A superior SEO system will always win out..

This is Part 2 of this SEO Tips series, part 1 is here, you should read it first.

Advanced SEO & Web Design Keyword Strategies

So following on from Part 1 where we discussed overall keyword strategies and how to think horizontally with keywords as well as vertically to obtain maximum longtail keyphrase coverage around your theme, today we’re moving on into structuring the site “as Google like it” from the beginning, as the fastest way into the SERP, and to ensure that you have  ultimately have the best possible chance of eventually becoming “the authority” – as defined by sitelinks on the matter. It’s really very simple, and we think you’ll shake your head and wonder why you didn’t think of this before..

Use Google Related Search to tell you how to Structure your site

We want to be presenting the most “Google logical” site structure to Google, right from the beginning.

As time progresses on and you evolve the site (which you will need to, to reach the hallowed “authority” status) you will add in more and more content at deeper levels, so the initial structure at the top will get stronger and stronger as it is now supported by more inner content.

So, say we were building a site with the ultimate (top level) target phrase,:

Search Engine Optimization

Do the search, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see..

These related terms are GOLD - they are the natural sub pages Google expects to see..

This is what Google is telling you are the related subjects for your term, this is what else they expect to see on a website about “search engine optimization”  so now  it’s simple, optimize the homepage for your main term (plus any “modifiers” – eg “company” that fit that page), and use the highest traffic related suggestions (and relevant to you, obviously “search engine submission” is a scam, so omit anything you don’t do) as your second level pages, thus:

Search Engine Optimization

• seo services

• seo tools

• seo techniques

• seo company – “company” is a “modifier”, and so can likely be excluded from nav and structure as it would naturally fit on the end of “search engine optimization” on the homepage.

Cross check the traffic on these with your keyword research tools, you only want the toughest of these main terms on your first page, it is important to use only the minimum of essential links from the homepage inwards**, this will maximise the strength of each link, and the amount of Pagerank reaching each inner page.

** (we’ll come back to this in depth at some point soon)

Then repeat the process for each second-level page.

So now we have..

SEO Services

• seo copywriting services

• seo consulting services

These now make up either second level sub pages of the SEO services page, or sub-headings on the page, depending on your site / keywords etc etc..  If you are using a truly superior SEO dynamic system (such as Wordpress on Thesis 1.7) all you now have to do is name and place the pages (parent / child etc) and use the best keywords in the navigation at the top, and WP will do the rest for you, ie  link from every other page etc.

SEO Navigation Design Tip

Lots of people fall afoul of Google’s famed over optimization filters by “overcooking their navigation through trying to insert “top” level keywords into the nav, pointing at internal pages.

For example, go back to the second example above, the SEO services page is already (will be anyway) optimized for SEO Services, so the anchor text pointing at the Consulting & Copywriting pages does not need “SEO” or “Services”, merely the main topics, ie Consulting & Copywriting, trying to squeeze the extra SEO in will quite likely get your site labeled as an onsite spammer, and maybe even -950 (over optimization) Filtered, don’t do it, keep it as clean and neat as you can.

It must also be noted that ultimately, you probably won’t rank for the top level keywords  anyway unless your content is good enough (or you have monster link resources available to you) and that there is no substitute for compelling unique content, SEO’d or not.

It should also be noted that this is a very useful way of checking whether a Web Designer understands even the basics of how Google works in their website structuring, if you look at an “SEO web designer” s own website and it is full of “About us”, “who we are” and “what we do” -ie non-thematically constructed structures in their primary navigation and site structures, with certain exceptions, they’ve likely got no real clue about real SEO techniques past meta tags and Page Titles.

Hopefully this will be helpful, any (genuine) questions welcome in the comments.

Superior-SEO.US

Or “How To“  Structure & Design a Superior SEO Website – Part 1

“SEO is misunderstood by many, contrary to what most people think it is not all about picking a few likely keywords (or key phrases) & then getting your site to rank for them.”

Because although this is how most people envision the process, this is a very myopic view. The SEO process is actually only the means to an end, the end goal is for the website to earn as much money as possible.

So you if you’re scratching your head wondering what SEO is, now that we know what it is not, let’s try and explain. To run a successful SEO campaign, you need to start with the end result you desire (sales, money in the bank) and work backwards through your sales process to the first customer contact, ie how did they find you?

Put yourself in the mind of your ideal customer and try to think how they would, what would they be looking for?

Keyword Brainstorming

This is possibly the most critical part of the process, you need to research as many possible, cover all angles to start with and then whittle down to your main target keywords and phrases.

If in Google (or another search engine)

• What did they type into it? – ie what were this customers buying keywords / phrase ?
• Is this customer typical? – your usual demographic? if not who is?
• Is this the only way of saying it? what alternatives are there?
• Then think about the other customers who are going to your competitors, what words and phrases are your main (top 5 ) competitors targeting?
• Compile as complete list as you can of the main (upper level or short-tail) phrases.

Having gotten your primary list of desired targets together we need to expand them out, like branches of a pine tree structure, each branch dividing and branching further, lets use an example to illustrate.

Say..  we were looking at the phrase “Superior SEO” as a site name

..Obviously we know that gets no traffic at all, never mind buying customers (we ve been #1 for 2 years .com and .co.uk) so to optimize a site for just that would be silly. So aim higher (ultimately) but then build downwards with all the possible variations you can think of, the thesaurus is your friend here – Superior Synonyms

“Superior” + variants and trophies

• “Truly Superior”
• “Define Superior”
• “Superior Definition”

Other ways of saying superior (applicable in context, there’s plenty more)

• Top
• Best
• Expert
• Advanced
• Supreme

“SEO” variants and modifiers

• Optimization (or optimisation in UK / Europe)
• SEO Optimization
• Search Optimization
• SEO web design

Other ways of saying “SEO” (we know they mean slightly different things, but your customers may not)

• SEO Optimization
• Website Optimization
• Internet marketing
• Search Marketing

Then start playing with combination s of the two sides, together..

Superior SEO

• superior SEO optimization
• superior search engine optimization
• superior search engine marketing
• superior internet marketing
• superior online marketing

And lastly we have to then add in the second set of modifiers, company / services / plus all the singular and plurals as well, consultant consultants consulting consultancy etc, each of which can happily sit on the end of the above phrases, giving examples as diverse as :

• superior online marketing service/s / company
• superior internet marketing company / service/s
• advanced search engine optimization
• ultimate online marketing consultancy.
• advanced seo web design
• superior web design
• Etc etc etc, almost ad infinitum..

So we can see that any truly superior SEO web design must encompass all possible ways of saying the same thing, and must rank as equally for all of it as possible, and just focusing on one or two phrases is anything but superior.

SEO Ibiza was optimized along these lines and is 2 & 1/2 years old now and so benefits hugely from this approach – if you take a look at these superior rankings you can see the effect at work, obviously these were not the prime target phrases, just an example of how a superior optimization system works across all the variations of the phrases.

So again sticking with this site, the strategy is.. (in reverse order)

1. Primary (short tail) – superior,  seo, wordpress web design, that kind of thing
2. Medium-tail – superior definition, seo web design, advanced wordpress web design, / (thesis etc)
3. Longtail – all the other terms  all the other modifiers advanced etc, and then aimed at all the subsets too, web design, techniques tips etc.

We want to rank for the big words eventually, but in the meantime we want use superior seo to rank for every single longtail hit possible, from our target keywords in any combination. Building out the lower end of your traffic pyramid like this ensures that you don’t get to the top for a phrase, only to find it was a flop, lots who should know better, do and will continue to make this mistake.

But having your list of phrases is a long way away from having a site optimized for them, although it’s a start, but in the next of this series of posts we will cover possibly the most important part of this process, how to map your keywords, to your site design and infrastructure, in the way that will best please Google, this is critical and the bit most web designers often get badly wrong with dire consequences, stay tuned..

SEO Ultimate

SEO Design Solutions “SEO Ultimate” plugin is fast becoming our favorite SEO plugin, it’s installed on all our main sites now.

In our opinion what makes this the overall superior SEO Plugin is the ongoing product development which means that since we started using the plugin there have been at least 4 upgrades adding functionality all the time, and which now sees basic autolinking functionality included in the version 1.81 release, it is both very simple to understand and use, but extremely powerful and has all the onpage SEO-related functionality you need in one plugin.

..In our opinion this is now the truly superior “All in One” Plugin.

Headspace 2

From UrbanGiraffe the extremely comprehensive and advanced Headspace 2 SEO plugin, a very good product, but possibly a little over-complicated for anyone but advanced SEO practitioners, thoroughly recommended if you want to try it. Offers very advanced features such as nesting illustrated here.

Redirection

Also from UrbanGiraffe the excellent “Redirection” plugin which allows you to use 301 redirects to tidy up old posts, change URLs, cloak affiliate links and has many more SEO uses (and we’ll be covering some of these in upcoming SEO Tips posts)

Contextual Related Posts

Ajay DSouza’s related posts plugin is our favourite because it looks at post context to suggest related posts, rather than using the tag system as most do.

Broken Links Remover

This is a great plugin, one of those you wonder how you managed before once you’re using it. Not only does it automatically check your site for broken outbound links and allow easy fixing of problem links, we also use it to remotely monitor other sites, ie if you’ve linked to a site, and it gets hacked or goes down for any reason , you’ll be automatically notified of problems (via the site running the Broken Links plugin) whenever you log into it.

Nofollow Case by Case

We didn’t like “nofollow” much for outbound links even when it was thought you could “sculpt pagerank” internally using it, we always believed that if a link deserves to be there at all, it should be live. Wordpress comes with nofollow implemented as standard on comments, this plugin makes everything live as default, and you simply add /dontfollow to any URLs you may want to kill linkjuice on for any reason.

XML Sitemaps

The default XML sitemap for Wordpress plugin, it rebuilds the sitemap every time you create or edit URL structures and auto-pings to ensure you are re-crawled / indexed as fast as possible. Install it, run it, forget it.

SEO Booster Lite / Pro

This is an interesting plugin we’re testing the Lite version of but think we’ll be buying the Pro version shortly, and it seems to do what it’s supposed to, i.e. advanced whitehat automated SEO.

It works by monitoring 2nd page hits you’ve had from search engines, and auto linking to them using the search term as anchor text, to try and elevate that term from second page to first, for a traffic spike. We’ll be going into more detail on this on upcoming blog posts, but suffice to say its promising enough to make this list.

Then all you need is:

The Best Wordpress SEO Theme

..which in our opinion is Thesis – v1.7 (out very soon) and you’ll be away.

Wordpress SEO firepower

But SEO for Wordpress is not just installing all the goodies..

Lots of people are under the impression that SEO is all automatic on Wordpress, and this just isn’t true, because just like a championship winning race car, not everybody will drive it the same.

Although it is true that if you know how to write and optimize content properly Wordpress does look after the technical side for you, simply having the best plugins, theme and set up is not enough, you will still need engaging and effective content, and a correct site structure to deliver superior seo performance.

For the “..How to’s ” please see our SEO Tips Series

Another in the excellent “How to” series of SEO tips from the mighty SEO Design Solutions..

This week they’re explaining how to put the “design” into SEO web design..

Over to Jeffrey Smith @ SEO Design Solutions

“Here are 10 powerhouse SEO tips that you can use to design a new website and make sure it gets off to the right start. First, the strategy, then a brief synopsis of the tactics are outlined below.

SEO Tips to Build a New Website:

1. Start with a theme (meaning your market and the top level keywords).
2. Use Keyword Research to build that theme into the site navigation, internal links, tags and naming conventions.
3. Determine the tipping point is for the top 5 competitors and exceed them using time-released content.
4. Leverage internal links to select preferred landing pages.
5. Build a stable base of off page links from trusted sources first, and then ensure a fresh supply of relevant ongoing links.
6. Build pages properly the first time “optimal” using a pliable CMS system which does all the SEO / heavy lifting by default.
7. Use keyword research to integrate less competitive keywords (branches of the root phrase) into supporting posts, pages and off page content (then go back to point #3).
8. Keep site architecture flat and make sure to link to a sitemap for that segment of the site (if you use categories).
9. Make changes to older / trusted pages – If ranking priorities change, go back and edit and add additional links and content to leverage pages 4 months or older to link to new pages with supporting keywords.
10. Measure the results and rinse and repeat.

Start with a theme: Understanding the competitiveness of the keywords, based on competing pages, the authority of the competitors holding down the top 5 spots and the content and link thresholds they exhibit is a great start for any endeavor.

You can also expand your base of modifiers to embrace multiple variations or flavors of the market to drive additional traffic that competitors may be leaving on the table due to their own narrowness or lack of creativity. *Links will be provided at the end of this post for further elaboration on various tactics and techniques.

Use Keyword Research: When conducting keyword research, keep in mind, it is the long term objective that matters, so you have to build the most competitive keywords and phrases into the site structure so that it is always present and acts as a hook for a node of relevance.

Then, using faceted or tiered navigation, you can drill down from the most broad phrases into the category and / or product level (giving each page its own focus) vs. trying to mash everything together as a keyword free for all.

The rule of thumb is a page should be optimized for 3 -5 keywords per page, anything else is just mid-tail and long-tail traffic which will happen anyway, once all the pages are indexed, linked and working in unison.

Determine The Tipping Point: Each keyword has a tipping point, determining what that is takes to outrank others requires observation, analysis and execution to overcome.

For example, is it 15 pages of content for keyword A, 25 deep links and 100 internal links from other pages, 5 pages of content for keyword B, 100 deep links and 4 months to season enough search engine trust?

They say practice makes perfect and no two websites are alike, however this is a moving target and requires persistence based on keyword thresholds exhibited by (a) your own website and (b) the thoroughness of your competitors SEO strategies and whether they are hollow or back by solid SEO metrics.

Leverage Internal Links: Leverage the links you build from other websites by using keyword relevant internal links through co-occurrence. If a keyword exists on another page you intend to rank for, and then make sure that all of the subsequent pages are linked to the preferred landing page with the keyword or semantic variation to support the preferred ranking.

Off Page Links: Getting the proper type of off page inbound links matters more than the quantity of links pointing at a page or website. Trusted links pass trust; you can have 200K inbound links from sites that are classified as a bad neighborhood that pass nothing of value to your website. On the other hand, you can have 1000 quality links from sites that have trust and authority and pass more ranking factor along than the 200K links.

Aged sites replete with either (a) trust or (b) rankings in the niche, market or segment your site corresponds to are ideal.

SEO for a CMS: You don’t have to over-think your SEO, just build it on a solid platform (such as WordPress) refer to our WordPress SEO Tips. After you set your site up properly the first time, you can easily mirroring the title, h1, meta tags and page naming conventions and focus on adding themed content to add an array of robust keywords and landing pages to garner rankings.

Keeping Site Architecture Flat: Flat site architecture implies building relevant pages in the root folder and using exact match or targeted naming conventions for the url structure. For example, instead of having a site format and naming convention like domain.com/electronics/games/sony-psp/ you could use domain.com/sony-psp-games.html to flatten the subfolders.

Here is a great piece on competition and how to leverage content silos to get that value out of your deeper pages and add traction for specific pages.

Making Changes to Older / Trusted Pages: You can benefit tremendously from refining or editing pages with trust or page rank to increase indexation for other newer pages or site segments.

Many SEO’s don’t tell you that your websites most trusted pages (older than 4 months) are a treasure trove when re-optimized or utilized (by adding additional content or links) to act as pivotal points within a website.

Linking from trusted pages passes along value beyond measureable link flow alone, it allows your other pages to rank on less inbound links from other sites (as inbound links or external inbound links are treated much in the same way).

Measure, Rinse and Repeat: No explanation needed here. Just test the metrics, keep a log and make adjustments where needed to dial in specific keyword variations.

These 10 SEO tips should allow you to make a great start and strong ranking finish. Now, as promised, here are the links.

• WordPress SEO Tips
• Overcoming Competitive Markets
• SEO and Internal Linking
• How SEO Really Works
• 6 Steps for Launching a New Website

"Ibiza" image optimization

As we keep saying, Superior SEO is NOT just about ranking for a few particular phrases anymore, it’s about a holistic understanding of the big picture, and looking sideways as well as upwards in the SERPs.

One of the most important developments for SEO moving forwards is the advent of Google universal search results, i.e. images, and video appearing in the main SERP results.

Obviously if:

1. you have a strong marketing plan
2. you know how to make your results appear there..

..This could have a lot of potential. With that in mind we have been experimenting for a good while now to truly get to grips with how to rank images, because for most SEOs this is still a bit of a mystery, and nearly always an afterthought, but it shouldn’t be, because images are usually much easier to rank for than the same keyword in the normal SERPs, and for a new site can really get traffic moving quickly by comparison to the equivalent time to rank normally.

Also, following the “usual advice” won’t actually do you much good, that’s far too random, and entirely too  “may, or may not..” for us, so here’s a basic “how to” for anyone aspiring superior seo-ers who want to know.

1.) Use Wordpress for your website if possible

Lots of people say Wordpress is all you need for SEO, but that’s not actually true, as the SEO content and design are what YOU TYPE IN, not the particular codebase that you type it into. However with Images, it is closer to the truth, although the same principles apply on any site, Wordpress does help you get it right without trying so hard.

2.) Follow the “usual” advice

Naming the image with relevant keywords, using alt text including (variations and modifiers of) the keywords, and a descriptive title, plus getting the keywords on the page, in the proximity of the images.

(This is as far as most SEOs can advise on image rankings, (without 1.) )

3.) Hotlink and use the image in another post, on the original site, or even better, another site.

4.) Link from the second image, to the first image, using your target keywords as ALT (anchor) text

5.) Text Link at the page from a couple of other places using your target keywords as Anchor Text

The picture above is on one of our test sites that has been pretty much empty since it was built 18 months ago,  so you’d likely think that the chances of getting it to rank for “Ibiza” with no content to speak of, and no links to speak of are pretty slim?

heh heh…

Now if you were to believe  the Google Adwords tool, “Ibiza” on the “exact ” setting is 1.2 million searches per month globally, and 20.4 million on the “broad” setting.

Without going into details this little website that’s had no work done on it whatever until this weekend just gone, has been quietly racking up between 2 – sometimes nearly 500 hits per day from just this one keyword.

We wouldn’t mind betting that’s more than the majority of Ibiza sites get from their entire longtail and main searches.

So anyway, now it’s established with a reasonable amount of relevant through-flow, we’re going to sort it out a bit and use it for it’s intended purpose, a high-quality hand-edited FREE Ibiza business advertising directory.

Superior SEO tips from a superior SEO design company

Seriously, there is hardly anywhere on the internet that you get this kind of information from, and we should know, we’ve seen more SEO blogs than most.  If you are seriously interested in learning about the more advanced aspects of  SEO you should be subscribed and reading their blog.

So we’ll hand over to Jeffrey Smith now:

First I would like to thank Matt Cutts (Software Engineer and Chief of the Webspam Team for Google) and Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting for the great interview they published on March 14th.

Google SEO: Topics from Matt Cutts Eric Enge Interview

Thanks to this interview, a plethora of looming misconceptions about SEO can be laid to rest or dismissed as conjecture as this is as clear as it is going to get from any official statement from Google regarding the inner workings of their search engine. This is not the interview, you can read that here, but rather our appreciation of the topics discussed.

Getting answers directly from the source was a great relief for many advanced SEO’s, who now have a baseline (for now) to use as a barometer regarding the way Google crawls, indexes and interprets pages, duplicate content and the underlying structure of a website.

By using some of the tips he suggested, it may provide insight to some problem areas which until now, may have been improperly diagnosed. There was so much to dig into for SEO’s as the tidbits pertain to a wide variety of conditions that must be anticipated, revised and optimized in a website in order to reap the rewards of a top ranking SERP (search engine result page) position.

They touched upon the crawl budget (whereby Matt dismissed the notion of an index cap) which suggests a website only has an allotted volume of potential pages indexed and he correlated the degree of importance to their web crawlers are proportionate to the amount of PageRank within a web site.

This means if you want more PageRank, then either (1) create more pages (more pages mean more PageRank) or (2) acquire quality links from sites replete with PageRank. More importantly, if you create more buoyancy in your website it as a result of your own contents internal dynamo and domain authority, make sure that your pages are not orphaned and have a sufficient amount of internal and/or external links to support them (like branches from the base of a tree), so they do not suffer from link attrition.

You will also note that  although PageRank is a primary metric that indicates crawl depth, site authority or the aggregate trust and authority of a site can also allow PageRank to accumulate (despite there are no inbound links from other sites to individual pages).

We always suggest getting 5-10 inbound links minimum to the pages that have significance for ranking factor, even if they are only for the second level push (pages that link to primary pages). By doing this, it is effectively considered link equity and / or link insurance for that page when it ages, so it can accrue ranking factor and pass it along to your primary / more significant pages deemed worthy for commerce or conversion.

Under the same auspices, the amount of internal or external links (that pass value) change based upon the competitiveness of the keyword. Yet, ranking credit does apply to a site that is replete with authority (meaning PageRank can move around and strengthen pages further away from the root).

Also, Matt touched on duplicate content, the importance of site architecture, how to reduce canonical conflict and off page considerations such as the server environment and how that may impact indexation (how deep the Googlebot crawls) based on how many simultaneous connections and bandwidth is allotted to your web property.

It is not a matter of speed as much as it is bandwidth under this assumption. Page speed and loading time are factors, how they impact or if they impact rankings at this point are uncertain. However, if you are hosting your website on a shared server and have noticed a dip in pages indexed, you may want to consider a more aggressive package with more bandwidth.

As addendums to the topics they covered, we would like to touch upon:

• Proper Site Architecture & Page Rank Decay
• Duplicate Content and Canonical Issues

Proper Site Architecture and PageRank Decay: Funneling the appropriate link equity through site architecture is a basic premise in search engine optimization and utilizes the number of inbound and outbound links on each page to create a relative hierarchy of pages which represent the most commercial or prevalent value to users.

The homepage by default is the strongest page in a web site; however, based on internal links, how many links are leaving each page, deep links and whether or not pages are built into the primary navigation also play a role in this ordering of PageRank within a site.

Also, keep in mind (based on our testing) that as you move further away from the root folder, page rank tends to decay and it becomes harder to make pages nested in sub folders rank unless they are augmented by (a) more internal links (b) more citation from other websites via inbound links as a result of peer review.

With this in mind, you can use theming and siloing (creating a relevant hierarchy of themed / similar content in their respective folders with keyword-rich naming conventions) to elevate relevance and communicate to both users and search engines the subject matter of those pages.

However, in the event you want to create a prominent page as a catch all to consolidate that ranking factor, then you ideally should use flat site architecture where possible (using keyword-rich and inclusive naming conventions) to create the preferred landing page and extract the link equity from the themed pages through internal linking and co-occurrence.

You may have 100 pages of nested content (such as articles and blog posts deeper in the site) in our case, let’s use the keyword “conversion optimization” as an example, but you should have the conversion optimization landing page on the root.

As a testament to the tactic, search for conversion optimization services in Google, the ranking for our site was created in this fashion. The page itself only has 5 external inbound links, but the on page authority the page garners as a result of being at the root of the domain, with a few choice links from the proper area of the site is all it needs to maintain this position.

This is easily done through creating a structured format for link flow to move through the site. Ideally, Wikipedia is a prime example of virtual theming (which means they use lateral co-occurrence of keywords to cross-link individual keywords and pages).

You can use virtual theming, theming and siloing or deep links and flat site architecture in tandem to dial in a number of specific rankings (based on their monetary value to you).

If you note the destination of any link on any page in Wikipedia, you will also note that any time that keyword occurs on any other page in the site (on a page that is indexed and has ranking factor) passes the link flow back to the primary landing page most appropriate for that keyword.

You can implement the same type of landing pages with flat site architecture (meaning they are either in the root or close to it) so that the page is no more than 3 clicks away from the homepage or easily accessible from the primary navigation. Any link built from the home page (or pages in the root) and/or built into the primary navigation typically carries more weight to how search engines interpret this hierarchy vs. pages further away.

Matt also addressed one way of managing link equity by using a tiered approach instead of PageRank Sculpting with IFrames or Javascript, which he stated “PageRank Sculpting is taking the PageRank that you already have and trying to guide it to different pages that you think will be more effective, and there are much better ways to do that. If you have a product that gives you great conversions and a fantastic profit margin, you can put that right at the root of your site front and center. A lot of PageRank will flow through that link to that particular product page.”

He further explains “A good example might be to start with your ten best selling products, put those on the front page, and then on those product pages you could have links to your next ten or hundred best selling products. Each product could have ten links, and each of those ten links could point to ten other products that are selling relatively well.” This is SEO at its finest and is a perfect instance of doing things properly in the first place, vs. trying to patch a leaky bucket of fix sub optimal site architecture.

In their interview, they really covered allot of topics aside from the ones we rehashed above.

Matt also touched on:

• Using robots.txt to block folders that have ads or affiliate offers, so they don’t get crawled.
• 301 redirects and how there is a slight decay and how the total link flow may not reach the new destination page.
• PDF files and how they are crawled as pages and much much more.

Here is a quick SEO tip regarding PDF files, always use no-follow on PDF links or make sure there are links back to your main pages, otherwise they can leech PageRank and link flow.

In closing, here is the link to the interview once again and thanks for both Eric and Matt for covering these topics in great detail.

From the Thesis team this morning..

Our goal this year is pretty simple:

We want to continually blow you away with the best products and services that will help you build the best websites on the planet. Marketing rhetoric is fun and all, but I like action, and I know you do too. Here’s what we’ve got in the works at DIYthemes:

First, I’m going to release Thesis 1.7 over the next couple of weeks.

Developers will get a beta version, and then everyone will get the final release once bugs are squashed (I like to think there won’t be any bugs, but then again, I WOULD think that ). Our last release, 1.6, was biased toward design, but 1.7 is going to bring you more technical detail that will further improve on our world-class SEO framework.

Here’s what’s new:

- Options Manager.

If you’ve ever delivered a Thesis site to a client, then you know what a pain in the butt it can be to go into a new site and set every single option by hand. With Thesis 1.7, you’ll be able to save and restore the Thesis Options without having to be woefully inefficent.

Oh, and skin developers? You’ll be able to use this new functionality to share font and design settings, and this will make it easier to help people set up your awesome skins on their sites!

- Insane New SEO Controls and Detail.

Thesis has always been optimized and ready to perform in the search engines, but there were still some areas where exacting, precise controls were lacking. Not anymore.

Version 1.7 contains a totally redesigned document  that allows for SEO customization at a level that no one has ever seen before.

You’ll be able to supply  details, and even control the indexing (noindex, nofollow, noarchive) onevery stinkin’ page of your site.  Better still, you’ll find a new page in the Thesis Options panel that will give you total control over all these
details on your Category and Tag archive pages.

Optimize EVERYTHING because that’s how you win on the Web, and that’s what Thesis is all about.

- New Headline Filter.

This one’s a bit technical, but I’m using (and loving) it on my newly-relaunched version of Pearsonified (http://www.pearsonified.com/), which is running on a pre-release version of Thesis 1.7. Basically, this simple filter will allow developers to show/hide headlines, and you’ll be able to use this to create more diverse post styles on your site. I’ve used it to create “asides,” which are a little less formal than my normal posts-here’s an example (note the absence of a headline and byline):

http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/01/web-publishing-2010.php.

It’s just a little thing, but oftentimes, things like this bring the most joy to people
who like to customize their sites!

- Beefed-up Internationalization.

Thanks to the help of our fans in other countries, I’ve been able to identify certain parts of the code that were not so translation-friendly. To fix this, I’ve gone through every single string in Thesis and made sure that everything is up to spec for internationalization. Now, it will be easier than ever to use handy translation software to translate Thesis into different languages!

Now that you know what’s coming in Thesis 1.7, let’s get back to something I mentioned in the subject of this email: “a new kind of website optimization.”

The killer part about this is that I wasn’t talking about Thesis!

As you know, Thesis is all about helping you build a flexible website that is technically precise. Problem is, your CONTENT is every bit as important as the code that runs your website, and it’s always been a bit of a bummer to me that I can’t do more on this front to help you out.

Well, thanks to my partner Brian Clark, this little problem is solved I know this is a bit of a tease, but you’ll be hearing more from me on this in the days to come!

Finally, thank you so, so much for being a part of this journey. It’s a pleasure to wake up every day and know that I can help you in some small way, and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to do that!

Rock on, folks.

Chris Pearson & the DIYThemes team

From the Mighty SEO Design Solutions – www.seodesignsolutions.com

Aligning Keywords and Landing Pages

One of the most valuable components of an SEO campaign is the correlation of aligning keywords and landing pages.

How to Optimize Keywords and Landing Pages

During the early stages of optimization, it is not uncommon to depend on the authority of the homepage to act as a “catch all” page for your websites most coveted keywords. However, the homepage has been proven as one of the least likely places to facilitate conversion.

Considering that rankings are “by the page” the real objective of search engine optimization is to identify and solidify on page factors to communicate a hierarchical chain of relevance within a website to convey which pages are optimal for the keyword or key phrases in question.

One way to do that is through unifying four vital metrics within the site architecture and on page metrics.

1) Allintitle: a metric that assesses the local and global term weights for keywords in the titles.

2) Allintext: a metric that assess the local and global term weights for keywords in the body text.

3) Allinanchor: a metric that assess the local and global term weights for keywords in anchor text (both from within the site and from other sites to individual pages).

4)Allinurl: a metric that assesses relevance based on mirroring keywords in the URL naming conventions, subfolders or sub domains.

Follow the link ror more information about allintitle, allintext and allinanchor or how to use Google search operators for SEO.

By consolidating these prominent SEO ranking factors through structured search operators and employing SEO by design rather than trying to go back and fix a leaky bucket, it is possible to improve the relevance score for individual keywords systematically as a result of holistic structure, planning and execution.

Consider this your SEO ecosystem which allows each seed (keyword) to become fertile, nourish itself and bear fruit.

In this case, the fruit is to appear in the top 1000 results of Google, make its way to the top 100 and then either use other pages to reinforce topicality and buoyancy and move into the top 10 spotlight.

Step 1: For a landing page to have the proper on page signals to capture a competitive keyword it will require structured dedication and citation such as:

• Enough content on the page (based on the keyword).
• Enough content within the site (to cross the tipping point).
• Enough links from within the site (to establish the internal pages hierarchy)
• Enough links from other sites (if the on page elements are not enough).

Step 2: Planning -Finding the competitive keyword thresholds is not difficult, but assessing your own websites ranking potential is a mandatory step. We call this gap analysis (determining the objective and where you are at present).

In order to navigate the gap, it will require time, content, links and patience; and the more competitive the keyword, the more time, content, trust or links you will need to offset the barrier to entry.

Ideally, the most competitive keywords should be supported by:

• Primary navigation
• A keyword-rich subfolder
• A keyword-rich page naming convention and title

Other metrics for consideration from a standpoint of relevance are:

• Time: how old is the content, is it still relevant?
• Popularity: How many citations are linking to it?
• Supply / Demand: How many times has the page been accessed based on other pages in your website.
• Value: Is the information authoritative, academic or educational or commercial (search engines are programmed with preference).

Step 3: Execution –Map a tiered site structure using theming and siloing to produce the necessary dynamic to propel your pages to the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).

For your pages:

• Use Exact Match keywords in titles for your primary keyword first, then add secondary or plural search engine proven synonyms (not exceeding three keyword variations).
• Use Relevant Mata Data (Including Information only relevant for that page).
• Use the exact match keyword in the H1 tag, and plural variations in H2 tag if needed.
• Build internal links to that page from other pages that have theme relevance for the keyword (in the title). For example, link similarly themed pages using the anchor text you want the target page to rank for.
• Use the keyword in the first 50 words of the page, and use it at least 2 other times in the document. Preferably you should employ alternate synonyms to reinforce topical relevance (without resorting to spam / keyword stuffed content).
• Acquire inbound deep links to the page from other websites to provide sufficient peer review from search engines (since they measure citation as a favorable metric).

Taking the on page SEO to the next level implies sculpting relevance through the proper utilization of link equity, selecting your preferred landing pages and pairing those pages with a suitable value proposition, call to action and conversion action to facilitate the sales funnel.

Put simply:

• Choose a main category page for each dominant keyword.

• Use subordinate product or article pages to provide structured inbound internal links to support the main category pages.

• Build links to those 3^rd or 4^th tier pages to provide buoyant ranking factor to the entire keyword cluster (the aggregate semantic collective of related keywords). by building links to the deeper pages in a website, each page in the site above in the hierarchy or the root folder benefit as well.

In the 3^rd example above, this alone becomes a priceless component of any SEO strategy. Under the notion that your website is only as strong as its weakest link, as long as each page is nurtured, connected through virtual theming (internal links) or a sitemap or secondary navigation, it can contribute to the global ranking potential for the entire website.

Don’t waste time or opportunity from relying on any one page in your website to do the heavy lifting. Instead, endow each page with vigor and ranking potency by adhering to the solid principles of SEO by design

We are very serious about building this site into the best resource we can for people who simply want to learn the superior SEO, from the not-so, be able to tell the difference, and implement techniques that work the best on their own site.

With that in mind we will be linking to every and any worthy information and resources, like this from the mighty SEO Design Solutions..

What is superior SEO web design? – we’ve quoted small parts below but are handing over today’s lesson to the masters, get over there and check it out.

The days of building static websites page by page are coming to a close. Dated platforms like (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.) that do not allow the content to speak to other segments (such as an inherent dynamically updating navigation menus or sitemaps) are essentially defunct in competitive industries.

Websites need to be dynamic, lean and pliable in order to incorporate changes at the side wide level (much like widgets or modules) as well as have the ability to customize each of the elements that require fine-tuning independent from those widgets (which means solution by design is more than just a motto).

What are some of the components of Superior SEO Web Design?

• optimal and sub-optimal naming conventions
• relevant meta descriptions
• site architecture (flat, themed, tiered)
• sitemaps (how many, which type xml, ror, html?)
• enhanced tagging features and tag pages
• landing pages (establishing a hierarchy)
• syndication (RSS aggregators)
• elimination of duplicate content through custom
  sidebars, iframes or footers as secondary navigation
• an SEO friendly CMS (content management system)

These are just a few components that search engines assess to extract relevance. The notion is, if you have the ability to scale content over time, then the real missing ingredient is a pliable template that you can use as a platform to support the various branches of the website.

As we have been saying all along, clearly there is a lot more to a truly superior seo performance than merely ranking for a few easy terms. You need to think bigger, and you need to do it right from the start.

If just one aspect of your site is incorrect, like sub-optimal navigation, or large and slow loading, or not scalable for the future, it will hold the rest back and you never attain superior performance against the competition who get it all right.