• Backlinks. Backlinks is the term used to describe links that are incoming to a particular website. When a particular website has a higher number of incoming backlinks for specific keywords, it will be viewed as more relevant and important for those keywords by Google. Building backlinks is the key to building a good reputation for Google and online users. That is the simple explanation, and there are many more factors. The days of buying links to your page will definitely not work, and there is no way getting around good content to build authority for your website.
• Content and Blogs. The idea of a good blog is to provide good advice and share you expert knowledge with internet users. At the end of the day, the professionals who do this will be viewed as the best, whether it is by Google or not. At the same time, because of such high competition, companies are forced to put out content and place it around the internet. Since the Panda Update, the best option is to put that content online on sites that specialise in a particular relative topic. When those sites feel that content is appropriate or good enough, they will want to post it, backlinks included.
• Reading Content. This is where it gets tricky. When you are reading an article, the writer may be skilful enough to make you believe the content is genuine, and yet it is essentially a sales piece. This is the art of SEO writing, not just in terms of Google, but also in terms of writing for people. I am in this business, and I am impressed at how some articles and other content I read, actually just lead me to a sales pitch, after I was convinced.
• Decisions to Make. This is where we need to stop and think. Is the article genuine, and the content genuine, and it is backlinked to the appropriate site because of that, or is the article a genuine con, and it is backlinked to the appropriate site because of that? Useless articles that do not inform, or at least generate some debate will not work in terms of SEO anymore.

So admittedly, this article is written by someone who is involved in SEO (search engine optimisation). Do you think it is a con, or do you think it is genuine advice for you as a user to read between the lines when reading information on the internet? In this case, advice on how to analyse the intention of content you are reading on the internet.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, including SEO and search engine optimization.

Related Posts

• Google Expect More Social and Local and Surviving Changes (0)
• A Few Guest Blogging Tips (0)
• Google PageRank Changes Will Generate A Webquake? (1)
• What’s the difference between artificial and organic links? (0)

There are several websites that invite ‘guest bloggers’ to submit blogs that will then become generally accessible.  That’s fine, but if you are going to take the time to create the blog and post it on the guest bloggers’ website, you should be doing that for a specific purpose, other than the satisfaction of seeing your creation on the internet.  Typical goals would be to generate free publicity and/or traffic for a website or to identify yourself as an authority on a specific topic.  You may have a long term goal in mind that your blog should become a source of income, presumably through advertising. For a successful venture of that type, the blog would have to become a truly authoritative source of information that would attract a large audience and that would justify the cost of the advertising to the sponsors.

Your blog should always include a page that identifies you and describes who you are and you should make sure that the page is easy to find.  Link back to previous blogs you have written, or otherwise reference some other content that you have created.  Quality guest blogs are trusted resources, especially those posted on the more well known blog sites.  If you specialize in a very specific subject area, make sure that the site you select has a focus on that area, that you speak with an authoritative voice, and that your writing is original.  Make sure that the tone of your blog is compatible with other postings and appropriate for your topic, having the right balance between formal and informal.  Carefully proofread your copy.  Check sentence structure as well as spelling, especially if you are not writing in your native language.  Thoroughly check your facts before posting the article.  Reference the sources of your information by linking to them.  If the topic you are discussing is at all controversial, be absolutely certain that your information is correct.  Once your article is live, your real work is just beginning.  You should be active in replying to readers’ comments and maintaining the pace of the discussion.  Be ready to follow up with another posting.

Assess the response to your article in terms of traffic generated, comments, etc., and determine if the article met your goals. If you are not entirely happy with it, decide how it could be improved, then be sure that your next article meets your expectations.

Related Posts

• A Guide to Analysing the Value of Content You See Online (0)
• The new law – No content quality, no site (0)
• Google Expect More Social and Local and Surviving Changes (0)
• Generating forum activity for blogs and conversion rates (0)

• Google Places. Google’s places listings are growing at exponential rates. Any business must have their business listed in Google Places. Google Places can mean any business can come up the top of any search, especially when a search is specific for a locality.
• Maps. No-one could have known how important Google Maps would have become. As more geolocation influences search and the way applications work, Google Maps continues to be extremely important. The important foundation of Google places continues to show greater details and include more detailed features that can be exploited by any marketing specialist. Google will deepen its relationships with location-based services. Staying abreast of the developments is essential for any professional marketer.
• Social. The rapid growth of Facebook has been, and continues to be, a huge issue for Google. It is fair enough to say the social media giant is Google’s only real competitor. Google is including social media interactivity in its search results, but this is to the exclusion of Facebook. What this means, if your friends and friend’s friends have used Twitter and other social media, and you happen to search on a similar topic, those relationships will influence the Google search result. For these tools to have effect, users must be connected through Gmail and Google Profiles. At the same time, we do not see anything as radically social as Facebook. Google says it is researching this issue, and so we can expect changes in the very near future. +1 is the latest application of which Google is showing the greatest amount of interest in. Social integration into the way Google works, and how we get search engine results, will most probably radically change further in the very near future. To give you some idea of how important this is inside Google operations, you should know that Google’s employee bonuses have been based on social media, in that they can expect bonuses if they succeed, and have salaries docked if they fail.

The last 12 months have seen some huge changes in Google that have really changed the game for many businesses and search engine optimization professionals. Google’s changes have even caused some businesses to go broke. Staying ahead of those changes has become more important than ever. More than just taking advantage of those changes, it is imperative you can survive them.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, including SEO and Search Engine Optimization.

Related Posts

• A Guide to Analysing the Value of Content You See Online (0)
• A Few Guest Blogging Tips (0)
• Google PageRank Changes Will Generate A Webquake? (1)
• What’s the difference between artificial and organic links? (0)

Page Loading Speed and User Behaviour

It’s difficult to find tests to measure how much page loading speed impacts the number of visitors. On many blogs you will find just generic information that if the page is not loading in x seconds you will lose 50% of the visitors, without any test to prove it.

One credible source I could find is Google. Marissa Mayer is one of the first Google employees and she handled some important google projects. As she mentioned in a Google I/O ’08 Keynote conference, page speed seems to be a SEO factor of crucial importance.

Google uses a process called Split A/B Testing to measure the impact different changes have on their visitors. Split A/B Testing assumes that 2 or more versions of the site are served to the visitors. Then the metrics of all the versions are compared. Marissa describes(minute 15:37) that on users request they introduced results with 20, 25 and 30 results on a page for a 6 weeks test. Despite the fact that users asked for more results on a page, the traffic dropped by 20% when 30 results per page were returned because the page load time almost doubled. And for google that means an extra 10 ms!

The same results were confirmed by the Google Maps optimizations. The pages were reduced by about 30%(from 110-120k) and the traffic increased by 30%.

Another sets of results is shared in a Performance Related Changes and their User Impact presentation by 2 engineers from Microsoft and Google. Both Microsoft and Google analysed the user behavior when the page speed was reduced.

In the following picture you can see that a delay of 1000 seconds reduces not only the number of visits, but also the increase the time until the next click with the double of the value. This will decrease the user satisfaction even if he continue to stay on the page:

The results presented by Google confirm the bing results. Google published the results for tests involving smaller delay times. However, when the delay time is increased from 200 to 400 ms the number of visitors leaving the page gets doubled:

You can watch the full presentation here or check the slides:

Performance Related Changes and their User Impact

Page Loading Speed and Search Engines

Some time ago some rumors spread that page loading speed is going to be the next Google factor. It become official couple of months back when it was announced on google webmaster central blog. This seems to be in the google trends to “make the web faster“.

Page Speed: Measure and Improve

It’s obviously that you have speedptomize your website in case you didn’t until now. Some optimization techniques will be discussed in a later post. First of all you need to know how fast your pages are. In order to find where the problem is you need to measure the page loading time.

There are 3 problems you might have:
1. A slow hosting provider – maybe you have too much traffic your solution can handle or you share the same machine with someone that slows the machine or your hosting providers simply sucks. In this case you have to change the hosting.
2. Your script, is running slow because it’s not optimized. In this case you have to optimize it.
3. The thing everybody tends to ignore: You have plenty of javascript in your page. The server serve the page in 20 milliseconds and then the browser runs javascripts for 10 seconds. You still need to optimize it.

How to measure the page speed? For the first 2 cases use the this url or this one for more details. If you want to see how the webpage loads on browser you can use 2 firefox addons: PageSpeed and YSlow.

I never tried but this workaround to track page speed with google analytics looks interesting.

Related Posts

• How to optimize Wordpress .htaccess file (0)
• Improve Page Loading Speed Optimizing Static Content (0)
• What are Content Delivery Networks (0)
• Your hosting provider doesn’t support gzip configuration via .htaccess? No Problem! (0)

When we talk about Seo we talk first of all about the success of a webpage or a website. In order to measure it we can use a few factors: Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Number of backlinks,…

Alexa Sparky

Alexa Sparky is the official addon from alexa. It displays the Alexa page rank and a small traffic trend graph in the status bar. Right clicking will pop-up a menu from where you can open Alexa Related pages: Traffic Stats, Related Links, Keywords,…

Alexa-Sparky

SeoQuake

SeoQuake SEO extension SeoQuake is really useful plugin if you want to research and gather data about the first results on google SERP page. It adds using for each result in google page the PageRank, number of backlinks according to Google and Yahoo.

Seoquake

SearchStatus Addon

SearchStatus – Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank in status bar and provide a popup menu to open pages on useful pages on google, compete.com, alexa and seoMoz.

SearchStatus

Keywords Addons

Keywords are the real tags of a webpage through the web. Search engines are indexing webpages and websites based on their keywords. On the other side potential visitors perform searches based on keywords. Keywords are the core of the web search.

Wordtracker Seo Blogger

Seo Blogger is a extension from wordtracker that be be extremely useful for doing a keyword research. The main benefit is the fact that it is integrated in the browser so it’s more useful that keywords tool from google. There is also a drawback, wordtracker keywords research is done on less than 100% of all the searches, so the accuracy can not be even compared with the keywords research tools from google.

Wordtracker-Seoblogger

KGen

KGen – display the keywords in a webpage ordered by weight and importance.

KGen

Server Info

Sometimes it’s important to find out where a specific site is located, who is the owner of the domain, what type of webserver is used,…

FlagFox

FlagFox – display an flag icon near the address bar, showing where the site host server is located.

FlagFox

Domain Details

Domain Details is a more advanced plugin. It can display the country location of the server, type of server and header information.

Domain Details

Web Development Addons

Web Developer is a very complex addon for web developers. You can use it for seo to perform all kind of tasks: Hide the images to see the titles, disable css to see how serach engines sees a page, display title attributes,…

Firebug is another tool for web developers, that can be used by seo professionals as well. You can use it to inspect html elements or to use the page speed plugins that will be described in the next section.

Page Speed Addons

Page loading speed is an important seo factor that is very often ignored. If the page doesn’t load in less than a few seconds you’re gonna lose almost half of the visitors.

YSlow – is an addon created by yahoo, which works in firebug and records the loading time of each component and shows a list of suggested improvements that can be made.

PageSpeed – is the google clone of YSlow. It works in the same manner and usually the suggestions that are made are the same.

Related Posts

• 5 Dirty Little Tricks for Guest Bloggers (2)
• HttpFox – Firefox Addon to See All the Files Loaded on a Webpage (0)

1. Company Age

You should know for how many years the SEO Company has been operating and providing SEO services. With more experience they will be more credible and will be better in their work. As they have been in the field for some years they will know of all the strategies that can be used and how effective they are.

2. Experience in your Niche

You should know if the SEO Company has experience to work in the niche market that you work in. It is always advisable to work with a company which has worked for a company of your field so that they know the details and know what will work well.

3. Testimonials that can ve verified

All good SEO companies have good testimonials and they will ensure that they tell you about it. You should know about the testimonials and you should try to talk with the clients so that they give you the correct feedback.

You should know that if past clients avoid to give you details about their ex-seo company, it means they do not have a good track record so you should take care. Every client would be more than happy to give a good feedback about a seo company, if they had a good relation in the past.

4. Portofolio

You should look at the portfolio and check for the companies they are working for or they have worked for in the past. You should see the rankings of the site which will show how effective are the SEO techniques they were using.

5. The SEO Strategy

Ask them which strategy they ar going to choose. If they are telling you they will bring lots of links submitting to directories, social media, forums or other ineffective strategies, then forget about them.

6. Pay for Results

You should try to negotiate in terms of results. The results are the ranks of your websites not the number of backlinks they would build. Offer them only a half of the pie for what they provide and the rest when they achieve what you are demanding for(the 1st, 2nd,… position in google for certain terms). If they are unwilling to accept then they know it might not be achievable.

Related Posts

• -

Google Page Speed is a tool used internally by Google to optimize their webpages, which is now made available for the public. The tool is built as a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. When I discovered it I was a little amused that Google is using Firefox internally instead Chrome for such purposes.

Yesterday I just gave a try and Page Speed seems to be a really useful tool. To install the tool you have to open the Page Speed Download Page and install is as a Firefox Add-On(If you don’t have Firebug Add-On install it from here).

Once installed open a webpage and go to Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug. You’ll notice a Page Speed tab in the Firebug panel. Inside that tab click Analyze Performance button:

You’ll get a nice report with all the things that can be improved:

Here are some of the tips provided by Page Speed:

• Compress images and show you how much you gain from that. You can just save the images and use them. It also gives a resized version of the images to the dimensions used in the page.
• Compress Javascript files.
• minimize DNS lookups
• put the static content to a cookieless domain.
• Combine Javascript and css files
• distribute resources on multiple domains to enable parallel downloads.

Some of the things are easy to implement, some of them requires advanced configurations(adding a cookieless domain). Anyway Google Page seems to be a really nice tool, in future post I’ll try to explain how to implement some of the tips.

Related Posts

• 5 Ways to Measure Your Website Speed (0)
• Improve Seo Using Google Trends (3)
• Charles Darwin Google logo only in some countries (2)
• Google PR Update (2)

First of all they can not detect it, control it, measure it. The entire Google castle was built on the “measuring” what other pages “think” about a specific page. In simple words: back links. If links could be traded as any other resource the rich players will put lots of money in buying links. Google algorithms will be affected to some degree and the quality of the results will suffer.

The second reason for which Google don’t like it is the fact that their revenues might be affected. Most if not all the Google revenues are based on advertising. Google castle is build on the backlinks net foundation and powered by the ad marketplace they built. Content on web becomes more and more and grows much faster than the money spent on ads.

More and more people will be tempted to sell ads when they will realize that a sold link might bring more money than an embedded ad unit. On the other side people will realize that a paid link is not bringing only new visitors but an improved search engine position.

I’m sure that if there would not be the terrible punishment of losing the place in the eternal Google index the link trading would flourish. Let’s try to imagine how the world would be if the link trading would be “legal”. First of all lets assume big players will put their money in paid links and will reach the sky in SERP pages. A new job will appear called SEO profession(wait this job already exists). The site owners selling links will have more money; they will also buy links to promote their websites.

The question to be asked is “Would the paid links affect the quality of search?”. Somehow when we think about paid search we think that bad sites will reach the top just because they afford to buy more links. How is that different of what happens today? Bad sites can pay good SEO professionals to push them in the top. It’s more probable to reach the top of the engines with good SEO than with good quality.

Google already have some powerfull algorithms and it can measure and control what’s happening on web right now. Why to make the web to play by your own rules and not leave it free to control and regulate itself? The response is obvious, but is it profitable also on long term? It’s not a bet agains future, to freeze or to force the market in the direction you want, instead of adapting yourself for the market changes? How long the little site owner will agree to make 50$ a month from adsense when he can make those money from selling 2 links?

Related Posts

• Google PageRank Changes Will Generate A Webquake? (1)
• Ethical Seo – Can it really be? (0)
• How to submit a website to Cuil (2)
• Cuil = 3xGoogle? (0)

That’s why in this post I will try to apply “military” principles to practical SEO. First of all lets’ establish very clear what we want to achieve through. Lets define SEO as a set of actions we are going to perform in order to achieve the best results we can get based on what resourced we have. By resources we can understand our time, money or other people’s time and money which can be used in a seo campaign. The results of course should be increased number of visitors and better positions in search engines.

The way you select the techniques and prioritize your tasks will bring(or not) crowds of visitors on your sites. Looking for different information about all kind of strategies on Wikipedia I came to this a set of millitary principles:

Army’s United States Army Field Manual (FM-3-0) of Military Operations (sections 4-32 to 4-39) are:

1. Objective (Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective)
2. Offensive (Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative)
3. Mass (Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time)
4. Economy of Force (Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts)
5. Maneuver (Place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power)
6. Unity of Command (For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander)
7. Security (Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage)
8. Surprise (Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared)
9. Simplicity (Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding)

Related Posts

• -

I’ve created 2-3 pages on squidoo and I’m very pleased by a health check they have there. It displays a few check points where you have to work on your article to improve it. All of the points are just the seo advices written in a language that someone who doesn’t know what seo is can understand.

In reality many people publish content there with the solely purpose to get some link juice to their own websites. I think this is an option but in 99% of the cases is one of the worth option. The first reason is that the page you publish in a website like squidoo will have have bigger chances to outrank your pages you want to promote this way, so first of all visitors will go to squidoo before coming to your site.

Another reason why you should take care when you publish content on other sites is that you’ll not be 100% control to that content. A blog post caught my attention regarding it: Be Careful with HubPages – Dofollow Nofollow Fraud. The author noticed that links in his pages on hubpages gets nofollw when he dosn’t log in in the hubpages account for a long time, and that this fact is not made public by hubpages.

I don’t think sites like hubpages, trying to reach the top of the search engines are purely evil. Everyone want to do it. However they have to do this by generating as much content they can, selecting good content and publishing new content all the time. And not always their goal is your goal.

So, I think you should take care before enriching other sites with your content, and remember that the content you put there might be yours, but the benefits you get from there are controled by them.

Related Posts

• Seo Case Study: Squidoo.com (2)