Daniel Coburn

A: Alt Tags, Analytics, and Advertise

Bot’s are blind and can’t see pictures. Help them out make sure you fill out all alt tags. There has been some rumor that GoogleBot gives special weight to alt tags.

Get some sort of analytics program that gives you details on your site. Not analyzing is like trying to thread a needle in the dark. If you don’t know how you are doing, what content is hot or not, how are you going to make the appropriate changes?

A major part of SEM (Search Engine marketing) is advertising. Make sure to track conversions. Try Adsense, YPN, Adbrite, Chitika just to name a few. Get your site visible to the end user. Get that name recognition started.

B: Backlinks and Bold Tags

Get as many quality backlinks as you can. These are the cornerstone to any good seo friendly site. For the dumber bots they lead to your site, for the more complex bots like GoogleBot they are a vote, a link, and a description. They are 50% of rankings. Don’t believe me? Check out this Article from the BBC Google checks what words link to sites, and it essentially cast a vote. At one time Googling Miserable Failure brought up George W. Bush. I knew search engines where smart, but wow that’s impressive.

Bold or Strong tags make your keywords pop. They are a plus 1 for search engine optimization. Having “blue widgets” are cool, blue widgets are nice. Is not as good as blue widgets are cool, blue widgets are nice. Just don’t make it so obvious that you are doing that. Spread your words out and make good sentences and statements.

C: Content, Cache, and Conversions

Content is King, Queen, and even the Joker. Create quality content often, and keep it fresh. Keep the bots coming back for more. The more content the more chances you have to get visitors. At its basic level if you have no content.. you have no pages, and will obviously have no visitors. Doh!

Check your new pages cache frequently, or at least until they become cached .Google Toolbar lets you check to see if the current page has been indexed (cached). How long did they take to show up in the search engines? Which ones showed up quicker, and why? How can you increase the cache time. When where they last indexed? You want to get pages indexed as quickly as possible. Get in the cache.

If you advertise find some way to check your conversion rates. Usually measured as a percentage. What is a conversion. Well it’s when you pay for a visitor and they perform a specific task. These tasks may include purchasing and item, registering for an account, or just viewing a specific page. Most advertisement companies will generate some simple script that you place on the page. When they reach that page then the conversion is made. Drop conversion campaigns that have a high cost per conversion.

D: Digg, Del.Ico, Directory Submit, and Duplicate Content

Digg Del.Ico.us and other social bookmarking sites are a great way to meet, greet, and get traffic. Get to know these sites, submit content often, and traffic should improve.

Submitting to directories with pr 4 or greater is a must. They provide some traffic, and also some extra link juice. Make a goal to submit to at least 1 a week. Also realize some directory submissions may take up to 6 months to get approved. Here is a great list of some SEO Friendly Directories.

Do not, I repeat DO NOT create duplicate content. Don’t have 2 pages with the same content. Canonical content is the same url with and without a www. example. http://mywebsite.com/test.htm is often seen as a totally different site from http://www.mywebsite.com/test.htm This is called Canonical Content. Search engines often are not smart enough to figure this out. The best thing to do is to create Duplicate Content Fixer and add the data to your .htaccess file.

E: Elements and Evolve

Learn Basic (X)HTML Elements/Tags. No matter your level of experience. Learning, or re-learning tags helps. Vary your tags and use proper syntax. Close all element brackets.

Evolve. Once you start getting good search rankings and tracking it’s just begun. You need to constantly evolve. We don’t mean change the entire site, but look at that analytics data. Check your top exit pages. How did you screw them up so that you have such a high bounce rate? Where are people coming from? What terms are you ranking well for and why? What terms are you ranking lousy for? These are all questions you need to ask and understand the answers to.

F: Frames and Flash

Both frames and flash are a no no for seo. Bots see frames as separate pages, and the content in them as a page themselves. They are confusing. Flash is or was until just recently impossible to crawl by bots. You can’t even give it an alt tag it sucks. Stay away from flash if you can help it.

G: Google and Google (noun then verb)

The 7 million pound Gorilla in the room. Set a goal to learn as much as you can about why your competitors are ranking well. Google gets more search traffic than all of its 3 major competitors combined. Wow.

Google your keywords weekly to see where you rank. Something of a warning. Google takes into account the bounce rate… or the number of times a person searches for a term and then returns to search again. This tells them that they didn’t find what they wanted on that url. If it’s a long tail term that isn’t searched for often clicking your site and then searching again for the same term could bear not so positive results.

H: Headings

Learn your <h1><h2><h3><h4><h5> heading tags. They are all really easy. <h1>Some data here</h1> they are the blinking lights on a runway for the bots. They get immediate attention and tell the bot hey this page is organized and is about “blue widgets” or whatever the page is about. Don’t overdue it however. Make sure to use them in order. <h1> Then <h2> etc. then you could maybe <h2> then <h3> etc. It’s very important that you use these. No joke.

I: Italics

Use the <em></em> tags to italicize your keywords making them stick out to users and the bots. When creating a content rich page with I try to italicize my subject (keyword or phrase) a 1x. Usually the 2nd or 3rd time it appears. From what I’ve read bots consider a bold or italicized word important.

J: Javascript

No javascript menu’s. Do not use Javascript in your menus, while they look cool, bots don’t run javascript. They have no way of following those javascript links. Javascript is a SEO No No. Instead use static text links.

K: Keywords

Research your keywords. If you are new to seo or just got dropped off from some planet named mars let me explain keywords. Keywords are searched terms, or phrases. Try some of these cool tools. Use these to find what people are searching for. Put those phrases in your title, description, content, but use them for real. Don’t keyword stuff. Create content that you would want to see when searching for that term. Make the user happy first. Then implement SEO.Tools: Keyword Playground, WordTracker, Adwords Keyword Tool, Seo Book Keyword Suggestion,and SelfSeo Keyword Suggestion Tool.

L: Layout

Whether its a single, double, or tipple column layout. Before you create draw it out on paper and see how it looks. The layout makes the difference between 2 page views and 15 page views per visitor. You want to immerse your user. Put controls or links in normal places, places where you would look.

M: Market Place, Meta Tags, and Apache Mod Rewrite

Research your marketplace. What sells, what’s just a fad, what’s hot, what’s not? Check out Google Trends. It’s an amazing tool that let’s you see exactly that.. trends. Is the marketplace over saturated. Google the term? Are there more than 30Million results? If so it’s probably over saturated. From a SEM point of view it can be very expensive to purchase ads in a over saturated market. Supply and demand. more people wanting ad space mean more expensive ads.

Meta Tags are essential. Description, and Keywords are just a few. Check out this free meta tag generator. Without these your seo sucks. While some people debate over keywords meta, no one argues over description. This is what shows up in the search results.

While search engines are getting smarter every week, it’s still common SEO practice to Mod Rewrite your data. Google Mod Rewrite tutorials if you need instructions. Basically it allows users on an apache web server to make the url more seo friendly. It can turn http://yourwebsite.com/page.php?id=20&content=Cooking+With+Fire&start=true into http://yourwebsite.com/cooking-with-fire.html Since url’s are looked at for content comparison on search engine results you want it to be short and simple. Older bots also have trouble getting over the ? and &. Just like my old grandma and stair, she just can’t get up them, and they confuse her.

N: Niche

Find your niche. Start off in a niche and after you gain trust and traffic then branch out into broader titles.

O: Often

Update content often. When we say this we mean new content, not change the old content. Google knows if your page is stale, they also know their users don’t want last weeks dirty laundry. They want fresh, relevant, content that gives them that info they just searched for. If you update often enough, you can get new content added daily to search engines. As a prime example posts made at the sitepoint forum will show up in google within 3 hours! Google has deemed them a trusted resource for fresh content.

P: PageRank

PageRank is the most visible and misunderstood measurement of a web pages worth. It was originally based off of backlinks when it was created. It was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page. What’s it mean? Not much. Its a decent measurement of a website’s worth, but there are website out there with PR 5 that get 60 visitors a day while some website’s with PR 4 get 6,000. The more quality backlinks the better pr essentially. O yeah people call it PR often in forums. No one knows for sure all the variables but basically the more quality links you have coming in the higher the PR.

Q: Quality and Quicklinks

Create quality content. What’s the point of getting or paying for visitors when they leave after seeing the low quality content you offer. Create quality content.

Make your most important keywords and content available on every page as quicklinks. This will dramatically increase the rankings for those pages. not to many however. Somewhere between 3-10 is appropriate. Any more and you’ll be spreading the link butter to thin.

R: Relevance

Get links from sites that are related to your niche. This is simple, but almost always overlooked. Some mexican horse viagra website linking to your stock tips site isn’t doing you any good. Warning stay away from the mexican horse viagra.

S: Simple, StumbleUpon, and Spelling

Keeping it simple means don’t make pages that are over 200K, keep it minimal. Don’t overwhelm your users with to much animation, ads, or other crap unless you don’t want them to come back. Doing this will also allow users to find what they are looking for. Google only caches about 200kb per page. Much more than that is wasted seo time.

Again hit up those sites like StumbleUpon. A Good stumble can bring you a thousand or more visitors a day.

No one want’s to read crap. Use spellcheck I personally suck at spelling, and this may be an understatement. While writing ABC’s of SEO i’ve mispled atlast 100 werds or more. Spellcheck fixed them however. Search engines take notice of spelling errors and some say even grammar. They check for sentence structure to prevent spammers from creating random content with keywords embeded. Now on a second note sometimes misspelling a commonly misspelled word can help. As people will search for those misspelled terms.

T: Tables, Tweak and Test

Try to stay away from tables. They confuse robots. Robots are dumb little creatures and having to navigate through your <table><tr><td>table</td></tr></table> tags is confusing isn’t it. Try using CSS instead. It takes less code and loads faster. You can float pictures and other content left or right.

Tweak and Test. Make small changes to layouts, content inbound link titles etc. Wait a few weeks for the change. Don’t expect immediate results. Did your page go up or down in ranking? You can always improve.. tweak tweak tweak and test.

U: Underline

Just like the strong and italic tags the underline tag can help give special weight to keywords and phrases.

V: Variation and Validate

Vary or alternate incoming link tags. Don’t have 300 links to your website from other sites saying “blue widget” but have some that say buy blue widgets, free blue widgets, try our blue widgets, widgets blue and so on.

Validate your html or xhtml. Make sure it looks good and doesn’t give the bots a headache. Remember to make it easier on them.

W: Wait

Be patient. Any good seo guru will tell you, unless your site is old and established you need to wait. Keep working, it’s going to take months to rank well.

X: Xchange Links

If you are starting a new website research similar sites and offer link exchanges. It’s not such a good idea if you are established, but if you are new and need indexing, traffic, and to build those inbound links and get your keywords hopping.

Y: Years

When purchasing a domain purchase it for at least 2 years. This helps because the search engines realize hey this guy is in it for the long haul and not just some guy who is going to put up some crap template site with no long term goal. Many black hat domainers will create quick scraper sites and hop from domain to domain. Prove you’re not one. Register for 2 years not 1.

Z: Zesty

Keep content zesty and fresh. Spicy and new. Stay on the cutting edge of your field. Give your users the latest and greatest. Stand out.

Source: howtorank.com

I have just posted a paste of my resume up on my blog for anyone to see.  If you have any opportunities feel free to call me or email me, also if you need any consulting work on SEO/SEM I’m availbile to assist remotely if you are not in Salt Lake City: http://www.danielcoburn.com/online-marketing-resume/

Today I was looking at the people choice award nominee’s for user generated content.  Most really weren’t that good.  I didn’t really like the winner, except it did take a lot of time and effort to find the quotes from Obama.  The Star Wars lip sync was actually a guy that had nothing to do with the original song, it was from a group out here in Utah.  The swimming one was just annoying.  Wassup 2008, well ok it was good, but depressing.  My favorite after watching all of them has to be “Where the Hell is Matt (2008)”.  First He got to travel a TON so I’m jealous, second, the guy own the phrase “Matt” on Google.. how flippen cool is that!  This is an amazing example of how viral videos can help with your seo effort to own certain terms.  Take a look below:

Something that has been around for sometime, but has been getting a lot of attention the last few years and that’s Really Simple Syndication or RSS Feeds.  It’s an xml feed that is able to be accessed from across the web and parsed on a secondary site.  This is a good way to allow information from you site to be accessed remotely.  With the advent of live bookmarks you’re web browser can let you know when items are updated on your favorite blog.  So to view mine go to: http://www.danielcoburn.com/feed/ (and bookmark it in your live bookmarks!)

Also places like feed burner are a great way to find and track feeds.  One thing that some lazy people try to do is use other people’s RSS feeds to supply content for their site vs. creating their own.  Now it’s ok to use feeds, just make sure they are not the bulk of your sites content.

I was working with a friend this week on helping them expand their pay per click (PPC).  I was surprised to find out how many people don’t know how to use some of the great tools Google offers.  I mentioned the keyword tool that Google offers, and one thing that needs to be mention is the trend column.  This is off by default (dumb it should be active), so you will need to go to the show/hide column and choose the trends.

Now the trend will show you 1 year of historical word trends.  So if you were to use a keyword like “ski trips” you would see that during the wintertime (in the U.S.) you’ll have a higher amount of search and in the summer a lower amount.  This will allow you to set a level of expectation for your business.  If your keyword is steady throughout the year than you can expect a level of steady success, if it’s cyclical plan accordingly, or find the words that trend the opposite to market towards during their peaks etc.

I’m helping a friend out with some paid campaigns they are doing and have started to help them do some keyword research.  One of the best tools to use is actually Google’s Keyword tool.  It will tell you the approximate search volume, and even the monthly trends to help you understand the cycle of the words you are doing.  There are a lot of other tools out there, but start off with the free on from Google and then decided to move on elsewhere later.

The first thing you need to do is put a single keyword in and let it generate synonms, and you’ll get a gaggle of information.  After you’ve done that, feel free to have the same tool look at your competitor’s site.  What a great way to have Google tell you what keywords they think your competitors are good at ranking for?  This applies for both PPC and SEO, you’ll want to use the keyword list to develop content and expand your PPC campaigns.

One of the most overlooked way to obtain quality inbound links is by using press releases.  Just about every site or company can come up with a reason to do a press release.  If you place a logical link in your release to your site and it’s picked up by a company then you’ll have another link into your site.  Now put it in persepective, you can some times get  a release picked up by 100′s of sites, now imagine doing a good release once a month, you could get a significant amount of new links every month and you can publish release for a relatively low cost from a couple of hundred dollar to even free at some sites.

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

You build good internal links to push your pagerank around, now you need to focus on building up your Internet reputation. How do you do this? How does Google say who’s important? Short answer it’s a popularity contest! Longer answer: It’s a popularity contest amongst peers.

So when you build links it’s important to build them from pages that make sense to be pointed too you.  So if you are a dog site, links from computer sites don’t help you too much.  So you need to find good sites that are in your niche and get links from them, also bigger sites with links into you are also helpful.  Now on those links if you are able to control the text that’s in the href use keywords that are important to you.  So instead of having <a hfref=”http://www.site.com”>site.com</a> do something like <a href=”http://www.site.com”>keyword</a>.

Also you should try to get your site into DMOZ and if you can afford it get it in Yahoo! directory.

As we mentioned your links need to look like they make sense or they won’t pass PR to you and could actually hurt you if the search engine see’s that you have a ton of unrelated links you will lose authority amongst your friends and will lose rankings.

So just make sure the links make sense to users and they’ll make sense to the engines.

Anyone who has even taken a physics class knows that matter is neither created nor destroyed….  The same sort rings true for pagerank.  All of the pagerank in the world is equal to 1.  If you add 1 million pages, the universal sum is still 1.  Since you cannot change the universe, you need to know how to massage it.  If you have a website with 5 pages, you cannot control a lot of the virtual real estate, and will have to create more depth to control more of the pagerank available.  If you want to grow pagerank on certain pages you need to funnel traffic through links to them.  For example pages that should not have pagerank are contact us, privacy policy, etc.  they don’t earn you money so don’t give them the benefit of pushing rank to them.  So how do you push the rank internally?  Simple provide links.

All page link to your home page, so the home page of a site typically gets more rank since more pages both internally and externally are pushing rank to it.  While pages that should also be considered are category pages etc.  Many of these will be part of your universal navigation so they will also get rank pushed to them.  It’s important that you use appropriate keywords were possible to allow search engines to know the phrase that is important to the page you are pointing too.

You also want to have links to your contact us page etc since you do want to allow customers to get there, and you need them for better ranking in Google, but instead of use <a href=”contactusurl”>contact us</a> use a no follow <a href=”contacturl” rel=”nofollow”>contact us</a> this will prevent you from passing rank from a page to that un “wanted” page.