Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

The importance of your link structure to the success of your site (especially ecommerce sites) cannot be over emphasized. The basic pattern for internal linking is as follows:

Videos now show in rankings on Google and other search engines. How do you manage to push your video up the ranks? Many people don’t realize that YouTube remains ahead of Yahoo! in the No. 2 spot behind Google, when it comes to search, according to comScore.

Some videos rank well on Google but not YouTube. Why? Google is the number one priority for organic traffic for many webmasters, and SEO is the prime way to move up the rankings. Lots of webmasters don’t even bother learning about tactics that might help with other engines, and this is a mistake when it comes to YouTube. Some videos show up in Google and others don’t, because what triggers a video result in universal search is complex.

Web search has the most search volume. YouTube videos with large numbers of views and comments on YouTube don’t always trigger a Google universal search result, with that honor going to a lesser watched video, and Matt Cutts says “…it could be that this one has more PageRank, and that’s why it outranks it.” It comes back to links, as it always seems to with Google.

Tags are still the most important content elements on a YouTube page – meta title tags, meta description tags, and meta keywords tags. These are all translated by YouTube into HTML elements on the video view page. Even though Google is developing technology that can index Flash and the content of videos, text is still the main way that indexing is determined.

If you want Google and YouTube to know what your video is about, you MUST optimize the title, description, and tags. You can even add a transcript to the description or take advantage of YouTube’s annotation feature to add captions or subtitles, increasing the available HTML for Google to crawl.

YouTube’s ranking algorithm is a mystery, just like Google’s, but it is fairly clear that these factor in: embedding, ratings, play lists, commenting, sharing or favoriting, channel views, subscribers and inbound links. The age of the video also seems to have some impact, as well as flagging (adverse effects from flagging).

Making a video rank well on Google is different than making it rank well on YouTube, however – Google doesn’t seem to count embeds as links – which most people would feel that they should count. After all, strong back links stand as Google’s most important indicators of value. This means you should strive to obtain keyword-rich anchor-text links from relevant, reputable places on the web, and give your video some honest to goodness PageRank.

The fastest way to do this? Social media. Just like any other link driving campaign, social networking can get your video out there, and when it comes to something going viral, a video has a good chance – people love videos. Digg, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Sphinn – all of these can cause a skyrocketing in your videos popularity, and get you moved up the Google SERPs chain fast. If you can get picked up by a major blog, you’ll get even more face time on page one.

Bottom line? Use both SEO for content, tags, linking and social media to get your videos to rank well.

For years, DMOZ was the most popular directory among search engine marketers and professionals. It had a reputation for being “quality” directory, thanks to its age, its authority among search engines, and the lack of a fee for listing. However, as years have passed, some question its real value.

It can take weeks or months to get a listing, and the prospect of success is hit or miss.DMOZ is strict as to which sites it will include, and lists major reasons why a site is not put in because of “poor quality” or for not being in accordance with DMOZ submission guidelines.

The idea is that DMOZ listings are high value, and should be treated as definitive resources. If the quality of the websites included is great, then DMOZ’s reputation stands as one of the best directories in the web. If not, and if DMOZ is just being exploited by search engine professionals wanting to get link juice, the primary purpose of DMOZ (providing a quality website directory for everyone, not just SEOs) is corrupted.

DMOZ allows users to search websites which have been “manually reviewed” by human editors and given the stamp of good quality in terms of providing information, trust and reputation; no spammy or affiliate sites allowed. DMOZ editors visit the actual website, navigate it, read your content, examine your services, check your background and verify your business address. If the websites cannot pass, a DMOZ listing is denied.

But does it really benefit you? Do people actually use DMOZ? Or is it just a strong link? Some webmasters will use DMOZ as an alternative to Google, Bing and Yahoo for search. However, a problem exists in a severe lack of websites and updated results.

By all means try for a DMOZ listing, just don’t make it your main mission, you can get good links elsewhere and grow organic traffic through good SEO.

Beware! Selling links is shady, shady territory, and you can sink yourself fast by following black hat tactics!

The world of SEO is a dangerous place know only a tiny bit about! You can read a few blog posts, understand the basics and go to work on your website. The mistakes that can be made in this situation are many, especially in the world of link exchanges. Generally speaking, the more relevant inbound links a website has, the better its ranking will be.

Unfortunately, some people have twisted this by leaving out the all important word ‘relevant’  and the  link-exchange industry has boomed. Link exchanges are not as simple or straightforward as they appear.

A link is a nod of approval between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you.  Page rank is calculated from a complicated algorithm ; it boils down to high is good. If you spend lots of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, it is updated frequently, and other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site higher as far as PageRank goes, and you’ll probably rank well for SERPs as well assuming you’ve done your keyword targeting properly.

How do you get high PageRank?

• Make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your own visitors’ experiences. A client should follow a link off your page and not land on a bogus website. If a recommendation by your site leads people to trust your opinion, they’ll come back to you!
• Also be aware if a reciprocal link from this other site will do you any good. Low PageRank sites should only be linked out to in cases of extreme value and relevancy.

Link building should only be undertaken if you understand the ramifications, utilize the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data.

You can be accused of being a link spammer even if you think you haven’t done anything wrong. Watch out for unscrupulous link directories and sites Use the techniques above to make sure you’re posting to relevant sites/directories/ articles/ blogs or wherever you choose to submit your content and links.

Linking software creators claim that you can get thousands of back links with the press of a button or for only “$89″. The only way to get good quality back links is to do the research yourself and hand-submit every single link, or sue an SEO firm that does the work manually and gives you a list of where your links are coming from and the PR of each site.

If you avoid these two traps, you’ll be well on your way to getting the links you need to get your website placed higher in search results and, as a result, generate more sales.

What do you do when you kind of end up with links you’d rather not have on your site, but can’t really get rid of? You know what I’m talking about. You set up your site, hit all you buddies and relatives up for links, and now those non-relevant, off topic, zero PageRank links from blogs and little personal sites are dragging you down.

We’ve talked a lot about what sites to link to, what backlinks will be worth the most,  and how to avoid links that will hurt you. But what if you jumped into link building the wrong way when you first set up your site, and you have some links that are sitting there like an elephant in the room?

Good news! You don’t have to hurt feelings or make enemies by ditching those links. You can instead smoothly direct search engine spiders to discount links, pages and even whole directories if needed. Do try to spend time fixing the problems as soon as possible, but don’t be afraid to block crawlers from indexing stuff they don’t need to see. ‘Disallow’, ‘no-index’ and ‘no-follow’ are useful tools to keep ‘bad links’ or junk pages from hurting you so much.  Eventually you’ll have to clean house, but if you are short on man-hours this is a temporary fix.

Add a ‘no-follow’ attribute to ‘bad’ links and ‘disallow’ spiders to access those awful pages. You can add a no-follow to a link simply by adding it to the HTML like this:

You can put a page disallow in your root folder added to the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /bad-page/keep/out.html

You should also link very specifically to each page for the highest relevance. Categorizing your links carefully and matching them to the best pages in your site will help strengthen your website from within – you need strong internial site architecture to be competitive in a consumer satisfaction driven environment!

As for those reciprocal links from family and friends, consider a ‘Friends of (your sitename)’ page,  and have the less relevant links listed there. You can no-follow each link, or simply disallow the whole page. This also lends a little extra ‘testimonial’ style to your site for visitors as well; it’s like seeing your ‘followers’ . Just another step to the socialization of the web!

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner