow

• MG: why link to sites that you are nofollow’ing? Doesn’t think you should waste time with nofollow
• JW: thinks Google will eventually stop using nofollow tags, she doesn’t use them
• RH: thinks it’s a new fad, that it’s better to have good external links, thinks it’s a red flag
• TF: doesn’t believe in them
• BC: works for him

Topic: Blogs

• MG: how does the end user want to receive your information?
• JW: watch dead blogs and hackers
• RH: suggests to read about WordPress SEO, Feedburner for WP (“mybrand”); Google knows # of subscribers of RSS feed
• BC: add relevant blogposts faster than relevant pages; dedicated bloggers; integrate info into site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Roger Montti (AKA martinibuster), Owner, martinibuster

• Small window for links from .edu (Spring/Fall, when schools are in session)
• Focus: two main link building initiatives – industry heavyweight backlinks, charitable opportunities
• .edu’s are generally desirable because: usually not in bad neighborhoods, in maps of link relationships, these pages are generally going to fall outside of relationships that are known for link manipulation and commerce, sometimes features original, authoritative and expert content (but not always), relevance
• .edu’s to look for: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directory, resources

Speaker: Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, NetConcepts

• LinkedIn: three active links can be added, with modified anchor text
• Link Building campaign – encourage employees to create LinkedIn profiles w/ publicly accessible profiles, link deeper into the site – not necessarily the homepage
• Network in Meatspace (AKA the real world) – build relationships w/ bloggers, register and attend conferences who link to the attendees, real world meetups (meetup.com)
• Hunting for commonalities: tools: Ranking.thumbshots.com, Aaron Wall’s hubfinder tool
• Make donations and get links

Speaker: Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link

• Develop base links: foundational links – solid links to insulate (directories); variety of elements: blog, rss, wiki, video, photo, downloads, coupons, article, affiliate, newsletters; directory sources: Google Directory
• Benefits: increases deep linking, uses keyword anchors, descriptive text, provides diverse text
• Association links – chamber of commerce, associations, clubs and organizations, advocacy works, federations, etc. (for associations: weddle’s) – networking is key (mail/email to membership, provide incentive to link), buy ad space for association newsletters (paper and electronic, provide copy), develop contests, develop scholarships,
  optimize your listing in membership directory, issue press release
• Media Links – target key journalists, backlink competitors, mine social news and bookmarking sites, set Google Alert for news and add keywords, cyberjournalist.net, Yahoo! news directory, blogcatalog, pay for sources, topix directory
• Issue press releases – avoid free press releases, pay for distribution details and inlink reporting, highlight willingness and give interviews, look for niche distribution services (such as Biz Wiz Wire)
• Develop and promote your onsite media resource (“news”)

Speaker: Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

• 3 killer link reclamation strategies: request 404 error log, sort 404 log data from most requested pages, look down your sorted list – but go beyond the typical ‘top 100 referrers’

Speaker: Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

• Linkscape

Q & A

• Only the first link counts!!!
• To change/kill pages, 301 redirect!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX – Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS – can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS – efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  – More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Bryan Horling, Group Product Manager, Google Inc.

• Web History – saves web history within google account
• Localization – Using the searcher’s geolocation to affect search, different levels of granularity, both explicit and implicit information
• Localization by: country, region, city
• Personalization – Using searcher’s personal context to rank results, recent search (short term), web history (long term)
• Universal search (mixed results) affected by localization
• Recent searches: Disambiguation (Example: search for “ethan allen” then “jordans” – Jordan’s furniture #1, 2; search for “jordans” – Air Jordan’s #1, 2)
• Web history: disambiguation – skew results based on history, website preference, refinding (shows visits)
• What’s this mean for SEM? Half empty: collecting metrics is difficult, seeing how your pages rank
• What’s this mean for SEM? Half full: easier for people looking for your service to find you, easier to retain customers who prefer your business
• What’s this mean for SEM? Top position is not winner-take-all, create compelling and interesting content, appeal to users, not search engines, you can control personalization for your searches (use search details, disable it by appending &pws=0 to searches, sign out, firefox extension: greasemonkey script, edit or turn off web history)

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.