Natural Search Tactics for Retailers
On Tuesday I gave two presentations at the Shop.org Annual Summit. First was "Natural Search Tactics for the Retailer" with fellow panelists Ken Jurina from Epiar, Jenny Schlueter from Dell, and Ian McAnerin from McAnerin International. It was a very tactical session - focused on tools, tips and techniques. Ken covered keyword research, Jenny covered content optimization, Ian covered technical optimization, and I covered link building.
Some are a few key points from the session...
- Mine multiple data sources for keyword data, such as Google Insights for Search, WordTracker, Yahoo Panama Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Tool, MSN Keyword Forecast, Trellian Keyword Discovery, Google Webmaster Tools, Wordze, Google Suggest, Google Traffic Estimator, Google Trends, Hitwise, NicheBOT, SEO Book Keyword Tool, GoodKeywords.com, internal site search logs, referrer logs, and PPC broad match. I'd add to Ken's list: comScore Marketer, WordPot, and Yahoo Search Assist (the autocomplete that is built into the Yahoo search box).
- Determine keyword difficulty with the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool, InternetMarketingNinjas Top Ten Analysis Tool, and KEI from KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker.
- Useful link analysis/link building tools include Yahoo Site Explorer, Back Link Analyzer, Thumbshots Ranking tool, TouchGraph, SEOChat PageRank Lookup, SEOChat PageRank Search and SEO for Firefox extension.
- Types of links that are likely to get discounted include: reciprocal links, affiliated sites (on the same IP range or hostname), footer links (at the bottom of the page), site-wide links, links contained on a page called links.htm / links.asp, and links with the exact same anchor text. Remember that the more links on the linking page, the less PageRank you'll get.
- Review your existing links using the Back Link Analyzer and contact those webmasters who link to you with suboptimal anchor text. Focus on the highest value links where you have rapport or influence with the webmaster.
- If you have multiple servers, rotating IP addresses (load balancing) can make it look to Google like you have duplicate copies of your site, and edge computing can cause geolocation issues. The fix is to detect spiders and send them to a canonical site version.
- Use the country code TLD for a country, use a subdomain for language or major group, and use subdirectories for topics. e.g. language.company.ccTLD/topic/page.htm
- A gTLD (.com, .net) is almost always geolocated via IP address. A ccTLD (.ws, .la, .tv) overrides IP geolocation. The duplication problem does not affect clearly geolocated sites. Always declare language and character types on web pages.
- Scripts that build links on the fly, AJAX, and Flash are bad for SEO. An Iframe is treated as a separate page; includes are better. Use a spider simulator such as SEO-Browser to test your site.
- Search engines strip most HTML code out of a document before parsing, so most HTML validation errors do not affect rankings. Exception: some errors, such as a missing "<" can kill the indexing of your page. Best Practice is to always validate your code.
The Powerpoint, which includes all 4 presentations, is available for download here.
The second session I presented was with Amy Africa and it was a site clinic session where Amy and I did impromptu critiques of audience members' websites. Amy covered usability and conversion; I covered SEO. It was a lot of fun. There were no Powerpoints for that session.
6 comments
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Excellent post Stephan and thanks for the information-rich presentation. It's a gem for anyone who's new to SEO.
One thing that I am not clear about is that you mention site-wide links get discounted.
Do you mean that links from the blogroll (which are on all pages of a blog) are not good. Or at least I get that links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links, be they in the blogroll or elsewhere. Am I getting it right?Comment by Affan Laghari [Visitor]
· http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com —
09/19/08 @ 10:17
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Great stuff Stephan! The way you share information in easy to grasp bits is very nice. Quick question, when you say "Remember that the more links on the linking page, the less PageRank you'll get." I'm a bit confused. Is this a reference to Google not liking a page that has too many links, or is there an issue with your linking page "sharing away" your link love, which impacts your own site's PR?
Comment by Craig Tomlin [Visitor] · http://www.wcraigtomlin.com — 09/19/08 @ 15:17
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Affan, indeed you are correct - links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links. This is because Google prefers links that appear to be earned by merit.
Craig, being 1 link out of 10 total links on somebody's page is better than than being 1 out of 100 because the PageRank on that person's page is divvied up amongst all the links on the page.Comment by Stephan Spencer [Member]
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09/20/08 @ 15:05
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Though I'm new to SEO, I have been following many blogs in the last few months and never got this tip about the site-wide link being discounted, which will definitely save me a lot of time.
I guess another reason can be that links from inside the post (or article) are normally set in a favorable context, where the text surrounding the link would also be topically relevant to the link.
Anyway, thanks again, Stephan!Comment by Affan Laghari [Visitor]
· http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com —
09/20/08 @ 18:38
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Great Post Stephan, very informative. I think links from inside an individual blog post are better than site-wide links
Comment by Lisa [Visitor] · http://blog.findsavings.com — 09/26/08 @ 11:13
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Hi there, Stephan;
Thank you for the article.
I know it's been a while since you posted, but I FINALLY made it through your post and the power point slides. It raised up a few questions.
You mentioned that site-wide incoming links are bad. My question is how bad? If another person's site has 500 pages that link to you in the footer, should you ask them NOT to link at all (so you aren't "penalized" by google)?
In essence, is it better to have NO links from a site than to have several hundred?
Or are you saying that ONE contextual inbound link with relevant anchor text might be better than 100, or 200 or however many incoming site-wide links?
You also mentioned in the Power Point presentation that when asking for other sites to link to yours, that it is a bad idea to provide them with the text / code to link to your site. Why is that? Is it because you want a certain amount of diversity in the anchor text when sites link to yours? Or is it an etiquette issue where you think it is more likely to have a favorable response if you allow the webmaster to write whatever he or she wants when they link to you?
Thank you in advance for any more insights you could share. And thank you again for the article and the slides.Comment by Mark R [Visitor] · http://www.thebuddhagarden.com — 11/14/09 @ 10:36
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