Internet Marketing Notes » Search Engine Optimization

SEO Tips for Twitter Content

Jason — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:33:13 +0000

In case you’re unaware, Google has recently reached an agreement with Twitter to include tweets in their search results.

The article by Julie Batten gives a good account on how SEO can be applied to Twitter content.

I summarize some of the tips here:

Ensure you create a keyword-rich Twitter profile
Ensure your tweets are keyword-rich and have a prioritized sequence of keywords
Build relevant followers — followers are your in-bound links
Generate in-bound links via other sources (e.g. article submission) to improve authority of your Twitter profile
Encourage others to retweet your Twitter content
Choose a relevant Twitter username and account name

I’m sure we’ll see more concrete findings on the effectiveness of these SEO techniques in the coming months.

Happy tweeting!

A Way to Get Quality Backlinks and High PageRank

Jason — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:37:58 +0000

I came across an interesting blog post about getting quality backlinks and high PageRank.

Have you ever added a little chunk of HTML/Javascript code (sometimes called a widget) on your website to add a fun or “live” informational element to your site? e.g. a stock ticker, a weather report, or a graphic depicting the stage of pregnancy you’re in?

These third-party codes normally embed a link back to the developer’s site. Imagine if this widget is embedded in blogs and social networking sites — the number of one-way backlinks to the widget homepage could be staggering. Having a good number of one-way backlinks often translates to high PageRank.

So, you could easily leverage on this technique of creating one-way backlinks if you’re a web developer but what if you’re not? Well, you could hire freelancers to do the job of creating the widget for you. Of course, you’ll need to find some way to relate the widget to your site content.

For case studies, check out Open Source Candy’s excellent blog post here.

Can Google Toolbar Cause Pages to Be Indexed?

Jason — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:29:34 +0000

So, you created a new web page and visited your new page using a browser installed with Google Toolbar.

You hope that your page will somehow be indexed by the Google search engine…

Well, that’s not going to happen, at least according to Matt Cutts.

In an experiment by Philipp Lenssen (where he had a little bet with Matt Cutts) on the premise that

once you installed the Google Toolbar, every URL youâ€™d visit would slowly be added to the Google web search index… even otherwise unlinked URLs, as long as theyâ€™re public (and not excluded via robots.txt)

Philipp set up a secret page and visited his page via a browser installed with Google Toolbar.

After a few months, Google Toolbar did not index his secret page. Philipp lost the bet of course.

Yet another Google Search myth debunked!

Tools to View PageRank of Links on a Web Page

Jason — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:20:39 +0000

Do you know the Google PageRank (PR) of the links on your web page?

There are several ways you can find out the link PRs:

Enter each link URL in a PR checking service, or
Open each link and see the PR in Google Toolbar, or
Use the Website PR Overlay tool by SEO Bench or Visual PageRank tool by iWebTool

With the Website PR Overlay or Visual PageRank tool, all you need to do is enter the URL of a web page and you will see the PageRank values graphically overlayed on top of all the links found on the web page.

Visual PageRank tool provides additional visual cues to identify external links and links with rel=”nofollow”. Neat!

Dedicated IP PageRank Advantage Myth Busted!

Jason — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 16:29:12 +0000

I just came across an interesting post by Matt Cutts indicating that there is noÂ difference in Google PageRank treatment between a site hosted on virtual hosting (multiple sites on 1 IP address) versus a site hosted on a dedicated IP address.

The followingÂ is what Director of Technology at Google Craig Silverstein stated in reply to a Slashdot interview questionÂ on virtually hosted sitesÂ having PageRank penalized:

Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, youâ€™ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperceptionâ€“thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

I’m just wondering what it means by misconfiguration in virtual hosting.Â

Anyway, all my sites are on virtual hosting and the busted myth isÂ a comforting note indeed.

How to Increase Blog Search Engine Traffic by Porting to WordPress

Jason — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:34:37 +0000

Here’s a story of how Chris Pearson apparently increased his search engine traffic by 455% in just one month (from September to October).

He made two simple changes:

He ported his blog from MovableType to WordPress
He based his design code on the Cutline framework

Chris built the Cutline framework from scratch with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind.

With some creativity, it just proves how easy it is to implement effective SEO on the WordPress blogging platform. Read Chris’ post for a detailed analysis of the result that he has achieved.

If you’re just getting into WordPress and don’t know where to start, you can download two free chapters of Gobala’s WordPress Adsense System.

You might also be interested to read why WordPress is bettter than other blogging platforms in many ways.

New Google Webmaster Tools

Jason — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:27:04 +0000

Google has added a few new features in to its webmaster tools.

The new features include:

1) Googlebot activity report

It shows you the following:

Number of pages Googlebot has crawled your site per day
Number of kilobytes of data Googlebot has downloaded per day
Average time it took for Googlebot to download pages.

Here’s a sample Googlebot report of one of my sites (figures blurred out):

2) Crawl rate control

Choose Googlebot’s crawl speed: Slower, Normal, or Faster.

Note that the “Faster” option is only available if Google finds that the crawl rate is a factor of your site’s crawl.

3) Enhanced image search

You can associate images in your site with labels (much like tagging) to improve indexing and search quality of those images.

4) Number of URLs found in Sitemaps

Find out the number of URLs that Google found in each Sitemap you have submitted.

How would these new features help you as a search-engine savvy internet marketer? I think it’ll help you detect undesirable crawling patterns that may indirectly hurt the search-engine visibility of your site.Â At least when there’s a problem, you can now better formulate remedial steps.

Links:

Google Now Indexes URLs Containing “&id=” Parameter

Jason — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 07:37:10 +0000

It’s now official. Google search indexing algorithm has been updated to index URLs containing the “&id” parameter.

Well, does this mean you should ignore using friendly URLs or permalinks?

Here’s what Google has to add:

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls.

Personally, even with the updated search indexing policy in effect, I will still continue rewriting my URLs. Not only are friendly URLs more elegant and easier to remember, I believe the SEO benefits of friendly URLs still prevail.
Links:

Redirect Affiliate Links to Increase Click-Through Rate

Jason — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:05:52 +0000

If you are using regular affiliate links to promote an affiliate program, chances are you are missing out on traffic and commissions. You might want to use redirection links instead.

Here’s how a direct affiliate link and a redirection link look like:

Direct affiliate link: http://www.example.com?id=123 (where 123 is your affiliate ID)
Redirection link: http://www.yoursite.com/product.html

Notice that the redirection link appears to be like a regular static page on your site.

Why use redirection links in place of direct affiliate links?

Increase email delivery rate – Avoid or minimize the risk of your affiliate link being blacklisted by email filters because of other spammy affiliates promoting the same affiliate program. Also, redirection links are typically shorter and therefore preventing the URL of being broken up into more than one line (thus resulting in a broken link) in the email message.
Search engine optimization – Search engines generally favor crawling “static” URLs rather than dynamic ones (typical of affiliate links). But some might argue that both static pages and dynamic pages get near-similar treatment by search engines of today.
Increase article submission acceptance – Some web publishers and article repositories might not accept articles with affiliate links. However, using redirection, the links appear to go to your own site and not the site running the affiliate program. You’ll also get the indirect benefit of having more backlinks to your own site, thus enabling your site to be ranked higher by search engines.
Reduce click-fear syndrome – Typical affiliate links will have “special characters” such as “?” and “&”. To some users, these links appear unusual to them and appear less trustworthy and therefore these users will not click on the links.
Minimize missed affiliate commission opportunities – There are some smart Alecs who copy your affiliate link URL and manually remove your affiliate ID before going to the product page that you are promoting. Yes, these people do not want you to earn affiliate commissions!

There you go. I’ll write on how to create redirection links for your direct affiliate links in the coming future.

Searching for Internet Marketing Notes?

Jason — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:05:50 +0000

Wowee! In less than 2 weeks, this blog has been listed as #1 on Google for the search keywords internet marketing notes.

Nothing is permanent on Google. For now, I’ll just savor the moment. (See screenshot below)

[Update 29-Oct-06: Guess I have spoken too soon. This blog has been zapped by Google (from over 20 entries down to nothing). I'm not sure why. I know a few unscrupulous splogs has been linking to this blog. Perhaps this blog is now being sandboxed. Oh well, patience is virtue. I know I'm doing things right; it's just a matter of time before I get legitimate backlinks.]

[Update 4-Nov-06: It's back in Google's main index a few days ago. Phew!]