Internet Building Codes Blog

I actually had several people this morning all inquiring about the same issue so I thought I’d add a blog post on an effective blogging strategy for SEO purposes.  Here’s what I wrote:

You want to shoot for consistency in the Title, Headline, Description and Keywords.  You can use slight rewording but I’d focus on a hypothetical phrase like “green lawn fertilizer” for one set of posts and then focus on a variation like “lawn fertilizer” for another set of posts.  By sets, I mean this:

1. Write blog post #1 about something like “green lawn fertilizer.”  Put NO hyperlinks in this one because it’s going to be your money page that we’re trying to rank.
2. Write blog post #2 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
3. Write blog post #3 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
4. Write blog post #4 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
5. Write blog post #5 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
6. Write blog post #6 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
7. Write blog post #7 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
8. Write blog post #8 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.
9. Write blog post #9 about something related to lawns.  Put 1 hyperlink in the body of the first paragraph that says “green lawn fertilizer” and link it to post #1.

After you’ve written a number of posts on one terms, switch it up and change to another phrase.

When you write the description, just write it as an advertisement to get people to want to read the post.  It’s the 2-line description found in Google so make it sound enticing.  Don’t worry too much about optimization of the description.  It doesn’t carry much weight in Google’s algorithm.

I hope that helps.

I ask people all the time, what are the two most important things in weight loss.  Of course, we all know the answer.  They say diet and exercise.  That’s obvious.  But then I ask them the most important part of diet and exercise.  Then they look a little puzzled.  Reluctantly, someone usually raises their hand and says, “diet?”  I say, “nope.”  Then everyone in unison says, “exercise” as if they confidently know the answer.  I say, “nope.”

What?  If it’s not diet and it’s not exercise, then what is it?

It’s the word “and.”  Diet and exercise.  You have to do both, simultaneously.

How many times have you failed to lose weight?  If you think back you’ll probably see that you neglected to exercise and watch your diet at the same time.  Many people go one diets.  But if you’ve ever tried it, it’s tough to cut your calories and exercise.  Every time you exercise, you burn calories and you get more hungry.  You eat a ton and get discouraged with your results.

Here’s another common scenario.  You work out like a mad man so you can still enjoy all of your favorite foods.  Do you think you’re actually going to shed those pounds if you’re still drinking the soda pop and munching on those chips?  Of course not.  You can’t just exercise and not watch your diet.  You have to do both, simultaneously.

There are a million scenarios.  But it’s been proven time and time again that if you can stick to a low calorie diet and exercise a few times a week, you’ll lose weight.

So what’s all of this have to do with SEO?  Well, I see people all the time struggling to get first page search rankings.  They are madly blogging and building tons of links but they ignore the other important aspects of good SEO.  Or they have built thousands of links into their site but they haven’t had the time to add any new content to their site in months because they’ve been so wound up with the link-building campaign.

It’s just like weight loss.   You have to look at the best practices and then do them simultaneously.  There are dozens of tactics that most search engineers employ, but in reality, you have to work on the top 3 or 4 ranking criteria simultaneously.  Get those right and you’ll get better results than any focused effort that ignores the other tactics.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

David Letterman just said that New York City is the #1 tourist destination in the U.S.  That made me think about a post I did last week where I was discussing how you’d need to optimize a site for the phase, “New York City Vacations.”  I was discussing how an inexperienced search engineer would link to that page using a phrase like, “Things to do in New York” rather than linking to that page with the phrase, “New York City Vacations.”

In addition to that alignment, it’s also wise to consistently use that phase in your external and reciprocal link-building campaigns.  Rather than getting other web masters to link to your site using your domain name or worse yet, “click here,” use the optimized phrase.

So not only have you created an optimized page, you’ve aligned your on-page SEO strategy with your linking strategy.  There are dozens of other small ways that you can align your strategies so be cognizant of your site’s alignment when you’re implementing them.

Chadd Bryant

SEO malpractice is rampant these days.  It’s everywhere you look.  I see blatant examples of SEO malpractice everyday, but fortunately, the majority of it is the result of ignorance, rather than intentional harm.  So what are some of the most common issues?

I don’t see a lot of the old-school mistakes any more, like white text on a white back ground.  But that used to work pretty well, until Google caught on to it.  If anyone’s still trying that trick, they’re either a fool or are just trying to ruin your search ranking forever.

While I’m not seeing a lot of those types of tricks any more, I am still seeing a lot sites that just seem to miss the point of SEO.

It’s not just about filling your pages with keywords.
It’s not just about using keywords in your headlines or titles or even in the meta tags.
It’s not just about using your keywords in the right location on the page.

It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.

It’s not just about getting lots of sites to link to your site.
It’s not just about creating lots of hyper links within your site.
It’s not just about bolding your text or using footer links.

It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.

It’s not just about building a huge set of thousands of keywords.
It’s not just about finding words that get lots of traffic.
It’s not just about writing compelling headlines.

It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.

It’s about aligning all of your efforts at the same time.  If you get 50% of the things right, that’s not going to get you top rankings.  You have to fire on all cylinders.

So how do you do that?

Align everything.  If you’re focusing on a particular phrase, optimize a page for that phrase.  Then point hyperlinks on other pages of your site to that optimized page using the keyword as link text.  Re-read that last sentence until you get it.  Inexperienced SEO companies neglect that simple point all the time.  They create silly links that say things like “click here” as the link text.  All that does is help your page rank better for the phrase “click here.”

Then build links from other sites into your site, using the keyword as the link text, pointing to the optimized page.

Don’t optimize a page for something like “New York City Vacations” and then point links to the page that say “Things to do in New York.”  That’s not aligned.  An aligned site would use links that say “New York City Vacations.”  That reinforces the content on the optimized page and let’s Google know that an outside source have confirmed the content on the page.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

Last time we were talking about the recipe for SEO success and I equated SEO to a great chocolate chip recipe. Like a chocolate chip recipe, you can’t expect to get the same results if you forget to add all of the right ingredients. As I was pondering the similarities, I thought of another one. Many times, people think that you can do SEO a little at a time. But how would it work if you made a batch of cookies with the eggs and figured you’d add them later if the cookies tasted a little odd? Of course that wouldn’t work. You can’t just add eggs to a baked cookie. And there are some things that are fundamental to a great SEO recipe and can’t just be added later if things don’t taste right.

I know, many of you are thinking that the web is dynamic and can be changed at any time. Sure that’s true, but it’s much more difficult to improve a page’s validity with Google than it is to just do it right from the beginning. Once Google has tasted your recipe, they are less likely to believe that you’ve suddenly become a great cook (or SEO engineer in this case.)

Here’s a quick example. If you have a number of pages in your site, it’s likely that they weren’t all created on the same day. Google picks up on your pages as you create them, provided you’ve developed a site that’s regularly spidered by Google. If you want to see which pages Google has spidered, search Google for site:yourdomain.com. You’ll immediately see a list of all the pages that Google knows exist in your site. Some of the older ones will have link that says “cached.” Click one of those links. That will tell you in a box at the top the last time Google bothered to read through that page. I’m sure you’ll be surprised. While you may be thinking that Google loves your site and reads through it every hour, you may be surprised to see that Google is only bothering to read the pages that have changed regularly. Take your blog for instance. If you have developed a pattern of frequently changing your blog, Google may visit your site every hour or more to see if you have new content. But the other pages on your site that have not changed are not read again by Google. So might it be difficult to go back and try to fix them, to try and add eggs now. You could, but Google wouldn’t necessarily know you made any changes.

So how do you get Google to notice your changes so that your updated pages will be indexed again? We’ll get to that one later. Until then.

Chadd Bryant

For those of you who don’t know who Matt Cutts is, he’s probably the most-respected search expert in the industry not only because of his intelligence, but also because of his insider knowledge as an employee of Google. So here’s a link to a great article summarizing Matt’s most important revelations: http://sn.im/mattcuttstips.

It’s no secret.  Inbound links are huge.  Google loves ‘em.  Every site that links to your site essentially gives your site a vote that helps to raise it in the search results.  However, here’s the mistake that most people are making:  They’re not paying attention to the text that is linking to them.  You know, the blue underlined text?  That’s called the anchor text.  What it says it crucial.

Here’s what I’m talking about…

If you click on a link that says “internet marketing” you can expect that you’ll end up on a page that’s all about internet marketing, right?  So Google realized that the anchor text that other sites use, is a pretty good indication of what a page is about.  But if you get a bunch of sites that link to your site with a link that says, “click here” you’re wasting your big card.  All that does is tell Google that your site is all about, “click here.”  Does that really do you any good?  Do you want to find customers when they search Google for, “click here?”

Not many sites want to rank well for that phrase.  But they don’t know any better.  They spend countless hours getting other sites to link to them and it’s all a waste of their time.  Imagine if you simply asked the other sites to link to your site with the phrase “internet marketing” (assuming you have a site about internet marketing).   You’d begin raising your rank on Google when people are searching for internet marketing.  Now that’s time well spent.  Miss that one little point and everything is a waste.  I hope that helps!

Chadd Bryant
Internet Building Codes

Like I’ve said in the past, most every SEO tip, when taken all by itself is relatively simple.  It’s a cumulative effect.  Make sure you do every little thing right and you’re likely to wind up at the top.  But if you violate Google’s guidelines, you may wind up at the bottom of the listings.

Today’s post is just another, “seems too obvious to even mention” but there are so many people that violate this principle, it’s worth stating.

Don’t have any broken links in your site.  Obviously, no one would intentionally do this, but it can’t be over looked.  Use a simple tool like deadlinks.com to make sure that your site contains no broken links.

While each day I think that the topic is pretty simple, this one is sometimes tough to convey.  Anchor text.  You know, it’s the blue, underlined hypertext link.  The words used in the link are considered your anchor text.  After years of Google being jacked around by underhanded webmasters who were aggressively cheating their way into the rankings, Google decided to clamp down and take the majority of the power away from the webmaster and give that power to the voting public.  Now, unscrupulous web designers can’t cheat their way to the top of the listings as they once could.  As you may recall, when Google first started, you’d be searching for something innocent like restaurants and you’d be confronted with illicit images that were quite objectionable.  How did those companies get their objectionable sites to come up when you were searching for restaurants?  Easy.  They’d fill their site with words that were unrelated to their content, just to get you to their site.  They’d hide the word “restaurants” in their code and Google would naturally think that their page was about restaurants rather than something much more lude.

Google saw the same results and eventually they changed things.  I think it was about November of 2003 when they had their biggest dynamic shift.  They changed the way they ranked sites and overnight, sites that were at the top, fell to the bottom of the results.  Unfortunately, some legitimate businesses went from success to failure overnight.  Their entire source of business dried up and no one visited their sites any more.  That was the cost we had to pay for more relevant results.

So how did they begin ranking sites?  They started using the number of links leading to a site as the main indicator that a site was really about something like “restaurants.”  If Google saw that your site had 100 other sites like linked to it with the phrase “restaurants” they figured that your site must really be about restaurants.  After all, if you ran an objectionable site, you’d have a hard time getting 100 other sites that would link to your filthy site, especially with a link that says “restaurants.”

You see, it’s generally assumed that the text in a hyperlink describes the page that it leads to.  For instance, if a page says, “click to check out our list of great restaurants,” you’d assume that if you click on the link, it would take you to a list of great restaurants.

So Google began looking at the anchor text as a way to rank sites.  Links became the primary means for ranking because the results could be more reliable since the voting public essentially controlled a large part of the equation.

If you could get 100 sites to link to your restaurant with a link that said “great restaurants in Denver” then your site would likely be found toward the top of the search results when someone searched Google for that phrase.  Sure, your site still needed to be about restaurants in Denver, but the majority of the weight when ranking your site came from the other sites that linked to your site.

Since 2003, the ranking algorithm has become even more sophisticated and today, Google incorporates more than 100 different factors into their calculations when deciding where your site will come up in their search results.

Tomorrow, we’ll pick up here and talk more about anchor text to help you avoid making some of the more common mistakes.

Chadd Bryant

I seem to think everyday, “This tip is pretty straight forward.”  When it comes to SEO, none of the techniques are rocket science.  The hard part is just making sure that you get all of the little details put together.  It’s like a puzzle.  Look at two puzzle pieces that fit together.   Taken by themselves, they’re relatively simple.  Just a couple pieces of cardboard with notches cut in them.  But toss them in the box, shake it up and the problem becomes a little more complex.  SEO is very much the same.  Each of the little pieces, by themselves, are relatively simple.  Really, how hard is it to put your keywords in your headline?  Or how about remembering to make them bold in your page?  Not too hard either.  But when you get a list of hundreds of things like that, SEO becomes as complex and time-consuming as a 1000 piece puzzle.

So for today’s topic, let’s talk about phrase order.  It’s pretty straight forward. 

It’s important to make sure that you try as much as possible to make your keyword phrases on your page, match the order of the words in the search query.  But how will you know what people are searching for?  We’ll get into that more in the next few weeks, but for now, let’s just say that you have to do your homework and do the research to discover first what people are searching for.  It does you no good to build a site that’s optimized for a phrase that no one is looking for.  You have to be sure that people are looking for the phrase first.

Or, you may find out with some research that twice as many people are looking for one phrase than another closely-related phrase.  I see it all the time.  Let’s say you’re going to make a site about cats.  But after doing a little research you may find that twice as many people are looking for kittens as cats.  Or maybe 4 times as many people are looking for “dogs.”  If that’s the case, you may change the direction of the site.  There are a lot more considerations to take into account when doing keyword research but we’ll talk more about that later.

To begin your research, just check out Google’s page where they tell you how many people are searching for each phrase last month.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So now that you’ve looked into the most popular phrases, let’s get back to keyword order.  If you see that 120 people a day are looking for “food for cats” and 276 are looking for “cat food” it only seems logical that you’d want to optimize the page for “cat food.”  Mentioning the alternative phrase helps a little because the same words are still used in the phrase “food for cats” but it’s not as relevant as a direct match for “cat food.”  Therefore sites that mention “cat food” more will be seen as a better match for the search query and will likely come up higher in the search results pages.

Chadd Bryant