SEO Tricks

Take a Load Off

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/figure-lifting-weights.jpg” alt=”man lifting weights” title=”man lifting weights” width=”200″ height=”199″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-12548″ />OMG – I feel like a new man and I’m not really sure what to do with myself. Because over the past several years I’ve gotten extremely good at spreading myself too thin. 16 hour days have been the norm. I’ve worked on numerous projects and, in all honesty, never fully-completed any of them.

Not in a way that I would have liked to anyway.

Well today that all changes!

Yes, I know it’s Friday, but who said anything about taking the weekends off – I still don’t know how to do that yet.

You see, I started this site a couple of years ago, mostly for testing purposes, and without any definitive goals in mind – other than helping people learn SEO while I get better at it too.

And I’m still learning every day. But you know, things are changing every day too. The day I think I know it all is the day you need to RUN from this blog.

I’m just a regular guy who loves the Internet because of all the opportunities it provides. It allows me to be creative in ways I never imagined possible before. It opens up doors and allows me to plow through my many subconscious barriers.

It allows me to feel alive.

BUT, up to this point I feel like I’ve failed you. You’ve probably <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/free-SEO-ebook”>downloaded my eBook and subscribed to the site. Almost never to hear from me again.

By the time I get out a rare (monthly) blog post, many of you don’t even remember who I am.

That’s kind of embarrassing.

And not very fair to you.

Out of my many web projects, this is the one where my name counts. Where I’ve established myself as an authority. Where I genuinely want get to know you, and let you get to know me.

Which is kind of hard for both of us when I’m never around.

Well not any more!

I’m committed to bringing this site to life. To helping you in ways that make you want to stick around. To giving you content you can’t get anywhere else. To being different than everyone else.

To ROCKING IT!

Why now?

You’re probably wondering why I’m able to do this now…

It’s mostly because I’ve learned to work smarter. Here are some new KEY skills I’ve recently picked up, that have improved my business dramatically, which I hope will inspire you:

• OUTSOURCE more (graphic design, video editing, etc)
• FOCUS on the stuff that matters
• STOP trying to learn everything
• STOP getting caught up on the details – JUST DO IT
• AUTOMATE everything possible

Two of the best resources that I’ve learned to take advantage of over the last year are Aweber and oDesk.

Email marketing has never been my thing, and I’m terrible at designating anything.

Today I depend on both.

But those are just two that have helped me recently.

Whether you’re an in-house SEO, an SEO consultant, or managing your own business website – there are a ton of available <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/resources”>tools and resources that will make things easier for you. I’ve been using several of them for years.

Maybe you’ve never had a problem with time management, or shared any of these similar issues.

But today this is where I’m at.

It’s exhilarating. And I want you to feel exhilarated too!

Talk to you SOON. A lot sooner than in the past – I promise.

Blog updates sent via <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/software/aweber”>Aweber.

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Mad Rush to Create YouTube Videos

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-11897" style="border: 0pt none;" title="youtube" src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/youtube-logo.jpg” alt=”youtube” width=”200″ height=”150″ />Last week there was <a href="http://www.SEObook.com/panda-25and-youtube-wins-again”>major buzz going around about the latest Google Panda update 2.5. And as usual, there was plenty of controversy. One of the most controversial items discussed over the weekend and last week was YouTube topping the list of winners AGAIN.

Yep, that’s right. Youtube, as well Google’s Android.com and partner AOL, all topped the list – earning some of the biggest gains from Google Panda 2.5. Along with several mainstream news media sites.

The Biggest Loser

Surprisingly though, some of Panda 2.5′s biggest losers include ConsumerAffairs.org, MoterTrend.com and Entrepreneur.com.

Which tells me nobody’s ever safe and Google can skew their results however they want to.

What Does This Mean to You?

It probably means it’s time to start taking video marketing more seriously, or at least step it up a bit. However, you could sit around and complain that it’s not fair.

Thankfully – and I do mean thankfully – there are plenty of folks who are a lot smarter than me being watchdogs, so I plan on focusing what I can control, and that’s video content creation and marketing.

The major plus is, at least posting videos on YouTube is free – for now anyway. And almost everyone has some sort of video recorder these days, so there shouldn’t be too many excuses, even from me.

Actually, YouTube has been a major search player for a long time. So using YouTube videos to drive <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic to your websites, and sell products and services is nothing new. Many smart Internet marketers have been making a fortune off it for years now.

Significant Downstream <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic Increase

What is new is the phenomenal increase in downstream <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic from Google’s search results to YouTube. Aaron Wall reported, they are up almost 200% over the past half a year, gaining to somewhere between 9 and 10% off all of Google’s downstream <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic.

Just check out the screenshot of this search term showing YouTube in the top 3 positions of Google’s SERP.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11905" title="youtube in top 3 google search results" src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/youtube-top3-in-google.jpg” alt=”youtube in top 3 google search results” width=”600″ height=”494″ />

If you’re crafty enough, you might even be able to capture all three of those top spots.

Many people don’t realize that According to Alexa, YouTube is the 3 most popular website on the Internet – where it has actually remained strong for quite some time.

I’m no video marketing expert, but do know where to find the best information. If your looking to get started with online video marketing, one of the best sites to check out is <a href="http://www.reelSEO.com/”>ReelSEO.com. They’ll tell you just about everything you need to know about Video SEO.

You could also search YouTube for videos on how to create YouTube videos <img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”wp-smiley” /> , and check out this page.

Types of Videos

Here are some business video content ideas to help get you started:

• Website introduction
• Business overview
• How-tos / Instructional
• Customer testimonials
• Webinars
• Interviews
• Speeches
• Presentations

I can promise you one thing, the longer you wait, the harder it is going to be to compete with everyone else. Including the spammers. Because if you didn’t think YouTube was full of SPAM before, you can bet with this latest news, it’s going to get ambushed with it now.

Blog updates sent via Aweber.

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3 Handy Free Tools to Check for Broken Site Links

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/broken-link.jpg” alt=”broken link” title=”broken link” width=”200″ height=”150″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-11451″ />Have you checked your company website or personal blog for link errors recently? If not, I bet you’d be surprised of how many issues you find using one of these handy free tools.

Regardless if you run a blog, small static website, or a large corporate site; finding and fixing broken site links is extremely important for user-experience, proper indexation, and better search engine rankings.

One way to do this would be to go through your site and test each hyperlink by clicking on them one at a time, but that’s not really feasible for most websites. Especially when most of us are already strapped for time. You could also verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and check for crawl errors through there. Which I recommend you do anyway. But even then you’re likely working with outdated data and extremely limited features.

A better way would be to use an advanced <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/SEO-audit-tools”>website audit tool that allows you to crawl and diagnose each website on the fly. Luckily, there are 3 free tools I like to use that make broken link detection and repair super quick and easy.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/screaming-frog-logo.jpg” alt=”screaming frog SEO spider” title=”screaming frog SEO spider” width=”302″ height=”73″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-11608″ /><a href="http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/SEO-spider/”>Screaming Frog SEO Spider is undoubtedly my favorite free website spidering tool for small websites. It crawls and analyzes websites extremely fast, then displays the information in a very straightforward and easy to navigate interface.

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/screaming-frog-SEO-spider-interface.jpg” alt=”screaming frog SEO spider interface” title=”screaming frog SEO spider interface” width=”600″ height=”361″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-11618″ />

In addition to helping you detect broken links, Screaming Frog SEO Spider also collects and reports a ton of other helpful search engine optimization related data:

• Server Errors
• Head Section: Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords,
  Meta Robots, Meta Refresh, Canonical Link Element
• Internal / External Links: Permanent and Temporary Redirects,
  Nofollow Link Attribute, Anchor Text
• Duplicate Content
• Heading Tags
• File Size
• Page Depth
• Image Information: Alt Attribute, Address, File Size

The free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to perform a number of basic tasks while crawling up to 500 URIs. But, for a £99 per annum license, the 500 URI limitation is removed and all configuration options and enhanced features are enabled.

Compatibility: Windows PC, Mac

Xenu Link Sleuth

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/xenu-sleuth-logo.jpg” alt=”xenu sleuth logo” title=”xenu sleuth logo” width=”302″ height=”142″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-11640″ />Xenu Link Sleuth is a completely free broken link checker I like to use for analyzing large and small web sites for broken links. It’s a very basic looking tool specifically designed to detect and report on broken links only; it doesn’t come with a bunch of other fluff which makes it extremely fast and easy to use without having to wade through a ton of irrelevant data just to find important link errors.

The free and only version of tool fully-featured and completely configurable. It offers a number of advanced features such as allowing you to check for specific errors and including or excluding groups of URLs and directories from your analysis. There are a number of export options available, and you can set it up to automatically email you a report upon completion. In addition, the user interface it very straightforward which makes it easy to navigate when you’re looking for particular errors and other important information.

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/xenu-link-sleuth-interface.jpg” alt=”xenu link sleuth interface” title=”xenu link sleuth interface” width=”600″ height=”361″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-11669″ />

Standard Reports Include:

• Broken Links, Ordered by Link
• Broken links, Ordered by Page
• List of Redirected URLs
• FTP and Gopher URLs
• Valid Text URLs
• Page Title and Meta Descriptions
• Download Speed
• File Type
• HTTP Status
• Orphaned Files

Compatibility: Windows PC

IIS SEO Toolkit

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/iis-SEO-toolkit.jpg” alt=”iis SEO toolkit” title=”iis SEO toolkit” width=”302″ height=”78″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-11684″ />The Free <a href="http://www.iis.net/download/SEOtoolkit”>IIS SEO Toolkit is a bit cumbersome for checking web sites for broken links. Especially when you just want to quickly check for any 404 not found errors. It was obviously built with developers and webmasters in mind. However, it’s completely free so once you get a grasp on it you’ll find it does a great job of auditing your website and reporting a ton of important search engine optimization related issues, in addition to finding broken links.

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/iis-SEO-toolkit-external-links.jpg” alt=”iis SEO toolkit external links report” title=”iis SEO toolkit external links report” width=”600″ height=”184″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-11688″ />

From within the link report you will be pleased to find the link URL, status code, page title and meta description of the linked pages. Simply right click or double click the URL to find additional details such as the linking page, last modified date, HTTP headers and content type.

Summary of all items reported:

• Invalid Markup
• Robots.txt Restrictions
• Duplicate Content
• Hyperlink Errors
• Performance Issues
• Missing Image Alt Attributes

Note: after you download and install the IIS SEO Tookit on your Windows PC, you’ll have to bind your website URL to the “Default Web Site” within the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, if you want it to crawl your hosted website or blog on a remote server rather than a local copy on your computer.

Like I said, it’s a bit cumbersome for simply doing broken link checks, but is one of the best “free” tools available for doing complete site audits – including checking broken links.

If you have an extremely small website you might also want to use the free crawl test tool from <a href="http://pro.SEOmoz.org/tools/crawl-test”>SEOmoz. It’s a fairly informative tool that will crawl and report on up to 250 site links for free.

I like to start with my favorite tool, then after I’ve fixed all of the concerning issues I double check my site with another preferred tool. All three of these broken link checkers do a fairly good job, but they don’t always find and report the exact same error codes and site issues. So I recommend not relying solely on one of them to sort out all of your site’s kinks.

I know there are some other really great paid tools, but keeping in-line with the topic of this post; what’s your favorite “free” broken link checker tool? Do you know of any good ones I haven’t listed here? Please take a moment to share your favorite with the rest of us below.

Thanks for reading and sharing!

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Google’s Next Moves?

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/next-arrow-sign.jpg” alt=”next arrow sign” title=”next arrow sign” width=”200″ height=”150″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-11265″ />The following is a guest post by Mark Barry from Integrity SEO Experts.

Since the notorious Google Panda/Farmer update in February 2011 there has been considerable speculation about what the updated algorithm means in the long term.

Going back a bit, Google’s algorithm was set to determine what type of content a website was offering. Moving more up to date, it began to include factors such as user interaction with any given site.

Today, the algorithm appears to be considering some quite radical additional factors which take account of both content quality and user experience of individual sites.

Although there are still no hard and fast facts or figures as yet, industry experts believe that there are definitely a number of user experience factors which Google has data on and is currently using. They can be broken down into four main sections:

Visitor Behavior

The first of these is visitor behavior, not just on-site but before a visitor clicks through. Google’s preview feature (the magnifying glass to the right of each search result) gives users the option to preview websites before loading. It is believed that sites currently high in the rankings which are overlooked by visitors will be penalized. Once on page, other visitor behavior which could be used by Google includes:

• Bounce rate
• Print occurrences
• Time on website
• Scrolling

Feedback

Another sector is feedback from website visitors:

• Brand searches
• Comments or reviews on content/products
• Repeat visits
• Social media feedback (+1 or Likes, for example)

Interestingly, the Google Chrome browser, which currently has almost 20% of the search engine market share, includes a toolbar plug-in which lets users block certain sites they do not find of interest. Enough blocks of this type are already affecting sites in a negative way.

User-Friendly Features

Sometimes overlapping the feedback section, user-friendly features include:

• Advertising density (percentage vs. content on page)
• Quality of advertising (low click through/high bounce = negative)
• Media incorporation e.g. videos
• Purchasing behavior (displaying popular items to establish
  credibility)

Content

The last section is all about the quality of content and how appropriate it is for the targeted audience. This is the least clear section in terms of how it could be applied to the algorithm, but paying attention to these factors can only be a good thing:

• Keywords and/or Keyword Stuffing – relevance of keywords and
  percentage of use per page
• Spelling and Grammar – should be 100%, even reviews and comments
  with poor spelling and grammar can equate to a poor user experience
• Reading Level – suitable for a 13 to 14 year old is considered about
  right so that an average adult reader can absorb the information quickly
• Page similarity and weak pages – pages which contain very similar

information to each other or those which contain no relevant copy at all should be removed or re-written to avoid negativity.

The changes have left a lot of uncertainty with SEO companies as they are not sure if their methodologies are still going to be effective. The only thing that they can still be certain of is that unique content and a quality <a href=“ http://www.integritySEOexperts.co.uk/link-building-services/”>link building service is the way forward.

Of course the fact that any or all of this is being used in Google’s algorithm is presently just supposition or educated guesswork, but there is certainly no harm in paying attention to these matters which at the end of the day can only serve to improve websites and user experience of them anyway.

Mark Barry is staff writer for <a href="http://www.integritySEOexperts.co.uk/”>Integrity SEO Experts, a full-service SEO agency based in the North East of England.

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Removing Desolate Pages that Waste Valuable Link Equity

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/businessman-evaluating-webpages.jpg” alt=”businessman looking at website content and evaluating web pages” title=”businessman looking at website content and evaluating web pages” width=”200″ height=”174″ class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-10841″ />I guesstimate that 90% or more of all active websites and blogs on the Internet could use a content audit RIGHT NOW. And I bet your site could benefit from one as well.

So today I’m going to walk you through one majorly effective step I took when doing a content audit for this website, so I could improve its value to users and overall performance in the search engines.

I maximized the site’s link equity by removing some of it’s least visited web pages.

Should I Be Concerned with My Least Viewed Pages?

I’ve heard some folks suggest it’s a waste of time to worry about old, buried pages on blogs, but I think it really depends on what’s important to you. If monetization is at the top of the list, then It can be extremely helpful. Especially on sites in highly competitive niches, where every bit of link-equity counts. But it can also help any website that needs an extra little boost.

What are you thoughts on it?

By removing some of a site’s least popular pages you can:

• Improve the Rankings of More Important Pages
• Improve the Site’s Useability to End Users
• Improve the Site’s Overall Bounce Rate
• Make More Money

Finding Your Least-Visited Content

The first thing I look for when doing a content audit of this type is pages that have the lowest number of unique pageviews.

A real easy way to do this is by using your analytics software; I’ll walk you through doing it with Google Analytics.

Log-in to Google Analytics, then:

1. Browse to Content > Top Content
2. Set “Advanced Filters” similar to those in the image below

(This a good starting point, but you may want to make some adjustments depending on how your web site or blog is set up.)
<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/content-audit-google-analytics-filters.jpg” alt=”google analytics filters for a wordpress blog and web site content audit” title=”google analytics filters for a wordpress blog and web site content audit” width=”600″ height=”472″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10126″ />

Click Apply Filter.

I like to export it to a CSV file at this point so I can modify the data even further by categorizing URLs similar to how the navigation is laid out on my site, and then removing the ones that weren’t caught by Google Analytic’s 9 filter limit.

Once you’re here there are several different ways to adjust your report and work with the data, but the main points of consideration are filtering out pages with more than 50 unique pageviews and the length of historical data used.

I chose 50 unique pageviews as a good starting point, but depending on the type and size of site you’re auditing, more or less may be better to start with. Also, I typically like to go back at least 15 months in case there were any pages that didn’t perform well in a 6 or 9 month report, due to seasonal <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic. In this case I could only go back approximately 8 months due to my available Google Analytics data.

<img src="http://www.SEOrankings.com/wp-content/uploads/content-audit-page-low-pageviews.jpg” alt=”page with low unique pageviews” title=”page with low unique pageviews” width=”600″ height=”241″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10132″ />

By looking at the screenshot above, you can see that I was able to quickly red flag content within the first 10 URLs displayed.

Evaluating the Poorest Performing Content

Once I’ve identified my least popular pages as defined by unique pageviews, I then look at several additional metrics for each page before deciding what to do with it:

• <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/best-free-online-tools-to-check-backlinks”>Backlinks a page has and whether they are nofollow or dofollow links
• Google PageRank of Page
• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Value to Site’s Current Objectives
• Is the Page Cached by Google

What to Do with the Worst Pages

Now that you’ve completely identified you worst-performing pages and content, it’s time decide what to do with them. If a page has minimal <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic and zero backlinks, then it is probably a good candidate for deletion. However, if a page has minimal <a href="http://f019f51vaby49z23ust2v-t99u.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=SEORANK”>traffic and a decent number of quality backlinks, then you may want to keep it, but make it more prominent on your site. You could also improve it, or 301 redirect it to a newer, more elaborate and updated, related page.

I used to redirect all deleted pages to another page on my site using a 301 permanent redirect, even if there wasn’t a good replacement page in place. However, my .htaccess file is getting out of control now, and I’m seeing beyond just using 301s for everything. If I remove a page that has no valuable backlinks and no real replacement page, then serving up a hard 404 error can make great sense.

Just keep in mind, if you delete or redirect any pages, you’re probably abandoning some images and breaking inbound page links from other pages on your website. A <a href="http://www.SEOrankings.com/SEO-audit-tools”>site audit tool can help you find your abandoned images and all your broken site links.

This site has less than one-hundred fifty post / pages, and by going through this super quick and easy process I was able to immediately get rid of more than 15 pages of very weak site content, and found over 50 other active pages for further evaluation.

What are your thoughts on deleting old, poor-performing blog posts? Do you delete them, or keep them regardless if it will help your site’s overall optimization or not?

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