So simple a kid could use it!

Nowadays when people ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, by simply typing exactly what they have asked me into Google returns usually some type of relevant answer that may help me answer that question.

But seriously folks, how is your attention span compared to the next generation of the largest new market of consumers - the young 8-15 year olds out there who spend the most of their parent’s money on the latest movies, games, gadgets, you name it.

What I’m getting at is that it is about time things start to change. How much longer will be we inhibited by browsers. Why can’t an online community exist in a much more interesting medium than a text based one.

The future is coming soon and it will drastically change our use of the Internet as we know it today. Soon our desktops will be able to do things we never dreamed of in Hi-definition and with great clarity and speed. As the new technology emerges some of the questions that will come out of it are;

Music Industry - How come a song that was just released by Ashley Simpson costs $0.99 on iTunes and a classic hit song by the Beatles also costs $0.99. There is something really wrong with this and I feel that the Beatles track should be ‘valued by the its track record’.

VS

Ashley Simpson VS The Beatles

How in world do you do this? That’s the million dollar question. New delivery methods are undoubtedly on the way and the television channels we currently watch on TV networks will soon become merged into your desktop via Hi-Speed bandwith over IP. Why not just buy it FROM the artist instead of iTunes? For now its just easier.

The whole way we search is going to change too.

Why when I search am I limited to the algorithm that Google has created and has made all these companies become slaves to? Something gonna come soon and shake this all up.

Why when I search on images in Google am I limited to such a TERRIBLE interface?

The point here is that a browser really can’t cut it for certain types of searches…the way of the text-based search is going bye-bye and Google has about 3-5 years left at this model…which really can’t be changed other than adding video search. Unless Google develops a better browser soon they will become a lot less of what we are all seemingly praying to as ‘google gods’ for the time being.

What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Drastic changes so we’d better be prepared.

If there is a better way for us to get content faster and search visually rather than with text, the entire concept of SEO will be out of date and I may need to switch industries or redefine how to help clients reach their customers online.

Just something to think about. Maybe we can figure this out some way and stay ahead of the 9 year old technology we currently embrace daily and are afraid to ‘piss off’ and get kicked out of.

Your friendly neighborhood SEO.

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

More than you may realize, these days many of the blogs you read are actually written for one purpose.

Search Engine Rankings

Often a writer will be given a keyword phrase such as ‘Blog Search Rankings‘ and be told to write a 500-700 word post about that. The sole purpose of this is to help their site rank higher for that search term. The only real way to improve rankings and this is the kicker: is to build great sites.

So, while choosing interesting topics to write about may seem like a better idea than writing about the sites main keywords, the very best way to do this is to write something interesting that ties back into the primary search phrase you wish to rank for.

So for example, if you wanted to write about ‘Blog Search Rankings’ as this post is mainly focused on, my approach in this article that you are reading is to be ‘helpful’ in some manner. It is a ‘how to’ style post that describes something useful that a reader may actually use.

On that note here are some ‘how to tips’ for blog writing that will help with your search engine rankings.

H1 tags

After you post your blog, in FireFox press either ‘Control-U’ or ‘Command-U’ to view the source. Older IE6 or other browser users may need to use the dropdown menu and select ‘View Source’. If your blogging software is configured correctly, hopefully the title of your post will be in an H1 tag. If it isn’t you may consider editing some of your preferences to make this so. The key about H1s is that you should only have ONE per page that highlights the most important keyword phrase for that page. For this post the only H1 tag you will find that is actually rendered is the one surrounding ‘How to Write Blog Posts that Rank Well in Search Engines’ at the top of this post.

H2, H3, H4 tags. - Any sub headings should be surrounded by H2 tags, and tertiary levels of headings should be H3, H4, etc. the further you go indenting. You can use your style sheets to determine what the respective heading will look like.

For example you could put:

<H2 class=”header-2-style”>

if you have a class called ‘.header-2-style’ predefined in your stylesheet.

This is something you can easily do while posting your piece and doesn’t have to be done later by some ‘SEO Expert’.

Link Titles, Title & Alt Attributes for Images

As many of you may already know, when you mouseover an image sometimes descriptive text will be displayed. This is from the ‘alt’ attribute in the <img> tag. More less widespread is the use of a ‘title’ attribute within the <img> tag.

i.e. <img src=”http://www.wpromote.com/affiliates/wpromote.jpg” title=”The Wpromote Logo” alt=”Wpromote Logo”>

Notice how there are both a title and an alt description. These serve two purposes…the title is for google and the alt is for the user who mouses over the image and gets a description.

For Hyperlinks the same concept of a title applies and not many people would ever think to do this intuitively. This is what you should use:

<a href=”http://www.wpromote.com” title=”Wpromote PPC Management Experts” target=”_blank”>Wpromote PPC Management</a>

Every link on your site should have a title. The title tells Google what your links are and will help with your rankings. Now if you want to hyperlink the image above to go to the site in the link example above…it may seem like a lot but this is really what you should put in the source code:

<a href=”http://www.wpromote.com” title=”Wpromote PPC Management Experts” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.wpromote.com/affiliates/wpromote.jpg” title=”The Wpromote Logo” alt=”Wpromote Logo”></a>

Here is the same example rendered:

Other Tips

If you use WordPress (I am currently using WordPress to edit this post) depending on which SEO(Search Engine Optimization) related plugins you use there will be options to create custom titles etc. If you use the ‘SEO Title Tag’ plugin from NetConcepts then you will have that option - i’d suggest cutting and pasting the post title in the ‘Title Tag’ field that appears AFTER the post when this plugin is turned on.

Tags

Be sure to add keywords that are in your post to the ‘Tags’ section in WordPress right after the post content section. examples: for this post I will include: Seo Title Tag Plugin, Title Tag Plugin, Blog Seo, Blog Search Rankings, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Wpromote and others. Try to put at least 5 tags in the tag section that are found in your post if possible.

Categories

Make sure you select an appropriate category for your blog post. If you don’t have one in your category list, then simply add one that makes sense and is ‘relevant’ (That word again) to your blog post. You can select more than one category if it applies, for this post I chose, SEO, Internet News and Wpromote. I noticed that there is no ‘blogging’ category so I created one and added it to that as well.

We’re Almost Done!

At the bottom of the page below the blog content post section below the tags and categories is an area for Advanced Options.
Under ‘Excerpt’ here is where you will write the description that comes up in the Google search engines when that post comes up for a result. The average length is 160 characters. You want 2-3 sentences that describe the contents of that specific post and preferable have the main keyword phrases for that page closer to the beginning of the description.

This is VERY important, more important than the link titles (which people never seem to take the time to do, thus making it easier to outrank their sites) and is almost as important as the Title tag for the page.

-Till next time

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

If you want to know more about SMX here is a link to their SMX News Feed.

I had a great time the past two days learning more about Social Media and meeting a lot of cool people. This is a much smaller community then most people think. This is likely because some of these larger conferences (like Webmaster World / Pubcon in Las Vegas) attract a lot of ‘wannabes’ who are on the outside of this industry and are often trying to figure out how to grow their own business without hiring a search marketing firm.

What’s nice about SMX is that most attendees are Search Marketers & SEOs or somehow much more closely related to the industry then some of the larger conferences. For example there weren’t guys there who are all about their online auto sites.

Some of the things I learned about more than I had expected to are listed below

1. I even learned more about the strength of lists in blog posts and on Digg.

2. I won’t make a list now, I was just practicing

Yahoo Answers

So, I’ve learned that Yahoo! Answers is a really great place to get traffic from. All you really need to do is know your own industry, then create a profile and start answering questions from the categories that relate to your site (or your client’s site). The longer you are on the site (by answering questions and participating) you will be rewarded with more abilities. I really like this model, just like SeoMOZ allows you to have ‘do follow’ links after you have reached a certain level of participation.

The important thing to understand here is that as you can gain credibility in Yahoo! on your topic, also be sure to give credit to your page. If your answers are voted ‘best answer’ then you receive points that give you more credibility in the community and increase the link love to your sites.

The help section also encourages you to simply ‘Ask’ your question if they don’t help you out with what you need either!

When answering questions, it is encouraged to site your sources, in which you would be best to put something like the following:

Source:
Aaron Kronis / Wpromote
http://www.wpromote.com

After 4 days, the ‘answering’ of posted questions ceases and everything goes into ‘vote’ mode. Most people don’t really care about the questions, they are just looking for answers so you can go in and simply vote for your own answer as the best - your competition will be with the others who answered and want the ‘10 points‘.

Yahoo has a ’scoring’ system where you start with 100 points and after 250 you can then start to click ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ on questions, for example along with more options like being able to ’star’ a question more times then just 10 in one day. You get 2 points for answering, 10 for best answer and -5 to ask a question.

Extra special: from SMX - > Another sneaky tip for all you bloggers and SEO folks out there: In Yahoo! Answers, on the profile below the avatar you will see 3 tabs: Answer, Discover and Vote. Click on vote, look for your own questions and vote on them. Most people don’t remember or know how to do this.

Wikipedia:
It has come to my attention after SMX that the large community of Wikipedia can be an excellent resource for helping out your clients with their link-building efforts. If you find a very old picture on Wikipedia and your client has the same thing for sale and has updated photos that are ‘not going to have licensing issues surrounding their use’ - basically amateur photos - then you may be able to get them into Wikipedia.

This would be you helping Wikipedia grow its image database with newer fresher and more up to date images. You would give up the ‘rights’ to the images, but in exchange for a link when it is referenced on Wikipedia. I’m still researching the numbers on this, however it is amazing how many links you can actually get from this if your image is accepted.

Start learning about this at The Wikimedia Foundation, which consists of volunteers who edit “The World’s largest free online encyclopedia”.

Until next week,

Team SEO

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

If you’ve messed around with creating a web page, odds are you’ve used tables. Tables are a great way for someone who is new to web design to start laying out their HTML. I know that’s where I started. While they can get the job done, tables were not designed to be the backbone of web page layout. The table element is meant to be used for displaying tabular data (hence the name). Time to learn some CSS!

What is CSS?

CSS stands for “cascading style sheet.” Think of it like this . . . there are two main properties to your web page. On one hand you have the HTML. Your HTML is responsible for the content of your website and has NOTHING to do with the visual representation. On the other hand you have your CSS file which tells your web browser how to display the content. Check out csszengarden for an excellent visual representation of this idea. Here you can see the work of advanced web designers applying unique CSS files to one common HTML document. Notice how each example contains the exact same content, but is displayed in a vastly different manner through the use of CSS.

Separating content and design is extremely important. One of the most frustrating things on the web is waiting for a web site to load. If I’m browsing the web and find myself stuck loading a page, chances are I close the window and find someplace else to go. So if you want to drive traffic to your site, you want to make it load as quickly as possible. This is where using CSS really shines! Browsers are much quicker at applying CSS properties to an HTML document then reading through HUGE table layouts. CSS files are also cached (stored) on the user’s computer which means it only has to be downloaded once. So if your web site has more than one page that references the same CSS file, load time is almost instantaneous.

Using CSS also addresses the issue of getting listed in search engines. The cleaner and more organized your web page is, the easier it is for search-engines to read and rank your site. If you have completely identical sites, in terms of content, where one is designed using a bulky table-based layout and the other using CSS, search-engines can make a more educated guess as to what the CSS based web page is about, and thus will receive a higher ranking and more search traffic.

Switching over to CSS layouts is a very important step in website optimization. While it can be pretty intimidating at first, it is a giant leap in the right direction. I highly recommend checking out the web tutorials found at Lynda.com to get started. If you’re more advanced with CSS, alistapart.com is a great site to learn more about professional techniques and web standards.

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

I’ve been asked this question by several friends and colleagues as well as by several clients who own numerous domains and don’t understand what is the smartest way to utilize them.

First off, it is generally best to take the oldest domain you can find (based on its ‘creation date’ in WHOIS or from the Wayback.org results) that FITS with your site’s keyword targeting.

For example, if you have a great old domain, say runningshoes.com that was registered in 1994 and you also have woodenbarrels.com that was registered in 2005 it really depends on WHAT you are selling.

The goal is to rank high for things that your target consumer is already typing into Google now.

So if you are selling ‘Wooden Barrels’, then the choice domain to build around has got to be woodenbarrels.com.

Okay, so with that said, if you still own the runningshoes.com site and can’t do anything with it, simply 301 the site to woodenbarrels.com and forget about it until Nike offers you thousands to buy it.

Onto your barrels now - here is the question: Should I buy woodenbarrels.net, woodenbarrels.org, barrelswooden.com, thewoodenbarrel.com, woodenbarrel.com, woodenbarrel.net, woodenbarrel.org?

Are you ready for the real answer here?

Here is the catch:

If you really want to rank first for “wooden barrels” and drive traffic to www.woodenbarrels.com, it isn’t buying the domains and forwarding them that is the key here. The real key is your competitors and preventing them from owning domains with the keywords you want to rank for.

So, go ahead and buy any domains that a competitor could potentially purchase and compete against you with, especially if your main keyword phrase is in it.

Initially you may think, “I don’t have to worry, I have woodenbarrels.com”. Then when you see Pay-Per-Click ads for ‘woodenbarrel.com’ coming up for searches on “Wooden Barrels” you’ll kick yourself for saving the $9.99 in the decision not to buy the domain when it was available.

Another alternative(which you should be doing anyways):

Build a really really great site, with awesome content, updated daily with meaningful information related to your topic and become the authority on Wooden Barrels. In conjunction with SERIOUS link-building, that’s the secret to ranking.

Your friendly neighborhood Rockstar SEO

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

I don’t agree that skateboarding was ever a fad, it is still around and people have made an honest living doing this activity which is now featured in the X-games and is a now a multi-million dollar industry.

I can confidently say that skateboarding is a sport that is here to stay. However, when skateboarding first came around there were many naysayers who called it a ‘fad’, even comparing it to the Hula Hoop or Pogo Stick and many skateboarders had a rough time trying to justify the time they spent doing it. Check out Dogtown and Z-boyz or the late Heath Ledger playing ‘Skipperboy’ Skip Engblom in the feature film Lords of Dogtown for some background on what the guys went through in the early days of skateboarding.

I know I used to come to California for just that (see photo), but now I’m an SEO manager out here so it is my job to learn about new services out there that may help drive new traffic to the sites I’m promoting, but at what cost?

So with someting like ‘TWITTER’, I wonder if my time is better spent commenting on do-follow blogs (which pass PageRank without the ‘nofollow’ attribute in comment links) and other link-building initiatives?

Recently, I’ve seen and taken part in some discussions regarding Twitter and its role in SEO. Obviously if you have a lot of people following your ‘Tweets’ (messages similar to Instant Messaging(IM) but that go out to everyone on your list, sort of like a Reply-All on IM to all your following subscribers) then you may be able to get people to frequent your latest happenings online, such as blog posts, special offers or even have them get in on some interesting commenting discussions.

So, on to more about this phenomenon. Apparently Twitter isn’t going away anytime soon. Although there are lots people who think that it is very annoying, the debate is open which already helps anyone who is pro-twitter by exposure. See this article on MSNbc called ‘Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you are doing‘ which touches on how some folks maybe just don’t understand Twitter, or do but don’t want to know what this ‘micro-blogging’ service is telling us every second about the folks you are following.

It really seems to be gaining momentum with the latest being a new partnership with MTV which may make this year’s event that much stranger. I also find that there seems to be small community out there promoting all these ‘new sociable networks’ as I’m running into the same people all the time now at things like the interactive SXSW conference. i.e. utterz and mashable. See this interesting post about the top 10 ‘most beautiful social networks‘

So for those who say that Twitter IS in fact a fad, I have to tend to think maybe they just can’t seem to get anyone to follow them. I have about 7 followers @kronis and I could fall into that category, but I am lately using its ‘direct message’ feature a lot to get in touch with people who I know are online after I see them ‘tweet’.

Usage: when you make a twitter message and would like it to privately go to someone on your follow list, just enter: “d username message”. This is identical to Instant Messaging and works well, so now that you know how it works, try it out and follow some ‘tweets’ or rants or promote your next foosball tournament or one-act play via your mobile phone, as this is killer for your iPhone.

Save this Post!

Hide Sites