In today’s modern internet sales environment you need to ask yourself:

“ Will Front Page Rankings deliver the sales results I need ? “

The short answer is a resounding “No” but let’s elaborate a little on the question and then answer it. “Being on page 1 of Google”  is still a surprisingly common desire by “rookie” business website owners.

Whether it’s a new business, or a new website for an existing business, the number of people who think that if they could “just rank on the front page of Google” for a particular phrase they have in their minds, that all their problems would be over is still considerable.  .. But are superior rankings alone, enough any more?

..Consider the screenshot below.

Many people don’t even recognise the faintly pink area as an advert/s, and sometimes there are as many as 3 adverts there, so a legitimate #1 and #2 as shown above,  is already equivalent to #4 and #5, to these people.

And many SERPs these days have Local Business (maps) listings plus Videos, Images all around, so the choice  of destinations other than your site grows all the time.

So CTR (or Click Through Rates) starts to take even greater importance as even a #1 Organic ranking will probably have several enticing choices above and below it, and not even be all that clearly a #1 position to a non-techie searcher, and if you’re ranking below the fold on the browser there’s a good chance the searcher might not even SEE your listing.

So clearly, improving your click through rates on rankings that do get seen, so that the customer  (hopefully) clicks your site over and above the others all around you is not only the only way to improve traffic on a keyword when you can’t actually go any higher, but also it’s a great way to snipe traffic from above you from lower positions.

The Changing Face (& Workings) of Google.

If you’ve used Google in the last few weeks you can’t of helped noticing they have changed the look of their sacred interface quite dramatically, (leading incidentally to reports of less traffic  for some sites since the rollout) however that is not all they have changed, not by a long way.

As noted by several sites, Google caffeine is live – that is the new super-powerful infrastructure that Google runs on, and this has shaken lots of sites performance up in many different aspects, not just rankings.

We think perhaps the new version of Webmaster Tools is also Caffeine-powered because it’s pretty hyper compared to the last version and now gives far greater insight into your site’s traffic and performance across all Google indexes than has ever been available anywhere before, and now includes basic keyword CTR data, which although limited is more than we had before, and gives a reasonable indication to us that Google will likely be looking at this more and more as time goes on, perhaps even as ranking signals, finally.

What happens when they DO click my site?

Good question. Considering the ever increasing difficulty of ranking high enough to be seen,  and then of getting them to actually click yours, over your competition, what happens when one way or another a precious customer does find you? ie

Does the Website Convert (visitors into customers) ?

If it doesn’t, before you spend any more time and money worrying about SEO, you would be much better off spending some time and effort on either getting a decent site, or looking into improving the conversion rate of your current site, ie Conversion Rate Optimization.

Hence you can hopefully  see that Superior SEO in 2010 has far more wide-ranging connotations and responsibilities than ever before, and people who think that just  a front-page ranking for a keyword is all that is required to build a strong  online business don’t understand either Google, their competitors, and quite likely their own potential customers.

Obviously any system calling itself superior design must work well on not just one search engine, but should be equally well received by any and all search engines.  Any site relying exclusively on traffic from one search engine is always vulnerable to sudden algo rankings changes, competitors overtaking them etc, and is not maximizing traffic across the whole SE user-base.

A truly superior seo system will perform equally well on all the engines, anything else is, well inferior

Our own favourite superior search engine ixquick..

Yahoo..

Bing..

Dogpile..

Ask..

And finally Cuil, although this site isnt there yet, we can’t help thinking that’s a promising SE for the future, they certainly seem to be able to work out what’s what on their superior SEO listings

And finally, it should of course also be doing the same on Image search..

This is Superior SEO Domination in action…

Superior-SEO.US

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

We’ve been writing about this  for several weeks now, so were excited to see Thesis 1.7 is finally here ..from Chris & the Team a couple of days ago.

WE think if you don’t have it, already, you should buy it NOW

Truly Superior Wordpress SEO

Hi!

It’s party time here at DIYthemes, and there are two big reasons why:

First, this week marks the two-year anniversary of day I launched Thesis. To commemorate this momentous occasion, I decided to have a look through some of the original Thesis files to see how far we’ve come…

And as it turns out, I’ve seen horror movies that scared me less than that old code

On the upside, knowing where we’ve come from makes me all the more excited to announce the second big reason why we’re partying this week at DIYthemes:

Thesis 1.7 has arrived!

While you should ALWAYS upgrade to the latest version of Thesis, this one is extremely important for three notable reasons.

1. The new Options Manager allows you to save and restore your options settings, and this will prove useful whenever you work on your site.

Whether you’re installing a new Thesis skin, sharing options with friends, or backing up your settings for upgrades or server moves, you’ll find the Options Manager to be extremely helpful.

2. Thesis 1.7 is the most efficient, fast, and flexible version to date. You’ll notice performance improvements on your live site AND in the admin panel; usability enhancements like this are what make Thesis a joy to use.

3. Although I’m known for my attention to detail, I really went nuts on this particular release. Fortunately for you, this means that there is a lot to love about Thesis 1.7! Check out the new feature list, and you’ll see what I mean:

http://diythemes.com/thesis/version-17-features/

In addition, to help you get started with Thesis 1.7, we’ve added helpful videos to the Thesis download page. Whether you’re installing Thesis for the first time or upgrading from a previous version, you’ll have a clear example of how to get Thesis up and running!

Oh, and one last thing-starting this week, we’re going to begin publishing tutorial videos, helpful tips, and community news on the DIYthemes site. To receive automatic updates by email, visit the address below and enter your email address in the appropriate box:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thesistheme

Finally, thank you for being a Thesis user and having such impeccable taste in Web software

Chris Pearson and the DIYthemes team
http://diythemes.com/

——————————————————————-

In our opinion Thesis 1.7 is the best wordpress SEO theme by far. 

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.

This is a good phrase, isn’t it?

It’s totally traffic-less apart from the various SEOs trying to rank for it, but it’s emotive, it  just sounds so good everyone wants to rank for it, to be “the one” who is #1 for Superior SEO services

This week there’s a new kid in Town..  www.superior-seo-services.com

The colours and styling look suspiciously like our old friends  FPR, but if that were true they’ve upped their game a little and at least built it on the right platform now

It has certain trademarks from their coding, but it’s impossible to say for sure at the moment.

Anyway, whoever it belongs to, they’ve gone for the full sniper approach, domain, internal linking etc, let’s just hope it’s going to rank for other things besides “Superior SEO” and “superior SEO services” or it’s going to be a mighty big disappointment traffic-wise, and a huge waste of the raw ranking power of well configured Wordpress SEO installation.

Because of actual superior seo, at 6 months in, ours is getting a reasonable amount of wordpress-specific traffic now, especially on the subject of Thesis 1.7, and doing this kind of thing too

Superior SEO services we look forward to jousting with you in the charts