Top 12 SEO Tips for 2011 - Post Panda

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Here's an interview I did in London last year before I merged Vanguard SEO with Blueclaw. I wouldn't want you to do without

GaryTheScubaGuy

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

7. Canonicalisation

Because of development issues, server settings, programming platforms, and even natural site progression a site may have multiple version of a homepage, or even an entire site. Let’s say you upgraded your site from an html site to a php site. Many times in the crossover pages are left on the server and are crawlable to the robots. These present several issues. You may have the same content and the new page never gets indexed. Links back to you may be to different versions. To mention just two of the most serious issues.

I’ve seen a website that had 8 individual and crawlable versions of their homepage live at the same time. This can reduce the strength of your page. (Ever see a site that has a lower homepage PR than an internal page?) The simplest and least painful way to fix this is with 301 redirects.

8. Links or Websites?

I have a lot to say about links, and since at least half of the questions I get in the forums, at conferences and from clients is about links, I’m guessing it’s what you are most interested in. So Google has said over and over not to buy links. If you do buy them, then you have probably seen some damage, depending on your techniques.

Establishing what links to buy and where you buy them from has always been a bit speculative because everything from page size, site size, the number of other links, the quality of the links, the relevancy of the site and various other factors have affected what a link is actually worth. Then you had to deal with things like checking the integrity of the link was still intact, or even still there. There are dozens of tools out there that were built just for this purpose.

So what do you do? I had a look at all the different methods available and several are still effective (I.e. blog posting, blog rolls, establishing forum links, Yahoo Answers and so on) and in the end, what I’ve found is that the clear winner for my money is going out there, doing the homework and negotiation and actually buying sites. If I own the site then I also own the content, and more importantly the links I’ll put in the existing content. I’m looking for related content or a website with a silo of related content that I can take existing keyword phrases and change them into hyperlinks.

I usually look at the overall spend on "sponsorship – wink, wink" x 18, in order to establish a maximum offer. So if the total amount the client is spending on links is £1000 per month, I look to buy a site for up to £18k. Anyone that has looked around at brokerages that sell sites knows that £5k can buy you a lot, let alone £18k. Take into account the money saved on maintaining purchased "sponsorship" dues versus your campaign expectations. Outside of hosting and domain renewal you will own the links forever – they will never expire.

There are a few other factors to look at before buying a site;
• Domain Age – 2 years minimum unless other factors outweigh this factor
• Page Rank – yes it does matter when buying a site because it represents G-Trust
• Number of existing back links
• Quality of those back links and are they to any deep pages?
• How many pages are indexed with Google?
• Install McAfee Site Inspector on your computer. It will flag any issues to do with bad history, malware or any one of many other problems it may have
• Other pluses are host location vs. target location, the number of registrants of the domain, DMOZ listing and rankings. If it’s a forum, the number of active members and recent posts are important.

[bonusbetting]

Thanks Gary. Interesting that you're in Leeds, so am I. Perhaps I should come and see you, though I suspect your service is beyond my budget

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Can't get cheaper advice than free!

[EugeneK]

Nice tips.
Keep posted.

[cass]

Hi Gary,

Many thanks for all the insightful SEO tips every bit helps!

Cheers,

Cass

Internet casinos

[bingomarketing]

First post here. Saw it as part of the email newsletter. Just want to say thanks for writing such a thoughtful article.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

H BingoN\Babe,

Which newsletter is that?

Thanks in advance

Gary

[bingomarketing]

H BingoN\Babe,

Which newsletter is that?

Thanks in advance

Gary

was in one from the gpwa

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Lol - I figured as much. I didn't see it though. Could you send me the issue?

Thanks in advance.

Gary

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

9. Create a Mobile version of your website.

Mobile is the “next Big Thing” and creating a mobile version is free and easy on sites like Zinadoo and Mobeezo.

You can also get mobile apps built for a few hundred quid. This can be used as a viral and social media tool, used to get numerous links from great ranking sites like a link from Apple if you build an iphone app.

Next, use sites like : Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter Places, Loopt, MyTown, BrightKite and Facebook. You could use tools like TwitResponse to set up auto Twits for a month in advance using a basic spreadsheet.


There are also many Affiliate offerings for cross selling gaming mobile apps. I saw one at the EGR conference and the Internet World conference in the last 2 weeks that was really impressive. Its a universal Smart Phohe application that acts as a betting interface that works in real time with any gaming platform (e.g.William Hill, Ladbrokes, etc) and allows you to manage, place bets and it even determines probabilities.

The best part is that you can white label it and sell it to your punters.

This is just one example of the many mobile applications that are emerging in 'M Commerce'

There are also incredibly 'soft' markets in mobile search, both paid and organic.

10. Optimise for Local Search

If you have a brick and mortar shop or an office where you trade and don't already know this, you must be hiding. Local search is the easiest way to smash the top spots, and will soon take on even more power.





Top tips here are;

• Put your address and phone number on the site and in the meta tags. Do not use 800, 0800. 0945 etc. numbers.
• Add yourself to Google Maps
• Add yourself to Bing Local and Yahoo Local
• Don’t use URL redirects on your homepage
• Be sure your whois information is showing the correct address and phone number. It does not matter whether or not you paid extra to ‘hide’ your information, Google is a Registrar and can get to it.
• Add the geo-tag to your coding.

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

• Spend a couple hours submitting yourself to business directories. A few quid is worth the link alone and Google uses many of these directories. Good ones are;
  
  • GetListed.org
  • Yelp
  • Hotfrog
  • Superpages
  • InsiderPages
  • Citysquares
  • Mojopages
  • Google Places
  • Business-directory-uk.co.uk
  • Thompson local
  • Yahoo Local Merchant
  • Ask Business Search

• If you have more than one location, add a landing page or even a website for each. If you have an established website use subdomains as explained in tip #4
• Set geographic targeting in Google Webmaster Tools
• Get local links. Sponsor a local kids sports team and give incentives for facebook links for a free pizza night or offer an auction item for a charity event that is web-based
• Upload a dozen pics with keywords and descriptions that target your area to Picaso and Flickr and geo-tag them. Link to these from your site.
• Google Local Business offers the option of including videos in your business listing.Since Google bought YouTube, now you can include links to your YouTube videos and tag them with your target keywords/phrases/location which not only improves your rankings onGoogle Local Business but will also help visitors searching on your keywords come across you in the organic search results as Google typically displays video results on the first page.

Both of these sectors are what I consider to be soft markets. Someone could really do well with a bit of work.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

BONUS;

These are the 12 sites which I've found do not consistently delete submissions.

http://www.iblogme.com
http://blog.co.in
http://www.bloglines.com
http://www.thoughts.com
http://www.quizilla.com
http://www.multiply.com
http://www.livejournal.com
http://www.blogsome.com
http://www.hubpages.com
http://www.squidoo.com
http://www.weebly.com
http://www.xanga.com

[Dreamydell]

thank you for sharing..

[RyanTheRave]

Thanks Gary.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

11. RSS Feeds for Building Free Links

You create RSS feeds to supply information on site updates, increase traffic to your site and place links in your content that will be republished and provide free links back to your site. Using the scraping technique mentioned above, Black Hat SEO’s would search out RSS feeds and build a data base with the content for future use, spin the content and reuse it or just republish the content. In all cases they would insert their own links. They build programs or plug-ins (such as the Word Press All-In-One SEO plug-in) and these will take any chosen word or phrase and search through the content and when found change the code to make it a link to their chosen site. There are many other ways this can be used but you get the basic idea.

The neat thing here is that they need to do this automatically for speed and being able to make rolling URL’s and websites quick enough to beat the spam-bots for a few weeks for this technique to pay off. Because of this most don’t have the time to clean everything up properly, so your links remain.

Publishing the URL of your RSS feed on the many different sites that list these (I.e. FeedBurner) will insure a nice number scrapers posting your links to their sites.

I guess the first criticism of this would be that they will put you on Viagra sites – well even if they do I haven’t seen this particular method draw penalties when I messed around with it. But remember – I don’t condone or endorse....blah, blah, blah.

Here are some simple steps to get started with RSS:
• Set up a FeedBurner account to allow your feed to be consumed by others.
• Share your feed on your various social networking profiles. Many social networking sites have the ability to consume and display your RSS feed to your friends, followers, and fans.
• Submit it to multiple RSS submission directories (do a search for RSS submission for some options).
• Here’s a starter list for you of where to submit your RSS feeds through;
http://www.feedmil.com/addfeed.jsp
http://www.feedest.com
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedgy.com/Submit.aspx
http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php
http://www.feedbees.com/add.php
http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://feedfury.com/submit
http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank/?Fe...com%2frss.aspx
http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
http://www.rss-network.com
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.rssmad.com/index.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.plazoo.com

12. Use Social Bookmarking & Social Media

I first talked about social bookmarking and how it could be used as a tool 5 years ago when I was at a gaming conference and someone asked me what could be done to improve their rankings just a spot or two. In the Gaming industry top positions for ‘Hollywood’ keywords like Poker and Bingo within the top 10 results can be significant. One position in the top 3 results can result in the difference between 6 figure ROI’s and 7 figure ROI’s.

Based on the graph below showing click through rates in relation to the top 10 ranking positions, the difference between the 3rd and 4th positions is 2.44%. The number of global searches for Poker is 24,900,00. Based on what we know, 2.44% click-through difference between the 3rd and 4th position, this ONE SPOT could equal over £600,000 per month or over 7 million per annum.


The difference between the next 2 spots is over 20% less because if you are not in the top 3 you are not in Google’s syndication network which includes every one from AOL, iWon, Ask and Netscape, to dozens of other top search engines. And this isn’t PPC or paid results, these are their organic results.

So I understood why someone might be concerned over one position...

What I recommended from this point was scrutinised (especially at the SMX and SES conferences with primarily SEO’s in attendance and other SEO’s on panels. So I proved myself by taking the top 10 results for poker (this was on Google.nl because I was in Amsterdam) and there was a ‘kicker’ listing, which is what I call this;


I targeted someone that was below the target site and wasn’t a competitor. In this case it was Pokerlistings.nl. I used Onlywire, a mass submission social bookmarking site to submit Pokerlistings.nl. There are 100 times as many sites and tools like this now available that submit a chosen page or site through multiple venues such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Blogger, etc. Back then I used Onlywire. The entire process took 10 minutes and that was all I did.
By the next day the target site (the guy in the audience) was ranking a position higher.

I remember practically getting chastised at SMX Advanced for “teaching blackhat techniques” and even took criticism from a couple forums I moderate like GPWA and SEO Chat.

At the end of the day Google themselves have created a toolbar plugin that allows simultaneous submission to GTalk. Twitter, Facebook and various other social bookmarking sites. At that time though the critics said it was ‘grey’.


Social Bookmarking can improve your rankings. Five years ago it lasted 30-45 days, now its a week at best and involves LSI and a few other factors. Its just one of the things any good SEO will be including in his/her arsenal.

There are lots of companies and software that do this. Some will even ping the page or automatically submit it through article directories and post it to Wordpress blogs and Phpbb forums. I use these for saving me time. Some think its grey hat SEO but if I were a normal person that wanted to put something out to the public without the hours or days of work required, I would use tools like this.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all have plugins for their toolbar which allows you to submit to multiple venues.Use these tools under strict control as they are easily abused and can cause more harm than good.

Facebook and Twitter are examples of Social Media and it has been stated by Google that they are now using this as a significant ranking element. I always assumed that they did because what better set of un-engineered data on a mass level could you possibly find?

Take advantage of the automated tools for your daily tasks.
On-site Website Checks - Xenu and Screaming Frog
Article Creation or unique spins - The Best Spinner or Spinner Wizard
Link Analysis (yours and your competitors) - Majestic SEO
Blog Building & Population - Scrapebox & Market Samurai
Automated Article submission, SBM, Pinging, RSS & Press Releases - SENukeX
Third Party Outsourced Agencies for Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.
Twitter Professional Tools - TwitResponse & Tweet Adder

[rak]

You are a machine Gary.. Thanks for the info. You have me re-energized for the weekend. Its a 3 day weekend here, me wine, your info, and lots of reading. I can't think of a better way to pass the weekend. Well I can.. but this is so damn good!

If anyone else will be doing the same this weekend - add me on Skype. Lots of fun to be had.

[mobileslot4u]

I don't agree with the 'first link rule' and logos. Google will ignore logo outbound links and navigation links. Simples

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Look it up

[techwoman]

Gary, this is awesome material!!! It gives me the excitement to get started from scratch on a whole new site
Thanks for posting!!!!

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Hi Meredith,

Go to my site in my sig. On the right side there are 4 tools you should try/get (considering you have multiple sites);
SENukeX
Tweet Adder
Onlywire
Screaming Frog