Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah SEO Consultant

The long tail, in reference to search engine optimization, is all the keywords and keyphrases that hold little traffic by themselves, typically longer 4-7 word phrases, but collectively add up to a large amount of traffic. Illustrated below is a diagram of the head and the long tail.

If you’ve ever ran a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, in your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, for a popular keyword you can certainly appreciate what a drain on financial resources that can be. Especially, if you’re landing page content isn’t “sticky” and doesn’t provide optimal ROI with conversions. There is a much cheaper way of leveraging value of PPC campaigns while driving your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts full force. The trick of this trade is maximizing the long tail search terms for PPC and the head terms for SEO.
You’re probably wondering how you can find your what the long tail of your own Website is. There are a few tools out there for that. My favorite is HitTail. Through an external JavaScript placed on your Website, HitTail records all search queries coming to your site and separates the head from the tail. It shows you a diagram of the percentage of long tail visit vs the percentage of head visits. SearchtheWeb2 is a semantic search engine that clusters word phrases related to your search query via natural language processing. It clusters the popular keyphrases and the long tail keyphrases in a list for you to narrow down your search if desired. It’s great for seeing what kind of long tail phrases are related to certain keywords. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Microsoft’s adCenter Lab Keyword Group Detection Tool are both really great to find semantically similar keywords that people might be searching for in their longtail queries. So bookmark these tools and revamp your search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies for maximum online profit.

Personalization has been creating a lot of hype in the Utah search engine optimization scene lately. Personalization has been implemented into the results of Google accounts that are signed in for quite some time now. Google collects your search history and displays results based off of what you’ve searched for and clicked on in the past. Many search engine marketers and optimizers have been reluctant to Google pushing this mainstream. Reason being is that it makes the game of SEO a lot harder when everyone has a different set of results.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spam king, claims that it will be tough times for black hat SEO artists because SEOs will have to focus more on users and less on algorithm reverse engineering. I was curious to what black hats were thinking so I cruised over to SEO Black Hat and found this post. Apparently, they are excited about personalized search and view it as a great thing. Additionally, nobody posted any comments about how this might affect their jobs as blackhat SEOs.

I don’t think there’s going to be too much to worry about for SEOs. Google Bookmarks are going to have a huge impact on people’s results. With that said, I see social bookmarking campaigns being just as big, if not bigger, than link building campaigns.

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, said that personalized results only show up in about one of every five searches, and would only lift two results into the top 10, never replacing the number one organic result.

There are many caveats I want to address with personalization. The top result is typically the most visited result for any search query. If the top result never changes then that’s not really much personalization now is it? If you’re someone who typically uses the “I’m feeling lucky” button in Google then you’ll always get the same result whether you’re signed into Google or not. Also, everything you click on gets ranked higher in your personalized results. How does Google determine if you liked what you clicked on or not? That’s a major flaw in this system right now.

Another issue is the latency involved with temporary search patterns and localization. What if you’re on vacation for two weeks in New York and you’re searching for local restaurants, hotels, clubs, etc. When you return home your results are going to be skewed towards New York. How long will it take to recognize you’re not searching for New York based businesses anymore when you return home to Utah or wherever? What if your kids hop on your computer to search for something like kids games? The next time you search for games online your results will be tainted.

Personally, I’d like to see Google more focused on semantic mapping and clustering of search terms while it refines personalization. They already have started implementing this feature for select search phrases, but I think they need to push it a bit more. I think Clusty.com and Quintura.com have both done a good job of semantic clustering.

Link building is the most important element in high search engine rankings. Search engines count links to your site as a popularity vote. Search engines have grown smarter in recognizing link patterns, linking profiles, deep-linking, one-way and reciprocal linking strategies, etc.

Your links should be inbound one-way links with appropriate anchor text related to your site. They should also come from a site that’s related to the theme and content of your Website, or the link will be devalued. Who you link to matters as well. If your site links out to link farms (sites that’s only purpose is to host a large array of spam links) then you could be penalized for it.

Benefits of link building

Like I’ve said before, if content is king then link building is queen. I’m actually quite convinced that links are king. I’ve seen contentless (is that a word?) sites rank well just based off their link. Consider a link a vote in popularity. They key thing to remember is it’s not about the quantity it’s about the quality. Quality links alone can make your site rank well for your search terms without doing much else.

Consider the Google bomb of ‘Miserable Failure’. For years, up until just recently when Google finally assessed this matter, if you were to type ‘Miserable Failure’ into Google the first page that would come up is Bush’s page on whitehouse.gov. Nowhere on that site does it even mention ‘Miserable Failure’ but some pranksters linked to that site using the anchor text of ‘Miserable Failure’. Sure enough, whitehouse.gov was #1 for that term. Google has started catching on to this method of Google bombing, or mass-linking the exact same anchor text from a large number of multiple sites. This is why it’s important to vary your anchor text of your keywords and keyphrases when getting links from other sites.

Link Building Strategies

Reciprocal linking is pretty much a dying practice, but people still do it and some still swear by it. To do reciprocal linking what you should do is create a page on your site as a directory page to swap links with others. I would refrain from naming it “links” or something that search engines might catch onto really easily. Search engines don’t really condone reciprocal linking, but if you must then read on. You’re probably better off naming it “affiliates” or something similar. On your affiliate page create a directory of sites you’ve traded links with. You must make sure these sites are related to your niche or theme of your Website. Trading links with non-related sites is absolutely worthless. Linking to banned sites or link farms will hurt your TrustRank with Google as well.

To trade links with a Website look for a “links” or “affiliates” page on their Website. Sometimes they will have instructions on their site like how to link to them. Other times, you should just e-mail the Webmaster or owner directly in a professional manner. Do not use an automated program to find links and email the owners. These have a very low return rate of response. Be sure to have linked to them already before e-mailing them regarding a link exchange, and show them exactly where their link is.

To find your competition’s links go to Yahoo.com and type linkdomain:competition.com. All of their backlinks will show. You can then go through these and see what you have to do to get links from some of their best sources.

There are a few good directories to get links from and the rest are pretty much worthless unless they are related to your niche. Some of the better link directories are quite costly. I will share directories in a later post but for now know that directories like DMOZ (free), Yahoo!, Best of the Web, Business.com, and bCentral (currently not accepting new people) are quality directories to stick to. Other directories are generally link farms, and some even require reciprocation. I would highly suggest not doing that and I will explain why in the next section.

Link bait is an overused term basically meaning to offer something that people will want to link to naturally. Some common things to link bait with are informative articles, widgets, web applications, tools, or anything to lure someone in to your site. If others see it as beneficiary to them, then they will link to your site naturally. Informative articles can be bookmarked on social bookmarking or social news sites and spread like wildfire. If you land your article on the front page of Digg you can expect a surge of server-crashing traffic.

Purchasing links…too risky. But if you must, then be very careful about doing so.

Press releases are a great way to get exposure. PRweb.com and PRleap.com are great sites that distribute your press release to many news aggregators including Google. Not only do you get great exposure of your breaking news, but you get tons of incoming one-way links that you put in your press release.

Articles are similar to press release in the sense that you can mass-distribute them to article Web sites and reap the benefit of a large amount of backlinks.

*NOTE: Before submitting any press releases or articles, be sure you post them on your site and let them get indexed first. It’d be a shame to submit your content to someone else and they get the original creator credit for it. If that were to happen you would trigger a duplicate content penalty for hosting the material on your site.

.EDU and .GOV links are the best kind of links to get, not because of their domain extension, but because they are considered great authorities and are have good trust rank. Typically .EDU/.GOV sites have a huge amount of authorative links going to them from other trusted sites. They have great content and only link out to other trusted domains.

The Rate of Inbound links is very important. If your site is new then chances are you’re not going to get a hundred links in one day, and none for the rest of that week. These kinds of patterns set of flags to search engines. Be sure to keep your link profile consistent to avoid appearing like you’re spamming.

Quality not Quantity

Like I mentioned before, it’s all about the quality of the link. The quality of a link is determined by who links to you and how they link to you. Someone that links to you should be related to your site’s theme or niche market. You want to look for several things such as:

• Is there site listed in search engines?
• Do they have a robots.txt file blocking their link page?
• Do they use “NoFollow” on their links?
• Is their meta data telling search engines not to crawl links on that page or cache that page?
• Is their page full of hundreds of other links?
• Do they have a low page rank value?

If you answered “YES” to any of these questions then they most likely aren’t worth getting links from. However, getting links from only high page ranked sites looks unnatural to search engines in your SEO efforts. You want a wide array of page rank values linking to you, but the higher the page rank the better the value in some cases.

You want to get links from sites that:

· Rank well in their own search terms

· Have high traffic volume

· Have good PageRank value

· Have good usability, accessibility, and information architecture

· Are relative to your theme

· Are informative and useful

Some people worry about leaking PageRank when linking so they either refrain from linking or use “NoFollow” techniques. I think that by practicing these methods you endanger the usability and friendliness of your site. PageRank doesn’t hold much value like it used to, and others won’t favor your site if you don’t credit links so my suggestion would be to link freely. My guess is that these are probably factors when Google is determining TrustRank.

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In this screen capture vidcast I give strategic development and SEO advice on two URLs of one of my professors. Below is a summary of the things I came acrossin these two different Websites. If you would like your Website analyzed and posted on my blog please e-mail me at Jordan {at} JordanKasteler {dot} com.

Podcast-Tuneup.com

Things to work on:

• Canonical issue of index.html to WWW version of domain and /main/ version of domain
• Keyword Research
• Include Keywords in Meta Data / Titles
• Descriptive ALT attributes
• Anchor text usage
• Content optimization for keywords
• Inline Javascript and CSS usage
• Blog URL length
• Deprecated HTML
• Duplicate content of RSS feed, blog page, and permalink
• Duplicate content of printer friendly version
• Favicon is Squarspace’s

Things that are good:

• Canonical issue of WWW vs non-WWW
• Usage of “Podcast” in Title/H1 tags
• Good linking
• Tableless layout
• External CSS/Javascript files
• Favicon
• Inline Javascript and CSS usage
• RSS feed offered via “link rel”
• Custom error 404
• Printer friendly version offered
• Included keyword in domain name

NANlink.com

Things to work on:

• Canonical issue of index.html, WWW version, and non-WWW version of domain
• Title tag
• Make CSS external
• Avoid 100% Flash
• Seach engine listings
• Custom error 404

Things that are good:

• Tableless layout
• Valid use of Flash embedding

My top ten list of search engine optimization techniques will primarily focus on on-page optimization with the exception of a couple things. I want to keep this list more at a beginner-level because I intend it to be a general protocol list for Webmasters to implement in their development. I will explain the list in much further detail below.

1. Canonical Domain Issues
2. Keyword Research
3. Title Tag Optimization
4. Meta Data
5. Keyword Density
6. On-page keyword Usage (ALT attribute, H tags, body copy, meta data, title, anchor text, images, file/folder names)
7. Sitemaps
8. Crawlability Issues
9. Code Optimization
10. Internal/External Links

1. Canonical Domain Issues – Typically a domain can consist of several different versions such as: www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.( html | htm | php | asp | jsp | etc). Google can read your WWW and non-WWW as two different versions of your site. The bad thing about this is it triggers a duplicate content filter and then chooses to index only one version. Let’s say Google indexed your non-WWW version, and all of your backlinks went primarily to your WWW version. Well those are wasted backlinks now because they aren’t being passed.

Solution: 301 redirects with a .htaccess file if your site is hosted on an Apache server. A 301 redirect is a “permanent move” of a Webpage. The code below tells bots to redirect the non-WW, index.html, index.htm, and/or index.php to the www.domain.com version. Place the following code in a file called .htaccess and put it in your root directory of your site:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(htm(l)?|php)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(htm(l)?|php)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you’re using an IIS server instead of Apache then do this:

• Open Internet Services Manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select “a redirection to a URL”
• Enter the Webpage of redirection
• Check “exact URL entered above” and “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Then “Apply” those settings.

2. Keyword Research – There are a lot of great resources out there for keyword research that I’d like to share. One of my favorites is by Aaron Wall author of SEOBook. His free tool is a compilation of many different keyword research sources ran together to help you find what people are searching for. It can be found at SEOBook.

Overture.com, also known as Yahoo!, has always offered a free keyword selection tool. Overture Keyword suggestion tool

Keyworddiscovery.com and Wordtracker.com have always been the two biggest paid ones. However, Keyword Discovery is currently offering a free keyword search tool. There was a good article in Search Marketing Standard comparing the pros and cons of each. Unfortunately, I have no used Keyword Discovery, but I have been very pleased with Word Tracker. It’s also good for finding those long-tail keywords. In case you are wondering, the long-tail is the 5-7 word longer key phrases that are less popular. A lot of marketers have found it very beneficial to target these large amounts of longer phrases than the few extremely popular ones. I will blog more about this another time.

Incorporating related words and phrasing to your targeted keyword is very important to spiders especially in relation to LSI/A and PaIR. I will blog more about LSI/A and PaIR later, but for now just know that your content should have a related theme to your keyword, and not just be filled with “happy text”. MSN recently released adCenter Labs. There is a tool on here called “Search Result Clustering” which is great for finding related keywords to your main keyword. The caveat is there data is based of their top 10 results for your keyword. MSN ranks sites differently than Google. MSN results tend to favor on-page SEO and Google tends to favor off-page SEO.

3. Title Tag Optimization – Titles should stick around 5-7 words. A lot of people will say that it’s not how many words but its how many characters. I’ve found word-count to be more important. Your title should have your main keyword and then your branding, typically.

For example: Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah’s SEO Pro

I’ve managed to stick to 7 words, and incorporate my main keywords. Fortunately for me, my branding, “Utah’s SEO Pro”, is also related to my main keyphrase “Utah Search Engine Optimization”. Keywords and branding should be separated in titles with either a dash – or a pipe |. I lean towards pipes since dashes are also used in breaking up words.

4. Meta Data – How many times have you heard someone claiming they know SEO because they know how to construct meta data? I know I have many times. Meta data isn’t half as important as it used to be. I’ve read recently that MSN is the only one who cares about the meta description tag anymore. Even if they don’t matter they’re still good to have because some search engines still use them. Also, meta description is used as the descriptive text in your search engine listing. Here’s an example of proper meta data:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”utah search engine optimization, utah seo, utahs seo pro, salt lake city, utah, search engine marketing, social media, utah web designer, jordan kasteler” />

<meta name=”description” content=”Utah’s SEO Pro is a blog and podcast related to search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Author and Host, Jordan Kasteler, is a Utah SEO professional who is been working in the area of search engine optimization for quite some time now.” />

Here are some rules to follow for your meta keyword:

• List keywords in order of most important to least important
• Keep keywords around 250 characters or below. MSN accepts a maximum of 1024.
• Be careful of repeating a keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times
• Don’t use keywords in your meta data that cannot be found on your page’s content

5. Keyword Density – It used to be that people kept a very close watch on the density of keyword in their body content. Typically they kept their keyword density around 2-7%. Now days there is very little weight on the keyword density of your content as long as it’s not overdone or unnatural appearing. They keyword density I’m referring to is in your meta data and title tag. I’m not going to give you an exact rule to follow, but just use common sense for this. Don’t have your title, meta keywords, and meta description all be just your main keyphrase. That’s a 100% density and will raise a red flag.

6. On-page Keyword Usage – There is such thing as over-optimization if you abuse your usage of your main keyphrase. The places you do want to have your keywords and keyphrases are here:

• ALT attributes
• H tags
• Body copy
• Meta data
• Title
• Anchor text
• Images, file, and folder names

ALT attributes can be added to your <img> tags. They tell spiders and screen readers what that image is about. If possible, use your main keywords to describe the image.

H tags should be set up as a hierarchical tree of headings. Your main header description of your page’s content should be a H1 tag. The H1 tag is the most important and should include your main keywords or keyphrase. Secondary headers should be H2’s, Tertiary should be H3’s, etc.

Body copy should have your main keyphrases used throughout. It’s most important to have them in the first 200 and last 200 words of the content. Extra weight is given to them if they are bolded or italicized. This is an old technique that many SEOs cringe against using, but search engines, especially MSN, still give good weight for it. Like I said before, there is such thing as over-optimization. I wouldn’t bold the main keywords more than 3 times in a typical 750 word page.

Meta data – We’ve discussed this up until now, but to recap, don’t overdo it. Don’t repeat keyphrase more than 6 or 7 times, keep meta keywords to 1024 characters or preferably 250 or below, and don’t add keywords that can’t be found in your content.

Title – We’ve also discussed this as well. Don’t go too far past 7 words and don’t repeat your keywords in your title.

Anchor text is very important for internal and external links. Your anchor text tells crawlers and users what that link is about. It is important to you user main keywords in the anchor text of link to give that particular page or site good ranking for that keyword or keyphrase. When getting backlinks from other people, try to vary your anchor text around your main keyphrase. Too many backlinks with the exact same keyphrase, especially in a short amount of time, will trigger Google’s ‘Google Bomb’ filter.

Images, files, and folder names should also be focused around your main keyphrase. Use dashes (-) when separating words in your naming convention. Dashes tell search engines that the word is separated. Underscores (_) tell search engines to read it as a whole. For example:

Utah-SEO-Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “Utah SEO Pro” as the name of that image.

Utah_SEO_Pro.jpg will tell a search engine to read “UtahSEOPro” as the name of the image.

Do you see where your keyphrase can be hurt by using underscores?

7. Sitemaps – Sitemaps are important to search engines and users. My favorite sitemap tool is www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will create an XML, ROR, and HTML sitemap for your Website. In addition, it will create a URL list of all your pages to submit to Yahoo! for indexing that can be submitted here http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. The XML map is made especially for Google to submit to their Webmaster tools that can be submitted here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. This is important in telling Google how to crawl your site. MSN, Google, and Yahoo! teamed up to create one generalized protocol for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org. It’s nice to seem they playing together on this issue.

8. Crawlability Issues – Never hide your navigation behind Flash, JavaScript, or Images. Always use text for search engines to crawl your navigation. CSS gives your text-based navigation the power of styling similar to using images and the power of roll over similar to JavaScript menus. Spiders have a hard time crawling Flash, and almost impossible time with JavaScript, and they can’t read text that is made from an image (although, Google’s new vector reading patent on images might change that in the future). If you are insistent on having a Flash menu or image-based menu then I suggest creating a text-equivalent alternative in the footer of your site.

If you have a dynamic site then your pages might not be crawlable if they have many parameters. If your URL looked like this for example:

http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date

Google can typically crawl up to 2 or 3 parameters of your site. It’s best not to risk it though. Any more parameters than 2 or 3 you definitely need to use Mod_Rewrite

Solution:

Mod_Rewrite. Many tools can be found on the internet such as this one: http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/url-rewrite.html. In a (.htaccess) file you can tell your Apache server to write your parameter-based URL to appear as a static URL such as : http://www.domain.com/folder/1234.html instead of http://www.domain.com/folder/index.php?var=1234&sort=date.

9. Code Optimization – CSS layouts have many benefits over table layouts. They lessen your code-to-text ratio and allow spiders to access your content easier without sifting through tons of nested markup. Keep your CSS and JavaScript out of the <head> and in external stylesheets. This reduces your on-page markup and index page’s file size. It also gives a slightly quicker load time. You can use PHP to combine your scripts into one file so it only makes one call to the server. It also can strip out empty space and comments to condense file size. To learn how to do that visit: http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72.

For table data use the “summary” attribute to tell screen readers (and search engines) what the content in that table is about. Also, use the ALT attribute to describe images. “Longdesc” is a good attribute if you have a longer description of something such as a Flash movie. You can store the description in a completely separate HTML file it will read from.

It’s good practice to keep your code validated. The World Wide Web Consortium offers great code validation tools for XHTML and CSS. Although, Matt Cutts claimed that Google doesn’t care if your code is validated or not other crawlers might. If there’s a code conflict it can halt the spider dead in it’s tracks and may not be able to fully crawl your site.

10. Internal/External Links – Receiving external links from other sites is the #1 item of importance for your rankings. If “content is king” then “linking is queen”. Just keep in mind that pages that link to you should be related to your content. One-way links from sites carry far greater weight than links that are reciprocated. Reciprocal links are a dying practice. Try to keep a good ratio of top-level URL links and deep links. This means don’t get all links going to your www.domain.com. Get some links going to the most prominent pages of your Website (i.e. www.domain.com/page.html). The reason being is because it looks natural to search engines when someone is linking to something specific, like your internal page, rather than something general like your main domain. There are many variables that determine the weight of the link such as:

· The content of the page that’s linking to you

· Where on the page your link is (within the body content is the best)

· If it’s a directory listing then the higher on the page the better

· The anchor text of the link (should include your keywords)

· The # of outgoing links the page that linking to you currently has

· The relevance and authority of the page that’s linking to you (PageRank is a small determination of that)

· If the site linking to you is blacklisted in search engines or not

Internal links help users find things throughout your site, and help search engines crawl pages better. It’s good practice of information architecture to link to related pages within your content. This will help pass PageRank throughout your site as well.