SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

Search Engine Promotion Campaign for Shopping Carts / Dynamic E-commerce Websites

nishalegend — 2009-07-06T13:24:21+01:00

SEM (Search engine marketing) comes in different shapes and forms: basic or in depth, on-page and off-page SEO, PPC management, multilingual SEO, XML feeds, etc. Some companies break their services down to number of hours; some offer the guarantee to refund your money if you're not satisfied with the results. We take performance as a reference point. The contract is the most important aspect of our relationship with the client. SEO is just a term, an umbrella for a large and varied combination of services. It may be a tediously and boring aspect, but it's crucial for the protection of your business to understand exactly what you're getting in return for your money.

Strategy starts here: Maximize search engine exposure, boost website traffic and enhance your website promotion campaign."I want to be number one position on Google." It's usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization (SEO) - a company wants to be in that desired top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or peculiarity, when companies approach us with their coveted goals for an SEO campaign, it's usually all about rising their rankings and positions.

The First Layer – Site Makeover

This includes

Evaluating the current status of your website
Keyword research, analysis of the degree of competitiveness
Analysis and recommendations on optimal website structure, navigation, code, etc. for best SEO purposes.
Performing Split A / B Testing Campaign: Site structure analysis, recommendations and adjustments - Fixing the site for users and search engines. We have seen an increase in sales from one version of a home page to another when they were undergoing A / B testing campaign.
Analyzing initial report on web site performance.
Editing and/or optimization of text for various HTML tags, dynamic URLs, Meta data, page titles, and page text as necessary.
As required, Creation of additional web pages / folders or content for the purpose of “caching” keyword/phrase searches.

The Second Layer – Rankings

Rankings, rankings and rankings. This is by far the most popular measure for any SEO campaign. This includes

Hand Submission to free directories & search engines.
Local Search Engine Submission.
Social Book Marking.
Social Media Optimization: It takes 6 to 8 months to get results from Search Engine Optimization. However, business owners do not have time or patience to wait for 6 months. The solution is to use Social Media Optimization techniques to get quick results. Social Media Optimization services includes following:

Blog marketing
Article submissions
Press release
Reputation management
Online branding

Video Submission and Optimization: Video is what users like to see before buying any product. Submitting video with right key phrase to various video sites increases product popularity.
Image Optimization.
Products RSS feeds submission in B2B and B2c websites like ebay, alibaba, shopzilla and biz rate and many others.
Submission to important paid inclusion directories/search engines.
Buying text link advertisements from relevant sites to increase the link popularity of the site
Regular content updates on websites
Reciprocal and one way link exchange campaign
Analyzing monthly report, Google Analytics report and website statistics report on web site performance.

The Third Layer – Traffic v/s Conversion

Increasing search-referred traffic is not a perfect measure because, if visitors are not converting on your website, there's not a big value statement to be had. Essentially, the Traffic v/s Conversion layer refers to the number or percentage of search-referred visitors showing interest in your products or demos (your POA or Point-of-Action). The take rate merely signifies a visitor who demonstrates an interest in your POA, for example, by clicking on a "Contact Us" link.

This includes

Advanced Google analytic setting to set goals for important pages like Contact us, Home page, Products page, offers page and Brands page etc.
Identifying kind of traffic (demographics), hits on web pages, and making changes accordingly to divert traffic to (goal) main pages of the website.
Consulting to make website more user friendly and with less number of clicks to add to cart, reviewing and making registration, login page optimization if needed.
Maintaining website ranking in search engines till warranty period.

More than Rankings

All layers of the onion, so to speak, are important to an SEO campaign. But the closer you get to the actual value return, the more accurate your assessment of success or failure will be. Rankings alone are no denotation of success. For that matter, neither is search-referred traffic if the visitors don't take an action on the site that can lead to a sale. And when the lead finally comes in, there is no way to track the value unless you follow up with off line metrics to determine exactly how many leads from your website is worth. These are all base metrics. But if you do not follow these metrics and do not maintain the website regularly, the conversion/ROI game you are thinking of will decrease simultaneously. So make sure that your goal is keyed to the bottom line by under going regular AMC for your Search engine Optimization Campaign.

About the Author

I am a SEO Executive in a popular web development company Creative Web Mall. I have been working in online marketing for 6 years. In my 6 years experience, I've been studying all the measures needed for a successful online business. The strategy above is frequently detailed for our clients. After having success with this strategy for more than 50 projects, I am glad to share with all the SEO experts and wanna be SEO experts and even for those who wish to run a successful business online.

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How To Make Your Microsoft .Net Site More SEO Friendly

gspowart — 2009-07-02T11:40:10+01:00

Posted by gspowart

Whitespark's YOUmoz post "Using mod_rewrite to Convert Dynamic URLs to SEO Friendly URLs" was great for those that use Apache on Unix or Linux, but those of us using .NET and IIS still need to think about how we apply decent SEO principles to our websites.

Luckily, .NET gives us a way to do 301 redirects and dynamic URL re-writing and I thought I'd share it with you here on YOUmoz.

WARNING - GEEKY, MICROSOFT STUFF COMING UP!

301 Redirects

The first thing you need to do is to add a global.asax file to your project and you need to override the Application_BeginRequest method. The code below checks to make sure that the website is being called with "www" rather than just the domain name. If there is no "www" then it does a 301 redirect to the correct location. protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string newURL = "";
string localPath = Request.Url.LocalPath.ToLower();

//check the request to make it starts with www
//and is not localhost (dev)

if (!Request.Url.Host.StartsWith("www") && ! Request.Url.IsLoopback)
{
UriBuilder builder = new UriBuilder(Request.Url);
builder.Host = "www." + Request.Url.Host;
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location", builder.ToString());
}
}
That's pretty simple. You can also extend this method to redirect request to old pages to the new location: if (localPath.EndsWith("internet-marketing/OldPage.aspx"))
{
newURL = "http://www.examplewebsite.co.uk/SEO";
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location", newURL.ToString());
}
These two examples give you everything you need to do a 301, search engine friendly redirect on IIS with .NET.

SEO Friendly URLS

To do URL rewriting is again quite simple but it does require an external plugin.

Download the excellent open source URLRewriter from http://urlrewriter.net/ and copy the Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.dll to your Bin directory. In your web.config file, add the following line to your <httpModules> section: <add type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" name="UrlRewriter" />

Then, by adding simple Regular Expression rules to the <rewriter> section, you've got a really simple way to do dynamic URL rewriting and start having some nice anchor text rich URLs.
<rewriter>
<rewrite url="~/AnchorTextDirectory/([0-9]+)/(.+).aspx" to="~/Articles/ArticleText.aspx?id=$1" />
<rewrite url="~/Anchor1/Anchor-Text-File-(.+)-(.+).aspx" to="~/BoringDirectory/Boring-File.aspx?ID=$1&country=$2" />
</rewriter>

Just because you're using a Microsoft platform doesn't mean you can't do some clever SEO stuff. But you will have to find out how to do it yourself!

I hope this has been useful - it's not going to appeal to many people but I hope that some of you find it helpful.

Please leave your comments and if you have any questions I'll be really happy to help out.

Gregor Spowart is a Director at Berkshire-based Mass Media Design

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UK Indexing Case Study

westgate — 2009-07-01T15:08:32+01:00

Posted by westgate

Optimizing a site for an overseas audience can be a daunting task. There are usually a number of barriers that make it more difficult than one would hope for. The barriers can come in the form of language or stipulations from the client, such as U.S. hosting that can't be changed or a non-geographical domain, like a .com or .org. A client that I am currently servicing asked me to optimize their site for a UK audience. The difficulty of this challenge was that it happened to be a dot com domain name that was hosted here in the U.S. Major search engines have a pretty easy time indexing your site to the correct international audience when you have the appropriate ccTLD (country code top level domain), but when location indicators are mixed, indexing can become much more difficult. This is especially true for search engines other than Google - Google allows you to indicate which audience you would like to target in your Webmaster Tools account (if you happen to have one associated with the site). Below I’ve outlined some of the steps I’ve taken to gain indexing in UK search engines with an international domain (.com) and U.S. hosting. When I started, the site was not indexed in any UK search engines – even Google UK. Instead, it was indexed for U.S. search queries.

Step 1) Webmaster Tools

There is an option in Google’s Webmaster Tool’s that allows you to choose which country's search results you would like to target. Go to Site configuration > Settings and choose the geographic target you’d like to be associated with. Yahoo! and MSN should have similar tools to this, but they don’t. This step alone made it clear to Google which audience I was targeting and within a few days the site could be found in Google UK search results. I needed to take additional steps, however, to make this point clear to other search engines.

Step 2) Address

My next step was making it clear that there was a physical location of the business in the UK. Of course, some Web sites do not have a physical business address, which would add a degree of difficulty. Luckily for me, there was an address that I could take advantage of. The address was stated in the footer, but to make it even more obvious, I placed it in an HTML address tag. I also visited local UK search engine centers to make sure the company was listed there.

Step 3) Home page title tag

In this step I added ‘in the UK’ to the homepage title tag and mentioned the term ‘UK’ a few times throughout the copy. In all honesty, I’m not sure if this has had any effect at all. It was an attempt to further influence Yahoo! and MSN that I was targeting the UK. Simply adding this term to the site will not get you indexed in the UK, but I figured that when coupled with other factors it might have some benefit. I plan to remove the term from the title tag once I am indexed in all major UK search engines, however, I have still failed to be indexed in any of the UK versions of MSN, Live or Bing. To expand on this point, I contacted MSN to inquire about getting my site indexed in the UK version of their engine. Their reply was prompt, but did not answer my question. It went as follows:

Form submission:

I want my site indexed in UK results, however it is only indexed in US results. I know the website does not have a .co.uk extension, but the business is physically located in the UK and the address is on the site. I've managed to get it to work in other engines, but have been unsuccessful in getting it to work in MSN or Bing. How do you suggest I fix this aside from changing the domain name or server location? Thanks.

Response:

Hello Jeff, Thank you for writing to Bing Technical Support. This is Luis and I understand that you want your website indexed in the United Kingdom. I know how important this is to you and I look forward to assisting you today. Jeff, you might host your site in a different location than your target market. When your site is located in a different market, your site may rank higher in your local market's search results, and rank much lower in your target market's search results. Windows Live use information such as the website's IP address and the country code top-level domain to determine a website's market and country. You can alter this information to reflect the market that you want to target. We appreciate your continued support as we strive to provide you with the highest quality service available. Thank you for using Bing. Sincerely, LuisBing Technical Support

Current status of my client’s site

As of this post, I am happy to say that the site ranks well for many competitive terms in both Google UK and Yahoo! UK. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a way to change the geographic target audience in MSN search engines. If MSN would put more effort into their webmaster tools, they could simply have a page where you could control this – like Google does. Unfortunately, their lack of developer tools gives me limited options for indexing my client's site which has the barriers of a dot com domain and hosting outside of the target country. In a perfect world, I would use a .co.uk domain extension, but if you work with clients, you know that there are limits, no matter how important a factor may be.

Have you had similar encounters or do you have any suggestions for cracking into Bing’s UK results?

Jeff Swanson is a Site and Search Optimization Specialist at Movéo Integrated Branding

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Optimizing Joomla 1.5 for Search Engines

raaboo — 2009-07-01T09:31:36+01:00

Posted by raaboo

A few posts on here have spoken about Joomla and its possibilities - but nothing really has been mentioned about Joomla 1.5 - so I thought I would contribute my experience.The most important things you need to do with Joomla are the following:

Get your Template Right!

So many times you will look at Joomla sites, only to notice scripting errors or templates that do not fit all of the content correctly.

Plenty of free templates are available and can easily be amended, with the change of a few image files, so that you get the look you want. Avoid just using the default templates that come with Joomla. It does your site no harm in using them, but there are better ones available out there. Paying for a template is a good option as you get some great support and advice from the provider, such as rocket themes or yoothemes (which are generally considered to be some of the best).

The great thing about 1.5 is that you can select which templates appear on which pages, according to the menu link that the section is related to. This means you can have different templates for different needs; perhaps there is a template that would work brilliantly for your online shop, but not for your news articles and vice versa.Whilst I do not recommend utilising different templates throughout the site, it does have its advantages, dependent on what your site is for! My main reason for not using multiple templates is purely for consistency - the template brands your site and as such, using different templates can cause confusion over your actual brand image.

Avoid using too many modules

When building your site it is imperative that you keep the modules appropriate to the content that they display with. In 1.5 you can customize where modules appear and with most templates you get different module 'suffixes' which change the CSS of the module, giving it a different appearance. Most templates have these but various articles on the Joomla help site (www.joomla.org) you should be able to get advice on how to create these suffixes yourself in the default CSS file (editable through your sites template manager). I mention these suffixes because they are extremely useful in helping to organise the look and feel of your site.

Avoid overcrowding areas of your site - keep your frontpage content to a minimum of modules.

Most importantly utilise all the positions - I don't mean one module in each position as some templates have over 20 positions available, I mean to avoid using just the 'left ' and 'right' module positions - by doing this your site content is kept clean and you can move content around easily without causing too much disruption to site users.

Think like your users!

Always look objectively at your site - get someone else to tell you what they think, no matter how harsh - pick someone who won't just give you lip service, it will get you nowhere - fast!

Remember the key positions for people looking at your site - these are as below:

Top Left: generally the first position people see on your site. Your logo and tagline should be here with relevant content underneath.

Top Right: The best place to put menus and search functions as this is where they are commonly found on most sites.

Centre: CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT - Think you get the message! Avoid putting just modules in the centre of the page although I am not against this. My own homepage has a module as the main homepage content - the reason for this is design! It looks better than just the main content. Joomla allows you to create a custom HTML module. All I did was create a custom module and position it in the top centre. It appears to users as the main content because the module expands down the page. The main content is only a centimetre or so high below this and simply displays any error message or search results. If you go for this option, make sure you set the module to only appear on the home page! Otherwise your homepage will be every page in your site

Fully utilise the template typography!

Okay, so some templates do not have full typography options - simply enough you can create your own styles in the css of the template, to denote how you want your H1, H2 etc tags to appear.

With those templates that do have typography - use it! It really boosts the look and feel of the site by using things like drop caps and different colour styles. One great example is www.talkingminds.org - this uses different template colours and typography styles depending on which area of the site you are in.

This helps users define areas of the site and because only slight styles have changed, the difference is noticeable enough for people to differentiate between the areas, but subtle enough to not confuse people. Make sure you use the H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags in your content.

H1 should be for your content title, with H2 for your sub-headings. H3 and H4 are recommended for highlighting content. Also BOLD appropriate content but without making your content unreadable. Most importantly, DO NOT do this for all your keywords only. Make a relevant title for the page (more on this below) and design the content for the people reading it, not a search engine - it’s no good having a highly ranked site that people do not use because your content is poor!

Avoid using Joomla's Default SEF Service!

Lets be fair - the default Joomla SEF (in global configuration) is good for basic use - however it generates URLs punctuated by far too many comma's and forward slashes - your URL then becomes unmemorable.

Get something like sh404SEF (I use it although others are available such as Artio and SEF Advance). sh404SEF is free and in constant development and works wonders - with it you can avoid having URLs like mydomain.com/component/content/14/category/12/article/56 and can instead trim this down as much as you want.

The URLs for content on my site are all only 1 leading slash - so a review on the Lowry Hotel in Manchester is mysite.com/lowry-manchester.html. In each content item, when creating it, you can set the title and the SEF title; known as 'alias' in Joomla. This also applies for your actual menus as well.

You should always make this relevant, so if your article was called The Dangers of Cucumbers, you should set the alias to cucumber-dangers or similar. By default, Joomla will make the alias the same as the content title, but will remove all spaces, replacing them with a hyphen (-) so Cats and Dogs would become cats-and-dogs.With my site, I have every review title set as 'review of {hotel name}'. This is set by what 'title' you give the content when its created in Joomla - again, make it short and sweet but relevant!

In sh404SEF you can set text to be pre-pended or appended to the content title (see now why the title is relevant!). So all my content is appended with 'From Chocolate Pillow Hotel Reviews'. Now, my keywords are 'hotel' and 'reviews' so I have managed to get the keywords in to the title of every page, with little effort as it’s automatically appended - as all content on my site is from my site, the title will always make sense! When putting all the above together you end up with the following:

Title - Review of The Lowry Hotel Manchester From Chocolate Pillow Hotel Reviews (okay, lets be fair, its a long title, but in my experience, it is still all read, although the main part that shows in searches is 'Review of The Lowry Hotel Manchester...' - the title is still relevant and the keywords are still read by most search engines)Article URL - mysite.com/lowry-hotel-manchester.html - easy to remember and to get to

Article content - H1 tags for the following portions: Hotel Name and Location; Editor Review subheading

H2 tags for the following: Overall Rating; Editor Review Title (i.e. The Lowry Experience)

H3 tags/Bold for the following: Rating Criteria (Cleanliness, facilities, cost of stay etc) I did the above after lots of research and being a non-believer that most SEO would work, however after doing this, my site has jumped massively up the rankings - where I was previously number 40 or so, for the same search I am now in the top 10. Anyone who does care to look at my homepage will see a little trick I discovered (although no doubt to be frowned upon) as below:

Create 3 or 4 small paragraphs describing your company and what you do, along with what the site is about. Wrap each paragraph in sequence with a H1 tag, then H2, then H3, then H4, then Bold. So paragraph 1 is a couple of sentences wrapped in H1, paragraph 2 is a couple of sentences wrapped in H2 etc.... writing your paragraphs is tricky as you need to make it readable, but containing your keywords. So mine is:

<H1>We are your independant source for Professional Hotel Reviews of Luxury and Boutique Hotels across the UK.</H1>

<H2>Our team of independant assessors travel up and down the country all year to bring you honest opinions and editorial reviews of the best and worst luxury hotels, so you can ensure your idyllic break is as luxurious and decadent as you deserve.</H2>

<H3>Feel free to have a look around the site and read about where we have already visited, add your own review to places you have stayed or even nominate a hotel for us to take a look at via the Contact Us link. </H3>

So you can see how the tags degrade down the intro, but with my keywords still included throughout!

My Top Tips for Joomla!

Utilise all the available HTML tags - Use H1 etc to their full potential. Don't stuff keywords into pages - obvious really!

Put title attributes in your links and on images (this may involve having to do some coding, but the Joomla site has lots of good info on these code hacks)

Use a 'random content' module - there are plenty available out there at extensions.joomla.org. This way you can essentially 'fool' a bot into thinking content has changed throughout the site - merely because the random content module will pull different content out and this will be noted by the bots as different content - suggesting your site has been updated, even though it may not have been!Review all your title and menu links - make them relevant to the subject and short and descriptive

Capitalise Words in Relevant Titles - these make the content stand out more in links throughout your site

ALWAYS make sure that your modules match the size of your content - the worst thing is seeing sites that have a lot of 'whitespace' caused by a long module on ones side of the page that extends further down the page than the main content - this looks unsightly and appears like you have paid no attention to your layout.

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How To Analyze Keyword Difficulty - Tooless!

hornedogey — 2009-06-29T16:30:22+01:00

Posted by hornedogey

There is a lot of information on the web on how to do the basics of SEO yet it took me years to figure out the right way to analyze Keyword Difficulty. I think there are a few reasons for this. One being that it’s a difficult subject to explain and it’s a lot more complicated than it looks.

I know there is a keyword difficulty tool from SEOmoz that pretty much automates a lot of the process but I still find I like to get waste deep in data and would rather evaluate my keywords by hand.

I am going to explain my method of keyword difficulty particularly for Google but I was hoping others could post their methods in the comments after this post.

Before I explain my method I always do this research with SEO for Firefox installed from SEOBook.com, it’s a great tool for assessing the serps at a glance.

Listed below is my method for assessing keyword difficulty and the explanations of why I do it:

For the purpose of this post I will use the keyword Basket Weavers as my primary.

1. Direct search for the keyword in Google (Ex. Basket Weavers)

I do this because I want to see what kind of results are showing up for my keyword. A common suggestion is to search for the term in quotes so that you are finding a phrase match and are only evaluating the websites that are competing for that term but the fact of the matter is the websites that are competition are the ones that showing up for a naked search on your keyword with no search operators. No one is going to search for "Basket Weavers" so your only accurate competition is the regular keyword search in Google.

I then look at the Page level links that show up on SEO for Firefox. I do it on the page level because those are the links contributing to those pages rankings and domain level links are not a good measurement of rankings as they can be deceiving. If I see a lot of low numbers within the XX's then I immediately know that this is not a super competitive keyword.

2. Allinanchor Search for keyword in Google (Ex. allinanchor: "Basket Weavers") Ok this is an interesting one that I don’t see done a lot. What I am doing is search for the sites that have the keyword directly in their anchor text. I believe that this is the single most important metric to ranking and is how I evaluate all the keywords I analyze. For me on page SEO is a given I am really only interested in the off page campaigns as I will always optimize my websites on page. By retrieving the websites with anchor text targeted backlinks for this keyword I know what general level of competition the keyword is.

3. Cross reference Allinanchor Search and Direct Search

My reasoning for comparing the two is I want to see wither that keyword will require a strong backlink campaign and is dominated by link builders or if top ranking sites are more on the Authoriy Domain side and a lot of sites are ranking because they are giant hubs that touch on the subject.

For example Wikipedia is a giant hub that shows up for Basket Weavers. That tells me that I will need to do a lot of work to surpass the authority sites dominating this keyword's serps but it is still achievable.

When analyzing the sites that show up with allinanchor I like to look for a website that has only a few links (less than 5) and then go back to the direct search serps and look through them until I find that website. That then tells me if I beat that websites backlink campaign and optimize my sites on page elements, I will rank above that website in the serps.

Something I noticed is that a lot of the time you will find that top ranking websites doesn’t show up for the allinanchor search. This is because they are ranking high for a closely related term so Google seems to also rank them high for your target term. This is interesting because at a glance it seems impossible to beat that top website but the allinanchor tells you that the website is not actively targeting that term it is just ranking for it as its related (easy to beat these sites).

4. Analyze the backlinks of the top domain in both searches

This is the most crucial step. When analyzing the backlinks I use SEO Elite as I find it to be the best tool for the job but any backlink analyzer is fine. After I have fetched all the backlinks for the domain I sort the backlinks by Pagerank. I then use the tool to highlight all of the links that have keyword targeted anchor text in them and record their pageranks. I then add all the recorded pageranks together and record their RAPRS (Relevant Accumulative Page Rank Score).

I also do the same for the direct search term to figure out what related search term its ranking for and what level of backlink power is allowing it to surpass a direct attempt at ranking for the keyword (usually very strong sites that are difficult to beat).

Now that I have a RAPRS for the domains that I am attempting to surpass I know roughly the amount of link strength I need to surpass that competitor in the serps. If the score is to high then I move on to another keyword and evaluate it the same way until I find a top ranking site with a low score.

Let me give you an example of how I calculate my RAPRS metric:

Let’s say basketweaverman.com has 7 backlinks:

fdwafaw.com PR 0 (anchor = Basket weavers)

ofwakjfaw.com PR 0 (anchor = click here)

basketit.com with PR 0 (anchor = new site!)

basketman.com PR 1 (anchor = Basket Weavers)

basketmww.com PR 1 (anchor = Basket Weavers)

Basketlady.org PR 2 (anchor = Basket Weavers)

Basketdog.com PR 4 (anchor = Basket Weavers)

BasketBasketBasket.com PR 4 (anchor = Bag Maker)

The RAPRS for this website would be: 0 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 4

So my RAPRS is 8.

So if I get at least two relevant Pagerank 4 sites linking to me with the anchor text Basket Weavers then I should see some decent rankings.

That is how I evaluate keyword difficulty I know it’s a very lengthily process to do for many keywords but I find a lot of amazing "Low hanging fruit" keywords that scared other SEO's off because they did not analyze the SERPS correctly to rank for!

What do you think of this method and how do you analyze keyword difficulty?

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6 lessons learned on Facebook advertising

Preseren — 2009-06-29T08:16:17+01:00

Posted by Preseren

Facebook advertising is getting more and more interesting to advertisers for a few reasons. It is one of the most used social networks, the ads can be really targeted and its cheap (or it can be cheap if you know how to use it). After I ran a couple of advertising campaigns, I would like to share a couple of lessons I learned about it.

Use a picture. The Click Through Rate gets much bigger, if you use a picture, probably because people like to watch pictures on Facebook. But on the other hand, you don't want the CTR to be too big, so don't use a generic picture, that is not connected to the item your selling. The picture should not look like one you would publish in your profile, because people see it as a profile change, and click on it without any real interest. People just like to browse around Facebook, and you don't want to pay for that.
Test (I know, not really a new lesson). Test the max bid you are willing to pay. Start small, probably with the smallest number that is proposed by Facebook. You can get a LOT of clicks for only $0.05. But it differs from group to group and from country to country, so watch your ad carefully and if you don't get enough exposure, raise the bid.
Add a call to action. Tell your users what you expect from them after they click. “Sign up” or “Buy”, it should be in your ad, because people really like just to click around, and this are not people that you would like to pay to get them to your website.
Don't play around with your ads in the morning (morning for me means morning in the CET time zone). Even if you change only one letter or adjust something small, the ad needs to be reviewed by the Facebook team. And it only happened to me in the late afternoon, that means I needed to wait half a day to get my ad showing again.
I'm sorry, but a lot of the targeting options don't work in a lot of countries. Keywords, town, school and other categories just didn't work for me in Slovenia (Europe). But still, its more than others can offer.
Facebook tells you, if they have a big campaign that will influence your ads. That means if some one else bought a lot of clicks for a day, and your ads just won't show as much, Facebook sends you a message not to change your settings, because it will all get better a day later. And it does.

At the end of the day, of all the different advertising options I've tried, Facebook gave me the best results. You should think about your goals of the campaign first, think about where the clicks are going to take the user; on your website or on a Facebook page and start. As mentioned, you can start small and build the campaign, so you can use it, if you are a small Internet shop, or a big, known website.

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Why you should consider breaking your subpages down to one page

salomonitc — 2009-06-25T14:13:17+01:00

Posted by salomonitc

Many SEO consultants know that scenario: A client complains about being nowhere in the SERPs, even though they consider themselves to be one of the best results for a particular search query. The client mostly is a small local business and if you check out his site, you almost always see the same mistake: there is not enough copy on the homepage. Many sites only have a picture, some welcome text and navigational elements on their homepage. As we all know, the homepage is typically the page with the best link metrics. For a small website it is often the only page which has any links at all.

So why does this mistake happen? One reason is, that even the smallest website seems to need a menu nowadays. This leads to a dispersion of relevant content and, of course, keywords. The resulting sub-pages have a relatively small amount of copy, a lower PR and no deep links.

Here is a great case study:

Look at this site: http://www.fitnessnonstop.de. It is a commercial site for a discount fitness center in a small city (42k people) in Bavaria, Germany. As you can imagine, there is some competition, but it is not too hard to rank for a localized keyword if you do your homework. In 2008 they had a simple site, which consisted of only one single page. You can check it out in the web archive. This single page had plenty of relatively good copy with relevant keywords. However, the user had some scrolling work to do. Therefore a simple navigation was inserted at the top of the page, which just brought you to the corresponding section, if clicked (using hash-urls). The site ranked quite well (around place 1-4) for localized queries like 'fitness weiden'.

In late 2008 they decided to use a content management system and to 301 the site to their exiting company site at http://www.orthomed-weiden.de/fitnessnonstop.html. At a first glance one could expect an increase in rankings because the city name is now in the URL. But that's not what happened: the site virtually disappeared from the SERPs. They only kept ranking for specific queries like the company name. Sadly there is no webarchive version of the page, but I will tell you what the page looked like: As they wanted to use their newly gained CMS possibilities, they decided to split up every block of the old page into different sub-pages. On the main page (http://www.orthomed-weiden.de/fitnessnonstop.html) they only left one h1-tag, a picture and some copy which altogether was around 15 words. Nearly every word from the old page was now somewhere on one of 6 sub-pages. The The h1-tag, URL and title tag contained the main keywords, however, their rankings were gone.

So I recommended them to grab some copy from the sub-pages an put it back on the main page (as it is today). About two weeks later they were back on place 2 for fitness weiden for example.

From a SEO perspective it is easy to explain what happened: It is not enough to have relevant content. As relevancy/popularity metrics a applied mainly on page level and SERPs list only 1-2 pages per domain, you have to break the metrics barrier on every single page. Especially if you have not much content, few 'money words' and no deep links. As you can see, it is often crucial to keep your text together in order to be relevant. Personally I think there could even be a certain amount of copy a website needs in order to rank. Visualising ranking factors in a pie chart is a good approach to teach you where to invest your time, but may not have a correlation to why your rankings are bad. There are conditions under which a ranking factor can 'beat' a more important ranking factor.

The concept of getting more relevant text should be applied to landing page optimization as well. Often I see landing pages which are greatly optimized for a good user experience (pictures, call to action, certificates, etc.) and to some extent also for search engines (obviously SEOed footer links for example), but there is just not enough copy to look relevant to the search engines. I am not saying that you should blindly add some obvious seo text or even stuff keywords just to get relevance. Just write naturally about your company, what you do, since when, etc. and keep an eye on keywords. Consider adding an about us section on every landing page! And if you are worried about duplicate content, pay someone to write the same thing in different words over and over again. Another, more scalable option is to have a testimonials database were you can grab data from. I would recommend making the selection deterministic, thought.

When I find myself in a situation were I have to quickly explain all that to a person which is not very tech-savvy, I sometimes recommend doing a quick check with ranks.nl (or something similar) for keyword density (goal: 2 to 6 % density for every keyword). Even if this metric is broadly considered to have no effect on rankings, I like that it is easy to understand for somebody who has never really thought about SEO before. It avoids: 1. pages with few copy, 2. missing important keywords, 3. keyword stuffing

What do you think: Is there a threshold at Google of how much copy a website needs in order to rank well? Is it a good decision to have a single page site even if usability is slightly worse? Does it make sense to rewrite your "about us" a hundred times (for hundred landing pages)? Is it ethical to recommend a metric which is believed to have no effect on rankings?

(This is my first YOUmoz post and I am no native speaker so please be lenient ;-))

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Redirecting Spiders on Windows Servers (Specify http crawling)

pmurphy — 2009-06-24T15:47:12+01:00

Posted by pmurphy

In a recent visit to Bing Webmaster tools, I discovered that many pages on my site (including my home page) were being indexed as https:// rather than http:/

I had a look into my Yahoo Webmaster stats and discovered a similar phenomenon.

Google indexed http pages only.

Because I run a shopping cart on my site that requires https for certain pages, 301 redirecting the entire site was not an option.

To complicate matters, my entire site runs as an asp.net application on a cloud Windows server, preventing direct access to IIS or the use of htaccess. In addition, because asp.net serves content from the same directory for http and https pages, an alternate robots.txt file for the secure content was also not an option.

I did some research online and at SEOMoz and found plenty of posts talking about how to redirect user-agents to the http version of the site. Rand did a great article on white hat cloaking that describes similar tactics.

Unfortunately for me, nearly 100% of the information out there deals with Apache redirects rather than Windows. Due to my shopping cart software, I am stuck with a Windows box.

So how does one go about correcting this on a Windows server?

The solution requires having the IIS Rewrite module installed (part of IIS 7). It will handle any pages that are served by the asp.net application.

Enter the following into the <rewrite><rules> section of the web.config file of your application:

The above solution is for Bing but you may enter any user-agent ID in the pattern field that currently says MSNBot.

I believe this qualifies as a "Nearly White" tactic to use Rand's definition. Since the content is the same on the https and http versions, you are not fooling the engines. Rather, you are providing a better experience for users and telling the engines what content to index.

Many of us have to use Windows servers for the time being and this method of redirecting https to http for the SE's while preserving the ability of your site to use SSL for things like shopping cart functionality should come in handy.

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Case Study - How to Beat Google and Rank #2 for Viagra

stuprice — 2009-06-23T14:49:35+01:00

Posted by stuprice

I have been following the keyword "Viagra" lately and have noticed a website creep up the ranking ladder. Most of the sites do belong on the front page of Google, such as: Viagra.com, Wikipedia, howstuffworks, etc.

So... I was wondering how did http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com rank for the keyword "Viagra" and stay on top of the Google search results for the past 2+ weeks?

The domain name http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com is the medical/technical name for the active ingredient in Viagra.
According to Google, the domain has 155 indexed pages (volume of pages that reference Viagra are pretty high).
The age of domain is 7 years, 8 months.
Amount of sites linking to them are 8,562.

Let's break down their links to see what keywords are linking to them and where they are linking to them from.

According to Yahoo, the top sites linking to them are:

Why would bluegrasstours.com link to a Viagra site? I couldn't find the link on the home page, so let's look at the source code. Here is what I found:

<div id="begin_template"><a href="http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com/">viagra kaufen</a></div><script language="javascript">function setOpacity(a,b){ a.style.opacity=b/10; a.style.filter='alpha(opacity='+b*10+')'; } setOpacity(document.getElementById('begin_template'),'0'); document.getElementById('begin_template').style.display='none'; </script><div id="header">

I thought maybe that was a fluke and all of the other links were clean? Nope, many sites that link to sildenafilcitrate have the same/similar div tag injection on their websites, which makes the link is invisible to users. They probably have thousands of sites (among their 8,000+ links) like this linking to them. Here is some research I found on this black hat tactic.

So...why would sildenafilcitrate.com do this? Well, let’s see:

According to wordtracker - 4,067 search "Viagra" each day (approximately). The second position will receive about 12% (according to AOL's data) of the click-throughs. So one week = 3,416 click-throughs. Let's say that the conversion rate is 5%, which would equal about 171 orders online. This, of course, is only a rough estimate and does not take into consideration the long-tail keywords. Overall, they make a crap load of money and provide users with another spamming Viagra website.

So...that is how you beat Google and rank #2 for the keyword "Viagra."

I hope you found this case study useful, and that you leave your thoughts on this tactic.

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