1. Duplicate content.
Googles overarching mission is to provide its users with high quality information which is relevant to the search query that they submitted, therefore it will come as no great suprise to learn the Google has effective measures in place to make sure that the top ten results for any given keyword do not comprise of pages containing identical content. One of the means that Google uses to achieve this is by penalising pages that contain content which originated on another website.

2. Cloaked Content.
The idea of cloaking content is not a new concept, infact it has been around for years. One of the oldest methods involves rendering the text in the same colour as the pages background to make it invisible to the human eye whilst presenting the same text as content to search engines. There are other methods of cloaking text through CSS. Each of these proceedures are against the terms of service of Google and as such, carry penalties.

3. Paid Links.
Many websites offer people the chance to obtain a link from them in return for cash, often these links can seem as though they would be very valuable for your SEO efforts, it is not uncommon to see PR6 and PR7 websites offering links for cash. However, before you grab your credit card and go off hunting, there is a catch, buying links is against Googles terms of service and carries hefty ranking penalties. Typically Google will penalise both websites involved in the paid link transaction, and additionally every pagerank update sees the PR of sites know to have sold links heavily downsized.

4. Linking To Websites Of Bad Repute.
Google and other search engines realise that no person can control who links to their domain, however the websites that your domain links out to is an entirely different scenario, these links are firmly within your control and google considers each of the websites you link to when it calculates your ranking positions. Linking out to websites of a bad repute will have a negative impact on your own rankings.

5. Canonicalization.
Canonicalization is the process of showing identical (or very simular) content on more than one url. Often this can occur through incorrect server configuration (not redirecting non-www. to www. or vice versa) but canonicalization can also come about on ecommerce websites that show the same product lists on more than one apge or even on websites that display the same products on pages which sell in alternate currencies. In this situation, use of the rel=canonical tag is recommended to let search engines know which page you would like them to index.

5 Common Negative SEO Factors was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

Your Guide To Commonly Used SEO Jargon.
If you would like to suggest SEO related jargon or terminology for inclusion in the encyclopedia, please leave a comment below. Suggestions are always greatly appreciated as they help us to keep the encyclopedia concise and up to date.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

• 200 – Signifies the successful loading of a webpage.
• 301 – A redirection used for the permenant relocation of a webpage to a new url.
• 302 – A redirection used for the temporary relocation of a webpage to a new url.
• 404 – Page not found error.

A

Back to top

• Absolute Link – A link that defines the full location of a particular page.
• AdCenter – The pay per click marketing service providing paid listings on Bing.
• AdSense – Google’s affiliate advertising service whereby webmasters recieve a commision for adverts that are clicked on their website.
• Affiliate Marketing – A method of online marketing that involves recruiting others to sell your products or services online, and rewarding them with a commission payment for each sale made.
• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) – web based technology which is used to create interactive web applications.
• Alexa – A web traffic reporting service – data is collated by means of alexa’s tool bar which transmits browsing behavior back to alexa for reporting purposes.
• Algorithm – Complexed mathamatical formulas used by search engines to determine the ranking positions and relevence of webpages in their index.
• Alt Attribute – Also called an image alt tag, this attribute can be used to tell search engines what a particular image is about, it is commonly used in on-page optimisation.
• Anchor text – The text that is used to link a webpage when linked via a hyperlink, the Alt image tag becomes the anchortext when an images is linked.

B

Back to top

• Backlinks – Links that point form other domain to your website, Backlinks are a major factor used by search engines when deciding your ranking position.
• Black Hat SEO – Website promotion using techniques that are in breech of search engine guidelines. blackhat techniques can yield fast results but inevitably result in penalties of even permenant banning form search engines.
• Blog – An interactive website that allows authors to post articles and readers to submit comments regarding the articles.
• Blogroll – A list of links containing all the links that the blog links to.
• Bounce Rate – A figure that denote the percentage of visitors that leave a page almost as soon as they have arrived withoutvisiting any other page on the same domain.
• Branded Keyword – Search terms relating to a specific brand such as “coca cola” or “addidas shorts”.
• Breadcrumb Navigation – shows the full path of navigation used to reach a page, this can be beneficial to search engines and readers, especially on larger sites.
• Broken Link – a link that does not point to a webpage, either because the page has been moved or deleted, or because the link was incorrectly created.

C

Back to top

• Cache – A copy of a website saved by search engines incase the site unavailable when requested.
• Cloaking – The practice of showing different content to search engines and readers, this is a blackhat technique and should not be used, penalties for cloaking include permenant bans.
• Clustering – When a search returns several pages from the same domain they may be displayed together by the search engine in order to improve user friendliness.
• CMS – Content management system. Scripts upon which websites may be built to facilitate a back end admin area which allows the websites content to be changed and updated easily.
• Contextual Ad – An advertisment for a website with a strong topical connection to websites theme.
• Cost Per Action (CPA) – The overall cost of an online marketing campaign per result.This figure is used to identify the overall efficieny of the campaign.
• Cost Per Click (CPC) – An auction based billing method whereby advertisers bid for advertising positions in search engines by stating the maximum cost per click they are willing to pay, traffic recieved via the campaign is then charged at a maximum of the agreed rate per click.
• Cost Per thousand (CPM) – A method of advertising where a set charge is billed for each thousand impressions of the advert.
• Crawl – The process carried out by search engine spiders, automated programs which search the internet looking for fresh content to index. A spider is said to “crawl” a webpage.
• Crawl Depth – Crawl depth determines how many internal links a spider will follow to reach new pages whilst crawling your domain.
• Crawl Frequency – How often a spider visits your domain to check for new content. Regularly updated domains tend to be crawled more often.
• Cloud Tag – A visual depiction detailing the keyword density of a website, higher density words are normally shown in a larger font with less frequent words being smaller.

D

Back to top

• Dead Links – Internal links that no longer function, either because a page has been moved or deleted. dead links reduce the usability of a website and should be removed as soon as possible.
• Digital Marketing – A form of marketing that utilizes any digital medium other than the internet.
• Deep link – Linking internal page of a website to internal pages of another domain.
• Dedicated IP – A permenant identification number issued to a node for communication purposes.
• Dedicated Server – A server used soley by one person or company. Benefits include the ability to manage apache and php settings, as well as exclusive use of the servers ram, cpu and other resources.
• Description – Snippets of text displayed in search engines and directories as a means of describing the url shown.
• DMOZ – The worlds largest web directory the Open Directory Project is maintained by a global group of volunteers.
• DNS – Domain Name System, a technique of naming computers and other internet resources.
• DoFollow – An attribute which permits search engines to count the attribute link as a “vote” for that site and therefore affect the linked sites SERP for keywords used in the anchortext.
• Doorway Pages – Web pages intended to rank for particular keywords with the intention of sending recieved traffic to another webpage, these pages should never use html redirects, doing so can bring penalties for the recipients site.
• Duplicate content – Content that is identical or highly similar to the content used on another webpage or website. Duplicate content is a serious issue and can have very negative effects on rankings.
• Dynamic Content – Web pages that contain content automatically update their own content via rss feeds or other methods, these pages are normally indicated by the presence of a question mark in the url.

E

Back to top

• Entry Page – The landing page where traffic from search engines enters your domain.
• Ethical SEO – SEO methodology that is performed according to the standard rules and regulations followed by the search engines.
• External Link – Links pointing to your domain or a page on your domain from another website. Number, quality, and relevence of links are major ranking factors.

F

Back to top

• Feed – Allows subscribers to recieve updated data or articles from a website or blog on an automated basis.
• Free for all – FFA websites are set up with the sole purpose of providing free links for the promotion of sites, however these links carry little weight and low relevence, and are therefore not worth the effort required to get them.
• Filter – Filters form part of search engine algorithyms and are used to identify things like duplicate content with a view to removing identical pages from the search results.
• Frames – A method of displaying more than on html page in the same browser window, generally best avoided, frames can cause severe usability problems.
• Fresh Content – Brand new and original content (not scraped or reworded).

G

Back to top

• Google Adwords – Google’s pay per click advertising service where users bid for positions in search results through an auction type method by stating the maximium cost per click they are willing to pay.
• Google Analytics – Google’s free traffic analytics services which allows webmasters to identify traffic sources and bounce rates.
• GoogleBot – The name given to Google’s automated spider.
• Google AdSense – Google’s affiliate advertising service whereby webmasters recieve a commision for adverts that are clicked on their website.
• Google Base – A Database maintained by Google that allows users to add virtually any kind of content including excel templates and images.
• Google Bombing – This involves creating large numbers of links to a particular page with a chosen anchortext in order to get it to rank for that searchphrase, this is normally malicious in nature for example in 1999 the microsoft home page was googlebombed to rank first for the phrase “more evil than satan himself”.
• Google Bowling – The process of sabotaging a competitors webrankings by creating low quality spam links pointing to their pages, this damages their pages trust and therefore removes the page from the top of search results.
• Google Traffic Estimator – A tool provided by Google that is used to determine the monthly search volume and cost per click (adwords) for a particular keyword.
• Google Sitemap – Sitemaps are a basically list of the urls that you want to be indexed, submitting a sitemap via Google webmaster tools increases crawl efficiency and reduces the chance that Googlebot will miss important pages when crawling your domain.
• Google Sitelinks – Sitelinks are sometimes displayed underneath a sites listing in search results, they are links to other internal pages on that domain generated automatically by google when it thinks the sitelinks are relevent to the users query.
• Google Supplemental Index – A secondary index where google stores pages with less trust and inbound links, duplicate content is also thought to result in a page being returned as a supplemental result, Pages in this index recieve far less exposure in the search results, meaning it is therefore very bad for SEO.
• Google Website Optimizer – A free application provided by google that allows webmasters to test different versions of a html page with a view to reducing landing page bounce rates and increasing conversion rates.

H

Back to top

• Headings – Used to provide a webpages readers with an overview of the content that follows.
• Hidden text – Blackhat technique whereby text is created in the same colour as the page background to render it invisible from human eyes whilst allowing spiders to include the content.
• Hijacking – An unethical sabotage technique that involves tricking search engines into believeing that a page from one domain has move to another domain, thereby damaging the original pages rankings through duplicate content.
• HTML – Abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language.
• .Htaccess – A directory-level web server configuration file used by some servers (including apache) which has many uses including url redirection and enabling file caching.

I

Back to top

• Inbound Links – inbound links are also referred to as backlinks, they point to your domain (or a page on it) from another website.
• Index – A search engines index is used to store data, this facilitates the fast and efficient return of results relevent to a users query.
• Internal Link – Links that point to another location within the same domain, internal links are beneficial to optimisation as they can improve the understanding of search engines regarding what the website is about.

J

Back to top

• JavaScript – An object orientated web based programming language, originally known as “mocha” then “livescript” before being renamed to javascript.

K

Back to top

• Keyword – A word or a phrase that is likely to be used as a search term by internet users on search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
• Keyword Density – Also referred to as keyword weight, this refers to the number of times a specific keyword is used throughout a pages body content, density or keyword weight is displayed as a percentage.
• Keyword Frequency – The number of repetitions of a keyword within a single pages content.
• Keyword Prominence – Search engines attribute more importance to keywords appearing in certain areas of a page, keywords used in the opening lines of the first and last paragraph of a page are said to be more prominent, and carry more influence with regards to on-page optimisation.
• Keyword Relevancy – The relevance of an individual pages content with regards to being included in search results for a particular keyword.
• Keyword Research – Analysis that reveals which keywords are relevent to a webpages content, and how much traffic and competetition each of the suggested keywords have. The goal being to select high traffic low competition keywords that are highly relevent to a pages content.
• Keyword Stuffing – An outdated and no longer effectual method of acheiving high rankings by using more repetitions of a particular keyword than your competitors, both in the meta tags and page content.
• Keyword Weight – See above entry for Keyword Density.

L

Back to top

• Link Authority – The value of a particular inbound link with regards to trust, PR and relevence.
• Landing Page – Entry Page where traffic lands when a link is clicked, this could be from organic search results, a marketing email, sponsered listings, or a link on a refering site.
• Landing Page Quality – Google provide a landing page quality analysis free to adwords users. Relevence to the advert being run, and originality are the two main factors used for determining the score.
• Link Baiting – An SEO technique that involves creating enticing content which people will link to through their own free will because they see the content as usefull or interesting. Linkbaiting is a very effective method that when properly conducted can bring huge numbers of high quality backlinks.
• Link Building – The process of creating or obtaining links that point to your domain or a page on it from other websites on the internet.
• Link Equity – The number of inbound links a particular page has.
• Link Farm – A group of domains that exchange links with each other for the sole purpose of increasing pr and search rankings, such groups are easily spotted as they are highly interlinked and such practice is in breech of most search engines terms of service.
• Link Popularity – A major factor for determing the search results position of a given page by search engines, calcualted by examining the number, quality, and relevence of inbound links.
• Long Tail – Highly specific low competition keywords which are longer phrases than standard Keywords. Long tail keywords generally carry lower traffic but have a higher convertion rate than standard keywords due to the fact they are so highly targetted.

M

Back to top

• Meta Description – A coding statement providing a short and concise description of a webpages content. Meta description is sometimes used by search engines underneath a pages listing.
• Meta Keyword – A coding statement used to inform search engines of the keywords relevent to a pages content, although this tag is no longer as poweful as it once was with regards to determining the keywords a page will be returned in search results for, they still have some use in improving a pages overall keyword relevence and should therefore be utilised.

N

Back to top

• Natural Link – A link to your domain or one of its pages built by a reader because they found the content valuable.
• New Visitors – An analytical metric which shows the quantity of new visitors to your website as opposed to returning visitors.
• Nofollow – a html attribute which instructs search engines not to count the attributed link when calculating the search rankings of the linked page.

O

Back to top

• Organic Search Results – Search engine results that are ranked according to page relevence, link popularity, and trust, as opposed to paid listings from services such as Google Adwords which are classified as sponsored or paid results.
• Outbound link – a link pointing to an external domain or webpage on another domain.
• Open Directory Project – The internet’s largest human edited web directory, also known as DMOZ or ODP.

P

Back to top

• Page Rank – Google’s link analysis algorythm, a method of measuring the Importance of a particular webpage by assigning a value between 0 and 10.
• Page Title – Or page meta tag, gives a web author control of how that page will be diplayed in the search results. Title tags are also important to onpage optimisation and although they should be primarily written for human readers, they should also contain important keywords.
• Paid Inclusion – A Listing in a directory or search engine for which a fee must be paid. Additionally some commercial directories also charge an evalutaion fee to consider your site for listing, the payment of an evaluation fee does not guarantee inclusion.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – An internet advertising model where advertisers bid in an auction for advert positions in search results by stating the maximum cost per click they are willing to pay each time their advert is clicked.
• Pay for performance – A marketing campaign that is billed on a per sales conversion basis or when a predefined search ranking traffic volume, or other metric is acheived.
• Penalty – Punishments issued by search engines for violation of their terms of service and unethical SEO practices, penalties range in severity and Google is thought to use three main types of penalty: -30, -950, and index exclusion.

Q

Back to top

• Quality Content – Original, informative, and well written content, highly prized by search engines like Google.
• Quality Link – A Link pointing to your domain from a website that is relevent to your content, and is well established with high levels of trust.

R

Back to top

• Reciprocal Links – A link exchange whereby two pages on seperate domains link to each other. Links exchanged between two domains where the outbound link points to a different pages than the inbound link is on are not strictly speaking classed as reciprocal links.
• Redirect – Used to forward traffic and inform search engines when a page is moved from one on location to another, this can be on the same domain, or to a different domain. Redirects can be permanent (301) or temporary (302).
• Re-inclusion request – A request that can be submitted to search engines for reinclusion in their index after a penalty has resulted in your domain being dropped from their index.
• Referrer – When you click a link on a webpage and end up on another domain the page containing the link that you clicked in order to reach your destination is said to be the refferer.
• Relative Link – Relative links are used for referencing pages on the same domain that a user is currently browsing and do not state the full url, just the path to that file on the server, for example /contact.html would form the url portion of a relative link whereas http://www.highimpact-seo.co.uk/contact.html would form the url portion of an absolute link.
• Reputation Management – By monitoring the actions of an organisation, and the opinions those actions generate within the the general public or other organisations, a reputation management company can create feedback of their own intended to alleviate the impact of any bad press and improve the overall standing of their client.
• Return Visitors – A visitor that has previously visited your website.
• Robots.txt – A text file used to control search engine spiders that crawl your site by telling then which pages and folders they may spider and which they may not by ustilising the robots exclusion protocol.
• ROI – Return on Investment. the ratio of monies gained through a marketing campaign or other investment versus monies invested.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – An XML based web feed system that allows regularly updated content content such as news or blog posts to be automatically syndicated to a list of subscribed recipients.

S

Back to top

• Search Engine – A computer program capable of retrieving files or documents that are relevent to the users search terms form a database, network, or the internet.
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing: A holistic encompassment of all online marketing methods including SEO and PPC to increase traffic and visability within search engines.
• SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making off page and on page alterations to a website with the intention of improving organic search result positions and the amount of relevent organic traffic recieved.
• SEO Copywrighting – Creating content for a page or website that contains optimal density, prominence, and proximity of important keywords whilst at the same time being interesting, natural, and informative to the human eye.
• SERP (Search Engine Results Page) – The list of web pages that is provided by a search engine in response to a users search query.
• Search Marketing – See SEM.
• Sitemap – There are two kinds of sitemap, the first is a directory level file intended to assist spiders and tell them the location of pages you want to be indexed, the file contains the url of each page on the domain that you want them to crawl, the second kind of sitemap is a webpage that contains a link to every page on your domain with the aim of providing human users with a means of finding information.
• Social Media Site – Sites that allow users to bookmark sites, exchange media, or links, Social media sites depend on user contributions to provide their content.
• Spam – Unsolicited commercial email communications or low quality irrelevent blog comments submitted with the sole purpose of obtaining a link.
• Spider – An automated program that searches the internet looking for fresh content to add to its search engines database.
• Stopword – Search engines ignore certain very common words like “the” “a” or “to” because they can save time by doing so and still return relevent results. Stop words are therefore sometimes ommited from meta tags to free up space for important keywords.
• Supplemental results – a reserve index of pages that are viewed as less important by Google, pages in this index Sites are only returned in search results when there are a low number of relevent results found in the primary index, therefore pages in the supplemental index rarely rank for and high traffic keywords. In addition, pages in the supplemental index are generally crawled less frequently. Duplicate content and low page rank are thought to be amongst factors considered by google when a page is added to the supplemental index.

T

Back to top

• Tagging – The process of adding a keyword or keyphrase to a piece of information such as an article for descriptive and metadata purposes. Tags are normally found at the foot of an article and link to further information relevent to the article. Tags can also be used to index articles on a blog so that users can search for information by topic by browsing a list of tags.
• Trackback – A protocol which provides webmasters with a notification every time another trackback enabled website or blog links to one of their articles or pages.

U

Back to top

• Unethical SEO – Immoral SEO techniques such as hidden text which are normally in breech of a search engines terms of service. These practices can result in penalties or permenant exclusion from a search engines index.
• Unique Visits – A count of the number of unique visits that a website recieves over a set peroid of time (ie one month) each individual visitor is counted once, regardless of the number of return visits they make within the measured period.
• URL Rewrite – A method of altering a url which can be used to insert keywords and make the url more descriptive and SEO friendly, or additionally to make dynamic urls appear as a static url.

V

Back to top

• Viral Marketing – A method of marketing that works by self propogation, this is acheived by enticing people to pass on your offer which results in your marketing message growing and spreading in the same manner as a virus.

W

Back to top

• White Hat SEO – SEO techniques which are in compliance with the terms of service as set out by search engines.
• W3C – An International group of organisations and individuals that work together to create web language standards with the aim of improving the usability and cross platform compatability of the internet as a whole.

X

Back to top

• XHTML – A language containing aspects of HTML and XML, Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language allows added functionality and cross browser stability.
• XML – Extensible Markup Language. Created and maintained by the world wide web consortium (W3C) XML is a simple and flexible structured document format.

Y

Back to top

• No Entries

Z

Back to top

• No Entries

Encyclopedia Of SEO Terminology was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

What happens when Google Finds Duplicate Content?

When Google finds a page that it recognises as duplicate content  it runs a series of tests that are intended to successfully determine which copy of the content is the original, there are several factors that will be taken into account during these calculations and the below list of factors are highly likely to be amongst the ones used by Google:

• Domain Trust
• Number Of Page Links
• Does one copy accredit another as the original by linking back?
• Which page was spidered first.
• PR

Ok, so Google has now decided which of the copies is the original, but what happens to the pages that are now regarded as duplicates?

Well its a sad ending for these pages I’m afraid, Google has a special place for bad pages like this, and its called “the supplemental index”, a sort of badlands for web pages where trust is thin on the ground, and high rankings are even thinner. Google will still continue to index your pages, your domain will still be crawled by Google bot, although crawl rates for sites that fall into this category are generally very low. The simple fact is that Google is not interested in returning multiple versions of the same content in its results.

Generally speaking google will attribute the correct website as the original owner of the content, but what if things go wrong? Maybe you have a brand new website and your content has been plagiarise by a domain that has higher trust, PR, and authority than your new domain? Well there are two courses of action you can take in this situation. The first is to try to contact the owner of the website that is using your content and try to get them to remove it. The second is to file complaints with the top four search engines for DMCA infringement and hope that they rule in your favour.

Duplicate Content Issues was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

Submitting a sitemap to Google is free and simple to do. Ideally you should create your sitemap in XML format, once it has been uploaded to your domains root directory you can submit it by loggin into your Google webmaster tools account. Remember that you will need to update the sitemap and resubmit it everytime you add, delete, or move pages in your website.

A sample Sitemap containing just one URL and using all optional tags is shown below. The optional tags are shown in italics.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.widget.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

lastmod: This displays the date this file was last modified.

changefreq: Frequency that the page is updated.

priority: Here you can select the priority you want Google to give to spidering that page on your domain. A priority factor of 0.0 would be minimal and a priority factor of 1.0 would be the maximum. This factor is ONLY relative to your site and will not affect your rankings.

Google has provided a detailed helpfile on how to create XML sitemaps here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html.

The most simple way of creating a sitemap is by using one of the many free sitemap generators available online such as: http://www.sitemapspal.com or http://www.xm-sitemaps.com although for larger sites you many need to pay a small subscription fee as most generators have a 500 page maximum on free users.

Creating A Google Sitemap was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

Google are expected to provide a search tool shortly which will allow webmasters to check their rankings on a datacentre using the new algorithym (watch this space).

According to Matt cutts, one of the most significant ranking factor changes of the new algorithym will be page load speed. Google is constantly striving to make the online experience better, and believes that this can be acheived in part by rewarding sites that load quickly, and penalising those that dont. Lets face it, nobody likes waiting for a page to load.

This news indicates that W3C standards compliant websites will fair extremely well in the new algorithym, whilst poorly coded sites, and those using slow loading custom javascript will seriously need to rethink their strategies in order to maintain high visibility in Google.

Caffeine to launch after christmas. was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

SEO Book

Coming in at the prestigious first place is Seo Book’s brilliant tool bar. The tool bar contains many tools, but my two favorite are SEO X ray, and Rank checker. SEO X ray can be used whilst viewing any page to display the number of inbound links a page has and lot of other handy information, It can also tell you who is the registrant of the domain, and the domains age, all handy information to have when conducting research. Rank checker, is as you would expect, a rank checker. It has the ability to check multiple keywords at a pretty impressive rate on google and yahoo. You can save the results and also create keyword profiles for limitless number of domains. Although I do use far more sophisticated (and expensive) corporate edition rank checking and reporting software to provide my clients with their monthly reports, I find this tool great for checking ranks on a spur of the moment basis, perhaps when a client is on the phone asking for a progress update etc. And having said that rank checker does support the exporting of results to excel, so there is no reason that it could not be used for client reporting.

SEOmoz

Coming in second place is the seomoz tool bar, it has a lot of especially good features, but a big negative point is that most of the top features are only available to paid subscribers of seomoz. One very useful feature that is available to free users is the ability to highlight any links on a page that have been tagged with the rel=no follow attribute. This is very handy when link building as it allows you to identify at a quick glance whether a page is worth targeting for links or if they no follow all outbounds. I am sure that this tool bar could have been as good as the Seo book one, but the fact that they have limited access to some tools that are in the most part freely available from other sources means I have to mark them down.

Search Status

Search status is a handy addon to have installed on your browser, it displays Alexa Rank and Google page rank side by side on your browser toolbar for any page you are visiting, very handy when you are link building. Search Status is created for use with Mozilla Firefox browser.

Google Tool Bar

Google Tool Bar contains other functions that are not seo related, such as a spell checker and autofill, a feature that allows you to auto complete online forms, but it also contains the much coveted google page rank display! and a feature that allows you to check the backlinks a page has by clicking the downarrow next to the page rank display and selecting “backward links”. you may have to go into the toolbar options after installing it to turn on the PR display feature
(tools/addons/google tool bar/options/page rank)
The above version is for Mozilla Firefox browser.

SEO Browser Add-ons was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

A good way to deploy keyword backlinks is by searching for blogs of a simular theme
to your keyword, and then reading the blog and posting a relevant comment.
Ofcourse the higher the Pagerank of the blog, the more your link will be worth, Personally I would aim for blogs with a PR of at least 4.

In Order to create a keyword anchored backlink just add the below html code:

<a href=”http://www.your-url-goes-here.com”>your keywords here</a>

For instance, if we take the url of:

http://www.highimpact-seo.co.uk/

Then add a keyword, (in this instance I am going to use “seo”) and the url to the code, the finished link will look like this:

SEO

Keyword Anchored Links was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

The first think you should do is analysis, use an seo tool to check that your meta tags
are correct and relevant to the site, its simple to do and will ensure that you are not rowing against the current when it comes to SEO.
This tool will check your meta tags and also give you an indication of keyword density on your webpage.

Meta Tags are lines of html code and text contained in a website that tell the search engines about that site.

Keyword density means the amount of times a word appears on the page, and is shown as a percentage. This can be used by search engines to determine what the page is about.

Ok Now what ?

Once you have completed the analysis and determined that everything is ok, you are ready to start building backlinks, backlinks are links from other websites or blogs that point to your site.
Search engines like google use backlinks as a way of measuring how important a website is, the more backlinks that point to your site, the higher in google’s listings your site will be returned.

Are All Backlinks The Same ?

No. the value of a backlink is affected by many factors.

The higher the page rank of the webpage your link is on, the more powerful that link will be.

Other factors can affect the value of the link such as:

Page Being Blocked form search engine spiders by “no follow” in robots.txt
Pages Alexa Ranking.
Amount of links on the same page.
Relevant authority of the site.
Age of the Domain.
Amount and quality of the pages inbound links.

Keyword Anchored Backlinks

Keyword anchored backlinks will allow you to improve your position in the rankings of major search engines for any keyword you choose, for example if you used the keyword “chicken soup” as anchor text for your links, then you would see your website improve in the rankings under the search term “chicken soup”.
In order to learn how to make Keyword Anchored Backlinks just click the link.

Seo Basics was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

This method is useful if for instance you have a website with price lists in different currencies there could be several pages with almost identical content, specifying a canonical page will not only allow you to avoid duplicate content penalties for these pages, but google will also view all inbound links for the simular pages as though they were linking the single page you specify in the canonical attribute. this can obviously have a major positive effect on that pages position in google’s results.

How to Specify a canonical page.

Fistly determine which page you want to use as the original vesion of your simular pages, this is the page that all incoming links currently spread across the duplice content pages will be attributed to.

once you have determined this you can go ahead and add the following attribute in the HEAD section of each of the other pages that has simular content: (do not add it to the one you have chosen as your original version)

<link rel=”canonical” href=”full_original_page_url_goes_here” />

There is another aspect to canonicalization, which applies to home pages on a domain and the variences on the url that can be used to link that page for instance:

domain.co.uk/my_website/index.html
domain.co.uk/index.html

In this instance it is feasible, and highly likely that you would have inbound links pointing to both versions of the same page although this would not attract a duplicate penalty, it would just result in only one version of the page being indexed therefore the link juice pointing to the unindexed version is going to waste. But heres the good bit, you can use the rel=”canonical” full_original_page_url_goes_here attribute to redirect the link juice from the unindexed version to the version that IS indexed, this could also result in a potentially massive increase in inbound links for that page and have a major effect on its search engine position.

Webmasters who host their pages on Apache servers have an altogether different solution made availiable to them to avoid the links attributed to a single page from being split between different urls although I would only reccommend this technique for brand new domains/websites, as it results in urls becoming unusable This is acheived by editing the htaccess file on the servers public root folder.

For instance, adding the following commands to the bottom of the htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http ://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

would stop anybody being able to access your site without using the www. prefix.
therefore nobody would create links to this url.

Canonicalization was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

Google Top 1000 SERP Checker

This is the best online SERP (search engine results Position) checker I have found
I allows you to check your position in the top 1000 results of Google for 59
different countries. Also free to use.

Search Engine Position Checker

The search engine position checker is another valuable online resource, allowing you to check your SERP position on these 12 search engines:

Google
Yahoo
MSN
AOL
ASK
AltaVista
Google.co.uk
Yahoo.co.uk
MSN.co.uk
AOL.co.uk
ASK.co.uk
AltaVista.co.uk

Free Online SEO Tools was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.