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WordPress SEO – All You Need To Know

January 1, 2010 By einstein99

Learning WordPress SEO – All You Need To Know

Here is my WordPress SEO Checklist you can use as a guide:

  1. Figure out what keyword phrases you want to rank well for and assign 1 or 2 per page.
  2. Use the great WP plugin “All In One SEO Pack”.
  3. Don’t use the WordPress default permalink structure… I use /%post_id%/%postname%/
  4. Get inbound links from high PR authority sites using your keyword phrases as anchor text.
  5. Add good H1 or H2 titles and use more h2′s for subtitles throughout your blog post.
  6. Include bold or italics or even some bold + italics text on the page.
  7. Link out to at least 1 high PR authority site per page.
  8. Create interior hyperlinks with a keyword you need for the target page.
  9. Make bulleted lists (ordered and unordered) whenever you can.
  10. Write in targeted keyword phrases and their derivative variations in your text.
  11. Add Alt tags for some images using your target keyword phrases.
  12. I always add images to every blog post and static page.
  13. Use Google’s drive toward Universal Search to your advantage.
  14. Encourage commenting with do follow links and respond to good comments.
  15. Be cleaver with your blog post titles and use 3 or 4 word most of the time.
  16. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not blocking search engine spiders.
  17. Update your sitemap.xml file automatically with a plugin.

If you type “wordpress seo” on Google, the first entry on the SERP is from WordPress legend and SEO pundit Joost de Valk. Joost is from the Netherlands and his name is actually pronounced like “yoast”. And that’s why he named his famous and incredibly high (I’ve been to Amsterdam 7 times so far) PageRank 6 website yoast.com.

OK so you can see what one of the brilliant stars in SEO and WordPress says about the subject by going to his site first. Joost is one of the world’s leading WordPress plugin developers and he is almost scary smart. It’s a good article.

We all know Google Loves WordPress right? Well it’s true. The Master Mind Anti-Spam King at Google is Matt Cutts and he himself uses a WordPress blog even though his company makes Blogger. Matt talks about WordPress in positive terms because there are many features that just lend themselves to automatically following the recommended Google WebMaster Guidelines. That being said, here is what you can do to improve the built in linky goodness.

I take a straight forward approach to WordPress SEO that may be simple, but for the person out there who needs help, you can get by on this and maybe get some great rankings that might have otherwise escaped you. As a web design consultant I don’t do this for the sake of art. I build beautiful WordPress sites that rank well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing so my clients can get new prospects from the internet and make millions of dollars. These recommendations are what I do for every professional site I build and maintain.

1.) Figure out what keyword phrases you want to rank well for.

Assign one or 2 phrases per page and know that your homepage and your about us page are going to get the most views and have the best luck getting ranking for your primary keyword phrases. Most websites do best shooting for 1 or 2 primary keyword phrases and a total of 5 phrases all together. Professional SEO’s sometimes will map out 50 keywords on a large website but it takes a lot of work and it’s really for professionals. My personal record so far was a site that I got 34 Google #1 rankings for at one time in English and almost as many in Spanish. I also had a total of 110 Top 10 rankings on that site in English the same month. So it is possible to map 50 or even 100 keywords to a website but it’s hard. Most of you out there would do well to find 1 keyword or 2 and go for it.

2.) Install the plugin All In One SEO currently maintained by Semper Fi Web Design.

Every blog post and every static page on your website should have a custom written meta title and meta description. This plugin will do the job of making these meta titles and meta descriptions automatically for you. It also gives you the option in every blog post and static page to enter your own titles and descriptions. Being a professional full time SEO, thats a big part of my job every day and I make custom titles and descriptions that are way better than the automatic ones the plugin creates. But I’ll tell you about that in another post. For now just know this is the single most important thing you can do for yourself in terms of WordPress SEO. Plugin developers need your support with a small donation every once in a while by the way.

There is a 3rd field that is optional called the meta keyword field. Google does not use it but I think they still look at it and I’m sure other search engines do look at the meta keywords. I enter them. Just add a few words that appear on your page and don’t do any keyword stuffing here. That might give you 1 strike with some of the SE’s.

3.) The WordPress default permalink structure is bad for SEO, don’t use it.

I use this permalink structure: /%post_id%/%postname%/    That gives me keywords right in my url so search engines can grab onto them.

4.) Get inbound links from relevant high PR authority sites using your keyword phrases as anchor text.

Don’t pay for them from cheap outfits – that will get you caught and it won’t get you banned, but it won’t help you. Don’t ever get involved with any linking schemes – they don’t work anymore. Those “you link to me and I’ll link to you” schemes are terrible… your PR out and PR in negate each other. You get a tiny bit of credit but it’s simply not worth your time to do it any more. The single best way to get inbound links from high PR authority sites is to use paid directories like Best of the Web and Yahoo Dir. If you have a huge spend available then buy every directory listing that gives you a do follow link that you can find. Avoid any directory that links to a lousy community of course.

5.) Add a good H1 or H2 title as the opening characters on a blog post and use more h2′s for subtitles throughout your blog post.

6.) Add some bold or italics or even some bold + italics text on the page. Use secondary keywords for these.

7.) Link out from the page to at least 1 high PR authority site. You can link out to a hand full but try not to go over 5 for an average post. If it’s a list of some kind then by all means link out like crazy. If it’s a site you like and trust, use do follow outbound links. It’s going to take PR from your page whether you use a do follow or a no follow anyway.

8.) Use at least one interior hyperlink with a keyword you need for the target page. You can use 2 or 3 internal hyperlinks if you want but remember each takes a percentage of the potential PR on that page.

9.) Add bulleted lists and ordered lists when you can. I try to get one per post at least.

10.) Use targeted keyword phrases in your text. Use them several times and especially at the very top of the page where they are deemed “prominent”.

11.) Add Alt tags for images using keyword phrases. Don’t over do it with alt tags. I don’t use them on every photo but I do use them maybe once or twice on a page.

12.) I always add images to every blog post and static page. I don’t know if this helps much with ranking but I think it must because it makes the blog posts more robust.

13.) Play the Universal Search game.

Google loves to find references for search phrases in meta titles, on page text (especially in H1 or H2 tags), anchor text from inbound links, in alt tags, and in Podcasts and Web Videos. It’s called Universal Search when Google includes all forms of media. Get yourself some web videos that are relevant and use keyword phrases you are trying to hit for in their titles.

14.) Encourage commenting and respond to good comments.

Allow Do Follow on good and relevant comments but strictly do not allow spam comments. If surfers know they can get a good do follow link from you they will more often than not leave you a good comment. Spammers and spam bots will feast on it if you let them. Use the Akimet plugin developed by Matt Mullenweg and delete all spam comments frequently. I eyeball every comment and delete all except for the 1 or 2 decent comments from real people and friends. When your WordPress site is popular enough you can just do away with the do follow and go to the default of no follow.

15.) Be cleaver with your blog post titles.

On WordPress sites I have that are “heated up” where they have been around a while and I post to frequently… my post title goes to #1 on Google within a few minutes of me submitting the blog post. That’s not just because I’m a good SEO, but also because I use 3 or 4 word titles that I carefully construct that will get me hits for my keywords but will not be competing with IBM or HP for top ranking on 1 or 2 word phrases. Trying to rank top 10 for a title like “web hosting” is nearly mission impossible. Trying to rank top 10 for a title like “cheap reseller web hosting” is doable.

16.) Check your robots.txt file every once in a while to make sure it is not blocking bots and search engine spiders.

The robots.txt file is an ascii text file at the root level of your WordPress site that gives specific instructions to search engine spiders that they may or may not abide by.  Usually the directives tell bots where they are welcome to look and where they are not welcome to look. The big SE’s will usually agree to your robots.txt directives but sometimes in the search for images even the big bots will ignore exclusion directives here. You can even try to tell “bad bots” to stay away from your entire site, but that rarely works. You can also specify the location of your sitemap.xml file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

17.) Keep your sitemap.xml file updated, and since it’s so time consuming, make sure you do it automatically.

Search engines look at the sitemap.xml file on your WordPress site to see if you have added a new file. They also spider the site and discover files but they will get the new content faster if you automatically update the sitemap every time you add a new blog post. I use a couple different plugins for this on different sites but mostly I use the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin by Ann Brachhold and I recommend it.

(I was not paid by any persons or companies listed in this post – Cheers – Mal)

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Learn About WordPress Tagged With: , ,

Web Design Consultant Test

December 26, 2009 By einstein99

Web Design Consultant Test

How do you know the self proclaimed “web design expert” you are talking with has real skills? Give them this test:

  1. Ask to see their best 3 pieces of website design work and then check their Google ranking for their top phrase. The most beautiful website in the world that does not rank well on Google might as well be under a rock because it’s not going to bring you in new business. Web designers that don’t understand the design has to be integrated with SEO on every page should work for your competitors – not for you.  I’ve talked with many web designers that told me they were a “real graphic artist” and their artistic vision was more important than visibility on Google. Wow, that’s from the stone ages of the internet and they just don’t understand clients in competitive industries want more business from their websites, you are not interested in “supporting the arts”.
  2. Ask to see their top 3 most competitive Google #1 rankings. If they tell you that Google ranking has nothing to do with web design tell them they are right, don’t waste another minute of your life with them, and hope they work for your competitor. I want to rank top 10 for my most competitive phrases on Google so I can get more business. I really want to rank #1 for several phrases but I’m realistic and I know just getting on Google Page One in the top 10 rankings is outstanding.
  3. Ask your web design consultant how they built “relevance” into each page of the website. If they can tell you that the page name, the page title, the page headings, the page text, and links to that page from other interior pages of the website all more or less have a relevant match on the primary and secondary keyword phrases for that page… you got yourself a web designer that knows SEO. That’s vital to bring in more internet shoppers. If you just want to look at art you can always go to a museum. I want a beautiful website that ranks well on Google so I can make more money.
  4. Ask your prospective web design consultant to show you the meta title for your “About” page and the meta title for your “homepage”. If they are identical, it means the so called “expert” was either lazy or really did not know what they were doing in terms of integrating their design with search. That’s not going to get you any new business. Send them to work for your competitors.

Old School Web Design Has Nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization SEO

  • 9 out of 10 web design consultants don’t know the first thing about SEO (search engine optimization) and that can cost you millions in new business.
  • The same 9 out of 10 web consultants will tell you how design and SEO are 2 different things and you don’t need SEO for a website.
  • I can tell you from experience 9 out of 10 web design consultants will tell customers they are an “expert” on SEO when they don’t even know the basics.

First of all, no matter how beautiful a website looks, if it does not rank well on Google… it’s nearly worthless in terms of attracting new prospects for your business. A website that does not rank well on Google might as well be invisible. Why bother?

Is it Important to Rank Well on Yahoo and Bing?

85% of all searches are done with Google. Many Professional SEO’s don’t bother doing anything for Bing or Yahoo. So the short answer is: No. I do a few things for Bing and Yahoo including verifying websites in Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer… but in terms of on page optimization Google is like the 800 pound Gorilla these days and you don’t get much in return when you score big on Bing or Yahoo anyway.

Web Design for business goes hand in hand with SEO for business, they can’t be looked at as different entities anymore. Web design and SEO are intertwined. They compliment each other. If your web design consultant tells you any differently, get a better one and send yours right to your toughest business competitor because you will be able to outrank them and gain an advantage using internet marketing.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,

Google Local Disappeared Me

December 18, 2009 By einstein99

My Google Local Maps listings disappeared off the face of the earth again recently and I’m going to explain how I think it happened. But first a little background and I’ll start with the naming conventions. Google Local Business Center listings are known my many names…

  • Google Local
  • Google Local Maps
  • Local Maps Listing
  • Google LBC
  • Maps Listing

and there are also Yahoo Local listings and Bing Local listings. But this article is on a problem I had with my Google Local listing. Since Google search is still dominating 85% of all market share in search many professional SEO’s like myself will add a listing to all 3 main SE’s but only spend time enhancing the Google LBC.

Above is a screen print showing 3 Google Local Business Center listing that I maintain. In the last 30 days I’ve gotten an outstanding 3,500+ impressions for the Manhattan Bakery I work for. That’s quite good especially considering the competition for bakeries in NYC is intense. It’s what SEO’s might call a highly competitive phrase in a “Tier 1″ city. Cities and States are ranked by a lot of factors in SEO but in this case New York City generates a tremendous number of searches that are geographically local giving it the top shelf rating or Tier 1. You can see I have an off the hook 5,000+ impressions for my NJ Diner site. Since the geographic ares is “NJ” That’s also a Tier 1 category… it generates a huge amount of searches. I’m lucky with that total as well because the competition in NJ for Diners is intense also… there are over 700 diners in New Jersey. Now for my problem listing… and it could not be closer to my home… IT IS MY HOME !!  (I have an office in my house as well as an office in New Rochelle NY and one in midtown Manhattan).  My own listing has an almost invisible 79 impressions in the last 30 days. My main phrase is NJ web design and I currently rank #12 in the main index for it. Now that’s quite respectable and I’ve been on Google Page One in the 10th position for a few days but I’m happy with being at the top of Google page Two for now.

What Happened to My Google Local Listing?

There are a set of rules and recommendations provided by Google to help you to setup your local listing. It’s called the [Google] Business Listings Quality Guidelines or the Local Business Center Guidelines. That’s the good part. The bad part is this guide is also your main tool to figure out where you made mistakes that caused Google to downgrade your listing. In terms my Russian friends might use “if you disrespect them they might disappear you”. One time Google “disappeared me” in the LBC because I made the mistake of using the words “Google Maps Listings” in my “Description” field. That is a no-no according to the Guideline and it was confirmed by Google Local Pundit and Internationally recognized expert Mike Blumenthal. If you want to learn a lot about Google Local you have to read Mike’s blog. It’s the bible of local search.

How Can I Get restored to Listing Health?

Within 2 days of fixing my problem with my description the last time I was restored to listing health and I was actually back on the top of a Google 10 pack. So when I noticed they disappeared me again I had to go back to the guidelines and read them again and look for clues as to why they might think I disrespected them. I think I found it. I had tried a little experiment and instead of calling my Company / Organization field just Web Design Workplace, I thought I would be smart and call it NJ Web Design Workplace. It states in the guidelines “Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name..” Whoops !! OK I fixed the problem and I’ll see if it can get me back on top.

<No persons or companies mentioned in this post have paid me in any way for this article – Regards, Mal>

Filed Under: Learn About SEO

WordCamp Boston 2010 is Sold Out

December 16, 2009 By einstein99

Sold out over a month early that is. Wow. I’m glad they announced the sell out immediately because I was just about to get a hotel. My brother is at Harvard graduate school and I’ve been meaning to visit him for a while. This was going to be it. Oh well. I got shut out of WordCamp NYC last year when it sold out early too but this year was just a blast in New York with the unlimited capacity venue at Baruch College. I hope with the increased awareness and participation in Big City WordCamps that we can have a few less sell outs on the east coast.

If there is a change in the status I will post it up ASAP. And get hotel reservations ASAP as well.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: ,

Is Twitter Helping?

December 16, 2009 By einstein99

As a professional SEO who tries everything to do with social media I often debate this question. Is Twitter helping your SEO? Helping your bottom line in terms of PageRank or leads?

My short answer is NO. Twitter is NOT helping. It’s an additive play toy that has no redeeming qualities that inherently build Google PageRank or increase the number of high quality backlinks to my web pages or move my rankings up on competitive phrases. But that’s just me. I have friends who swear by it but I still remain cautious.

I’m experimenting with a twitter plugin called “Twitter for WordPress” at http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/ (See below)

What Twitter does effectively is it allows Pundits of all kinds to churn out and publish interesting, helpful, and funny commentary all day and all night to a stream of zombie like drones (and regular folks too). Instead of having “SEO Radio” I can just follow tweets from the top 5 in the field who like to Tweet, like Matt Cutts for example. I can login to Twitter once a day, send a tweet to my followers and read up on what Matt Cutts has been tweeting. I might gleen some useful information that way and I have.

The big problem with Twitter it is that people get addicted and it becomes a time drain and gossip tool rather than a productivity tool. People get hooked and they tweet all day… until they quit. Email can become a time drain, I get 500 emails a week and I process every one. But I do it 2 or 3 times a day for 10 minutes each. And my iPhone helps me to crank through the volume quickly when I have time commuting or wherever. Twittering is a form of communication like email, but it’s more additive and less substantial because each tweet has a max of 140 characters.

Tweet away and when you need help, remember there are half-measures with Twitter. But when you are making the switch from addict to user, you might have to just put it down and walk away for a while before you can go back to it and control it… one or two sessions a day.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

Made For Adsense

December 15, 2009 By einstein99

What are AdWords and AdSense?

Years ago Google became a “kind monolith” (remember 2001 A Space Odyssey?) overshadowing and enhancing all life on the planet. Some might phrase that “manipulating all life on the planet”. In any case, Google adopted a recent invention called Pay Per Click or PPC advertising. It was a way for advertisers to get instant leads and sales with search engines because you could pay for advertisements. These paid or “sponsored results” would appear above the fold and in directly in the hottest places on the page. They became very effective at making sales because surfers would type a phrase into Google or Yahoo, and the first thing they would see was a paid ad in a light blue background area or prominently in the sidebar.

Marketing firms rushed to spend money to buy PPC advertisements from a company called Overture for Yahoo ads or from a division of Google known as Google AdWords. It was such a good idea and so effective at providing excellent ROI return on investment for advertisers, that it actually became the #1 source of revenue to propel Google into the Fortune 500. Yahoo eventually purchased Overture but by then it was too late for them as Google took 85% of the market share for search. Google split their PPC business into 2 halves… the side where you could buy advertising became Google AdWords. The side where you could use your own websites to display Google advertisements became Google Adsense. Literally hundreds of thousands of advertisers flocked to Google AdWords, and tens of thousands of webmasters flocked to Google AdSense to sell real estate on their websites for AdSense “impressions”.

What is Made For Adsense?

A Made For Adsense website (known by SEO pundits as an “MFA site“) is a website designed to lure searchers to their site using “link bait” or artificially manipulated ranking in order to deliver Google AdSense impressions or page views where the ads are present. A classic MFA site will provide almost no helpful information to a searcher and it’s only function is to deliver pageview or impression hits for Google paid search advertisers. MFA sites will typically use up to 2/3 of a webpage to display Google advertisements.

MFA sites are SPAM. They are garbage that floods cyberspace and detracts from a search engines usefullness.When Google started pushing AdSense, they actually became the #1 spammer in the world themselves and it took a couple years for them to develop a way to prevent MFA sites from tainting the user experience surfers wanted. There were many MFA spammers that made 6 figure incomes with template driven RSS fed MFA sites in the beginning. They were sold by the thousands on eBay. Now I must admit Google is fair to excellent at keeping MFA sites off the first page in the SERPS. Occasionally one will slip into the Top 10 Google rankings for a short while. I provided an example in this post where an MFA site is actually ranking #1 on Google for a coveted and lucrative phrase.

How do you identify an MFA site?

An MFA site generally has these characteristics:

  • provides zero useful information to searchers
  • usually has PageRank 0
  • much of the screen is taken up by Google Advertisements and up to 2/3 of the screen might be just Google Ads.
  • if the site makes it to Google Page One, it probably won’t be there for long. It may have manipulated the Google Algorithm to get there in the first place and they almost always get caught over time.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

Backing Up WordPress

November 6, 2009 By einstein99

Sometimes there is a right way and a wrong way to do something. In this case, there are a lot of right ways to get your Stand-Alone WordPress blog backed up. I’m going to demo my system and you can use it if you have a similar set of parameters or just get a grasp on the tasks if you have a different set of circumstances.

The official core WordPress document written to help you with backups is one you should be familiar with. It’s on the official WordPress Codex and it’s located here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

I’m running on a Unix host with a Plesk Dashboard / Control Panel.

  • Make a copy of the local folder where you keep your WordPress blog. After I copy the entire folder / directory tree, I usually rename the old one to wordpress-blog.old and then I’ll make a brand new folder (empty) for the next step.
  • Use FTP to copy the entire directory tree from your server / host down to your local folder. With the latest versions of WordPress allowing version updates and plugin updates to the server directly, you really have to make a fresh local copy of whatever you have currently on the server / host. In the past my master copy of a WordPress blog would be local, but since I use the automatic update feature constantly with updates to WP and plugins, the master is always on the host these days.
  • Backup the database. Lots of ways to go about this. The first is to do it manually. You can go to your Plesk dashboard and then access the db via phpMyAdmin. There are a staggering number of possible combinations selecting the export manually, so I just use a WordPress Plugin. The one I have been using lately is called: WordPress Database Backup and it’s located at: http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/ This plugin allows you to set it for weekly backups to the server, to an email address, or a “Johnny On The Spot” backup to your local machine.

That theoretically covers the backup portion and you will find other references on the internet for the “3 step WordPress backup” in a number of places.

You will normally restore this backup to the original location if you have to but you can also use this backup to move your WordPress installation to an entirely new location. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: , ,

NJ Web Design – SEO Case Study

October 26, 2009 By einstein99

This site is all about New Jersey web design and integrating websites with SEO search engine optimization… but our latest NJ SEO case study features our favorite “Work for Food Project” ever. Tiffany Diner is practically a historic landmark with Bergen County NJ residents and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has ever lived in the area that has not had a few great meals here. Like many NJ Greek Diners, the owners knew a lot about food and a lot about print advertising but internet marketing was a new topic. Web Design WorkPlace took this business from no website to over:

  • 12,000 unique visitors a year
  • almost 40,000 Google LOCAL impressions a year
  • ranking # 3 on Google for the phrase:   NJ diner competing with over 85,000 web pages that have those words in their title (10-25-09) !!
  • rank # 3 on Google for the phrase:   New Jersey diner competing with over 16,000 web pages that have those words in their title.
  • Google # 1 for the phrase:  NJ diner and restaurant

Web Design Workplace Nikon Photography

We’ve taken well over 2,000 pictures at the Diner and there are probably more than 300 on the site right now. We use all Nikon Digital SLR and Nikon lenses. One of the great features we put into this site is the ability for users to click 3 times on each photo to blow them up to huge proportions… 3800 pixels wide in some cases. This has attracted Google Images to grab lots of our classic NJ Diner photos to use for their galleries and subsequently, a lot of other websites are using our photos. In this case we’re flattered and not worried at all about infringement. We are sharing the love of NJ Diner food with everyone who wants to take a look.

Google Local Business Center – This is very important for internet marketing.

Lets take a look at some of the stats. First of all, for a brick and mortar business many times the critical number we want to achieve is a high Google Local impressions count. When a searcher types a geographic location and then an area of practice, sometimes Google or Yahoo or Bing will return a local map and the top 10 businesses on that map that are relevant to the search phrase. The map is always “above the fold” meaning searchers see it first, without paging down. And it’s totally FREE to get placed in the Google local listings. It’s the greatest thing IMPO (in my professional opinion) to hit search in the last 3 years. You actually don’t need a website to get listed on Google local but it helps in a number of ways.

Google Analytics – Bounce Rate and Time on the Site

Not all NJ SEO’s use Google Analytics but Web Design Workplace does. We use it for 2 key factors, the bounce rate which is the percentage of searchers who land up on the site and bounce off it without looking at other pages, and the time on the website. If the average time users are on the site is less than a minute you know you’ve got some problems. Maybe the site looks bad or maybe the site is ranking for the wrong phrases and people are getting there by accident.  When users are staying on the site between 1 and 5 minutes that’s a good sign that you have a nice looking site and the users getting there are supposed to be getting there and they like what they read or see. Google Analytics always gives us a total unique visitors number that is half of the number we get from the server logs so we take both sources with a grain of sale and use them both for ballpark estimates.

Here are the server logs

(from AWStats package running under Plesk Dashboard on Unix Hosting from Hostnexus)
See our unique visitors is double the number we get from Google Analytics. Can you guess why? Google Analytics relies on a piece of javascript code at the very end of every web page in your site. If you don’t have that code on every page of course those stats are lost, and if you land up on the web page and you can’t execute javascript code (search engine spiders for example) you are not counted as a unique visitor. So raw server logs are always going to show more or many more so called unique visitors than the filtered number you get in GA.

Filed Under: Featured2, Learn About SEO Tagged With: , , ,

Where do Sitelinks Come From Daddy?

October 25, 2009 By einstein99

Ahh, a new right of passage as a full time SEO with 2 “Tweens”, I get asked difficult questions sometimes related to the mysteries of life. Mysteries of life that were created by Google in this case. My 11 year old boy was looking at my main website listing on a Google SERP and he pointed to the “Sitelinks” and he asked me what they were. I told them what they were called and they were a way for Google to help searchers by giving them a mini table of contents to a website that they thought was structured well, and that they kind of liked for a number of reasons. Then he asked me the question that inevitably arrives in the life of every SEO father who has children who are also web surfer rats like Dad…

Where do Sitelinks come from Daddy?

Luckily I was prepared to explain some of Google’s mysteries without embarrassment and without fear. Being an X-Navy submarine guy helped in this case. I went on to explain that there were some things we might never know about how Sitelinks were created, but we were informed a few years ago by a Google evangelist and former employee Vanessa Fox that Sitelinks were created automatically. I told him that Google could not reveal the secrets of some of it’s mysteries to normal people like us because evil SEO Black Hats would take that information and use it to manipulate the search algorithm and spam innocent searchers like us and our friends. He said “Oh that’s smart Daddy, I’m glad they’re looking out for us”. But then he got right back to the main question… “But why do YOU have sitelinks and all these other sites DON’T have sitelinks?” And I told him that I could only guess, but I felt that Google was tipping their hat to my webmaster skills and patting me on the back for being a good SEO. I told him I had only seen Sitelinks bestowed on sites that were easy to navigate and they had significant PageRank on their homepage and they had a good amount of high quality inbound links that were from relevant authority sites. And he said “Oh   t-h-a-t-’s   why…” and I said “Yes son, that’s why they gave them to us and they don’t give them to everybody in the neighborhood like it’s “Trick or Treat” or something like that.

I thought it was over. I got ready to get back to work. But just then he asked one more question before I kicked him out of the room so I could really get some work done. He looked at the Sitelinks again and he said, “But Dad, if this was really automatic, how did they know what to write?”. And I was about to answer but I did a double take on my own sitelinks. I assumed the Sitelink categories were actually like snippets that were made from either text on the page or possibly text from part of the meta description or meta title. But I found something that was a bit of a surprise. I found that on this particular WordPress site that my Sitelinks were made from:

  • Tags from the blog posts (this surprised me at first)
  • Blog Categories that appeared on my Nav Bar and SubNav Bar
  • Blog Post Titles

And it all started to make sense to me, and my son told me that he understood this mystery of Google life enough to get back to Lego Star Wars on Playstation 3.  Of course Google had found out a way to make it easier for searchers by giving them a mini table of contents to a well structured site made from the site’s own major menu choices and blog tags of importance or relevance.

Here’s a screen print for the file:

where do sitelinks come from

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,

SEO Game: Hundreds of Google # 1 Rankings

August 30, 2009 By einstein99

In July 2009 I set a new personal record for my clients:

250 # 1 Google Rankings and

1,000 + Google Page One Top 10 Rankings.

Wow. That’s a lot. I’m talking in very short sentences. It’s a milestone in the 8 years I’ve been studying and working on SEO really. Search pundits will frequently say at panel discussions these days “oh, the rankings mean nothing, leads and client satisfaction are what counts”. The reality is that these rankings were 90% GEO + AOP meaning geographic area + area of practice so they were local and perfectly relevant to users searches. They generated a ton of leads. My clients were bawow happy. Me too. Rankings are getting less meaningful and I’ll discuss that in another post but these are solid GEO + AOP rankings and they are not necessarily effected by the physical location of the searcher the way personal search works.

Best of all, my entire collection of Google # 1′s and Top 10′s is all 100% pure white hat with no artificial ingredients of any kind.

What does that mean really? “There were 250 Google Number 1 rankings”. It means that on hundreds of phrases my clients wanted on their keyword lists, these phrases hit big. All the way to the top. What we also find in SEO is that similar phrases and derivative phrases frequently hit big. So for example if we hit # 1 for a phrase like:

New York City cosmetic surgery

We might also hit for:

New York City cosmetic surgeon

There are hundreds of factors involved literally, and I have to think a little bit of luck as well. I don’t want you to think anything in SEO Theory involves magic, it’s just that with competition that difficult I have to feel lucky that I won top spots in some cases.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,
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