Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Tropical SEO » Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing talks about linkbaiting. First he stresses the importance of the title with this jewel:

Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:

• Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
• The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
• Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
• Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
• Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
• Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
• Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
• Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
• Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting

He then give great tips about content, including making it scannable, losing the ads and getting friendly bumbs from friends.

Per Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length : SEO Book.com:

Content Suggestions Based on Publishing Formats:
AdSense Site:
A page which has 500 words on it will overlap many more keyphrases than two different pages that have 300 words each. As long as you can put your AdSense ads in a prominent position that gets a decent clickthrough rate without sacrificing your linkability I would recommend going with 500 to 600 word articles.

If you write naturally and your site gains a decent amount of authority you will end up accidentally ranking for many great keyword phrases that never showed up on keyword tools.

Site Selling CPM Ads:
If you are selling CPM ads that may favor breaking longer articles into many shorter pages so each read article gets more page views. This is especially true if you have a strong brand, great mindshare, great link equity, and many direct readers, like Wired.com.

Lead Generation Sites:
Focus your content on conversion, perhaps even using brief pages with little content, but ensure your content is unique. Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site.

Another thing I really enjoyed in the post was the stat that 50% of online shoppers at top retailers look to customers reviews to influence their decision. That hit home with me because one of the presents I bought was drastically influenced by online reviews at Amazon. I changed features and models and was completely redirected based on user’s feedback about the product I thought I wanted. Web sites need to make use of this to the greatest extent possible.

SEW’s “Weather.com’s SEO Efforts Rest Heavily on Analytics” does a good job descibing the thought process behind optimising for a keyword. I like the talk about selling the project internally as well. This is a good article for SEW… I want to boycott them for dissing Sullivan but if the content is valuable…????

Authorama: Testing If Google Can Restrict Public Domain Books It Offers For Download
is a great article that, among other things, outlines how to get full-text, copyright free books from Google Book Search.

SEOmoz Blog | A List of Web Page Quality Signals

SEOmoz gave a list of some web page quality signals today. They are:

Intrinsic Features:

How accurate is the information presented?
How biased or unbiased is the data?
How believable is the content?
How credible is the source?
Contextual Features:

Is the information relevant to the user’s query?
Does the information add value to the subject?
Is the work recent enough to be of value?
Is the source thorough in its presentation?
What amount of information is provided?
Representational Features:

Can the material be interpreted in different way
How easy or difficult is the material for a user to understand?
Does the document state the information concisely?
Is the source consistent?
Accessibility Features:

Is the document accessible?
Does the content present security risks?

When creating a site, these are valuable things to keep in mind. Specifically, you should try to create value-adding, thorough, regularly updating content that is accessible, has a privacy policy and doesn’t use vulnerable code. Search engines probably have a hard time knowing if content is thorough… only that thorough sites tend to be XXX pages with XXX words per page and XX off-site links, but even those sorts of rules have to be a mild signal for Google because there is so much variation. Google clearly values updated content over stale content and I haven’t seen any clear signal showing that Google likes accessible pages or those with privacy policies any better than any others (but it can’t hurt). The only ‘trick’ to be sure of that I see from this is to make sure that pages you create change in some way each time Googlebot visits (I like putting links to recent relevant news storys on the page via RSS). About that quality content, Google can’t tell but people can. Good content attracts backlinks. Backlinks are SEO gold.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001866.shtml

A brand can still push their main brand name (say Paypal, for example) while promoting their name as being Paypal Payment Solutions. Place more emphasis on your core brand name, but also make relevant keywords look like they are part of the legitimate official name to get a bit more friendly anchor text.

I used this in the Chml Srucnoc competition with my Chml Srucnoc in 2008 slogan and push. This should be considered and adopted anytime you’re doing a link building campaign. The only reason not to do this, is if it would make your brand or site sound awkward to the human readers.

Here’s a post I liked from the SEObook blog: Linking for Conversion

If you link to a few authority sites from within the content it helps engines know what community the page belongs to. Although you do not want to link out too heavily on your main core conversion / offer pages. Hopefully you could create other linkbait pages and other content which helps carry the authority of those other page. If you do link out to other authority sites on pages highly focused on conversion perhaps it makes sense to do it below the fold.

The part that stands out to me in the post is where he says “If you assume (rightly) that users ignore your navigation…”.  I’ve never written with that in mind.  I think SEObook overdoes it but if people really do ignore navigation, that should effect how I write.  The part about links in the text working against screen scrapers is a nice point too. (unless they strip the links out which is what I would expect to happen).