When trying to find information on the internet, you typically go to a search engine. When using the most popular search engine, Google, a user enters a query, Google’s machines search their index for matching pages and return the results that are the most relevant to the user. Google determines relevancy by over 200 factors, one of critical factors is the PageRank (PR) for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In more detail, PR can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web, i.e., that sums up all backlinks and their associated ranking weight. We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations)[1]. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this article.

In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other [black-hat] practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. It is not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of backlinks that help you rank better in Search Engines. Having backlinks from unrelated or “bad” sites can actually penalize your ranking. Also a 1,000 poor quality backlinks may have less weight than 1 high quality backlink. Quality is very important in creating your backlinks.

How to determine a quality backlink?

A quality backlink will have these characteristics:

1. The theme of the backlinking website is similar to your website or web page
2. The backlink’s anchor text has the keyword or keyphrase that you are optimizing for
3. The backlinking webpage has a Google PageRank (important for Google SEO) of 1 or higher (the higher the better)
4. The backlinking webpage has few outgoing links, the fewer the better (see above equation as to why)

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. WebPaws.com uses Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and white-hat techniques using some of the best practices that can help your website avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

PageRank: How to Rank Well with Google is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 5 – Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Selling your products on the internet requires many factors to produce desired results:  such as great products, a good business model, supporting customer service, etc, but the key at the page level is providing very good communication about the  product.  Product descriptions should  inform, persuade and lead your customers to a sales transaction, which make them very powerful selling tools.  Listed below are several suggestions to increasing the time on page and time on site via well crafted product descriptions.

1. Educate: Educating your customers about your products provides additional value while you are teaching them how this product can improve their life, work, etc.  RadioShack does a good job of this with their Research library.
2. Use Persuasive Emotional Imagery: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind.  Understanding some basic psychology will help you in crafting your copy to show/describe what is important to the user (your targeted audience) to aid in persuading them to choose your product over your competitors products or even the same product but described differently.
3. Include a Call-to-Action: Don’t forget to add a call-to-action in your product description copy.  It is one thing to talk about your product, show great images, talk about its practicality, usage, benefits, etc. but if there is no way for the visitor (potential customer) to go the next step, you have failed in your endeavors to sell your product.  Put an action button such as “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” near the image or main product title.  You can also include a “Send me More Information” or “Call for More Information” link to
4. Focus on benefits, not just features: It is frustrating to listen to a salesperson rattling off useless specifications and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand.  Focus on the unique benefits of your product. Instead of saying “This radio has over 100 presets” you can show the benefit that this radio can hold All of your favorite channels in memory. Another example, instead of saying “This handheld has blue tooth technology”, say that this handheld allows wireless updates, syncing and hands free usage.  Features are important, but should not be the focus, putting them in a table at the bottom of the page or in a separate page linked in the main product page can be a good idea.  Also allowing potential customers to compare features of similar items is a useful tool to helping the customer make a good choice.
5. Proofread Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
6. Use Customer Reviews: Allow your customers to describe or review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
7. Brevity is Good: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description.  Using a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information will lighten the page, keeping focus on the crafted message of images key text and other key product describers.
8. Interactive Visual: Adding a product video or flash presentation will add a new dimension to the users experience, if done well, may enhance the customer’s understanding and interest of the product to help encourage a positive choice for purchase.  The video should show the product in use by a user highlighting it’s unique benefits, enticing the viewer to want this product because of its uniqueness in functions/benefits/features/productivity/time savings/etc.

Using most or all of these techniques will help to retain the customer on your product page a little longer.  This not only increases the Time on Page statistic but also the amount of information the customer is taking in on the product page which increases the likelihood of a sale, our ultimate goal.

Increase Time on Page & Site for Product Descriptions is a post from: WebPaws.com

Increase your website’s popularity with Link Building

Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It’s also a good way to get natural traffic; as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor’s links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

The best source of linkage data is Yahoo!. Google purposely does not report accurate link data with their link: command, and MSN’s rankings of links can often show less valuable and effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well, typically placing more valuable links near the top of the results.

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
   This command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.
2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   This command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.
3. Linkdomain:url.com word
   This search will show all pages with the term “word” that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.
4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the – sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search; for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don’t contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple – signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).
5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
   In addition to the – sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don’t include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. linkdomain:seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

Competitive analysis also includes using the top search results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks particularly well for many related searches, a link from that site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you. Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or phrase you’re targeting, a link from that page is sure to provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.

Building Personality & Reputation

The cult of personality on the Internet provides excellent opportunities for charismatic, well-written individuals to make headlines, friends, and links through online networking. A variety of social interaction sites operate across industries on the web, delivering ready-made sources for building a reputation and earning links. The keys to this methodology are to provide honest, intelligent contributions to existing discussions while maintaining a connection between yourself and the communities.

Online forums are great places to start, and can frequently lead to additional venues for the engagement of your colleagues. In building a successful reputation in an online forum, honesty, integrity, and openness provide the best chances to be taken seriously and seen by others as an expert on your subject matter. Forums typically offer a built-in system for referring folks to your site – the signature link. Although debate exists on whether search engines count these links for ranking purposes, there can be little doubt about their effectiveness in driving forum visitors to your site. One last tip for forums is to use a single link to your site in your signature – ensuring that people identify you with one unique online property, rather than several. Combining these effective techniques of forum posting and signature links with blogging can also be very valuable.

In addition to forums, outlets like blog comments (which frequently use the “nofollow” attribute, and are thus valuable for live visitors but not search engines), ICQ Channels, chatrooms, Google groups, and privately hosted boards or chatrooms can all serve a similar purpose. Stay consistent in each format – using the same voice, avatar (the accompanying photo on many forums), and username in order to build reputation and recognition.

Highly Competitive Terms & Phrases

For some terms and phrases, even the best websites with the most diligent promotional efforts will have a very difficult time penetrating the top 10-20 results. In these instances, it can be tempting to rely on efforts outside of the search engines’ guidelines. However strong this temptation may be, be advised that search engines do not tolerate spam or manipulation via automated links, nor do they allow such results to flourish for long. Although these methods, commonly referred to as “black hat SEO”, may have some effectiveness in the short term, they have little chance of long-term success in the SERPs and may become permanently banned from search results.

For highly competitive results (from “mortgage” to “car insurance” to “university degree”), targeting the above described “long tail” (the more niche-related search terms for which a smaller degree of heavy competition exists) can be the best method. Search engines are also careful to consider the age of a site and its links and give heavy weight to those sites with long-held, highly trusted links. Thus, while rankings may be sparse at first, over time an enterprising site owner can achieve some measure of notice, even in the most competitive of searches.

reposted from seomoz – http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg6

Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis is a post from: WebPaws.com

A key factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the understanding of keywords, where they should be placed on a web page and how they may be weighted with relative value in a given web page for a SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

From a design standpoint, let us first work backwards with a keyword. Ultimately, when a person types a keyword or keyword phrase into a search engine query, they expect their query to lead them to a list of highly qualified website links. These links, once clicked and browsed into, will lead them to the answer, image, or result they are anticipating based the the keyword phrase they initially typed into the search engine query.

A search engine query may have the following three purposes: navigational, informational, or transactional and the purpose is also tied to the query (the question or selection of keywords to search on).  The search engine algorithm will take the keywords and decide, based on the relationship of each word to each other in placement, verb tense, names, and overall meaning to decide what the most likely results should be.  Each major search engine has it’s own algorithm and SERP based on the keywords or search phrase which is called a query.

The content of a webpage is reviewed by a search engine robot (bots/spiders) that searches the internet (web) for relevant content to index and store the results for various keyword groupings, again based on the specific search engine algorithm.

The bots that visit your website will try to follow as many relevant and working internal links, keep track of content relevance and score various key words based on the placement, use and relevance in content within the XHTML tags and properties, the semantic structure, the page’s title, meta data, and other elements of the web page.

There are several keyword tools to help analyze the popularity or effectiveness of the use of a keyword.  These tools were designed to help SEM marketers evaluate keywords for use in search engine marketing campaigns.  They also indicate the monetary value of a keyword phrase that may be used in an SEM or PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign.

One example of a Keyword Tool is the Google AdWords tool found in the below link:

Keywords Tool

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

Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas based on an inputed keyword or phrase and whether you are looking for descriptive words or phrases or for website content.  The tools results are tailored to the primary language and the geographical area selected for what terms people are actually searching for.

Keywords can easily be identified by the web page’s content, counting the reoccurence of various words and giving them some weight such as SEOBook’s Keyword Density Analyzer Tool, http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/, SEO Chat’s Keyword density tool, http://www.seochat.com/, and WebConf skeyword desnsity tool, http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php.

Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords in the copy (text content) of your webpage.  It is important for your main keywords to not only have the proper keyword density, but also placement and use in the XHTML tags and properties to rank well in Search Engines.

Example Page

<head>
<title>SEO and Keyword best practices</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 title="SEO and Keyword practices for giving more weight to specific keywords">SEO and Keyword practices</h1>
<p><em>Keywords</em> are the primary source for search engines...</p>
<blockquote>Keywords are Key to a successful marketing campaign employing SEO...</blockquote>
<p>More content about SEO and...</p>
<p>In conclusion, keywords should be artfully placed and...</p>
</body>

In the example page above, notice how the primary keyword is “keyword” and how and where it is used within the web page.  The primary placement is in the <title> tag within the head, followed by the main content in the <h1> tag and property of the h1 tag, then one of the first words in the first <p> tag, followed by a blockquote and then within the last <p> tag.   Most search engines give the greatest weight to this type of placement schema.

Make sure that your keyword targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can significantly impact your entire optimization experience. Choose keywords that are highly relevant to the content, affordable to your budget, but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Multiple keywords or your phrase selection should also be designed and targeted to bring qualified traffic to your webpage.

Search engines give greater weight to a keyword if the content also includes various synonyms for your keywords within your body text on your webpage.  Google uses these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page to your main target keywords, which in turn can help improve your placement within a SERP.

Other places to use keywords include the domain, page specific URLs, link anchor text, image alt text, inline links and site navigation.

The top SEs are: Google, Ikntomi, FAST, AltaVista and Teoma

Yahoo, who aquired Ikntomi, appears to give more weight to text matching when compared to Google, which seems to give more weight to concept matching.

This blog will be finished shortly, I must go to bed…

SEO – Keywords, Lesson 3 is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 2

by Ryne C Allen, WebPaws.com

Search Engine Optimization starts at the inception of your web page or site and evolves with a purpose or direction, appropriate content, semantic structuring of the HTML document and then formating this document into an attractive presentation using CSS.  All the while following known web standards to produce a solid foundation in which to further market your web page.

Business websites should be part of the business’ marketing plan or broader yet, the business plan. Even non-business websites should have a plan or written conception. In lieu of a previous written plan, the minimum suggestive guide would be a “statement of purpose” for your website followed by some basic marketing research to be used in the development of your website.

The statement of purpose defines the reason to create your website (sell products, disseminate information, provide a service, become a portal, promote a business, collect data, etc.), the primary purpose of your website (transactional, informational, social, promotional or a hybrid of purposes) and what measurable goals you expect after 3 months, 6 months and 1 year from launching your website. This information is critical to having a successful website, one that meets your goals and expectations. You develop and write content to meet your website’s purpose. This is your primary focus for the content you add to build your website. If you lose focus of your primary purpose, then your website will not meet the goals you have set and will not rank well for its primary purpose.

Examples statement of purpose and results:

Organization: Humane Society

Primary Purpose: Rescue animals, care for them and find them good homes

Website Purpose: Promote & find sheltered animals good homes, donations

Goals: 3 m – 3% adoptions, 6 m – 10% adoptions, 1 year – 25% adoptions

Results: 3 m – 2% adoptions, 6 m – 7% adoptions, 1 year – 35% adoptions

Website: Example Website – http://www.webpaws.com/mwhs/

In order for this example website to be successful, the site needed to be designed around the animals rescued and up for adoption. In this case, cats where the primary animals rescued and the primary focus of the website. So visitors looking to adopt a pet cat can easily navigate within the example website and learn about the different cats up for adoption, get attached or attracted to a certain cat, fill out a request form (a lead) which might motivate them to go in person to the shelter and adopt their new pet (a conversion).

Now that you have the focus of your website content, you can start to assemble the primary pieces into an SEO friendly format or semantic structure. Developing good semantic HTML (HyperText Markup Language) structure is one key to a solid foundation for your website. Good HTML structure is based on communicating properly, using logic, order, in your content with semantically correct markup (HTML) structure. For example, if you have a heading, then use the heading element, beginning with the <h1> element. If you have a paragraph, then use a paragraph element <p>. If you have a list, then use a list item element <li>. If you are quoting text content, then use a blockquote element <blockquote>. If you are placing code examples in your content, then use the code element <code>. These and other HTML elements provide meaning to the content, making them semantically correct, in addition to providing a solid HTML foundation for your web page.  Expert SEO marketers will in addition to using correct semantically structured HTML elements, add appropriate attributes to these base HTML elements (tags) to fully optimize the content’s message and readability by user agents (web bots).  An example attribute would be:
<h1 title="Good SEO practices start with a solid HTML document">SEO Practices</h1>

Good semantic HTML practices require two things of authors:

1. To avoid the use of presentational markup (elements, attributes, and other entities) in the primary content of the document
2. To use available markup to differentiate the meanings of phrases and structure in the document. So for example, a book title would need to have its own element and class specified, such as <cite class="booktitle">The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</cite>. Here, the <cite> element is used because it most closely matches the meaning of this phrase in the text. However, the <cite> element is not specific enough to this task, since we mean to cite specifically a book title as opposed to a newspaper article or an academic journal.

The development and proliferation of CSS has led to increasing support for semantic HTML, because CSS provides designers with a rich language to alter the presentation format of semantic-only documents. With the evolving development of CSS, the need to include presentational properties in the basic HTML structure of your web document is now hurting your SEO in favor for proper semantic HTML structure followed by CSS design to appease both the automated user agents and human visitors or your web pages.

Proper semantic HTML is one key element to building an SEO friendly website. By providing a semantically rich HTML document (web page) it will yield additional value to your code in several ways:

1. First, it provides consistency in style across elements that have the same meaning. Every heading, every quotation and every similar element receives the same presentation properties, which in turn,.makes your HTML web page more intelligible to a wider range of user agents which range from web browsers and e-mail clients to search engine crawlers (“spiders”), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and Braille browsers used by people with vision impairments, but in this case, especially user agents as search engines bots

2. Second, semantic HTML frees authors from the need to concern themselves with presentation details. Such details would be left up to stylesheet designers, which would make better use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – a kind of type-setting and page formatting code) for the human visitor

3. A third advantage is device independence and repurposing of documents to reach or be viewed by different user agents. A semantic HTML document can be paired with any number of stylesheets (CSS documents) to provide the proper type of output to various computer screens (Web browsers), high-resolution printers, handheld devices, aural browsers or Braille devices for those with visual impairments, and so on

4. Additionally, these user agents may more easily find clues for developers to use possible web hooks of interest and add them in their projects or products. A web hook is a very simple server-side mechanism for web applications that allow users to do what they want with their data. You just let them specify the URI for various events that the application will use to pass data or information to in real-time

Developing proper semantic design of your content, followed by the appropriate design elements of the style sheets (CSS) makes it easier to follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards. You can check if your code meets the current web standards by checking these on-line validators:

· W3C X/HTML Validator: http://validator.w3.org/

· W3C CSS 2 Validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

· W3C Semantic Checker: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html

Please note, even if your web code is XHTML or CSS valid, it is not necessarily semantically correct. This still needs to be checked by a human, but the Semantic Extractor above aids humans (web developers) in their semantic HTML structure designs.

We now have a good map to help us develop a rock-solid foundation for our web page that will yield the most effective SEO performance in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

SEO – Search Engine Marketing, Lesson 2 is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 1

by Ryne C Allen, WebPaws.com

SEO – Search Engine Marketing, Lesson 1 is a post from: WebPaws.com