If you are not a part of SEOmoz in some way go check them out now.  I am not one to gush or give reviews but they are the real deal when it comes to SEO & online marketing. The newsletter is proof positive that they not only put out great content but also deliver great content from some of the best sources on the web today. Go here to get this newsletter - The SEOmoz Top 10

Full disclosure: I am a paying SEOmoz client – but I have not embedded any affiliate links or anything in the links on this post (not even sure if they have an affiliate program).

Some tidbits I learned from the SEOmoz Top 10 newsletter;

1. Anyone having issues with understanding why Google Analytics is now returning results on referring sites that are from (not provided)? This is a recent Google change and this article from the that newsletter points to the “why its there” and “what to do” – 7 Best SEO tips for (not provided) Keywords

2. Crawling Bots (especially the Google bot) are NOT archaic crawlers that just see “code or text” any more.  They can crawl flash sites and also will assess user experience as well as crawl Javascript.  Check it out here -  Just How Smart are Search Robots?

3. And my favorite! People are thinking that On-page SEO isn’t as useful now since the Panda update and Long Tail doesn’t convert – Think Again! Great article and study of long tail conversions and on-page SEO versus great consumable content – On-page Optimization is Not Dead & Long Tail Keywords Increase Rankings and Conversions

There are 8 more too like “How to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool”.

Get the Newsletter so you don’t miss this great stuff!

How often does that happen? Rarely. Why? That’s a long conversation for another day. But mostly because they have no budget and their idea of viral is not everyone else’s idea of viral.

FULL STOP I’m not going to finish this post on viral video

……I had this post sitting in my drafts for about 10 months.  I never finished it because I just knew it would get everyone riled and upset and denying the fact that viral (viral video or anything else for that matter) is on such an organic level that to TRY to make something go viral is ALMOST always a failure….why?  Well, I finally found some information that actually makes sense and is backed by actual RESEARCH.

For all of the folks that think viral is a choice….think again – http://messymatters.com/2011/07/31/viral/

Now for viral video….why is it viral?…., you decide, but this post is finally done on viral video;

SEO in the USA especially will benefit from creating social networking profiles on social media websites. In addition to the three best known social media websites (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) there are very many lesser known social networking sites. In principle any of these could have a significant search engine ranking, but you should only create a profile on a site where there will be a clear benefit to your website. Creating a profile just for the link is acceptable, but having a meaningful profile will have much greater value in the long run. You will find social networking sites to be ideal for building a strong network of relationships with your clients.

You should routinely incorporate keywords into tweets and posts, and although Twitter limits you to only 140 characters. it is still a great way to share a link to a blog or an article.  Simply placing a keyword into a Tweet (perhaps as a hash tag) can ensure that the Tweet will make it to a search engine results page.  With Facebook, there’s more room for targeting keywords in your posts.  Don’t forget that the title of your post is a great place for keywords.   Write descriptions of  the content of the posts, and these should also contain keywords.

Your blog posts on Facebook or LinkedIn shouldn’t include the whole article.  Include a teaser and a call-to-action that will encourage visitors to move from the social networking site to your company blog. If they read the whole posting on the social network site they won’t need to go to your website.

By all means include links to your social media profiles on your website, but not too prominently.  Why would you want to send them away from your site?  There’s no point in getting someone to ‘like’ you on Facebook if you want them to make a purchase.  If they are already on your site, don’t send them away. Your social media profiles should serve as entrances to your main site, not the other way around.

If you can identify leaders in your industry that your target audience looks up to for advice, you should reach out to them. These influential individuals can help you improve the position of your brand in the eyes of that audience. The first step will be to connect with them on social networking sites. But you will have to provide some content. You can’t expect others to share their content if you don’t share yours. Google has stated that they will consider the authority of the author for social media posts to impact search results.  A link or story shared by a quality user will have significant value as opposed to a link to a low value account. Quantity can be a useful goal, but ultimately quality will be worth more.

Some earth shaking shifts are happening in the Google/SEO/Social Media arena that are going to get folks talking for a few weeks on what it all means and if the changes Google is making will stick.

Social Media is being influenced and affected by Google’s ranking algorithms – we’ve seen hints. I just noticed today that Facebook video is ranking individually and is also viewable via a google search – take a look!

I have a long term client who is now ranking for several positions on Google for a particular key phrase – but notice #10. The cool thing is the video plays WITHOUT being logged into Facebook.

So, will this stick and if so does that mean Facebook is a new SEO hot spot?

I have always been a big believer in the fact that you can intentionally set yourself up for success in Social Media but you must do it with solid SEO principles if you want to be on-purpose with your programs. What do you think?  Is SEO still the foundation even when it comes to Social Media?

Have fun with the stats below – cool beans.

The idea behind the social media marketing is quite simple. It executes the changes to the website thus it would be linked more easily, more visible in the searches and also quite frequently get included in various posts on the blogs. It helps us to promote business to the prospective customer directly.

1. Increase the link-ability

2. Make bookmarking and tagging easy

3. Reward the inbound links

4. Social Media Content

5. Give value to the users

6. Reward the valuable users

7. Participate in Social Media Conversations

8. How to target the audience

Another great resource for social media articles.

Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation

Ok now let’s talk about the yin and yang – if the user experience is the yin then we also need the yang to balance it all out. That’s where you set the pages up to allow the search engines to find your pages and love them.

There is something called the Page Rank Checker (http://prchecker.info), put together by Google of course, that can give us a little insight to how well we are doing. Page rank takes many factors into consideration and the better you have your pages set up for Googles spiders the higher your page rank will be on a scale of 0-10 (10 being best).

If we allow some of the “no value” pages to get good ranking or have value in Googles eyes it hurts our pages that we want to have the highest value and traffic (no value pages – i.e. privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.). So we can tell Google (and the Page Rank Checker) which ones we want to have the value and the ones we do want to have any value.

Be sure to read this twice – if you give all of your pages an equal shot at ranking on Google the ones you may not care about ranking will take some of the rank from your “high-value” pages. How do we control this?

Use “no-follow” tags. That way we can tell the spiders which ones to take a look at and rank and which ones to ignore. Beautiful! But HIGHLY UNDERUSED!!!

This leads to our section on Dynamic Linking.

Dynamic Linking

This is a concept that allows you to focus that page rank on the pages you want to rank well and get attention by the search engines.

The next 2 statements are important – a page that has incoming links is getting page rank from each of the links coming in. The higher the page rank of each link coming in the better for that page and higher the page rank goes.

On the flip side as that page links to other pages it divides page rank between each link it sends out. Therefore with too many links going out the rank is diminished with each link. So there is a slight balancing act to be employed – get high links coming in and give a few high value links going to the right pages. How can you control it = no-follow tags. Assign this tag to those pages you don’t care if they rank (terms & conditions, privacy etc.) and you can increase the value of other links and the overall page rank in general. Now you are dividing page rank between fewer pages.

Here is what it will look like when using it in your HTML code;

<a href=”terms.html” rel=”nofollow”>Terms and Conditions</a>

Ok that’s it! Simple

But where do you use it, how often and why?

Top Level Rank Development – Your Index/Home Page

Lot’s of links flow to and from the Top Level Index/Homepage so here is the SUGGESTED and RECOMMENDED areas for no-follow tag;

• Add no-follow on all of the links to your “overhead” pages. If you have a shopping cart, this includes the link to the cart.
• Add no-follow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have a logical reason to give a direct link.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your site map page, if you have one.
• Do not use no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links.
• Do not use no-follow on the links to your second, third, and fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results for some reason.

Second Level Rank Development

• Add no-follow on all the links to your “overhead” pages, as above, unless you want some of them to get indexed.
• Add no-follow on outbound links to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link, or want to pass some “link love” along to that site.
• Add no-follow on all links to the site map. From the spider’s perspective, the site map is only linked from the home page.
• Add no-follow on the link to your “resources” page, if you are exchanging links. The resources page is only directly linked from the home page.
• Do not use no-follow on links to your second, third, fourth level pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results.

Third Level Rank Development

Typically with so much of the linking going from the top level to the second level it will keep the third level from developing much page rank. But this can be where many of your product purchase pages or information pages are. Here is what you can do to drive page rank a little deeper;

• On all second level pages, add no-follow on all links pointing to other second tier pages – unless you’re trying to boost a specific page.

Simple isn’t it? So on a shopping cart site, this means that your “category pages” still link to each other, but you use no-follow. From the spider’s perspective, your navigation is different on the second level from the top level.

Third Level Linking Strategy

If you have a second level that is a category unto itself and the third level beneath it is common to the second level category only you can link the third level together in a ring.

A couple of things to keep in mind when using no-follow;

• If you are using no-follow links from “page a” to “page b” then you should probably go ahead and use no-follow on every link going from the “page a” to the “page b” i.e. if your are using no-follow from the “home page” to the “terms of use page” then you should have all links going to the “terms of use” page as no- follow.
• If you are using multiple links from “page a” to “page b” the only link that will count for link reputation utilizing the desired anchor text will be the first one that appears in the code. So be sure the first link in the code is the keyword you desire to rank for and get indexed on the search engines for.

Don’t try to do too much with your internal linking strategies. Keep it basic as in this post and you should do well. Again these are recommendations and suggestions.

Are you an SEO Superstar?!

Creating a structure that works for the search engine spiders as well as your visitors is the ultimate balancing act. But if you ever want to lean to one side or the other ALWAYS lean to the side of giving the visitors an excellent experience.

So in other words build your site for people not automated robots and spiders. With that being said here are some structure principles to live by;

• Usability – Build your site for visitor usability and ease of use not just for spiders.

• Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation – When making sure the spiders can crawl the site with ease be sure to do that by having an internal dynamic linking strategy between the pages, using anchor text, that are the most important to you. So not all of the pages will matter if the spiders get to them i.e. about us, terms of use, privacy policy etc. Optimize for the pages that you choose to rise in rank and reputation and tell the search engines to leave the other pages alone.

• Page Penetration – Get as many pages ranking and being indexed on the search engines – the more that are on the engines the better = Page Penetration.

Per the above structure principles lets dig a little deeper into each one (Usability is Part One for now);

Usability

The main thing to consider when developing pages is keeping your keywords in mind as you design and develop a web page and content; however, be sure to also keep in mind that a human user looking for a product or information will be reading and looking at your web page.

So always make sure you write for the human users before you write for the search engines. I would rather err on the side of making sure that the words and information on the page allow the user to have a great experience than have the search engines find it, index it and have a user leave the page quickly because it doesn’t make sense from a user standpoint.

Top Level – Your Index/Home Page

This is the page most will see when they find your website therefore it needs to give them a “clean and clear” view of what your site is about and where they can go to get deeper information (second and third level)

So clean navigation and a clear overview is paramount to your success in keeping a new visitor on the site as well having them “click-though” to other pages and get deeper into the various levels on your site.

Second Level – Funnel/Category Page

This level of pages funnels the user down to specific categories of information or products (if it is an e-commerce site). Again this level should give a clean and clear message and where to go next. This level will boil it down so your user can find their product or information in the next click from this level.

Third Level – Information/Product Purchase Page

These are the content and product pages. These are the pages where action takes place for the user. A product can be purchased, an e-book can be read or downloaded or the information the user was searching for is found. Sometimes these pages can be accessed directly from the top-level homepage depending on how important or how popular the third level page is.

If you find a third level page getting accessed more than all of the other pages on your site you may want that direct link from the homepage to bring your users there without an extra second level stop over before allowing them access to the third page.

The third level in a lot of cases is deepest you will have to go on your site. If you do need to go deeper then there is a lot more work involved to get the deeper pages indexed and found by the search engines.

Watch for Parts 2 and 3 which will detail Dynamic Linking and Page Penetration…..

During my head-bobbing experience which wouldn’t allow me to sleep much I was thinking about my last blog post regarding Social Media Experts/Gurus and how they seem to be popping up everywhere.  The thought that kept me ruminating on the post was that there aren’t many professed SEO experts or guru’s that have only been around a few months. Why?, Check it out;

1. SEO isn’t something you learn overnight.  SEO is continually changing and it’s not something you “jump into” and call yourself an expert.  There is On-Page SEO (an art in itself) with no-follow rules, internal page linking strategies and all of the associated tags.  There is Off-Page SEO (which includes Social Media) requiring back link strategies, bookmarking, authority acquisition and content development strategies to support your On-page SEO. Most importantly, you actually have to prove that you can get results.
2. SEO is more science than marketing.  You can’t wave your arms extolling the benefits of transparency with fancy terms such as “media assets can be created on various platforms to increase your reach and interaction”.  SEO is working with raw data, interpreting the effects, testing and implementing additional strategies to get results – lather, rinse, repeat.  Social Media will be a contributor, however, I haven’t seen Social Media lower an average site Alexa rank 25,000 spots within a couple of months.
3. SEO isn’t for the weak or timid.  You charge a client money and you better get results – more traffic, more visitors, more conversions and have the numbers and knowledge to back it up and adjust to get predictable outcomes.  Social Media is engagement and testing messages but rarely do you see intensive backend tracking for social media campaigns – unless they were truly a social media expert/guru.

Tracking and numbers are everything and social media, to me, is very much a part of the overall plan for a company or a client; however, it must be measured for it’s overall effectiveness based on the client’s needs, products and audience.

I think a better term for anyone in the industry would be to stay away from being a Social Media Expert/Guru and become an Online Marketing student working to become an expert.  Learn all of the various ways to get a client tangible results that bring traffic, conversions and revenues that can be tracked back to all of your online campaigns. Learn how to adjust a complete campaign not just one aspect of the campaign (i.e. Social Media).  Those who take this approach and get extremely good at it will be the ones who will be revered as the complete package in the online world and will never have to look for work even in a recession.

A good article by Shoemoney – SEO vs Social Media

Oh yeah, and I will blog about DEMO too which was an incredible experience!