Topical SEO

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eVision SEM has released a fantastic guide to optimizing PDF documents for search engines. Now rather than be annoyed by all the pdf files showing up in Google whenever you’re searching for something, you can join the party.

Download  Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines. The guide is excellent, although I’m a little disappointed that when you search on the exact title of their .pdf, it only comes up on the 8th page of Google…ooops.

Jerry West has a great post on his site about how to avoid internal duplicate content penalties that can occur if someone links to your site using the “www” version of your domain name when your site is setup to not use it.

The post also points out the danger of using internal relative links.

The fix is a simple bit of code added to your .htaccess file which forces browsers to used your preferred version of you domain.

# Begin non-www page protection #
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.webmarketingnow\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webmarketingnow.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
# End non-www page protection #

I’ve found this tool: WikiMindMap to be very useful in exploring a new market from a high level.

WikiMindMap is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public Wiki’s, such as Wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not always straight forward to find the information you are really looking for. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for.

How to find reciprocal link partners…notes from the Link Building Course by Jerry West course offered by University 2020.

Before You Start

You should know what your “money” keywords are. These are the keywords that actually convert into sales. From the list of money keywords, pick the ones that have the highest PPC cost to target as the ones you want to rank for in organic search.

Build links (matched to the content on your site) with these money keywords in mind.

Go to Google and Enter Your Money Phrase

With the SEO FireFox Toolbar turned on and Google showing 100 results per page, then go to the 3rd page and view results 301 - 400 for your term.

Look for:

• A title tag that is properly optimized for your term
• A .com domain
• A nice clean URL, no dynamic variable names
• An aged article
• An article (and page) without or with few, outbound links

Be picky!

Gather 10 possible exchange partners, as you will only likely get 2 of them to actually complete the exchange. Make notes about the site, page and where you would like your link (the phrase on the page).

Send an Inquiry

Email, or call them by phone. You want text within their articles, to link to one of your articles…deep linking.

“How much would you charge for a link, in that location and text for one year?”

If the price is right, say $50 then purchase it. Otherwise offer to swap links, or whatever deal you can work out.

Search for More Opportunities

Go to Google and enter the following:

• “advertise with us” <your keyword> -cpm
• “rate card” <your keyword> -cpm advertising
• newsletter <your keyword> advertise [or sponsor]

the -cpm gets rid of cost pre thousand or banner impression type ads.

Newsletters get archived, so check archives for the quality.

Scan the results for interesting sites that are a good match for your phrase.

Look to get 2 or 3 solid relationships a week.

Take Back Control

Think of link building as forming relationships with related quality companies. See the form on this page and the requirements for link partners: http://www.webmarketingnow.com/link-exchange.html

You can take any emails received and direct them to a form like this. Use a “captcha” to prevent bots from spamming you.

Related Resources:

How to Win Links and Influence People - Part 1

Before requesting or agreeing to a link on a page make sure of the following:

1. The page is indexed in major search engines

2. The webmaster is not using “no follow” tags on the links.

3. The page is not blocked from search engine spiders via the robots.txt file

4. The link is not actually a CSS link which does not pass page rank (actually not a real link but a CSS class with an on_click event that redirects the browser).

5. The fewer outbound links the better, especially avoid pages that are nothing more than lists of links.

6. No gambling, prescription, sex, hate, spam, link farm, etc. sites (unless, of course, your site matches one of those categories).

7. Ignore all “Spam” reciprocal linking requests. Spotting Spam should be easy for you as the messages sound canned and non-personal.

1. One Way Links

Tools, in depth resources, directory links, hot news, trends and pages already in the SERPs top 10 are best for attracting one way links.

2. Reciprocal Links

It is a falsehood that reciprocal links are discounted by Google. What is discounted is the types of pages that these reciprocal links are usually found on: a long list of links to sites that offer zero value to a reader…these are worthless.

But there is now evidence that quality in content reciprocal links do not have value.

3. Three Way Links

Are to be avoided at all costs. Google considers them “link farms” and as an attempt to game the system.

It makes sense that these link structures are not difficult for Google to detect and usually one or more of the three “partners” is involved heavily in this type of link scheming and is already on Google’s blacklist; making it simple for Google to detect and discount any new links that show up to their sites.

This post is about choosing the right keywords to include in an article.

Prerequisite: you must have set the parent theme or topic of each article before beginning this step.

Diversify your Keywords

The point here is to choose 30 keywords that are technically and fundamentally ideal for your topic or theme.

By “technically ideal” I mean; they will help you support your theme and give ou better overall rankings on the search engine for your website.

By “fundamentally ideal” I mean; they will help you attract visitors who are
looking for such topics and researching the subject matter using the same kinds of words you are including.

5 Types of Keywords

1. Pure diverse keywords
2. Pure Diverse SIPS (statistically improbable phrases)
3. Partially diverse keywords
4. Partially diverse SIPS (statistically improbable phrases)
5. Technical Long Tails

Up to 10 of number 1 & 2 combined. The rest from 3 - 5.

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s most important is:

• Traffic > 12 per day
• TRI Index > 30 % (co-occurrence, the term is found on the same pages as the parent theme)
• Market Share > .10 is high

Look for the keywords with the highest TRI & highest Market Share…possible articles (even if you are at the VMAD level).

Note: Remove all filters to find possible expert verbiage. Default filters will filter out keywords that don’t have any cost per click or traffic tied to them.

Keyword Selection Strategy - used to pick bulk keywords that go into articles, not necessarily titles.

Market Intelligence - used as a quick method for locating possible silos and parent themes.

Go to Amazon.com and do a search for the keyword you are researching.

On the results that come up, click on any book that has “Search Inside” wrapped around its image.

Scroll down and look at the “Inside this Book” section.

There may be keyphrases or SIPs that are worth exploring further.

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

Did you know you can put spaces into the display URLs to improve readability?

Here’s a real AdWords example:

This is certainly worth testing, I’d be willing to bet that the ability to read and detach the target keyphrase it will improve CTR.