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Tag Archive for ‘SEO’ rss

SEO Diagnosis: User-Generated Duplicate Content

by on Oct 27, 2008 (0) Comments

The Problem: You run a website that allows for user-generated content like job listings, rental properties, classified ads, personals or even UGC products (think eBay or Etsy). Thoughtless users, thinking only of themselves and the time they’re going to save, wreck your SEO by posting the same content they’ve put up on ten of your competitor’s sites. This creates duplicate content issues for you instead of that dream of Web 2.0 SEOs – free, unique content. It can definitely be frustrating.

The Symptoms: The search engines start by simply not listing your pages, but sometimes it gets more severe and whole subsections of your domain go unspidered or unindexed because the engines’ algos have determined that you’re a clearing house for material they’ve already seen and don’t need again. In rare cases, this might even cause completely unique, valuable material to be excluded from the visible SERPs.

Personalize Your Link Building

by on Oct 07, 2008 (0) Comments

The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

Developing Internal Links and Authority With SEO

by on Oct 05, 2008 (1) Comments

Instead of trying to make a one size fits all argument out of SEO, understand that rankings are a by product of multiple factors unified for a common goal.
SEO should never be an afterthought, but rather a means to produce a specific attainable goal for generating and measuring traffic to your content which can [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Developing Internal Links and Authority With SEO”, url: “http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo/developing-internal-links-and-authority-with-seo/” });

The Quality of SEO Matters

by on Sep 26, 2008 (0) Comments

The quality of SEO matters now more than ever. With constant revisions to dated algorithms, search engines are savvier than ever in discovering sites that lack the proper quality to rank competitively.

In the not so distant past, obsession with the home page, tons of off-topic links bullied their way past search engine algorithms, now, those days are drawing to a close.

Search engines, like people have become fussy readers with a preference of what they consider as a top caliber website that offers educational or beneficial information based on co-citation and engagement.

No amount of SEO is going to pull the wool over the eyes of advanced artificial intelligence like search engine algorithms that look at link clusters (the time stamp and proximity or link velocity of inbound links), search volume click-through data as well as the quality of the sites referencing your own. To be clear and direct, quality is the cornerstone of a successful online presence.

We have known all along that relevant content strategically organized in a way that fundamentally supports information retrieval such as (theming and siloing), has strong internal links and has persuasive and compelling content and usability was the objective.

Solid SEO Starts With A Solid Business Model

by on Sep 25, 2008 (0) Comments

Bob Massa, one of the original SEOs (though I don’t think he likes to be referred to with that label), always talks about SEO from a conversion standpoint, offering quotes like “traffic without conversions is the epitome of futility.”

The SEO space is a bit crowded right now. So many people are fighting for attention that it seems like people are fighting without purpose. There may be more people writing SEO blogs than there are reading them. That abundance of new publishers makes it easy for established authors to build links by re-spinning old phrases with new definitions, but if those links don’t create profit what is the point?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Looking back a few years, I can see that I was a bit economically challenged. I tried helping many people for free… but then some of those people I helped for free could never get enough, plus when something is free many people simply do not respect it. I remember my wife reading a book about self-made Internet and info-based product millionaires, and coming across a guy who in the past valued my time at nothing, always reminding me of how poor he was (though never reminding me that he is economical with the truth!)

How To Walk A Mile In A Search Engine’s Shoes

by on Sep 25, 2008 (0) Comments

Small business owners are often curious, and sometimes desperate, to understand why their web sites are doing well — or doing poorly — when it comes to search engine visibility. Online forums and message boards are filled with questions like “Why is my competitor outranking me?”, “Why doesn’t my new product page bring me any search traffic?”, or “How come my site hasn’t been crawled in a month?”

If you live and breathe search marketing, these questions are often pretty easy to answer. But when you’re busy running a small business, these questions may as well be rocket science. One way to get answers is to analyze what the search engines think of your web site, and walk a mile in the search engines’ shoes, as the saying goes. When you learn to do that, it’s easier to solve those questions that you’ve been curious (or desperate) to answer.

Three ways to see what search engines think of your site

1. Use the search engines’ webmaster tools.

Keyword Exercises for SEO

by on Sep 25, 2008 (0) Comments

Don’t be fooled by people trying to tell you that tracking SEO metrics based on keywords and keyword performance is obsolete. Keywords and the traffic they produce are alive and well and depending on the position (above the fold or below the fold) and the percentage of traffic they receive is tangible to assess conversion and performance benchmarks.

Over 80% of consumers hot on the trail of a product or service have a higher propensity of clicking the top 3 search results when presented with the top 10 websites for their query. If a user has to scroll below the fold the click through numbers taper down to the remaining percentages.

However, depending on factors such as:

1) the competition for the phrase

2) the relevance to the searchers intent and

3) the emotional click-triggers from the snippet/description in the search result (and how sticky it is) impact who gets the click.

Obviously, the more keywords that encroach on a topic, the higher percentage for conversion you have from those topics, when each of the pages becomes buoyant after gaining some authority in search engines (typically 2-4 months).