You should also check out other articles relevant to the SEO for blogs: How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe and SEO for WordPress Part 1

Google Sitemaps

To keep the quality of the web search high Google spiders constantly crawl the Internet searching for new or updated content. The main way Google discovers a new page is following links that point to it. Some pages don’t have enough incoming links to be quickly discovered by Google, and it may take weeks for them to appear in the index.

To speed up the indexing process Google allows webmasters to upload a specially formatted XML file called ‘sitemap’ containing links to all the pages in a given website and the frequency of their updates. This not just increases the chances of a new or updated page to be picked up quickly, but also optimizes the indexing job, as instead of random crawl spiders now can be sent directly to the new content.Although I can say that from my experience WordPress blogs are usually indexed without much problem, it is still can be useful to create a Google account and upload a sitemap file for your blog. There is a handy plugin for WordPress that allows you to create sitemaps with little or now knowledge of PHP and XML. Check it out:

• Wordpress Sitemaps plugin from Arne Brachhold. It builds a new XML sitemap every time a post is written or updated. It can set priority of a page based on the number of comments to it. It also has a friendly user interface to customize all the parameters. Plus there is an informative video tutorial explaining how to install the plugin and work with sitemaps by Andre Chaperon.
• To display your XML sitemap in your blog just as a regular sitemap (which would help visitor to browse your blog) use SiteView plugin . The page is in German, so here is the link to the automated English translation .

Ping Servers

Each time you publish or update a post your WordPress engine attempts to notify ping servers about the new content on your site. Ping servers provide lists of recently updated blogs to blog search engines and aggregators helping them to show the most recent content to their users. You can manage the list of servers to ping in Options -> Writing section. The more servers you ping the better, but be aware that as your blog notifies a long list of ping servers this an extra load on your webserver making you wait every time you publish updates. The best solution is to choose a few popular ping servers that can guarantee that all the major blog search engines and aggregators will be notified about your new post. Here is the list of recommended ping servers:

• http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
• http://rpc.newsgator.com
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

A comprehensive list of active ping servers you can find on Wikipedia

Valid (X)HTML

Only a small percentage of pages in the Web fully confirm the standards of W3C, and even some big websites allow having their web documents not validating against the W3C rules. The modern major browsers are capable to display such pages regardless the errors in HTML and search engine crawlers are mostly able to index them. But sometimes structure (X)HTML errors may prevent your pages to be indexed correctly. To make sure that your pages are valid use the W3C validation service or one of the plugins for your browser, such as for example, this one based on Tidy.

Post Content above Navigation

Your blog navigation and the content of your sidebar are repeated across the blog while the content of your posts is mostly unique. It would be a wise decision to put your posts above the navigation so that to get advantage of the content prominence (one of the factors used to judge the relevance of a page).

To see how the content and sidebar navigation are arranged in your pages use a text-only browser like Lynx, or temporarily disable CSS in your browser options. Or better yet, install Web Developer plugin for Firefox that allows you to enable and disable CSS in one click. Once you disabled CSS you can see you blog just as search engines crawlers see it.

The designers of WordPress themes place post content above navigation and sidebar by editing CSS file associated with the theme. The most popular blog layout – posts to the left, sidebar to the right – doesn’t require any special adjustments as sidebar appears after the post content. But when you want to use a three column layout or a layout with a left sidebar – you have to make sure that the theme you are going to use puts posts above the navigation and sidebars in the CSS disabled view.

Showing Teaser Text or Text Excerpts on the Home Page

If you prefer to write long posts you should think about showing only a part of them on your page. The reasons for that are:

• decreased loading time for your home page,
• improved visibility of you previous posts,
• precaution against duplicate content penalties.

Simply put tag after the first or second paragraph of your post and make sure that the first lines displayed on the home page are capable to capture the attention of your readers motivating them to read the entire post. Copyblogger gives excellent tips on writing captivating teaser text.

Some more resources on SEO for Blogs:

The importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO

SEO for Blogs and RSS

This article is largely based on SEO für WordPress – die besten Tipps – Teil 2 by Michael Wöhrer with some new input by me.

WordPress

Below is a rundown of useful tips that can help improving your blog’s position in search engines as well as providing some additional benefits to your readers.

Permalinks

By default URLs to WordPress posts look like this: http://yourblog.com/?p=321. This URL calls the PHP engine to show a post or a page identified by its number, in this case 321.

This is a totally valid URL and search engines (at least the major ones: Google, Yahoo and MSN) no longer have problems with indexing dynamic content. However, a wise webmaster is aware that having keywords in URL is an advantage over meaningless parameter values. Keywords in URL are in fact one of the biggest factors determining the relevancy of a page to a specific search query.The permalinks feature of WordPress allows creating meaningful URLs easily. Just go to Options page of your blog’s control panel and click the menu item ‘permalinks’. Here you can choose, for example, date based permalinks, which include the title of your post, as well as the month and the day of posting. While definitely an improvement over the post-id based URL, it is still not perfect. What the use of these month-and-day? Let’s get rid of it and click the ‘Custom’ option and type /%postname%.html in. Now your URL will look like http://yourblog.com/post-title.html. You can further customize the post URL by providing a different ‘post slug’ when writing your posts. The post-slug option you can find in the right sidebar of your post editing page.

More info on customizing the permalinks structure.

Page Title

Page title is another important factor influencing the relevancy score of a page in search engine index. Besides, title is what will be shown in a search engine results page as a link to your post. Again, the default WordPress setting for this feature is far from ideal. The fresh install of a WP blog shows page titles as The Name of Your Blog » Post Title. Considering that this structure is propagated to every page in your blog you might suffer from duplicate content penalty (see a more detailed description of duplicate problem here). This can be sorted out by editing the header file of your current WordPress theme. In fact, many theme authors are aware of this problem and publish their themes with this problem already fixed.

In your dashboard go to presentation page and click theme editor menu item. Then locate and click header link in the right sidebar. This will open the text editor with the upper part of the source code shared by all the posts and pages in your blog.

Take a look at this piece of code:

So let’s delete all but the last one:

No wait! What about the home page? This will leave it without the title! Change the code as follows:

Now this will check, if it is a home page and assign your blog name as its title, using the post title otherwise.

Headings Structure

A clear headings structure is beneficial both for users, as it improves readability, and for search engines, as it describes the content of the page. Generally it is advised to have one h1 tag per page – at best containing your post title, a few h2 for subtopics of your post and a few h3 whenever necessary to emphasize or give a title to a paragraph in your subtopics. This is just guidelines; you are not required to create h2 and h3 headings in every post you write, for example in a one consisting of two paragraphs. But keep in mind that longer posts should be logically divided into subtopics to make users stop at headings while skimming the page (a common reading pattern in the Web).

Do not overuse headings! Once webmasters had realized the weight the keywords in headings had in relevancy scores, headings became often abused. Numerous headings sometimes disguised with CSS as text of normal height and weight were filled with target keywords to manipulate the relevancy algorithms of search engines. This practice, however, now is detectable by SEs, and you might get punished for using it.

Changing headings structure requires a little bit more advanced skills and some knowledge of PHP and CSS. Do always backup your current theme before editing it!

Alt Tags for Pictures

Whenever you insert an image into your post take your time and add a meaningful description of in as an alt tag. There are two basic advantages of doing so. First, there are a lot of your potential readers browsing the Net with images turned off. In this case, instead of an empty box, they will see the description. Or a visually impaired user can benefit from the description when his text-to-voice software recites it for him. Another advantage is that your page can be discovered by users doing image search by keywords you provided in the alt description.

Tagging

Tags are a relatively new and powerful feature in website promotion. Not just page title and the content of headings determine the relevancy of content. To even greater degree it’s the job of links pointing to the page. Keywords in link anchor and URL are the most important factor that determines which pages will be shown to a given query.

Linked tags you place in your post have far less power than those ones linking to your page. But they still help search engine to determine to which topic your post belongs, thus increasing your topical score.

Here are some popular tagging plugins for WordPress:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Jerome Keywords
• Category Tagging

Links to Similar Posts

This is one of the most powerful features for blog promotion. It helps users discover similar posts they’ve just read. This is much more convenient than browsing through archives or searching for a keyword. In fact, this is one of the factors that made YouTube so successful: links to similar videos made user stay at YouTube and spend in average 30 minutes a day there.

In SEO terms such links help building tight topical linking structures, again to the benefit of your blog.

This functionality can be added to your blog by installing this extension plugin to Jerome Keywords

Continued: SEO for WordPress Part II

Largely based on article SEO für WordPress – die besten Tipps – Teil 1 with some new input by me.

The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority – such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be “a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target sites”.

How active are these splogs? This question calls for a little experiment; similar to one described by P. Kolari, A. Java and T. Finn in their paper “Characterizing the Splogosphere”. They did their experiment in early 2006, and I am going to repeat it at a smaller scale now, in the early 2007.

Every time a blog is updated it sends a ping to one of many ping servers in order to invite search engine crawlers to index the new post. I am going to use ping data provided by one of the most popular ping servers – Weblogs.com. Due to the limited scale of the experiment I will be using the smaller dataset covering the last 5 minutes of pings. It’s pretty big though: 8117 pings. I’ve written a simple Java application to parse the XML file and extract URLs and names of the blogs in the dataset. Also some of the blogs were classified by blog platform: Blogspot (Blogger), MySpace, Spaces.Live.com etc. I have discovered a number of popular blog services, that I haven’t come across yet, such as a popular Taiwanese site Wretch.cc, or Italian Libero.it and Splinder.com. I was surprised to see how few pings came from some other popular blog services; Livejournal for instance had only 6 pings! Obviously LJ doesn’t rely much on Weblogs.com, but LJ has little to do with my experiment, as it is known to have very small percentage of splogs.

So below is a break down of blogs by platform, according to a ping dataset retrieved on a Sunday evening, Feb. 11. Do not mix blogs under Wordpress.com category with blogs using WP as a blog engine. Only those blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are included into this category.

Fig. 1 Popular Blog Services in the Sunday Weblogs Dataset

The huge ‘Rest’ category consists of standalone blogs and blogs hosted by minor blog services.
A few words on the blogs in the dataset: a lot of blogs were not in English, I think as much as 70% of them. For instance, all Wretch.cc blogs and many Spaces.Live.com ones are in Chinese, there are also a lot of blogs in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and German.

Once dataset was downloaded and processed I started manually reviewing the blogs and discovering spam. Of course I couldn’t visit all the 8117 blogs, so I randomly selected 20 blogs from each category.

How did I classify spam blogs? While blogs with automatically generated content or dictionary dumps are easily classified as spam, those with plagiarized content or in foreign languages required a bit more of effort. Nepotistic links with keyword stuffed anchors were a good indicator of spam. Copyscape.com helped much discovering plagiarized posts. And finally, affiliate and contextual ads were the final complement in the spam classification problem. It has to be noted that very few blogs in languages other than English were classified as spam. I can be sure about my judgment of German and Russian blogs, since I know these languages, but when dealing with others I relied only on excessive advertising and nepotistic links as spam indicators. I skipped Wretch.cc and Explog.jp samples as I was totally unable to judge Chinese and Japanese blogs. In total of 177 reviewed blogs 36 were classified as spam.

Below you can see two charts, one indicating a ratio of spam within a sample, and another showing how much each blog platform contributes to the total amount of spam.

Fig 2. Percentage of Spam Blogs in 20-blogs Samples

Fig 3. Contribution of Each Category to the Total Blog Spam

With the notable exception of Blogspot, the majority of blogs hosted by popular blog services are spam free. Of course one can question their quality, as many of them are of little value to others. But let’s not forget that most of those blogs are private diaries or personal playgrounds never intended to have big audiences; and as long as they have value to the author and his/her close circle of friends we can’t call them spam.

Thus, according to my reviews blogs hosted by beon.ru, Libero.it, Spaces.Live.com, Livejournal.com, splinder.com, and typepad.com showed no instances of blog spam in 20 blogs samples. Among 20 MySpace blogs I have discovered 1 splog, and Wordpress.com sample contained 2. The popular Google’s service Blogspot has confirmed its unofficial name of Splogspot with 50% spam ratio. ‘The Rest’ category comprised by standalone blogs and blogs attached to commercial sites showed even bigger proportion of blog spam: 23 blogs of 27 reviewed were classified as spam. The relatively low number of splogs hosted by public services can be explained by anti-spam actions taken by the administration of such services. The standalone splogs, however, are not subject to such moderation, which allows them to thrive producing tons of junk content for SE crawlers and overloading ping servers with spam pings.

As you might have noticed I used the same style of charts introduced by the famous blog ModernLifeIsRubbish.co.uk, which has an excellent tutorial on how to create pretty pie charts in Adobe Illustrator. Highly recommended!

If anybody is interested, here is the dataset I used: Dataset

But five top directories are not enough. As I said above, I usually do at least 10 manual submissions, so I have to choose my directories wisely. The only two ratings easily available to web users to judge the quality of websites and webpages are Alexa Rating and Google PageRank. Both are flawed and often do not reflect the real authority or traffic of a page. But since there is nothing better I have to stick to these two when deciding if a directory is worth submitting to. Of course, one must not forget the power of themed sites. Whenever I have a choice between a general directory and a directory focusing on my topic – I choose the latter.

To make the choosing process easier I have obtained a list of article directories, their names and URLs. Yesterday, I downloaded Eclipse and wrote a simple Java application that queries Alexa Web Service for rating data, and makes PageRank lookups. I’ve run this application on my list this morning and here are the top results with Alexa rating < 100,000 sorted ascending:

The complete table has over 550 directories and can be downloaded as a tab delimited text file or as an Excel sheet.

PhraseRank

From the very beginning, Google’s distinctive feature was the hyperlink induced popularity ranking. Algorithms using text content to evaluate relevancy of web documents played much lesser role. The reasons to this disparity are purely pragmatical: authors of web documents have total control over their content and are at liberty to modify it to deceive ranking algorithms and get higher positions in search results. Hyperlinks however are much less influenced by webmasters and provide a more reliable measure of authority (link weight) and relevance (link anchor).

Now Google introduces a new way to evaluate relevancy of a web document based on its content which might prove itself to be immune to manipulation attempts such as adjusting the keyword density or the automated generation of keyword-rich web pages. Actually the new system can become a remedy against MFA (Made For AdSense) sites that display meaningless scrapped keyword-rich content with paid contextual advertisements.

The new indexing and ranking system is based on the use of phrases. From a user’s point of view search queries in most cases are phrases or ‘concepts’, rather than sets of keywords. Despite this, conventional indexing systems still rely on individual terms. Indexing of phrases is avoided because the identification of all possible combinations of words would require immense computational and memory resources. For example a lexicon of 200,000 unique words could have approx. 3.2×10²⁶ phrases – with no system capable to store such a great amount of data in memory or efficiently manipulate it.

This problem is solved in the new system, which identifies phrases that are sufficiently frequent and distinguished in the crawled documents. By detecting phrases and indicating that they are ‘valid’ the system can identify multiple word phrases. This eliminates the need to index all the possible combinations of words in phrases that vary in length.

Another important feature is the ability of phrases to predict the presence of other phrases in a webpage. For example a phrase ‘President of the United States’ indicates that the document most likely contains the phrase ‘White House’. For every phrase the system creates a corresponding list of related phrases ordered according to their significance. This enables the system to detect spam pages based on the excessive appearance of related phrases.

So how does the system work?

Indexing

The process of indexing includes identification of phrases and related phrases. The system analyses the sequences of words and marks them as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ phrases. ‘Good’ phrases are those that occur quite frequently across the indexed documents or have a distinguished appearance, e.g. are delimited by markup tags, punctuation or other markers. Another distinguishing feature is the ability of a ‘good’ phrase to predict a related phrase – such as in above example ‘President of the United States’ predicts ‘White House’. Some phrases, for example, idioms (‘out of the blue’, ‘sitting ducks’ etc) tend to appear with different and unrelated phrases, and are not able to predict anything. Therefore idioms and colloquisms don’t count as ‘good’ phrases.

At the end of the indexing process the system produces a list of valid phrases along with a co-occurrence matrix as a predictive measure. An estimated size of the list is 650,000 phrases.

List of good phrases, or posting list has the following structure:

Phrase i: list:(document d, [list: related phrase count][related phrase information])

For each phrase i there is a list of documents d containing i. For each document there is the number of occurrences of the phrases related to i, and a bit vector containing the information about related phrases.

Bit vector consists of pair of bits. In each pair the value 1 in the first position indicates that a related phrase k is present in the document d; otherwise the value is 0. The second position indicates if a phrase l related to phrase k is present. The related phrases l of related phrases k are called ‘secondary related phrases of i‘. Bit vector is very important as it is used to determine relevancy of a document when the search results are ranked.

Example of a bit vector

Phrase i: document d: [related phrase counts:{3,4,3,0,0,2,1,1,0}]

related phrase bit vector:={11 11 10 00 00 10 10 10 01}

For phrase i there are 9 related phrases k. Now take a look at the bit vector. First pair indicates that both related phrase k₁ and one of its related phrases l are present in the document. Fourth and fifth pairs show that neither k₄ and k₅ nor their related phrases l are found, The last pair shows that although there is no occurrence of phrase k₉ one of its related phrases l is present.

For each phrase i the documents d are sorted in declining order according to the information retrieval-type score assigned to them with respect to the given phrase. This pre-ranking significantly improves performance of the system. To calculate ranking score the system can employ a link-popularity algorithm such as PageRank.

Phrase Identification. For a detailed description of the process please refer to [1] (paragraphs 0026 - 0102)

Searching

The search system receives a query and identifies phrases in it. Once the set Q of query phrases in created; the system retrieves posting lists for the query phrases in Q. Posting lists are intersected to determine, which documents appear on more than one list.

Phrase Based Document Ranking

Documents can be ranked according to their bit vector values. A document containing the most relevant phrases has the highest bit vector value and gets the highest ranking. Note that this approach uses the information about related phrases to rank search results, so even documents with low frequency of the query phrase q can get high rankings provided they have sufficiently high frequency of related phrases.

To produce the final ranking score the ‘body hit’ scores calculated above are combined with ‘anchor hit’ scores in a form of a linear function with adjustable weights, e.g.

Rank = (body hit score)*weight1 + (anchor hit score)*weight2.

For each phrase the indexing system also creates lists of documents in which the given phrase is an anchor in incoming and outgoing links. So the anchor hit score for document d can be calculated as a function of the related phrase bit vectors of the query phrases Q, where Q is an anchor term in a document that references document d.

Detecting Spam Documents

The new phrase based approach enables the future indexing system to detect and penalize spam documents. A statistical analysis of the document collection shows that normally a web page contains 8 to 20 related phrases. A spam document that deceives a search ranking system with an inflated keyword density is expected to contain an excessive number of related phrases, like 100 and more. Therefore by identifying deviations from the expected number of related phrases can be used to detect and battle spam in search results.

This system can also be applied to identify automatically generated content intended to be displayed along with paid contextual advertisements. Such sort of content is often used in MFA (Made for AdSense) sites and is nothing more than a meaningless sequence of keyword-rich text blocks scrapped from other websites, RSS feeds or search engine results pages. Although the conventional indexing systems are already quite effective in preventing these sites from showing in search results for popular terms, they still can occasionally appear in results for long-tail terms.

To Sum Up

The new indexing and ranking system proposed by Google uses page content (phrases) to rank search results in a way that is highly immune to manipulation attempts. The properties of a web document used to rank documents, i.e. phrases and relations between them, are influenced by the properties of all the other documents in the index, and therefore are out of control of webmasters.

The phrase based approach also enhances the ability of search engines to detect unnatural patterns in text content, such as inflated keyword density or scrapped content. It also enables search engine to provide more topically focused results by culling documents covering multiple topics.

The new approach can be used as an augmentation to the existing link-popularity based ranking systems as an additional parameter in the final score formula. Link popularity values are also used to pre-rank documents in posting lists to improve the performance of the search system.

Reference:

1. Patterson, A.L. “Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system“, United States Patent Application, 12.28.2006

Sometimes I check my old ‘link exchange’ e-mail account I used to build link popularity for my very first website. There are lots of people contacting me daily with exchange proposals. Well, not actually people – they are mostly bots.

Probably one of the reasons I still maintain that e-mail is that those requests are a source of a persistent amusement for me. One example: a request in pink letters with images of dancing puppies and bouncing hearts written by a ‘blond chick’ (picture attached) asking me to link to her pharmacy site! Or maybe I just enjoy reading the admiring comments on the outlook and content of my site that precede every exchange proposal?

Link exchange scam is an interesting theme for a study per se and still awaits its researchers. But in the meanwhile the SEO community is being successful in summarizing the guidelines for the most perfect link exchange scam.

Filing an Exchange Request

• Send an automated e-mail request or use a bot to submit it via an online contact form. Combining the both methods is preferred whenever possible.
• Use a free e-mail account such as Gmail, or better yet, some foreign free e-mail service to send your message. Sending a duplicate request from your company account is also beneficial.
• Do send follow up e-mails. Sooner or later your victim will give up and read one of them.
• Send minimum 100-300 automated requests every day. Push your mail server’s spam detection to the limits.
• Make sure that the website you are trying to contact is absolutely unrelated to your field.
• Send your request to every e-mail address you can find on the target site. Let the sales or customer support guys forward them to the webmaster.

Writing Your Request

• Address properly. No names required. Best thing is to use the website’s title or at least the URL: “Dear Blue Cheap Online Widgets”, or “Hello www.bluewidgets.com”
• Kiss ass. Tell your victims how much you adore their websites. Do use superlatives.
• Inform. Let your recipients know how important PageRank and incoming links are. Go in depth with the mysteries and magnificence of the PageRank and how the high PageRank will ensure them the first positions in Google.
• Scare. Notify them that their link popularity is low, and their positions in search engines are threatened.
• Share a secret. Tell them that the three-way linking is more effective, since search engines detect and ignore two-way links.
• Threaten. Notify them that their link will be removed from your high quality directory if they do not provide a link back in the specified number of days.
• Show your scale. Make your message easily detectable as a bulk sending by setting a different font size and color for the recipient’s address and site name.
• Be unofficial. Use the Internet argot in your e-mail. Like ‘u r’ instead of ‘you are’. This is the Internet – formalism is unacceptable.
• Threaten them again. With hundreds of reminder e-mails.
• Use a girl’s name. Most webmasters are male and should not resist a lady asking for a favor.

Prepare a Sound Links Page

• Your link page must have at least 100 outgoing links, preferably uncategorized. Make sure that minimum 50% point to pharmacy and gambling websites.
• Your proposed links page has to be deeply buried in a keyword-rich URL like: http://www.yoursite.com/widgets/cheap-widgets/amazingly-cheap-widgets/widgets-links/
• Make sure the links page URL contains at least one poison keyword like ‘links’, ‘partners’, ‘directory’, or ‘exchanges’.
• Alternatively provide a dynamic URL with a minimum of 100 characters of meaningless parameter values.
• Choose links pages that are in Google’s supplementary index.
• The PageRank for your page has to be between 0 and 3 with 0 being the best.
• Make your page look more credible by putting AdSense ads on it. “Well, if Google approves this page, then it is worth having a link from it”.
• Disguise your low PR links pages by opening them in a high PR frame.
• Orphan pages are the best.

Use SEO Tricks

• Link to your partners using one of the following options:
  • ‘nofollow’ attribute
  • javascript links
  • 302 ‘Found’ redirects
• Edit robots.txt to restrict spiders from indexing your links pages.
• Double protect your links pages from indexing by adding meta ‘noindex,nofollow’ tags.

The above guidelines are compiled from my own experience and the hilarious thread ‘SEO Link Exchange’ from the WebMasterWorld forum.

The list can be continued. Any suggestions?

Related Link: Nouveau Riche Scam Top ten RE scams

Why invest in SEM in small to medium European markets

According to SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, the investment in SEM in the US will reach $11 billion in 2011.

Let’s face it. When it comes to new technologies and adjusting to new technology, no one can bet the US. It’s a very big market and there is an infrastructure built to progress new ideas and specially investment in new industries.

The “start up” never works that well outside the US, and most of the time it’s not even because of financial matters. Americans think “future”, always, even if when they vote conservatively.

So SEM seemed a logical thing when search engines gained importance in the sales process. People research things online – people will shop more and more online or at least will make decisions based on web research.

But that’s easy.

Let’s talk SEM in emerging markets.

When should one begin to think about SEO and PPC? Does it really pay to advertise online, when most of the country you are targeting does not use the Internet for shopping? Or when parents there are hesitant to discover the online world, because they still look at the tv remote with suspicion?

When you talk about the UK, France or Germany the problem isn’t the same. But let’s consider much smaller and underdeveloped markets: Portugal, Greece, etc…

I can speak about the Portuguese market because our company is Portuguese. We are considering other markets, but for now we have to stay within the confines of Portugal.

When we have a meeting with a potential client, imagine a hotel manager, we try to make him realize the benefits of investing online. He can attract costumers at a very low cost, his website should work 24/7 in that task and he should be proactive in influencing people’s minds when they search for hotels near his.

He immediately looks at us and asks the killer question: “do people search for hotels online?”.

We nod yes with a nervous smile. Sure they do.

Maybe not a lot of them, but some do. We can even tell you roughly how many. And you can think about attracting foreign costumers at a low cost. And we can provide estimates; promise certain results, concrete objectives. Do other marketing campaigns give you that? As a cool side effect, your brand image will get a makeover.

Hum… he looks interested, but unconvinced.

To give you an idea, the online advertising investment in Portugal was a mere 30 million euros in 2005 (23 million dollars). 5 million euros (3.8 million dollars) in PPC ads.

No wonder the hotel manager is reluctant. No one invests in online marketing!

So why should he?

Two words: “Low, Low cost”. Ok, three words. Sure, our market is small, but that means you can have a dominant position with a smaller investment. And if you look forward, the market will grow, and your company will be prepared. If you play your online cards right, you will be a leader.

The risk is very small too. PPC can be done with very low budgets, as low as 1 euro a day (3.8 dollars). Yes, that’s for the entire daily budget, not just a keyword. That’s emergent markets for you…

Low cost = big results. That’s our pitch.

And even if the costs are low, we, as an SEM company will make sure they will get even lower. And that the right keywords are researched, contents created, new costumers attracted.

In 2006 the growth of online adverting in Portugal will be 26%. That’s massive. Above European average.

Did he know that people that research for the keyword “holidays in Lisbon” could be interested in hotels? He didn’t. But they are. We recommend a landing page with info about the city, interesting tourist routes, where to eat, what shows to see…

He likes the idea.

We have experience doing SEO and PPC in the Portuguese market. We even do Spanish PPC. So rest assure – we tell him – we’ll deliver you results, measurable results in a short time and we have a long term plan for your online future.

He finally looks convinced and smiles.

The nervous smile comes off our faces and we shake hands. It’s difficult to get clients for SEM in Portugal, but it will only get easier in the future.

As for all emergent markets, the difficulty local SEM companies go through are not that different. First educate your potential costumer and he will understand your pitch. He should, because you give added value to his business, that’s your role.

At the end of the day, he will have a smile on his face.

Slowly he will gain more costumers online. And when the market is mature, he will think in disbelief how he didn’t see how important online adverting would become.
Nuno Hipólito
SEO consultant.
www.searchmarketing.pt

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Feedvertising is a technology that enables bloggers to run text ads in their RSS feeds. One service I discovered lately that provides such technology is Text Links Ads. If you have a Wordpress blog you can join the network, which already features such popular blogs as TechCrunch or Problogger. See an example of feedvertising: this is how an affiliate link looks like in Problogger’s RSS:

Feedvertising is very flexible. You can choose your advertisers (your affiliate links, your own products or advertisers suggested by Text Link Ads), provide your own custom prefix to the ad, such as ‘sponsored by’, ‘thanks to our sponsor’ or whatever you like, you can write your own text after the link to express your opinion about the advertised product or service. You can also let Text Links Ads to run paid links not only in your RSS but also across your entire blog.Text Links Ads provides you with a plugin customized to your blog which is easily installed and managed just as any other WordPress plugin. Unfortunately this also means that if you have a Blogger account you are not able to use this service.

Feedvertising is not a contextual ads provider so you can keep running your AdSense ads without violating the TOS. Your payouts depend on the popularity of your blog, which is measured as a combination of Technorati and Alexa rankings, and can be up to $250 per month per link for the top publishers or $40-70 for moderately popular blogs.

For more information on creating an account in Feedvertising as well as the instruction on setting up the plugin please refer to the excellent video by TubeTutorial.

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When deciding upon keyword placement we all try to get the most out of our target keywords saturation. In the same time no one wants to get penalized by accidentally inserting too many keywords in the page copy, or by including too many words between H1 tags. Since search engines would never publish the exact numbers for maximally alowed keyword frequency or keyword prominence, all we can do is just study top pages in SEPRs and make more or less informed guesses. Or we can conduct an experiment, and calculate the average numbers for top pages in the results of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. For the tables below I used data provided by WebPosition software, which calculates the average scores of the top 5 positions for dozens of keyword searches conducted by WebTrends Inc.

Of course aligning your parameters to the top averages will not guarantee you the high rankings, but it can ensure that your keyword saturation stays within the allowed boundaries.

Google Averages

Partial matching enabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive

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MSN Averages

MSN Averages: Partial matching disabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive.

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Yahoo! Averages

Partial matching disabled, Non-Exact Search, Non-Case Sensitive.

Head - words between HEAD tags, this includes TITLE

Body - words between BODY tags including:

• Headings - words in H1, H2 and H3 tags
• Link Text - anchor text of outgoing links
• Hyperlink URL - words in URL of the outgoing links
• Body Text - words in your page copy , excluding the content of ALT and COMMENT tags

Parameters’ Definitions and Calculations

Frequency

When defining keyword/key-phrase frequency we distinguish between exact, non-exact and partial matching. Exact matching means looking for the exact matches of a key-phrase. Exact matching is possible when user performs a search with quotation marks around the search terms. For example if the content of an H1 tag is “Bahamian Paradise. Bahamas Islands: All inclusive Atlantis Bahamas Deals” then the frequency of “Atlantis Bahamas” by exact match is 1 (one occurence). By non-exact matching the frequency for the same phrase is 1.5: 1 for one occurrence of ‘Atlantis’, plus 2 for two occurrences of ‘Bahamas’ divided by 2 – the number of words in the search phrase. Partial matching or keyword stemming also considers keyword modifications as matches. In this case the frequency for “Atlantis Bahamas” will be 2 – word ‘Bahamian’ is considered as a match to ‘Bahamas’.

Words

This is simply the total number of words in the analyzed area. Be careful not to put too many words between H1 or H2 tags, or in link text, since it might be considered as spam.

Keyword weight

This parameter determines the degree to which a specific keyword or phrase dominates in any given area. This parameter is calculated by multiplying number of words in the key-phrase by its frequency and dividing it by the total number of words in the area.

Average Prominence

This parameter shows how close are your keyword or phrase to the start of the area. Most of the search algorithms assign more weight to more prominent keywords, and therefore it is beneficial to have your targeted keywords in the top of the page or in the beginning of the page copy. However in order to avoid spam penalties the keyword distribution must be as natural as possible, and you might find it necessary to put a keyword in the middle or at the end of your page. Prominence calculation is:

• If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.
• If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be around 50%.
• If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.
• If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.
• If the area consists of multiple parts (like having 3 heading tags on the page) then all three areas are treated as a single contiguous area when prominence is calculated.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic – a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the ‘next/previous entries’ pages – those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not ‘human-friendly’.

Trackback URLs. Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like ‘www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/’ its trackback URL will be ‘www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/’.

Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn’t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar. (see a thread here)

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

Solving the Duplicate Content Issue in WordPress

Adding ‘noindex, follow’ tags

What can you do to avoid this problem? You can tell the search engines what URL to index by using ‘noindex, follow’ meta tag, robots.txt exclusions or 301 redirects. Let’s say you want Google to index your front page, posts, single pages and category pages and forbid the spiders from crawling the content of archives, feeds and ‘next entries’ pages - page/2, /3, … To do this you have to add to your header.php the following code:

     if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';}

For those not familiar with editing templates in WordPress: in your dashboard click Presentation menu item and after the new page is opened – click Theme Editor. In the Theme Editor choose ‘header.php’ and then paste the above code into the editor form. This code has to be inserted anywhere between head tags .

Here the tag is added to the home page but not the ‘next entries’ page (is_home() and ($paged<2)), to your posts (is_single()); to solo pages, like ‘About me’, if you created any (is_page()); and to category pages (is_category()). If you don’t want your categories to be indexed just delete || is_category(). All the other pages will get . They will not be indexed, but this will not prevent crawlers from following their outgoing links.

Adding unique meta description

For this purpose I use Head Meta Description plugin. This plugin can be configured to use an excerpt of your post as a meta description – this is especially useful if you have to add this tag to hundreds of existing pages. Or you can add your own manually as a custom field, which is my personal preference.

Using more tag

By using this tag you tell WordPress to display only the first few lines of your post. This greatly reduces the similarity of home page and your articles. If you have too many existing posts to edit, you can use an ‘excerpt’ plugin, such as this one from Semiologic

Redirect to a canonical URL

You should edit your .htaccess file to perform 301 redirects. Non-www addresses like yoursite.com should be redirected to www.yoursite.com. URL without trailing slashes like www.yoursite.com/category should be rewritten to include it: www.yoursite.com/category/ This can be done by inserting the following code into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

For more details I advise you to read this: the process or rewriting the URL layout.

Preventing spiders from crawling feeds and auxiliary pages

For this purpose you should edit your robots.txt file by inserting the following code

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

Another two practical tips

Some people find it useful to restrict the number of posts displayed in your home page to 4-5, as less posts are duplicated.

A great article on customizing the more tag in Wordpress.

To Sum Up:

• To avoid the duplicate content issue in WordPress include you should do:
• Add ‘noindex, follow’ meta tag to your monthly/weekly/daily archives, ‘next entries’, and if necessary, category pages
• Ensure that all your pages have unique meta-description tags
• Set up 301 redirects for your non-www URL and URLs without trailing slashes
• Restrict search engine crawlers from indexing your feeds and trackbacks
• Use more tag to show excerpts in your home page instead of full posts
• Restrict the number of posts displayed in your home page

References:

• WordPress And Google: Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues thread in the WebmasterWorld forum
• Google indexing /feed URLs Issues thread in the WebmasterWorld forum
• 301 Redirect – a How-to by Beyondinc.com
• URL Rewriting Guide