Secret Keyword Resource - Dumb People

Posted by stuart as keywords, seo, search engine optimization, search engine

Well, not dumb people as such, just people who don’t know as much as the experts.

If, like me, you spend a fair bit of time researching keywords, you might be missing out on a golden resource sitting right in front of your nose. I’m not talking about researching thousands of keywords for PPC campaigns, or (ahem..) “Mass content aggregation sites”, I’m talking about single keywords for single pages in niche sites.

In my real job, I do web development work for graphic designers. This means I do pretty much everything other than design the template look and feel of the site. Part of this work involves helping clients decide what they want to achieve from their websites, who they are targeting, and helping them write the content for their sites.

Many of these sites are for small businesses who are “going online” for the first time, who have a small array of products that they’d like to get the word out about.

One of my main jobs is to talk to clients about the pages they’d like to incorporate into their site, and site structure (do we have a page for each product etc?).

Once we’ve determined what our pages will be, I ask the client what keywords they think people might use to find their products in a search engine. After the initial blank stare, I usually get a list of industry specific terms, or terms so broad that they have not a hope in hell of ranking for.

The problem is that these people are too close to the product or service that they are trying to sell.

Enter the golden resource - other people. Mrs. PimpMyPageRank is getting heartily sick of me asking her questions such as:

• What would you type in to Google if you were looking to buy Revlon makeup in Adelaide?
• What would you type in to Google if you were looking for a dog boarding kennel in Tea Tree Gully?

etc. etc.

But while she keeps providing me with good keywords, I’ll keep asking her.

So what about you, do you ask actual, real, living people for keyword suggestion? Do you think it’s worth the time?

The difference between post titles and page titles, and why you should care

Posted by stuart as wordpress plugins, seo, search engine optimization, wordpress, search engine

Yes, there is a difference!

See the bold text just above the content you’re now reading? (feed readers will need to come to the site for this one). See how it says “The difference between post titles and page titles, and why you should care”, that’s the post title.

Now look up at the top of the browser, at the bit up there in next to the firefox logo (or opera, safari, IE, whatever), the bit that says “Post titles, Page titles, and SEO for Wordpress”, that’s the page title.
As I said in a previous post, Wordpress gets a lot right as far as on-page SEO goes right out of the box, but there’s room for improvement which might just take you from also-ran to Uber-blogger.

One of the dumber things that Wordpress does is to use the same text for the post title, title tag (page title) and URL.

In this post, we’re going to look at why you should change your post title to differ from the title tag, and how to do it.

Conventional wisdom sugests that the page title is the most significant on-page factor in relevance for ranking for a given keyword. This means that we want to give our keyword absolute highest prominence in our page title. For example, the page title for this post says:

Post titles, Page titles, and SEO for Wordpress

That’s the bit that a search engine is going to give the most weight to when trying to work out what the page is about. See how I’ve pretty much targeted three keyphrases here:

1. Post titles
2. Page titles
3. SEO Wordpress

…. and through broad match, any combination of the above.

Now let’s look at the actual post title:

The difference between post titles and title page titles, and why you should care

This is the text which is going to show up as the title if your post is submitted to social bookmarking sites, in your profile in Technorati, in a feed reader, and pretty much anywhere else your post is referenced. We want this to be catchy, clever, and to grab the readers attention. Think of this as an advertisement for your post. If people only have access to your post title, and not the post content itself, we want them to be thinking “Wow, that looks interesting, I want to read that”

Of course, in Wordpress, our post title will generally appear inside a H2 tag (or a H1 in a properly optimized theme), so we still want our keywords in there, but it’s not as important as it is for our page title.

So now we understand the difference between our page title and post title, we need to know how to change them:

Enter the All In One SEO Pack. A lot of you will already have this plugin for Wordpress installed, if you don’t, go get it now, drop it in your plugins folder and activate it.

Once you have the plugin set up and activated, when you’re next writing a post, scroll down to the bottom of your post entry page, and look for the “All in one SEO Pack” section:

Here you want to enter your page title in the top box. This is the title that will appear at the top of the browser window, and the title that Search Engines will take the most notice of when trying to judge what your page is about.

So in conclusion:

• Page titles should be written for search engines, keeping your keyword at top of mind, whilst still making sense to humans.
• Post titles should be written to get the readers attention, whilst still keeping the search engines in mind as a second priority.

Fun with sploggers

Posted by stuart as backlinks, splogs, wordpress plugins, rss, search engine optimization, spam, wordpress

**Update - I’ve tweaked the sig2feed plugin so that your signature text appears at the top of your post in the RSS feed, instead of the bottom.You can get my revised version of the plugin below (insert the standard disclaimer about backing up your blog before you install new plugins, my accepting no responsibility for damage caused etc.) .

Get the Modified version of sig2feed to display signatures at top of feed items

This means that your links will appear even when sploggers use post excerpts instead of full feeds. If this doesn’t make sense, just keep reading and it will!

I love sploggers. I’ve even been known to set up the odd splog site myself (purely for research purposes, of course).

The good thing about most sploggers is that they are pretty dumb, so they can be taken advantage of for our own nefarious purposes.

Firstly, let’s address the question: What is a splog?

A splog, put simply, is a blog which uses some kind of RSS to blog software, to take other peoples RSS feeds, and publish them as content on their own blog. The premise behind splogging is to get a blog with an absolute shitload of content indexed by the search engines, get some search traffic, and convert that traffic to clicks, usually using AdSense.

In my experience, splogs usually last somewhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months before the search engines work out what’s going on, and delist them. (Surprisingly, Google seems to be the stupidest of the search engines when it comes to detecting splogs, they seem to last considerably longer in Google than the other search engines.)

OK, so why does the average splogger being dumb work to our advantage?

Well, your experienced black-hat SEO is probably not using splogs to make his money, he’s off spamming backlinks to intermediary sites to funnel traffic to a “money site” (A white-hat affiliate site, usually), so we’re not going to be trying to take advantage of these particularly clever people.

The average splogger has gotten hold of some bog standard RSS to Blog plugin (no links, but they’re not that hard to find), installed it, chosen some keywords or RSS feeds, and set a the thing on auto-pilot and rarely checks the content being displayed. The good thing about this is that these sploggers usually leave the blog post title link back to your blog, and any links within the posts intact. They’re also probably not nofollowing outbound links, too. This is what we’re going to take advantage of.

There’s no point putting links in your posts back to your blog, as that link is already there in the post title. We’re going to use our friendly sploggers to build good anchor text backlinks to our other sites.

There’s a good argument that the quality of the links will be poor, and they’ll be coming from what the search engines consider to be a bad neighbourhood, so I’ll address these points separately:

1. Poor link quality (from low ranking sites) - so what? A link is a link is a link. A low PR link is better than no link at all, and if you’ve got quite a few scrapers “re-purposing” your content, you can gather quite a few links this way.
2. Linking to your site from bad neighbourhoods - This is a complete non-issue. Search engines can’t penalize you for the links pointing to your site, if this was the case I could just nuke all my competitors by linking to them from some of my “less-savoury” sites. Imagine the impact on the big pharmaceutical sites if they we’re penalized for dodgy inbound links?

OK, so how do we actually get these links into our feed without making our blog look all spammy? Enter the sig2feed plugin. The sig2feed plugin alllows you to add a signature to your RSS feed without it showing in your actual blog. (Get the modified version of the plugin above)

Grab the plugin, upload it to your Wordpress plugins directory, and activate it. Look for the admin panel in your “Manage” tab, and create signature to point a link at any site you need some backlinks for . (Make sure you use good anchor text, and if you’re feeling particularly creative, write a couple of sentences so that the content surrounding the link is of the same subject as the site you’re pointing the link to). Scroll down the page and make sure you’ve clicked the “Enable custom RSS Signature and display in RSS feeds?” right at the bottom, hit the “Update Options” button, and you’re done.

Next time you make a blog post, in your feed, above the content of the post, your signature line will appear with your backlink of choice in place.

Have fun!

Do you dofollow your pingbacks?

Posted by stuart as nofollow, dofollow, linking, link love, link exchange, links, pagerank

I’ve noticed something interesting a happening little more frequently lately, and I’d like to ask you, the punters for your thoughts…

The thing I’ve been noticing is that when other bloggers link to a post of mine, they are no-following the link.

Now when you link to a post of mine, you basically get two, and in some cases, three do-followed links back to your blog:

1. From the original pingback/trackback section under the post you’re linking to,
2. From the recent comments list in the sidebar of the blog, and…
3. If you comment often enough, in the “People who Rock!” (most active commenters) section in the sidebar.

I can understand people’s reticence to dofollow links in this age of Google getting a little over-zealously slap-happy with bloggers who sell text links and paid content, but let’s have a look at the reason that the nofollow attribute was first introduced.

The nofollow attribute to a href tag is meant to tell the search engines that the owner of the page upon which the nofollow tags appear cannot vouch for the quality of the content being linked to.

That original purpose, noble as it may have been, is now being held like the sword of damocles above the head of bloggers who now fear any outgoing dofollow links may be penalized.

Taking the above point about being able to vouch for the quality of the content beyond your nofollowed link, the linker needs to ask themselves whether they should be linking to the content in the first place. If you don’t trust that the quality of my content is good, why are you linking to me at all?

Take a look at number 5 in this list from searchenginejournal of 13 reasons nofollow sucks:

5. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves.

In my opinion, it’s also a little like going to one of those sweets boxes you see on the reception desks of large companies, usually selling bags of sweets for some charity or another, and instead of paying $2 for your bag of lollies, paying one dollar and taking the candy anyway.

You’re getting full value from your link from me, why are you being so stingy at passing that link love back?

So here’s the question:

What do you think is a fair policy for nofollowed pingbacks? Should I nofollow the outgoing link back from my blog? Delete the pingback alltogether? Just leave it and get on with writing content so maybe some one eventually links to me with a dofollowed link?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this….over to you!

Wordpress SEO tip - All roads lead to home

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, wordpress

Out of the box, Wordpress gets an awful lot right as far as SEO goes. That’s not to say, though, that there’s not a few things you can do to make it even better.

Today, I’m going to look at internal linking, and an easy way to optimise for your main keyword on your home page.

Internal anchor text linking to your home page is a great way to improve your ranking for your chosen keyword, the more links using the right anchor text pointing to your home page, the better you’re going to rank for those keywords. Of course, this is not a replacement for inbound links, but this technique is something we can easily control, without relying on external sites linking to us, or running around like a headless chook commenting on other blogs.

So off we go:

Firstly, run on over to Headzoo and grab the aLinks plugin. Unzip it and upload it to your Wordpress plugins folder.

Activate the plugin, then look for the aLinks button in your WordPress console:

Click that link, and you’ll be taken to the aLinks Console. Click the “keyphrases” tab across the top of the console:

Now, we want to scroll down the page a little till we get to the section titled “General Keyphrases”, and fill in the three fields as follows (using your information of course):

Now hit the big “Update Keyphrases” button, and now (using the above example), every time the term “SEO” appears on my blog (even in old posts!), it will link to the home page of this blog, using the above title text.

Easy!