The Bulls Roar » SEO

Internet SEO Lies Designed To Keep You Poor

AnnieInfinite — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:56:09 +0000

This post is quite obviously going by the title a little bit of a wrist slap for all you people who think that old tired and ‘Black Hat‘ SEO and marketing methods are going to miraculously put your tiny site on the “first page of Google” which seems to be some hackneyed ideal that every one is still searching for.

The bad news: It WON’T!

Matt Cutts verified this himself: “NO-ONE can promise you the first page of Google any more!”

Unless, yes there is an unless… unless they are promising you to put you on the first page of Google under one keyword, in your locality (small defined area) with two adjectives that creates one long tail search term and most importantly you will be there more often on your computer not others because of Semantic Search practices.

Basically semantic search (and this is Google and Bing and all other search engines are following suit) where the search algorithms take into account your own search history on your IP including your locale, your previous search history and your keyword semantics – the meaning you put on those keywords or search terms e.g. if you search for fishing and your previous history shows you really mean fly fishing when you search the term fishing, your searches will be based around fly-fishing whether you want them to or not, until you show enough search history to Google to change the meaning placed on your ‘fishing’ search.

Please read the previous paragraph several times, enough times for you to fully understand the repercussions to your site and to your SEO practices!

There are heaps of SEO firms out there right now still trying to make promises they cannot keep. Read these vital posts I have collected for you over the past few weeks to validate what I am saying to you:

Don’t Get Google Slapped!

Link Farms – Link farms are a whole bunch of websites set up with one job in mind – to link to other websites and create backlinks. They have minimal or zero useable content and simply link out to other sites. You can usually purchase links from these farms (so as to increase your number of backlinks) for a price, but this is simply not worth it. As soon as the search engines recognize the site as link farm, they ignore all the links. It’s quite possible that you could get “blacklisted” for this sort of thing and end up ruining all your efforts.

When I was new to SEO, I bought 1000 backlinks from one of these link farms and anticipated huge results. Google Webmasters only picked up about 30 of them (out of a thousand!) and within a month or two they were lost (or removed). I was just lucky that I didn’t get banned!

Cross Linking – Similar to link farms, this is the practice of linking between a whole lot of websites that you own. Apart from being ineffective, the cost of this sort of practice is simply a waste of money (considering that you can easily get links from writing articles, etc).

Cloaking – Cloaking essentially involves having two different pages – one that your visitors see and one that the search engines see. This allows you to create a heavily optimized page for the search engines, and a very “pretty” page for users. This practice is strongly frowned upon by search engines and will in most cases get your site banned within a few months.

Duplicate Content – Whether it the same content placed on different pages within your website, or content copied from another site – the search engines don’t like this for one reason – there’s no value to the visitor.

From www.site-reference.com via clp.ly

Understanding Metaweb The Official Google Blog (Semantic ‘Entities’)

Google Buys Metaweb What this means for you!

Metaweb’s technology could change the way Google Search works.

Metaweb is a difficult concept to describe, although the video above does an admirable job. Essentially, it views keywords, the way we search now, as an inferior search method to what it calls “entities.” Words can vary in meaning, refer to different things, have different levels of importance or relevance at different times, and often return inexact results. So Metaweb has created a constantly growing database, or directory, of 12 million “entities,” which are really just persons, places, or things, and all the different ways you might refer to them. Wording isn’t so important with Metaweb, it’s the end meaning that matters.

Once Metaweb figures out to which entity you’re referring, it can provide a set of results. It can even combine entities for more complex searches–”actresses over 40″ might be one entity, “actresses living in New York City” might be another, and “actresses with a movie currently playing” might be another. Instead of searching through that jumble of keywords, Metaweb would just connect you to those three entities, and file down your results.

From www.fastcompany.com via clp.ly

and of course this excellent post on what Google thinks of your Squeeze or Landing Pages:

Google Slaps Squeeze Pages

It’s true: squeeze pages are nothing less than poison as far as your performance in the search engines is concerned. Google and other search engines have been working on ways to discount the rankings of these pages, which are rarely the kind of content that users are actually looking for when they use the keywords which these sites target. It comes down to what it always comes down to when search engine rankings are the issue – relevance. A webpage designed to entice visitors to fork over their contact information simply isn’t that relevant to many, if any, actual search engine queries, no matter how much content you try to cram onto the page.

Speaking of the content, this is something which has changed about squeeze pages in the last couple of years. Once these pages started being penalized by search engines for their lack of content (”classic” squeeze pages, after

all, feature little more than an opt-in form), marketers started turning them into the online equivalent of the long form sales letter – in other words, something no one wants to read, especially not page after page. This unappealing content has led to a further decline in the ranking of these pages in search results, making them even worse marketing tools than they already were.

From www.sitepronews.com via clp.ly

The Death of Squeeze Pages

Google Buys Metaweb for Better Search Results (dailyfinance.com)
How has social media affected search? (simplyzesty.com)
Why Semantics Is Important For Search Engine Optimization – Semantic Web (semanticweb.com)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Matt Cutts, Metaweb Technologies, Search Engines, semantic search, SEO, Web search engine

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SEO Tactics to Use Even If You Can’t Use Metatags

AnnieInfinite — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:32:16 +0000

: Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via Flickr

I got a call from a dear friend with a website the other day, her web designer had created her site on one of those generic create-a-site online software and hosting places (which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent). Now this site building software does not allow you to enter your own keywords or metatags, so what can she do to enhance SEO and Traffic? Everyone knows we need food in the form of keywords and metatags for the search engine spiders to feed on.

As we all should know our websites usually need to have our well researched and constantly updates keywords entered in the appropriate places and those keywords also need to be turned metatag descriptions for our site and our contnet pages and this needs to be done in a way that is like porridge – just right. When done well our keywords and metatags encourage and make it easy for the search engine spiders to find, catalogue and crawl our site – thus improving our ranking, searchability and traffic.

So what do we do if we have a generic site building software that claims to add the appropriate keywords and metatags for us? Well, some of us will be very happy we don’t have to go to all that trouble , and some of us will be worried that this just isn’t going to be good enough.

The lady in question was in the last group, she was very worried about it and like most of us cannot afford to have her site all redone on other software, at least not right now. She arranged to spend a couple of hours with me on Skype to sort out her options and this is what I advised her to do:

1. Create high ranking links to the site: Did you know that Google and many other search engines now count incoming links at least, if not more highly than keywords and metatags. The strategy behind this is that if you have high ranking links coming in to your site (one way) and some going out (reciprocal) that each of those is agreeing that your site is about what you say it is. A kind of verification, if you will that your site is kocher, almost like a recommendation, and the higher ranked the site the more impressed the search engines are.In this case web directories are your answer, the more highly ranked the better. Of course the easiest way to tell if they’re highly ranked is to choose the ones that are on the first page and at the top. What is really great is that as you are filling out the submission forms for these directories they ask for a site description (metatag) and your tags or keywords thus fulfilling your need to have keywords and metatags that are searchable by the search engines. General directories are great and the first one to go for is DMOZ.com which is a human edited directory with perhaps the highest Google ranking of all. When you have submitted your site to the general directores, the next ones to go for are those in your niche again looking for the highest ranking ones.

2. Claim your site/s and blog/s: Did you know in many cases your sites and blogs have already been noted by some sites and are just waiting to be claimed by you? Any blog whether it is a stand alone blog or one attached to a site, is ready to be claimed at Technorati (and other blogging directories) so go straight there and create an account and claim your blog, this counts as a very high ranked recommendation. If and when your blog is over 6 months old submit it to Best of The Web Blog Directory but remember it must be at least 6 months old. Now go to Alexa and claim your site, add information, keywords and tags etc..

3. Use social media to drive traffic and add incoming links to your site: via community sites like Facebook and Twitter, creating articles and pages on sites like eZine, Squidoo and HubPages with links to both your site and your blog, and internal pages on your site as deep links are needed for your site to be taken seriously. If you haven’t already get an account on all of these sites and learn to use them, add in some videos coming in from your YouTube account, and an online image album to your site with all the images tagged with your keywords and site url with Flckr and next thing you know your site will be high in the rankings and traffic will be increasing on a daily basis.

My motto in life is, “there is always another way”, and in my experience there always is. Use these tactics to improve SEO on any site, please don’t rely on just your keywords and metatags even if you have a site that allows you to add your own. This information is vital and in some cases even more important than getting your keywords and metatags exactly right!

Have fun!

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Technorati, Web crawler, Web search engine, Website

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The Bulls Roar » SEO

Internet SEO Lies Designed To Keep You Poor

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SEO Tactics to Use Even If You Can’t Use Metatags