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Calling All SEO Super Geeks! | ||
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I need some help regarding SEO and blog structure. So I’m calling all SEO geeks that have any knowledge of what I’m about to ask. I know there are super genius SEO people out there that can give their two cents on this… * Anyone that offers some solid tips I will make a follow-up post and give you the link of your choice to say “thanks.” (And I’m sure the info will be of tremendous help to my blog readers.) But before I proceed I want to clarify that I know a lot about SEO. I wouldn’t say I’m an “expert” as I don’t feel I have mastered it, that’s probably because it changes so much, but I’ve pulled in millions of visitors during the past year or so from organic results — my point is, I’m no newbie, yet I’m willing to admit I don’t know it all. I have some issues I am interested in knowing answers for (related to optimizing blogs for SEO) and so I thought I’d create a post to “put it out there”… WARNING: This is a very new blog and to be honest I haven’t yet had a chance to do everything I have planned to spice it up. So before I get beat up over it Hehe. It reminds me of Andy Beard not too long ago teasing me for not having permalinks setup on my old blog (that I posted to like once every 8 years). It’s just one of many things I knew I needed to do but kept finding ways to not do the work. A big “thanks” to Aaron Putnam who contacted me to let me know there were some things I should do to improve the blog — he didn’t know I had all that stuff in the works but had been too lazy to add it yet. Aaron has a great pre-launch checklist for WordPress blogs that has some great tips for things you should do if using WP for your blog. My Questions For The SEO Super Geeks 1. Permalink Post Structure - are there any test results (because I’ve read some conflicting opinions — and see my own confusing data) that indicate it’s better to be using a /name-of-the-post/ (directory) structure instead of a /name-of-the-post.html structure? 2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’ - same question regarding www.domain.com/name-of-the-post/(or .html) VS. www.domain.com/archives/some/other/folders/name-of-the-post/(or. html) ? i.e. is anyone seeing a real difference in archiving their posts in a several directory deep hierarchy compared to one closer to the root level.  [EDIT] The reason I mention this is because I have some data (non-blog pages, but many pages in a large series) that actually ranked better for the deeper path. I had a pretty sophisticated sitemap for those pages and I’m wondering now if some of that linking structure (i.e. PR passing) is why; because I know the consensus is “closer to root ranks higher.” So I was just curious to the data others have with blogs. 3. Tags: Hype Or Reality? - I’m talking about putting a tag cloud after each post and filling it with keywords related to that post; then linking those keywords to a url like domain.com/tag/name-of-tag and having it go to the permalink for the post. So all the tags are just links to the same post. I have done a little bit of testing on some other sites trying to use a similar structure and wasn’t really seeing much from it. But maybe I wasn’t using enough tags and/or too many… or maybe there’s some other ’secret’ to it. I see a lot of tag usage now but I have yet to personally see much results from my testing. Maybe Andy Beard wants to chime in on this since I notice he’s using them for his posts? 4. PageRank ‘Aiming’ - this is getting a bit more advanced… does anyone have any experience with using a blog structure to no-follow certain links within the blog while ‘aiming’ all that PR on that page to a certain tag or special permalink for a specific post? Okay, that’s a bit geeky, I know. But some of this has worked for me in the past (not on blogs but web sites) and I am just curious if anyone happens to have figured out a pretty cool structure to do it with their blog — and might even be doing it to aim more PR to certain posts (i.e. ones that contain targeted keywords) compared to other posts that aren’t as much as a priority - yet still using SEO fundamentals so ALL the posts are getting indexed nicely. Have Any Thoughts? Please post your comments. Any solid tips will be included in the follow-up post with a link of your choice. I will email you personally concerning the link so don’t post it in the comments please. Thanks!
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« Bye Bye Affiliate Links | How Is Your Target Market Trending? » |
I know that I need to have my post titles listed before the blog name and some other obvious changes. I just haven’t yet had the time to do it (it’s coming very soon).
June 12th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
First tip: Use the description meta tag to put in something that describes the pages better. This might not help in the SeRPs, but it will mean people will be more likely to click your link when they see your listing on a search page.
June 12th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Oh, here’s a good plugin to do meta tags: http://guff.szub.net/2005/09/01/head-meta-description/
June 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
First off, I’m NOT an SEO Geek, let alone Super.
This is what I know.
Darren Rowse has a post on how to rank well according to Matt Cutts.
In that post he refers to the interview.
Lynn Terry shows you how to change from any other permalink structure to that one.
Furthermore, it’s also a good idea to add a permalink to the title of your post.
Also, (hint) I always recommend including a link to your home page from any other page (in the sidebar). Otherwise, once inside, users can’t navigate back.
Just a few ideas.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Case
June 12th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Questions one and two don’t really matter very much in my testing. I have blogs that use both and the results are comparable either way.
Question 3 is very important, but here is an easy trick to use. All of the sites that recognize tags will use categories as tags if they don’t find any at the bottom of the post. To avoid irritating Icerocket by using Technorati tags, I add extra categories and don’t bother as much with tags.
Question 4 is becoming unimportant for rankings. Page Rank is becoming less important as time goes on when it comes to ranking in the engines.
Link bait works very well for better rankings and in all honesty John, your name alone is normally enough to create link bait.
There is also a “do-follow” movement among bloggers that feel good comments deserve credit for their thoughts. This can give you very powerful one way links pointing to your blogs and sites. Simply post relevant comments.
Be sure to use a social bookmarking plugin for any blog. Again John, your posts will be bookmarked simply because they are yours.
June 12th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hi John,
2 months ago I created a blog to my site http://www.millennium3000.com because the site had PR 0
and not ranking well for any keywords, it also had some problems with traffic. Six weeks after
created the blog on the same URL, the site jumped from pr 0 to PR 4 and now it is ranking for
many keywords.
My answer to your questions based on my experince:
1. Permalink Post Structure - are there any test results (because I’ve read some conflicting opinions) that indicate it’s better to be using a /name-of-the-post/ (directory) structure instead of a /name-of-the-post.html structure?
Answer: Yes, it is better to use /name-of-post/directory I tried the other way with 4 other
blogs and none of them did as well.
2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’ - same question regarding http://www.domain.com/name-of-the-post/(or .html) VS. http://www.domain.com/archives/some/other/folders/name-of-the-post/(or. html) ? i.e. is anyone seeing a real difference in archiving their posts in a several directory deep hierarchy compared to one closer to the root level.
Answer: I tested this and the best way was by using http://www.domain.com/name-of-post.html
and the one closer to the root was best.
3. Tags: Hype Or Reality? - I’m talking about putting a tag cloud after each post and filling it with keywords related to that post; then linking those keywords to a url like domain.com/tag/name-of-tag and having it go to the permalink for the post. So all the tags are just links to the same post. I have done a little bit of testing on some other sites trying to use a similar structure and wasn’t really seeing much from it. But maybe I wasn’t using enough tags and/or too many… or maybe there’s some other ’secret’ to it. I see a lot of tag usage now but I have yet to personally see much results from my testing. Maybe Andy Beard wants to chime in on this since I notice he’s using them for his posts?
Answer: I tagged all the post and my post were picked up by google in less than 24 hours and ranking well in very competitive market, such as ipods and xbox.
In my testing having 3 to 5 tags were the best results.
http://www.millennium3000.com/blog you will see some post has less tags than other and the ones with 3 to 5 rank better.
4) I am sorry, I am not sure exactly how to do #4
Manuel
June 12th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
As for your questions:
1. Use directory.
2. Keep the page(s) as close to the top-level domain as possible. The deeper the path, the less “weight”
3. Use tags…it does help
4. Definitely nofollow pages you don’t necessary care about in SERPs (contact, policies, about, etc). Deep link the pages that mean the most, then get link love for those pages…they’re your bread & butter….pamper them.
Extras…you need to change your permalink structure to drop the dates and /blog/ . This post is http://www.income.com/blog/2007/06/12/calling-all-seo-super-geeks/ . It should be: http://www.income.com/calling-all-seo-super-geeks/ or http://www.income.com/traffic-generation/calling-all-seo-super-geeks/
You don’t have any h1 tags
Yes, you need to restructure the titles of your pages to be search engine frindly as well as user friendly. For some reason “blog archive” is included in the title…it’s taking up valuable space
Probably the most important thing you need to do is utilize the “more” function in your posts. You have full posts on your main page, category page, archive page, and actual post page…that’s 4 duplicate content pages in a search engine’s eye. The homepage will therefore be the first and quickest to get indexed while the others will hurt in SERPs.
This is huge…have a killer ping list. Ping all the best sites about your article as soon as it posts. Set this up in the Wordpress admin by going to Options > Writing and then putting the following in the bottom box named “Update Services”
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
That’ll get you spidered and indexed faster than a blackhat can doubleclick.
Finally…make Google sitemaps EASY. I use this plugin on my Wordpress blogs: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
That just about covers blog SEO (specifically with Wordpress). Of course, all of this is moot without good content, so keep the good stuff comin’!
June 12th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
John Reese ‘the internet millionaire’ asking for Internet Marketing help from others?
Has he had a personality transplant or something?
or has he lost his marbles?
Hehe
June 12th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Hi John,
My advice on SEO is to pay someone else to do it! Seriously, after studying my butt off I realized that yes, I COULD learn it, but that doesn’t mean I should. Our time in the CEO role is much to valuable to spend on this stuff.
Might not be the ‘advice’ you were looking for, but if you end up taking it hopefully I’ll get the link
Brian
June 12th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Hi John,
I’m a strange hybrid: long time web designer and internet marketing junkie. I love your stuff! We create blogs for loads of clients, a couple of whom are your friends and quite well known marketers. Even before they cared about SEO, we cared for them.
I must preface this by saying I take a long-term, white hat approach to SEO. I want to GAIN when Google updates, not drop. I don’t believe in fighting the system or playing games that don’t matter long term. I say this not gratuateously, but to frame my answers.
Also, I think there are other SEO issues that are more critical to bloggers than these, in terms of title and meta tags and avoiding duplicate content primarily. I actually don’t use plugins for these issues, as I’ve never found any that were totally satisfactory. We do some code adjustments that work much better.
That said…
1. My opinion is that it’s a non-issue. Google will waif about on this type of thing. One thing is best, then another. Filenames containing keywords used to be very helpful. Now not so much, in blogs or otherwise. It’s not worth spinning around on. All other factors being 100% the same, it will help. But that really never happens. And if all else where the indeed the same, I wouldn’t try to beat them on URLs…
2. Shorter URLs are best. Back in the day with Alta Vista and then Yahoo, now with Google. Closer to root has always been best. But bots are smarter now, so you can have a reasonable 3+ level site if the architecture is good and see no detriment. IF the architecture is good….
3. Tags… ah…. tags. They’re wonderful in the blogosphere, not that important out of it. They’re a “blogosphere” child and will help bring traffic through Technorati and other such sites, but not all that valuable elsewhere. I know many will disagree on this, but it’s the cold data of dozens of sites we work on speaking here. We add on such an easy way to tag (that actually also helps client clarify their key phrases per post to help with other ‘layman’ SEO) that it’s totally worth doing for what benefit it brings.
4. He He, pagerank and nofollow - well, John this is a BROAD and quite technical topic indeed! FIRST, you do need to be quite certain of what you’re doing in the overall sense of your site before trying to use “nofollow” in your site to push PR. (I know you know what I mean John, but that statement was directed at the general public.) Using nofollow can certain help a site with well thought out SEO architecture. As for blogs, there are loads of considerations with the way that content is dynamically generated that have to be addressed. Honestly, on a blog, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to do extensive IA (information architecture) on them. I believe their power is in the ‘common man’ of the posts. And I think that’s part of why they are currently in favor with the engines.
You can certainly ‘nofollow’ certain blog pages, and even write the php to ‘nofollow’ more extensively, but my question is, why do that in the age of the long tail? I like to take a “traditional” website and do extensive IA on it with ‘nofollow’ and such, and then set up a blog for the “free for all long tail” factor and do traffic pushing.
Great blog post and questions John! I look forward to other people’s answers. And, I’d LOVE to hear from you directly if you have more “geek” questions. We love being the “geeks behind the curtain” for internet marketers!!
June 12th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
[…] blogging and Beers Design founder Lisa Beers commented her answers. Below is a synopsis, but click here to read John’s original post and all the comments he […]
June 12th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I’ve been building blogs for people and myself for some time now. Been through all the latest and greatest (and not so great plugins) so here is my two cents worth.
Get rid of the date from permalinks. I use category/postname and thats it. Those 2 fields should contain your keywords anyway and gives the blog that silo structure that is so beloved of Google (believe that or not, I do).
Tags dont do much for me but Im sure it doesnt hurt to use them either. Just depends if you can be bothered.. I know i cant and i dont see any adverse effects of not using them.
Use the Optimal Title plugin to fix your Title tag.
As for your last question and going back to my silo comment.. I dont believe it is beneficial to create messy cross links between posts. You should create links within posts which go to the top of a category, but not to another post itself.. this tends to bleed the sites theme. Then again if your site isn’t set up for themes then its a non issue anyway. but thats a whole other topic.
Have fun
June 12th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
John,
Thanks for the recip link and the mention in your post. If you’re sending out an S.O.S. for SEO super geeks, you might as well go straight to the source with Aaron Wall over to SEObook.com. In the meantime, I’ll take a crack at a few of your questions.
1. Permalink Post Structure - Although posts ending with .html appear more static in nature, non-.html ending posts have a slightly higher keyword density which will yield slightly better SEO results. Again, so goes the theory.
2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’ - I tend to keep my directory depth as shallow as possible. However, so long as you keep the directory structure sensible, using keyword/content relevant directory names no more than 2 or 3 levels deep, you should be fine.
3. Tags: Hype Or Reality? - I’ve had some success with post tagging using a url similar to your example. Technorati, as you may already know, is big on blog tags and has been recently dominating the natural SERP’s with their tag search results pages. I like the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WP by Neato.
4. PageRank ‘Aiming’ - Not sure I follow exactly what you’re saying, but by default, WP applies a no-follow to all reader comments and trackbacks. Andy Beard compiled the ultimate list of do-follow and no-follow WP plugins which may further help you out.
Again, thanks for the mention and g’luck with your SEO endeavors!
June 13th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Here’s some data related to URL structure…
I performed statistical correlation analysis of nearly 1 million search results which represent the top 20 listings from over 40,000 searches conducted in June 2007.
In summary, these particular findings indicate that you should end your URL with a slash (/) so that it appears to be the root page of a directory. When separating words in a filename, an underscore (_) performs best for SEO purposes.
Here’s a page I put together that contains charts of this relevant data:
http://www.rankingreasons.com/stat_data.php
June 13th, 2007 at 2:55 am
I think your blog has good seo because it has unique content that humans want to read. Therefore people will refer to it and link to it in a natural way, and that is what Search engines love.
You are serving them what they want already, and in no time you will be a powerhouse ranked website.
I would change your page titles though, they can be far more content related.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:10 am
Great tips, everyone!!!! WOW. Some smart folks reading this blog.
CHRIS - question… so you think an underscore separating words outperforms the hyphen? i.e. /two_words/ VS. /two-words/
June 13th, 2007 at 3:39 am
John,
Yes, all things being equal, sites that use an underscore (/two_words/) as opposed to a hyphen (/two-words/) tend to rank higher.
Chris
June 13th, 2007 at 3:44 am
There are many things you can add on your blog, here are my 2 cents you can do for your blog.
1. Installed MyBlogLog onto your blog!
You can sign up for a free account at MyBlogLog and installed it on your blog, I have used it on my own blog and I increased my traffics stats instantly by just 200% just because I installed it and tagged it correctly with the right words.
2. Install plugins that help to tag your post
You want to have plugins to be tagged to EVERY post that you write, this in return will get your post tagged to search engines and other help traffic sites like technorati.com
3. Have a subscription for your comment post.
There is plug-in for wordpress that allows people to subscribe to your comments, because of that feature alone. My own blog now get a 60% conversion of every 100 people coming back to my blog because of that tool itself.
It a really power plugin all blogs should have.
4. Stumbleupon every post you have
Get free targeted traffic from just stumbling it on every post you have. Another highly recommended tool would be using social bookmarking to get your site ranked high and get more page rank for your site.
That tool itself helped get my blog from Alexa Ranking of 1 Million to now 34,000 in just 6 months =)
You really want to use stumbleupon.
I have gathered 6 post and experiments and I have done all of them in video to shows others how you can get even more traffic with Web 2.0
You can check out the videos for free at
http://www.gathersuccess.com/tags/hits-report/
June 13th, 2007 at 3:51 am
For SEO on your blog.. I highly recommend you use Headspace2… it’s the BEST SEO PLugin I have ever use.
What this plug-in does, it not only creates Tags for your blog post but it also have different tags and title and meta tags for EVERY Single Individual Page!
And You can even program the plug-in to be able to automatically tag and titled all your post based on titles you want them to be.
Example:
Post Title: How to make money
The meta keyword and description will be tagged to the title of the post. With the click of the mouse every post on your blog by default will be tagged,titled in that way!
So you really want to check out this plugin at
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2
Also.. you want to check out other blogging tips and experiments I have done for the past 6 months… I grow my blog from zero backlinks to 7k over in Yahoo using these principles at
http://www.gathersuccess.com/tags/blogging-tips/
June 13th, 2007 at 3:56 am
John, I thought you have a large marketing expert team, including SEO experts. Or else how are you able to write content for Income.com tutorials? Do you write all the content?
June 13th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Hi John, i am no expert but certainly can give a little input on this.
Some of these are relevant to you as you understand SEO, therefore some rules of outside blogosphere will apply here and I will not be talking in any order, just typing away;
1) Signup to blogstorm.co.uk link tracking solution. This will help you identify the post that is receiving the most linkbacks. However what you want to achieve also is ’static content pages’ that you believe will be the main link baiting posts. For example the initial report released. You believe that this is an integral part of the services and a post that should be kept highlighted, promoted and receive better serp. Your approach therefore would silo structure and would convert popular pages to a ’static content’ page.
silo wed design:
Ways to bend the way a search engine puts documents in context include:
1. Campaigning for relevant incoming links to your site
2. Increasing the number of documents on your site, and pushing a few of them forward by using a well rounded internal linking strategy
3. Concentrating outgoing links from a document to other documents on the same topic
- Put your main content on static pages
Static pages (Write / Page) let you create content that lives outside of the blog chronology.
Contrary to posts, static pages can be hierarchized using page parents (to the right in the editor). Your site structure could look like this:
/
/section1
/section1/topic1
/section1/topic2
/section2
/section2/topic1
/section2/topic2
… which is the most natural way to organize a site.
(resource and more info - http://www.semiologic.com/software/widgets/silo/)
So what you are doing is what you would do normally for one of your salespages except on your sales pages the links come from the outside. However the content of the anchor text maybe unknown to you, but in the case of a blog with the internal linking you will know the anchor text that you will use.
You would want to eliminate http:// PR ranking for your site and redirect to http://www. Therefore requiring this tool:
http://www.justinshattuck.com/wordpress-www-redirect-plugin/
A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/
I am going to stop here as I have realised that I assume john is using wordpress, which I have do not know if he is.
Tag clouds have worked for technorati to some extent however there is a real issue and debate that google has with this, to the extent that it does not follow the tags for youtube. Google wants to eliminate the number of steps it takes the user to get to a article/post/destination. now due to the nature of the big players technorati, delicious, netscape they see benefits of these links i.e. http://www.technorati.com/tags/income however this be benefit is only visable when there is not sufficient enough ‘competitive’ sites/blogs for that ‘tag’ word or technorati has seen a phenomenal growth for a particular tag that google will give it a high rank (this is unlikely) digg, wiki the like of do not use ‘tag’ as the core function of their operations thats why individual articles/posts/pages so to sepak relevant to that ‘keyword’ receives higher ranking. In conclusion ‘Tag clouds’ ‘tagging’ are a benefit in viral marketing and searches conducted outside of the major search engines generally, they will do wonders for a blog within in technorati, netscape, reddit, etc as part of the internal searches conducted by bloggers.
The best SEO permalink structure is to have your post appears with ‘category’ and the ‘post title’ in the URL. Simple SEO, the category title should have the keyword that most of the posts in that category would have i.e., http:///www.income.com/internet-marketing/the-internet-marketing-report
You will not get penalised. What you would expect from most of the permalinks is the category and post to be included within the anchor text, this will boost the ranking in search engines. Engadget, techcrunch, mashable get 1000s of permalinks to posts and this boosts their ranking and gets them a top place for a lot of long tail keywords within a matter days.
As said I am no expert. But have 30,000 visitors (not page views) to a blog that is 6 months old and in the top 30,000 for technorati. Target 100,000 visitors a month and top 500 in a year. Could be done, I have secret
June 13th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Time for a blog post in reply, as it is a little long for a comment
June 13th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Tagging helps only because they allow you to add a keyword to the URI. Even if tagging just duplicates content, it helps if someone uses your specific tag keyword to search.
But adding a list of tags to the bottom of the posts doesn’t help. It just clutters the bottom of the posts (if you also have social bookmarking buttons, ask for comments, and ask people to subscribe). Your page views don’t increase because of tags. And in fact, fewer people will comment on your posts - if there are a lot of other links there.
But as you are asking only from the SEO viewpoint, tags do help.
The best solution: Add the tagged pages to the sitemap xml file. But don’t show them at the bottom of the posts.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Hey John,
Not sure what you are up to here.
Surely you know that those who use the word “SEO” are generally scammers and wanna-bes… the blind leading the blind.
You can’t get the actual reverse engineering data from those who actually do reverse engineer the engines by asking the SEO snake oil salesmen for advice. That’s like going to an IM forum for advice on how to run an Internet business.
I guess it can sometimes work if you do the exact opposite of what they advise. Since they will be wrong more than 50% of the time you’ll get some benefit from dong that.
Do a search for “internet business” (without the quotes) on Google. You’ve seen my more impressive accomplishments. I’m not going to share them here.
You have my contact info if you need the actual data. If you are just doing a social experiment to find out all of the snake oil salesmen who identify themselves as “SEO” experts for some reason, I’ll watch and learn what you are up to.
-James D. Brausch
June 13th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Hehe. Hey James! How you doing? Haven’t talked to you in ages.
That’s a great ranking for internet business. Nicely done. BUT…
Do a Google search for “income”
June 13th, 2007 at 9:46 am
I whipped up a long comment and I’m not sure if it’s stuck in moderation or got kicked as spam…but it had quite a bit of info specifically for this blog & wordpress. Let me know if I need to try and repost it.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Ankesh - there are other factors involved
James - all I do is test and track, and sometimes refer to the results of various experiments - I encourage other people to do their own testing and tracking.
Imagine if you allowed comments on your blog (you know, a blog could be a community), and even removed nofollow from comments and trackbacks, and still competed against sites in the search rankings that are older, and receive a huge amount more links simply because they have a larger audience.
It has been a little difficult to report on results for the last few months because Google wasn’t reporting supplemental results accurately.
Then again they are not handling link attribution from syndicated content correctly this week, despite an overwhelming number of links from other sources, and within the original content.
The ideal scenario is to rank well without even trying, but there are multiple combinations to achieve the same goals.
There is more than one way to skin a fish, and in the same way you could have 2 great but totally different headlines for the same article or sales page, that converted equally well, you can have different site structures that work well for SEO, both in the same situation and in different situations.
June 13th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Hey John,
Sorry for budging…
I thought of something…
Why don’t you consider producing some merchandises for Income.com like a T-shirt, mug, etc. (with the word
“Income.com” emblazoned on it)
I’m sure you’ve legions of supporters out there (incl. me!)
who would be willing to fork out some cash on these items
It’s also great viral marketing ya know…
And you’ve got a gambit with the short and pithy URL…
people on the streets will tend to recall the catchy URL
easily
June 13th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Here’s a completely new, unique, take on SEO. Feel free to make a subdomain and throw some content and a link to your blog in the post!
http://www.Suckered.Us
June 13th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
@chelsie M…. explain to me what why this is a new, unique take on SEO? Dying to know
June 13th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Azzam my system takes a few concepts that were tried and failed (Billions of subdomains with useless words indexed in SE’s for major revenues) My system allows users to create unique content for each keyword subdomain and along with adsense provide revenues. Subdomains are created by a user’s topic and so the ads are all tailors. Subdomains are treated as external links by SE’s and not internal therfor Alexa and PR will both be highly affected and raised enourmously. Sure subdomains have been tried before but my system gives a new ease of it by providing a wysiwyg editor right onboard. Every single day my traffic is rising, so is my income. If I had funding to promote this to more users, as well as a few other things I’d literally be rolling in the dough. Until an investor comes along or Content is steadily added I’ll have to suffice with adding lots of my own and slowly steadily my income raises. Meanwhile I’m averaging a decent earning daily already on a site only two weeks old. Imagine my earnings off 1 million articles when I’m already earning decent off 129 of them.
People have tried subdomains but nothing quite like this.. We even pay for people’s content (.10 cents per article) but that’s minor compared to the income generated long term from a keyword and effective relevant content!
If anyone would like to discuss more feel free to email me at admin @ suckered.us
Thank you.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Hey John, I was just wondering if you could cover something on membership sites and how they work.
Thanks for your wonderful work.
Amy
June 13th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
thanks for asking the question. I’ve learned a lot just reading other people’s ideas. thanks
June 13th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
@Chris,
Re: hyphens vs underscores you recommend underscores. I have always heard the opposite. How does your stance reconcile with this post from Matt Cutts:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
June 14th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Ways to bend the way a search engine puts documents in context include:
1. Campaigning for relevant incoming links to your site
2. Increasing the number of documents on your site, and pushing a few of them forward by using a well rounded internal linking strategy
3. Concentrating outgoing links from a document to other documents on the same topic
I have done a little bit of testing on some other sites trying to use a similar structure and wasn’t really seeing much from it. But maybe I wasn’t using enough tags and/or too many… or maybe there’s some other ’secret’ to it. I see a lot of tag usage now but I have yet to personally see much results from my testing. Maybe Andy Beard wants to chime in on this since I notice he’s using them for his posts?
http://www.bullydomain.com
June 14th, 2007 at 5:19 am
[…] and Articles! The conversation started with John Reese’s Income.com Blog post today, “Calling all SEO Super Geeks! ” and the focus on 4 very specific topics that related to whether or not certain actions have […]
June 14th, 2007 at 8:10 am
For what its worth - I think tagging works great when done correctly and for the benefit of users. It then creates pages of everything that is related and an rss feed based on that tag. Countless times we have seen our tag pages show up on the front page of google SERPS on various sites.
I can also say that the setting of meta descriptions on each page doens’t hurt as it helps to make each page unique.
As for the permalinks - I use post-title - but i also have year and month - because I think in terms of archives… like a librarian…
June 14th, 2007 at 8:23 am
[…] Reese of Income.com wrote a post in his blog on Tuesday calling for some help from all SEO Super Geeks. While I don’t really think of myself as an SEO Super Geek - some of my partners have often […]
June 14th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[…] View his full post with all 4 questions here… My reply to his post is as follows: […]
June 14th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I’d reply but… it looks like you have gotten all the help you need from your questions.
June 14th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
[…] Looks like things are boiling over on your end with your new income.com pre-launch blog. I love your new sound studio… I’m jelouse!
Anyhow I’m not an SEO expert but I’ve been Stompin’ for a while and this is what I would say in response to your questions.
1) From all that I have read I chose to do the full directory url structure with my blog instead of the .html version. I don’t have a hell of a lot to back it up but it’s working fo me. […]
Visit my blog to see the rest of my reply:
http://www.howimademyfirstdollar.com/blogger/?p=53
June 15th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Hi John,
I’ve got lots of ideas I could discuss with you if you want to have a chat sometime. I actually have an unpublished book on SEO for blogs.
I’m mates with Mike Long (we played at a Magic world championships once), Mike Filsaime, Rich Schefren and Mark Joyner, not sure if you have heard my name before when talking with them. I’ve been meaning to introduce myself to you.
If you do a search for “John Reese” my blog should be there.
Love to have a brief skype chat sometime about blogs and SEO (I’m in Australia).
Cheers,
Yaro
June 15th, 2007 at 4:29 am
[…] I am sharing this link with you promptly: Questions For All SEO Super Geeks >> and most importantly the […]
June 15th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Here you go, John:
1 & 2 mean NOTHING to search engines, but they may make a small difference in how people feel about linking to you. “Closer to root” means nothing to search engines, it’s the actual structure of the site that matters, not the URLs.
#3… tags… well, if you do it well, it can have quite a strong benefit from a structural standpoint. Just as Amazon gets a lot of benefit from showing you other products people bought on a product page.
#4 - blogs are, in general, fairly well structured to begin with, but I do recommend using nofollow on links to your ‘overhead’ pages. You have a big benefit if you make a great post (like this one!) because those posts get a lot of direct links from across the web.
My new book (SEO Fast Start 2007) has generated a wee bit of controversy in the ‘white hat’ SEO world, because I am recommending using some dynamic linking (nofollow) to channel PageRank, but I don’t get the fuss*.
Google’s people have admitted that PageRank doesn’t work very well inside of a site to identify the most important pages, and said that it’s OK to use nofollow to help things out.
As an example… on most shopping cart type sites, without nofollow, the second-highest PR page will usually be your (empty) shopping cart, because it’s linked from every page.
*It’s also possible that some of the fuss is actually because I am giving it away for free, when a few of these guys are trying to sell outdated information…
June 15th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Nice job John - creating a nice buzz with this post, plus some decent link bait.
I guess I am the only one who figured it out - do I get a prize or something?
June 15th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Hello John,
A friend of mine pointed out this entry and told me to pop in, now let’s see if I can offer something useful.
1. Permalink Post Structure
In regards to SEO, there is little beyond the domain name that will affect your rankings. However, there is another reason one may want to have keywords in the URL — they will be displayed in bold in the search results page and draw the eyes of the searcher.
As for the optimal permalink structure, I firmly believe it depends on the purpose of the blog. Unless you’re running a news-style or explicitly date-based blog, then the date in the URL is little more than cruft.
Personally, I like to use the /post-id/post-name(/ or .ext) because I’m able to shorten my URL to /post-id/ in a pinch and it will reduce the number of 404 - page not found - errors that are generated. For instance, if you use the category name in the URL and decide to later change the category or structure of the post, instant 404.
Regarding whether to use a directory or an extension is, again, personal preference.
2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’
Really doesn’t matter if your blog is structured well to begin with.
3. Tags: Hype Or Reality?
Depends on how you use them, but they are a reality.
4. PageRank ‘Aiming’
I’ve only been playing with this for a short while. But then again, I’ve always been a firm believer in properly setting up a robots.txt file and putting the meta robots tag to good use across my sites, which generally makes adding the nofollow to links moot.
~ Teli
June 15th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
[…] http://www.income.com/blog/2007/06/12/calling-all-seo-super-geeks/ […]
June 15th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’?
I think “depth” is irrelevant. What matters is what links to a particular page. e.g. a PR 5 deep page will perform better than a PR 4 page closer to the root. I just don’t think that depth really matters all that much. Too easy to manipulate, therefore its not relevant.
3. Tags: Hype Or Reality?
On this one I have no experience to pass on. Personally though I hate tag clouds, and find them a useless “Web 2.0″ geek thing.
4. PageRank ‘Aiming’?
I have a lot of experience in an html site with this, but not within a blog structure. As you have had success with this John, so have I. However I suspect that these days Google is out to stop this practice and aiming your PR with nofollow links would be really easy for an algo to detect.
June 16th, 2007 at 10:34 am
If I was your SEO and you came to me with these questions the first thing that I would ask is: “What’s your conversion goal?”
Many of the answers would then be based on what you told me.
For example, I’ve seen two separate Google reverse engineering studies which both “prove” that the default structure in Wordpress is a higher ranking factor than the pretty permalinks that Andy and the rest of the WP SEO dudes would have you set up.
But, if your audience is all savvy and believe the common wisdom, then it may not be worth it to have an “unpopular” permalinks structure even though you would derive some SEO benefit from it. In short is the business image more valuable than the SEO value?
That’s why business must drive the SEO and not just SEO for “more traffic” sake.
The same goes for tags, they will create a lot of extra pages on your site which will pull in more traffic, but they are mostly junk pages that are lists of articles snippets, so you’ll need to have a conversion mechanism in place before they will become valuable to your business.
Jon Symons
June 16th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
You’ve had so many people come and answer questions for you, but since you have a Word Press blog, here are some of the best plug-ins for SEO purposes, IMO. I run two blogs for one of the Internet wunderkind, and I have found these to be most helpful:
Another WordPress Meta Plug-In helps you to add your own description to every post. Since description is uber-important, it’s a good one. You can add keywords, too, but they’re so like, yesterday.
SEO Title Tag gives you the ability to give yourself a title, not allow WP to do it for you. So you can title each post the way you would any website.
Google Sitemaps builds one for you and updates every time you make a post.
Social Bookmark Creator gives people the ability to bookmark posts. Use the drop-down menu, which is much neater and you can add more bookmark sites without making your posts look cluttered.
Google Analyticator, of course, so that you can receive Analytics stats just by plugging in your Analytics ID
Chicklet Creator so that you can allow people to subscribe to your blog in many different forms.
Love all of those. I mean, how can I possibly answer the questions when Dan Theis was already here and done it? I wouldn’t presume.
Best,
Pat Marcello
June 17th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Geez..this is awesome. Just reading the tips brought in from the comments. Thank You John for getting this rolling. =)
June 17th, 2007 at 3:06 am
Google Secret Guide : http://adsharing.net/google/1283-google-secret-guide.html
June 19th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Hi,
I cannot contribute anymore useful on the SEO tips here, but I want to make two comments.
@Jon (June 16th, 2007 at 10:34 am)
> … In short is the business image more valuable than the SEO value? ..
>Jon Symons
All your SEO effort may not be worthwhile, because too many users click away. You are absolutely right, you need to have conversions, need focus on business first. But that means you need to focus on the HUMAN USER, your audience. That’s where USABILITY ENGINEERING comes into the game. Unfortunately, usability is a term not found too often explained in depth in marketing material. It is used as a slogan, but it is rarely mentioned that there are a lot of heuristics, that you can follow to achieve a good user experience. Yes, do usability engineering for your audience and SEO — a kind of usability engineering for search engines — for the robots and spiders. You probably have heard about useit.com A very good resource about usability. Check it out.
@ “the underscore versus hyphen topic”
It seems that above posts indicate that ‘underscore’ performs better for SEO purposes. My rational for it is, that ‘underscore’ might be a stronger word seperator than the hyphen, which can be used to combine words as well. Maybe that’s why the search engine rank the keywords in a URL clearer, when seperated by the underscore.
However, usability guidelines suggest that you have hyphens in your file names, rather then underscores. Because hyphens perform much better for humans in terms of readability. Especially, when you follow another important usability guideline that says, ” Links should be underlined, always!”
Now what?
SEO says “A”, usability says “B”. Unfortunately this might not be something easy to test for, if you really need statistical significance. You surely need to take business variables into account. Short term and long term.
Adios
John
June 19th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Hi everyone….
Here is a brain-teaser for ya!
Who can tell me what “testing” means?
Cheerio!
Koorosh
June 20th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Ok, I actually am an SEO expert (I’m not bragging or showing off, it’s just what my specialism is), so I’m going to weigh in here and lend my wisdom of years of SERP tracking and tinkering…
1. Permalink Post Structure
It is indeed better to use the /name-of-the-post/ structure. The actual reasoning for this stems from accessibility, and affects the trusted-because-it’s-well-made side of SEO.
2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’
Deeper is better. Again, this stems from accessibility. A URL should follow the hierarchy of the site navigation structure. Thus, if you go to Services and the SEO in a site, the URL should read http://www.somesite.com/services/seo/
3. Tags: Hype Or Reality?
Tags - hype. Same reason as the keywords meta tag failed. It’s nice from the point of the user, in that it’s a serendipitous way of navigating a site, but SEO value? Little to none.
4. PageRank ‘Aiming’
Ah, good old PageRank. I’m guessing that you’ve never really studied the algorithm for calculating PR, but I’m guessing you know roughly how it works. However, the way Google determines PR seems to have evolved from its starting point, to now include semantic-based matching.
Initially, it was based on the principal of “If page A and page B link to page C, page C is probably on the same topic as A and B. Thus A and B are probably on the same topic too.”
Now it seems to also look at the content on the page, and the site as a whole, in question. From there, it can then try to understand the purpose of that link, the reason why that link is there.
What this means is that you can’t “point” PageRank per se, but what you can do is use nofollow to clean around the edges. Think of not so much as pointing PR, but making the area it can hit smaller.
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t make the “power” of the PR going to that page greater, it affects the PR to every page. If you have a site that links only to sites on fishing, you’ll do better at passing PR than a site that links to fishing and governmental policy. It’s all about relevance. Keep you links on topic, and nofollow off-topic stuff.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Just had a thought to jump in with:
Basic principle of SEO - optimise like there aren’t any search engines. Build your site to be the best site there is on that topic. See http://www.adamscreative.co.uk/articles/searching-for-gold/index.html for more…
June 21st, 2007 at 3:34 pm
“Basic principle of SEO - optimise like there aren’t any search engines. ”
Yeah, that’s good advice for the idealistic and naive, lol.
June 24th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Does anyone know how to change the hyphens to underscores in Wordpress? I haven’t been able to find a plugin or hack to do this.
Thanks!
Brian
June 24th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
[…] This is day 7 of my 30 day marketing challenge. Today’s ideas come mostly from John Reese’s article here. […]
June 25th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
4. PageRank ‘Aiming’
Partial answer:
I think that Google doesn’t like this ‘manipulations’, and that that is the reason why it introduced supplemental results, basically forcing you to choose between having more pages in the (main) index, or having fewer pages that are ranked higher. I don’t want to repeat myself, so you can read more at
http://www.links.com/seo-blog-tips-tricks-tools/search-engine-optimization-tips-4-wordpress-blogs/
That page also has some links to PR related WordPress plugins.
June 25th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Brian, you dont want to be changing to underscores.
Hyphens are the preferred method of joining words for SEO.
June 27th, 2007 at 6:56 am
[…] recently posted about search engine optimization for blogs and asked my readers to chime in on the […]
June 27th, 2007 at 8:47 am
[…] new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I recently posted about search engine optimization for blogs and asked my readers to chime in on the […]
June 28th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Isn’t worrying about these details the 80% that brings 20% of the results? Everyone will link to this blog because your name is on it.
I think John just asked so everyone else could apply the answers to their own blog.
Thanks John! There are some great answers here.
June 28th, 2007 at 9:29 am
[…] Share This […]
June 29th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
[…] blogs and on my own. I won’t reiterate here. You can see John’s post and my comment at http://www.income.com/blog/2007/06/12/calling-all-seo-super-geeks/#comments and it’s pretty far down on the […]
July 6th, 2007 at 10:27 am
[…] Income.com Blog by John Reese 29 […]
July 7th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
[…] Income.com Blog by John Reese 29 […]
July 12th, 2007 at 5:17 am
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July 31st, 2007 at 7:04 am
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August 9th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Keep in mind that “Theme Bleeding is Suicide for Search Engine Rankingsâ€, because Silo-ing can become very confusing if you don’t understand the basic concept from a very elementary level.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:34 am
Told you my theory would work. Daily alexa average in under 3 months now around 50k
http://www.suckered.us .. Daily average 30,000 to 60,000 uniques and 300,000 to 500,000 pageviews daily atm and steadily increasing. Links now available for purchase onsite.
Lots of good reading here people.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:49 am
PS John If you’d like to contact me I’d like to discuss some things.
Sincerely.
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 am
Hey John…
Just found your blog. (I know, I know - I live in a cave)
1) RE hyphens vs underscores. Underscores are the equivalent of exact phrase match. So seo_super_geek would only come up in a search for “seo super geek” (ie; the exact phrase) seo-super-geek could potentially come for a search for any one of those words or any combination. So if you want to direct hit a phrase match, use underscores. If you want to come up for partial match, use hyphens
2) With the nofollow thing, what Pete said (Keep you links on topic, and nofollow off-topic stuff) was good advice. Most search engines are using latent semantic indexing (ie; recognizing words in the same genre) but cleaning up around the edges to avoid linking to totally unrelated content is good advice. Loads of work, but good advice. An easier solution would be to nofollow all links in comments, and then remove the nofollow for links you want to give weight to. Still work, but maybe not as much.
3) Had to laugh at James’ comment; “Surely you know that those who use the word “SEO†are generally scammers and wanna-bes… the blind leading the blind.”
lol He’s not half wrong. Like all the SEOs that are still offering to buy incoming links while Matt Cutts is posting a link to report paid links because they’re a violation of Google’s TOS.
Kind of reminds me of Joe Girard’s comment that “most of the so called experts are putting ideas in your way that you’ll have to get rid of or reshape…” That comment always stuck in my head… you’d almost think he was an Internet Marketer instead of a car salesman.
4) Having 2007/06/12 in the url isn’t a big deal in 2007. But in 2009 if the blog is still up, the dates in the urls might seriously date your content and reduce it’s ranking unless algorithms manage to figure out which dated content is still valuable. It would be a pity to see some of your content suffer by being dated, because it’s great content.
5) Trustrank trumps pagerank. With good trustrank, you can be on page one with a PR2. With bad trustrank, you won’t be on page one with a PR5.
Sorry for being so long winded. Keep up the great work. There’s good reading here.
September 19th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
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October 21st, 2007 at 4:40 pm
oh i can’t believe what i’m seeing with my eye. Masood Garfield.
December 25th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
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January 29th, 2008 at 8:05 am
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March 6th, 2008 at 3:15 am
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March 25th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
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March 27th, 2008 at 9:12 am
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April 1st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Really nice tips on this blog.
I am looking forward to try them up on my newly launched blog http://blogs.digitss.com/
Thanks.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Really useful article, thanks for sharing.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
You can check my blog, I ve used nearly all SEO methods and it seems working well.
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April 16th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Very useful information
I see there are realy good tips. I am going to use some of them
May 25th, 2008 at 11:08 am
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August 15th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Just wanted to say that I am a relatively new follower. I’ve known of your name for a long time, but just recently grown more with your blog. Great information! Also enjoy your TS2 program. You are also a somewhat of a neighbor living in Orlando and I’m up in Jacksonville area. Maybe we can do lunch?
Many Blessings