Mobile Search Archive

From Threaded Archives

-----------------------------------------------------------------

==> Topic: HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Ruby etc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in I-Search #148

From: I-Search <>

Now for something completely different. We're going to write out our coding plan and start discussion surrounding languages in use to publish Search Return. While not entirely HTML5 yet, we've ported some of the code to HTML5 and plan to overhaul it all to HTML5 early in 2013. Virtually all Sidecar 1.0 is written using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript, with a location test page.

Sidecar 2.0 is under development, an entirely new platform that is going to be written with the use of those languages but also connected to Ruby and Amazon Web Services for a backend. Our Squid link building tool, which is still operational, is written on that backend and currently hosted on Amazon Web Services. We are excited to get Sidecar 2.0 running in parallel.

Sidecar is especially neat Javascript. It triggers crawl events that have remote agents report data back for updating the HTML5 toolbar window. With respect to Perl, there are some functions with our host, Pair Networks where we take advantage of their built-in scripting for forms and rotating text. PHP is part of several applications, including but not limited to Wordpress.

We don't use Wordpress for the Search Return domain. AirDisa and other domains are powered by Wordpress. We hack PHP here for a backend CMS system that we took offline for this 2013 upgrade. PHP is a language that is similar to Javascript except that it is processed by server and not client. The power of Javascript is in it's processing on the client.

Selecting languages for specific purposes is one of the most important things a hacker can do. No hacker should learn just one language but think in terms of tasks and which language should be used to solve a particular problem. Some choices are obvious, others aren't. I am often taken aback knowing that Wordpress is written entirely using PHP, for example.

Sure, it works. There are, of course, problems from conflicts. A hacker can put together a plugin that blows up an important function for the core system and make some interface inoperable, or take a website offline. The plugin rating system is how Wordpress addresses this. It is assumed a user who installs a plugin will carefully read reviews.

Free plugins often come with a payload. Watch out for ads inserted into footers of mobile versions or links pointing back. It's not a question of whether the hacker deserves the credit, of course they do. It's a matter that if they want the plugin to be used on a popular commercial website, they ought to offer a for-pay professional version.

It is for this reason that we often advise tech SEO people to go with default installations, and plugins or extensions by the same manufacturer. This is true if we're talking about operating systems, Web server platforms or CMS systems. And as always, take the time to do your research about choices. There are plenty of things that can blow up.

Stay tuned,
I-Search

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Tech SEO Strength
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #147
New Discussion

From: Search Return <digest@searchreturn.com>

Now's the time that tech SEO made a comeback. Some have mistakenly written off tech SEO in favor of content marketing and social media. Those are important too but to wholly write off tech SEO is not wise (especially if it seems too complicated). There's still a lot for the technically inclined social and search marketer to do in today's digital world. Social media marketing is the new normal these days. There was resistance to it, people wondering how to measure effectiveness and if all the effort can pay off. It's in Google. That's too important.

Programmers are lucky and can be lazy while still accomplishing more than less technical marketers, and clients still have an amazing array of silly technical SEO problems. It was never a secret that much of SEO work is cleaning up work after others. That has not changed much over the last decade but couple that with the fact that bad SEO still sells and you will see there is no end of work to be done. If clients make mistakes and go with amateurs, there's not much you can do to convince them to stop.

Content goes missing in the Google index and it could be avoided by using 301 redirects. Even a single regular expression can re-organize and map new content properly, sometimes with one line of code. Technical help is scarce only to people who are unwilling to pay for it or when you're too busy and don't have the availability. Don't be caught in the trap and seek the help you need. An hour with a tech can save your company millions, not to mention your job if it is on the line.

As I write this, we managed to escape a 'fiscal-cliff' that would have been felt around the world. Whatever your politics, this is an important time. It's been a long time since I-Search was last written. The previous issue sounded hopeful about search at the dawn of our recent recession. That recession? We're still in it and the hiatus we took from I-Search lasted all through it. Is the recession over? One thing is true, signs of economic recovery are good.

SEO thrives like it did after the first 'bubble' burst in 2002. SEO was one of the industries that proved it can survive and lead the recovery. SEO has resilience because it has to do with positioning in front of SERP scanning eyeballs. Powerful stuff. Social search marketing describes the new age, after the recovery with a Facebook Open Graph platform, Twitter threads and Google+ updates in their SERPs. The I-Search Return is going headlong into the future starting again now.

One of the things I miss today is technical SEO talk. Blogging made knowing code not important and world of the amateur took over with powerfully dangerous tools. There are so many pitfalls to relying on a vendors who insert ads into your content. If you are a blogger, maybe it's a pretty small concern for access to a free plugin or platform. It is perfectly reasonable for a theme or plugin writer to be reimbursed for their coding work. I might For an enterprise publishing though, you risk competing ads in your content. Imagine!

I-Search Return will rely on its roots with Apache SSI, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Cocoa Touch (Objective C) are all languages we will use to implement the digest and threads. Before sending any issues out via email, we will take time to cleanse the list. We might ask you to re-subscribe at some point. We will be exploring a different kind of threat. Google's grip on digital marketing dollars directly competes with you. If SEO survived social revolution and recessions, can it survive Google?

Stay tuned,
Search Return

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Alt Text
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #129
New Discussion

From: SearchReturn <digest@searchreturn.com>

SearchReturn Tip: Many SEOs have stuffed page keywords in areas that don't fundamentally affect the way a page appears. They do this in an attempt to get rankings with on page criteria. Meta Keywords is one place where keywords are supposed to appear and they don't affect the way a page displays. We've covered some key thinking in a previous issue about how to craft the Meta Keywords container.

Alt text, on the other hand, is an attribute of the image container and it deserves specific treatment. The text does appear, typically with a mouse hover and tooltip textarea. The visually impaired utilize software known as "screen readers" that essentially read aloud highlighted page text or the contents of a Web page - including Alt tags.

Few things trigger emotions more than stuffed Alt tags, particularly with the visually impaired. Keyword repetitions are read aloud over and over and are difficult to skip to make navigation a pure nightmare on SEO pages. Bear in mind this is a large audience of avid Web users that include an elderly population and all otherwise visually impaired users.

Alt text must depict the image that it applies to and that can in fact include the use of a keyword where it makes sense. This is the seed of the problem when overzealous SEO practitioners took the idea too far until it they disconnected Alt text from its purpose and supplied lists instead of a descriptor.

What makes Alt text increasingly important is that XHTML now requires the use of it for all image media. Your page code will not validate as XHTML without Alt text for all images. You can supply it even empty for those images that are used as spacers (or other non descript images), but you must at least do so to validate your XHTML document.

The consequences of not depicting images properly, or neglecting Alt text altogether can lead to failure to comply by standards of design (such as XHTML), or government body certification, and can even lead to possible lawsuits such as that which experienced recently.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-25-blind_x.htm

The greatest part about paying attention to Alt text is that it is perfectly appropriate to supply a keyword that depicts the image properly - and you actually have to, so go ahead. Just avoid stuffing. Images that link to destination pages can provide you with opportunities to get creative with keyword usage.

Keyword use in Alt text is not going to get you a number one ranking but it benefits your visually impaired users. Keep your focus on the visually impaired when authoring your Alt text and you will have the right incentive to write well. Search engines are paying attention, and you can appear in specialized search including Google's experimental Accessible Web Search. Assume that good Alt text descriptors help your rankings, and stuffed ones hurt you pretty bad.

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: SEO Copywriting, Part One
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #128
New Discussion

From: Heather Lloyd-Martin <heather@searchenginewriting.com>

SearchReturn: A number of our members have provided feedback that interviews would be great and add value to the list. The first person we contacted for our interview series is Heather Lloyd-Martin. Thank you Heather!

Heather is credited with starting the discipline of Search Engine Writing, a focus area of hers since the early days and why we can rely on her for answers that reach from pertinent old school to today's hottest tips. In the next installment, we'll reveal one of those hot tips that originated with Heather and very few really have it. In the meantime, enjoy!

If you'd like to throw your hat in the ring and be interviewed in SearchReturn as part of our series, send an email request for an interview using the following:

Interview Request? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=Request

 

Interview with Heather Lloyd-Martin
Part One

1. In the old days, we saw a lot of company websites launch with what amounted to not much more than an online brochure. In fact, many simply took brochure creative work and duplicated it on the Web. I recall labeling such sites "brochureware," a phenomenon that exists still today.

There are lots of things wrong with that approach including completely missing out on search engine listings. Forget search engines for a moment. I want to ask you about the important differences in offline versus online writing style that brochureware completely misses and if you see sites of today making similar mistakes.

 

Answer: Oh yeah, I see some of the same things with catalogers who make the move to online. They typically want their readers to have the same experience as the offline catalog. So, they just take their catalog creative and upload it to the Web. It makes perfect sense from a branding perspective (as well as a content creation perspective - they just have to write the content once.) From a search engine perspective, it doesn't work.

In the B2B space, companies may upload their brochure because they don't have any copywriters on staff, or they aren't aware how crucial SEO copywriting can be for their site rankings (and conversions, too!). For companies new to online copywriting, they're often surprised that SEO copywriting can actually improve their site conversions - it's not just about sticking keyphrases into the copy.

Unfortunately, material that is written for brochures (or catalogs) is not the kind of text that is optimized for search engines at all. Catalog copy, for example, is typically too short, running 25-50 words per product description. This approach works great for print. Chances are, though, the copy doesn't contain any keywords. And why would it? It was originally written for a print medium.

Sadly, without keywords, the text isn't leveraged for search engine rankings. And many times, the company isn't seeing the natural positions they want.

 

2. What are some specific things that make writing for search engines stand out from writing for the Web?

 

Answer: The main difference is that SEO copywriting weaves keywords into direct response copywriting. It's not stuffing a page with keywords. It's not about losing the conversion flow or sacrificing the tone and feel. It's simply about transforming powerful marketing copy into copy that has a better chance of positioning well.

"Regular" online copywriting certainly has a place. For instance, online direct response letters (the ones that are one long, scrolling page) or lead response forms probably won't benefit from SEO copywriting. That is, a one-page site probably won't position - and adding "extra" copy to a lead response form may hurt conversions.

Even if SEO strategies wouldn't apply in these cases, folks would still want to create a strong online copywriting strategy. After all, if you want to get people to buy a product - or give you their email address - you have to build trust, demonstrate your unique benefits and entice your prospects into taking your desired conversion step. And that's exactly what good copywriting does.

Heather Lloyd-Martin
Chair Search Engine Marketing Council, The DMA
CEO SuccessWorks Intl.
http://www.searchenginewriting.com

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Meta Keywords
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #127
"I can see keywords in the keyword meta tag being used, via JavaScript, to set "tag" values when a page is bookmarked in a social media site, as titles and descriptions are already used."

From: John Smart <John@InternetDesign.com>

PHP has functions on board for this, which we used to help populate a reference site. The get_meta_tags command returns those features for - well, whatever reason.

John Smart
InternetDesign.com
A Human Touch in a Digital world.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Meta Keywords
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #126
"Thoughtfully applied Meta Keywords, however, have uses beyond the major search engines that you can enjoy while knowing they play a minor role of influence on your rankings in Yahoo!."

From: Sean Carlos <sean@antezeta.com>

I can see keywords in the keyword meta tag being used, via JavaScript, to set "tag" values when a page is bookmarked in a social media site, as titles and descriptions are already used.

I'm not currently aware of sites where this is possible, but I haven't looked into it for several months.

- Sean Carlos

Antezeta Internet Marketing
Eng: www.antezeta.com
Ita: www.antezeta.it

Moderator Comment: This would be an excellent and natural use of Meta Keywords for social bookmarking if the site could rely on webmasters to be honest with their use of keywords. It could be that the application could populate the keywords container for users that are bookmarking and allow them to edit them as they do with Titles and Descriptions.

I can see treating them slightly differently then the editing interface for Titles and Descriptions. I would pull them into a field, and allow users to click those they like which would populate the container which would save the list as tags. That would rock since webmasters would have incentive to author the container properly, and users would get exposed to keywords they might not have thought of on their own. We love the idea.

Thank you Sean!

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Meta Keywords
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #125
New Discussion

From: SearchReturn <digest@searchreturn.com>

Essential Tip: The Meta Keywords container has gotten less and less important as legacy engines like Infoseek disappeared. The truth of the matter is that keywords were often so stuffed as to render the thing practically useless as a signal for what words search engines should care about with a page of code, especially as awareness about the usefulness of inbound linking grew with the advent of Google.

Inbound linking is now getting just as polluted as keywords have ever been in the past, with commercial intent contributing to the noise and influencing the ranking process just as falsely. Since inbound links work great today, it is no wonder that most SEOs concentrate their time and effort building links. They typically neglect Meta Keywords altogether.

In this SR Tip, we will re-examine Meta Keywords and discover hidden treasure that authoring an excellent keywords container provides. The rankings of tomorrow can shift and change just as quickly, perhaps quicker, than they have in the past. We ask for you to rethink your approach, and consider the real benefits of Meta Keywords.

Should you care about keywords anymore?

The Meta Keywords container is designed for search applications. There is no disputing that if the search engines could rely on the webmaster community for being honest and pure with their use of keywords, they would not hesitate to make it more important for rankings. Why not pay in and be honest and pure now?

Microsoft has stated, and Google has implied, that they care not for using page keywords for any influence on their rankings. Regardless, Yahoo! continues to allow some minor influence since theory suggests the inherent quality of keywords can in fact provide for a better search application.

A roughly accurate search engine could be designed solely on the basis of indexing Meta Keywords alone. It would have reasonable reliability with accuracy (outside the commercial noise). This means the container is not completely devoid of usefulness.

Going further along this line of thinking, applications that can use keywords include everything from specialized desktop or network search to full-blown website search. If you want users to have a good experience with site search, consider the keywords container and how you can influence the result set including common queries in your Meta Keywords for custom crafted results.

Most site search is terrible; just horrifically bad. If you approach Meta Keywords with this in mind, you could automatically include the best keywords for ideal responses, influencing the application and making interactivity with your users a better experience. That leads to reaching more goals with loyalty, and a better perception of your business.

Most importantly, inbound links have been polluted ever since the advent of Google. Very few asked for an exchange of links, or sought large numbers of commercially available links with specific text unless the linking itself was deemed to be valuable by traffic alone. Then inbound links meant Google rankings.

The quality of rankings has decreased sharply as people have been able to "artificially inflate" their popularity by gaming inbound links for Google. It seems this erosion is not dissimilar to the way that Meta Keywords once were highly important.

Meta Keywords are not at all likely to be as important as inbound linking. Rather, inbound links, the kind you can solicit, may be doomed for a fall to a much lower level of importance. We believe where and how well you are connected via linking as social bookmarks, and actually cited by the cleanest, purest third party resources will continue to dictate how well you do in search engines over the next five years or so.

Thoughtfully applied Meta Keywords, however, have uses beyond the major search engines that you can enjoy while knowing they play a minor role of influence on your rankings in Yahoo!. All things being equal, it may just be enough to have you appear above a competing listing where the other webmaster neglected them.

Meta Keywords

Author an unique set of Meta Keywords for each page. Meta Keywords is the only appropriate place for alternate and correct spellings, as well as the only appropriate place for commonly misspelled keywords to appear.

Use words that are found in the body of the page itself as much as possible. Consider your nouns as naturally occurring primary search terms for inclusion. Find other words that you would highlight with a marking pen for the search user as you go through the document.

Use commas. Do not repeat items exactly. Do not bother with altering case in order to repeat items. All lower case is fine. Avoid repeating any single word more than three times throughout the container. Avoid more than twelve items total; remember less is more.

Fewer terms provide more power to each item individually. Start with the most important and end with the least important. Go with five items (or even fewer) for your most competitive pages. Once you've done the hard work of authoring excellent keywords, consider indexing and using them for site search.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: WordPress, Meta Descriptions
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #124
New Discussion

From: Michael Brandon <michael@searchmasters.co.nz>

I note with interest the recent email about wordpress SEO. I have written a post on my wordpress blog about Word Press SEO http://www.coreseo.com/cat/wordpress-seo/ - now ranking top ten for that phrase.

In it, I talk about changing orientation of the wordpress title, meta descriptions, url's, introductory paragraphs, h1's, redirecting index.php to root, ... and show off some of my success stories with wordpress SEO.

It is certainly interesting that the out of the box wordpress templates are not SEO friendly.

Page titles

Your emails have had some great points about page titles. Following your discussion, I have decided on a number of my clients sites, to not include the sitename/branding in the 71 characters of the title. It has allowed me to target another phrase, and so get great additional traffic into home pages.

Branding is totally important, and that is why I have until now advocated having the brandname as the last characters of the 71 in the title. However, getting ranking [and] therefore traffic is also rather important. So I include the brandname in the meta description, and its generally part of the domain name ;)

Kind Regards

Michael

Michael Brandon
Search Engine Mastery
Getting you to the top of the Search Engines
http://www.SearchMasters.co.nz

 

Moderator Comment: The Meta Description is our follow up plan for what to write for our set of tips. So here it is.

The key with choosing words to write in the Meta Description is to first look at the page content. One temptation that you can endulge is to write a more general Meta Description that is deployed site wide, however the cost to this is a lack of specifics in search results that would otherwise lead to more clicks.

If you can, it is recommended that you write unique Meta Descriptions for each page. Take the first sentences from the page copy (where keywords make appearances), and try to craft more concise language for Descriptions that may display to search users. If you don't find the text in the first sentences, continue down the page until you do.

Choose two to three sentences for this purpose and trim out needless wording. Then fix it up so that it reads logically. You want to retain any call-to-action (or benefits) and include them if they aren't already there. Finally, make sure to write to keep the essence of what Meta Descriptions are for. That is, descriptions allow a more verbose descriptor for the page and what users can expect to find if they click. You get plenty of space to do so (175 character or more).

Michael's experience about changing title branding by placing the brand in the description is perfect. Follow his example when it makes sense. The brand can be incredibly strong at the front of a title, but if you plan not to include it there, be sure to include it in the Meta Description. He notes that you get branding in the domain anyway, regardless whether the description displays, but at least you can have it there without a negative SEO affect. Nice going MB.

In the case that you decide to include brand in the description rather than the title, the same logic follows as with titles: include the brand at the front. This would provide you the branding boost in search results that you want, even for small brands where appearance in the title is not really warranted. It is a similar mistake to put brand at the end of descriptions as it is with titles. We recommend always placing brand in front of the description whenever it's not in the title, and always leave it out of the description when it is in the title.

The search engines do not display the Meta Description every time. When they do, they don't always display it from the start. But generally The Meta Description appears starting with text from the front in most cases. That way, your branding has more chances to appear in the effective spot at the front of a listing additional times when it's not in the title. Place your brand in the front of the Meta Description to get this effect.

On a last note, remember to use text that makes a good descriptor for the page and lets search users know what to expect (and why they should click). There is no noticeable ranking benefit from keywords in Meta Descriptions so you can write with abandon. Remember though, search users look for keyword usage in listings, so don't avoid keywords altogether just because you know you can.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Blog Title Wordpress Plugin
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #123
"The alternative would be to allow the blog owner to name their own files and serve the original number-based system as default."

From: Stephan Spencer <sspencer@netconcepts.com>

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress (available for download from http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/) allows you to decouple the post title from the title tag, so you no longer have to keyword-stuff your post titles just to optimize the title tags. There's also an admin for mass editing title tags across the whole blog all in one fell swoop.

For filenames, there's a plugin called WordPress Slug Trimmer (http://pietersz.co.uk/2006/07/wordpress-slug-trimmer) that shortens the filename if there are too many keywords in the post title.

Cheers,
Stephan

Moderator Comment: Stephan has a keen interest in blog SEO and luckily for us has provided these resources for those that use Wordpress. Having seen Stephan on conference panels, he has demonstrated great value for some companies using blog software for virtually their their SEO efforts, and has written some of his own plugins for the popular Wordpress platform.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Great Debate
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #122
New Discussion

From: SearchReturn <digest@searchreturn.com>

At Search Summit in Sydney Australia, I had the chance to perform on a panel debate where the topic was centered on whether the audience should work SEO entirely in-house or outsource it to a third party. Each audience member had a voting handset, and a poll conducted prior to the debate revealed that 52% performed their SEO entirely in-house to approximately 20% that outsourced. The remaining figures went to partial in-house or outsource but the majority of them did SEO in-house.

Each speaker had five minutes to make their case and persuade the audience with their votes. I was up first, followed by Yahoo! and there were six panelists in all. With the luck of going first, and all the passion I could muster in the moment, I ultimately pulled in 76% of the vote for my debate and the number of votes needed to win the whole debate. The following is a transcript of my go, and the audio will be posted in a short while at http://www.positiontech.com once we develop a page with additional information.

Enjoy!

I've got five minutes to convince you - especially the more than half who answered the question, the poll, that they do SEO and PPC entirely in-house about why you should at least double-think that choice and perhaps consider outsourcing part or possibly all of it. The reason being, is there are a number of reasons, and many of which you probably have heard from people who are trying to sell you services - so I'm not going to try to repeat any of those things, but I will try to explain exactly what the benefits are for you to actually outsource it.

Of course, you've heard about cost. Everyone talks about cost. It can be cost effective particularly if the strategies that get deployed for something as expensive as PPC is, saves you money and those savings can compound month after month to actually help you realize not just the savings over what the SEO charges, but savings over what you might also internally be able to do. Because working inside a company you may have sort of a narrow view of your products and services and want people to think outside of the box.

Are you doing social media optimization which is the new big thing in the United States? This is one of those things you're going to want to figure out - how your company fits into social media. The types of websites that I'm talking about include the Digg, Wikipedia, the del.icio.us tagging and that sort of thing. Are you going to want to spend the resources to actually investigate those services? Figure out what social media optimization is all about and actually deploy those resources and spend that amount of time optimizing? You know you can drive more traffic to your website with one page-one Digg posting than all of your rankings in the world will ever drive you. And it's the search marketing firms that are leading the charge in social media optimization – starting in the United States. It's just a matter of time before it gets here in Australia.

We're talking about natural optimization now. The folks that have been doing it for a very long time know very well how to optimize naturally. They know very well the guidelines and they keep you out of hot water. Time and time again I have companies who decide to go in-house and then they deploy something and get in trouble and then they come back with their tail between their legs. I am not trying to disparage anybody who tries to do in-house. In fact, I encourage them. But the issues are that they might not be considering things like violating trademark law and other things. I see a lot of cases. Actually, I do litigation support for companies who get into trouble. For instance, we were talking earlier about dynamic key word insertion. And then a keyword where someone is looking for a competitor and then all of a sudden you've got an ad that is displaying your competitor's name and it goes to your website. Your competitor sees it and then gets really angry and then sends a "cease and desist" letter your way. Those are the types of things that SEOs live, breathe and they either succeed or die by.

The successful ones, and obviously you are going to want to if you do outsource – make sure you get references and other information regarding the SEO you are thinking about in order to make the choice to outsource. But trust me. These people that do a good job and are reputable in the industry are people who think of all these different things.

Let's just see a show of hands. How many do social media optimization right now? Okay. That's less than half which means the half that said they do everything in-house - at least more than half – say 25 or 30% of you - don't even do any social media optimization. The kinds of things and the kinds of traffic you can get with that – including rankings – think about the ranking benefits that you get when you do social media optimization correctly. People find your content and go "Gee, that's a site I would like to link to!" Bam! New search engine rankings for you. Maybe in a whole new area you never even thought about. Maybe even in a whole way in which you don't think about your products and services because you're in the narrow-minded company-specific thought process and you don't think outside the box. The people who also engage search – don't forget this – have worked on behalf of a number of industries and can bring some of the disciplines from outside your industry into your industry and benefit you by driving more traffic to your site, saving you more money with things that they have learned outside with other firms. That's why outsourcing makes sense. It can save you money and actually make you money over the money you save when the SEO wins for you. And also they can think outside the box. They can drive more traffic than you ever thought was possible. And how do you know if you're really doing it right if you're doing it in-house? Because you look in your statistics and you're happy. Hey, search marketing is actually so profitable even if you're doing a piss poor job! You actually might show a profit and think everything is cool. Think about the potential you would be missing if there is another 75% of success in profit margin out there for you but you don't know. What you don't know you don't know. Them that know, know that they know. Them that don't know, they don't know they don't know. That's the problem. And so with SEO and outsourcing, you're going to hire the professionals and the expertise – those that have the experience from way back have been doing search marketing before Google was even a company. And those types of folks know what is important to search engines, what search engines value. They're in and out through the guidelines and that sort of thing.

That's five minutes...

Voting breakdown...
Outsource Team 52% In-House Team 48%
Round 1 - Detlev Johnson 76% Aidan Beanland 24%
Round 2 - Robbie Hills 39% Scott Gledhill 61%
Round 3 - Fionn Hyndman 42% Mike Motherwell 58%

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Brand In Title
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #121
"If you add brand at the end, the click through can suffer and you reduce the power of the keywords by adding to the limited character count."

From: David Dalka <david_dalka4gsb@yahoo.com>

In your opinion, does this also apply to blogs? Or are the rules different there?

David Dalka
www.daviddalka.com/createvalue

Moderator Comment: Hi David. Blog software generally populate titles with the text used for the title of the post. To influence your page titles, write your headlines for posts with that in mind.

Yes, all the advice applies to blogs. Unfortunately blog software companies who became aware of SEO have begun to generate page file names also using the post title text. In my view, this has resulted in SEOs who stuff for the purposes of adding keywords to their page titles end up with file names that have hyphen-separated-lists-of-stuffed-post-title-text.html

I believe that shows poor quality judgment.

The alternative would be to allow the blog owner to name their own files and serve the original number-based system as default. That allows the best of all worlds since the SEO blogger can name their files using best practices, and those that don't care have a default that isn't virtually automatic poor quality.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
==> TOPIC: Title Finishing Work
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted in SR #120
New Discussion

From: SearchReturn <digest@searchreturn.com>

In previous installments, we've covered some essential guidelines that a good title writer must consider at all times when crafting their text for titles. The preceding tips were accumulated through years of careful contemplation authoring sites before and through to the days of SEO. The logic SEO experience has brought us changed the writing style and provided marketing benefits including popular keywords and phrases.

The resulting tips are relatively timeless.

Though search engines change, titles resist change because of their continued importance outside search. No matter what the current space allows, limit your length to less than the character count which appears in popular search engine listings. Recall you are writing titles as bookmark text since search listings are basically that (and titles literally are that).

Take note of special space consisting of the first few words, (twenty-five characters or so). Finally, either use your brand, (or simply lose it) and virtually never place your brand at the end of the string.

What remains is the difference in approach for different types of pages and thoughts on how to draw and distill keywords and phrases out. If you haven't written your content intentionally to include popular keywords we'll need to discuss that at some point. The following actually assumes you have not taken that step since it can pollute the title writing process. If you find it difficult to follow these steps and you have optimized the body, you may have too high a density in keyword usage.

First and foremost, a homepage title must be written far more broadly than an interior page. You want to capture not just the essence of the homepage, but the entire purpose of the site. This is because your homepage title will appear in listings far more frequently than any other page. The special space and its powerful combination of keywords must present search users with the best phrasing you can muster.

As for brand, even if your interior pages may not have it, this page can be an exception to the rule. Just remember brand goes in front. The rest of the way, think hard about a combination of the most popular keywords. Work with those words in a manner that conveys the essence of the site as a whole. The combination may just present itself to you from these keywords.

Next you want to do the finishing work on the homepage title by completing the text so that it offers some uniqueness or other benefit your site provides based on the subject matter in your power phrase combination. Use only words that appear in the body and if not, these words will highly likely be ones you can easily include in a heading, bullet or elsewhere.

Having the words in the title alone can weakly suffice for listings, but remember users will need the visual queue that they are in the correct place *after* they click - and search engines reward this. If the words you want in the title aren't in the copy, get them in somewhere where landing users will see them immediately, without scrolling. Bullets and headlines are great for this.

There are at least two main types of interior pages you will want to pay close attention to. We call these category pages and product level pages in ecommerce, but these terms can easily be translated in meaning to your content driven site if that's what you're working with. The connotation here is that category pages are one level down from homepages, covering an array of specifics under one topic, and product level pages are specific to one detailed item or topic.

Avoid simply listing your product page topics in category page titles, and instead approach the work as you would when doing homepage titles except you have far more refined sets of words to work with (making your life a little easier). Category page titles should work broadly on the category topic similarly as homepage titles. Product level pages, on the other hand, have a purpose singular to that page and must be treated entirely differently.

Most SEOs do product level title writing reasonably well. After reading all the noise online about writing titles, they know they must include the keywords distilled from the page body. No where is this more important than product level pages. You can have titles on the homepage or even major category pages where a word or two isn't in the body and it can still do fine, (although that is not optimal). But you suffer far greater loss of power on product level pages when the words you are using in the title do not appear in the body. It's only fine if there is virtually no no other matching content on the Web.

There are several reasons why this is important. Suffice it to say that the main reason is you are working with more refined, less popular search terms where your rankings will rely more on body content than inbound link text. Since you are working with an interior page and specific product or topic, you will have fewer inbound links to that page, and may not have any inbound links that use the text with your keywords. Write your titles for these pages entirely from the words that are found in the body.

This is the correct time to bring into the discussion an important note about repetition. Product level page title writing is inherently predisposed to risky repetition. The following also applies, however, to all title writing. You may have found through your work that repeating does indeed boost your rankings a bit for the words used more than once in the title. This may be a fleeting benefit or one that is not due to the repetition as much as you think and is partly due to other factors.

Where SEOs get into real trouble is when they ruin the title repeating keywords and arguing it still somehow makes literal sense. This old trick actually has its roots in writing directory descriptions for Yahoo! back in the mid-nineties. The idea was to stuff keywords using a comma separated list and design the text to satisfy the rules of complete sentences so that in theory it could pass the category editor review process. The results of all this is terrible quality.

Repeating and listing is where SEOs go awry. If you sense the need to repeat a keyword for rankings and think you know a way to do it, limit repetitions carefully. Try not to ever repeat a word more than three times. Repeating also *must* make sense in the text so that its quality doesn't suffer as a bookmark. You may be able to take the tack with your repetition that you include varying forms of the word. A premium quality example of this appears in SR issue #116: Nice Title.

http://www.searchreturn.com/digest/116.shtml

Michael Zerman cleverly wrote text that incorporates the word [bodysurf] repeated three times in varying forms: bodysurf, bodysurfers and bodysurfing. Not only that, but the name of the website appears at the start. Even if the special power at the front of the title exceeds our suggestion of twenty five characters (at thirty four), the excellent compromise was made since the very first word is bodysurfing and the organization name will itself attract more clicks.

Note that a word needs only appear once to qualify for a listing. Google bombs proved it doesn't even have to be there at all. Certainly more instances of keyword usage adds weight for higher rankings, but if the quality of the page or title suffers as a consequence, your performance degrades without a hint from tracking. You think you're doing alright when you could actually be do much better. A better title that is more professional will get more traction for clicks and extra weight from click ranking can climb your listing to the top.

Michael's excellent example nicely illustrates the top concepts from the series even though he wrote his title before we published. A special note of thanks to Michael Zerman, a longtime I-Search reader who faithfully subscribed and contributes to SearchReturn. Thanks for that mate! Makes me want to write a page on my own bodysurfing past and link his title to the target.

That's our main timeless advice on title so far.

Comment? mailto:digest@searchreturn.com?subject=SEO

 

"A big welcome back to you Detlef. Now that you've resurrected the I-Search mailing list that was your claim to fame." -Danny Sullivan