SeoSU.com

Use the Power of Social Media

seosu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:25:52 +0000

A look at how Social Media is/can be used to market websites and products… and combined with SEO. Search Engine Optimizers and webmasters MUST understand the web2.0 concept, how it works, how it can be used for SEO purposes… Plus a look at the advantages and disadvantages of releasing your products/websites for review by the general public.

Before you start reading this article, keep in mind it was written by an author (Steve) who is targeting corporate players/businesses - but the article and the concepts that Steve talks about, applies to just about anyone who is involved in buying/selling/promoting anything online. That includes YOU! Yes… even if you’re webmaster, affiliate marketer, blogger or domainer - all this can be useful for you too… so have a good read!

……..

A CONSENSUS SEEMS TO BE emerging that the real marketing significance of social media may lie beyond the opportunity to display targeted media against individuals and groups. Instead, social media’s real power lies in its ability to function as a recommendation engine in which real people praise or pillory products. These opinions may be honest, informed, and impartial –or inaccurate, biased, and vengeful — but it’s clear that they are exerting influence on shoppers as they roll through (or are derailed from) the purchase funnel. This phenomenon hasn’t escaped the attention of SEO types, who have attempted to reinvent themselves as SMO (social media optimization) specialists. Nor has it gone unnoticed by corporate America, whose efforts to “manage” conversations have occasionally resulted in spectacular PR fiascos such as those which embroiled Wal-Mart and Edelman, its PR agency, over “WalMartingAcrossAmerica.com” or Sony and its agency over “AllIWantForChristmasIsAPSP.com.” Like “black hat” SEO tricks, such tactics are risky; and while they might work very well for a while, heads will roll if you’re caught.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things that marketers can do to make better use of the growing body of opinion-based information that don’t have any risk associated with them. Here are some observations and recommendations on how this may be done:

1. Forums are where products are discussed.

Too many of us in this business associate the phrase “social media” with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al. But these huge sites are more about socializing than exchanging information about products. Do a series of product searches on Google or the other engines and you’ll see that the majority of opinions about products occur on good old fashioned forum pages, the kind that have been up on the Web for more than a decade. Every product vertical you can think of (including photography, autos, movies, household appliances, and a ton of others) likely has several specialized sites associated with important products within these verticals. While a fair number of the people reading such opinions are regular users of such sites, many or most of the accesses to this content come through search engines, where users are conducting long-tail queries such as “Nikon D50 scope mount, “Audi transmission problem,” “koss headphones lightweight” and the like — and discussion forums often turn up in high positions for such long-tail queries.

2. Contextual is king on forum sites.

A large number of these product-oriented forums are AdSense or other contextual network publishers, which means that you might consider reaching their users through targeted contextual ads, instead of duking it out with deep-pocketed competitors vying for space on SERPS. Google and the other engines have taken steps to make their contextual networks more attractive by rolling out more precise targeting criteria (including demographic targeting), and just last week Google announced that it will be serving a DoubleClick cookie through this network, which adds frequency capping, plus more advanced reporting. While contextual ads are much cheaper than pure-search ads, only testing can establish whether moving budget to contextual provides similar ROI. Don’t ignore the possibility that your contextual efforts may draw a unique (and possibly more attractive) population of users who might not have responded to a similar (but more expensive) text ad placed a SERP.

3. Move your content with care.

After performing a number of product-oriented long-tail searches on several popular sites with forum areas, I was struck by the number of instances in which links embedded in opinion posts yielded Error 404 (broken link) messages. Usually, the broken link pointed to a formerly active URL within a manufacturer/retailer’s site which had drifted with time. Manufacturers and retailers cannot be expected to never move or delete their product URLs, but at the very least they should install appropriate redirects — so that these clicks don’t dead-end in a 404. Just because a product may have been superseded or even discontinued doesn’t mean that people aren’t still talking about it somewhere and following links to investigate a possible purchase. Why destroy a path that may be delivering you customers (and PageRank) right now?

Bottom line: you don’t have to wait for Facebook and its brethren to come up with a new generation of ad units or targeting options to begin harnessing the power of social media. Just find out where everybody’s talking (for good or for ill) about your product, investigate how to reach such people in a cost-effective, non-intrusive, contextually sensitive manner, and do your utmost to make sure that the links that these people have already created still work.

These low-key tactics might not get you a speaking engagement at a high-profile social media conference, but they’ll sure come in handy when it comes time to justify your salary.

Contribution by: Steve Baldwin - Who is an editor-in-chief at Didit, an agency for search engine marketing and auctioned media management based in New York.

Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell us what you think…

add your ideas or discuss what you think of the concepts that Steve talks about above.

What is the Google Sandbox?

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:52:27 +0000

Ok, so over the past month or so I’ve been collecting various search engine optimization questions from all of you. Today, I’m going to answer what was the most frequently asked question over the past month.

You guessed it… What is the Google Sandbox Theory and how do I escape it? When you finish reading this lesson, you’ll be an expert on the good ‘ole Google Sandbox Theory and you’ll know how to combat its effects. So, pay close attention. This is some very important stuff.

Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear:

The Google Sandbox theory is just that, a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google or the benefit of years of observation.

The Google Sandbox theory has been floating around since summer 2004, and has only really gained steam after February 4, 2005 , after a major Google index update (something known as the old Google dance).

Without being able to verify the existence of a Sandbox, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

Almost everything that you will read on the Internet on the Google Sandbox theory is conjecture, pieced together from individual experiences and not from a widescale objective controlled experiment with hundreds of websites (something that would obviously help in determining the nature of the Sandbox, but is inherently impractical given the demand on resources).

Thus, as I’ll be discussing towards the end, it’s important that you focus on ·good’ search engine optimization techniques and not place too much emphasis on quick ·get-out-ofjail’ schemes which are, after all, only going to last until the next big Google update.

What is the Google Sandbox Theory?

There are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.

In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.

This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.

Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.

Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed ·Allegra’ (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.

This was a major update to Google’s search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent ·exodus’ of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.

Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox Effect

A common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the ·Time Delay’ factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were ·released’ in the ·Allegra’ update, this ·website aging’ theory has gained a lot of ground.

However, I don’t find much truth in the ·Time Delay’ factor because by itself, it’s just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.

Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the ·Allegra’ update. Along with shattering the ·Time Delay’ theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a ·link threshold’ theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.

While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive linkbuilding campaigns. In my opinion, link-popularity is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.

This concept is known as ·link-aging’. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the ·age’ of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.

The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have don’t have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, don’t you?) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results · some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the ·Allegra’ update.

How to find out if your website is sandboxed

Finding out if your website is ·Sandboxed’ is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almostperfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core ·good’ SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engine’s weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I’m talking about, let’s take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding search engines

If you’re looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this · the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping the sandbox…

Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine’s algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does ·holds back’ new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website. As the ·Allegra’ update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon · combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy · have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your website’s Sandboxed’ time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website’s “sandboxed” time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don’t need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the ·white hat’ rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles I’ve mentioned many times in this course, you’ll not only minimize your website’s Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Here’s a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is ·ready’. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your website to be ·perfect’. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly · so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ·cloaking’. Google’s search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don’t waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as good’ content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine’s algorithm, whether it’s a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.

Have you taken a look at SEO Elite yet? If not…
What’s stopping you?

Now, get out there and start smoking the search engines!

What are back links?

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:25:41 +0000

Back links are an important part of most successful websites on the net and are almost essential in order to get reasonable listings on search engines. Back links are quite simply, links from other websites. As part of most search engines algorithms it is obvious to see they rely heavily largely upon the amount of quality incoming links your website has. I would like to reiterate, quality links, there are many unscrupulous link farms and link schemes that if you participate in, will get you banned from the major search engines. Search engines see links from other, usually established, websites as a mark of respect and that you probably have something to offer.

If you your website is just starting out or you are new to the world of SEO then you should know that back links are a crucial part to a website, almost as much as any content on it. With just one link to you from another indexed site you can usually get a few search engine bots visiting your site within hours instead of days, or even weeks through manual submission. Back links usually mean that you can achieve some reasonable key words in some search engines within weeks if you have a good quality site.

Armed with the above information it is easy to see how vital back links are, so now you are wondering where to get them. Well you are advised to stay away from disreputable sources like I previously mentioned but they rarely work any way, instead you should visit places like the Sitepoint Forums & WebHostingTalk where many professional webmasters can be found. It is recommended you aim to link swap with websites that have a better google page rank than yourself.

Contribution by: Daniel Chow

The MUST HAVE Seo Tool Kit!

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:22:42 +0000

Getting natural traffic to your sites can be a drag, it can take a lot of time getting your site search engine optimized… doing link exchanges, marketing so on and so forth. We’ve all been there - done that… you know how it goes! But there are ways to speed up the process of bringing traffic to your websites. SEOSU.com highly recommends WEB CEO… you’ll love it… that’s for sure!

WEB CEO is a fantastic tool - or should I say set of tools. It has everything you need to ensure you get good search engine rankings - you get free training too - seriously, every webmaster should try this out.

Did I mention its FREE?! Yes that’s right folks, the software can be downloaded for free - there’s no time limits or restrictions, you get to try everything out for free for as long as you want. Even the training course is provided at no charge. Totally worth it. Have a read below, you’ll no doubt take up the offer… but please come back here and leave a comment - let us know what you thought of it.

Used by more than 440,000+ businesses in 124 countries

See the results quicklyand have fun in the process!

Welcome inexpensive targeted traffic and convert it to sales by optimizing your website for your visitors and the search engines.

Fun while making money? Is this really possible? Yes! If you integrate two simple to use, key tools into your daily business tasks:

Web CEO software package consisting of 12 potent tools to organize your efforts
Professional Training Course in Search Engine Marketing to learn all the best practices

Some of the important tools you will find

in the package
will help you:

Get suggestions for new keywords relevant to your business and research your own keywords
Get optimization advice and tweak your Web pages in friendly editing environment
Create link partnerships
Keep track of your site&rsquos rankings and links
Get comprehensive real-time visitor reports

Download the free edition of Web CEO

and get access to the Training Course now!

Speed up your Link Exchange Program!

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:11:37 +0000

Link Exchanges are a very time consuming project. The time it takes to find the sites to exchange with, contact them and place a link on your page can seem like an eternity. The hardest part about link exchanges isn’t the research, it’s the waiting. This article will give you some tips to help speed response time to your requests.

“How long does it normally take?” you ask. The average wait can be 2 to 3 weeks, sometimes even longer. The reason for this is that many people operate their web site as a hobby or side business and may not be on top of their email. Keep these timeframes in mind before you judge the successfulness of a link campaign.

The first step is to find sites related to your web site that DO NOT have a large directory of links posted. You want to link to sites that have less than 100 links on their link page. Their Page Rank (PR) should be at least equal to yours. Higher is better, so always aim for the heavy hitters.

Now, on to the business of saving you time.

Once you have located a site to contact, send a short but poignant email. If your email is too long, it may not be read. What should be in your email? First of all, your email should be personalized. Don’t send the same email to dozens of people, send one at a time. This will help avoid being thought of as a spammer. The personalized touch shows you are serious and that the email was sent by a real person. Nothing says “this is of little importance to me” like a form letter, so avoid using them.

The letter should also include:
The HTML code to your text ad. This will make it easier for people to add your link to their site.
A link to your link page. This will make easier for whom ever you are requesting a link from to find your page.

Also, if they ask for you to link first, do so. If you have already been to their site (and certainly you should have if you are requesting a link), you will more than likely know if they want a good faith link up. The email you send them should have a confirmation that their link is up and that you are requesting a reciprocal link.

Once you make contact with the web site owner, how long will you wait? A week? Two weeks? Honestly, it may be a month before you see your link unless you show some persistence. It doesn’t always depend on how often they do updates. I would contact them once a week after your initial inquiry after checking their site first. They may have placed a link up without notifying you.

So, in summary:

Spend time finding sites that will be an asset to your enterprise to save time by not corresponding with those that won’t.
Succinct, personalized E-mails
Include all coding and links necessary to make it easy on the site you want to exchange with
Research their link policy ahead of time
Be persistent

Link exchanges are very time consuming. It takes patients and great recorded keeping to keep track of who has and has not added you. I do this with an excel spread sheet. It makes keeping track a lot easier to do. Especially, if you are doing large link campaigns.

Good luck.

Contribution by: Joe Balestrino

Beware! Automatic Search Engine Submission

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:00:01 +0000

Submitting your website to search engines is the first and the most basic step a webmaster takes to get the word out about his/her new website. There was a time when this was a very long and tedious process, where one had to go through many different search engines, and submit their websites manually, but now there are many services, which promise that they will automatically submit your website, for a low cost, thereby saving you a lot of time and hassle.

So are their claims genuine?
Should you go with them?
Or is it better to do this boring and tedious job manually?

This article aims to answer these questions.

I bet you’ve come across a few statements like these below….

“We will submit your website to 10,000 search engines for only $30″

“Get listed in 1000 search engines for only $15″

These are the sort of claims you would have probably read on many websites, offering search engine submission services. It is strictly advised against using such services, due to many reasons, discussed below.

Firstly, there are at the most 10 major search engines, which send 95% of the traffic to all websites, and the other 5% are usually free for all (FFA) search engines, which just take in submissions, and may rank your site at the top for a short period, and will lower your position as soon as a new load of submissions come in. Even if they do send you little traffic it is likely to be untargeted. It is also to be noted that most FFA search engines are topic specific. Another danger with these types of search engines is that your email address is most likely to be sold to third parties and ultimately your inbox filled with spam, and when you are going for a 1000 submissions, there is no way to find out which search engine actually sold your email address.

There are some other services which actually claim to submit your website free to these search engines, now as the saying goes ¡§there is no free lunch¡¨, they purely work with the sole intention of obtaining your email addresses for spam purposes.

Another claim made by some search engine submission services is ¡§we can get you high rankings in major search engines¡¨. This is totally untrue, and impossible. Search engine submission by these services is done by using automatic software, which opens up the site submission page, fills up the form with the help of information provided and submits it. This process has nothing to do with optimizing your website for better rankings. Some of these services also claim that they can get your entire site indexed in only a day. Once again, this is not possible as most search engines have limits on the number of pages that can be submitted to them, in a day. For e.g. with Google you can submit a maximum of five pages per day.

contribution by: D. Chow

Social Media - Good or Bad for your Brand?

seosu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:05:25 +0000

With the increasing uptake of social media sites such as Digg, Technorati, Slashdot, YouTube and MySpace, together with community bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit and Ma.gnolia, companies the world over can reach their target markets via a whole new channel.

Social networking is like viral marketing on steroids. Companies can release a new product in the morning and have it talked about by millions of users on thousands of sites by the afternoon.

Look at the bottom of this article and you’ll find a number of small icons - clicking these will allow you to share this article on your favourite bookmarking and social media sites. This is the kind of tool we’re talking about here - just give it a try and see how powerful it is.

The good news is that social media is user driven. The bad news is that social media is user driven. Yes, there’s the rub. Users are fickle creatures - they can love a product one minute and then drop it like a lead balloon the next, depending on their experience with the product, a rumor, or whether they have had their morning coffee yet. And if their experience is bad, the noise is generally louder. To protect their reputations it’s not just journalists that companies have to impress these days. It’s anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Love it or hate it, the user community now has enormous power over the online reputation of a company or brand.

Not surprisingly, businesses and individuals alike clamor for the attention and mostly enjoy the limelight that social media can bring. Others hate the intense scrutiny that often accompanies the popularity. An example is usability blogger Kim Krause Berg’s unpleasant first experience of Digg - I Don’t Digg Being Dugg.

Online communities can even bring a site to its knees. Marketers are calling it the “Digg Effect” or the “Slashdot Effect”. Buzz for a site can cause more than good or bad publicity. As Kim found out, the effect can cause traffic overload sometimes resulting in site downtime and lost business.

Social media can also kill the reputation of a brand instantly. Take the Microsoft Windows Vista Laptop Scandal for instance. No stranger to the benefits of social media, Microsoft had allegedly tried to exploit the power of the blogosphere at the end of last year, by sending a number of A-list bloggers a free Acer Ferrari laptop loaded with the yet-to-be-released Windows Vista and Office 2007.

The pitch was a request for the bloggers to “review” the new Windows software in their influential blogs. Many bloggers did write a review, but some did not disclose their free gift. When this fact was discovered later, the bloggers were hammered by large portions of the blogosphere for what they saw as a clear conflict of interest. Microsoft were tagged both literally and figuratively as bribers and Windows Vista was widely panned with parody tag lines such as “Vista: So Bad We Had to Give it Away”. Not a great start to an online product release.

Another example of the damage that social networking can do to a company’s online reputation is the National Pork Board of America’s recent battle with breastfeeding advocate and well-known blogger Jennifer Laycock. Jennifer was sent a harshly worded letter from the Pork Board’s representing counsel, threatening her with legal action for allegedly stealing their pro-pork slogan “Pork: The Other White Meat” in a pro-breastfeeding t-shirt she had designed that read “The Other White Milk”.

The letter suggested that their case for trademark infringement was probably solid. Unfortunately for the Pork Board, the poorly-worded letter also suggested that they were insensitive to breastfeeding mothers and the plight of starving infants. The Pork Board didn’t count on Jennifer’s influence in the blogosphere and the power of social networking to carry her defiant response to the world. The Pork Board ended up receiving bags of hate mail and thousands of flame emails via their online contact form, forcing them to issue a public apology to Jennifer from the Board’s CEO and a generous donation to the Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio in order to save face.

To their credit, the Pork Board did the right thing. They also made sure that all persons who complained about their approach to Jennifer received a polite, measured email response from the CEO. As a former PR consultant myself, I tip my hat at them. Having the apology come from the very top is smart. It demonstrates how seriously they took the complaints. The wording of the complainant response is polite and restrained. Addressing each and every complainer personally is impressive. It would’ve been tempting to ignore all the flames and issue some stock standard release.

Their choice of legal team may have been questionable, but the Pork Board’s public relations team mobilized quickly, upgraded to full damage control mode and did a great job of mopping up the PR mess before it spread too far. Social media might have damaged them, but the Pork Board’s reputation was ultimately salvaged by quick thinking and a swift online response.

Such situations underscore the growing importance of online reputation management (ORM) in our Web 2.0, social media-driven world. Companies should be tracking their online reputation on a daily basis to check for negative commentary via social media in order to avert potential PR disasters. Major search marketing players such as Andy Beal recognized the potential growth in ORM a long time ago. But I wonder how many PR/Search Marketing agencies currently offer this service?

With brand reputation increasingly at risk, you can be sure the smart agencies will be adding ORM to their service offerings faster than you can say “Can you Digg it?”

About the Author: Kalena Jordan

Kalena Jordan is one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

SEO Terms Explained

seosu — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:30:12 +0000

The importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a major factor in how well a business / website does online. Business owners and webmasters alike have been doing whats needed in order to rank well in search engines, but whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring professional SEO experts - its always important to understand the basic terms used within this industry.

Understand the techinical terms / language used in SEO can be a pain in the back side. This glossary seeks to remedy that situation, explaining specialist SEO terms in plain English…

AdWords

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

Algorithm

A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings more advertising revenue).

Article PR

The submitting of free reprint articles to many article submission sites and article distribution lists in order to increase your website’s search engine ranking and Google PageRank. (In this sense, the “PR” stands for PageRank.) Like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you’re proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the “PR” stands for Public Relations.)

Article distribution lists

User groups (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, Google, Smartgroups, and Topica groups) which accept email submissions of articles in text format, and then distribute these articles via email to all of the members of the group. See also ‘article PR’.

Article submission sites

Websites which act as repositories of free reprint articles. Authors visit these sites to submit their articles free of charge, and webmasters visit to find articles to use on their websites free of charge. Article submission sites generate revenue by selling advertising space on their websites. See also ‘article PR’.

Backlink

A text link to your website from another website. See also ‘link’.

Copy

The words used on your website.

Copywriter

A professional writer who specializes in the writing of advertising copy (compelling, engaging words promoting a particular product or service). See also ‘SEO copywriter’ and ‘web copywriter’.

Crawl

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door.

Domain Name

The virtual address of your website (normally in the form www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links back to your site.

eZine

An electronic magazine. Most publishers of ezines are desperate for content and gladly publish well written, helpful articles and give you full credit as author, including a link to your website.

Flash

A technology used to create animated web pages (and page elements).

Free Reprint Article

An article written by you and made freely available to other webmasters to publish on their websites. See also ‘article PR’.

Google

The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes so long to increase your ranking!

Google AdWords

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

Google PageRank

How Google scores a website’s importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar (from http://toolbar.google.com), you can view the PR of any site you visit.

Google Toolbar

A free tool you can download. It becomes part of your browser toolbar. It’s most useful features are it’s PageRank display (which allows you to view the PR of any site you visit) and it’s AutoFill function (when you’re filling out an online form, you can click AutoFill, and it enters all the standard information automatically, including Name, Address, Zip code/Postcode, Phone Number, Email Address, Business Name, Credit Card Number (password protected), etc.) Once you’ve downloaded and installed the toolbar, you may need to set up how you’d like it to look and work by clicking Options (setup is very easy). NOTE: Google does record some information (mostly regarding sites visited).

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the coding language used to create much of the information on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read the HTML code and display the page that code describes.

Internet

An interconnected network of computers around the world.

JavaScript

A programming language used to create dynamic website pages (e.g. interactivity).

keyword

A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target ‘keyword phrases’ because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank highly for them.

Keyword Density

A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

Keyword Phrase

A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches.

Link

A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word or image is a link.

Link path

Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2, page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search engine ‘spiders’ and ‘robots’ use text links to jump from page to page as they gather information about it, so it’s a good idea to allow them traverse your entire site via text links. (See ‘Link paths’ on p.21. for further information.)

Link partner

A webmaster who is willing to put a link to your website on their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking.

Link popularity

The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a number of methods to increase their site’s link popularity including article PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link directories.

Link text

The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include your keyword.

Meta tag

A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which describes some aspect of that page. These meta tags are read by the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search.

Natural search results

The ‘real’ search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.

Organic search results

See ‘natural search results’.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising)

See ‘Sponsored Links’.

PageRank

See ‘Google PageRank’.

Rank

Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for a particular word at a search engine.

Reciprocal link

A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized.

Robot

See ‘Spider’.

Robots.txt file

A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site’s root directory on the web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. See ‘Optimizing your web ’ on p.22. for more information.)

Sandbox

Many SEO experts believe that Google ‘sandboxes’ new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word.

SEO copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who is not only proficient at web copy, but also experienced in writing copy which is optimized for search engines (and will therefore help you achieve a better search engine ranking for your website).

Search engine

A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Site map

A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site (and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web.

SPAM

Generally refers to unwanted and unrequested email sent en-masse to private email addresses. Also used to refer to websites which appear high in search results without having any useful content. The creators of these sites set them up simply to cash in on their high ranking by selling advertising space, links to other sites, or by linking to other sites of their own and thereby increasing the ranking of those sites. The search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and already have very efficient ways to detect SPAM websites and penalize them.

Spider

Submit

You can submit your domain name to the search engines so that their ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ will crawl your site. You can also submit articles to ‘article submission sites’ in order to have them published on the Internet.

Text link

A word on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. Text links are normally blue and underlined. Text links are what ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ use to jump from page to page and website to website.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a particular page published on the Internet. Normally in the form http://www.yourbusinessname.com/AWebPage.htm.

Web copy

See ‘copy’.

Web copywriter

A ‘copywriter’ who understands the unique requirements of writing for an online medium.

Webmaster

A person responsible for the management of a particular website.

Wordcount

The number of words on a particular web page.

World Wide Web (WWW)

The vast array of documents published on the Internet. It is estimated that the World Wide Web now consists of approximately 11.5 billion pages.

Original contribution: Glenn Murray

The importance of Backlinks?

seosu — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:59:41 +0000

When setting up your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on Google there are several factors you need to look at in order to obtain a high rank on their search engine. Of course your content and meta tags must be inline with positive density percentages and reciprocal links. Google then takes your website and performs a mathematic equation and places a numeric value on your website depending on one of the most important features, reciprocal or back links.

A back link and reciprocal link are identical. They both say the same thing to the Google engine, that your site should be ranked higher in the order because other people find value in what your website has to offer, thus they provide a link to your site. In turn, you keep a closed loop by reciprocating the favor to the other website by extending the same courtesy of a back link. Thus creating a solid network connection. Google likes to see interconnectivity and will reward your website well for planning it this way.

There are drawbacks to the equation. As things change a website that you are affiliated with may drop a hyperlink or a page may get accidentally deleted. When the Google robot goes through your website and finds a dead link it notes that you aren’t keeping good care of your website and punishes your web rank by reducing its point value. If you wish to know what your sites current point value is download The Google Toolbar and search for your website www.yourwebsitename.com in the box and perform a Google web search. Upon reading the full URL, Google will go directly to your site first thus pulling up your home page. There on the toolbar will be a page rank for your website between 1 and 10. 1 being a less visited and noted website and 10 a site that screams traffic 24/7.

Some of the individuals you share reciprocal links with may in fact scan all their links for continuity, should they receive a bounce back for a broken link on your website you can be assured you will receive an email from them. Keeping your website in balance with other sites you share links with will keep the Google engine happy. If you go off and add a company that is not Google friendly, meaning they have no back links you may also lose points.

By Jakob Jelling

What is are Reciprocal Links?

seosu — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:17:46 +0000

Reciprocal Links are a mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search engines (especially Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links.

Many believe that websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized. However, if the sites linking to eachother have similar content and benefit from linking then I personally don’t think its a bad thing.

Of course its always better to have one-way (incoming) links - they are much more valuable, but reciprocal links are a good way of starting your seo campaign for a new site.